Giles MacGregor dreamed of fire and blood.
Sweet, precious sleep was split, cut in three parts by sudden sharp detonations, the bomb-memories destroying themselves and everygriffon around them. In his dream, they sounded off, somehow like nothing so much as a door slammed in the night, strangely loud and clear from across the far side of the loch. The loch high up in the highlands he once had called home, the loch that curled between his mother's home and the clanhold, so close, and so far, muted and warped by restless water in darkness. In his dream-talons, the slugger shifted awkwardly, snagging despite all his best efforts to draw it out under his rough cloak. His fellows were faster, and swifter, and they fired while he fumbled.
The memory of the screaming crowd, and beyond them, the damned crab-backs falling like tenpins to their fire. Giles' slugger finally untangled itself from his cloak, and looking up to see his targets, they were gone behind a cloud of powder-smoke, and his fellow clangriffs were already away, charging and screeching with their long blades swinging. Giles saw an equine shape with a sword high over the heads of the shadowy crab-backs in the powder-smoke over the backs of his fading fellows, and he pulled his weapon around to fire over their heads. Before he got his sights on the smudge that might have been an enemy officer, it went off in his talon, wasting his shot somewhere high up into the air over the stinking cloud.
The dream-Giles sobbed, as his too-clumsy claws scrabbled nightmarishly for his black powder and the shot and the ram-rod, all while the high keening cries marked his clan's charge into the powder-smoke.
Then, as he tossed his ram-rod aside, he heard the cannon-fire from behind him, and as always, he looked up to see the powder-smoke cloud parted by the terrible passage of the grapeshot, and briefly, before the cloud closed in with reinforcements, the shocking bloody ruin of the flower of Aerie Tarvie blowing across the pavement-stones of Gilbert Square, and the crouching bluecoats with their spear-tips red with clan blood.
And as always, he woke to the second volley of the ponies' cannons' fire in the darkness of the powder-smoke.
Giles woke with sulphur in his nostrils, and looked wildly around the crowded workers' nest. It was still dark, but there was perhaps a touch of the slightest color of morning to be seen, darkly through the thin clear screens. Screens with which the masters had replaced the old paper windows, after those hens had destroyed them with their fighting the month before.
His own shift was asleep, those who were still in their bunks. Half the barracks were on sixth and seventh shifts, and off finishing up their night-work. Fourth shift must have woken Giles - they were stumbling around in the darkness, getting ready for their own work. Today was seventh-day for fifth shift, and Giles like the rest of the workers on that shift had noplace official to be; it was traditional, which is to say obligatory, for off-shift workers to not fill up the mess hall for those who had machines to tend, and piecework quotas to meet.
Giles wasn't hungry, anyways. He slipped out of the barracks between the fourth shifters muttering for their coffee. The nestmother didn't notice the skinny straw-blue griffon as he lurked just out of her view on the far side of a clot of fourthers.
They weren't supposed to go out on their seventh days alone. The masters said that 'prentices got into trouble by their lonesome. In Giles' observation, flocks of griffons were more trouble than singletons, but that was definitely a minority view among the Trottish. The Trottish were a flocking clan.
A great bloody huge flocking clan. Their flocks darkened the sun when they rose into the skies. Giles counted it good that the city-clan griffons weren't much for flitting about. He liked the light, and didn't relish it when some ruddy crab-back came flying over his head.
The Trottish city-griffons didn't like to be called clan-griffons, of course. The city griffons were a strange, vast clan, a clan where nogriff knew anygriff else, but for family and immediate kin. Half of Giles' shift didn't see their kith and kin but a month out of two. The long shifts in the factory took up all their time, and sleeping and food ate up the rest. One seventh-day a week allegedly to themselves made for 'prentices isolated from their families.
Not that Giles had any family to maintain connections with. None living, none in a day's flight. Not since the Bucket.
He had run like a panicked alley-cat when the charge had shattered. He hadn't been able to help himself. The shock of seeing all of his kin blown to haggis had been bad enough, but he'd dropped his powder-horn, and didn't think to do anything else.
MacGregors weren't worth a piss without other MacGregors around them, ta keep 'em honest. That was what his uncle Galt had always said. Usually with a laugh, after Giles' mother had sent him to collect his drunken uncle from the pub.
Galt had been their sergeant, before the grapeshot had turned him and six other McGregors to a ghastly pink ruin.
Right in front of Giles.
So Giles had run and run, and scrabbled and hid. Giles had clubbed down some blue-feathered griffon with a spear that had tried to stop him. Knocked the big tom down with his slugger, and then broke the delicate, worthless, horribly expensive wonder-weapon over the tom's partner's crest, and kept on running.
Giles had left the broken precious weapon behind him. It had come apart in his talons the one time he'd needed it.
Eventually, Giles had fetched up behind a pile of crates in an alleyway, and crouched, balled up, hiding from the ponies and their minions. Sharp spears, and terrible cannon-fire.
They'd talked brave talk, the griffons of clan MacGregor. Generations of bravery and bravado, of the conquering lords of the fallen pony city. Of Guillaume the Clever, and his tamed nag. Of how they'd seize the white duchess some day, and make her their nag.
They had been fools.
He hadn't been surprised when the clip-clop came out of the tumult of the battle's aftermath. Screams and howls and the clashing of blades and the terrible sound of the cannons' volley-fire… and somehow he'd known they'd find him.
He'd never had much luck, Giles MacGregor.
The ponies had magic. How had the MacGregors ever thought they could pitch claw against pony magic, and prevail? The old stories had to have been lies. No griffon living could possibly have won against that.
The clip-clop stopped, and Giles had looked up through the feathers of his tousled crest, through the cage of his arms and talons, protecting his cowardly head from the inevitable blow.
The pony was pink, pink and brown - a brown costume. Terrible blue eyes peered under a lank waterfall of pink, and in that moment Giles had seen his death drowning in those bottomless blue pools, the spring blue of the loch in brightest day. The loch that Giles' little sister had disappeared into, three springs back when he hadn't been watching her.
"Hello there, little birdie. Lost your flock? Don't cry, little birdie. You're a survivor, aren't ya? Smile, griffie! You didn't die today! You're a lucky little survivor, aren't ya?"
Giles had stared up at his death, and didn't understand. He still didn't. All he knew, walking into the Trottish dawn, on a spring morning he never thought he'd see, was that the strange pink Death had smiled madly, and patted the curled-up, cringing clan-griffon on his crest, and had dragged a filthy tarp over his head. He'd heard pony's hooves clip-clopping away from him, unseen, as Death passed him by.
His paws tapped-tapped-tapped across the cobbles as the sun warmed the chill out of the stones. Aimlessly wandering through the morning air led him to a dining room in the southern blocks of Halfpenny, a dining room which had set up an open-air cafe for the breakfast crowd. Giles didn't have the money for cafe food, but he stood there and watched the more prosperous Trottish griffons conspicuously consuming. There was a white pony eating with a flock of laughing, grinning journey-hens, her horn glowing blue as she made papers and objects float about in her pony magic.
Giles watched the workaday pony miracle, and thought about the pink Death, and what she'd said. The strange, dire promise the pink Death had given him before she'd left him to live.
Today was the day. Six months later. Six months spent as virtuously as Giles could manage, living first in the gutter, and then in the 'prentice hall. Six months pretending he wasn't exactly what he was. Six months like a chick in his shell, gestating. Of taking on town-bronze, of learning how to speak like a Trottish griffon. Of learning how to be… civilized. What a strange word. The pink Death had called it 'socializing', but the Trottish didn't really socialize. They worked and worked, and lived by the masters' clocks and schedules. Giles had obeyed every tick of the clock, every caw of supervisory journey-hens and toms, done everything he was told.
The terror of the Crab Bucket had faded, retreating into his night-terrors. The other griffons of his shift had grown used to his nighttime starts, although he'd absorbed enough blows in his early days, to have his cringe-reflex beaten out of him. Somehow, the beatings and the work had conspired to fix whatever the Bucket had broken in him. Giles didn't twitch at loud noises or screams anymore.
The pink Death had promised him this; but she had promised him something else, with that.
So Giles waited, and watched the breakfast-shifts wash away, and the luncheon crowd began to trickle in.
And then there was a darkness, and a shadow, and Giles looked up.
And there it came. The airship, descending. Smoking like the factory's stacks. It didn't look like salvation. It didn't look like much of anything, really. Giles had kept an eye out for airships ever since the previous fall, but even before then, he'd marvelled at the ponies' great flying ships.
Yet another pony miracle.
He shook out his stiff wings, and took to the air, to follow the airship with the Trottish arms painted on its rippling sails. He saw on the deck, another horned pony, and a huge griffon hen with strange coloration he'd never seen before. They were dressed in Territorial colors. The pink Death had said something about that, too. Nogriff saw Giles as he silently followed the airship until it settled in the city.
He almost shied in terror as he realized they were landing in Gilbert Square, and barely controlled himself as he realized that they were settling on the patch of paving-stones where the courage of Aerie Tarvie died screaming.
He remembered the deep blue eyes of pink-maned Death, and looked up into the unblinking eye of clearest spring sky. She'd promised him a new start. She'd told him what he'd had to do, and what to wait for, what to look for.
This was it.
He folded his wings and landed beside the grounded airship. He joined the marvelling crowd of griffons and ponies, and sidled his way through the press.
He almost didn't recognize the hen and her pony officer in their glittering crystalline magic uniforms. The huge hen with stripes on her shoulder met his eye, and he blushed, confused.
"You're not recruiting for the Territorials?" Giles asked, barely keeping the clan tones out of his words.
"Nah, my tom. No more Territorials for us. We're forming a new regiment, y'see? Serving the Princess, not the Duchess. You lookin' to take the Princess's bit, my pale friend?"
"If you 'ave the bit, I've got the toime. Can ya keep the guild-marster from comin' after me?" Giles asked.
"Tommy, the Princess's bit dissolves all apprenticeships. You look a bit old for a 'prentice, anyways. Not that I know much about that end of the guilds. Sign here, tommy, and start again."
Giles signed, and started again.
"...And that's the long and the short of it, Corporal," Gilda concluded, looking anywhere in the cluttered, ill-lit room than the half-convalescent sitting in his battered lounge-chair. "New regiment, new recruits, new problems. We'll be looking to steal some veterans from any unit that isn't holding onto theirs too tightly, but we want the right veterans, to get the Sixth set properly in her traditions. Begin as you'd continue, as they say."
It was the day after Gilda and her unicorn had crash-landed in Gilbert Square, and found themselves absent-mindedly recruited a corporal's guard for the new Guards regiment. Gilda had known they'd need help, so, she'd gone to see the old corporal.
"Who says that, Gilda?" asked Gustav, looking cross. "I never did. Winds, I 'ope you never learned anything from our lot. Thieves and slackers and scapegraces, the lot of us."
Gustav was staying with his sister's boy's family, since he'd never had time to start his own family. They'd plopped him in a back parlor, shabbily furnished, full of old furniture no longer good enough for the front parlor.
"If that's so, Corporal, then we're all in a great deal of trouble, because I learned everything I know about sergeanting from you and the others."
"I can't see 'ow! None of us ever were sergeants. Excepting the sergeant-major, and you could see as 'ow 'e weren't nogriff to be picking bad 'abits up from, now weren't 'e?"
"The Territorials always had sergeants, Corporal. They just called you 'corporals', because the Equestrians are a bunch of tribalist snobs."
"I don't care if you're in some brand spankin' new outfit with your shiny new duds, Gilda me 'en, you won't be bad-beakin' the orficers in me presence, you won't! Don't think I'm so crippled I won't wing-beat you to an inch of yer royal-crested 'ide!"
"Oh?" asked Gilda, provocatively, eyeing the old bird wrapped up in his blanket. "You can get up out of that seat, can you? I thought you were invalided. Retired. Useless."
"Like 'ades I'm useless! Those daft cunts can think what they want, but I'm bird enough to beat some respect into young tail-tuckers like you lot!" The corporal was out of his chair, and bristling, with one wing held threateningly over his head.
Only trembling just a bit.
"Yes, I can certainly see that, Corporal Gustav," Gilda said, suppressing a grin. "I knew when I saw you come out of that surgery that you'd be back and cawing at the grumblers inside of six months. Look at you! Ready to start PT again, aren't you?"
"Yer damn roight I am, I am! Bloody continentals, come over to tell us when and where we can serve our bloody duchesses! Medical retirement me blue-steeled buttocks! I got ten good years in me, I do!"
"You certainly do, Gustav. I wish I could do something about it, but I'm not in the Territorials anymore. Technically, I'm not even working for the Duchess anymore. Some might even say I never did, it was all some stupid mistake, can you believe that?"
"Yeah, well, Grippe. Everygriff knew she was dirty, we just didn't know 'alf 'ow dirty. Sorry about that, Gilda. I probably should 'ave said something, I should 'ave."
"Not your job, Gustav. Not your job. But it is my job to get old birds in place, to keep these new recruits in line. You're an old bird, and nopony's got a claim on you now."
"Not since they drummed me out of the service, they don't. By damn! You're right. I could do - anyfing! There was this young idiot from the militia wanted to talk to me, but I told my nephew to tell 'er I weren't in. You're lucky you were one of my 'ens."
Gilda thought that he was lucky that he'd let her in. That room smelled like death creeping up on the old bird. Inactivity was bad for injured old birds. Now to reel him in…
"So you'd be willing to come work for Captain Shield?" Gilda asked, carefully.
"Work for you, you mean, Gilda me 'en. Going to be a sergeant-major, are you?"
"I bloody well 'ope not!" Gilda squawked, surprised into an accidental Trottish outburst. "You were there when I was captured! I've barely got a year in the service."
"Less, dependin' on 'o you ask, these days, roight?"
"Exactly! We need to pull this outfit together out of nothing but baling wire, twine, and the captain ma'am's paper commission. It's an impossible job!"
"An' yet, ponies and griffons 'ave done it before. The Territorials, they ain't no older than I am, you know? I weren't there at the actual beginning, but I was for the Fifth 'erself. One more year, and I'd 'ave 'ad me pension, the bit-pinchin' barstards. There from the bloody beginning, and not a bit for an old veteran, can you picture it?"
Gilda certainly could. Nogriffon gave up a bit if they could keep it in their sharp claws. And none of the ponies were any better.
"Well, we want to pay better in the Guards, but in order to shake the money-tree, we need to be… plausible, you know? Shined up and impressive," Gilda said, vaguely, waving a claw in the air.
"Yeah, I can see it. Bronze and polish gets the bit-hens moist, gets 'em in a mood to give up the coin. Nogriff wants to waste their ready on a shabby trooper. 'Ave you thought of getting 'em drunk? I always found that 'elped when I wasn't lookin' my best. Which was most of the time when I was younger."
"Aw, come on, Corporal. You had to have been a hen-slayer when you were a fledgeling!"
"Awr, go on, Gilda. You know I'm an ugly old tom, and I was an ugly little kit. Do you have a nice set of duds planned for the troopers? Fancy duds always sells the troops."
"Lady Rarity is still hanging around town, and said she looked forward to fitting us out. Fancies the 'Crystal Guard' thing, she does," Gilda said, smiling.
"Lawks! I could see it!" Gustav said, looking into the distance, an answering smile on his beak taking ten years off of his weathered face. "Like every day was a crab-back march!"
He looked up at Gilda, and got out of his chair, and stretched, trying to stand as tall as she did.
"Damn me, but I'm in! Just promise me I'll die in the 'arness this time. Never say you'll 'and me back to my nephew to rot in this room again!"
"Corporal, we plan on going places. When you die, we'll bury you somewhere foreign. That's a promise."
Oh I am glad to see this. Mitch, I missed your stories a lot and it was something that was lacking in my weekly bookshelf.
Look like super-genius planer Pinkie Pie, the mad commander was 50 steps ahead again with sleepers agents. Man that will be a byzantine plan to unravel!
And Gustave is back! Yay! He and Gilda have such good interaction.
I hope we will see a lot of different species in the Crystal Guards because one, that would be interesting and somewhat original. And two, I find that one of your strength as a writer is that you are good at using characters with varied backgrounds and you play off well the interaction between multiple species and the various clashes it can cause. And on top of it, MLP has such a great advantage when it come to multiple creatures having to live in the same world.
I've been watching for nine seasons, and you're not alone.
Damn it all, Pinkie is playing games again, but her games often come with corpses made out of civilians and her own damn side!
Maybe I'll get lucky and we'll see the miserable nag get executed as she deserves.
So. Pinkie's old tricks aren't down and out just yet, I see.
Aw, but it's good to see the sequel finally. I'd quite enjoyed its predecessor and have been missing seeing new updates for it, so this will hopefully fill that void nicely.
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Wouldn't you be mad if you could turn your head just so and see all the other better, tonally/theme/etc not writing critique, stories you could have been a part of? Like she said, she didn't choose to be the one that existed
9851752 Mad? Oh yes, I'd be mad. But there is a massive difference at being mad that you got stuck in a crapsack reality (and know it) and deciding to go on an obviously futile quest to make your reality more like the "good" ones through conspiracy, theft, treason and murder, and not caring about the resulting body count because "they're not real" and "the ends justify the means".
And none of Pinkie's victims chose to be the ones who don't exist. And considering they had their own hopes, dreams, and lives when Pinkie wasn't around, I'd say her claim of being the only "real one" is pure sopholism and nothing more than an excuse for her actions.
A number of people have defended Pinkie's actions (both here and back in Good Trooper), but I still don't think there would be anywhere near as many supporters of the "Pinkie Plan" (or possibly any supporters) if the exact same things were done, with the exact same reasons/excuses, but the perpetrator was named Sombra or Tirek.
I like how they call the new recruit Tommy. Means a soldier but also works because he's a tom. Clever.
Wait, exactly how big is Gilda? Cuz I was under the impression that at the starts of GTG she was, idk...hardly an adolescent? And now, a year later, she's already grown like, 100+ pounds? Do Griffions/Lions/Eagles have short, intense puberties? Was she a later bloomer that made up for lost time? Did I miss something.
9863698
She was a late bloomer who may have been suffering slightly from malnutrition issues prior to the Territorials. And yeah, she shot up like a weed.
Held off starting this due to work stuff; glad I found it again.
9851970
For what it's worth, collateral damage in the service of trying to make the world a better place is to be preferred to wholesale slaughter just to place yourself in power so you can abuse the position. Maybe not by a lot, but still.
9941174 I'll agree with that, but there still must be accountability.
I've always liked the fact that while the Operative in Serenity did horrible things for the "Greater Good", he still recognized that they were horrible things, and knew that "I did it for the Greater Good" was not an excuse to avoid punishment.
I knew there'd be haggis in this if I just read for long enough
But of course it'd be Pinkie Pie that would find him.
After all, she always does.
Poor Pinkie just wanted a happy ending for everyone
And she'd massacre thousands for a chance to get close to it
Heh. Rarity?
Pinkie... promised him something?
Woah, dude. He has no idea how special that is.
Heh. There's a couple of familiar characters.
And, Gilda's actually considered "huge" by the common griffin's standards, hm? Interesting.
At least he's honest about it
Which is rather bizarre, since they're under a banner associated with the new Duchess
Ah, so he did find out about that...
Oh, I bet they have a really good designer
There we go
Dammit, Pinkie!
Man, something about a line like that really does stir one's heart
9941174 For me.... the whole world will be collateral damage for my ascendance into a transcendent being.
Alondro, Oct 2, 2032:
i.imgur.com/kNv5gsq.jpg?1
Trust me, it's for the BESTEST good!
Okay, back to the fun. And knowing what we do now about Pinkie here.... yeah, she really was trying to save as many creatures as possible, but so few of the possible paths had any way to avoid causing even more pain to reach that point.
But, Gleaming is at least going to take care if him, or a th least have Gilda do that.
And yes, experienced NCOs are a must for a unit. Need someone to train up the new grunts and the new officers. Gilda is a good sergeant, but can only do so much on her own.
So, onwards to adventure! And getting some bit pinching tightwad to pay the unit.