Imaginerian

Tall sits on a mushy little couch, waiting for this branch's receptionist to start up the projector. The room smells of weeks-old coffee, and worn-out teabags protrude from the garbage bins. Nothing like back in Skyfall; not much in the way of amenities here.

"I hear the MREs are pretty good, though," Eckhard says, still ribbing Tall on as the griffon slumps down with him, wings covering the kirin's back. "You can have everything go down in flames, but good food? That'll keep you alive, make you proud of your country for caring about you enough to excite your taste buds."

Apple Bloom talks with the receptionist—fortunately, Tall caught her nameplate, remembered her name… Paper Clip. Ordinary and foalish, that's how most Equestrian names go. With both ponies busy—and Nascente poring over the briefing's papers a few times—Tall pops a question: "I don't think I really caught what got you in Walkover's?"

Eckhard flashes a smile at him. "Ever heard of a little place called Brodfeld?"

"You mean that little griffon kingdom with the grain and wheat on the flag?" What little he knows of the place is that it's nearly to the other side of the Griffonian continent, far from anything he cared about back there. That and the whole civil war with communists.

"So proud about your heritage, and here you go thinking you can play fast and loose with mine, eh? Well, I'm no Brodfeldian, but it was nice to see a bunch of griffs not caught up with imperial politics back in the Empire's capital. I soaked up some time with a bunch of roaming knights in modern armor, and that's how Apple Bloom got me."

"How she got you?"

"Yeah," he says, sinking his back deeper into the couch, gesturing at the Earth pony fiddling with the projector. Maps and figures blur in and out of focus on a dimly lit wall. "A bit hard to enforce a monarchy these days, so there's the second civil war you probably haven't heard about. Ended up saving families from being burned by both sides. See, at least with the Empire and Aquileia and so on, they had professionals, had experience… Brodfeld's a backwater, plain and simple. When the prince got enough money to spend on artillery and claw-me-down chemical weapons he got from the black market? Imagine stuffing a family of five into your tank just so they could get a chance to breathe and get out of there."

Leaving Tall on that, Eckhard gets up from the couch. "Come on, I think we're about to start."
Now seated at the one and only round table, their silhouettes illuminated from behind by the projector beaming a map detailed with legend and text, the three soldiers drink in the information. After Paper Clip exits discreetly, Apple Bloom trots right in front of the projector, pointer in hoof.

It's only then that Tall notices the portraits of the Equestrian princesses high up on the walls, just outside of the projector's reaches. Celestia, Luna, Cadance, Twilight Sparkle, and Flurry Heart—painted and regal, all five of them, with polite smiles and not much else.

"I've been honest with y'all, and as ya can see from the state of yer' livin' quarters in HQ here, times have been tough. As much as I like y'all to get on the frontlines and get in some real action, we're puttin' the three of ya' with… well, a certain Gallus from the Royal Guard would've liked to entertain y'all, but I jus' got word that he got a serious injury. I'm scramblin' to find somepony, though I know a good corporal. You'll like her… maybe. She's got certain skills."

She slaps the wall with the pointer. "Anyway, you've read the news. Nirik invasions here and there, another offensive on the west gone wrong. North Kiria's lost some ground to those poor folk and it's causin' chaos."

The nirik invasions—the three major nirik warlords, he recalls, having mostly stayed the same since they broke out a decade ago. The one to their west call themselves the Sororal State of the Champions of Concord, and as far as he knows, is the most unstable, both in theory and in practice—invoking the name of the Kirian Goddess who called for balance and temperance. A smaller map on the corner of the screen shows how much territory they've gained in the month before—up to Safflower, part of a delta, where two rivers split off. Just a days-long trip from Fragrance.

"We've lost a lot of good mares and stallions these past few weeks, and while we ground 'em nirik to a halt, we're pretty much startin' from square one, and that's where y'all are startin', too. Kirin don't care 'bout how we're doin' but how safe they're feelin'—they can't see the fiercest fightin' on the front, but they can see police officers and roamin' soldiers. That's where you come in."

She steps back to let everyone drink in the town map of Camphor. In dotted lines is laid out the structure of the under-construction "Dull Line Electrodam, which they hope will make enough energy for the place with just the local river—simple clean energy! Makes 'em not so dependent on some bigger power plants and havin' to turn off electricity in some parts of the year. However, the mayor's concerned about nirik attacks since the Champions got mighty close. Put two and two together, and you three an' your on-the-ground leader's on guard duty. Don't flex your stuff—we're not here to scare the locals. Ya stay there an' watch things 'till the rest of Walkover's push the nirik back where they came from. Any questions?"

Tall's hoof springs up. "Then we go to the front, right?"

Apple Bloom stares at him for a good while. "Well, depends, Tall. You three have the resumes, but Kiria is a different beast. Resident kirin aside, doin' combat with wrathful fire-breathing creatures ain't normal. If things go too well with Dull Line, then y'all be posted in Fragrance for a few personal jobs with some magnates, businesskirin, the works. Escorts an' all that. But that's neither here nor there. Right now, we've got a buildin' dam to protect."

She then takes out a cigar, lights it up, takes one long hard drag.

Private security services for a hydroelectric dam. With a spice of nirik, maybe.

"Can't be worse than the demons I've seen," Nascente says off-hoofedly, as if in a daze.

Tall still stuffs his time in the firing range with poring over the dossier and the maps. The village of Camphor is as close to nondescript as it can get: a settlement started by creatures gathering by the river to water their crops with, then boats went up and down said river for trade, then it changed hooves between petty nirik tyrants—back before the Realm had even been a concept. It seemed impossible to unite these vast tracts of kirin when a small argument over vegetable prices at the farmers' market could incinerate the homes of hundreds.

Then, peace came over when a new religion challenged the nirik norm. The Way of Fire. Many of his family and friends back in Skyfall paid, at minimum, lip service to it. The tenets were hazy to him—it had little to do with churchy religion like the griffons' with gods like Boreas. The one thing his father drilled into him—both of them in foreign, Griffonian three-piece suits—was that to go nirik was to corrupt the gift of their Goddess, Concord. Balance was what all true kirin should strive for—the balance of maintaining their inner flame without letting it explode into an inferno that would burn others along the way.

And so Camphor would remain at peace as a village with nothing of note. Not even when the Silence came. They had always been farmers and fisherkirin, so minus the trade boats, they sustained themselves on the river and the crops. Just a century-long season of poor yields.

"What's it like back in Skyfall?" Nascente says.

That gets Tall out of his mental journey. He just fired a full clip of a pistol, magically held, onto his target. Bull's eyes on half his clip. Nascente's been firing by his side, though without levitation magic, he reloads with his muzzle through the teeth grip. "Nothing out of the ordinary."

"Nothing out of the ordinary for your background," he says.

"Says the zebra who writes 'Basic demonic magic' as a skill in your CV."

Nascente can only chuckle. "'Trash management' isn't much compared to the horrors I've seen before the Equestrians approached me."

"It's like I'm boring compared to you two," Eckhard butts in before emptying his SMG in bursts. The shots are mostly clustered around the center. "Mafia baby here and the demon whisperer there."

"It's not a family like that—we're not the Wingbardian Mafia serving pizza and talking about self-made creatures."

"But a mafia all the same," says Eckhard. "I mean, hey, I'm not judging. I've met ponies with seedier pasts. It's the adorable ones with bullet cutie marks that you watch out for. And shoot first."

On that joke, Tall continues firing, sometimes imagining a nirik on the other side of the shooting range.

From the headquarters' top floor—of one of Sycee Trading House's subsidiaries—Chief Executive of the Administration of North Kiria Fickle Current sits with a sweeping vista of the city of Fragrance. The coast splits his view—on his right, the formidable fleet of cargo ships, importing and exporting a rainbow of shipping containers under the pier's harsh lights; on his left, a land lit by neon, with its rowdy nightlife under way—a mix of work and pleasure, of night shifts between oily gears and broken hooves, of innovators frying their horns over the latest in electronics.

A technological paradise. Made in Kiria. Or Made in Fragrance if Fickle fully had his way.

Fickle flexes a foreleg, cracking a joint. He counts the years and decades in his head. If he'd been raised here, he'd be long dead, relying on old treatments when the griffons had advanced medicine, had come up with surgeries… approaching eighty years of age, yet he's as hale and hearty as ever.

Said nearly-eighty-year-old reads through his planner pockmarked with a bevy of meetings and negotiations, scanning everything. A few bright spots appear—free time, time to schedule another meeting. The block of time before it, in his own scribbles, is marked, on unions + national reputation.

He takes the telephone on his left. "Miss Firecracker? May I ask you to make an appointment with the Equestrian embassy here? This is about public relations, you understand…."