Dead Cat Bounce: A Fanfiction Fanfiction

Chapter Four: The Natural Condition

In the morning I awoke with some blisters, a dubious new skillset, and, most importantly, two Gyrobowls.

“How you doin’, Romeo?” I said as we scooted out of the truck cab.

“Sore. Really sore,” Romeo said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“No, not you too,” he said. “This is ‘torn tendon’ sore. Now if you excuse me I’m going to have to do my exercises now, the ones that I’ll have to do every day for the rest of my life because of you.”

“Awkward.”

Romeo went out on the pavilion to do his controlled wiggling movements for the next fifteen minutes. At the start he’d turn around every so often just to glare at me, but after a while his mind started to wander and he started telling me about the dream he had the night before.

In the dream he was a little filly, and he solved mysteries after school. He found out there was a secret group that turned ponies into trees. The group was led by the Day Mare and the Night Mare, who were kinda like the princesses, but really they actually totally weren’t. He ended up getting captured by them, and he got forced to eat the magic acorn that turned you into a tree, and he got turned into a tree.

But after he became a tree he learned that the group was actually a secret society sworn to protect the world. Then a hurricane happened and this giant tank-gorilla hybrid showed up, and he and the other trees had to go fight it. Then he woke up.

“Oh, one time I had a dream where I was trapped on beach full of seals,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, like seals bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye could see.”

“Was it scary?”

“Oh, terrifying. Like I didn’t know what to do ‘cause if I moved it’d probably provoke a seal, and seals are pretty violent right?”

“I think it depends on the kind of seal.”

“Well, these were dream seals, which are probably one of the most aggressive kinds of seals.”

“Anyway,” he said with a chipper smile, “I think I’m ready to go now. You almost packed up?”

“Yeah, just a second. One last thing to do,” I said.

The colorful plastic gleamed in the morning light. Oh yeah, I thought as I hooked the Gyrobowls to my saddle, this will be so much easier. The internal bowls rotated around on their hinges to keep themselves upright. They were ready to lovingly cup their contents like a mother would hold her foal.

“Screw saddlebags, I got Gyrobowls!” I said as I effortlessly poured all my hominy into my two awesome spill-proof, virtually-indestructable Gyrobowls. I reared up and took off with a sense of confidence I’d never felt before.

Never again.

_____

About fifteen minutes after we left Gobbler’s Knob, I remembered something.

“Hey, Romeo,” I said, “we forgot to turn off Actaeon last night.”

“You’re right. That’s going to be a problem,” he said as he slapped his forehead in frustration.

“Do you want to go back to the truck and do that now?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

_____

Day turned to twilight the moment we stepped under the dense forest canopy. It was summer, and the seasonal trees were determined to soak up all the light they could. Looking through the forest was like looking at a solid wall of dark green. Despite the gloom the ground was covered in grasses and shrubs, and even the tree trunks were green with moss and lichen.

We were only able to make our way up the overgrown mountain by following the divot that a stream had cut into the slope. Foul-smelling black fungus grew on the rocks around the stream. It crept up the fallen trunks of old trees, and it overwhelmed and smothered the surrounding moss. The slippery fungus spread everywhere as we climbed further up the mountain.

It got so bad that we decided it would be easier to abandon the stream and just bushwhack the rest of the way up. The vegetation was so thick we didn’t realize we were right in front of a slug the size of a bus. It slurped its way through the forest towards us, toppling trees in its wake. It stopped, and it waved its eyestalks at us and made wheezing noises from the hole in the side of its body.

It said, “Sbluerb! Spu, spu, spu delu?”

“I think it’s trying to talk to us,” Romeo said.

“What would a slug have to talk about?” I said. “I don’t trust it. It probably wants to lay its eggs in us. I say we shoot it and move on.”

“Hold up. This is interesting, and you’re terrible,” Romeo said. “I’ve never talked to a slug before.”

Romeo walked up to the slug, and the slug craned its eyestalks down to meet him eye-to-eye. “Sbluerb!”

“If you can understand me, say ‘Splorb,’” Romeo said.

“Sbluerb!” said the slug. “Sbluerb.”

“If you cannot understand me, say ‘Splorb.’”

The slug nodded its eyestalks and said, “Sbluerb!”

They stood around looking at each other for about a minute. At least Romeo did, but I don’t think slugs can stand. Romeo shifted his weight from side to side, and then the slug started to slide away.

“Sberble-berb!” it said.

“Sperble-berb!” Romeo shouted back.

“So what’s the diagnosis, Romeo?” I said.

“Well, I think it’s intelligent. And friendly. It just doesn’t speak English,” he said.

“So, we should shoot it?”

“What do you think?”

“…yes?” I said. “Nopony’s looking. We won’t get in trouble.”

“Don’t shoot the slug, okay?”

“But I—”

“No buts.”

“Fine,” I said.

The slug mowed through the thicket that we had just spent half an hour trying to muscle through. Nothing but bare earth and slime was left in the slug’s wake. We followed its slime trail back up to a slug-shaped hole in the forest that went straight through to the tree line. It was like a road. It was even sparkly, but that was because of the slime.

“See Charlie, you don’t need guns or magic. We have something with us that’s much more powerful than those.”  Romeo smiled pleasantly.  “Kindness.”

“What kindness? All you did was say, ‘snerble-werb,’” I said.

“Serble-burb.”

“Whatever. The slug had already cleared this path. Had we done it my way,” I said, “we’d still be able to go through it, and the slug would be dead. That’s like cost of opportunity, Romeo. Cost of opportunity.”

_____

Of course, nopony maintained an actual trail up Mt. Moriah, but there was still evidence of foot traffic. We followed the muddy rut through the meadows up the mountain. The long streaks of mud down the steep grassy slope showed us where not to step.

A long-dead glacier had carved a puckered scar along the slope the mountain. In its life the glacier had crushed the rock underneath, leaving a snaking belt of boulders, sand, and gravel in its wake. With the glacier gone the rocks lay bare. Nothing grew in this miniature valley, this moraine, save for the occasional solitary and stunted shrub.

We had to cross it, and that sucked. The footing was treacherous, and many times I nearly lost my balance. My missteps sent rocks tumbling down the moraine. Their clattering echoed through the valley.

I looked up from my feet to see Romeo, prim and proud, perched on a boulder ahead of me.

“Hold up a second,” he said. “I want to try something.”

“Quack!” Romeo yelled. He craned his neck to the valley. A second later the quack echoed back. He pumped his hoof in triumph.

“Quiet!” I said. “You’ll wake up the Hill Witch!”

“Hill Witches are a myth,” Romeo said, “like the Element of Laughter, or voter fraud, or that a quack can’t echo.”

“So?”

“Uh… so?” he said.

“I’m just sayin’.”

He looked down at me.

“What? I said I was just sayin’.”

_____

When we reached the snowline it wasn’t hard to find the Snowdark. It was an abscess in the mountain. The snow flushed from pink to an inflamed red and finally blackened as we reached the ruins of a factory and its company town. Oily discharge still dripped out of holding tanks that had blistered and ruptured.

Each tank had held a different color, and their contents had mixed and congealed to make the foamy tar that stained both earth and snow alike. Residual heat from the chemical spill had burned holes into the snow, and sulfurous fumes and steam wafted from poisoned ground that was left exposed.

Fortunately for us, we didn’t have to go anywhere near that shit. Trader Vic’s was on the periphery of the town. And at the same time it was also in the center of the town.

It turned out there were two towns in the Snowdark. One was the original company town built to service the factory, and the other was a more recent shantyville built off of the buildings on the original town’s outskirts to shelter scavengers.

It was built after the war, but the shantyville had long since been abandoned. It looked like it had been decades since anypony set foot here. The factory itself was in oddly good shape. Large sections of the outside facade were still intact, and their valuable materials remained unlooted despite their accessibility.

The sight of it unnerved me. Hotel Hotel told me that the goo was harmless, unsightly, but harmless. Had the ponies who had lived there known that? Had the tanks ruptured while they lived there? Had it spooked them into evacuating?

Or had the chemical spill already been there when they found it? That seemed more likely to me. The buildings of the shantyville stopped at the border of the chemical stain. Realizing that only unnerved me more. Had some other disaster driven them away? Or what if the chemicals really were dangerous and they had all died a few months after they had settled here?

Hotel Hotel told me it was harmless, but Hotel Hotel was the kind of pony who would lie to you about that if it got him what he wanted. He wasn’t the boss of Hörspen for nothing.

Was it wise of me to trust him? I thought.

Normally I like asking questions, but it’s not so much fun when you’re asking questions of yourself. Why does asking myself questions make me so uncomfortable? I thought. Then I realized why. It was introspection! Introspection is like shooting a laser at yourself in the mirror.

Questions are for making other ponies look stupid! I thought. And if you’re the enemy, then you lose when you win. But if you lose when you’re the enemy, does that mean you win? Ack! No! I have to point my laser at something else.

“Hey, Romeo!” I said.

“What’s up, crah?”

“Do you think the Snowdark is going to kill us?”

“As strange as it sounds, I actually trust Hotel Hotel on this one,” he said. “He wouldn’t order take-out from this place if he didn’t think it was safe. Also, Zulu and Iris weren’t able to find anything suggesting the place is dangerous, and Chang Ling tells me the place used to be some kind of food processing facility. Is this because of the abandoned town?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I mean, this is a town built on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere with no ready source of drinkable water or means of growing food. I figure there must have been some sort of supply cache or generator, and when that ran out everypony just left.”

“Yeah, but if it was as simple as they just ran out of supplies, don’t you think somepony’d eventually come back?” I said. “It’s not like this place is a secret.”

He paused for a moment to think.

“Okay, well let’s assume the chemicals they made or used here were toxic,” he said. “I’m still not terribly concerned. The stuff has had decades to dissipate or degrade, and toxic waste is more of a chronic exposure kind of deal, anyway. We’re only gonna be here for a couple of hours, so as long as we don’t eat or drink anything or bathe in the goo we should be fine.”

“The cosmic rays we’ve gotten from hiking up here have probably done more damage, anyway,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to be careful, though. We might as well treat it as if it was dangerous.”

“So just keep it ALARA,” I said.

“As low as reasonably achievable?”

“See? Aren’t you glad you took the reactor tour? Now tell me, do you remember what Epsilon times P-sub-F times P times P-sub-T-H times F times Eta equals?”

“Charlie, keeping it ALARA means not standing here and asking trivia questions. Let’s go.”

_____

“Trader Vic’s” was painted on a corrugated sheet metal billboard propped up the gutted second story of the original prewar building. At its entrance was an extended foyer of sheet metal and rotting laminated plywood done in the style of an Arabian souq tent. It was a lot less impressive than I had imagined. I had pictured something swanky and exotic hidden away for savvy merchants, and it was pretty obvious whoever built this was trying for that aesthetic, but this was just a worn-out pile of rubble among many.

I wondered how Hotel Hotel decided there’d be snacks here, but then I remembered I was just using this as an excuse to get out of Hörspen and I realized I didn’t care.

The inside was just as ramshackle and dilapidated, and in fact it was actually a little worse because we had to go through like five obnoxious bead-curtain doors to get through the souq tent. Inside the original building there were used heater packets and an unpacked rucksack on the floor.

Whoever lived here wasn’t home, so Romeo figured the sensible thing to do was to wait patiently in the souq tent for whoever it was to get back. I agreed, but I chose to interpret “wait patiently” in a very liberal sense.

The back rooms were filled with trash, mountains of it. I’d never seen so much processed food in my life, and it was pretty ridiculous.

That’s not eating clean, I thought, and I laughed for a good minute after that because that was a good joke.

The food residue on the trash was rotting, but it had yet to be picked clean by scavengers. I got the feeling that at some point in the past few weeks there had been a lot of food here, but it had all been eaten by what had to have been a big group of ponies. I got bored of looking at the trash, and I just sorta stared at the walls for a couple minutes.

There was a door with a keypad lock. Judging from the red light on the handle, I figured it still worked. While that was some impressive engineering, I ignored it. I wasn’t going to waste my time messing around with an old lock. But then I noticed that the paint had worn down on four keys.

That made things a little easier. it narrowed it down from five thousand and forty possible permutations to just twenty-four. Curiosity took hold. This I could justify doing. It was probably some sort of mnemonic, so I tried a couple.

P-O-E-M? No.

I tried it backwards.

M-E-O-P? No.

L-O-R-D? No.

P-O-L-E? No.

F-O-R-K? No.

I ran out of ideas and just started mashing buttons.

6 5 7 3

Three beeps and the lock disengaged. The door swung open, revealing a gutted room filled with broken bottles, soiled blankets, and the world’s most intense piss smell. I wasn’t the first pony to solve The Mystery of the Closet.

However it did look like the preceding Great Detective had generously bequeathed a stash of personal effects for me. A little tin box held a picture of a ritzy unicorn family, a box of crayons, and a white sphere with a tag tied around it. I took a look at the tag. It had something written on it:

Satsuma,

I will miss you terribly. I’m sorry I can’t send more. I want you and Breeze to draw a sunset for me when you get to the Stable. Remember me, and pleas, smile.

I love you

                                  Quilton

Quilton sure had shitty taste in jewelry. I chucked it at the wall. There was a loud crack, and the thing let out an “oooOOOooo” noise as it shattered on the floor.

I wondered what Stable stuff was doing all the way out here, but it probably wasn’t important. What was important was a little mesh bag filled with half-a-dozen plastic eggs. I grabbed them. I figured they contained chocolate or something.

I was getting hungry, and I didn’t really have much else to do, so I opened one of the eggs. Yep, there was chocolate in it.

Unfortunately the chocolate had shriveled up into gray little chocolate raisins. They were most assuredly not chocolate-covered raisins.

There was also a little Rarity figurine in there too. Neat!

I opened the other five.

Rarity.

Applejack.

Rainbow Dash.

Another Rarity.

Rainbow Dash with yellow coat and pink hair.

Most of them I put in my Gyrobowls to trade with Swap Meat. I really wanted that Candlelight Ecstasy standup, and if I walked away with that it would be worth it. However I took the yellow pegasus and wedged it in one of the crevices on my Actaeon module. I don’t know why, and some might have called it superstition, but I felt safer with Flitter hanging out on my battle saddle.

I heard three beeps from outside the door.

“Hey Romeo,” I said. “What’s up crah—”

A pony with a popped-collar gang jacket walked in. He saw the plastic egg shells on the floor and the toys sticking out of my Gyrobowls, and he puffed up like a threatened wolf.

“Bro, what the fuck are you doing with my stuff?” he said.

Then he saw the gun on my saddle. “Aw, shit,” he said, and he ran out the back door.

“Romeo, get out over here!” I shouted.

Romeo came out to meet me on the back porch of Trader Vic’s. The pony in the E ∆ gang jacket ran across the town and into the blackened snow field.

“Follow that Brony!” I said.

“Why?”

“He ran away from me,” I said. “If he ran away from me, then he has to be up to no good.”

“What about the chemical spill?” he said.

“Worry about that later,” I said. “The game is afoot, chase! Quickly!”

“But my leg—”

“Then run slowly!”

_____

Well, at the very least, the black snow isn’t causing a burning, itching sensation, I thought as we crossed over to the dark side. We chased him through the company town to the manufactory proper. Uninspired duplex apartments gave way to cardboard box warehouses. The sides were even corrugated.

The Brony ran into a zig-zagging chain-link fence corridor that fed into the walled-off grounds of one of the factory buildings. I slowed to a trot after I realized he was running right into the wrong end of a one-way turnstile gate.

Is he gonna see it? I thought as he ran towards the dead end.

“Oh, fuck!” he said when he realized the door wasn’t going to turn.

“Now you have to answer for what you’ve done, you villain!” I said. I shouted to get Romeo’s attention.

“Q-quiet!” the Brony said. “You’ll wake the Hill Witch!”

Oh, I thought, he’s one of those.

“DID YOU HEAR THAT, ROMEO? ” I said as Romeo came up behind me.

“Oh, no, no, no! Please! Don’t!”

“I THINK HE’S AFRAID OF THE HILL WITCH,” I said.

“No!” the Brony squealed as he went from zero to ramming speed in about a quarter of a second and charged straight into us. “I don’t want to be a lizard!”

Romeo was able to whirl out of the way, but the Brony plowed through me at full force and knocked me off my feet. By the time I got up again he had ducked around a corner and out of sight.

“She turns you into a goon, you goon!” I shouted at him.

“Well, would you look at that,” Romeo said. “I guess he’s gone now. Can we go now?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “Fortunately, I tagged him on Actaeon. We can search for him all day!”

_____