Chapter 5: ...and Professor Bitton
Twilight gathered the group together in the middle of the room, while the Professor set up a projector he pulled out from under a pile of papers and maps. She looked more enthusiastic than she had since they’d met her, which given her present company, wasn’t exactly a surprising development. What was surprising, however, was watching her hum while she worked with the slides.
Johnny leaned over to Applejack and whispered, “Um, what exactly is it she does for a living?”
Applejack considered him for a moment. “She’s Celestia’s star pupil, and the Element of Magic.”
Asshole leaned over Johnny’s shoulder, his current perch. “Yes, but what’s her job?”
The farmpony shuffled her hooves a bit. “She’s... um... ahem, a... uh... a librarian.”
Asshole facepawed and jumped down off of Johnny’s shoulder. “I’m out,” he said simply, and made his way back to the couch, where he took up as much of it as he possibly could falling asleep.
Johnny, on the other hoof, gave Twilight a once-over. “A librarian, huh? Does she... get out much?” he asked innocently, raising an eyebrow.
Applejack noticed Gallop giving the cowpony a look, but neither of them said anything. Finally, Applejack answered, “Well, no. Not really. She spends all of her time studying and making lists and sending reports to the Princess. Who she knows. Personally,” she added, seeing the look in Johnny’s eye as his gaze wandered over the distracted and bemused bookworm.
Spurs coughed and looked decidedly anywhere except Twilight’s... tail. Just in time, in fact, as Twilight looked up and addressed the group. “Ok, everypony, we’re ready!”
Johnny had braced himself for the eventuality that a librarian and an archaeologist would make some attempt to turn this expedition into something ‘educational’, and had since steeled his nerves against the impending presence of what many a non-scholarly pony considered to be the most inequine form of psychological torture devised by anyone with an IQ higher than their daily caloric intake: slide shows.
He could do this. he was ready. There was nothing that could-
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Applejack slapped her hoof to her forehead and dragged it down her face in shame, leveling a displeased glare at the sleeping forms next to her. Sure, the slide show had been boring, but there were limits to what ponies considered socially acceptable. She offered Twilight a sympathetic look as the unicorn’s face fell, seeing three-fifths of her audience unconscious. The lavender unicorn had accepted that Asshole would go to sleep; he’d walked away before they started. But for both Spurs and Shotgun to pass out, the later on top of the former in a jumbled heap of limbs, well that was just impolite.
Professor Bitton, on the other hoof, had either resigned to ponies falling asleep during his presentations years ago, or simply had more important things to do. Pushing the projector cart out of the way, he ruffled through a saddlebag propped up on a table and pulled out a rather thick-looking scroll. Walking up to the sleeping ponies, he bopped each of them on the nose, and chuckled as they started awake, and stumbled over each other trying to stand up.
Eventually, they righted themselves, and looked around the room. Asshole hadn’t even woken up, Ditzy and Bitton just looked amused, and Applejack and Twilight both rolled their eyes and decided that moving along was the better of how ever many options they were considering.
“Right, right, I’m awake. What now?” Johnny muttered, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and glancing about. His gaze fell on the large scroll Bitton was wielding, and sighed. “Yer not gonna put me to sleep again, are you?”
“Oh no,” the professor assured him. “This is simply a list of all the things that can kill you while we’re traveling, or in the mines.”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” said a small scratchy voice from the back of the room. Asshole was awake, and walking up to the group. Jumping atop Johnny’s head with practiced ease, he glared at the professor. “Nopony said we was goin’ into the mines.”
“Well,” Bitton responded, grinning slyly, “If I die in the mines I can’t pay you when I get out, now can I?”
Johnny and Spurs looked at each other, then at the archaeologist holding their pay ransom. “You magnificent bastard,” they said in unison. It was at that point that Twilight realized how alike their voices were. It was difficult to tell them apart even vocally.
Bitton nodded. “Indeed. Now, about this list.” He unrolled it before him, and the whole group looked on in varying degrees of worry, concern, and abject horror. And, in one pony’s case, excitement. “We have... sandcats, sandblasts, sand, sun, sandstone, sandslides, heat stroke, dehydration, exhaustion, sunburns, sandmites, sandworms, sandpits, quicksand, sand geysers, scorpions, cactus fruit poisoning, drowning, diphtheria, any number of water-born parasites, diseases, viruses, also pirhana, sandsharks, desert hawks, Rocs, rocks...”
The more he read, the more Asshole tried to hide in Johnny’s hat and Johnny tried not to throw up in it. Applejack looked like she’d eaten something foul, and Twilight just gaped in awe at the sheer amount of killing a desert could do. Ditzy seemed more than content just not listening to the list, as if she did this every day.
The most disconcerting reaction to Bitton’s reading, however, was Shotgun Gallop. She smiled bigger and bigger with each line, and was practically jumping halfway through.
“...and that’s just the desert. The actual living mines themselves host a whole new list of problems. We have crushing, impalement, suffocation, heavy metal poisoning, drowning again, ooh, ancient curses, I forgot about that; the possibility of temple guards, ghosts, more scorpions, sand, rocks, possibly sandrocks...”
Johnny had foregone listening to his last will and testament being read in reverse and instead focused on the almost gleeful demeanor of his companion, Shotgun. “What in Tartarus is wrong with you?!” he hissed. Asshole’s face seemed to ask the exact same question.
She turned her happy gaze on Johnny. “Did you hear all the cool stuff I get to shoot?! Sandworms! I GET TO SHOOT SANDWORMS!” she shouted, distracting everypony in the room. Even Bitton stopped reading.
For a moment. “...gold golems, spike traps, acid traps, poison arrows, large boulders, marauders, guns, swords, and tetanus. I think that’s all of it.”
“OH REALLY?!” Asshole yelled over the hat. “Are you SURE?! Did you think to maybe turn the list over and see if the BACK OF YOUR PAGE WANTS TO KILL US, TOO?!”
Bitton considered the cat’s outrage for a moment, and flipped the scroll over. “OH! How about that! Sand golems, rock golems, goldwyrms-”
Asshole almost exploded. “MOTHERFU-”
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While Ditzy helped Bitton clean up the room enough to start gathering supplies and organizing saddlebags for everypony, Twilight decided this was a good opportunity to get to know her “protectors” more.
She sidled up to Spurs, who was busy talking the finer points of desert survival with the girls and Cat. “Johnny, can I see you for a moment? There’s some other stuff I want to take with me, but I left it in storage downstairs. Help me carry it up?” Gallop and Applejack both gave her a look, but she ignored them.
Johnny, however, didn’t. “Don’t worry girls, I’ll be right back. Asshole, be a bro and make sure Ditzy doesn’t-”
CRASH. “My bad!”
Johnny heaved a sigh. “Do that any more than necessary.”
Asshole nodded, and walked off. AJ and Shotgun gave Johnny disbelieving looks, but he waved them off. “I’ll be fine. Go talk to Asshole some more, he’ll fill me in later.”
Twilight waited patiently for the girls to come to the conclusion that her and Johnny walking off alone together wasn’t any kind of serious concern, then led the tan pony out of the room.
Halfway down the hall, Johnny turned his head to look at Twilight. “Alright, whaddya want?”
Twilight did her best to look innocent. It wasn’t very good. “What do you mean? I’d just like a big strong stallion to help me carry heavy supplies up some stairs.”
Johnny ignored the obvious lie long enough for them to reach a smaller lobby on the floor below.Then he turned to the unicorn. “Come of it, girl. You’re one of those super-studious organized types. I seriously doubt anything even remotely important isn’t already in that room, labeled alphabetically and sorted by size.”
Twilight tried to look affronted, but decided against putting up the charade any longer. “Alright, fine. Look, I just want to know why exactly the three of you are coming along. I get that you guys handle problems in your hometown, however it is you do that, but this isn’t just some random thug going about beating up passerby. This is the find of a lifetime and one of the most dangerous expeditions in recent history. We’re not even sure we’ll find the place, and Bitton says he has it down perfectly where it is. What exactly about you makes you so qualified to protect us while we march through the apparently deadliest place in Equestria looking for a mountain of gold that’s taken self-defense classes?”
Johnny sighed and plopped himself down on a bench in the middle of the hall. “Look, I get that you have no idea who we are. I’m not surprised in the least. We try to keep our reputation as local as possible. But what we do, we’re good at. Shotgun Gallop, I trust that girl with my life. Time and time again, I’ve had to, and I’m still alive. Half those burns she has are because I wasn’t fast enough, and I still haven’t forgiven myself for most of them. You couldn’t be in better hooves than hers. I know I’ve never been.
“Asshole, yeah, he’s a crass son of a bitch. I get it. It comes with the territory. But the cat can smell trouble a mile away when it counts, and I’m still here cause of him. Both of them. He’s my brother and she’s... well, she’s as much mine as I am hers, but don’t you dare tell her I said that. I know things, girlie. So if you want to question anypony on this team, question me. But don’t go a second and think that they can’t or won’t save your hide every damn moment of the day. Money or no, they’re good folk.”
Twilight thought about his statement for a moment, slightly reassured, but pressed on. “Ok, so what about you? You can vouch for them all you want, but what does that mean to me if I don’t know a thing about you? Sure, Derpy and AJ seem to like you, and I know AJ won’t lie to me. I can trust you as far as she can, at least. But what makes you so qualified to do this job?”
Johnny laughed. “Who says I am?”
Twilight was taken aback by that. “What?”
He leveled his gaze at her. “Who said I am? I’m a drunken gambler of a pony that fixes all his problems in ways that earn you the kind of reputation you can’t buy your way out of with a kingdom of gold. I got a nickname where I come from, Miss Librarian. The Last Resort.”
Twilight furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. “How do you get a name like that?”
“By earning it,” Johnny said simply. His voice was flat and weary, like somepony who’d told the story a million times and still didn’t believe it himself. “There’s this bar in my hometown. I won’t bother telling you the name of the place, you won’t find it on any kind of map. Not cause it’s gone or anything, but it’s so damn small you could fit it in this hotel and still have room to point and laugh at it. It’s got a couple of houses, a market, a medical house, and a bar. That’s it. The bar’s called The Last Resort. I was born in that bar, in the loft apartment on the second floor. My daddy owned the joint, and I grew up in that bar.
“Now, I won’t tell you how I got my cutie mark, because something tells me you’ll need your sleep tonight. But I was in that little town for most of my life. All I did there was pour drinks and solve problems. That’s what my special talent is, solving problems. And it’s never how you want it done. Well, almost. Sometimes I get lucky, I won’t lie. But the people in this town, they all said ‘You got a problem, go to The Last Resort.’
“Well, eventually, the bar closed. Town was basically done for. We kept ourselves afloat being the only stop for food, sleep, and water for a hundred miles in every direction, but when they started putting in roads and train tracks, we just weren’t needed anymore. I was there till the last pony left town, by the way. About a year after the bar closed. But ponies still said ‘You got a problem, go to The Last Resort.’ Except they weren’t talkin’ about no bar no more.”
Johnny paused for a moment, either catching his breath or resting his mind, Twilight couldn’t tell. Then he kept going. “So if your boss, this Professor Bitton, thinks I’m the best guy for the job, it’s because all the other ‘best guys for the job’ skipped out on him, cost too much, or just plain said ‘no’. I’m the last person you go to when you need help because I’m the only pony that will always say yes. And I’ll be honest, even I was gonna say no when I heard about this job. So if you’re asking what my qualifications are, miss, it’s this: I showed the buck up.”
Sparkle didn’t have words. It wasn’t that often that anypony spoke to her so frankly, and to be honest she didn’t know what to make of it. She still had a million questions, and after hearing him talk, had a billion more, but she settled on one. “Well, ok. But I have to ask: How do you know Derpy?”
Johnny’s eyes went wide for a moment, obviously not expecting that question. Then he surprised Twilight in turn by tilting his head back, and laughing. “Well now, that’s a much more interesting tale. Let me tell you...”