Esperanza adjusted her glasses with a frown. She wasn’t sure how many days it had been since she had first met Felicity, but if she were to ask Sofia or Arianna, they would have told her that it had been a week. The morning after the mouse had found its way into her lab, she returned to find several uncompleted projects on the floor and several others not far from where she’d left them. She went quickly to work fixing everything and soon everything was back where she’d left it, and she began fixing the damaged parts.

Today she was having trouble finding a computer chip she’d removed from the baking robot after Felicity had almost accidentally activated it. She knew she had set it by one of her computers so she could check the code and see what needed to be fixed.

Esperanza opened a cupboard and took out a robotic dog she had built at Crystal Prep before being transferred to Canterlot High School. She wiped some dust off it, flipped the power switch, and set it on the floor. Loading symbols appeared in the robot dog’s eyes, and after a few moments it let out a mechanical bark.

“S.P.I.K.E., I can’t find a computer chip I placed over here a few days ago. It’s similar to the one inside you. Can you scan for it?”

Esperanza’s S.P.I.K.E., – her Symbiotic Partnership In Kanines (Electrical) – let out another mechanical bark and moved its head as it rolled around the room, scanning. Esperanza began tinkering with a gadget on her workbench for another minute or so, when she heard another bark and looked down at Spike.

“It’s not here?” she asked, and S.P.I.K.E. responded with a bark. “That’s strange. There’s no way it could’ve left this room.” She thought for a moment. “Unless the mouse picked it up thinking it was food? Oh no.” Esperanza stood up and hurried out of the lab. S.P.I.K.E. rolled after her, but Esperanza closed the door behind her and Spike bumped into it. He let out another bark and started rolling around the room, scanning and analyzing everything in it.

Esperanza hurried a few doors down and knocked on Arianna’s door. She waited a few moments before knocking again.

“Dash is training Felicity right now,” said Sofia behind her, startling Esperanza. She turned around and readjusted her glasses, which had slipped down her nose. “They’ll be back soon. Anything I can help you with?”

“I’m missing the AI chip for the baking robot,” she replied. “I put it by one of my computers a few days ago, but I can’t find it, and S.P.I.K.E. scanned for it since I based the baking robot’s AI off the AI I used for him, but he couldn’t find it either.”

“S.P.I.K.E.?”

“A robotic dog I built when I went to Crystal Prep. I didn’t bring him out when I went to CHS?”

“Not that I can recall,” Sofia said. “I’m pretty sure I’d remember if you brought a robotic dog to school. So you’re missing a computer chip, and you thought Dash could help.”

“Right. Yes, the computer chip. That’s why I knocked on Arianna’s door. The night that Diane killed that man, Arianna came to make sure I was going to go home to sleep. Just before I left a mouse found its way into my lab and I asked her to take care of it while I, well, I ran home.”

“Musophobia?”

Esperanza nodded. “There’s a possibility that the mouse thought the computer chip was food and took it, and since Arianna was the last to deal with the mouse, she might have seen it.”

Sofia nodded and took out her phone. She sent a text to Arianna before putting her phone away and turning back to Esperanza. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen what you’ve been working on,” she said. “Would you like to show me?”

“Of course,” Esperanza said. They walked down to her lab and opened the door. S.P.I.K.E. came rolling out and gave an electronic bark as he saw his maker. Esperanza picked him up and turned to face Sofia. “First of all, this is S.P.I.K.E., my Symbiotic Partnership In Kanines (Electronic).”

“Wouldn’t that be S.P.I.C.E. then?”

“It would if I spelled ‘canine’ with a C in the acronym,” she said, and S.P.I.K.E. barked again. “The AI program I’m using in the baking robot for Jacquelin and Diane is derived from the program I used for S.P.I.K.E. They both respond to spoken commands and questions and use a series of algorithms to determine which subroutines should be activated.” Esperanza set S.P.I.K.E. down. “Lie down.” S.P.I.K.E. spread all four of his limbs, lowering his body until he was “laying” on the ground. “Good boy. I’ve upgraded him a few times since I built him, but the basic dog training commands have gone unchanged, so they’re rather primitive compared to the newer programming. Scaling up that programming for a giant humanoid baking robot has presented challenges.”

“I can imagine.” Sofia saw a dismantled drone on the back corner of a workbench and approached it. It looked like one of the Rainbooms’ standard surveillance drones, but without several features that came standard on those. “What’s this going to be?”

“This is just a little side-project I’ve been working on,” Esperanza said, picking up the remote-controlled drone. “Using my surveillance drone as a base, I stripped out most of the add-ons and replaced it with a high-definition camera I’ll reprogram to automatically take a picture when it sees its user smiling or posing. It’ll be its own 5G hotspot so the picture can be uploaded no matter where in the world you are. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to include a microphone and video recording device for livestreaming.”

“A selfie drone?” Sofia asked, and Esperanza nodded. “That’s brilliant. Millions of people would find this useful. We could probably earn a lot of money legitimately by patenting this.”

Esperanza put her hand to her chin in thought. “Even if we were to limit production to millennials, there are 76.1 million in the United States. A 2018 survey found that 82% of these individuals had taken selfies and uploaded them to social media. If even only one percent of these were to buy a selfie drone, that’s still about 625,000 people. If we were to sell them for, say, $400 each, assuming 20% profit, that would be…” Esperanza scratched her head as she did the calculation. “Almost $50 million dollars in domestic profit alone.”

Sofia whistled. “That’s a lot of money. Go ahead and keep working on it, and we’ll see if we can get a patent for this.” Esperanza continued showing Sofia around the lab, who had two thoughts in the back of her mind. The first was admiration for Twilight’s calculator-like brain. The second was a rhetorical question: “with the profit we could make off Twilight’s technology, why the hell are we in a gang?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Snips and Snails walked up the stairs to their shared apartment carrying a bag of Chinese food. Snails, the taller and skinnier of the two young men, flipped through the keys in his keyring to find the right one.

“Hurry up, Snails,” said Snips, the shorter and more gaunt of the two. “I’m hungry and the food’s gonna get cold!”

“Give me a minute, Snips. Ah, here it is.” He put the key to the lock. It didn’t go in. “No, wait, it’s this one.” This time the key worked, and they entered their apartment and locked the door behind them.

The apartment was a mess. The floor was covered in old pizza boxes and takeout containers, and every horizontal surface was covered in mail, trash, and other miscellaneous things. Despite the clutter, the two young men had kept several walkways, as well as the couch they sat on to watch TV and movies, free of any clutter. Snips sat on the sofa and turned on the TV, setting the bag of food on the table in front of the sofa after moving some stuff to make a flat surface to set it all on. Snails went to the fridge to get a case of beer bottles and brought them over.

“Jackass marathon, here we come!”

As they watched the first Jackass movie, they were so invested in the stupidity on the screen that they were oblivious to everything around them. Someone could have snuck in through the window, or a fire could’ve started a few feet behind them and they wouldn’t have noticed right away.

One movie and an empty case of beer later, Snails stood up to go to the bathroom, stumbled a bit, and soon sat back down, holding his hand against his head. Snips looked at his friend.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just… I think I drank too much and then stood up too quickly.” He tried standing up again, but curiously felt dizzy again. He leaned against the couch and carefully made his way to the apartment’s bathroom. As he passed the kitchen, he felt an ache growing in his forehead.

“Hey Snips, get the headache medicine,” he called behind him. “I feel a headache coming on, and I don’t want to stop the marathon.”

“You got it, Snails.” Snips stood up and walked to the kitchen cupboard where they kept their prescription and over-the-counter drugs. He took out a bottle of Midol and started feeling a dull ache in his head as well. He set the bottle on the counter and reached up to get another bottle, setting it next to the Midol. He paused for a moment, looking at both bottles, and put the second one away. “It must’ve already been out.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sunset drummed her fingers on her desk. She hadn’t heard from Snips and Snails in a few days, and they were supposed to be at the music store the day before. She’d called them a few times, each time with no answer and with no call back. She had learned to always give them some extra time to respond, but they’d never taken this long to reply before.

“I’ll give them another day or so,” she finally said. She took out her phone to check the time, and saw that she had missed a call from Doc and that he had left a voicemail. She tapped through to the voicemail screen and hit play on the new message.

“Diane seems to be taking to the new medication well. Her vital signs are consistently stable. However, I possibly have some bad news. In monitoring her conditions, it appears that the medication also has the side effect of decreased reaction times and taking longer to come up with ideas. They’re still in the normal range for normal people, but Diane’s normal range is much higher. Her speech is also minorly affected. She pauses frequently while she speaks as if she can’t remember what she was about to say. As usual, I’ll keep an eye on her and update you on any progress.”

Damn it, Sunset thought. “Damn it,” she said, tossing her phone onto her desk and putting her head in her hands. Diane had been the wild card of the Rainbooms, the one you could count on to make the impossible possible and the likely unlikely. Sunset had once said that there was a difference between getting lucky and being lucky, and with the recent developments she wondered if she had been wrong. She’d known that this world was different from Equestria, and assumed that the difference between getting lucky and being lucky would remain the same, but perhaps that was just one more thing different about this world.

Sunset thought about Equestria for the first time in a very long time. She thought about how much better life had been for every pony, even for the most unfortunate ones. At least in Equestria nopony had to fear being brutally murdered with a switchblade just for saying the one thing that made somepony else fly off the handle.

No, the only things ponies had to be afraid of were magical creatures returning from exile. Sunset wondered how Equestria had fared against the return of Nightmare Moon, on whether she had successfully set up her reign of eternal night or if she had been defeated once again by new wielders of the Elements of Harmony. Princess Celestia hadn’t told her much about when she had defeated Nightmare Moon the first time, but she and the history books stated that she used the Elements of Harmony to do so. Princess Celestia had also confided in her former pupil that she was no longer able to wield the Elements, which is one reason she had been training Sunset. And, Sunset now realized, probably also why she had wanted her to make friends, so they could wield the Elements alongside her.

Sunset picked up her phone and got up from her desk. No use dwelling on the past and what might have been. She needed to focus on this world, today.

Sunset stepped out of her office and started walking down the hallway to a conference room in the back of the warehouse. The music store wouldn’t be open for over another hour, after all, and a little walk might do her some good.

The conference room had been designated early on as the war room, where she and her capos would gather to discuss missions and methods of gaining income. The room had a large rectangular table with seven chairs around it, one for her on the end, and three on each side for each of her capos. There was a smartboard on each side of the table where maps and documents could be projected and drawn on, but today they were turned off and unused. Sunset sat down in her chair and leaned back, putting her feet up on the table, and began to think about what she could do in the near future to accommodate her missing associates and her invalid capo.

It was here that Phillip found her, and knocked on the door to get her attention. Sunset looked over at the door and sighed.

“Good morning, Flash.”

“Morning, Boss,” he said. “We don’t have a meeting today. What’s up?”

“I needed to get out of my office for a bit,” she replied. “Did Doc call you about Diane as well?”

Phillip nodded. “So you came here to clear your head and think because you couldn’t find me to listen to my heartbeat.” Sunset looked at him with a bit of surprise and nodded. She didn’t know that he had figured out that that’s often what she did. Phillip pulled a chair over and sat down next to her.

“What are we going to do without her?” he asked.

“Don’t say that. You make it sound like she’s dead.”

“Sorry.”

“But I do get where you’re coming from. We’ve gotten used to relying on her being unpredictable. I’ve gotten used to it. Whenever a plan needed a bit of extra luck, I added her to the crew. I never thought something like what happened a few nights ago to happen. It made me wonder if I was wrong all those years ago about the difference between getting lucky and being lucky.”

“For what it’s worth, Sofia, I think that you were right. Luck is something that’s intangible, theoretical, and unprovable, and yet whenever Pinkie was part of something that thing always seemed to succeed for us.”

The room was silent for a moment. Sunset looked at Phillip, and then at her feet on the table.

“Snips and Snails haven’t checked in. They’re usually late, but this is much later than usual. I was going to give them another day, but I’ve been wondering if I should go over to their apartment now and see what’s going on.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“You think I should wait another day?” she asked.

“I think you should spend some time helping customers once the store opens,” he answered. “You’ve had a lot to handle lately, and focusing on something as simple as selling instruments might lower your stress level.”

“What makes you think I’m stressed?”

“Sofia, I’ve known you for over a decade,” he stated, staring into her eyes. “I’ve watched go through all kinds of emotions and stress levels.”

“Your advice for lowering my stress level is to help customers in a retail setting, a scenario which most retail workers hate because it raises their stress levels” she said. “Man, that sounds so messed up.”

Phillip shrugged. “Most retail workers aren’t also the leader of a rising crime family.”

“Good point.”

“I’ll go over to Snips and Snails’s place and see why they haven’t been checking in.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Sunset said. “Maybe if they see my top male enforcer came to get them, it’ll scare them into being on time for once.”

Phillip chuckled, stood up, and moved the chair back to its place. “I’ll keep you updated.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A black Camaro with lightning bolts painted on each side drove up to an apartment building and parked near the front. Flash stepped out and removed a pair of sunglasses, tossing them into the passenger seat before closing the door and locking the car. He walked up to the door and pressed the buzzer for their apartment. He waited a minute, and then pressed it again. After not getting an answer over the intercom, Flash pressed the buzzer for the landlord.

“Steve and Steve, did you lock yourselves out of your apartment again?” the landlord’s voice said, saying the two lackeys’ given names.

“No, sir. My name is Phillip, and I’m actually here to talk to them. They’re not answering the buzzer. We haven’t heard from them in a few days, and we felt it necessary to check in on them.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The Rainboom music store. They were scheduled to work, but all we’ve gotten was a couple no-call no-shows.”

“I can’t let someone into someone’s apartment without permission from the tenant or a warrant.”

“Perhaps not legally, but we’ve been keeping an eye on you. You have a bit of a record, and you haven’t exactly been completely obeying your parole, now, have you?”

There was a moment of silence. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

Within a minute the apartment building’s door opened and Phillip saw the landlord. “What have you seen?”

“Nothing too bad. Accepting bribes from tenants, sneaking prostitutes in, dealing marijuana to tenants – that one’s more of a public service in my opinion, but whatever – and wielding a firearm.”

“What can I do to get you to keep quiet about all that?”

“All I need is to get into the Steves’ apartment.”

The landlord breathed a sigh of relief. “Follow me then. You’ll need my key to get in.” Phillip followed the landlord up a few flights of stairs to the apartment and knocked on the door.

“Snips? Snails? It’s Flash.”

Phillip waited a moment and then gave a nod to the landlord, who unlocked the door and opened it. As the door opened, they saw Snips and Snails sitting dead on the sofa in front of a TV showing the menu screen of Jackass Number Two.

Flash held his arm out in front of the landlord, put a finger to his lips, and drew his handgun from its holster under his jacket. The landlord backed up behind the wall and Flash glanced around inside what he could see of the apartment and glanced through the gap between the door’s hinges. Seeing nothing, he stepped inside and pointed his handgun around. He made his way through the apartment, searching each room and coming up empty. He put his gun back in its holster and returned to the door.

“I didn’t find any assailants,” he said to the landlord. “You did me a favor by letting me in. I’m going to return the favor by making sure this all gets cleaned up. Soon a doctor and a cleaning crew are going to arrive. Let them in without issue. Don’t worry about their bodies or the trash. By the time my guys are done, all you’ll need to do is prepare the apartment for new tenants.”

The landlord was visibly shaken. “O… Okay. Do you need a copy of the key?”

“No, I’ll just take their copies,” Flash said, indicating Snips and Snails, “and we’ll return them when we’re done. Oh, one more thing: shut off the gas to this apartment. I smelled gas, so a gas line might have ruptured.”

“Right away, sir.” The landlord hurried down the stairs as Flash made his way back through the apartment, opening the windows to help ventilate the room. Flash walked to his associates’ bodies.

Snips and Snails looked peaceful, as if they’d just fallen asleep. Flash put his fingers to their necks to check for their pulses, but found none on either of them. He pulled out his phone and called Doc.

“Doc, I’m with Snips and Snails at their apartment. They’re dead.”

“I’m watching Pinkie at the moment, but I’ll get someone to monitor her and I’ll be right over.”

Flash thanked him and ended the call, then dialed the number for the cleaners.

“It’s Flash.”

“What can we do for you?”

“Snips and Snails are dead, and I’m at their apartment. There’s no sign of forced entry and there doesn’t appear to have been an altercation, but I suspect there’s more going on than I can see, so I need your crew’s eyes as well as their skills. I promised the landlord we’d take care of everything in the apartment.”

“We’ll be right over.”

Flash ended the call and started looking around the apartment. He returned to the door and looked for signs of a forced entry, but found none. He looked again for such evidence at the windows, but found none in the living room windows. He checked every window in the other rooms as well, and found that the bathroom door leading out to the fire escape was locked. He returned to the living room, finding a set of keys with Snails but not with Snips, and returned to the bathroom to unlock it. He opened it and stepped outside onto the fire escape landing.

“If I had wanted to kill Snips and Snails and make it look like an accident,” Flash asked himself, “how would I do it? And how would I get in?”

He thought about what he knew already. There was no sign of forced at the doors or any of the windows, so if there was an assailant they would’ve had to have been let inside, or found a way to enter without breaking anything. Only Snails had had his keys on him. If Snips had lost his keys recently, they could have been found – or stolen – by someone. Alternatively, Snips could have simply not had them when they went to get their dinner. The front door and the fire escape were the only access points to this apartment.

Flash took a closer look at the door on the fire escape, running his fingers along the trim, feeling for any damage. Not finding any, he knelt down and looked at the keyhole in the doorknob. He saw some scratches, but they easily could’ve been made by a key.

“Unless they’re fresh scratches,” he said to himself. He looked again, but couldn’t tell, so instead he took a picture with his phone and entered the apartment’s bathroom again. He heard a knock on the door and walked through the apartment. When he opened the door, he saw Doc standing there.

“Good morning, Flash,” Doc said and looked past him. “I see them. Have you touched them at all?”

“Only to take their pulses. And to look for their keys.”

Doc nodded and made his way to the bodies and went to work.

Phillip pulled out a chair from the kitchen area and sat in it. He took his phone out and turned it on, but stared at it. Soon the screen went black with inactivity as he pondered whether he should tell Sofia about what had happened to Snips and Snails. The store would be open by now, and if Sofia had taken his advice, she would be working with a customer or two. If not, she’d be in her office working on something else.

He turned on his phone again and called her. The phone rang twice before Sofia picked it up.

“Got news for me, Flash?”

“Depends. Did you take the call to avoid dealing with a customer, or because you were in your office avoiding dealing with customers?”

There was a moment of silence. “Office,” she admitted.

Phillip sighed, but couldn’t help from smiling. “Then I suppose it doesn’t have to wait, though I highly recommend that you should relax a little before I give any updates. You’re such a workaholic, Boss.”

“You love it, though, don’t you, Phil?”

Phillip could hear the smirk on her face through the phone.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point,” he said. “Please, relax. Let off some steam, read a book, go to the spa or something. I’ll give you an update when I get back.”

Without waiting for an answer, he ended the call. He knew he’d probably get some flack from Sofia after he returned to the music store, but it was worth it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Asshole.” Sunset tossed her phone on her desk and leaned back in her chair. Still, he had a point. The store was open, but she had indeed chosen not to help customers. With protecting Felicity, Diane out of action, and now Snips and Snails going AWOL all in the last couple weeks, she was starting to get pretty worried, and the stress was starting to get to her.

Sunset turned around in her chair and looked at the bookshelves behind her. Most of the books in her office were about history, strategy, weaponry, and other topics that most people wouldn’t consider relaxing, and to be fair, neither did she. She’d read these books to familiarize herself with this world and how to survive in it, not for entertainment. She turned around again and picked up her phone, sending a text to Jacquelin.

AJ, got any book recommendations?
Something light-hearted and not too serious.

Weird request coming from you

I know

Pretty much anything fantasy is my go-to
Magic, dragons, mythical creatures
Nothing that actually exists, but helps me deal with the harshness of reality

Thanks. I’ll look some up.

No Game of Thrones tho
That’s the exact opposite of light-hearted
Start with any Xanth novel by Piers Anthony
There’s a whole chronology but each book is standalone so you can read them in any order

Sunset sent Arianna a text that she was going for a walk and would be back in an hour or two, and started making her way toward the library.

Author's Note

The chapter title translates to "the drop that made the vase overflow"

We're coming to the end of the first act. One thing I like seeing as I write is how scenes change between the outline and actually being written out. The Twilight scene is an example of that. I originally had the chapter focusing on Snips and Snails the whole time, but adding the Twilight scene was not only a way to get a lot more words for NaNo, but to follow up on the previous chapter.

You may have noticed that when things are written from Sunset's perspective she calls everyone by their regular names unless she's speaking around others. Here we have Phillip/Flash's perspective, and that he thinks of himself as Phillip most of the time, but when there's a job to do he switches to Flash