Interview with a Zebra
Udders are an annoyingly unbreakable alarm clock, for which there is no 'snooze' button; but after Cheerilee helped me with that, gave me a farewell kiss, and went to work, I was able to catch a few more z's. When I finally did get up for real, I collected the latest batch of mail from Cheerilee's mailbox, sorted through it, and sighed. I was going to have to head back to Canterlot today anyway, before she got home, even if I didn't have some rather significant questions to ask Granny Loco and the other members of the royal dairy herd.
I got off at the Canterlot station a little before noon - and a fresh new batch of Pegasus Express mail arrived just as I made it to my office. One piece had been sent just that morning, from Marty Stu; apparently, he'd found a zebra who'd been doing some anti-slavery work of his own accord, and thought it would be a good idea for us to meet. Oddly, they weren't in Coltogne, but some place called Mustang, around a hundred thirty miles southwest of Canterlot. (I had a brief surge of nostalgia for the metric system, and wrote down a quick note to study the feasibility of importing it to Equestria, to aid in scientific research.) There was a personal note from the zebra as well: "Alea iacta est". I frowned at that - it looked like Latin, but I didn't have the luxury of Google Translate anymore, and my Latin-English dictionary was as lost to me as the rest of my bookshelves. Was it a saying? A quote? Ah, yes - that jogged my memory. Caesar crossing the Rubicon: 'The die is cast'. ... Odd sort of message.
Still - odd or not, the Dairy's network was small enough, and contained so few active agents instead of news-reporters, that even a single new active anti-slavery activist was worth pursuing. Page Turner let me know that Blueblood was currently entertaining several eligible young noble fillies in his private quarters. I considered what that might mean, shuddered, and decided not to interrupt; instead, I just wrote him a not that I was borrowing the Alicorn for a quick trip, and would probably have it back by morning.
I decided to bring along Safe in case the zebra was a bit too unhappy with somebody working with the current power structure, and Red to do any flying that needed to be done. Which led, as we undocked, to Safe dragging me out of the office and away from my self-prescribed paperwork, to start what he called 'the next stage' of my exercises - graduating from simple physical conditioning to starting to learn how to defend myself. "After all," he said, "you can't expect to win every fight by stabbing your own leg." Red, finding the entire operation hilarious, provided color commentary... until Safe drafted her, too, at which time I gleefully returned to her the same comments she'd been lobbing my way.
And so the afternoon passed. I discovered that while ponies sweated like horses, cows didn't, and the best I could do was panting like a massively oversized dog. Splashing water on my hide helped some, but Safe grumbled, until I described to him the times (when I'd been human) I'd gone through heat exhaustion - and that I had no intention of collapsing in a heap before my interview. So I ended up getting some of my paperwork done anyway.
As we approached the city of Mustang, the crew called out warnings of an unfamiliar airship hanging in the sky. As we got closer, we could see it was something of a rust bucket, the gondola resembling a sailing ship with some random plates bolted on, and the balloon being rather tattered; pretty much the opposite of the Alicorn's top-of-the-line fancy appearance. But it made no hostile moves, so the crew just kept a wary eye on it, and double-checked that the Alicorn's cannons were ready to be rolled out in a jiffy.
The meeting consisted of myself, a cow in a dark suit; Safe, in guard armor; Red, with her feathers; Marty, looking as serpentine as before; and two unfamiliar zebras, a Diamond Dog, and a griffon.
I introduced my side with the simple and polite statement, “Hello, there. I am called Missy, and I am an Inspector. This is Safe Guard, a member of the Royal Guard, and this is Red Hot Chili Pepper, my assistant.”
Marty nodded to one of the striped fellows, said, “This is Ivan, the zebra I sent you a message about,” and then leaned back and watched.
The indicated zebra looked at me, eyes wide, and nervously asked, “Is that a gun? What did I do to deserve a gun?” He slowly started backing away.. “And geez, who designed the suit?” He continued to back away. “I uh... have to go get Boss and the others...”
I noted that Ivan, unlike Zecora, didn’t seem to be interested in rhyming. To try and keep this discussion from ending before it started, I tried simply standing calmly in place. “As I have no relevant warrant, this is an entirely voluntary meeting. If you would prefer other people to be present, that is entirely acceptable.” I lifted my right forehoof, holding it out and ‘palm’ up, in an attempt at a peaceful gesture. “The suit is an original by Rarity Designs. As for my self-defense tools, I am not a unicorn, and their magic is much more versatile than my mere gadgetry.”
He nodded slightly, but kept looking in the direction he'd started going. “Right... What do you want?”
“In general, to keep Equestria’s people safe and prosperous. At the moment, I’m investigating reports of unusual slavery and anti-slavery activity, and I recently received a report that you might be strongly on the anti-slavery side of things.”
He looked around. “Yeah. If you are talking about Rej, than yeah. Against slavery.”
I nodded. He seemed a bit calmer, but I didn't want to do anything to startle him off; so I decided to try letting him take the conversational lead. “Good. In that case, feel free to tell me what you have on your mind, and what I can do for you.”
“Building supplies and someone with some sort of knowledge of how to build. Also, bug repellent.”
“That seems tame enough... dare I ask what sort of bugs you need repelling?” I had images of movie-scale 'Starship Troopers' insect things swarming across the landscape...
“The kind that stops fleas from getting on dogs. I think Boss is getting fleas and I really don’t want to add another problem to The Scourge.”
“Ah, small bugs." That was something of a relief. "I think I can dig up something for that. But... dare I ask about ‘The Scourge’?”
Ivan blinked. “It’s my airship. Did you not spot the really bad looking balloon?”
“I did - I was just worried that you were talking about some other ‘scourge’ you were fighting against.”
“At lot has been happening at my island, but I’m starting to fix it up. Before long, I’ll even be able to offer a safe refuge for others on it.”
This caught my immediate interest - another term for 'island refuge' is 'distant backup site', and I had yet to discover an added level of backuping that I didn't like. So I jumped in and asked, “For how many ponies, for what length of time? What would be required to upgrade the existing facilities to the new Bronze-level emergency-shelter standard, or even Silver or Gold?
He might have looked a little overwhelmed as he returned, “What is your definition of Bronze level emergency shelter?"
I tried to calm back down, and stick to the facts. “A Bronze-level shelter contains the food, water, medical supplies, and other necessities to allow a specified number of ponies - or other people - to survive for twenty-four hours. Silver is for a week, and Gold a fortnight.”
“I could probably get it to silver once it is fully rebuilt. Gold wouldn’t be that hard, I think.”
That seemed like a good start, so I started digging for more details. “Who else knows about this island? What’s the distance and travel-time? What are the potential obstacles to completion, and what are your estimates of the probabilities of those obstacles coming to pass?”
“And a bunch of slavers that I plan on taking care of shortly. I have to rebuild the island from the ground, an eldritch horror thing decided to rise up and destroy the buildings. In my floating rust balloon it is a few hours, between three and four, off the coasts of the volcanic wastes.”
That gave me at least a momentary pause. “‘Eldritch horror thing’? Is that going to be a common occurrence in the area?”
“If it was, would I be trying to retake the island? I’m not insane. I think. I just occasionally have delusions a spider is in my head talking to me.” He seemed to be half-joking about that last bit. But I wasn't sure which half, so I gave him my carefully-practiced Spock raised-eyebrow. “Uh... No, I actually have a God spider thing in my head messing with my thoughts. He has a top hat and a monocle and he is really creepy. Any ideas?”
“I’m afraid that I’m not very familiar with such matters. I do have some contacts in the psychological profession, and if you’d like, can put you in touch with a local professional who can provide the best help ponies can offer.”
“Right. Sorry I brought it up. So... any gods contacted you slash dwell in your head? I’m just asking because I don’t want to be the only one.”
I reluctantly considered the option that Ivan might not be stable enough to be useful, at least without getting fixed, first. “While I do have certain psychological issues of my own, as far as I can tell, the only people inside my mind are all me.”
“Right. Great. So, how did a cow get in charge of all of this? Like, Gary, is all powerful and how did you convince him to help you out?”
I blinked. “Gary?”. Marty made a brief gesture, and I guessed that he was who Ivan was referring to. So I shrugged. “And I’m hardly in charge of all this, I’m just doing my part, the best I can, under the Princesses.” This was at least technically true, as on the organization charts, the Princesses were higher-up than I was. Plus, it was a good idea to imply that the network was vaster and secretier than it really was, just to give any potential opponents who Ivan might leak info to a second thought about trying to take us on.
He looked blankly at me. “There’s more than one princess?” He muttered something under his breath, maybe, “Dang it.” Then he looked back at me. “I uh... I said that out loud, didn’t I.”
“You did." Since he seemed a bit unfamiliar with Equestrian government, I decided to fill him in. "Officially, Equestria is a diarchy - a monarchy with two co-equal monarchs. One was absent for quite some time, and so generally acts as the junior partner, but that’s more along the lines of an unwritten constitution than a definitive feature.”
He looked at me with wide eyes and raised brows. “Right. So. How about them totalitarianistic bodies?”
I paused for a moment to try to figure out what he might be trying to mean with his odd phrasing, then gave my best shot at an answer, “I’m not sure what you mean - most places outside Equestria’s borders tend to be rule-by-the-strongest, which is fairly totalitarian, if on a small scale.”
A nod. “Right. So... Would you happen to know what the Difficulty check of getting any useful information out of you is?”
Now that was an interesting phrasing. I was long familiar with Dungeons and Dragons - so long familiar, in fact, that I'd never really gotten the hang of Third Edition and later. But, I also knew enough about role-playing games in general to be able to at least hazard a guess at the precise meaning. Of course, if Ivan really was making a reference to an Earth-based pastime, then that was a rather significant item - and, at least at this stage of our relationship, I had nothing to gain by giving him any concrete clues about my own former humanity, and the knowledge therefrom. So I feigned partial ignorance of what he was talking about by answering, “Er... I suppose very hard, if there’s a chance that information can put other members of the network at risk - otherwise, as easy as I can make it.”
He closed his eyes. “So... Purple Flurp is the one that likes parties, right?”
I eyed him a bit oddly - if he wasn't human himself, or maybe just had talked to a human, then as a zebra from the islands, it seemed reasonable for news on the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony to have gotten garbled in translation. “I’m not entirely sure of who you’re talking about - do you mean the Bearer of Laughter, Pinkie Pie?”
He sighed. “Right. And you wouldn’t know what a computer is, would you?” He scuffed the ground with a hoof.
Ding-ding-ding. As soon as I got back to the Alicorn, I'd be adding a gold star to Ivan's file, just like the ones on Marty's and Griffin's. However, since all that I'd yet learned about The Game was that it could, potentially, lead to Equestria's destruction, as had happened to Mu and Atlantis, I didn't want to reveal my status as a game-piece to somepony who might end up trying to blow up the planet in the near future. So, to answer him, I reached into Red's saddlebag, pulled out an abacus, and said, “I’m reasonably skilled at computation myself. Is there a particular problem you’d like solved, or are we now playing the non-sequitur game?”
“Non-sequitur game. Do you happen to know that the snake hasn’t already been a snake and where his name comes from?”
He looked both unhappy and hopeful, but given the choice between letting him continue to be unhappy, or increasing the risk of all of Equestria's population getting killed - I could live with unhappiness. I assumed that by 'the snake', he was referring to Marty, so replied, “According to the information we’ve gathered, he hasn’t actually given his name, only a title that sounds like one - so I’m afraid I can’t really tell you anything about his name.”
Ivan sighed. “Yeah...”
The conversation continued, with Ivan dropping a few more D&D references that I carefully failed to respond to, while I, in turn, tried to ask some more leading questions, to draw out anything Ivan knew without revealing my own previous species.
Eventually, I decided that, voices or no voices, Ivan could still be useful. (And, after all, if there really was a god-type being communicating with him telepathically, then simple psychological help probably wouldn't be of much assistance.) So I finally leaned back, looked up at the sky for a moment, then back at him and said, “After listening to all of this... I’d like to extend to you an invitation to join the same network that Marty and I are members of. You could become a stringer, receiving news relevant to your interests, in exchange for passing along anything you know that’s relevant to our general mission.”
“Sounds... interesting?”
The hook wasn't quite set, so I let out a little more line. “There is another option available to you which may be of some interest to you. While the network has been building up our stringers and communication infrastructure, there is something of a shortage of active agents who are able to actually go out and investigate the various reports collected - and even fewer who have the ability to do anything about what they discover. I know you have your island to consider - but if you are willing to spend some of your time away from it, traveling in your airship through Equestria and the neighbouring lands, you could do some valuable work - anything from confirming a report to, if you’ve a mind, directly dealing with those slavers we’re able to locate.”
“What sort of neighboring lands? Also, would you happen to know how to reproduce gem effects? I have this idea involving frequencies around 40 hertz I want to test out. I know that it can disable a diamond dog, practically. I don’t know of its effects on cows or most creatures, but I do know that it wreaks absolute havoc with dragons and dogs. Maybe griffons as well. I was thinking we could... like... hook up a pipe that could blast out the frequencies and aim it at things? Maybe find a way to throw it as a bomb or something?” He stopped talking for a second and his eyes lit up. “You are trying to find all of the humans, aren’t you!” He slammed his mouth shut.
Once again, I raised my brow at his seemingly scatterbrained jumping from topic to topic, near manic in intensity. “I’m afraid that I’m not familiar any research into gems or frequencies that the relevant part of the network might be researching, I can easily provide you with a map and atlas, and I am quite curious what brought you to ask me if I’m looking for ‘hyumins’. May I ask what you know about them?”
His eye twitched. “Uh... I really couldn’t think of a reason why you would form a completely separate guard system like what you are working with instead of just reforming the present system. Clearly, there would be a reason why you would need to be separate from the regular guard. Considering...” He pointed at my chest, near where I kept Chekov holstered. “I’ll assume you have access to some sort of advanced technology. You wouldn’t want that advanced technology roaming free, eh? And well, why else would a cow come after me?”
I kept as absolutely straight a face as I could manage. “Do you have something against cows?” I also made a mental note to try to get my suit’s lines fixed, to try to reduce the visibility of the bumps Chekov made in it when holstered.
He shook his head. “Not really. I’m just curious on why and how you got advanced tech unless you have access to advanced tech, from say, another world or something. Unless you had someone who knew how to make it with you.” He nodded after that. “The point is, if you are going to be spreading the advanced tech, I have a proposition for you.”
“I’m afraid that anything that you are referring to as ‘advanced tech’ is, at best, proprietary information from the network, for internal use only, short of an imminent civilization-threatening catastrophe.”
“Right." In a hushed tone, he asked, "Then you wouldn’t want to know that they use the old recipe for yellow glaze, right?”
If Ivan at least had human-sourced knowledge, if not being a former human himself... “‘They’ who?”
“People who use glaze. You know what yellow glaze is made of, right?”
I did, in fact, know that a number of classical glazes, including some that were yellow, were made of urania - aka uranium dioxide. But that’s a purely Earth-based piece of knowledge which I felt it wasn't in my current best interests to reveal I possessed. So I sidestepped. “I’m afraid that pottery isn’t my field - and whatever the differences between our cultures may be, I do have other tasks which take up a lot of my time, so perhaps we can focus more on the topic at hoof...”
“Right. My island certainly doesn’t have a mine that exported that and that is certainly why I’m not worried about it.” He nodded. “So what were we talking about?”
“Um...” I had to take a moment to rewind through the conversation to find where it went off track. “Arranging for you to run some seek-and-destroy missions on slavers, if you’re interested, I believe.”
He looked at me. “Say... you wouldn’t happen to be a guy, would you? It goes against the cliche that I would find a boss that would offer me something great that is of the same gender that dominates the land. I mean...” He snapped back to the topic. “Right. Where would it be?”
I took a moment to twist my head to look back along my body, and made sure that my udder, while clothed inside my suit, was unmistakable for anything else. Satisfied, I turned back to Ivan. “You mean, where are the slavers you’d be hunting? I’m afraid I didn’t bring the big status map with me - but it’s mainly along Equestria’s borders, though there’s an increasing amount of incursions in the interior. It might be worthwhile to send your airship on something like a circuit around Equestria, and have the local members of the network send up updates for their regions as you approach, to allow you to set your specific targets based on the most up-to-date local data.”
He looked to be thinking it over for a moment. “Problem. I have four people, counting myself. Operating an air ship is hard with four people, and taking out slavers is hard with four people. I’m going to need something to convince me it is worth it to send myself after these mutts.”
“Not all are canine - but that’s quite understandable. I’d rather ensure you had the maximum chances of succeeding, as well. Provisions and materiel, access to an airship repair dock, bits to cover expenses met along the way, including reasonable wages - I can probably arrange to put you in contact with some freelancers who enjoy risking their lives. Is that a good start?”
He smiled. “Yes. That would help.”
(Author's Note: This chapter is a crossover with 7-4's story, "I Hate Dogs".)
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Hmmm... Chapter titled "Interview with a Zebra"... My story has a chapter titled "Interview With a Unicorn"...
I see your name in its favorites list...
Am I reading too much into this?
913735
I also noticed the patterns that Micro guessed were the same as the ones Hermione guessed.
Another note, I'm planning to do something in this universe. I don't have the story yet, but if you hade any tips, I wouldn't say no...
914370
Mm, seems likely - I was consciously thinking of 'Interview with a Vampire' when I picked the title. But who knows about subconscious influences...
914404
Well, yes, there I might have drawn a little too much direct inspiration from MoR there...
Tips, hm. Pay more attention to writing what you feel is important to write than anything else - use the setting to support your story, not to limit it. If you don't already know how, learn to touch-type. Know that by the time you finish writing something, you're going to be a better writer than when you started - and once you've published something for others to read, don't worry about fixing all the flaws you are going to see in your work, just keep on writing, keep on putting fingers to keys, and work on taking all that you've learned to make the next thing you write as good as it can be. How's that?
Nice to see some updates.
I've been considering getting into the whole Game world myself but realized I'd end up blowing up Equestria by accident. (And I don't find writing self inserts fun. Last time I tried playing a game with a bunch of Self Inserts the DM ended Merging me With Lilo Palakai. Things blew up. Not my fault. XD)
I like the whole rationality thing as a philosophy, in theory, but but lack the desire to learn to utilize the system. It would take away from my nice little hazy, story filled, doze.
915240 That's the point, Missy can coordinate the war efforts that will be coming in the years to come. Decades, if you want to use Nosguy's (Fist of Iron) history, where the game apparently hasn't ended after 20 years