The sun did not appear to forgive in places like this: that was the first thing Pepper had learnt through her time here. Here, surrounded by walls of craggy mountain, it felt like the sunlight was just funnelling in, like water to a basin, seeming to collect at every point you turned to. Every noon of every day along this perpetual walk, it felt like somepony was holding a magnifying glass to her head.
And even still, she was doing the best of the three of them.
Turning her head, she watched the two other ponies that trailed behind her. Coffee Break seemed more as though he’d fall down and die with every other step. Obviously, it was all just melodrama. Of the three of them, Break carried the least weight, drank the most water and still managed to complain more than the both of them.
“Pepper,” croaked Break, “I’m like… dying, dudes. We have to stop soon.”
“We’ve been moving for all of… what, an hour?” Pepper yelled back, hardly even giving another glance back. She knew exactly the state Break was in. She hoisted her rifle back against her side, posture firm – like a real soldier. Or, as much a pony half a world from home, fighting on grounds of... perhaps wavering ideological loyalty, could.
It’d been more than an hour, truthfully – not that anypony had kept track, anyway. Since they’d woken up at eleven o'clock sharp, in a little tent down the valley, nestled between the split branches of two great big trees, they’d made decent progress across the mountain that had once stood out to them like a miles-long barrier, preventing them from going where they were needed.
Coffee had, with all the insightfulness of a seer, recommended they get a vehicle at at least six separate points along this trip. Unfortunately, rentals were hard to find in war-torn Evian nations, so by hoof it had to be.
“Naw, dude. Don’t be like that, dude. I’m not asking for much, I just want a break! It's like, 3 bajillion degrees out here, why’re you being a douche about it? Look, Dazzle’s barely even on this planet anymore, dude!”
Pepper stopped, turning back to look. Needless to say, Coff wasn’t lying. Razzle Dazzle looked lost at the best of times. She had a peculiar unburdened jolliness about her, like most things that reached that brain of hers bounced right back. She was a foalhood friend of Break’s, and it had surprised Pepper to know that apparently she had just always been like this. The two had only been acquainted as mutual friends when they first set off for Prywhen.
Now, however, she stared off into the valley as if it was the first time she’d ever seen a tree.
“What did you give her?!” Pepper yelled, trotting over in slight panic.
“Relax, dude. She’s all good, I gave her a tab and we smoked up before we started off this morning. It was totally excellent." He looked over, nudging Dazzle with a dumb grin. "Right, Dazzle, dude? How you feeling? You cool? Everything all chill and nice and shit... and stuff, sis?"
Dazzle looked back over with the most empty expression imaginable. Coffee took that as an excuse to give the same grin back to Pepper.
"...Yeah," Dazzle finally said, a few moments later, to both their surprise. “I’m, like… dude.”
Coffee Break laughed, patting Dazzle's back and pulling her into a tight hug. “See? She’s doing awesome, she's just not got exaaactly the same tolerance as me, y'know?" He ruffled the poor pony’s mane. "You’re a great dude, Dazzle.”
Pepper watched with a sour look on her face, regretting just about every decision that had led to this trip. Served her right for deciding on a journey of this scale stoned. She put another hoof forward, turned her head again, and...
Oh, for Celestia's sake.
“Fine.” Pepper sat her pack on the ground, groaning. She came to a halt with a loud huff, much to the glee of the particularly stoned stallion behind her. She paced back and forth, back kept towards him, kicking a little pebble with such force it could likely be classified as shrapnel. “Fine! You win, as per usual. We’ll stop and get absolutely nothing done, like we have for the last six days!”
"Sweeet!" He hopped about, grinning ear to ear. He painted himself as an intellectual, but the pony before her gave greater impressions of 'first creature to light a fire'. He danced about, taunting her with his energy. If it was any colder, she'd have pushed him all the way down again and carried on with just Dazzle. Though, acid wasn't known for its soldier-enhancing abilities.
With another grumble, she turned back to face the group. Break was already sitting on the floor, bag unpacked, cigarette case and lighter in hoof. In a way, it was slightly impressive. It went to show just how far the muscle memory went from all those times they'd hung out after hoofball.
“Duude,” he placated, hoof out with the sort of confidence only granted to either the best of orators, or those that had no idea what they were talking about. It certainly wasn’t the former. “We’re like… no use to Filip dead, right? I mean… this is morale-boosting, and stuff. Buck, dude, they should give this to every soldier. I mean, those griffs would LOVE this! It’d be, like… excellent!”
Pepper opened her pack, rustling around until she found what was essentially a glorified picnic blanket. She threw it down with another exaggerated huff, and Coffee immediately flopped onto it, sunglasses on and canteen in hoof.
“They should… give this stuff to that Grover dude. Woah.” Dazzle finally spoke up, occupied with a particularly interesting daisy that was growing in a crack between two stones until Coffee managed to coax her into sitting with them on the blanket. “It’d… end war, y’know? Cause he’d be all like, ‘woah… dudes, this is crazy,’ and then he’d give it to his generals and stuff, and they’d be like–”
Pepper had just about tuned Dazzle out by the second word.
“I think you have a point.” Coffee nodded, passing Pepper a cigarette and lighting it for her. “Like, Grover? He’s just a stuck-up rich griff, doesn’t know anything about the real world.”
“Coff, you're still getting bits sent to you by your dad.”
“Yeah? So what? I use my wealth for good, dude. When the revolution comes to Equestria, dude, I’ll give them all my money.” He looked quite pleased with himself. Pepper looked on, taking a long drag from his cigarette and shaking her head.
She was the only one with a job. A shitty one, true, but a job nonetheless. That being said, as much as she criticised Break for it, it was his trust fund that had funded their little escapade into Prywhen.
“Dazzle, you got the cooler?” Pepper called, unsure if she would actually get an answer back within the next five minutes.
To her surprise, the bright-eyed mare in front of her smiled, nodded and pointed her hoof down the path.
Coffee looked over, rolling over onto his belly, hitting Dazzle gently on the side of the head with an outstretched wing. “Cooler, Dazzle.”
“I don’t have it,” she groaned. “I told you, I left it down by the river. When are we going back there? It was so beautiful.”
Coffee and Pepper exchanged a long glance at each other. Pepper shook her head, rolled her eyes, and took another puff at a cigarette, taking in the sweet nicotine.
“So no beer?” Coffee squeaked.
“No beer. It was in the cooler, bonehead. Was looking forward to that, too. Pass me whatever you’ve been rolling.”
Dazzle continued on.
“You know… when we were at that river, I saw the strangest thing!” She lay down, kicking her legs in the air, her forelegs over Coffee’s. “The weirdest, wildest thing. It was in the water, I think, and I was sure I was hallucinating, but it was so frickin’ real, and I’ve had bad trips before, so I grabbed a stick and I poked at it, and it moved! And I’m not sure what it was, if it was a fish or something, but I swear, I SWEAR it was a seapony! It was just totally crazy, because I’ve never seen one before, and I’m not sure why one would be out here, but it really was there, I’m sure! It smiled at me, then it went, and I was like, ‘woah, that was a–’”
“Are you done?!” Pepper yelled, startling Coffee just as much as it startled Dazzle.
The three of them sat in silence after that, with Coffee trying his best not to laugh and Dazzle giving Pepper a peculiar smile. She let her cigarette burn out, feigning throwing the butt at Dazzle and causing the batpony to stumble to her hooves and flee.
Pepper lit up a fresh cigarette, letting the end burn and the smoke to swirl around her face, mind beginning to clear.
It was a strange sort of liberty, being out here, sun beating down, hardly a cloud in the sky. Sure, technically, they were here to be the maximum communist guerillas, beating up the Imperial menace and saving the worker. Sure, technically, it was a warzone, but between the three of them, one bullet had been fired – it wasn’t on purpose.
Obviously, the whole saving the worker part was just going to happen later, and they’d told themselves this for the last week they’d been here. Pepper had begun to grow suspicions that Coffee didn’t actually want to fight.
However, here, halfway across the world, she’d been able to relax in a way she never quite had back in Marechester. For one, the sky wasn’t perpetually grey, and that had had a more than noticeable effect on her mood, despite how much she insisted she loved the cold.
Coffee looked over at her, pointing at his flask and holding it upside-down to show that he was all out. In return, he was given the briefest shrug of the shoulders Equinity had ever known.
But despite the constant bickering between the two, they’d met at a hoofball game two years ago, bonding over their shared passion of disobeying their parents. They’d been inseparable since.
A small smile crept across Pepper’s muzzle, dragging her pack over and producing two basic sandwiches, half-passing, half-throwing it over to Coffee. “There you go. You can have that, at least.”
“Aw, love you, dude.” Break grinned, smoke escaping his lips as he spoke. He scoffed down the sandwich he’d been given without another word.
She stuck her head out of the bag, looking over to their super-fried friend. “Got some marmalade, you like marmalade, Dazzle?”
Dazzle was practically unresponsive. She was sprawled out in a shaded spot underneath a tree somehow, despite the fact they’d never seen her get up. She had her eyes closed, her hooves crossed, humming a nonsensical tune, just completely away inside her own little world.
Coffee stumbled up, pressing into the pony’s side with a branch, producing a yelp that probably could’ve been heard from Griffinheim.
She rolled over, sitting upright and rubbing her side. Pepper held out the jar. She took it, inspecting its contents with a curious look.
The silence hung for a moment. Then Coffee began to burst into laughter.
All eyes fixed onto him – or, Pepper’s did, at least – shooting him a glance.
“She looks like an ANT!” Coffee exclaimed, as if it were on everypony’s mind. Pepper raised a brow.
“An… ant?” The disparity in just how stoned the three of them were was starting to get a little more tangible.
“I wish I was an ant.” Dazzle nodded, scooping out of the jar with her hoof. It was quickly snatched away from her.
“On bread, Dazzle, sweet stars. Not on your hooves, eugh, we've just been walking through mud!"
"Yeah, and you can't even put it on a cracker?" Coffee added. "I mean, who doesn't have crackers with marmalade? What do you have crackers with, if not marmalade?"
"Who the buck eats crackers with marmalade?" Pepper asked, almost offended. "Marmalade is a breakfast food, crackers aren't, it's as simple as that."
"You're kidding, right? They're great!"
"You're all mad," Dazzle sighed, sounding like a misunderstood poet. "Ants don't even have crackers. If you think about it, a cracker to an ant? It’d be like a whole house. Maybe even a… fort.”
“Woah.” Coffee looked confounded, apparently the greatest revelation of the century. Pepper swore he’d been less deep in thought trying to budget for this trip.
It was barely noon, and Pepper had already had enough for the day. She sat back against a rock, letting the sun wash over her. They would end up spending the rest of the day here, as per usual, and there was nothing she could do about it now.
Then again, it wasn’t the worst place to stop. The air felt different up here – it wasn’t just thinner, she’d gotten used to that. No, it was distinctly different. A certain feeling it had with the full might of Celestia’s sun seemingly bearing down on them. The valleys around here were just full of air that had to be breathed. The mountains jutted into the empty sky like earthen spears; not the colossal peaks of Canterlot, no, but they were different. It was warm, it was lush. Yellow-green in all kinds of shades, cliff faces of orange. It was like it had been painted in an entirely different canvas from the world she’d known in Marechester, where everything seemed dipped in grey.
Maybe it was also the weed. At least one of those cigarettes wasn’t a cigarette.
She put the rifle down to her side, gazing into the valley below. She could see why Dazzle took such an interest in it, if she was being honest. The mountains seemed to open into brilliant rows of verdant life, before falling again into another neat slope. Trails, cut out by the water, gleamed in the summer sun.
And there was Coffee. The loud, obnoxious pony he’d travelled with, with an ever-so-slightly lopsided face and a coat that seemed to blend with the stone. An idiot, sure, but her friend, still gnawing on the crust of his sandwich.
Dazzle was absolutely mesmerised. She wondered just what exactly she was seeing. There was this look of absolute wonder in her eyes, like she’d seen a butterfly the first time – Coffee coughed and sputtered on a piece of bread in the background, rambling on about the philosophical revelations he was coming up with in his head, a good portion of which Pepper had actually told him first.
She drank lazily from the flask she kept at her flank. It was bitter, and yet distinctly flavourless, and the strange whirling in her mind did nothing to dull the flavour. It tasted like it had sat there for far too long, and had acquired a faintly metallic taste because of it.
She longed for oats. It was a strange thing, but the crop they grew out here was rice. They’d seen a lot of the paddy fields along their ways, especially after they’d made their way out of Kivessin. They were massive, and just reaching the end of their harvest as they’d arrived. Obviously, the war had put some changes on that, but they’d seen workers out in the fields, hurrying about with their work and their lives.
She seemed to realise where she was all of a sudden, coming back to, seeing Dazzle sat close to her side, staring at the side of her muzzle quite intently. She looked over, raising a brow.
Dazzle just stared. The silence between the two was heavy. Pepper had a distinct feeling she was being observed, tested even. She just wasn’t sure what about.
“...What?”
“Your coat,” Dazzle spoke, with uncharacteristic clarity. “It’s very nice.”
“Oh. Thanks. Yours is…” she strained for a word. “Very bright.”
Dazzle smiled, a strange sort of pride welling up in Pepper because of it. “Yeah. Coffee said that too, when we met.”
Pepper didn’t respond. She stared out into the forests below, transfixed by the quaint beauty of it all. Dazzle didn’t seem to mind at all.
“You enjoy the marmalade, then?” she joked, poking her.
“Mhm.” She still seemed to have little bits of food in her teeth. She decided it would be best not to mention it. She was clearly having a good trip – courtesy dictated she didn’t disturb that. "I love marmalade."
“You know,” Dazzle began, resting her head on Pepper’s shoulder. “Coffee’s not a very good name.”
She looked at the pony at her shoulder, then back to the stallion behind her. He seemed to be keeping himself entertained with a lighter. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a plant. Accurate for him. But, that’s not a good description of a pony, if you think about it. If I were to describe him, it wouldn’t be Coffee.”
“Well… what should it be?” She inquired, still unsure just what had prompted her to start on this.
“I was thinking, maybe, cappuccino? That sounds cooler than coffee, don’t you think? Like, the drink, right?”
Pepper couldn’t help but snicker at that. “Cappuccino, eh? Sure he’d love it.”
“I know, right?” She giggled. “And… I’ll be, uh.”
“Dazzling.”
“Yeah, Dazzling. I’ll be Dazzling. And you’ll be…”
“I think Chilli Pepper works just fine, wouldn't you say? I've been told I look like my name.”
“Nope.” She groaned. “You’ve gotta be joking, these are cool nicknames, right? Like, awesome guerrilla names, like you wanted, right? No. I’m calling you Peppercorn.”
“Oh, of course, guerrilla names. Cappuccino, Dazzling and Peppercorn,” She repeated, mostly just playing along for the fun of it. “Right. Interesting. You’ve got a strange brain, you know that?”
She nodded, but Pepper had a distinct impression she didn't hear her at all.
“You’re like… really hot, dude.” Dazzle looked at her, a sudden seriousness in her eyes. She spoke lowly, without the typical bright tone she had come to know her by.
Pepper blinked, then blinked again, then for a third time. A blush rose in her cheeks, and she opened her mouth for the right words, but the right words never came, or maybe they were too odd, or maybe she was reading into this situation entirely wrong, or...
“Oh—” Pepper started, just as quickly silenced as Dazzle took her sunhat off and placed it atop her head, squinting her emerald eyes tightly as she positioned it just perfectly, providing some well-needed shade.
“There ‘ya go. Suits your stupid uniform shirt good, don’t you think? Pretty excellent, right?” She beamed, the biggest, dopiest grin on her muzzle.
Pepper opened her mouth again, only to find the words stolen away as Dazzle got to her hooves and bounded over to Coffee. She could only let out a quiet curse. Off she was, like breath into the air, off to talk about another of the seaponies she'd seen.
Dazzle – the name definitely suited her. So typical of her to leave without giving anything explanation. She almost felt a little annoyed, a little conflicted. In the days they'd spent here, she'd probably seen Dazzle sober for a combined four hours – and that was a generous estimate at that. But even still, she would sometimes break out into random waves of curious wisdom that left Pepper so very intrigued about the pony.
She felt the fabric of the sunhat, how it sat on her head, pushing her ears down to the side. She looked back to the horizon, trying to forget the flutter that had come over her, the strange, newfound respect that had come over her when the batpony gave her the hat. Did she really mean that?
She pressed her hoof against her cheek. Maybe she meant it literally? It wouldn’t surprise her, given how stoned the other two were. Another curse was directed at the sun for making things so very confusing.
It was a tiny gesture, of course, but this was her hat, the one she’d hardly seen her without. With the bright old sun that loomed over them, seemingly commanding the air to be still in its radiance, it wasn’t a gesture taken lightly.
They’d been scorched in this sun, it’d commanded every step to take its toll. It was a force they’d grown to hate along their journey, the limiting factor to all progress it seemed – Coffee’s greatest excuse.
Looking over at the pony rolling around in the grass, picking flowers and scoffing up bits and pieces from his pack, it was hard to tell what the fuss had been about from the start.
They just enjoyed each other's presence. Maybe that was it.
She smiled softly as she spotted two griffons in the valley below, rifles in claw, donning colours she recognised. Friends, thankfully.
She took the sunhat off, looking at it. It was old, and worn, a few loose stitches hanging out here and there. It was a little too big for her, and even after Dazzle’s corrections, it flopped to the left lazily whenever she tried to put it back on, like it was Dazzle and Dazzle alone that could command this hat to settle. It’d clearly been a well-loved hat.
"We're just... in the flow, dudes. Pepper, come on, we're like... philosophical-ising right now," called the stallion’s voice from afar. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the two were enthralled in another stunning conversation on the meaning of life, of social relations and more importantly, the last movie Coffee saw.
Her group was so terribly useless. She’d get them up in an hour. They’d get to work, in their own dysfunctional way, but a small part of her seemed to recognise the importance of this moment. It would be this she remembered; life in the sun, with the worst of company.
Another breath of smoke escaped her muzzle, almost causing her to break out into a coughing fit in the process. The sun had begun its descent into the afternoon, bringing a new wave of heat she now looked forward to a little more. Maybe not the worst company, exactly.
She shouldn't care at all, they met just six days ago. Oh, to Tartarus with it, though.
"Alright, Coff. I'll be one second, 'dude'. Say, gis' us a tab." She called back, poking into the cracked soil with a branch.
Peppercorn... maybe the nickname wasn’t so bad.
