Part 1, Day 4 (+66,792) Second

There are very few who deserve slavery, and they are often at the wrong end of the whip.

With a wave from Fossil, me and Storm set down, and set down the two ponies we were carrying. There were two more of Runfeld’s ponies waiting for us as we landed; one armored stallion with a drab brown and green for his hair and mane, and one white-maned, orange unicorn stallion with a mechanic’s jumpsuit and welding goggles. The armored pony looked vaguely impressed by our entrance, the unicorn was glaring at… all of us, I think. More Storm than the others.

The guard whistled.“You know, I thought that the gate getting stuck was the end of visitors for a while. Forgot that the wall doesn’t really affect everypony.”

The unicorn grumbled, perfectly loud enough to hear just fine. “Yeah, cause the only one’s that fly are gryphons and pegasi.” The tone he used to say pegasi… brought back some memories of before that I didn’t like. I remembered hearing that pegasi weren’t popular, I suppose running into a bigot was inevitable, though it was a lot more complicated in a town.

I grinned, trying to very little menace into it. “He’s surface born, if it helps.” That was supposed to help, right?

The unicorn snorted. “Oh? He tell you that?”

“The mare who sold him to me did.”

That unsettled the situation right there. The guard coughed. “So, I think this is about the time I’m supposed to ask who you are and what you’re doing in this town.”

“I’m Butcher. Mercenary. He’s Storm Rider. The two mares with us had an… encounter with some raiders. I can’t do anything for them, so I brought them here. Nearest town.”

“And how did you come into possession of a slave?”

Seems that wasn’t so popular outside Acros. I’d thought that Breeze was nervous because of what she’d been. ”My last job, and last employer I suppose, ended in Acros. I got a souvenir, then hauled my ass out of there before I could become one.”

“We don’t tend to allow slavers in our town.”

Huh. Even right by the slaver city… “Can I help a bit?” I turned to Storm. “Hey. Knowing that my life probably depends on your answer, and your life in no way depends on mine, have I done anything to you that you have a problem with?”

“You flipped me over to look at my dick when you first saw me.”

“Well, hopefully being horny isn’t a shootable offense, but I’m fucked either way. Besides that?”

For a tense moment I wondered if Storm was going to get me shot, but he sighed instead. “No… you haven’t.”

Honestly, everypony but (maybe including) me looked surprised. I could tell the guard wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, either. “Well… we’d still prefer the collar be off, for the comfort of the townsponies.”

“Well, if you know how to get the thing off, be my guest.”

He glanced at the mechanic unicorn. “Molotov here should have the skills to do it.”

I shrugged. “I’m willing to let him try if he’s willing to try, but,” I glared at the unicorn in question, “if he takes off Storm’s head, I will very carefully demonstrate how I got my name.”

He glared back. “I’m not some sort of amateur.”

“Then why don’t you demonstrate?”

“I need some tools from my shop.”

“Then might as well lead us there, huh?”

The guard (still hadn’t learned his name) looked between the two of us.”Well… um, looks like you two know what you’re doing. I’ll get back to my job, I think.” He looked over at Breeze and Nameless. “If you two could follow me, I’ll see what I can do.” With that, the three of them wandered away, leaving me and Storm with the racist unicorn I was trying not to murder.

“So,” said Molotov, “I guess you two are following me.”
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Molotov led us through town to a large building at its center. When he opened up the door, I was expecting a garage or workshop or something. I didn’t get that. Instead, the inside of the building was a large open space, with two guards standing besides a stairway down into the ground.

I paused, remembering the gate of the town. “Wait, is this a-”

Molotov sighed as he walked past the guards, who didn’t stop any of us. “The town is built around an unfinished stable. The houses might be on the surface, but if we have to retreat underground, we’ve got everything important down here. Hell, half the town lives down here anyway.”

“And I can just… walk right in?”

“I can wal- trot right in. You’re with me, so you get in too. You’d probably get shot, normally, trying to come in with a slave.”

Yeah… looked like I needed to get that collar off Storm. The tunnels Molotov led us down into were concrete, until we passed through the rather distinctive hole that the stable door should’ve been in, and then it was the distinctive metal halls of the stable. At first I couldn’t believe there’d been a stable so close to my home… until I remembered the town I’d lived in once more. Those fuckers would’ve done their best not to tell us if Stable-tec built a stable down the street.

Since nopony had spoken for a little while, Storm looked over at me. “Are… are you really okay with me getting the collar off?”

I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be? I spent some caps, but I’ll earn more, and if you listened to my multiple explanations, I bought you because I was horny. So worst case, you go your own way. I have to find someone to watch my back, and track down somepony else next time.”

Molotov cast me a sideways glance. “Track down?”

“Locate, find, seduce? Do I look like someone who cares about the specific terminology for finding someone to fuck?” I went back to ignoring him. “Anyway, easy version, you’ll be better off and I’ll live. Given you aren’t an asshole, there’s no reason for me to not take the collar off.”

I’m sure some measure of that whole line of logic thoroughly confused the ponies in the conversation, but I probably got the message across. Finally we arrived at Molotov’s office or whatever you call it. It was some large stable room that had been filled with every conceivable tool for every conceivable job. I couldn’t even name most of the bigger ones. There were a couple of other ponies around working on stuff, but they didn’t give us much mind and neither did we pay attention to them.

Molotov walked into this incredible dispensary of mechanics, shuffled through a pile… and picked up a screwdriver. I gave him my best incredulous look. “Seriously?!”

“What?”

“You said you needed the tools from here!”

“I did. Most of those things are set up so you can’t use direct magic on them, so I need a tool to get them off.”

My mind was blown by the fact that a pony in a mechanic’s jumpsuit wasn’t just… carrying a screwdriver around, but who knew what he’d been working on I guess. Mostly at the time I just let it go because he was getting Storm’s collar off. Molotov lifted the screwdriver in his telekinetic grasp, and I watched closely as he went through the meticulous process of taking off the collar. The only thing actually holding the collar on was a buckle… connected to some explosives, connected to a few tamper detection enchantments, connected to… and so on and so forth. It ended up being something of a half-hour ordeal of poking and prodding until Molotov figured the thing out, and it fell right off.

Storm sat there in shock for a moment, his collar now laying discarded on the ground, his neck open and free for the first time since I’d seen him. He slowly lifted up a hoof, touching his bare throat. I guess, until then, what was going on hadn’t really set in.

“Am I really…”

“Free? Yeah. Merry… Hearth's Warming, or whatever I’m supposed to say to that.” Storm slowly raised his hoof, reached over… and bonked it against my shoulder. I raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“Just making sure that this is real.”

“Well, it is.” I noticed Molotov in the background holding Storm’s collar. “What’s your plan with that?”

“I was planning to let the idiots here practice on it until one of them sets it off. Why?”

“I was hoping to get it back.”

Holy shit, if looks could kill. Actually, I was pretty sure Molotov was about to kill me when I quickly retracted my words. “Wait! I’m a mercenary, okay? If I have to catch someone, I don’t have a lot of ways to keep them running away!”

“Same thing can be said about slaves, and you aren’t exactly the glowing image of ‘trustworthy’, Ms. I-walked-in-with-a-slave.”

“Fair enough.”

I’d actually kind of wanted that, but it wasn’t really worth the loss of whatever goodwill I might have earned here. I sighed and headed for the door, since I’d rather not be around long enough for Molotov to start being racist again. A set of hooves fell in behind me as I stepped into the hall, not quite sure where I was going. But I picked a direction and set off and didn’t look back at who was following me.

“The collar was my payment. I’m not paying any more.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to ask for payment… maybe a split, you know?”

I turned my head to look at Storm. “You’re free, you know. You can stop following me if you want.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Then that’s up to you isn’t it?”

I turned back and started walking again, but this time I was a little happier about it. I’d have gotten over it if he left, but the wasteland is a much weaker nightmare when you’re with someone you trust.

Still, we were still lost in some town’s stable, and I did need to do something. I stopped the next local pony that passed me, a young little unicorn mare. She froze and looked up at me with more than a little fear in her eyes.

“You know where I can get some food down here?”

She pointed a shaky hoof the way we were going anyway. “J-just go to the next corner a-and follow the signs to the cafeteria hall...”

Of course it was something I probably could’ve found out myself. I gave the shaking little mare a nod and stepped out of her way. “Thanks. Have a good day.”

I didn’t need the manners, but it was a little way to make up for scaring the shit out of her. After she scampered off, I heard Storm chuckle. “You can’t do anything without scaring somepony, can you?”

“Fuck off, Storm. I spent the last few months in prison, I have an excuse.”

“Right, right.”

I realized in retrospect that I had no idea who Storm was. Without the collar, all my control of him was gone. He could do anything, say anything, and I could do just as much to him as I could to any other pony. Now I got to see how he’d actually act.

We followed the mare’s directions (and the obvious fucking signs) through the slight maze of halls towards food. The stable was… unlike how I’d heard stables were supposed to be. Some of the halls were the metal walls that I’d heard of, with electrical auto-opening doors and bright lights built into the ceiling. But off the main hall there were plenty of other tunnels with stone and dirt walls, far from professionally straight. I had to guess that they were hoof-dug.

We arrived at the cafeteria, which was an unwelcome callback to being school-aged. It was a large room, with a few dozen metal tables meant to fit probably a hundred ponies eating at once. Thankfully there weren’t that many in here at the moment, but there were enough to have an uncomfortable number of eyes on our winged pair. Ignoring the silence that followed me into the room, I strode across to a large window where a scarlet mare was sitting. Beside her was a list of prices, in front of her was a selection of… mushrooms. Hoof-sized, head-sized, sliced, skewered; there was certainly a variety of things that I hadn’t thought ponies could eat.

The mare smiled at me. “Welcome! What can I get for you?”

I ran an eye over her selection. “You… certainly have a unique selection.”

“Yep! You noticed that most of the town is underground, right? There’s not a lot of crops that grow easy down here, and it’s not like we’ve been getting many traders lately, so… mushrooms!”

“Do you buy other foods, then?”

That grabbed her interest. “I mean, we do if it’s good. What do you have?”

I pulled out my meat bag. “Just some things I hunted today. Meat from, um… radroaches, a scorpion, and… I think it was a frog.” There was a moment where the mare just looked at me, and I was nervous. Was eating meat a slaver thing? Had I said too much or- “...is something wrong?”

“What? No, no! Just, most scavengers who offer to sell me food are like ‘here’s some berries from a balefire crater’ or ‘i have an extra snack cake from a house last week’. I basically forgot hunting was a thing around here!”

“So you’ll buy it?”

“Yeah, just let me…” she lifted the bag in her magic, testing its weight. “That’s… about twenty pounds of meat…” she checked inside, “and it’s definitely all still good. Call it two hundred caps, unless you want some cooked up for you.”

That made my eyes bug out a bit. Storm was an expensive slave, and he only cost me a thousand caps. So I could earn that back with just a few bags of meat? Plus, most of the prices on her board were single digits caps amounts. “Um, n-no, I was planning to sell all that for now.”

The mare giggles at my shocked face. “The price? That much meat is normally a bit less, but with the gate as it is, meat’s a bit of us luxury good for us grounded types. I’d be willing to pay for a few more deliveries, if you want to bring them.”

That was a pretty good offer, as the caps went. But it was something to think about tomorrow. “I might take you up on that offer, then. But for now, we’d like to order some food.”

“Sure thing! Just tell the guards you’re hunting for Cherry Cola if you decide to do it!”

I’d never had mushrooms before, and neither had Storm, but we were both willing to try them. At Cherry’s advice, we got a variety, and took them back to the table. They were… different, though I hesitate to call them good or bad. The texture was entirely dependent on how you bit them, either rubbery or fleshy, and the flavors were all over the place for the various types.

Storm looked over at me. “So? What do you think?”

“I mean, I prefer meat, but it’s nice to try something new every so often. You?”

“I meant, they’re good, but I feel like I should’ve had some more protein.”

“Oh?” I leaned closer, grinning, and noticed a hint of purple on his blue face.

He looked away, “I-I just don’t have the caps to get my own room, and you’re the type of roommate to-”

I licked him, turning him totally purple and shutting him up. “Well, to celebrate your newfound freedom, I’ll let you be the top this time.”

Leading the blushing stallion up to Cherry’s counter, I asked about rooms for the night, and she gave me a wink with the directions. The area for visitors to stay in Runfeld was a small side hallway, part of the original stable construction, run by an older brown earth pony. “There’s showers and bathrooms at the end of the hall. You two are in room seven right over there.”

Once I paid for our stay, I enjoyed the luxury of probably the best showers still available, warm water running over me, cleaning away sweat and dirt and blood. When I was dry, I headed back to the room; it was a simple two room set-up, an open room and a bedroom. I’d arrived before Storm, so I set my gear off to the side, and waited on the bed. When my pegasus companion showed up, I was waiting, and pulled him onto the bed with me before he could protest.

“I hope you liked that shower, cause you’re gonna need another one soon…”

/Daily Report:/

/Misdeeds noted: 2/

/Punishments issued: 0/

/Objectives completed: 0/

/Good deeds: 2/

/Report sent/

/Goodnight/

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Footnote: Progress to next level - 30%

Author's Note

A little shorter chapter, though it's wrapping up the day in Runfeld.
Pretty straightforward, but as always leave a comment if you're curious about anything.
I have to write a paper, so the next teen-appropriate chapter will be a bit. The next inappropriate chapter is already ready to go.