The Universe Hates You Specifically

Just outside, a half dead lamp flickered pathetically. It was miraculous that the thing still functioned, pulsing out at a pretty impressive intensity for such old technology. It probably ran on some long forgotten enchantment, one that had long outlived its creator.

The main door creaked heavily, groaning as it opened. Anypony inside surely would have noticed the noise, or the sudden sliver of blue light that shifted into a full-blown cascade of illumination, but the only inhabitants at the moment were a few stray spiders. The barn’s furnishings were spartan to say the least. Off to one side, an unfinished game of poker was scattered across a bench surrounded by overturned milk-crates and crude, rustic stools.

Beatrix spotted a bookshelf and couldn’t stop herself from running over to check the spines. Most of them were old books; even the most recent of them was still an antiquity of the Pre-Death era. She scooped a couple into her saddlebag. It wasn’t going to hurt anybody if she went home with a few more books than she had bargained for.

But she quickly regained focus. Her money, and the specific tome she was looking for, were both still unaccounted for. She noted that the back door was open as she passed by.

It was unbearably clear that there was a secret room somewhere in the barn.

There was undoubtedly some clever mechanism, some hidden stairwell that led downwards to the real hideout. Something suitably cliché, totally lacking in practicality or convenience.

Bea considered the room briefly before sighing.

Her horn shone brightly, and the dry air crackled with raw energy.

She closed her eyes, focusing on visualising the rapid turning of the yellowed pages in a slim, blue, leather-bound book that had a vibrant red page marker.

She came to the page she was looking for.

Her eyes flickered open, and then she sank into the floor, and through the ground.

Clover's Compendium of Cantrips - Chapter 6, page 57; Enchantments and Alterations - Minor Intangibility

A few seconds after the top of her mane disappeared completely, the sound of heavy wingbeats approached, and a shadow momentarily blocked the weak lamplight coming into the room.

Sterling burst in through the window above the door.

Landing with a thump, he quickly took stock of the room, ignoring irrelevant details and instead tracking the path his quarry had taken from the doorway, to a bookshelf where she’d clearly stopped for a while, to a random spot in the room where her hoofprints stopped… and then she’d disappeared. Teleported, most likely to a hidden room.

He thundered over to the bookshelf and threw it aside, ignoring the well-worn grooves in the wooden floorboards from where it had been moved about. Naturally, the stairway behind it was dark and appropriately mysterious. Sterling scoffed and shot down the passageway, already planning for the fight that he could feel brewing.

His battleplan would involve punching, he decided. Punching and also kicking. Foolproof.

At the same time, the blue mare he was hunting had already regained tangibility and arrived in the depths of the hideout- which she was becoming increasingly suspicious of.

However, her intuitive distrust of the entire situation was utterly silenced by her simmering frustration. She had managed to get her money back, but she was still no closer to getting her prize- and it was also slowly dawning on her that maybe Sal never had it in the first place.

She shuddered and shook as her anger welled up within her.

A few rooms away, Sterling was also growing increasingly weary of the whole ordeal. The subterranean corridors and rooms were far too small for him to safely fly in, and he had absolutely no idea where he was headed- all he had to go off was her vocalised frustrations, grumbling and ranting and cursing that only seemed to get louder as he went deeper into the bunker.

But, there were only a few rooms, and it wasn’t long before he finally caught sight of her.

Springing off his hind legs, he flared his wings outwards as soon as the room opened up, adding extra force to his strike with a powerful flap. His hoof was just about to connect with the back of her head when she turned around.

Shit- coming up short, he performed a small airbrake to lessen the impact and prayed he wouldn’t hit her too hard. He couldn’t, in good conscience, suckerpunch a mare as hard as he could.

Time seemed to slow down until it froze. She looked startled, but only for a little bit, and her facial expression quickly returned to a mostly neutral scowl. Hold on, what? She had somehow managed to catch him and totally freeze him in a field of magic in the split second before he hit her.

That was seriously impressive.

His insides finally caught up with the rest of his body and he tasted a mixture of bile and blood. He had essentially just launched himself at a brick wall.

Bea ignored him and kept searching about the place, which he now observed was some kind of communal space- a living room, with a kitchen tucked off to the side.

Telekinesis is essentially impossible to physically resist once your opponent has time to act, and Sterling was pretty much just a regular Pegasus, which is why Beatrix was genuinely shocked when she heard him hit the ground.

The book was not here. She was angry- she had been all night . And here was a stallion who did not know how to quit, nor did he understand that he was supposed to be powerless in this situation. Everything was starting to get to her, and she had reached her limit. Bea blew up.

So did the kitchen. And also pretty much everything else for that matter.

The earth around the barn surged upwards through the initial blast and then came back down, the barn and the hideout and the night sky all merging into one as the entire building turned into a crater. Even with a force-field and magical fortifications on her body, Bea still got hit hard- bits of roofing slipped through her magic, leaving nasty bumps and sore spots that would definitely bloom into bruises over time. A substantial amount of wood splintered off one the beams, stabbing her deeply in the flank before it snapped off.

When the rubble settled, she dug herself out and limped off.

He did not.