Advent of Victory

It had been a pretty simple matter of giving the found evidence to the guards, and having both the conductor and Deciduous corroborate my story, for the guards to immediately take High Class into custody on suspicion of murder. I stood outside of her private car watching as she was walked out, a silver ring clasped around her horn. I guessed that it was probably placed there in order to stop her from using any magic to get away. She didn’t have anything around her hooves though that I assumed ponies had to ping them. Odd that they didn’t seem to carry those around just in case, or were they being more gentle with her for some reason?

She didn’t try to get away however, which had been the smart move on her side since I doubted she would be able to get away from the two guards. There were several other ponies looking on as she was led through the hallway back to the guard car where she was going to be confined for the remainder of the trip. For some reason there even seemed to be a reporter among the rabble, taking pictures of the mare as she was led away in shame.

She didn’t beg them to let her go or scream her innocence like I had expected her to do. No, she held her head high and walked with the same grace I had seen her posses previously. As she passed my small section of the hallway her eyes moved from their constant looking ahead to gaze at me. I could swear there was a pleading sadness in those eyes. What was she…

“Check.”

I blinked as I came from the memory and back to the current moment. How many turns had I played without paying much attention? Apparently enough to allow Scarlet an easy check. I moved back to block with a rook; the move would be a sacrifice, one I wouldn’t have had to make if I had been paying attention, but that seemed to be a big problem of mine.

Scarlet moved her bishop and captured my rook, which I then took with a pawn. She used her queen to take that pawn, putting me in check once more though this time I was free to move my king away unimpeded.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she captured another pawn with the queen. I took a pawn with one of my knights in an attempt to bait her queen.

“Just a lot on my mind,” I replied, before frowning as she didn’t fall for it; electing instead to claim another pawn and squeeze me into a corner.

“Still thinking about what happened with High Class? That was days ago. Check.” She shot a rook across the board to put me in check once again and put me on my back line. I moved a bishop in the way of her check so I wouldn’t be herded quite yet.

“I still have a bad feeling about the whole thing. The times just don’t add up, and my gut is telling me that she didn’t do it. Can’t really put my paw on why though.” She took the bishop and succeeded in pushing me onto the back line.

“Well if there is one thing that I have learned in my line of work it is to listen to your gut. Facts and evidence are great, but intuition is also incredibly valuable.” She moved her queen forwards, locking me into the corner “Checkmate.”

I sighed and dethroned my king. Maybe she was right, and I should take a second look into it. I don’t think I would be feeling any better for a while if I didn’t exhaust all options. Maybe, I just needed to get myself out of this room I had been in for days now, and wander about the train a little bit. Taking a walk could usually do wonders for clearing the head.

Scarlet allowed me to sit and think for a while as she began to reset the board. I hadn’t been able to beat her a single time all day, my mind was just not in the game and it was causing my play to suffer. She glanced up at me with a smirk as I stood from the couch and began to walk away.

“Running away from a little chess match?” she asked, the smirk on her face almost taunting me into taking a seat and trying again.

“No, I just need to clear my head. The games have been distracting, but I think I need to do some proper thinking. I will be back before dinner.” I made it to the door before her calling out caused me pause.

“We will be arriving at our stop before Las Pegasus today, we will probably catch something to eat there in a few hours.” I nodded to her in acknowledgement before leaving the car and closing the door behind me. The grime of the floor greeted me immediately and made me cringe. I wasn’t usually a person that was so against getting dirty every now and then, but would it really kill the janitor or whatever they had on a train to mop the floor for once. This was just ridiculous.

I padded down the hallway trying to organize my thoughts. There were certain tracks that did play out logically for High Class to have been the one to do it. She was a unicorn and like I had theorized earlier, she could have teleported to the room once the lights were out. She wouldn’t have used magic in the room because it would have given her away. Why return to the vent and hide the things though? That was the one thing that got me.

We are on a moving train, it would have been easy to just toss everything off the side of the train and no one would ever know. She had chosen to hide them though which seemed like an incredibly mistake on her part. If she really did do it then she was pretty smart and an amazing actor to no even act shaken up by committing this murder, would such a person be clumsy enough to leave behind so much evidence.

The handkerchief was proven to be hers and the blood on it was proven to be the victims. A couple of handy spells had figured out that much, so it was very concrete evidence against her. She was also the only one that seemed to have any motive to commit this murder in the first place, which was another strike against her. All the evidence seemed to point in that direction so was I just being delusional?

Was I just being stubborn and not looking at the facts correctly because I just so happened to like the mare? I had only met her once anyways so did it even make sense for me to avoid facts because I just so happened to like her on a personal level. Was there some sort of attraction that I was feeling for the mare somehow?

I stopped for a moment in the middle of the hallway at that thought. I had wandered so far in my musings that I didn’t really even know where I was any more, but that last thought took all of my concentration that I wasn’t even able to give a close inspection to it. Did I somehow feel attracted to her?

After a moment of consideration I came to the conclusion that no, I didn’t have that kind of attraction to High Class. I just happened to like her on a personal level and felt enjoyment to be around her. She would probably make a great friend were it not for her being accused of murder and the lead suspect in the case. I turned my thoughts once again back to the situation at hand.

All of the facts that we had did really point to her being the culprit, and there wasn’t anything that I could really do to change facts. If it wasn’t actually her that had done it then that means that the handkerchief was planted. Someone had known that we would figure her for this and had helped us along in the process. By throwing that one piece of evidence into suspicion it called into question the entire investigation. If the real culprit, assuming High Class didn’t actually do it, had planted that evidence for us to find then they must have known a good deal about the victim in the first place.

I came to a half open almost boxcar inhabited by a single pegasus and stopped in my tracks. The car itself was painfully simple, just a wooden structure with a desk that had a few papers lying atop of it. The open side gave me a good view of the landscape we were traveling by as the train sped forwards. I shook my head to clear my mind of my observations and in the end decided not to try and continue thinking about the case anymore.

I had been thinking these same thoughts over and over for the past few days and they didn’t really get me anywhere. I was just stuck in this repeating cycle of reasoning and I had nothing new to help break me from it. Maybe I should just give up on High Class and go with what the evidence was saying. My rational side was screaming at me to just drop it and get on with my life, but my irrational side wanted me to keep digging and try to find something more.

“Are you okay miss?” I heard a voice ask from in front of me.

I looked up to see the pegasus that I had just recently brushed off without a second glance looking at me intently. He was big for a pony, almost as big as myself and both his mane and coat color were purple. I couldn’t get a good look at his cutie mark from this vantage, but the most surprising thing about him was that he didn’t look a bit scared of wary of me at all. I decided to address this issue as bluntly as possible.

“You aren’t cowering. Why aren’t you cowering?”

He laughed off my statement and actually slapped his knee with a hoof. “Now that’s a good one coming from the fox that saved Rubyton singlehoofedly. And now she is running about the train putting murderers behind bars and she asks why I ain’t scared of her. You are a funny one Mrs. Vixen.”

I am not really sure why that irritated me so much but it did. I thought I was supposed to be intimidating, but here this pony was laughing at the thought because I had a little bit of reputation. How had he even heard about the Rubyton thing, and how in the hell did he think I did that all by myself. I was laid up in the hospital for a week and permanently crippled from that fight.

I let out a long tired sigh; I wasn’t quite in the mood to get into an argument with this yokel. “So what’s your name?”

“Name’s Stream ma’am. I fly this leg of the track.” He replied with a salute. Why was he saluting me?

“Fly? Doesn’t the train do all the traveling for us?”

He gave another laugh. Have you ever heard Goofy laugh in any animated show or movie? Yea, it sounded almost exactly like that, and it grated my sanity. “I’m the messenger pegasus for this leg of the track. I take the messages that need to be sent out and the next day the next pegasus flies to the train with any letters that need to be delivered. It’s a pretty cushy job if you know what you are doin.” He gestured to a stack of papers that were laid out on a table. Having nothing to do I walked over to the table and started reading through the mail, I had expected him to stop me immediately but he just continued to stand there with an oblivious smile plastered on his face.

“So tell me Stream, do you carry a lot of important messages back and forth?” I read over what looked like a plain expense report. Not really the kind of urgent message that I would have thought needed to be ferried back and forth.

He nodded immediately “Sure do, one time I even carried a letter for Princess Celestia herself.” I tossed aside another bill, why does the mail always seem to be bills.

“Oh really? What was it about?” A coupon for a horn enhancer. Wow.

“I didn’t read it. It had the royal seal on it so I wasn’t supposed to,” he replied, speaking of seals I finally found something that might be interesting, it was also sealed with some sort of symbol. Of course I opened it immediately and read it over, it was a lot of numbers and figures so it took me awhile to get a grasp on it.

“So you aren’t supposed to read the mail?” I asked, to which he gave me a nod.

“It’s against the rules.” So I guess he didn’t think the rules applied to me. Since I am not an Equestrian citizen do they actually apply to me? I wish I paid more attention in Government, because then I might actually know the answer.

This bit of paper was actually pretty interesting. Sure it was a lot of numbers and figures, mostly bit amounts, but I did like math back in school. “So what are you doing when you aren’t carrying messages back and forth?” I asked.

“Oh a little bit of this or a little bit of that. I actually live in Cloudsdale most of the time and have to commute out to get to the trains. They don’t have a lot of trains up in the clouds you see so most of the pegasi in my job live on the ground. Not me though, nope I live in good ole…” I stopped his rambling with a raised paw.

“Wait, this is really important.” I had come across something on this spreadsheet that had jumped out to me. Could this be right? Was this just really sitting around here waiting to be read? I rushed out of the room without another thought, I had to get the others to look at this.

I faintly heard the pegasus calling out behind me “Miss, you aren’t supposed to take that.”