11. Adventures in Nostalgia, Part 1
"So. I guess I should tell you all about Trevor, right?"
We're all sitting in Pinkie's hideout after the two bombings, one foiled and the other not-so-foiled. Goodflank, the lazy spy, lover of gang-bosses and failed terrorist snores on the table, out cold from Trixie and kept that way by the Twilight's magic. The librarian-turned-counterintel-specialist-turned-librarian-again-turned-counterintel-specialist-again hums as she patches up my injured wing.
"Friendship is magic, Gilda, but he was still acting eyebrow-raisingly strange," she says, "ponies don't come back from the dead every day, after all."
"I must admit, it's odd that you'd be so trusting considering how he acted at the refinery," says Trixie, "You're either becoming less paranoid or horribly nostalgic. I'm not sure which thought worries me more."
There's a thoughtful look on Rainbow Dash's face. It looks odd on her. "I know a few guys I'd trust if they reappeared like that. There's three of them in this room."
"I'm pretty sure you weren't lying to me, buuuut I like stories anyhoo so go ahead and tell us about Trevvie-Wevvie," chirps Pinkie. I grin a little, I can't help it. Trevor would have liked that nickname. He'd have heard it and grinned that weird public-schoolcub grin of his.
I crack open a can of lager and sit back in my chair. "Okay, I'll tell you guys a story. It ain't a nice story, it ain't fun for me to tell and I don't want to tell it twice. The only bird I've told the whole thing to was a Griffon Intelligence counsellor. I figure I should tell it once more though. And I don't – you guys are pretty much the only ponies or griffons I'd talk to about it. Even you, Pinks." Pinkie smiles at me. It's not her big stupid smile. It looks like one of Dash's smiles, when she tries to cheer me up. Pinkie rests a hoof on my forearm. I don't brush it away.
"Okay, cubbies," I say, "Let me tell you about a little place called Nainuoc..."
*
*|*
*<|>*
So yeah, Nainuoc. Big place, lots of jungles, full of deer, nothing to eat but noodle soup, so damn hot that your ovaries start sweating. There's been a civil war there on and off for two and a half decades now, though it's cooled down lately. It started off as a small thing between the white-backed deer and the water deer, but things changed, and when I was there six years ago it was between the East and the West of the country.
Now, officially neither the Blackwings nor the Griffon Kingdoms had any stake in this conflict. It was a civil war in a country that doesn't border griffon territories and was really just a proxy war between the Provincial Donkey Nations backing the Western side and the Camel Sultanates backing the Eastern side. Officially, the only griffons you'd find in Nainuoc in the last decade were mercenaries, working for the highest bidder and entirely unaffiliated with any clan or tribe.
Unofficially, we were pouring resources into the Western side. See, there are some ruins in Nainuoc that important griffon figures visited; they're very culturally important to us. The donkeys pay them no mind, there's nothing in them about growing potatoes or making whiskey. Camel sorcerers on the other claw? They'd be on that like stink on shit. It was in our interests to make sure the Sultanates didn't even know these ruins existed, so we had to make sure they couldn't get far into Western Nainuoc.
Toi Thung was our firewall. It's the city in the valley between two huge mountain ranges in the middle of the country. Toi Thung was split evenly between the Westies and Easties, and there was a cease-fire in place. They'd skirmish and occasionally take one block of the city from the other, but neither side had the resources for a big push. Griffon Intelligence wanted to keep the status quo in place, so it sent resources to the Western side of the city to make it impossible to take in one swoop, and sent teams on sabotage and scouting missions in the jungles East of the city to stop the Easties from massing resources for one giant assault.
Five months before Toi Thung, my superiors pulled me out of my boring-as-shit desk job analysing field reports from Nainuoc, sent me on a brutal, six-week crash course training with a Small Wing Service unit, then shipped me off to the jungle as a 'griffon intelligence advisor' for one of the squads down there. Turns out me and a bunch of other birds were being groomed for that role, birds smart enough to be useful in the field but not so smart we weren't expendable. They wanted people with analysis skills closer to the ground. I spoke a bit of French and had our contacts memorised, so I got picked.
They attached me to a seven-bird FOG team – that's the Field Observations Group – who were okay, for a bunch of warriors. Well, Trevor and Cheese were all right, and Butch wasn't the worst NCO in the world I guess. Gina, Griz were dweebs, Danish was a fucking mad dog and I hated Poke. When I first got assigned to them they were all in a pissy mood because they had to cubsit some whiny, know-it-all desk-jockey spook. Me.
The funny thing is, by the time Toi Thung happened, I kinda got along okay with them. Except Poke, that dickhead.
So anyway, we did a bunch of missions together, it was too damn hot, I hated it, spent most of my time in a damp tent squinting at damp maps and intelligence reports. After four months of that, we were in Toi Thung. I had this contact, Ngyuen, and she'd gone dark a week earlier. She was holed up in d'Hotel Veritas, an ugly thirty-story building at the edge of the Eastern-Western border in Toi Thung, Banlieu Huit. Either she was trapped, a defector or defunct. If she was trapped or traitor, we had to retrieve and debrief her. If she was dead, we had to secure her intel and materiel.
We were all in position, in a ruined bank across the street from Hotel Veritas. It was sundown; it took us the whole day just to get there from our safehouse. See, both sides were using weather magic to boil the clouds with ice and lightning. If you went above the cloud layer you were toast, and if you flew underneath it the sheet lightning would backlight you. There were shardslinger batteries on the ground ready to rip you to shreds if they spotted you, so we had to stay low on the ground.
Two water deer sat outside the front door of the hotel, playing cards on a fold-up table, ninety yards away from us. They had blowguns and cheap hoofblades. Our two sharpshooters, Gina and Trevor, lay waiting at adjacent windows on the first floor. Each had a crossbow trained on one of the deer. Cheese and Griz were spotting for them. Sergeant Butch and myself were the flankers, keeping the position secure. Danish and Poke were hiding behind cover on the other side of the street, two shadows in the night, ready to sprint and finish off the sentries as soon as the shots were fired.
I've never met a griffon or pony tougher than Danish. Big dude, all muscle, like a bunch of hams glued together with quiet fury. He was there on my Small Wing Service training crash-course. He shouldn't have been possible. I've never seen anybird that big move so fast. Melee training with him was a joke; he could've torn our instructor's face off with a single swipe. This one time, on exercise, he slipped and landed on a jagged rock, tore a gash in his left claw. While we're flying along, I see him wash out the wound, grab a needle and thread from his kit, and start sewing himself up in mid-air. He'd push the needle right into his palm, barely wincing. I heard him muttering, "I am one-" *srunk* "-RIGHT-" *srunk* "-HARD-" *srunk* "-CUNT!" as he stitched. In the field, I'd seen him crush a trio of deer commandos with enchanted blades, using nothing but his bare claws. Freakin' invulnerable.
Sergeant Butch passed me a signalling mirror, then pointed in Danish and Poke's direction, nodding. The dark grey camo paint daubed on her face and beak framed her eyes, giving them a crazy, psychotic look. She wasn't crazy, though. Butch was the most level-headed of the unit, apart from Cheese. She moved over to the crossbow teams, gave them the signal, then gave me the signal. I moved to a hole blasted in the corner of the bank and used the mirror to signal Danish. The giant block of muscle raised his right claw, and gave the 'all set' signal.
Butch gave the order. Gina and Trevor each dropped a bolt through the necks of the two deer sentries. Poke and Danish sprinted from cover and finished them both off, covering the deer's mouths and stabbing madly.
Butch ordered us up, and we all crossed the street to the entrance. Danish snuffed the lamp above the front door and Poke covered the two bodies with a tarp. Griz picked up one of the blowpipes next to the sentries' card game. Two cards lay face up, a pair of knaves, streaked with blood. There was something wrong with the bottle of booze. I grabbed the bottle and took a sniff.
"Careful, Griz," said Gina, "Those blow-darts are savage, one prick and you're out for a day. Like the sergeant on shore leave."
Butch rolled her eyes. “Watch it...”
Griz froze, then put the blowpipe down. "Right. Thanks for the eyes-down. We've got antidote, right?"
"Four doses, that's it," said Cheese, adjusting the heavily-modified spectrum goggles on her head. Cheese had done chemistry and engineering at Condorcorum Polytechnic. Freakin' genius. She was one of our medics, and our demolitions specialist. "You'll be out for an hour anyway, also, too."
The booze was wrong, very wrong. I took a look at the bodies as Gina checked the entrance for traps.
"These knuckleheads still got guards posted," said Poke. I fucking hated that guy. Most of the FOG unit were psychos but Poke went out of his way to be a flankhole. Killed a deer foal once, couldn't have been older than eight. He hadn't seen us, but he'd seen half a pack of cigarettes next to the path and picked it up. Poke crept out of cover, grabbed the kid, snapped his neck, hid the body and told the squad the kid was about to give our position away. Kept the cigarettes to himself. I'd been trying to push him into enemy fire ever since. "Looks like this dump is still in western claws," said Poke.
"No. These aren't westerners," I said. The bodies were wrong too. The squad looked at me. Poke sneered.
"Moneyshot, I've slotted enough Easterners and Westerners to tell the fucking difference-"
*
*–*
Rainbow Dash interrupts me. “Who's 'Moneyshot?'”
“I've heard that name before,” says Trixie.
“Moneyshot was my nickname,” I say. I stop myself from clenching my claws into fists. Force of habit. “See, half my job in Nainuoc was taking pictures of stuff and sending them back to headquarters. One night, I'm stuck in the observation post with Poke, Griz and Danish. I take the lens cap off the camera and there's this white goop between the cap and the lens. I turn around and the others are giggling silently like fuckers. My pictures were boring, Poke said, so he gave the camera a 'moneyshot' to spice them up. The name stuck.”
“Wait, what was the white stuff – did he – oh. Ewwww!” Pinkie's face switches from confused to grossed-out.
“Yeah. Not a huge fan of that name. Anyway, as I was telling...”
*–*
*
I cut him off, "The sentries were drinking honeywine, you don't get it in the west. Westerners wouldn't drink it anyway, they all drink rice wine, it's a patriotic thing. They're wearing western uniforms but they're made of hemp, not cotton. There's a cotton embargo in the east. These are disguises, damn good quality."
The sergeant nodded and then said, "So, Ngyuen hasn't cacked up a reply, she's dead or compromised. Same plan as before. Stay out of sight, remove sentries, be prepared for an ambush. Assume Ngyuen is unfriendly. Gina, take point."
Gina slid a mirror under the front entrance, checking for anything inside. All clear. She nudged the door open and we followed her inside to the dirty, dilapidated hotel lobby. The wallpaper was peeling and the room stank of damp and sweat. Everything of any value had been stripped, either to be pawned or melted down. Two elevators, one out of order. Stairway to the right. The remains of the hotel bar to the right.
A noise crunched from the bar. Hoofsteps. Bored muttering in French. Butch signalled us to hide behind the front desk. She and Danish crouched down either side of the door to the bar. Butch drew her poniard, a classy, blued blade that'd been passed down her family. Wasn't enchanted or anything, just so well-made you'd think it was. Danish didn't take out anything, he just flexed his massive claws.
Two deer walked through the door, dressed the same as the sentries outside. Danish and the sergeant checked there was nobody following them, then pounced. Butch slipped her dagger straight through one deer's ribcage and twisted. Danish grabbed the other by the throat, killing him with a soft little noise.
I didn't feel anything, then. Two months before, when they first dropped me in the jungle, seeing the squad slot some stupid dweebs like that made me feel wrong, sick to my stomach, like I was hollow inside. I had nightmares after Poke wasted the kid. By the time we were sneaking around d'Hotel Veritas, though? Nothing.
"The bar's a dead end and thirty flights of stairs are too risky," said Butch, wiping her blade, "We'll take the knackered elevator, pop the top and fly up the shaft. Crackers, check the elevator."
"Aye aye," said Cheese. Cheese and the sergeant had a professional history together, and the sergeant always called her Crackers for some reason. She doted on Cheese. Very good friends.
Cheese took out her tinkering kit, a leather roll of tools, mirrors and technomantics. I sat by her, passing her the tools and holding the viewing scopes as she fiddled with the elevator door. Unlocking it was easy; spoinking the trap inside without setting it off was less so. The rest of the squad stood guard, tense as gargoyles.
Cheese snorted and smiled, then gently pushed the metal doors open. A pulsing, angry-red fruit the size of a pineapple hung at face height, caught up in a web of wires. If me and Cheese hadn't cut a few of those wires, opening the door would have squeezed it tight.
"A blooming peppercorn in a wire snare, freaking genius!" whispered Cheese, "They don't even need a noise maker, if that thing sprayed juice in the air the whole darn building woulda heard us. Oh molly, I'm taking you as a souvenir."
We couldn't say 'no,' 'stop,' or 'Chingis, my eyes,' before she hopped inside with a set of wirecutters and clipped the peppercorn free from the wires. We were all damn lucky it would only squirt juice if squeezed too hard. Cheese stuffed the scaly, red fruit into a sandwich bag, then wrapped it in rags and strapped it to her kit. She was crazy with stuff like that, but Butch never had a problem with it. For every crazy risk Cheese took in the middle of an operation, she'd develop five awesome bits of kit from it. Cheese gave the 'all clear' signal, then the squad went into the shaft and started climbing the elevator cable.
We climbed slowly, just in case the deer were canny enough to set wire traps inside the shaft. We had our wings for support and extra push, but climbing thirty floors with your face next to Gina's ass sucked. It took us ten minutes to reach the top.
Danish pushed the elevator doors apart with his powerful claws, barely grunting from effort. I heard a confused noise in French from the hallway above, and a set of hooves trotted to the elevator. Danish grabbed the deer and thumped him, then next thing I know there's a knocked-out deer falling down the elevator shaft. Nearly clipped me in the wing, too.
We climbed into the 30th floor hallway. It was clean and well lit, not a pit like the lobby, and it stunk of noodle soup and cabbage instead of rot and damp. There were doors to the penthouse suite, a maintenance closet, and the stairway. Poke and Griz took the lights out of the sockets, Butch and Danish checked the maintenance closet, Cheese opened the working elevator shaft's doors and disabled the elevator mechanism, and I sealed the stairway door with uber glue. It wouldn't have been enough to stop a couple of determined deer from battering the door down, but it'd stop anyone from just waltzing in.
We finished the prep, and then Butch signalled us into position. She checked under the penthouse door with her mirror, then raised a claw. There were two targets inside. Danish took out a roll of yolos – griffon sweets, they're rabbit-flavoured toffee dipped in chocolate – took one out and smooshed it against the peephole. Danish and the sergeant readied up, then the sergeant knocked on the door.
"Hoang?" asked a voice behind the door. Sergeant Butch looked at me.
I pressed a knuckle to my throat so I wouldn't sound griffonish. "Les lumières sont baisées, ouvre la porte." My accent was off. We prayed it wouldn't matter.
The door opened. Danish grabbed the deer at the door and slammed his head into the doorframe, knocking him out. Butch leapt over Danish's back and tackled the second deer, who'd barely had time to get out of his chair. She pinned the deer to the ground and wrapped her arms around his neck in a tight chokehold. He was out in three seconds.
Danish and the sergeant gagged and tied the two deer, and the rest of us filed in, weapons raised. Poke and Griz had a poniard and handbow each, Gina and Trevor had their shortbows. The rest of us had flechette carbines, the break-open single-cartridge ones. Dunno if the Equestrian guard ever used them, what with unicorns and all. The carbine would crunch two depleted gemstones together and shoot a bolt of magic at the target, hard enough to break a set of ribs, or kill with a headshot. If you capped a cartridge with quartz, it would send shards through flesh and bone. Cute little things, but loud as a drunk donkey.
The front room was massive and split into two levels. The upper level looked down onto the lower level where we were, and a rickety spiral staircase led up to it. The lower level was plush, with rugs, two sofas, a big coffee table coated in food and beer, a few bookcases. Nice place, for a hotel in a warzone.
We must have been loud, because a deer on the upper level poked his head over the railing to check out the noise. Poke flew up and pulled him over; Griz and Gina grabbed the deer mid-air and tied him up. There was a shout in French from the upper level. Another deer had seen Poke. Poke pulled his handbow and shot. The deer wailed in pain, and I flew up to see what happened. Poke had missed the neck and shot him in the front leg. The deer dived into a doorway at the other end of the room. Two more deer craned their necks out, then slammed the door and cried alarm.
Poke yelled, "We're spotted, get up here now!" Me, Danish and Trevor flew up, then sprinted to the door. Poke pulled a flashbomb and reached for the door handle, but Trevor stopped him. Trevor took two folded squares of cardboard, both 12" by 12". Special mouseholing cut-outs, with det-cord on one side. They unfolded twice over, and he placed them on the wall three meters left of the door, one just above the other. The det-cord is wedged between the cardboard and the wall. Trevor crunched the acid-vial fuse, stepped back, and counted down on his claws.
Three. I raised my carbine. Two. Poke pulled the pin on the flashbomb. One. Boom.
Poke pitched the flashbomb as we rushed into the smoking hole in the wall. The flashbomb wasn't strong enough to blind and deafen, just enough to distract your target for half a second. It was all we needed. Danish grabbed the wounded deer by his front leg and hurled him into another deer. The fastest deer had flipped a table and taken cover. It would've worked better if Trevor didn't have wings. He flew straight over and dropkicked the deer with a nasty crunch. The fourth deer tried to draw a mouthblade. I slammed the muzzle of my carbine against his face, then swiped his front kneecaps from the side with the butt. His head hit the floorboards. I dropped an elbow into his liver, just in case he felt like getting up.
"We've got a runner!" said Poke, pointing at a swinging-open door. He chased straight forward and we had to follow. I looked over my shoulder and saw Butch and the rest of the squad come into the room. Butch and Cheese followed; the rest tied up the prisoners.
The next room was a cluttered kitchen. We vaulted over workstations and chopping blocks to get to the other end. Poke reached the shut door at the other end, dropped to his knees and slid the mirror under. He gave the 'all clear' signal, twisting the door handle with the other claw. The door didn't budge.
Poke said, "Room's clear, I need a charge-"
"CHAAAAAARGE!"
Danish slammed into the door at full speed, knocking it off its hinges. It led to a reading room full of documents and technomantics. There was a circle on the floor, filled with glowing runes, and more daubed on the walls. We ignored them. We shouldn't have.
To the left, a sliding door led to a small stairwell. I took point and scaled the stairs, Trevor right behind me, the rest of the squad bringing up the rear. I kicked open the door at the top.
At my front and right, a raised landing pad took up a quarter of the roof. There was a set of ventilation units between me and the pad. I saw a glimpse of a deer and a glint of metal, then I got tackled from behind. Three thin blades skittered across the rooftop where I had just been stood, dripping brown liquid. I saw the liquid hiss and sputter as it ate through the roofing tar. Trevor rolled off me.
That was the first time he saved my life that night.
The deer flung more blades across the air and at the door. "Get to cover," I yelled. Cheese and Gina slid to the ventilation units we were hiding behind; the rest of the squad stayed in cover. Butch and Griz blind-fired their carbines from cover, slinging shards of crystal towards the deer with a loud thundercrack. The blades kept coming.
"Normal deer don't have bladeslingers," I said, over the *tink-tink-tink of blades hitting the floor. "It's Ngyuen. Crazy bitch has us pinned down."
Trevor readied his composite shortbow. "I don't fancy she's coming in for debriefing, Gilda. Mind if I drop an arrow through her heart?"
I held up a rubber-tipped cartridge for my carbine. Still powerful enough to break ribs. "If I bring back a live defector, I might get a promotion out of here," I said, "and you dudes wouldn't have your crazy jungle fun messed up by lame spy crap any more."
Gina grinned and nudged me. "Ah, they'd just send you someplace more dangerous with worse weather, 'cause you've got 'field experience' and can 'take pressure.' They'd give us another damn spook, they always do. 'Sides, you're a solid molly, Moneyshot."
I grinned back. By that time, Moneyshot was more 'fond' than 'fuck-off'. Still hated it, but it was better. "Be my guest and put her down, Trev," I said.
"I'll need a distraction," he said, pointing to the knives flying overhead, "bangers out."
We used bangers to flush targets from cover. Six inch metal tube, yank the cord in the middle and a nasty acid eats through a thin membrane stopping two lumps of depleted amethyst. They sizzle like a banger sausage when the acid fuse sets off. Then they make a big bang. And shrapnel wounds.
Cheese took one out as Trevor nocked an arrow. She yanked the cord and pitched it towards the landing pad. The explosion cracked the air two seconds later, Trevor instantly shot up, took aim and fired at Ngyuen.
Trevor said, "She's down, zone's clear!"
We left cover, and the squad headed to the landing pad. Ngyuen lay near the edge in a pool of her own blood, with an arrow through her ribcage. Her mouth hung open, her small tusks twitching as she drooled blood. A qirin bladeslinger lay next to her, sleek and ceramic, splattered with red. In the middle of the pad sat a fat ceramic tube, a meter high, pointing skywards.
There were more runes painted on the floor here. Some glowed but others were painted in something thin and clear, so you couldn't see them. A trail of these invisible characters led off the landing pad, and probably back into the building.
We shouldn't have ignored those either.
Griz took her med kit out and started to inspect Ngyuen. She shook her head. "She's schtupped, there's a severed artery. She's got less than a minute."
Ngyuen coughed blood, and muttered something to Griz. Griz looked at me. "Yo Gilda, what does 'jiganya' mean?"
"Je Gagne?"
"Yeah."
"Huh. It means 'I win'," I said.
"Uh, guys?" Cheese pointed at the ceramic tube, her voice rising, "There's a fuse at the bottom of that mortar, guys. It's on fire, guys. It's nearly at the base-"
"Squad, get down!" said Butch.
I hit the floor and the air exploded. All I could feel was ringing in my ears and pressure rippling through my body. A few seconds later, the air flashed bright above us.
I pushed myself to my paws and looked up. It was a firework mortar. It had exploded into a burning deer skull with snakes crawling from the eye sockets. Everybird else was looking up at it too. It continued to burn.
"Well, that's ominous," said Cheese.
Thin beads of light started to rise from rooftops in the distance. More fireworks in response, all simple blue flares that flashed and burned in place. All the colour of the Eastern army. More than a hundred different rooftops set off flares, most on the Eastern side of the Banleui Huit.
The ringing faded, and we heard the noise. A low, angry drone. Danish flew into the air to hear better.
"Eastern war-cry," he said, "Deer streaming into the streets."
"Chingis, this is the launching ground for an assault on Banlieu Neuf," said Sergeant Butch, "and Ngyuen just triggered it."
Trevor perched on the Eastern side of the landing pad. "I can see alarms going up on our friends' side," he said, "Orders, sergeant?"
"The streets will be a meat-grinder, they're not an option," said Butch, "We'll fly towards the Western side, and as soon as we're out of range we'll light yellow flares. Let's hope they're smart enough not to fire on friendlies."
"We're going to bear Western colours? That'll blow our deniability out of the water."
"We've got no choice, it's that or get minced. Cheese, pass out the flares. We're going now. Gilda, if your spy code means you need to burn some documents or put some hairs on door frames or some bullshit, you're out of luck." She looked sterner than usual under the blue light of the flaming skull above us.
"Not a problem, sergeant," I said. Not collecting any intel would set my work back a few months, but I preferred some extra work to being dead. I walked towards Cheese to get a flare, and saw a trail of Ngyuen's blood touch one of those runes I shouldn't have ignored.
Every rune on the roof flashed bright purple, and the building shook for a few seconds.
"The fuck was that?" said Poke.
"I don't know, but we're leaving right now," said Butch, "Everybird strap in and form on me."
"There's something coming up the side of the building," said Trevor, "It's coming up - jings!" He jumped back from the edge and landed on his flanks.
A wall of shimmering black light shot up the edge of the building, and arched over us in a dome. Dark, forbidden qirin magic.
Danish was hovering above me when the eldritch web clipped the farthest feather of his wing. He didn't have time to scream before the fire destroyed him. He didn't even have time to look shocked.
The toughest griffon I'd ever met drifted down onto me, all hot ashes.
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First in a long while!
I missed you, spy games. Y'know, this is the first story I fav'd on fimfiction? I blame you for all the hooks this site has embedded in my flesh.
1971597
That gives me an oddly warm feeling in my tummy.
Dat intro sounds suspiciously close to burn notice intro
1971630
Note the 'crossover' tag....
Ye gods. Dark qirin magic, and a very nice 'Nam feel to the story.
AWWW YEAAA!
aaareading
Edit: Jesus
I flipped all my shits when I saw that this had updated, and it was completely worth the wait. Gilda's snarky tone mixed with the delightfully visceral imagery made for an awesome storytelling vibe. You'll get me to watch Burn Notice at this rate...
YAAAY!!!
It's here!! *ahem* I mean, "Hooray, another chapter of this fine story."
[Edit] Glad I could help. This turned out pretty good.
The reason I got into pony fiction has made it's way back to the surface! This was a great read.
IT HAS RETURNED! great to see this awesome story update
isn't the expo for France in fanon Prance? so that would make French expo Prench then, idk it's just jarring to see a real world term being used in a mlp fic, especially because you've converted everything else (all the gemstone based explosives, whatever this political senario with the deer is (or is that original? if so great work)
1971977 this story is a little darker then Burn Notice, plus it also adds a lot more stuff (like a batman expo with Pinkie), Burn Notice is a good semi-light hearted no heavy thinking necessary kinda show
I have been looking forward to this fic updating.
IT LIVES!!!
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw3345-1330646932156.gif
Did you just take all of the wars and put them in a blender? First it seemed like the Cold War, then WWII-era Berlin, then some sort of China v. Japan thing, and then the French showed up. It kept me guessing, that's for sure.
worth the wait.
I was wondering if you were still alive, dude. DEFINITELY worth the wait, and hope to see more ... and more frequently.
Pinkie wants more, you silly molly...
If it french or prench they speaking. Then it Indo-china or as it now known Vietnam.
HOLY
, YOU'RE ALIVE!
Love this fic so much. On my way home today I was actually wondering if it would ever get some more chapters. I sit down at my computer, and lo! A new chapter!
THANK YOU, thank you,THANK you, thank YOU, thank you, thank you, thank you, thanks(x100 billion thousand forever)
i love you
1971597 The knives are blaming hooks?:D
Seriously, glad to see this story again. A strong revival chapter to set the story rolling again :D
Goddammit Poke, some griffons just arent worth a Bean.
Death Eaters in FiM, I think that's a first. Well done.
imageshack.us/a/img442/794/ifuckinglovethisfic.jpg
I can't believe that today of all days, RIGHT when this gets posted my hard drive decided to take a dump and give me a blue screen. FML.
But about time dude. Love this fic to death. Damn good chapter to start the ball rolling again. I'm SO happy you picked it back up!
You know what's kinda fucked up, considering this chapter, that I just now noticed on the bottom of the page right below the reply box? THIS.
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BTW I was more than happy to help preread, and thanks for letting me help with this great fic.
And thanks for finally working on it again.
Freaking finally! About damn time this story came back.
One thing I always liked about this story was the sheer strangeness of the espionage. This war amongst the dears feels almost like something from a real world conflict, but mixed in with the magic and eldritch stuff and the fact that we're talking about dears and gryphons, gives it all this unique feel. I never even watched burn notice and I can still enjoy this story.
Oh, and I'm glad to see you're gonna take the time to explain why Gilda would trust Trevor given how unbelievable that was last chapter, especially with how paranoid she is.
And, another thing worthy of note is Gilda seems to be getting along with Pinkie. That's rather interesting and says a lot about Gilda and gryphon culture. It implies she has an almost dog-like loyalty to her. She only respects strength, and couldn't give a fuck about your motives and moral out look. Well, to a degree. Obviously she sort of cares, enough to call people scumbags and what not, but not enough to actually do anything.
1972301 Actually the misnomer Prench is a fanon term, as is Prance. French has been referred to directly when Fluttershy calls a style of clothing "French Haut C outre." The only other reference to the language was Applejack calling it "Fancy".
1974252 hmm, I didn't know that, for me it's still a little jarring to see a blatantly human name/word being used in a pony story (and even the show)
1974615
In the Banishment Decree fanon, French is the language spoken by residents of Highfrench, a mountain nation of griffons, ponies and hippogriffs, independent from both Equestria and the Griffon Kingdoms. It's where Gustav Le Grand is from.
1972495
Mostly Vietnam. Bloody civil war, used as a proxy war between several far away nations. The French langauge is spoken there as the colonial tongue, but there are still bits of the old language lying about, mostly because I know a wonderful writer who can translate French for me, but not one who can do Vietnamese. Lots of spies running around where they shouldn't be.
1973983
That's not my interpretation of the Gilda-Pinkie dynamics in this chapter. Gilda doesn't respect Pinkie because Pinkie beat her; Pinkie did that when they first met and Gilda just hated her more for it. Gilda was just in a situation where it looks like she did something reckless, criminal, and pointlessly lethal. She has a thin alibi, and she's barely even sure of what happened at the refinery herself.
When she explains to Pinkie what happened as best she can, Pinkie gives her the benefit of the doubt, even though Pinkie has every reason to hold her in contempt. Pinkie listens to her, analyses her body language and reasoning, and decides to give Gilda a second chance. Pinkie is showing a level of faith in her that Gilda would barely expect from Rainbow Dash. She implicitly tells Gilda that telling a fairly traumatic story about a dead friend isn't necessary to earn her trust, but if Gilda wants to tell it then she's happy to listen.
Finally, Pinkie rests a hoof on Gilda's arm and gives her a little smile. That is not Pinkie's style. Pinkie's style is a grin wider than her own face and a full body hug, the sort of thing that Gilda hates. The little-smile-and-hoof is more like Rainbow Dash in a tender mood. That gesture is a deliberate olive branch; it shows that Pinkie knows her normal behaviour grates on Gilda, that the mood isn't suited to Pinkie's usual unintentional Gilda-trolling, and that Pinkie will act in ways that Gilda is more comfortable with, because even with the flaws and stupidity and violence, Gilda is Pinkie's friend.
That is what the odd little gesture was about. The magic of friendship.
Couldn't be happier to see the ball rolling again on Banishment Decree.
You really have a gift for taking war tech and magicking it up
YES, YES!
Great to see this back. Man, just as tense and awesome as I remembered. Excellent action scene. That ending, and Danish's death. *Shakes head* Perfect for the tone, too. Damn. Glad Ngyuen got hers in the end, but the cost was high.
Awesome, so Awesome
1972301 It didn't used to be. Why do they always seem to mellow-out the few really badass characters when they get established?
1973952 Oh, that is just horribly, morbidly funny. Trixie and Gilda would be rolling on the floor, while Dash somehow managed to fall off it.
Twilight, of course, would be saying, "What?" 
Pinkie? She asplode. 
1982454 lol
Daaang...
Gilda's hardcore.
First Shin Bet and now the SAS?
I really love the Vietnam analogue you have. Dirty commie camels...
It brings to mind Equestria Prevail's New Royal Guard series
1983050
Erm, what DID I do there? I picked Blackwings because it sounded cool...
1983711
Sin Bet and the SAS and the SOG too!
YAY! It's back!
1982069 Oh, I still noticed. The guy that killed the young deer shall die by my hand. You do not stoop to such tactics.
Some will say, "But we did it in Vietnam!"
Note: First of all, most of those claims turned out to be false, created by anti-war propagandists like Kerry who slipped into the ranks for the sole purpose of bashing soldiers later (and how he avoided a court martial for being caught in a blatant lie in front of Congress is beyond me. It's obvious he was protected by powerful friends.)
Secondly, we LOST in Vietnam. And every CIA mission that used such tactics has led to a dictatorship that we have then had to remove. So resorting to deplorable tactics, in fact, has a terrible track record. (For anyone thinking of countering with that example, I have saved you the trouble.)
Carpet bombing and nuking the enemy into oblivion, on the other hoof: GREAT SUCCESS!!
1987896
Uh, the Americans used napalm in vietnam, and I'm pretty sure that's worse than just killing some kid...
Oh thank God! I have been waiting for this FOREVER! Excellent work.
Got asked to preread this, and had my interest piqued.
And now I just read through the whole story in one sitting.
Well played, Chuck.
Well played.
1989547 *nods slowly* Aaaaaaand we lost. Napalm is FIRE. Carpet bombs make big explosions. Which are cooler, and thus justified by God! (It's in Leviticus somewhere...)
Nice to see an update on this, as well as finishing Rumble Splits Lickety. I think I said it before, but your characterization is simply beautiful.
I think my favorite part of this chapter was the little bit of introspection Gilda threw into the narrative about halfway through, when she mentions how little killing all those deer bothered her. Not many fanfic authors who write about war understand the psychological scar tissue that killing forms.
Also, great last line there.
2005912
All that means a hell of a lot coming from you. Glad you liked it.
2005912
Something about this comment has been poking around in my brain for a day or so, because you struck on a huge vein of characterisation for Gilda that I didn't even realise was there.
Banishment Decree Gilda smothers herself in apathy, forming a massive psychic shell over herself like a Freudian tortoise. She lets herself feel weak, easy emotions like mild contempt, irritation and hedonism. When she's falling to her death, she doesn't feel despair or desperation, just a sloppy shrug of acceptance. She (initially) loathes Pinkie, but she can't bring herself to do more than snipe at her. She feels terror over her banishment, but she quickly suppresses it for several days and when it hits her, she turns into a mess. When she first goes into the flophouse, she feels pity and revulsion at the conditions, but not enough that she helps the prisoners instead of clearing the area first. She doesn't care about the politics of her work or patriotism, she does her job because the work is exciting and the frequence violence is both an outlet and a hedonistic pleasure. She still seems attracted to Rainbow Dash, but she refuses to expose herself completely by being up front, and will only go around the edge in a 'hey, wanna have casual sex, aren't I such a silly rake haha' sort of way.
Gilda has only felt strong emotion two or three times in the story, and each time they run completely out of control. When she sees a pegasus filly who looks like kid-Dash being tortured, she completely loses it, blacks out, and turns sapivore, which is almost as big a taboo as cannabalism for griffons. When the banishment finally sinks in, she breaks down and starts sobbing inconsolably, far from normal behaviour for Gilda. She not only doesn't show strong emotions, she can't deal with them. So everything gets pushed down.
We get little hints of how she ended up like this. She did cadet training as a kid, a full-time boarding thing where there was so much institutionalised bullying (and worse) that even Gilda kinda recognised it for what it was, but Gilda clearly didn't have it very badly, she says she got along well with all the older recruits. Gilda is pretty clear that the older recruits acted like assholes, so how did she avoid the worst of the bullying? We saw how clingy she was around friends she liked in Griffon the Brush Off, and we know she's good at bullying. Gilda joined in. She was the little shit at the back of the gang, as she grew turned into another one of the mollies. She knew it was wrong, the older recruits did it to enough cadets that she couldn't have rationalised all of them, so she just smothered it with apathy. She decided she just didn't care, that it wasn't her damn problem. She just wanted to get through cadet training in one piece, and if the other cadets are hurting, there's nothing she can do or cares to do.
She's lost that dog-like clinginess to the people she loves. It happened in GtBO. Once more, she actually felt something, felt pure and utter rage at Pinkie Pie, and ended up crushed because of it, Suppress, suppress, suppress.
Something happened with her family too. She has a large family - several possible fathers who all seem like family members, her mother, more brothers and sisters than she can easily name - but she hangs out with and thinks of her cousins, aunts, uncles and extended family more, thinks of them more. Why? Her uncle is gruff, friendly and a military careerist, her cousins are practical rednecks who love hunting and bushcraft, even Nigel, the intellectual of the group. They annoy Gilda to an extent, but she doesn't mind. She knows Gretchen is even more apathetic to others than she is and doesn't mind, she knows Nigel is a pretentious intellectual and humors him, she knows Terrence is a hyperactive whirlwind of toilet humor and redneck slang, but doesn't mind. They all get on each other's nerves, as much as any family does, but they all accept each other. They accept Rainbow Dash too, Gilda's interspecies high-school girlfriend. They go out of their way to include Dash.
There's the second part: Gilda went to a foreign school, to board. Why so far away? Maybe she was a hellraiser, but there's no indication her family are so rich they could just send kids away for misbehaving. Even if she had a full scholarship, there would still be travel and boarding costs. A middle class family, even an upper-middle class one, wouldn't send a kid away willy-nilly like that. No, her family had high hopes for Gilda. She'd obviously done well in cadets - not surprising with the older recruits mentoring her, being friends with her, and not breaking her down with bullying - and was a smart enough bird that she was Going Places. They send her to a foreign school for the summer, to make connections, learn about other cultures and come back with merits from her classes. That would put her way ahead, get her a scholarship into Condorcorum Polytechnic, or claws-crossed, even the University of Silvertree.
She got to Junior Speedsters, and it didn't work out like that. There weren't many griffons and the ponies weren't really comfortable with other races. Dash made friends with her. Brash, cocky and confident like the older recruits in cadets, but without the military organisation or the mentoring. Gilda didn't have a group of older mentors pushing her through, didn't have any real protection from the bullying and racism in Cloudsdale. All she did was chill out with Dash and do awesome stunts with her. Gilda came back to her family with no merits, bare pass grades, no wonderful network of well-connected pegasi, and an interspecies relationship.
Her immediate family might not have said it outright, but Gilda was a disappointment. She'd been the golden girl, told she was destined for success ever since cadets, sent away at great expense, and she blew it. Her siblings were resentful that she'd been given all these opportunities in the first place, since they saw it for what it was: Gilda had been lucky, she'd been shepharded through tough times, given preferential treatment. No sympathy from them. Her mother was wracked with guilt, because she'd obviously done something wrong by sending Gilda away, and now Gilda is enlisting, and only hangs out with her brother and his kids. And that was painful for Gilda, because she believed her own hype, at least for a while. She was going to make waves, make a name not just for herself but for her whole family. Junior Speedsters crushed that, and rather than deal with the pain, she just decided it didn't matter. She doesn't care about big goals and lofty ambitions now. Suppress suppress.
She hung out with her extended family because they didn't judge her and still saw her as a bright young lass, and went into Griffon Intelligence. It put her close to her uncle and cousins - she was dealing with military intelligence, and it's a wing of the griffon armed forces - but didn't put her in direct competition, or Chingis-forbid, direct comparison with them. She got sent on horrible missions, and suppressed even more. Her attitude towards killing, towards life and death, towards her friends and allies...
It all added up to make her an excellent spy. She doesn't care about life and death, so she'll kill when she's ordered to. She doesn't have the kind of ambitions that means she'll stab her superiors in the back. She can blend into different political groups, because she doesn't really hold strong convictions. If she's ordered to do something horrible, she won't spend weeks agonising about it and potentially turning or going rogue. She doesn't get emotional on morally dubious missions and need a handler to calm her down. She doesn't easily make attachments, and isn't big on keeping them. She doesn't have any one big ability that she's confident in, she doesn't have any areas she truly dares to be confident in, because that's just setting yourself up for a livershot to the soul, so she always makes sure she's lining her best areas up against everyone else's weakest.
And at the same time, it keeps her trapped. Her psychological defences are as much a cage as a fortress, and they'll only go so far. They've been breached several times already, and she's not equipped to deal with things when that happens. And if something really bad happens? If Dash abandons her, if Trixie dies, how is she going to deal with that? If she keeps going on, she'll end up a hollow shell who literally cares about nothing, and there's no where that ends apart from a sack full of depression before an old enemy finds and kills her. That is Gilda's psychological arc. She must learn to give a shit once more, lest she crumble into oblivions.
CiG, you have no idea how much that little titbit helped me develop Gilda. Sorry for blocking your screen up with a huge wall of text. I hope you find it at least half interesting.
2019290
That last part is interesting, about what will happen to Gilda if she loses any of the last people close to her -- Dash or Trixie. The impression I get from reading her is that it wouldn't have much of an impact at all; she might briefly mourn, but her overriding concern would be making sure the same ill fate that claimed them didn't claim her as well. Self-preservation, in other words.
Gilda strikes me as unmoored. Adrift. Even the banishment thing seems more like an insult to her pride than a serious theft of a part of her being.
I'm thinking back through the story and trying to recall a single instance in which Gilda willingly took a risk for someone else. Nothing immediately comes to mind.
I don't think it's possible to live like that -- at least, not for long.
2039199
You are oh-so very right to be suspicious about this information. Have a cookie!
2059639
Fabulous. I'd love to hear your further thoughts!