Winter was the closest Kludgetown ever came to having a ‘good’ time of year.
This wasn’t in any aesthetic sense, as the ramshackle excuse for a city lacked the carefully curated weather and artfully arranged snowbanks of Equestria, or even the wild untamed beauty of someplace like Yakyakistan. When the wild currents shifted and brought in frigid air from the north, Klugetown was rendered even more bleak and gray than usual. The silver lining of this, however, was that the colder temperatures kept Klugetown’s more cold-blooded denizens (of both literal and metaphorical varieties) inside, and it froze the streams of filthy water in the gutters to mostly-solid lines of slush, making them easier to avoid. In theory.
Spitfire stayed in the air anyway, keeping her hooves from touching the muddy ice covering the cobblestones. She beat her wings slowly, coasting through the quiet streets of Klugetown, steadily heading deeper into the seediest part of town. If her contact was right (and the cat had better have been, given the size of the bribe Spitfire had passed along), her quarry was lurking in a dive named Surly’s. And so, Spitfire glided through the cramped alleys and twisting thoroughfares until she reached her destination.
With its smoky atmosphere and dingy lighting provided by a scant few candles, Surly’s certainly looked the part; a hangover manifested in architecture. Insomuch as one could call its low ceilings, slanted walls, and crooked doorjambs ‘architecture.’ The dive didn’t look like it had been built so much as grown, manifesting in the space between two larger, slightly more solid buildings in the same way fungus sprouted in the split seams of a rotting log. Through some miracle of shoddy construction, the dive managed to be even colder and draftier than the streets outside.The stale smell of accidentally spilled beer and intentionally spilled blood filled the bar, serving as a warning to anyone foolish enough to step inside.
Spitfire went in anyway. She had a job to do.
The cramped little dive was mostly empty, save for a bartender of indeterminate (but vaguely mammalian) species and Surly’s only customer: a unicorn with a voluminous mane of orangish-brownish hair nearly the size of her entire body. For those trained to see it (and Spitfire had such training before she’d been sent on her mission), there was the faintest shimmer of light at the edges of the unicorn’s hairdo: a telltale sign of polymorphic magic. Or, at least that’s what Princess Twilight had told her to look out for.
Spitfire landed, then strode across the uneven floorboards. A quick glare over the rims of her sunglasses sent the nameless bartender scurrying into the back room, leaving the Wonderbolt alone with her target.
“Adagio Dazzle, you’re under arrest.”
Bleary-eyed, the unicorn (or unicorn-disguised otherdimensional entity, as Princess Twilight had put it) looked up from her glass and bottle, then shrugged.
“Fine,” said Adagio Dazzle.
“Don’t try to-- wait what?” Spitfire blinked.
“I said, fine. Arrest me. Take me away. Put me on trial for my many, many misdeeds.” Adagioheld out her front hooves, obligingly awaiting manacles.
“This some kinda trick?” Spitfire propped her sunglasses up on her forehead so she could see a little more clearly.
“It’s not a trick. I’m just tired of hanging around this stupid bar, in this stupid city, in this stupid dimension. Jail’s at least a change of scenery.” Adagio Dazzle scooped up her glass, drained it, and shrugged. “I knew they’d send somebody after me eventually. I just didn’t think they’d send a nobody.”
Sptifre blinked. Glared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know I’m a Siren, right? I’m an ancient creature of unspeakably potent magic-- or I was unspeakably potent –long story. My sisters and I once held entire kingdoms in our thrall! It took the likes of Starswirl the bearded to banish us, and even then it was a close thing! After that, when I wastrapped in that magic-starved ape-dimension, I still came this close to conquering it-- or, uh –a corner of it, And I would’ve gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for that meddling Princess and her little dog, too.”
“Your point?”
“My point is, I’m a terrible monster of legend! I’m supposed to face heroes. I was looking forward to one last battle, and they just send … you.”
Spitfire narrowed her eyes. “They sent the Captain of the Wonderbolts.”
“Because all the actual important ponies were busy, I bet.” Adagio Dazzle noted.
“Look, just because Princess Twilight had a pageant to organize, and the rest of the Wonderbolts are running the annual toy drive, and Major Sentry is off on personal leave--” Spitfire paused, then shook her head. “Look, I volunteered for this mission, alright?”
“Did you, now?“Let me guess, you don’t have anywhere to go for Hearth’s Warming Eve, so you thought you could distract yourself by charging off on a mad quest to go find the holiday fugitive. Am I right?” The corner of Adagio Dazzle’s mouth turned up in a cruel smirk. “Oooh, that look on your face tells me I’m right.”
Spitfire rolled her neck and flared her wings. “They told me to bring you in alive, but they didn’t say if I had to bring you in conscious.”
“Oh, come off it. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction. Hardly heroic beating up a half-pissed siren who’s lost her powers, don’t you think? Just let me drink until I pass out, then you can haul me in and tell all your friends that you stopped me from tying an orphan to the train tracks or whatever.” Adagio Dazzle poured herself another glass of turpentine-adjacent liquor.
“Kludgetown doesn’t have a railway,” Spitfire said.
“Maybe that’s for the best. I’d never actually tie an orphan to the train tracks. It’s too hard to get the timing right.”
“I-- you know what? I don’t even want to know.” Spitfire took off her aviators and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“What’s the hurry? Not like you’ve got anyone to go back to.”
“Didn’t you just surrender?”
“Not unconditionally.” Adagio Dazzle huffed. “You can bring me in once this bottle’s empty. This may be the last chance I have to get myself stupidly drunk before I get banished or turned to stone or sent to the moon or whatever. If you want to bring me in faster, have a drink.”
Seeing his bar wasn’t about to erupt into violence, the Bartender returned from his hidey-hole. Adagio Dazzle waved in his direction, and soon the bartender brought over a second glass. The siren filled it with foul-smelling amber liquid, and pushed it towards Spitfire.
The Wonderbolt looked down at the glass. “This is a trick.”
“What’s wrong, Captain?” Adagio Dazzle said. “Can’t handle your liquor?”
“I don’t drink on the job.”
“Good thing it’s a holiday, then.”
Wary, Spitfire sniffed at her glass of booze, and immediately blanched. “If you were trying to poison me, you’re going to have to try better than that.”
“It’s not poison.” Adagio Dazzle drank down another shot of the foul-smelling liquor, then barely suppressed a shudder. “At least, I don’t think it is. Now hurry up and drink before I chug all of this so I can barf on you while you’re bringing me in.”
Spitfire left her glass on the table. “That’s your evil plan. Drunken vomiting.”
“It’s all I’ve got.” Adagio Dazzle said. “But it’s still better than what Sonata Dusk had planned. She was going to dress like an elf, so she could summon a Krampus. How stupid is that?”
“Uh. Very?” The puzzled expression on Spitfire’s face showed she had no idea what a Krampus was.
“Thank you!” The triumphant expression on Adagio Dazzle’s face showed she had no idea that Spitfire had no idea what a Krampus was. “But instead of listening to me, she went off to do it anyway! So now I’m stuck here, in the most miserable city in the most miserable dimension I’ve ever been in-- and I have been to literal hellholes before. And New Jersey!But without my magic amulet, I can’t even harvest all the negative energy.”
And then, Adagio Dazzle did the one thing Spitfire hadn’t expected.
She began to cry.
“Look at me. I’m pathetic. At least Sonata Dusk had a plan, even if it was idiotic. The only reason I came here was because I thought it was the one place you do-gooder ponies wouldn’t find me, and I was wrong about that. I was wrong about everything.” A terrible, drunken epiphany struck the forlorn siren. “And if I was wrong about that, maybe I was wrong about Sonata’s plan, too? What if she really pulled it off and conquered all those stupid hairless apes without me?” Adagio broke into a fresh bout of wet sobs.
“Ay!” The formerly silent bartender shouted from the other side of the bar. “What kinda joint youse think this is? I gots an ambiances to maintains! Youse wanna cry like some sissy baby, youse gots ta pay extra!”
Adagio Dazzle instantly straightened up. “Cram it, Surly! I do what I want!”
“That’s more like it!” Surly said, and went back to wiping off the one clean glass in the establishment.
“Look, something tells me that your sister’s not going to take over monkey-world. I mean, you couldn’t do it when there was all three of you, so what hope do you have on your own?” Spitfire ventured.
“Oh, sure. Rub it in.” Adagio grumbled and started wiping tears from her eyes with dirty bar napkins. “I get it, I’m a failure.”
“I mean, yeah?” Spitfire said. “But, like-- there are worse things to be a failure at? I mean, being bad at evil doesn’t mean you’re necessarily good, but … maybe you could try not being a megalomaniac?”
“The next thing you know you’re going to say I should try being friends with those lousy girls who defeated me.” Adagio Dazzle huffed.
“Worked for Princess Luna. And Starlight Glimmer. And Discord. … kind of.”
“That’s such a pony thing to say.”
“Technically, you are a pony,” said Spitfire.
“Bah. I’m merely disguised as one because I don’t have enough magic to sustain my true form.”
“And without your magic amulet you can’t get any more magic, right? So it sounds like you’re gonna be stuck with four hooves for awhile. You’ll get used to it eventually.” Spitfire finally braved a sip of the liquor, then immediately regretted it as the sting of turpentiney bitterness burned across her tongue.
“And you’ll get used to that eventually.” Adagio Dazzle’s sniffles gave way to petty delight in Spitfire’s suffering.
“I hope not.” Spitfire wheezed.
“There’s a metaphor here.” Adagio Dazzle’s chair creaked as she leaned back to a slouch more suited for philosophy. “You don’t like drinking--” She paused, then squinted at the nigh illegible text on the liquor bottle’s label. “--Jeppsen’s Marelort. and I don’t like being confined to a four-legged body incapable of enthralling souls with song.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Spitfire said.
“Only because you haven’t been drinking enough.”
“And I intend to keep it that way.” Spitfire pushed her mostly-empty glass away with careful precision worthy of an explosives disposal expert.
“And that proves my point!” Adagio Dazzle scooped up her glass with both front hooves, drained it, and immediately broke out into wet, teary coughing. “Smooth.” She lied.
“Are you done?” Spitfire said. “Because seriously, I can promise even the deepest dungeon in Canterlot Castle is better than this dump.”
“It ain’t a dump! It’s an ambiances!” Surly called out from the other side of the bar.
“Shut it, Surly!” Prompted by entirely too much Marelort, Adagio Dazzle sprung to Spitfire’s defense. “Keep on running your mouth like that, and they’re gonna have to call you an ambiance-- I mean, uh –ambulance. Got it?”
“That’s more like it!” Surly smiled, showing uneven, pointy teeth. “Youse don’t lets anybody push youse around, toots. That’s the number one rule of Surly’s.” Whether Surly was referring to himself or his excuse for a bar remained unclear.
A chill wind wafted through the dive, and Spitfire narrowed her eyes. As a creeping suspicion snuck up on her, she sized up Surly for the first time since setting hoof in his namesake bar. Surly’s grayish fur and unassuming features allowed him to fade into the background of the dive-- quite literally. But now that Spitfire had the time to really examine the bartender, she found her sudden suspicion confirmed when she saw the faintest shimmer of light at the ends of his long and lank hair.
The telltale sign of polymorphic magic.
“We need to leave.” Spitfire grabbed Adagio by one leg and took to the air. “Right now.”
“The bottle’s not empty yet!” Adagio yanked her hoof from Spitfire’s grip. “We had a deal!”
“Yeah! Youse leave that Sirens right where she is!” Surly chimed in, and another frigid draft cut through the bar, this time strong enough to rattle the glassware. “Ain’t had eatin’ this good in a long time!”
“Wait--” Adagio Dazzle blinked. “Did he just say he was going to eat me?”
“Haw haw! Shows what you know! I’ve been chowin’ down on youse since youse got here, toots! You got some prime-o misery, lemme tells ya. Ain’t ever met anybody so angry at everybody-- most of all, yourself! Haw haw!” The air grew colder still, and frost began to creep across the floor.
“Wait, you’re parasitizing me?” Adagio said, aghast. “That’s not how that works! I’m an apex predator, dammit! I’m supposed to be the one who feeds on negative emotions! What even are you?”
“You haven’t figured it out?” Spitfire lunged for Adagio again. “Hearth’s Warming Eve, dark cave, frigid weather. This jerk’s a--”
“Windigo!” Surly said. With a flourish, he jumped up onto the bartop, his form suddenly erupting into freezing blue fire. His polymorphic disguise burned away, revealing a more ethereal and equine appearance. “Ons my great-grandma’s side, at least. Usually I ain’t ‘got ‘nuff magics strong ‘nuff what to throw icebergses around like they did in the old days-- but iffin’ I could get an angry Siren to feed on? Hoo boy, that’s somethin’ else, ain’t it? I could give the entire world some ambiances!”
“Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.” Spitfire put herself between Surly and Adagio Dazzle.
“Pssh, what can you do? You ain’t gonna zap me with no rainbows. I know the type.”
“Maybe. But I know something too.”
“Whassat?” Surly said.
“That anything with this much alcohol has got to be flammable.” Spitfire snatched the bottle of liquor, stuffed a napkin into its open mouth, and lit it on fire from the fat candle on the table. The booze-soaked fabric went up with a flash, and Spitfire hurled the impromptu incendiary across the cramped bar. Surly ducked, and the bottle sailed over his head.
“Ha! Youse missed!”
Spitfire slipped her sunglasses back over her eyes. “Wasn’t aiming for you.”
Behind the windigo, more high proof liquor burst into flame as it dribbled down from the bottles broken by Spitfire’s throw. Surly let out a dismayed yelp and ran from the burgeoning inferno, giving Spitfire enough opportunity to take hold of Adagio Dazzle and bolt for the exit.
The two regrouped on the other side of the ice-slicked street, and turned to watch Surly’s dive bar burn.
“You know, this puts this whole stupid holiday in a whole new light. Literally.” Adagio Dazzle said. “Hearth’s Warming is a lot more interesting with less stupid ponies hugging and more arson. That’s the kind of holiday I can get behind.”
“The only thing you should get behind is bars. In jail.” Spitfire noted.
“I’m not the one who just lit a dive bar on fire.” Adagio Dazzle smirked. “It’s a good thing you did. If you hadn’t, I don’t know how long I would’ve been stuck in that place, letting that … thing feed on my misery. So … thank you, Captain.” Adagio spoke her thanks slowly, as if the simple expression of gratitude was a new phrase of a foreign tongue she had just learned.
“You’re welcome.” Spitfire said. “But it wasn’t just for you. That windigo-- or whatever he was –said he was going to try to plunge the whole world into endless winter or whatever, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Either way, speaking as the more experienced criminal here, we need to get moving before the proper authorities get here.”
“Kludgetown doesn’t have proper authorities.” Spitfire said.
“Then we’d better move before the improper ones show up.” Adagio Dazzle said. “So please tell me you have an exit strategy planned.”
“There’s an airship waiting for me just outside of town.” Spitfire eyed her quarry, warily. “Question is, are you gonna come quietly or not?”
“I said I’d go with you after that bottle was empty.” Adagio said. “And you just happened to find an even more entertaining way to empty it. I was getting tired of this miserable place anyway.”
“That might just be the first thing both of us can agree on.” Spitfire flapped her wings. “So c’mon-- if we time it right, we might be able to make it back to Canterlot before the bars close. I’m gonna need something to wash the taste of Marelort out of my mouth.”
Adagio Dazzle canted her head to the side, curious. “I thought you were going to bring me in?”
“I am.” Spitfire shrugged. “Eventually. But it’s like you said-- no reason you can’t have a good time first.”
“Careful, Captain.” Adagio Dazzle allowed herself a rare, cruelty-free smile. “Keep that up, I might actually start liking you.”
“Happy Hearth’s Warming to you too.”
Side by side, the Wonderbolt and the Siren walked off into the Klugetown night.
