Unity 2: Why is This Still a Thing?

by Admiral Biscuit

Chapter 3: The Binary Bazaar

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Chapter 3: The Binary Bazaar*

Some of you might be thinking that Amethyst was suffering from moral turpitude, that she’d just gun down an innocent bystander on the street to get her clothes (and probably her wallet and credit cards, because the opportunity was there). Amethyst wasn’t that kind of pony; she knew full well if she gunned down an innocent bystander the clothes would almost certainly have blood on them, and who wants to wear bloody clothes? Have you ever had to wash blood out of fur?

Amethyst had.

So had KitKat—they at least had that in common.

“I don’t know much about guns,” KitKat said. “In fact, until just recently I’d never heard of them since they’re not canon.”

“I can already guess where this conversation is going,” Amethyst replied, shifting her newly-acquired cowboy hat to a more rakish angle. “Look, I’ve got lots of guns and I can afford to part with one and still be feared.”

“What if she uses it on somebody?”

“I keep the chamber empty for safety, and I slid out the magazine before I gave it to her. Besides, it’s a Taurus PT-138; it’d be a miracle if it worked.”

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The walk to the binary bazaar (which they would discover, to their sorrow, was not nearly as fabulous as the non-binary bazaar) passed entirely without incident.

The only incident was that the pair of them were stopped by a judgmental Karen. She was built like a troll, with a helmet-style bottle-blonde haircut, a spray-on tan, oversized sunglasses perched over her bangs, giant fake fingernails painted fire-engine red and a poorly-done boobjob, all highlighted by a blouse and tights sourced from a MLM.

She spotted KitKat first, and her eyes narrowed at the sight of a six foot tall well-muscled barbarian woman just walking down the street like she owned it in armor while carrying an axe and not conforming to proper feminine roles (for example, her fetlocks—which were fully on display—were feathered rather than being shaved smooth).

Karen opened her mouth to speak just as Amethyst came into view, five feet and some inches of curves in all the right places and leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination (except what little was covered by her recently-acquired cowboy hat) and whatever she was about to have said to KitKat was lost in a moment of lust or longing immediately followed by a proper puritanical pique.

“Hide your shame!” she shrilly shrieked.

KitKat pinned her ears at the sudden aural assault; Amethyst crossed her arms, which had the added effect of squozing her boobs together and giving her cleavage to die for. “I got nothing to hide.”

“Nothing to hide!” A vein in the Karen’s forehead began to pulse dangerously. “You slattern! Yourr tits are flopping out on display for everyone to see, and don’t even get me started about your—your . . . “

“My vulva?”

“Officer! She swore at me!”

Both KitKat and Amethyst looked around. There was no officer, and nopony had swore at her, although both of them were considering doing so.

“Manager!”

KitKat reached back for her tabarzin, while Amethyst rolled her eyes and selected a gun. Karen’s demon transformation was nearly complete.

“She’s got a gun!”

“I believe the words you’re looking for are ‘symbolic penis’,” Amethyst informed her and then shot her once between the eyes and twice in the center of mass with her .357 Magnum.

As the Karen burst into flames and then dissolved back into the abyss from whence she’d come, Sparkler reholstered her gun to the sound of applause from the crowd that had gathered.

•••

It took some convincing by KitKat to be let into the binary bazaar. Specifically, the gigantic and rather handsome anthropomorphic hound who guarded the entrance—and who looked exactly like Vortex from Helluva Boss (but was legally distinct)—was skeptical of her claims of not being non-binary.

(It was the armor; in this land women weren’t generally warriors.)

(Also her height kind of threw him for a loop; he wasn’t used to women who could look him in the eye.)

He was a chill dude just doing his job and he didn’t have a cosmic-minded roast beef against her; after she explained that she was just fitting in with her society’s role of being a proper mare, and that earth ponies were naturally taller and bulkier than the other two major tribes as well as most of the close pony adjacent species [i.e., kirins, zebras, snowponies, batponies, mules, donkeys, minikelpies] he let her in, thus thwarting the obvious plot element that was designed to separate the two of them.

Even if KitKat hadn’t known what a binary bazaar was, it turned out to be quite familiar. Dozens and dozens of stalls all lined up along the street, with anthros of every stripe or spot or just plain fur hawking their wares (in the sense that at least one of them was an anthro hawk, and also the other definition of that word). The only bizarre thing at the bazaar was that each booth only had two items on offer, although that should have been obvious from the name of the bazaar.

Yet another reason why the non-binary bazaar is so much better.

On the plus side, it didn’t take the two too long to find what they were looking for. Consider: if a bazaar is truly binary, and if they’re looking for a mystical malware musket, it’s plainly obvious that everything for sale is either a mystical malware musket or not a mystical malware musket, which means that mathematically they only needed to check one booth to find what they needed.

Hey, I don’t make the rules.

But of course it couldn’t be that easy; such an item could only come at a terrible price.

“Fifteen million rupees?”

The anthro hawk nodded his head. [Are hawks binary to an average person?] “Do the ladies find themselves short?”

“I’m taller than usual,” KitKat remarked. “I didn’t know this when I first appeared since I had no other anthos with which to compare myself, but now that I’ve seen a likely representative sample of male and female anthros, I can say that I am above average in height, shoulder width, and musculature (for females) while being below-average in bust, thank Celestia.”

“I’m not sure we’ve yet seen a representative sample,” Amethyst admitted. “So I can’t say if I’m short or average. I can say that I don’t have fifteen million rupees.”

“And now I know when Cheryl’s birthday is,” the hawk said, then shook his head as if to clear out a reference that came from nowhere. “You could break some pots or trim some grass. You might find some that way.”

“If every pot has a blue rupee in it, that’s still three million pots to break. Even with a montage, we’d be here all day.”

“I’ve got a better offer,” KitKat said. Both she and Amethyst were well-acquainted with open-air markets and bartering, but Amethyst had gotten hung up on the math and not realized that the solution was quite mathematical. “You sell us the gun for the three dozen bits I’ve got AND a small jar of honey, XOR we take it, kill you, AND walk away.”

“What kind of honey is it?”

“Forbidden honey.”

Logically, the hawk couldn’t argue with his logic, and he was a sucker for honey. His jizz*** got even better after he ate honey, and all the birders loved it.

•••

“Would you really have killed him?” Amethyst asked as they walked out of the marketplace, the Mystical Malware Musket slung over her shoulder.

“It’s a morally grey area,” KitKat admitted. “I’m opposed to killing without cause, but he didn’t know that. Let’s just say that I played by the rules of the binary bazaar: either kill him or don’t. It’s simple logic.”

“I just got caught up in the math.” The two of them stopped at a booth selling cookies: they had both Oreos and NOT Oreos, and between the two of them (the ponies, not the cookies) they had enough change left in the bottom of KitKat’s saddlebags and Amethyst’s the usual place to buy a tube of cream-filled sandwich cookies.

The two of them split the tube and when they were done, brushed their muzzles clean, dusted the crumbs off their hands, and then disposed of the empty wrapper in a convenient trash receptacle. As they left the bazaar, unhindered by an exit guard, KitKat turned to her unicorn companion. “Well, that was easier than I expected. What’s next?”

Amethyst Star called up the map again. “Looks like the Forest of Forgotten Files.”

“That’s the part where the ~~AI~~ mission brief says I do all the fighting?”

Sparkler nodded.

“And how do we get there?”

“I dunno, it only says ‘cutscene/montage.’

“Oh crackers.”


Author's Note

*This chapter doesn't have subtitles**
**except that one, and this one explaining it.
***Okay I lied, there is a subtitle. Jizz, to quote Wikipedia, is: " is the overall impression or appearance of a bird garnered from such features as shape, posture, flying style or other habitual movements, size and coloration combined with voice, habitat and location."
There's some stuff you just can't make up.

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