To review, I'd been pinned in the mud by a hulking earth stallion. He had stolen what ponies in proper circles never thought to attach the value of bits to. My splendrous magic had proved an equalizer. That day, the twin badges of bruises and bleeding scratches combined with the pride I felt fighting off a much more capable aggressor squelched the fear that might have sent an otherwise normal runaway filly crying all the way home to her butler.
I was not normal. Read that again. Try to understand.
Nothing about my life was normal, nor—as it would turn out—would it ever be. That's not this story, though.
I had spat at him, the stallion-like creature, and laughed. Last spring. In a thunderstorm. At the ground as the monster ran from me.
I'd spat. As a gesture; pointless, though satisfying.
I'd spat now. On the street. In Baltimare. Red brick buildings and converted warehouses lined the lower class neighborhood. A newspaper blew down the road into a wet gutter. The sky looked yellow thanks to smoke stacks that contributed to a faint stink of toil and low wage work.
The pony who had wolf-whistled at me: His blue eyes widened, as did his grin. The red roan was the obvious alpha horse's-flank in a herd of miscreants.
I'd reacted. Something I still worked at squelching, but had failed. Trained as a noble pony, I had learned to suffer foals—but it was really hard to do! So far, even the pain of being beat to within a heart-beat of my life hadn't taught me the essential lesson that bullies taught most kindergarten foals.
His wolf-whistle was new, though. I'd read in the bodice-ripper novels I'd gotten my hooves on that many mares considered a wolf-whistle a complement, though they'd be loath to admit it.
My gut considered it an act of oppression.
As I'd passed him and his primping herd, I'd added, loud enough to be overheard, "I'm too much for you to handle."
In the shocked silence, I'd held my eyes locked on his baby-blues until my neck complained. It wasn't ten seconds until I heard some mare say, "You gonna let that skirt get away with that, Trigger?"
"No. Was just admiring the view— Ow!"
Somepony had bucked him. I could tell from the disorganized clatter and clop of horseshoes. There was a pause, then clatter as the full herd followed me in a slovenly slow motion stampede.
For my part, my face heated up. I wore a mid-length skirt to hide my painted-on cutie mark that could too easily get scuffed as I worked. With any breeze, the fabric hid nothing below my tail.
Yes. I had. Filled out, that is.
I also wore a blouse with an integrated apron that bared my midriff. In a dowdy shade of grey-tan. It made Bite of Kale, the grocer I'd convinced to employ me, feel I understood my role as stocker and bag-filly. Thinking on Trigger's reaction, I was further convinced I understood why the old codger liked having a young mare around.
Clop-cl-clop clop clop and Trigger cantered behind me, his head tilted and neck down to get a better look.
Ruuu-ude.
He was close enough that when I flicked my tail—releasing the bun with my magic and whipping it around—I scored his nose. I pulled down the hem of my skirt, using the excuse to keep my Levitate spell spun up as I repurposed it.
"Ow!" he said rather dramatically, his gait changing to 2-1 2-1.
Despite my better judgement, I glanced back. He held a hoof to the tip of his nose. He grinned. I couldn't have drawn blood...
He moved the black hoof to show a red scratch.
I had!
The buck considered it a mating gambit, or feigned it pretty well as he approached until he walked beside me. I rolled my eyes and sped up.
He, and then his jeering herd, sped up too. We crossed another intersection where everypony gave way for the herd, and continued quickly toward the next. If I hadn't been up since dawn—moving crates of fruit and vegetables, then stocking the shelves, building pyramidal end cap displays of apples and cabbages, sweeping, and finally washing floors during the after-lunch lull—I might have enjoyed the novelty of the attention. I listened mutely as he studied me, then replied to his herd mates as they asked him if he was going to put up with my "snooty attitude," or my "disrespect", or me "trampling" all over his "stallion-hood."
I rolled my eyes at that last one. His herd egged him on, not buying that he was "softening" me up. I did learn some really interesting curses, mostly slurring family members and weird eating habits, but I'm not the kind of mare that repeats such things.
I earned a lame, "What's your name?" out of him next.
It worked on some level. I stifled a smile but my snort, though barely audible, was unmistakable. I shook my head.
He ruined it by speaking back over his shoulder, "You see."
Some mare said, "Stop playing with your food!"
"So," he continued, "Cute Dumpling, what kind of cutie mark are you hiding under that dress?"
"Mixed metaphor," I interjected.
"What?"
"Dumplings are not as a rule cute."
He growled. "What's your cutie mark?"
I answered, "What did that squeaky-voiced mare mean by calling me a 'skirt?'" I didn't bother to look back, but heard some horseshoes miss a beat.
"I'm sure Mustang didn't mean any disrespect," he said, his voice dripping sarcasm.
"Was it respectful for you to look up my dress?" I asked.
"Hey!"
"Who is following whom? You could just leave me be."
"You are seriously pushing it, my little pony. We do business in this neighborhood—"
"Like what?" I took a deep breath. We passed through another intersection, the one I needed to turn left on to go to my new hostel, but I didn't turn. I'd learned over the past half-year that it didn't pay to bring home trouble. If I was going to be delayed, I might as well have fun. Predators trying to oppress me were always fair game.
"I— Uh..."
"Loitering?"
His voice lowered. "You need to show some respect." He aimed a hoof at my shoulder.
A poke by the angle of it, but I pushed it away with as little magic as necessary. He momentarily stumbled, and the stallions behind him laughed. The mares sped up, and Mustang said, "We've gone five blocks."
"I know," Trigger returned, then noticed I was glaring at him. He actually "eeped" when he noticed that I looked at him without blinking. "Are you asking for trouble?"
I thought about that, which caused me to look away because I did that reflexively when thinking.
Maybe I was.
He wore naught but his white tee-shirt and the jewelry. His fur was a ruddy beige, and he had the five classic black points of his kind, hooves and nose, but his piled-up mane and tail were also black. For an earth pony, he was no workhorse, nor did he have any Clydesdale in him. The stallions behind him looked huskier. That meant he thought himself smarter, either in "business" or in the way he fought.
I still hadn't learned how to reliably cast my special spell. Was he the one who might help me break through?
I looked at how the muscles in his flank moved, and how he held himself.
"I doubt it," I answered myself out loud.
"What?"
"I thought you might teach me something, but I was mistaken."
He sped up to cross my path and stop me, but I guess I'd intimidated him enough that he didn't take that last step. It did give me a good, unimpressive view of his rear end. Now he turned red and angrily asked, "Are you Spurs or 2nd Street?"
"What are you, Trigger?"
"C.A. Syndicate. We all are." He lifted a sleeve to bare a shoulder that bore a brand in cursive that read, "CASYN." The scar was pink and the hair had only partially grown back. "You're going to regret trespassing—"
"I'm a part of no herd. And I was walking home after a long day at work when somepony rudely whistled at me and decided to follow me."
He stepped in front of me.
I stepped the other direction around him, taking one last glance at his flank. He had a fiery-torch cutie mark. Had his parents figured out that he would have a bad temper when he grew up, to give him a name like Trigger? Or had he taken the name himself? Or did he get stuck with it because his friends and herd mates tagged him with it?
As I passed him, I said into his ear, "Gelding."
"Gelding? I am not a—" He rushed up on my right side now.
"I was thinking of it as a verb."
His ears laid down pointing at me. "Do you think you can take me on?!"
I gave the roan a cursory glance. He had none of the brute strength of the monster I'd bested last spring, nor, I doubted, the tenacity. I wouldn't learn anything. Realistically, I might if the entire herd mobbed me, but then I might very well lose that battle. I wasn't stupid.
"You asked my name," I said.
He jerked his head back and blinked as my apparent non-sequitur confused him. "I asked— what?"
"My name."
"Gelding?"
"My name." I would be lying if I said that it was my name, but it wasn't what I'd said to him.
"That's not a very feminine name," he pointed out, looking back at his herd for comment. They'd gotten quieter through the previous intersections as we approached the next, and some of them had slowed down as we crossed this one en masse.
"Trigger," Mustang, the obvious alpha mare of the herd warned. Ahead, down the street, other ponies gathered.
"Is Trigger a masculine name?" I asked. "Or even the one your mother and father gave you?"
"Gelding?"
"You earned your name, didn't you? What about me?" I asked, wheedlingly, pushing him to accept what I said and to confuse him all the more as we approached the gathering crowd. I'd hoped for locals gathering around a market district or restaurants. I couldn't have been more wrong.
We'd walked up to another gathering of late teen earth ponies. They looked just as disreputable as the ones following me, but instead of tee-shirts, these wore button-down shirts, all flannel plaids, all open in the front, even the mares. I saw chains and steel bracelets. Almost all the mares wore red skirts with black lace.
Uniforms. They were uniforms!
I had gotten Trigger to follow me into another herd's territory.
Yay, me!
Nopony looked happy, especially Trigger as he whinnied in shock, then added to my vocabulary of unprintable phrases.
I tried to keep trotting on through, but the rival herd spread across the street and I found myself in the dead pony zone between them.
"Uh, huh," I said, stopped, and began backing up. I didn't join Trigger's herd, though. I sidled to the right until I stood against a building. Nopony on Trigger's side seemed to be paying attention to me, but they had spread out to cut off the street, and, incidentally, my retreat.
"You've entered Pommel Turf you stupid C. A.'s!" called a gruff mare. The lemon yellow earth pony had Saddle Arabian in her and she certainly towered over Trigger by a head or more. Her golden mane had been cropped to hoof length, and gold piercings in her ear and in her right nostril made her look crazy-formidable. Or maybe it was the slash scar across her muzzle. She kicked off the rear gate of a wagon parked on the street, which I doubted she owned, and jumped up on the bed. "Do you want us to destroy you?"
Mustang joined Trigger as the others formed up behind. The two mobs looked equal in size. If any of the shop doors were opened, I'd've just slipped inside. Whether due to foresight on the shop owner's part, or early closing hours, that was not an option.
Trigger yelled back, "We came here to prove a point!"
Of course they had.
The two sides started yelling at one another. I wondered if I were seeing the beginning of a territorial war between herds. They demonstrated the underdeveloped brains of cave horses.
If the constabulary caught wind of the storm brewing here, there might be arrests. That could get me identified–and returned to Grin Having.
Not something I wanted.
A war brewing? Hmmm.
I looked at the Pommel herd alpha mare. "Whirlaway," I'd heard her called after another pony called her a ditzy blonde. Sans the ruffian giddy-up and wearing a proper gown or nothing at all with a normal length mane, especially considering her green eyes, she'd have seemed a delicate beauty. She had the lithe bone structure.
Regardless, Whirlaway was definitely physically delicate. I wondered what cutie mark lay concealed under her skirt and how it had corrupted her so thoroughly.
I'd kept Levitate spun up all this time. I spent long seconds as the herd exchanged insults prepping the spell such that I could accurately reach my target at full force. Since the attack last spring, I'd gotten to be able to lift almost five pony weight. Taking a job as a grocery stocker helped with that. My eyes narrowed as all my spell equations balanced and I saw fiery digits whirl clearly in my vision.
I pushed down sharply on the bed of the wagon.
The vehicle had been built to haul heavy cargo, not just vegetables, and had hefty leaf springs. The wagon jostled, then bounced.
The mare tensed, then compensated left and toward the end of the wagon.
I swept her fore hooves from behind and to the right.
Had I not jostled the wagon first, the sweep would not have been enough. Pushing ponies proved difficult to do forcefully—that can't-hurt-a-pony-with-magic psychological flaw I suffered—but the two forces combined...
Her hooves slipped forward and off the edge of the wagon. Before she could compensate or think to jump, she fell, striking her barrel against the lift gate. It made a loud bang. Her neigh sounded shockingly louder.
Ponies erupted at one another.
That meant they charged toward the center of the fight.
I backed up against the storefronts. As I passed a spinning barber pole, I got behind the last pony in my way. Nopony cared about me at the moment.
I galloped away. At the first corner, I skidded right and around, losing traction only on a rear hoof. Not at all secure that nopony had noticed, I turned right into an alleyway. It opened on the east and shadows filled it.
I seeped into those shadows.
I found myself huffing and puffing, and I bent down to catch my breath. I started grinning, then chuckling to myself. I really had to learn not to taunt other ponies like that! Silly filly. One day I might really get hurt.
I heard horseshoes clatter by.
Then stop.
I had been chuckling. Shoot.
The horseshoes turned around and I looked up to see Mustang in the mouth of the alley. She was a svelte little pony. An earth pony, of course, and I could see by her muscles that she probably earned her name by being full of gallop. She was the buzzed-cut blonde palomino who wore the brass stud piercings I'd noticed. Nothing girly about this mare, especially sporting a new bloody nose she took a moment to wipe.
She had bucked at Trigger when she had thought he might be flirting.
"I see you, Gelding," she said, stepping forward.
I glanced behind me. My luck, it was a dead-end alley. Brick walls climbed two stories. I could smell the stink of rotting fruit in the trash cans lined up near a bolted and gated loading dock. My heart began to beat faster.
I asked, "Are you the one?" I renewed my spell prep. Was she the one who would teach me something?
"Are you some sort of crazy pony?!" Mustang shouted, stepping into the alley as she stalked toward me.
I backed up, keeping myself in the median where a paved drainage depression, centered between cobbled sides, gave me a more stable footing despite the stagnant icy water that made me splash through.
I said steadily, and hoped infuriatingly, "A pony named Gelding might be crazy. She might also be dangerous. Fair warning."
"As might a pony named Mustang."
I backed into the rear wall, bruising my dock against the cold surface. I said, "I don't know. Mustang only implies fast, maybe unpredictable."
The mare charged, screaming, "Predict this!"
She reached to her right and came back with something dirty-white in her teeth. She bit down and a two-hoof-length steel blade popped out. As she approached me, the blade glinted to my left.
I took one step forward and bent down as if cringing.
If she were going to cut me, either my face or my neck, she had to attack across and to my right.
As she braked just three pony lengths from me, I lifted her off her hooves. She continued forward, airborne. She did have gallop and had run like the wind. I didn't have to lift her long, but it was enough that she lost track of her hooves.
I leapt out of reach to my right and set her down at the point we would have been nose to nose. She stumbled and careened forehead-first into the brick wall at full speed.
She didn't even whinny as she dropped like a sack of beans.
I strolled over and saw that she was breathing, though her tongue lolled out—incidentally in a pool of black stagnant water. I picked up the jackknife.
I grimaced. The hilt looked like it had been carved out of animal ivory and looked a sick yellow-brown in spots. The blade snicked into the device when I rotated it. I grinned.
"Nice piece of kit, Mustang. Thank you!"
She didn't reply as I dropped it into my saddle bags. Laying there, I could see she had spent a good amount of time primping and putting on subtle makeup, including glittery white eye shadow, readily visible in her unconscious state.
I picked up a trash can and dumped the contents on top of her. It looked like the kitchen waste from a lunch diner. Mostly cabbage stems, potato peels, bits of pears, and the stones of plums, from the smell of it. A stream of foul brown paste followed, probably congealed frying oil.
Her skirt had ridden up in her collision. The mess quickly congealed on her hindquarters over her silver galloping pony cutie mark. Why somepony with her speed hadn't found a more savory profession, I didn't know.
I didn't realize I would learn the why's of such questions soon enough.
I set the metal can down beside her, not on top of her. If you'd heard I'd thrown it at her, you were wrong. I'm not that kind of mare. At the head of the alley, I looked cautiously both ways for further combatants. Finding none, I trotted away.
Turned out the hostel didn't have a hot pot for heating water for tea or for my instant soup. I hadn't yet perfected a heating spell of any kind. At the corner, though, I found a food pushcart. The young colt holding down the fort for his dad sold me a couple of carrot dogs. I loaded them with glistening grilled onions, horseradish mustard, and pickle relish (the sour dill kind).
I sat on the stoop of the hostel, eating. The air had cooled and the stars came out, though the city lights made it hard to see them. I heard ponies talking in the open windows above, and down the street somepony played a harmonica.
I smiled. What a pleasant end to an unexpectedly interesting day!