Chapter 17 — Mud
Chapter 17: Mud
“How about ‘a medium amount of dirty, not too little, not too much, just right’?”
Pain.
Some ponies can take a lot of pain without whining. Some ponies can also lie like a rug. And I don’t mean just any rug; I mean one of those Purrsian rugs made by that weird tribe of zebras in the Südlanden that trains cats to sew together really high-quality rugs that, despite lasting forever, perpetually smell of cat piss and old mares who will never be laid ever again in their sad, wrinkly lives. Despite me being the kind that lies, I uniquely do not smell of cat piss and never-to-be-laid mares. In fact, I think I smell of mud, pony piss, rotting flesh, and French silk pie at this moment in time.
|— ☩ —|
Have you ever tried to scream through your nose? Just keep your mouth clenched tightly and then try to shriek the N sound. Doing it angrily is optional but cool. See, I had just found out that I could do this because I really wanted to scream in agony. My left eye was pretty much dead and only kept in its socket by a clenched eyelid, my horn had fallen off, and my mouth was so numb from the icy water of the underground river that I wasn’t sure I could even work my jaw. Of course, this lead me to the discovery that screaming through my nose tickled my sinuses, and so I found myself screaming at once because I really wanted to scream but also because the tickling feeling in my sinuses made me giggle.
The tickling having reminded me that morale was such a thing to be had, I managed to open my eyes—no! Just the one eye, the right one. Remember, Jericho: keep leftie-eye closed. So I managed to open my good eye and look around. It was mud. My favorite. I was lying almost face-down in mud. But there was something else. I could see the mud—sunlight was pouring down on me and my best bud, Mud of Lud von Blood. That meant that I was outside, which was odd, considering how deep underground I must have been.
A thought about the possibility of standing up crossed my mind. It was appealing in the same way an overly eager mare was to a stallion who didn’t swing that way. The mud was nice. The sunlight was okay. The water sloshing up against my legs was cold, a little tide running up to my ass.
Wait. Water?! With a speed I should not have been able to muster, I managed to launch myself out of the water and into a stand and—oh dear God, eyeball bouncing around the inside of my skull. That was a new feeling for sure. With my good eye, I observed a thick, murky marsh-forest stretched out before me, like a mangrove forest. Then I realized there was a loud roaring sound coming from my left, and I realized I’d been hearing it the whole time. There was a waterfall, not a massive one like some of the falls back home, just a rather quaint one falling into a gutter-like stream that flowed into the murky bogwater that’d been submerging the lower half of my body for God-only-knew how long.
Then it occurred to me again that I didn’t know how I’d gotten here, and just how little sense me even being here made. I imagined a Deux ex Machina from the olden days, some pony dressed in a toga being loaded onto a stage via a wooden crane, only for the cable holding him up to snap, sending him plummeting to the ground and killing two fellow actors. In this analogy, I was the wooden stage.
I rubbed my cheek with a hoof, only to get a foul-smelling muck all over my cheek. “Oh. Oh, yeah, great. Just great. Thanks, Deus ex Machina!” I stamped my forehooves in the mud, splattering it all over myself. “Dammit, be smarter!” Something made a rapid series of throaty clicks to my right, and I twisted my head to it and demanded, “And what do you want for Weihnachten, little girl?!”
Two things stopped my thoughts, cutting them dead and replacing them with new ones. The first was that I wasn’t actually sure what language I was speaking. The other was that there a crab-like octopus just sort of sitting there on the murky water’s surface. It was as big as a small dog, was clutching onto the muddy shore of the bog with two tentacles that ended in savage pincers, had a head-sized body that resembled a bony octopus, and probably would go well with a side of chips.
“Um,” I tried, “you wouldn’t happen to have the time, would you? Maybe directions to a fancy restaurant? Know how to give a good massage?”
Instead of reply, it slid a tentacle almost tentatively towards me and poked my hoof with its pincer. The little creature gave a shake of its whiskers as if to say, “Huh. Big deal.” I took a cautious step back, up the muddy embankment. The friendly bogtopus ruffled its cat-like whiskers again, and then stood up on six titanic, crab legs that stabbed into the murky water, raising its body to about the height of my chest.
With a roar of sharp clicks, it lunged for me. A pincer tore at a forehoof, severing a chunk of flesh. My first reaction was to draw my sword, but when I tried to telekinect my sword, a searing migraine nearly torn my skull in two. I no longer had a horn, Scheiße! I felt a chunk of hoof crack and splinter off as its vice-like pincer bore down on them. But rather than scream and flail at the loss of forty-percent of my right hoof, I simply groaned and thought with vague amusement, Well, at least I jerk off with the left hoof. Though I can’t remember the last time I tired to m—
It rammed a pincer into my breast, the claw burying deep within the wound from the demon’s sword. Screaming, I failed backwards, falling onto my back. I freed myself from his stab, but now blood spurted freely from the open wound. The combined force was enough to make me involuntarily clench shut and then jerk open both eyes, and my left eyeball fell out and started to dance a jig to my suffering.
The bogtopus seemed to think this was the perfect opportunity to help me get rid of the penis that’s been such a dead weight between my legs, and I bucked its pincer away as best I could. It stabbed a hindhoof and snipped something off, but I couldn’t care less at that moment. See, then it thought maybe, just maybe, I’d help it achieve its lifelong goal of becoming a barber. And as its pincers reached for my hoof eye, I realized that I loved crushing the dreams of things that were technically smaller than me.
I rolled to the side, its pincer only nicking my cheek. “You have no manners!” I bellowed, jumping to my feet. Sharps pangs of agony ran up from my broken hooves as the bogtopus issued an almost curious series of clicks. “I agree, the current Equestrian government’s economic policy is bonkers!” I shouted, ramming it with my shoulder. Even though it was a terrible idea, my loose eye even smacking me across the face, the move knocked the bogtopus off balance, and it tumbled into the mud with me.
There was a hefty stone near where we’d fallen. I was about to levitate it up, only to stop before I started. Bad idea. So I reached over and fumbled with the rock, trying to get it into my hoof. Compared to the levitation, which I had grown so used to over the years, the task was almost impossible. But it wasn’t as if I couldn’t pick up, hold, and carry things with my hooves.
It swelled and clicked, kicking its legs uselessly against my much bigger body. The bogtopus stabbed at my face with a pincer, only to spear my ear straight through and giving me flashbacks to the night I surgically had to remove part of Cards’ ear. In return, I smashed its soft, shitty body again and again and again with the rock, spattering myself with teal-blue blood. Again and again I smashed, even when I knew it was dead. I had never been so fundamentally hurt by another living thing before—the Devil’s Backbone got me from the grave, so he didn’t count.
When I was done, I was straddling a terrifying creature with a pulpy head and body, myself covered in a weird gore. I panted and coughed, coughed and panted. “Stupid sonofabitch!” I snarled, and beat it some more. “I hope you have a bogtopus wife, and that she finds you and dies of a broken heart! And then your bogtopus children all starve to death after turning to a life of drugs, prostitution, and crime! I actually wish I could bring you back to life, give myself some life-ending STD, and then fornicate with you just so that you’d die of that STD!” Dropping the rock, I tumbled off the bogtopus’ gory remains and tumbled into the mud, coughing and panting, bleeding and wheezing. Not even awake and relishing in life for five goddamn minutes and already things were trying to kill me.
A slow, creeping realization worked its way cooly up my spine. My eye was still hanging from its socket and resting almost playfully upon my cheek. But that wasn’t the realization. The realization was that there was mud on my eye, that the eyeball was dirty, and that the flesh was necrotic. I could actually smell death on the eye, especially because it was snuggling up with my nose. Gritting my teeth, I tried not to think of the one, final solution to the eye problem. But the more I tried not to think about it, the more I did.
I would never see out of my left eye again. I had to cut it out to stop an infection. Stand up! a voice ordered, and I did. My arms and legs carried themselves over to the rocky walk by the waterfall; there the land was actually dry rock and flat. Looking over my shoulder to check if there were any more of the little monsters, I observed the bloody hoofprints I’d left walking the very short distance to these dry rocks. The thought that I had no idea what that thing really was and if its pincers were venomous made my stomach do a backflip, but all the judges gave it the five-point-oh at best. To say nothing of how dirty my wounds were. I might not have known how I was still alive, but I had a pretty good idea of how I’d die.
Bracing myself for what I had to do, I did something for the first time in Equestria that everypony thought was just so normal: I stripped down to the flesh and fur. It was a miracle that I still had my bags, and that they were all fine and dandy. Taking deep breaths, I checked my naked body over for any wounds I might not have noticed, but only found the reopened chest wound, the pierced ear, and the bleeding hooves. A strange feeling that Cherry “Mares can’t rape stallions” Berry was out in the bog with a snorkeler, staring at me, refused to shake itself from the back of my mind.
I ruffled through a bag and pulled out a small package of food. It wasn’t much, but combined with a healing potion, it was enough to stop the bleeding, and by some miracle, it managed to reunite my recently pierced ear. No longer would I be able to wear ludicrously massive earrings, though. Then I pulled out a pair of scissors, surgical thread, a sewing needle, and took a breath.
Have you ever tried to cut really thick construction paper, but instead of cutting, the paper just awkwardly folds up and twists into the scissors? Yeah, that was pretty much how I’d describe the act of trying to sever an optic nerve with a pair of scissors. It didn’t help that without the absurdly precise fine manipulation skills that a unicorn was privy to, this was pretty much impossible, but so long as I remembered the face of my father, my hooves would be steady. There was also the little mirror I’d found in my bag. It helped only a bit. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Only the strongest snips could cut the thick optic nerve.
And then it finally, finally, came loose and fell upon the rock. Some ponies can lie like a rug and feign having no pain. But all on my own, in the middle of nowhere, and having just cut out the lovely left eye which had been with me since before I was born, I didn’t… or rather, couldn’t hide it… because I wasn’t done yet. Not by a longshot. There was still the needle and the thread.
|— ☩ —|
My breaths slow and almost foreign to me, I leaned against the rock wall next to the waterfall. A hoof slowly came up and touched my left eyelid, the broken, jagged hoof feeling the triple layer of stitches. Never had I been a doctor, as my left eyelid could attest to. I brought the mirror up to my face. Without an eyeball and with my left eyelids sewn shut, my face looked hollow. In fact, I looked pale and sickly, like an old stallion on his deathbed, about to sign a will that granted all of his world possessions to his poodle, because his children were dicks. There was not enough blood in my body, and I could feel its lack. The last of my food had been eaten to survive the bogtopus.
I had counted the days I’d been in this godforsaken country. Judging by the sun, this was the eighth day. It took only eight days for this country to do to me what the rest of the world had failed to do. I had to hand it to Celestia, for the queen bitch of a nation of peaceful, love-the-earth, take-only-what-you-need naked pansies, she must’ve had a titanic set of balls to actually rule this evil place.
Then I recalled an old fact I’d learned somewhere that a certain external female sex organ responsible for her orgasm was a part of the female body that never stopped growing. Mature mares had bigger ones than young mares. And because in the womb, that external female organ was from what the penis actually formed from, it could get an erection. And if that science held true for thousands of years, then Princess Celestia must have had a certain external female organ larger than any penis, and capable of acting as one. After all, it was not an entirely unheard of, though absurdly and thankfully rare, disease that caused that female external organ to grow in size and essentially look like—but not function exactly as—a penis. The mental image of a tiny Cards wearing a fancy hat was now amended with a giant psuedo-penis. My testicles actually shriveled a little at that thought.
I resolved suddenly that if I survived this mess, I was going to ask Princess Celestia if I could examine her lady bits to see if she technically had a bigger penis than me. Maybe even have a sword fight with them like bonobos had. If that meant having to seduce her and then spend the rest of the night crying in shame and possibly pain, then in the name of science, so be it! Nature was so fascinating.
“What the hell?” I asked my head. I suspected that the bloodloss was getting to me, if only because that helped me cope with having just thought that though. “That previous line of thinking did not just happen… I need to see a doctor.” And so I closed my eyes, and rested my head against the rocky wall behind me. The sun was low, and I needed the sleep. It might restore some blood. So I drifted off into a good sleep. It was a good sleep because I did not dream.
|— ☩ —|
In the morning, I found out that I was still alive and hadn’t been castrated in the middle of the night by vengeful bogtopi. I also found a red line emerging from my right arm and running a few centimeters up, and the lines were as hard as a rock. What it was was simple: blood poisoning, and there was nothing I could do about that except to pray.
After I once again checked my naked body for all the fancy new scars I’d gotten within the last eight days, I used the last of my gauze to help bind my chest wounds. The scabs, to me, looked about as solid as the head of a goose after having a four-tonne weight dropped on it. Putting on fresh clothes, buttoning up my duster, adjusting my hat, and saddling up, I set off to the east, towards the direction of where I knew the coast eventually was, where I knew I’d find Equestrian hegemony. This meant going towards the waterfall and away from where the bogtopus had come from. I made a promise to heaven that if I ever saw another bogtopus, I would become a one-stallion genocide machine and destroy their entire species, turning their entire race into a fancy line of hats for the absurdly wealthy, because I figured Equestria was elitist enough to have a market for that kind of thing.
I climbed up the rocks and found that the swamp extended westward in a large basin. Up here were little forested hills, and I followed the fall’s stream until it ended not but a few miles to the east, where trickles of natural streams all poured out. Still no explanation as to how I got here from the underground river.
A little further up ahead and I reached another moor. Here, though, there was much more solid land, a lot less water, but still mostly water and muck. I could actually walk (hop, skip, and jump) through this infernal moor. But going through this place was slow. At this pace, I figured it’d take me about a day to go as far as I could go in a few hours on normal land. I promised some higher power that when I got out of here, I’d help save the world by burning down a wetland. How exactly I’d go about burning down wetlands didn’t occur to me. Around five in the afternoon, I was just singing songs about everything and nothing to stave the boredom off.
“Oh, I am the king of the swamp.
Was crowned by God, not by the church,
As my power comes direct from waffles.
Death to the bogtopus,
Put them in camps, destroy them all.
Ooh, look at that frog!
I say, hey!
Look at that frog, sitting there.
Ooh, if I keep singing,
Maybe I’ll forget the fact that I’m a…
Chiiiiild kiiiiiiller—yeah.”
And then I was sad for the rest of the day.
On the second day, I awoke with a fever, sweating like a pig who’s realized that his owners cleaned him and that he is no longer covered in shit. The hard red lines were running further and further up my arm, and within a few days, they’d be up to my heart, and I would die. Generally speaking, I figured that this was not a good thing, though I’d been wrong before. So as I sat there on a little isle of dirt in the swamp that second morning, I listened to the calls of the birds and distant howls of animals that I didn’t even pretend to recognize, and I started out across the moor and towards all the trees that blocked my view.
I imagined that if I had chosen a useful career path like a lumberjack, I’d be in no problem. I could cut down a few trees, kill a few bears, and forge a boat out of those to sexily cross the bog in style. I imagined trading in my duster and hat for a plaid shirt, a thick beard, and an axe, going around saving the world with my inherent lumberjack superpowers. Yes indeed, I’d travel around Equestria with my flying longboat crewed by exactly twelve gnomes and solve crimes. Oh, and at one point, I’d land my flying longboat, get out, and alongside my crew go break Duke Elkington’s knees with a bat.
A branch snapped to the north, and I jerked my head towards the sound. It was there for only a second before I blinked and it vanished: the tail of a black coat worn by a pony fleeing to the north. Though they were gone behind the trees and isles, I could hear them. Had the pony been standing there, watching me as I aimlessly thought?
Forcing my body onto my hooves, I called out, “Hey! Hey! I’m a friend! Can you help me? I swear I’m not an evil lumberjack yet!” I heard the sound getting quieter and quieter, and so I did the rational thing. I chased after the pony. As I got to where the figure had vanished, I saw no evidence that a pony had even been through here. I left indents and splashes and displacements and ripples in the water. None of that was here. I twisted my neck and eyes every which way, looking for the pony.
Far further away than a pony should have been able to go, I saw them standing there. Correction: saw her standing there. I saw that she was wearing a sort of coat not unlike but still not quite like the one I wore, and that it was navy blue and not black. From her little rocky island, she stared at me, her face obscured by a mask the color of bleached bones. The mask came with a large beak like a… sonofa… she was wearing a plague mask, like in the old stories where the Priester traveled around plagued lands to help people, often beating themselves with whips because it was hilarious to see at your birthday party as leprosy ate your tiny filly limbs. I couldn’t see anything of her actual body under her coat and mask.
“Miss!” I called out, raising a hoof. In the next instant, she was gone. Back up to the north. Great, I thought, the first Equestrian girl I meet who doesn’t want to use, kill, or rape me, and she’s running away. “Miss, come back!” I yelled, trying to navigate across the swamp after her. “I can give a really good back massage and I’m house-trained! I don’t really know what ‘house-trained’ means, but I’ve been led to believe it is a desirable trait. Though, to be fair, I don’t play well with others. When I was a toddler, I got banned from daycare because I tried to install myself as Lord-Protector of the Daycare and locked all the daycaring staff in a closet for daaays!”
So on I chased like a puppy chasing the master who randomly beats and loves it. The audacity of hope, eh? Even though I could feel a sort of pus of infection in my sewn eyelid, even though I could feel my chest bleeding under the gauze, even though I was sure my fever was at thirty-nine degrees (which I quick and dirtily multiplied in my head to one-hundred-and-eight degrees by Equestrian measurement, which I knew was wrong because that temperature usually meant death), I ran through the swamp.
This might have been a bad time to think about it, but I was also wearing socks at this moment. Of course, I was wearing them under my boots in order to keep everything neat and tidy as I slogged through swamp water and mud. Yet it struck me at that exact moment that I could never take off my boots in the company of others. If I did, I was sure some old southern mare would start to fan herself and go, “Oh, dearie me—I believe I have the vapors.” Then some strange stallion would pat me on the shoulder, wink, and say, “Oh, you dirty rapscallion, you.” And it would be pointless to try to explain to them that I wasn’t wearing them because I had a hoof fetish like they had, but because I was trying to be very clean. Stupid Equestrian sexual kinks. I bet that the first thing the Cherrypillar would have done to me back at Modern Times was suckle on my hooves, and that was a mental image I could not unsee. A thought that maybe with broken hooves I was now utterly repulsive to Equestrians also occurred to me.
I darted through a thick bush and came out near a little island. It was a patch of dark green grass with a lonely, dead tree upon the hill at the island’s center. Surrounding it was a treeless circle of dark water. I ran for the patch of land, hopping across rocks until I set my forehooves onto its dry soil, my hinds splashing in the water. Twisting my neck around to see if I’d caught on some root, I saw not a root but a filly with dusty eyes. My heartblood congealed into an icy, gel-like substance.
“Blossom…?” I muttered, staring into the huge furrow of flesh carved out of her little body from my sword. My fever pulsed, my arms and leg felt weak.
She opened her little mouth, a centipede crawling out of it and jumping into the water. “Why?” Blossom asked. Her grip on my leg tightened. “Why!?”
I twisted, grabbed her head—“No! That’s a bad filly!”—and slammed it dead into a rock. “Die, hallucination, die!” I looked around, expecting a small army of dead children to attack me. None came. Frowning, I looked back at the corpse-filly and saw that I had apparently killed some sort of beaver. Good. One less monster seeking to destroy all of ponykind. Backing out of the water, I tried to steady my thumping heart. “Great. Now I’m seeing things.” I turned up and screamed into the sky, “No! I will not be made to feel guilty over things. Stop trying!”
Taking measured, controlled breaths, I trotted up the island, up to the tree. “I hate you, tree, because you are probably symbolic of something. Impotency, maybe. In fact…” I looked at my flank “…I’m not entirely sure I can get it up. I mean, I just haven’t been in a situation where anything has interested me that much in years, but I don’t think anything happened to it. Heck, even when this evil mare was literally straddling me and undressing herself on top of me just last week, I didn’t feel anything down there. But would you believe me if I told you that I haven’t woken up with morning wood in years?”
From the far corner of this little clearing, I could see the mare with the plague mask staring at me. As she saw me looking, she darted into the forested bog and vanished from sight. “Hey, lady with the plague mask!” I yelled out. “Do you have any antibiotics? I’m sort of dying over here.” I trotted down after her. “Hey, if you’re running because you think it’s creepy that I was discussing morning wood with a tree, don’t be creeped out! I actually an okay guy for the most part. I’m even helpful and charitable!”
Tripping over a rock, I slammed my face into the dirt. believe it or not, this was actually a very novel experience because I hit my head in such a way that would have been impossible with a horn, bringing pain to a part of my body that had been unmolested for its whole life. “I mean,” I tried some more, standing up, “I once met this guy who was really sad about having a small penis, and I told him, ‘Want to know how to make your penis bigger?’ And he’s all, ‘Yes!’ So I tell him, ‘Then try having an erection!’ Long story short, he and his tribesponies made me their Chief Seer, which was actually pretty horrible because the Chief Seer was personally responsible for circumcising little boys and girls. And I don’t know about you, strange lady, but I don’t like the idea of cutting off vaginas—so I promise that I won’t try to do it to you!”
I jumped through the bush and nearly tripped and fell. I was exactly where I had entered the clearing from. The island and dead beaver were even still here. As I trotted and then slowed into a walk and finally ground down to a standstill, I was staring at the only real difference to this place: the fact that Cards and Lightning Dust were standing at the base of the tree, looking away from me.
Shaking my head, I trotted up to the island, ignoring the sounds of Cards sobbing, and how Lightning Dust had spread out a wing over Cards. “Hello, hallucinations.” They turned to me, Cards’ eyes red from tears and yet so utterly hateful. “Did you know that the word vagina actually comes from the ancient Latein word for ‘sheath’? As in, I currently keep my sword in a sheath. I put my sword in a vagina. Of course, auf Latein, it was pronounced more like ‘wah-gee-nah’, but it still counts.”
“You bastard!” Cards roared as I got near here. “What kind of monster makes jokes after what you… what you did?”
I shrugged. “The same kind that talks to hallucinations, apparently.”
Tears in her eyes, she pulled out her baton. “You… everyone… You killed everypony I ever knew. The stallions, the mares… the foals… All of them!”
“And to think,” Dust spat in an acerbic tone, “I called you my friend.”
“That’s very nice, but I’m talking to a tree right now,” I replied. “You’re not real.” Cards screamed and lunged at me. Rolling my eyes, I sidestepped her attack, grabbed her head, and threw her skull into the ground. With a single, casual motion, I stomped on and broke her neck. “There. Hallucination gone. Hey, Lightning Dust, do you know the way out of here?”
Rather than be a reasonable hallucination, she flapped her wings, hovered a few feet off the ground, and tried to tackle me. She was slow. I ducked down, she flew over me, and then I rammed my head straight into her gut as she flew above me. The hallucination let out a horrified garble as she dropped like a fly, rolled down the hill, and fell face-first into the water.
“I don’t like blood poisoning and all of these numerous infections I surely have,” I said to myself. “Because I seem to have some sort of mental disease that insists that I feel guilty for stuff. I sacrificed myself so that those mares could live. I know I’m not yet redeemed, and the Code is only held intact by duct tape, but it was a start!”
Somepony clapped their hooves. I looked up to the tree to see that mare sitting in the tree, her legs crossed as she clapped her forehooves. “Interesting outlook,” she said almost casually.
“I want to say that you’re not real, but something tells me you are real.” I adjusted my hat. “Do you have any antibiotics? Maybe a magazine about swords for me to read? A small child for me to bond with only to have to sacrifice her in order to obtain this mythical thing I’ve been lusting after my whole life?—ignoring how said object does not exist.”
“You know,” she went out in a voice that could make ‘good morning’ sound like an invitation to bed, “not many a stallion could so mercilessly kill his friends like that, hallucination or otherwise.”
“You know,” I said in a tone as close to hers as I could, “the word penis comes from the Latein ‘penis’, which used to mean ‘tail’ to them, and it still was the archaic word for ‘tail’ until the language died out. I find this funny because in my language, the word der Schwanz means ‘tail’, but it’s also slang for penis. I just find this connection to be amusing. So if I ever talk of my tail in any language, I’m referring to that fleshy thingy between my legs.”
“What?”
“Well, you said something utterly unrelated to what I said, so I figured I’d repay you in kind.” I narrowed my eyes. “Either give me some antibiotics or show me the way to Candyland, or I’m just walking away.”
The mare in the plague mask slid forwards and hopped out of the tree, landing on the grand with catlike grace. “Oh, I’ll give you something you need, alright.”
“That feels like a rape threat,” I said guardedly. “You know, where I’m from, the threat of succubi is very real, which is why we treat mare-on-stallion rape so seriously: it’s both morally horrific and the possible work of the succubus.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand you,” she said, inching up towards me. “When you get nervous, you start palavering. It’s a very strange defense mechanism. Kind of cute, in its own way.” She brought a hoof to her plague mask, lifted it just enough for me to see her lips. Then she lunged for me. Her lips forced themselves upon mine, and it was about as pleasant as dwarf with leprosy addicted to chewing tobacco.
When I blinked, I wasn’t in the swamp any longer. In fact, I wasn’t even in Equestria. I was in another life, from before the Dark Crusade. It was some sort of ballroom, a masquerade ball of some sort. Outside the large windows was the city of Zentrum, the governmental seat of the most powerful nation to ever reign upon this earth.
“Faust, huh?” the mare I was dancing slowly with commented in Teutsch. Her amber eyes reminded me of home. I was hit with a wave of disorientation as I realized that I was seeing her with both eyes, even though I could feel the stitches in my eye, the optic nerve bouncing around in my skull. “That’s an old name.” She flashed me an almost mischievous smile. “Then you can call me your Mephistopheles.”
I was struck with the sensation of having a working horn again just as soon as I was struck with the feeling of a literally God-given weapon on my hip. Looking over, I saw the lady with the navy blue uniform wearing a black masquerade mask. She slowly turned her head to look at me. Blue eyes, I thought. She has blue eyes. The blue-eyed mare winked at me, then vanished into the crowd of dancing ponies.
“Look, very nice meeting you, miss,” I said to my partner, “but you’re a hallucination and I’ve got something to hunt down.”
“I am not a hallucination,” she snapped back in a wounded tone.
“Yes, well, tough titty, said the kitty,” I replied in Equestrian, pulling out the weapon with my mind. It was such a good, natural feeling. Telekinesis. How I was going to miss you. “Everyone run!” I barked in Teutsch, firing the almost comically massive weapon for good measure. The absurdly masculine roar of the weapon just felt good. I missed that I had more munitions for it, but I didn’t, and so I never used it and its brother in the real world. But here in the land of hallucinations, I couldn’t care less for imaginary weapons.
The people here all screamed and scrambled for cover. Ol’ Blue Eyes was standing on the far side of the splitting crowd, by a large window that looked out upon a Zentrum night. She flicked me a smile before she dashed through the window. If this had been real, I would have pointed out that this should have either been impossible or severely cut her up to the point of major bloodloss. Instead, I just charged after her, holding my lone weapon high.
I really loved this weapon and its brother. The memory of where I’d gotten them ran through my mind. It was running through my mind because the image of a lake, murky forests, and warm sunlight flickered between the ballroom, like two realities vying for control of the very same place. The impossible sentation of my broken hooves landing not on stone, not on dewy grass, but upon both and yet neither at the exact same times nearly made me motion sick. Another me was lying there, having been stabbed through the chest—stabbing people in the chest, I had found out, was the customary way of greeting foreigners in most lands.
Like the very wind whispering its dark secrets into my ear, words spoken by an apparition of goodwill spoke to me, offering me holy arms. “Your angel told me that you were he to whom these were meant to be given. God Himself forged them for you, Jericho, just as He forged Kaledfulch for King Aloysius Pendergast, first king and founder of the Reich.”
The floating mare came down to me and held them out to me: two strange weapons and bandoliers filled with their munitions. “Think of them no different than how you think of your sword, Jericho: aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart, and forget not the face of your father.”
I leapt through the window, the place that was both a ballroom and a lakeside vanished as I tumbled down a short hill and into the gardens. Landing on my back, I found a hoof pressed tightly upon my throat. I looked up into her blue eyes. “Thou,” I croaked.
She bit the inside of her cheek. Biting the outside of her cheek would have been several kinds of freaky. “So, you are the Hanged Stallion.”
“Actually, my father named me Fffzzggrrll because he had an irrational phobia of vowels,” I said flatly.
“Were you aware that snark, playful sarcasm, was the mark of a prophet?” she asked. “All prophets in history—real ones, not evil sociopathic cult leaders, that is—”
“Which I would never be,” I added.
“—have been snarky?”
“Can you just get to the point? Just tell me what metaphorical demons of mine you represent and I’ll… give up sex or alcohol for a year or so to be rid of you. Sound fair?”
“Funny thing about that,” she said: “I’m actually real. Everything around us? That’s on thee. But thou and I? We’re real.” As I looked up into her eyes, something about them didn’t entirely seem pony. I couldn’t place my hoof on it, but they just looked… different.
“Weird choice of words,” I commented idly. “You remind me of that leprechaun I met last month who was really sad because he just found out that he wasn’t real. I offered to play the role of the rapist and help him to believe in himself.” She just looked down at me. “You know, because he’s a leprechaun.” No response. “And leprechauns don’t… nevermind.”
“What’s a leprechaun?” she asked.
“I believe it’s a small species of voraciously carnivorous trees,” I replied.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
We just sort of awkwardly stared at each other for what felt like a minute, but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. She took the initiative. “I-in any case, Hanged Stallion, a certain, uh, ‘mutual friend’ of ours led me here.”
“Is it that lesbian fiancée I accidentally had from that weird time I was a mare?” I asked.
“Look here, Hanged Stallion—”
“I appreciate the overly poetic title for ‘one who is thoroughly fornicated’, but—”
“Look!” she snapped, pressing her hoof harder on my throat. “The how and why are irrelevant, but I didn’t mean to show up. But to prove I’m real—” Blue Eyes pulled out and dropped a little purse on my chest. “I was told you tell you something, too. I was told to tell you: ‘The price of salvation is thy flesh consumed.’ Do you understand?”
“Autocannibalism is awesome?” I tried, but it came out as a little gurgle with her hoof on my throat.
“Oh, sorry. Is this better?” she asked, stepping off my throat, looking expectantly at the purse and I.
“Probably not,” I replied, and fired my weapon. Scheiße! I missed! I thought in the millisecond after the explosion of fire and light from my weapon. And then a hole appeared between her eyes, and she fell over dead, missing a good part of her brain. “And nevermind. Who doesn’t need a the rapist? I don’t. I am my own the rapist!”
The thousands of stars in the night sky all twinkled out. I glanced at the purse she’d given me, a sort of messenger bag that looked to have a respectable amount of carrying space, and seemed to have something inside it. Then the vision in my left eye flickered and died, the feeling of having a horn died, and the hallucinogenic reality around me faded from me.
I didn’t pass or phase out or anything cliché like that. One moment I was there, and in the now I was here in the dirt. But dirt was better than mud. A wave of vertigo hit me as I remembered that I no longer had that left eye, and that my optic nerve was jiggling and bouncing around in the empty hole where once its eye was. Rubbing my cheek with a hoof, I only scratched my face and sent a dull pain up my arm, the same arm where the hard lines of red were running through my vein. Worst of all, that really snazzy tuxedo I had on in the dream was gone!
With a tuxedo-less groan, I got to my hooves, trying to ignore the hot burn of fever. Let’s see: I’m under that same dead, white tree on that island. Nifty. Where’d that crazy hallucination mare go?
Then another thought answered. She was the only Equestrian mare who didn’t want to use, kill, or rape you. Of course she was just a figment of your imagination.
Sighing, my eyes drifted downwards, and my blood ran cold. Well, if it had, that’d’ve actually been really handy, what with the fever and the blood poisoning I had going on. There was that leather purse on the ground. For each second I looked at it, it looked more and more masculine and not at all like the typically girly purses those mares in Songnam had. And there was something inside it.
Bending forwards and only mostly sure that a bogtopus wasn’t going to come up from behind and fondle my genitals, I nosed the bag open. It had a drawstring of some sort, but it wasn’t tied or fastened in any way. There were four small boxes within the bag. I grabbed one with my teeth and pulled it out. It was a red thing of some kind of strong yet papery material, its edges all black, and it was heavier than it looked.
Looking down at it the box, I read the words inscribed upon it. “For the Hanged Stallion. 50 .45—Longs.” While I had no idea what that meant, I hoofed at the box till I got it open. Inside were, and I counted, fifty small cases of metal with a darker metal head. They glinted in the sunlight. My head shut down for a short while.
When the ability to think came, I took out my bag and orally pulled out the real-life versions of the weapon I’d use in the hallucination. I caressed them like how a stallion might caress a mare, except with actual love. It was the work of nearly two minutes to open up one of the two weapons, an embarrassing amount of awkward biting to dispose of the one munition within it that I had expended freeing myself from when the ponies of Sleepy Oaks had lynched me, and shortest of all was orally loading into it five new munitions and filling it up to its six-round capacity. I did it all in utter silence, a dreaded sense of horror creeping up my spine.
Yes, yes it was what I had feared. The God-given weapons that I never used for want of munition. About two-hundred units of munitions. I had no horn. There was hardly a way in hell to so much as pick it up, let alone use and fire it. Now that I had my weapons with more munitions than I could fantasize myself honestly needing, I was a cripple who couldn’t fire them.
I grimaced tightly as I put my weapons and the four boxes into the little purse. Eyes—well, eye twitching, I slung the purse around myself and wore it well. My body shaking with little trepidations, I tied the bag close. I swallowed hard.
“OH, YOU MOTHERF—”
|— ☩ —|
When it was all over, at least three flocks of birds had fled skywards, one of which dropped dead from having its virgins ears raped by the profanity of at least twenty-seven different languages. I was on the ground, drenched in sweat, dehydrated, suffering from a day’s worth of starvation, and panting hard as I tried not to cough. If there was a god—not just my own God, any deity—I was now on that god’s hitlist, I was sure. I was just going to be walking along the street one day when suddenly I get obstructed by the fanatic followers of that obscure deity and they were going to tear my balls and eye out, put my balls where my eye should be, and my lonely eyeball were my testicles should be. I’d be the world’s worst cyclops.
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I rolled onto my stomach and stood up. I took a long swig from my canteen of water. It ran dry less than a second into the drink. “I hate everything,” I groused, staring eastward with a focused look. With my boots on and my get-up-and-go having already gotten-up-and-went-without-me, I set about going east through the muck and mire.
As I left the clearing, I suddenly felt really bad. Why hadn’t I destroyed that white tree back on the island? It was a stupid, weak tree, and it’d be the perfect stepping stone on my road to becoming a lumberjack. In fact, where had those munitions really come from? If that mare was imaginary, then… Well, I either didn’t have enough blood or enough willpower to bother figuring this out. It was like being a unicorn without a horn: you keep trying to use that first-nature ability to levitate things and use fine-manipulation because the idea of now being an earther was almost incomprehensible, but all trying to use the horn ever did was end in a migraine.
If I thought about the logic of where the munitions hailed from too hard, my head just imploded. I relegated the “Where Did Those Come From?” thought into my “Endless Ocean of Apathy” folder. It was a mystery I could solve then I had comes to terms with my new state of being. Or when I actually had a full body’s worth of blood. Either or, really. For now, I had to focus on this wet, muddy, godforsaken swamp of limitless annoyances.
And so I slogged through the mire. So I hopped, skipped, and jumped in the places where I could avoid getting wet. And generally just had a miserable time. So I went on singing about everything.
“And now the second verse:
Oh, a leech tried to touch my balls.
So I set him afire.
Whoooa, you are some kind of snapping turtle
Please don’t bite the tip of my penis off!
But if we work together, thou and I,
We can both bite the tip of Duke Elkington’s penis off
And it won’t be gay, because—aww, that’s a blossom,
And now I’m sad—yeah!”
You are the worst singer ever and somepony should really stop you.
|— ☩ —|
On the third day, I woke up to the sound of a distant wildcat roaring. It was just before dawn, I figured. The lines running up my arm looked vicious, murderous, filled with a rage hot enough to consume entire worlds. Simply still being alive was astounding. My knees and elbows felt like that weird sex-lube stuff, much worse than feeling like jelly. As I just sat there, back propped up against a tree stump, I just found myself staring idly into the swamp and at the legions of fireflies, a hoof poking my sewn eyelid. The skin there was alive and healthy, but the lack of an eyeball made the skin a bit taut—at least, so it was after the stitches. It reminded me of a trampoline. Rather fun to poke at, even if it was likely infected.
Under the white, blinding light of the sun, I knew that staying here meant death. Going on meant death. But I would damned to just be an awesome collection of loot for some stupid adventurer to find. The swamp before me, to the east, made deep, distant throaty noises. They might have been the ragged last breaths of a rabbit about to be hilariously impaled by a carrot. Might have been the chuckling of a lion, because lions always showed up in my life, and lions were one of my natural predators (the other being Equestrian mares, it seemed). I couldn’t say for sure. What I could say for sure was this:
The Fatherland lay to the East, and Jericho chased after it.
If he looks familiar to you, well, that’s a reason for that. He is the kind of Mann who can touch a thousand lives in a single day, for better for worse. The echoes of his travels, his heroism, his villainy have been woven into a thousand tales spun in a thousand places, in thousands of ways—just like stories of the Great Flood, for instance, cut across the fabric of space and time and into the collective consciousness of all living things, so too does Jericho.
At once is he an icon and a fable, your best friend—praise be to the Mare Laurentia—and your worst nightmare made mortal flesh. Jericho is your damnation or your salvation. Sometimes he’s not even “or” but “and”. Aye, d’ya kennit?
The one thing he shares with us is the drive to make a better world. The one thing he shares with some of us is a fanatical hatred for eating raw tomatoes, though he can eat tomato-based products no problem, for some odd reason. He doesn’t really know how that works. But Jericho is also known by many names, if a creature such as he can even be “known” at all.
A creature such as he simply exists. He was born without a cause, a destiny, so he made one. Around the world went he, a million lives touched: countless lives ended. And right now, in the muck of a swamp with no name, on a continent far away from home, he is dying. Starvation, dehydration, heatstroke, infections everywhere, and blood poisoning.
“And he is monologuing creepily about himself in the third person,” I finished, sweating dropping down my forehead and onto the dirt beneath me. The hard line of red veins ran almost up to my chest, the fever made me the warmest thing in the entire swamp. I had been going for most of the day, I was sure, but it was hard to tell. I had simply stopped keeping track of the hours. And here, in a garden of strange flowers, my knees and elbows finally buckled. If there was going to be a Deus ex Machina, the time for it was now. I was going to end up the loot of some wet-behind-the-ears adventurer, and he was going to get gear that was way too high for his level, and he was going to become overpowered, and it was going to be horrible.
The bushes rustled. My ears perked up on their own. Something was coming. Probably swamp lions. I didn’t know if those were thing, but they would probably be a thing, having spent millions of years evolving to live here just to kill me. The Universe worked like that, you see. But I’d be damned if a lion ate me—I was going to eat it!
With the last of my strength, I reached out and grabbed my knife in my teeth. It was clean from the blood of the Devil’s Backbone, and it was still so sharp that the blade just went invisible at the edge. Like a newborn deer about to pounced upon and eaten by some kind of squid, I shakily forced myself onto my legs, a wide, toothy grin upon my mouth.
A blue earther mare came out of the bushes, humming as she carried a basket. The little thing looked so cute and innocent and probably secretly evil—I knew how Equestria worked by now. Her evil must be destroyed! She saw me and her violet eyes widened.
“Good for the Good God!” I tried to scream through my knife, and just collapsed into the dirt. On the plus side, she shrieked bloody murder, grabbed her head in her hooves, and collapsed alongside me. Great. She wasn’t a pony but actually one of those fainting goats dressed in a mare suit. Deux ex, anypony?
Sleeping suddenly seemed like a really good idea right about them. But that damn mare wouldn’t stop screaming and grabbing her head. She just kept shouting, “Le mauvais étalon! Le mauvais étalon!” That was odd because I knew that was meant. It was French for “the bad stallion”.
|— ☩ —|
The air gave me gooseflesh, even as I laid under the covers. It seemed to me that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I just stared forwards with a dull acceptance, unable to summon the willpower to wonder how I get here and why. My ears perked themselves up as I heard a sharp sound. I looked over the dark room and saw a large dresser, and sitting upon it was the Blue-Eyed Lady. At least I thought it was her.
She looked absolutely ghastly. Mostly because I was only seeing her with the one eye, but also because she actually was ghastly. She wore a short, navy blue jacket belted at the waist and what looked like faded Denim trousers. Lots of her gear was kept together with what looked like straps of leather. Her navy-blue jacket made her almost invisible, and I couldn’t see her face behind the plague mask. But even without the mask, her short jacket had a hood—it was up—and no doubt the hood would have hidden her face in its shadow.
She didn’t look up at me, just kept whittling at something in her hoof. The thing was, she wasn’t exactly holding it in her hoof, it was just sort of hovering there as if she were holding it. Was she carving a shiv?
“You know,” she said, still not looking at me, “most ponies would hold a grudge against a stallion who shoots them in the head with a schecht.” Schecht? That was the strangest word ever. The sch was pronounced like a sh, but sounded as if it came from the back of the mouth; it was not a sound I’d ever heard before. Her ch was like the Ich-Laut of my language, like the H in huge. It was just a weird mismatch of sounds to me.
She carved more, little wooden shavings flying off. “However, I am not most ponies. In fact, I am very forgiving. It is perhaps a bad habit of mine. I forgive too easily, but I never make the mistake of forgetting, Hanged Stallion.” The Blue-Eyed Lady raised her face to me, bearing down upon me with her plague mask. “He tells me to inform you to ‘thank Kain’. Or was it ‘thank Kane’? Kain-pine, Kane-mane,” she rhymed. “However you pronounce it.”
“You’re not real,” I tried to say, only to give a quiet groan.
“Tell me,” she said, “are you a follower of a prophet?”
“O-of the Mare Laurentia,” I croaked.
“Aye,” she replied in a thoughtful tone, “I ken the name.”
A doorway cracked ajar, a sliver of golden light trickling into the room. With all the effort of a child trying to ignore the sound of his parents violently doing it in the other room, a single gray eye poked into the room. I watched it scan the room, not even pausing over the Blue-Eyed Lady, and come to rest on me. The eye became a face, and then a head, and then a stallion. When I glanced back to the Blue-Eyed Lady, she was gone.
The stallion licked his lips as he looked at me. He moved to speak, then hesitated. “P-parlez-vous français?”
I blinked. “Oui, un petit peu,” I replied. And then went on in French, my voice like the scratches a horny dog makes on a wooden door separating him from his bitch: “I speak what is needed of me. I grew up in Neuorléans. Can we speak in Equestrian? I speak it better.”
He nodded. “Yes, I can do that. Around here, the… lingua franca? Òc, the lingua franca of the village is français. M-my name is Lothaire.” He spoke solely, almost carefully, like he was trying to tell me he’d killed my dog trying to dryclean it, and was now trying to get me to pay the drycleaning bill. “Little Felicitat found you out at the edge of the Sanha.”
I didn’t reply.
Lothaire cleared his throat. “Le mauvais étalon, she kept screaming. We heard her shrieks and found you both lying on the ground. She was put in the bed in her house, and the missus and I offered to try to help you. There’s no hospital for leagues, sénher, and I am the closest this town has to a resident médge.”
“Médge?” I croaked.
He rubbed his head. “Uh, my apologies, sénher. It means ‘doctor’. Sometimes I forget to translate little words—it’s a habit that Paire, that Father, got me into. Non-local ladies swoon over it, and non-local stallions see me as being educated, if a bit pretentious.”
I gave him a hard look. “Médge is not French for ‘doctor’.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Docteur is French for doctor.” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s probably just the blood poisoning and the fact that I’m dying, but your French is bothering me more than the fact that I’m pretty sure my eye is infected.”
“Òc. In schools they teach the langues d’oïl. Here in Caval, we’ve always spoken the Lenga d’òc—Langue d’oc, in standard French. Parlatz occitan? Òc, un pauc.” He flashed me a smile as he pawed at the floor. “I’m technically trilingual.”
“Huh,” I muttered. I looked down at my body, at the bed I was in. With tired slowness, I took my arm out from the covers. It lazily slogged out like a certain male sex organ coming out of a certain used condom, with all the sweat and shame that came with it. “Well. Blood poisoning. Looks fun.” And then I dropped my head onto the pillow and couldn’t stay awake
|— ☩ —|
“Jo pensi que,” a voice hesitantly said, “el surviva.”
My eyes… eye—I had to get used to only having one eye now—felt like a lead weight as I slowly opened it. I felt like so much flesh at that point. Not even a stallion. Just meat. Not even the good kind of nutritious meat you can cut off a demon; I was the kind of meat that tasted like Scheiße and clogged your fat arteries. Somehow, this made me wonder about that one prostitute mare I met who insisted that her genitals doubled as insect repellant, and that for the right price, she would confer unto you that power. I didn’t take her up on the offer, but, ah, how I loved my planet and its nutty occupants.
“My, look who’s awake,” a warm voice said. I looked over from the bed to see the gray eyes of Médge Lothaire. He was sitting in a chair, his legs a bit too spread out for my enjoyment. Well, at least now I know that Equestrians are uncircumcised. If he brings that thing any closer to me, I’m going to shove garlic bread up his urethra. “You were out so cold there that for a while, I wasn’t sure you’d make it, sénher.”
I regarded him for the longest time. “Ma bite est pleine d’anguilles.”
He blinked. “Pardon?”
“Mein Schwanz ist voller Aale.”
“Okay,” he hesitantly replied, glancing over his shoulder. “That’s not really helping me.”
“I wasn’t trying to help,” I said, looking at the wooden wall behind me. “It was just a French phrase that I know. Then I repeated it in Teutsch. It means—”
“Òc, I know what it means; I speak French,” he said, raising it hoof. “You just told me that your cock is full of eels.”
“Yes, yes I did.”
He scratched the back of his head and looked away from me. I noticed that he was a unicorn. “You know, this isn’t really how I pictured this going in my head.”
“You’d be surprised how often ponies tell me that,” I replied. Glancing to my body, I noted the thin white sheets, like a hospital bed, which sort of made sense. “So. I imagine this is the part where you tell me all the horrible things that were wrong with me and how your super doctor skill defeated them all.”
Médge Lothaire grimaced in a way that said better than words could, ‘No.’ Words would’ve been simple, honest. This was more like the look of somepony who was trying to tell you how he accidentally got your daughter pregnant. Even though that somepony was a eunuch. Lothaire wasn’t a eunuch, by the way; I could very clearly see that he wasn’t. Put some pants on, please—I can feel it looking at me, all cold and… feely!
“No, sénher, I cannot tell you that. I did managed to, uh, remove the stitches from your eyelid and restitch it up with clean, fresh stitches. Although, the old ones were good for clearly being impromptu and unprofessional.” He picked up a mirror. “Wanna tell me how I did?”
I looked into my battered, bloodied, bruised reflection in the mirror. Did I mention that I felt like so much meat? Well, compared to how I looked, I felt like a million Mark. It looked to me as if I’d passed out, and then a particularly pissed ex-girlfriend had beaten me with a frying pan for exactly two hours and twenty-eight minutes. My left eye, thoroughly black but nowhere near as cute as Cards’, no longer had the ragged stitches, at least. These ones were fancy and professional. I gave Médge Lothaire back the mirror.
“Òc, what I couldn’t fix was most of you,” he went on, seemingly unwilling to look me in the eye. “The Missus was able to help a bit, gars. I cleaned the infection out of your eye, but the poison is still strong in your foreleg, though we pushed it back good. And…” He looked at head, not my eyes. “Are you a unicorn?”
“Was, yes, until about four days ago,” I replied calmly.
He looked at the floor and shook his head slowly. “I… I can’t imagine what could do that to a unicorn. Can hardly believe you’re alive. That sort of trauma should have scrambled your brains into a fine paste.”
“I like tomato paste on pizzas,” I replied thoughtfully. “But I once saw a ugly mare who got naked, covered herself in pizza sauce, then offered herself in sacrifice to a giant bear. That was pretty fun to watch.” My tone grew steadily dreamier. “You know, there are tens of people everyday who are sacrificed in order to appease Princess Celestia. Well, not her herself, but there’s this one nation I found—and possibly wiped out because I once cleared my throat so hard that I coughed on one of them—where they believe the only way to continue making the sun rise is to ritually sacrifice sentient beings.” I stared up at the off-white ceiling. “I don’t think it does anything at all, and so I want to go up to Princess Celestia the Adorable and tell her of all the people, children included, who have their still-beating hearts cut out every day in order to arouse and please Princess Celestia’s lady bits.”
There was a pause.
“What in Celestia’s name…? You’re delirious, aren’t you? Do you need some water?”
“Half of my thoughts and internal monologues end up making similes and metaphors that somewhat relate back to my penis, someone’s penis, or vaginas in general,” I replied. “If it weren’t me, I’d seriously think that I just needed to get laid so that I’d stop obsessing over ponies’ genitals. But then I realize those genital-related thoughts are actually pretty funny to me, so I figure it’s best to keep the whistle dry. Comprends-tu?”
“Okay, I think I need to—”
I lunged out of bed and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Give it to me straight, doc! Will I ever play the clarinet again? Because my oral musical skills are what made all of the mares want me—you know, except for all of them.” A wave of heat sundered my chest, head, savaged hooves, and blood-poisoned arm all in half. As if hit over the head with a wet bag of marsupials, I nearly tumbled over. Instead, I fell back into the bed. But as my head bounced on the pillow, I caught a sight out of my eye’s peripheral vision, a sight I’d’ve seen clearly with both eyes.
There was a petite blue mare standing on the far side of the room, staring at me as if I were attempting to explain to her what it felt like to be raped by the bowling ball. Her violet eyes were so wide. Something in my head clicked, and I identified the mare as “Felicitat, the mare whose screams had ended up saving what was left of my life. Then she just vanished as if never there, and in her place I saw the Blue-Eyed Lady. She tilted her head and vanished too.
The Médge, I saw, was gone too. In fact, the sunlight filtering in through curtained windows was gone. When I blinked again, hesitant rays of light were creeping in through the curtain windows. Oh, nuts, I thought. Gritting my teeth, I tele—wait, no, no horn. Remember?—I grabbed the sheets and threw them off me. On my back I could feel a cold sweat. In the next moment I was shakily standing.
A mare’s voice asked something from another room. I couldn’t understand it. It was like the French I knew, but all wrong. I was half-sure she had just referred to me as “thin, tall, and ugly”. In reponse, a stallion said something to her in the same language—Occitan, he’d called it—and I could only pick up bits and pieces, not enough to translate properly, but enough to suspect that they were talking about me.
Slipping on air, I tumbled to the ground in a heap of naked limbs. Naked? Oh, hey, they’d undressed me. Fantastic. I could just sit there and stare at the Scham, the shame, between my legs. But instead, I looked at my chest wound. They’d been stitched up well and no longer looked like they were on the verge of bleeding at one moment like a mare bloated with menstruation.
Standing back up with a groan, I saw my bags on the dresser whereupon the Blue-Eyed Mare had sat. There was a mirror behind the dresser, and looking into it I could see my duster and hat cleanly folded up on the far side of my bags. It took me moments to shamble across the room. It felt like forever putting on fresh underpants, denim pants, a black shirt advocating a band I was fond of, and my hat. And then I saw it, lying under where my duster had been.
My heart thudded harder in my chest as I clumsily picked it up. Then I slid it on and adjusted it so that it fit perfectly. I stared into the mirror and at my badass new eyepatch. Screw it, it was almost worth losing the eye—who looked good? I looked good! Who was probably crazy and dying from infected wounds? See, now you’re just spoiling the mood.
And so here I was, a ragged, beaten, bloodied, mutilated, smiling stallion, his clothes clean yet rugged from well-worn use, his face in need of a light shave, his breath probably rancid, two of his hooves broken but manageable, his vision lacking proper depth-perception, his horn blown off, and with a completely badass eyepatch over his partially self-mutilated missing left eye. And what was I doing standing up? Hell if I knew, but lying in bed was apt to end in bed sores. A little, completely unreasonable lust to move and fight and try to repair the Code defeated the sane notion to stay put.
If Médge Lothaire couldn’t fix the infection, then I had to look elsewhere. Where? Shut-up, I’ll think of it! But something told me that the first thing I needed to do was find that mare who found me, Felicitat. Why? Well, because it was just a hunch, a deep intuition. I liked to trust my intuition; it was sane, helpful, and didn’t judge me when I committed mass murder.
Adjusting my head, I turned and headed for the door. It turned out that my room was on the second floor, a room labeled “Cambra 1”. I found the stairs and nearly fell down them, only barely keeping my balance. I fought to beat back the internal heat and pain. Bad body, I need you to work! There was no door leading outside here, so I entered the next apparent room, straight into the kitchen where Médge Lothaire and his slightly chunky wife were having breakfast, conversing in Occitan.
They looked up at me, Lothaire even dropping his newspaper unto the table. A part of me wasn’t surprised they were having French toast, and another part of me thought that it was really conspicuous. It’d be like me eating nothing but Sauerkraut while foreigners were in my house.
“Howdy,” I said, tipping my hat to them.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Lothaire exploded, jumping to his feet. “What are you doing up?”
“Well, at first I thought I should go for a walk, but then I fell down and realized you’d creepily undressed me. So then I found my clothes, and then this awesome eyepatch—thank you for that, by the way—and now I just sort of wish to leave. You mentioned not being able to specifically treat me, and I wish not to take any more of your time and effort.” I reached into my bag and tossed five gold coins onto the table. They two ponies just stared at it. “I have no sense of how much money is worth. This is a lot of money, right?”
The mare swallowed. “Òc—uh, aye, aye it is. An absurd amount. It’s more than I’ve ever seen in one place before!”
“Good,” I said. “That should cover whatever personal costs you had to spend on this one lost soul.”
Lothaire raised a hoof to me. “Look, sénher—you’re clearly not well in the head. Do not do this—”
“Recommend me so for I might be mad, but command me nothing!” I roared, and both ponies flinched. “I will not reward your kindness and charity with my horrid presence. I can but offer thanks and scraps of gold out of an eleemosynary sense that my presence will only bring unto you damnation.” Oddly eloquent for an Irrer, a madpony.
Eloquent? Is that what you call it? Sounds to me more like a pony who’s just discovered that thesauri are a thing.
Under my hard eye, Lothaire sat back down. He bit his lip and glanced almost nervously between me, the gold, and his wife. What, was he expecting me to go, “Nah, I’m just kidding. Give me my cash back and I’ll slink on into bed. I’m just an attention whore, you see”? Well, “attention whore” might not have been entirely without a lack of inaccuracy.
I adjusted the sword at my hip. Both ponies saw it, but it was Médge Lothaire who spoke up. “What are you? A Carolean?”
“Care-oh-lay-uhn?” I asked, cocking a brow. To cock was such a fun verb with so many fun uses.
They looked at each other, but again it was Lothaire who spoke. “Yes, the Caroleans—the trained ponies working for Duke Elkington. Like guards, but better-trained.”
I blinked. “A military?”
“Look, uh, forget I said anything. I don’t think you’re one of them. Aren’t—well, weren’t very many of those bucks, but they have a reputation for being tough.”
Rather that just wander out like I’d planned, I just stood there. “‘Weren’t’? What does that mean?”
Lothaire swallowed. “W-with the recent atrocities, Duke Elkington’s started calling for young ponies willing to protect Equestria, keep the roads safe, help with natural disasters, and other stuff. He’s all been passing weird legislation about that, too.”
Leaning against the wall because my hooves were hurting, I said, “Go on, Médge Lothaire. I’ve not been keeping up with current events.” And I still just might need to find a way to sexually humiliate Elkington in front of Princess ‘Cards-in-a-fancy-hat-with-giant-penis’ Celestia.
“Look, stranger, I won’t pretend to understand his so-called ‘allotment system’, but I know that many of his counts and barons are a bit peeved because it doesn’t exempt their sons, though most of the ponies being alloted are just us lowborn normal folk. The whole thing’s some sort of program to make sure his ponies can defend themselves, their homes, and their kingdom.”
Sounds like Elkington’s trying to build up his own cheap knockoff of the Rheinwehr, alright. “Well, I’ll have to chat with Duke Elkington about this. I know the guy personally. He showed me the bad touch.”
“Um,” Lothaire’s wife said. “Okay.”
“And has Elkington done anything here?”
Lothaire frowned. “No. The Duke in Songnam is Duke of Marcia. You’re in the la vallée de la Rivière Rouge, and no duke or duchess rules here, only local, weak comtes rule around here.”
I nodded, tipped my hat, and then proceeded to wander around their house until I found the door.
|— ☩ —|
My first thoughts were that this place looked like Ponyville or Sleepy Oaks. My second thoughts were that it somehow looked quainter, but in a fake sort of way, like the ponies here had been making conscious efforts to look quaint. Stallions trotted by with carts, a rogue chicken screamed as two fillies and a colt chased it, and the buildings weren’t so tightly packed. An average Equestrian morning, I supposed.
As I walked down the streets, I caught more than a few glares. That would be have been dandy, since I was an ill-groomed, oft mutilated brute with the sexiest eye patch ever—except that so many of them were mares, usually young ones. It wasn’t that they were mares, but it was that there weren’t enough stallions. There was actually an uncomfortable mare-to-cock ratio. Fratricide? That word popped into my head.
This whole thing felt worse than that one time last week where I tried to become a joint the rapist and analyst. It turned out that combining those two words and calling yourself a professional anal-rapist was seen as both a crime and threat. Except that that never happened.
There was one young stallion with a wagon who seemed to be delivering ice for iceboxes. As we walked past each other, he kept staring at my eyepatch. So I shook a hoof at him and growled, “Wha’ you lookin’ at, punk?”
“Nothing!” he replied quickly, looking forwards.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Don’t think I won’t punch you where your penis grows.” There. Now I’d demonstrated my superiority and masculinity over a stallion who was only barely an adult. I was a true stallion and the alpha male here.
At some local café lining the street, two mares sat at a little outdoor table. One of them slammed a hoof on the table and jumped up. “You did what with him?!” she demanded in understandable High French.
“Well, everypony gets lonely. I just happened to slip.”
“And onto his penis!?”
“Well, la Prophétesse said it would happen.”
The standing mare half-growled, half-groaned. “He was my boyfriend.”
“Well, not anymore, Sis.” The mare chomped down on some sort of eclair. She was paying so little attention that she missed her face and got chocolate all over her cheek.
“No thanks to you! And would you look at what you try to put in your mouth, and I’m not just talking about dick!”
“Oh come on,” her companion said, “you have to admit: it’s pretty funny, looking back on it.”
“Looking back? It was yesterday!”
“So? I’m sorry you don’t have a sense of humor.”
“Oh, so you don’t think I have a sense of humor?!” she snarled, and her companion nodded. “Yeah, well... Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” her friend asked in a tone so casual it had to be mocking.
“Fuck you!” And she stormed off, but not before spinning around and shouting in her high-pitched voice, “Bitch!”
Stupid Equestria. They were so damn weird. And for the most part, they’d been rather good about not swearing. Apparently, you swore more in this part of the country, or something. Of course, though, the raging mare stormed out in a direction that placed her on course for me.
Gritting her teeth—no, grinding them into dust—she jerked to a halt and pointed at me. “You!” she shouted, still in French. “What are you looking at?”
“I was looking at what appears to me to be a very angry mare,” I said auf Teutsch.
The way she scrunched her face told me she didn’t have the slightest idea what I’d said. Nevertheless, she replied, “Yeah, that’s what I thought you were looking at”—and stomped off.
Ah, and here I found a watering hole. La Taverne Bonne was its name, and I stepped into the dingy place. This early in the morning, there was nopony but the barkeeper and me. I approached and took a seat at the counter. With a single deft motion, I placed a coin on the counter and asked for “Something nice.”
He looked down at the coin, then to me. “I can’t make change for gold.”
“I never said you had to.” As he brought me a mug of ‘something nice’, I said in my best French, “I’m looking for a mare.”
“Aren’t we all?” he replied. Compared to the High French spoken in Neuorléans, he sounded like he was speaking with a mouthful of gravel. It was so deeply unpleasant that I couldn’t speak in French anymore, for fear of him speaking with that accent of his. Although, it was absurdly remarkable his dialect of French was even vaguely comprehensible to my own, since our two Frenchs has been separated by over a thousand years. I chose not to dwell upon that fact.
“A certain mare.” I leaned forwards. “One by the name of Felicitat. Know’st thou her?”
“Aye,” he replied in a low voice. Hooray, I’ve inspired him to act unnecessarily dramatic. “You seek la Prophétesse.”
“La Prophétesse?” I asked.
“Aye,” he said. What was with bartenders in this country and the word ‘aye’? “Many seek her. She’s the lifeblood of Caval, and Caval wouldn’t be the mighty town it is today without her.”
I rubbed my eyepatch. By the Archangel Thor, the feeling of having been beaten up by a bogtopus wasn’t getting any better. As I took a breath, I was also sure that time there were was a pressure in my sinuses. Great. Not only was my blood was not only poisoned, but I was also coming down with a cold. Or, like, the Rattle. Because if I was getting sick, baby, I was getting the kind of plague that could wipe out entire continents.
“And this Prophétesse, this Felicitat, where might I find her?”
The bartender looked around. “I can’t,” he began, but then his eyes flicked to the gold coin on the counter. Its very existence said for me: I am a stallion who has considerable assets at my disposal, the least of which being the steel that earned me this gold. If you won’t help me, I will dig a hole into your collarbone and plant a dainty flower in your wound. “What I mean is, Felicitat is a very shy girl. Not too fond of strangers. And, to be honest, a few days ago something happened to her, something about a ‘mauvais étalon’. Whoever he is, the poor little thing has been terrified of him and been hiding in her house ever since.”
“And why is this Felicitat so important to your town?”
“She is the Prophétesse. She can gaze into the future,” he said with a conviction that was almost religious. Of course, that just meant that I had to destroy his face. I was the only one allowed to start whacky cults around here.
“Impossible,” I casually replied. “Only the dead can see the future.” Or waffles.
“The dead?” he intoned.
“Ja, die Toten. Only those who can speak of experience in the afterlife can attest to what will come. Else you are dealing with a demon not wholly of flesh but not wholly of spirit, the old haunts who tempt ponies with dark secrets, and then drain their souls. The future is not for the living to know.”
“But fate would hold otherwise,” he replied, and I only just stopped myself from sneering. Blaming fate or destiny was about as reasonable an argument as ‘she dressed like a slut and was asking for it’ was a reasonable argument for refusing to buy your daughter a lollipop. “Fate brought us the oracle. And fate made la Prophétesse the only one who can go to the oracle’s shrine, speak with it, and live to tell us its secrets. Ever since she found the oracle, Felicitat has made this town the most successful town in the valley.”
I grabbed the drink he’d given me and downed it in a single swig. Aahh! This tastes horrible! Make it stop tasting on my tongue! With a cool façade, I looked at the old buck. Oh God, make it stop! “Seigneur, I dare think it would be very kind of you to tell me where I might find Miss Felicitat. It is in her best interests, I can easily assure you. After all, eleemosynary kindness is certainly its own reward.” I put another gold coin on the counter, flashing him a smile somewhere on the border between suave gentlecolt and ‘You gon’ get raped’. “And then some.”
He bit his lip and looked at the coin. He told me everything I needed to know. Greed sure was its own kind of magic, wasn’t it?
|— ☩ —|
“And here we are,” I said to nopony in particular. Probably to the voices. This place just seemed so scenic that I was pretty sure that this town had a really aggressive homeowner’s association: it was secluded, well-kept, had a garden with a little pond, a few trees and bushes, and it was guarded by a fence. Needless to the say, the gate had been locked before I arrived. Now the lock was picked and lying on the ground.
I walked up the path through the garden and to the house. The goose sitting on the little pond would have none of that, though. It took at look at me and squawked wildly, flapping its wings but staying put. As I paused to watch it, wondering if I should just kill it and chuck it through one of the house’s windows, the goose hissed and flew at me.
Fact: the average adult pony, regardless of gender, was much bigger than the goose in every way.
I flailed on the ground as the bird bodyslammed me, tackling me to the ground. With its dark, menacing honks of pure murder, it pecked at the one eye I had left. Its beak was surprisingly painful as it pecked and tried to eat my face off. Fantastic! I was going to get killed by a goose. A goose. Of all possible things, it was a goose.
“Honkers, no!” a mare shouted. “He’ll kill you!” As soon as it had begun, the goose just waddled off of me, leaving my curled into an anti-goose ball on the ground. Still trying to pretend like I hadn’t almost been killed by a goose, I stumbled to my hooves. I fell down, though, but I got it right on my third attempt to stand.
The goose waddled into the house through the front door. Standing in the doorway was an earther mare, likely younger than—if not as old as—Cards but still bigger than her, with violet eyes and blue fur. When our eyes met, she yipped in fear and slammed the door. I could easily imagine her pressing up against the door as I walked up to it and knocked.
“Miss Felicitat? You are the one who found me in the mud, yes?” I asked. That urge to find her was gnawing on the back of my eye, and that eye saw that the door couldn’t have been too thick or sturdy.
So with only a few blows, I broke the door off its hinges and flung it ajar. The mare was cowering away from the door, staring directly at me. With the dim light inside her house invaded by the light from outside, my shadow completely covered her.
“Hello, Miss Felicitat. I am the Bad Stallion.”
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Wow, just when you thought his day couldn't get any worse...
(And thanks for the shout-out!)
So Jericho gets part of his part of his hooves snipped off by a crablike creature? And on top of that, he is now poisoned horribly?
Where oh where have I heard that before?
covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/538208-M.jpg
He's the Bad Stallion.
He brings the Bad Touch.
So prepare yourself, my pretty, fill the bathtub and make sure you have tissues on hoof, because after he's done with you, there are two things you'll never be able to scrub away: The shame, and the stains on your sheets.
3175428 Snuggle me <3
It's about damn time he did it, too. Bastard, he.
3175454 Goddammnit Crushric! Bad kitty! No more references! Bad kitty!
Be right back, guys, I'm getting my whip.
3175428
Hey, for an artist such as thee, 'twas the least I can do. Getting fanart is so awesome
3175454
I won't lie, that's where the idea came from. Of course, Roland got better, Jericho... will not. Because I saw what happened to Roland and thought, "I like this, but if only it had been worse. And with ponies. Oh, I have an idea and it's going to mutilate Jericho and be much worse that what happened to Roland!" I saw his thing and decided that the same concept could be taken to different, far worse places. There's no Prisoner with Keflex here, no Pusher to get medicine from. And it takes a few days for blood poisoning to either kill you or turn your flesh necrotic, requiring an amputation. I like being horrible to Jericho. What can I say?
Know what? Just because, I should make "Roland Faust" the name of Jericho's father.
3175523 I believe that you've probably refrenced every game, book series, or movie that I've ever loved many times.
....Exept for the Blues Brothers. You should really work on that.
3175610
One big confession of a sociopath, really.
3175546
Gotta figure out what the Blues Brothers are, first.
3175474
No! Fuck-Dammit, Siffer! No more whips! My ass still stings somethin' awful from last week.
3175653
Yay! Somebody replied to m—oh, it's just you.. well, uh..
Fuck you, you ingrate. You can prepare yourself for tonight because baby, I want another Cards, and I ain't stopping till immaculate conception.
On another note, there are not enough creepy pony smileys!
3175625 An 80s cult comedy, one of my favorites, in fact. It's about a pair of brothers with an afinty for fedoras and jazzy blues music, played by Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi. I'd recommend it if you like over-the-top tounge-in-cheek kind of comedy (there are literally one hundred car crashes in the chase scene near the end, just for the hell of it) and if you don't mind three of four singing and dancing routines throughout the movie (Which are surprisingly well-done. My personal favorite is the Baptist Church scene)
3175665
No, fuck you, alternate universe son-daughter/wife. You have to treat me to a fancy dinner first (and not McDonalds like last time!). I am a whore of class, dammit.
Be consumed by your own genitals, you mutant cow!This whole story reminds me of something. A little series called Madness Combat!
Anyway, If you stop writing these for whatever reason, I don't know.
i think he is about 27
Que Jaws music...
Why not take a pincer from the bogtopus? It was certainly tough enough to snip a hoof after all...
That was fascinating in a horrifying squicky fashion. Reminds me of a time a had to go to the hospital to get stitches. It was not anything too serious, so I insisted on watching. The doctor was pretty awesome, humouring all my silly questions about the procedure, explaining how the sutures were designed to hold the bits of me together in the most efficient, least irritating way possible, and how they could be easily removed by simply snipping one end and gently pulling them out... I thought it was fascinating; Significant Other was too squicked out and did not want to hear my recollection of the procedure, the wuss.
So I made sure to describe every bit to him in graphic detail as often as I could...
May I recommend chlorine trifluoride? That will turn the whole area into a flaming pile of ash.
The Reactivities and Incompatibilities section at PubMed (under Safety and Handling) has some interesting titbits:
- Incompatibilities: <egghead chemical stuff>; organic material; refractory material (sand, asbestos, brick); water.
- Interaction with water is violent and may be explosive, even with ice.
- When in contact with rubber a violent reaction occurs.
- Most chemical elements are attacked explosively by chlorine trifluoride.
The wonders of having chemists in the family...
You better hope Cherrypillar does not have the same injury fetish you had with Cards. Cherry may take one look at your broken hooves and lock you in a cage and poke you with sticks...
You have absolutely no idea...
Errr... Say what?
Deep fried with ketchup?
Pan seared with fava beans and a nice chianti?
Wrapped in organic, free trade arugula and alfafa sprouts? (Low fat, gluten free, and carbon neutral!)
Problem?
It will be interesting to see how Jericho deals with suddenly becoming half blind, no depth perception (doors are really going to suck now!), and losing his primary way of interacting with and manipulating the world. Is surgery or augmentation/prosthetics a possibility, or will he have to teach himself to live like an "Earther".
Eh?
Typo?
Is this Luna (given her dream walking abilities) or somepony new? (Or somepony old that I lost track of since the earlier chapters?)
Should be five?
HEEERREE'SSS JERICHO!
Jericho really needs to work on his people skills, or it will be Sleepy Oaks all over again.
You are also afflicted with a steadily worsening burning pain back there (much like that time with the chocolate sauce and the poisonous tentacle badgers) . This drives you to uncomfortable distraction, filling your mind with genital themed non sequiturs, gaining you an additional -5 points in charisma and concentration during conversations with mares.
I would say late 20's, early 30's seeing as he served a stint in the infantry, worked Special Operations with Mr Welch, and generally made a nuisance of himself against the Many Angled Ones before coming to Equestria...
In terms of emotional trauma, world-weariness and cynicism? Probably going on 470.
How off am I?
3176201
That is oddly apropos. Jericho as Hank and Elkington as the Sheriff. I wonder who Clown would be?
Jericho certainly is getting beat up like Hank, but he is such a sociopath that I cannot really empathise with him. I can only really observe in clinical detachment as bad things happen to him, no sympathy lost here.
Also, what is with all the genital jokes and penis puns?
Was there a certain quota that needed to be filled or something? They are starting to wear a bit thin...
It is beginning to sound like an annoying kid running around the playground, shouting all the euphemisms and synonyms he memorised at the top of his lungs. It just comes off as embarrassingly crude and immature.
Meh.
Yay, Luna's shown up again, with an introduction now!
...Being shot in the face in a dream! Okay then. Let's hope that doesn't carry over to the conscious world, yeah?
For some reason I place Jericho being in his 30's. No idea why, I just imagine him having some age.
Jericho's defenitly 70ish, what else could explain the frequency of ass kicking he receives on a daily basis! Plots chugging foward, which is fanfuckintastic, one very important character has been introduced and the main asshero is one step closer to becoming a cyborg-zombie-alicorn-princess! Looking foward to this acid trip of a story!
Tell me, is 'The Hanged Stallion' supposed to be a tarot reference? It seems like it is, but I can never really tell with this story...
Also, I say Jericho is 22, just because it's a rather lovely number.
Holy crap. I know she wasn't real.....at least I hope she wasn't real......but Jericho basically killed Cards......the hell happened to being the good guy. Elkington should have hired Devils Backbone to kill Jericho, not the other way around, cause he is sure as heck not the lesser of two evils right now......
I'd say he's somewhere around the 25-30 range, and idk why, but this chapter made me think of this.
i.imgur.com/rQnP0.png
That part reminded me of this game:
worldofmunchkin.com/game/img/cover_lg.jpg
3177125
Nun, ich bin eigentlich nur der unbezahlte Sklave. Crushric hat mich, als ich im Park meine Liedchen gesungen habe, entführt und zwingt mich nun für ihn zu arbeiten, weil er selber nichts geschissen bekommt. Aber erzähl ihm das besser nicht, sonst bekomme ich heute wieder kein Essen.
(Well, I'm actually just a unpaid slave. Crushric abducted me as I sat on a bench in a park, singing my songies, and now he forces me to work for him, because he can't shit on his own. But don't tell him that or I might not get something to eat today, again.)
Jericho has to be a LEAST 35. At the most 40 or 42. ((Which is kinda old))
(No it's not, you have old 65 year old's still fighting in the war)
3176459
I take it you're French or sommat? Yeah, I was treating what little French I knew like Spanish, which I do know. Thanks for the advice, which I have since put into the chapter!
3176486
Thanks for helping me correct those 2 things that me editors somehow missed.
A good few of them were actually legitimate science, like that honest question I had about if Celestia technically had a giant penis. But a good amount of them here were buildup for Jericho's line that went:
3178343
Oh, yes. First two chapters are meant to set up the main plot for the rest of the act, and then I go crazy and mutilate Jericho some more because I'm a sick man who needs to hurt ponies in order to feel happiness.
3178589
Tarot? Aye, that it does, that it does. You'll see next chapter where it gets somewhat explained.
3178925
As Jericho saw it, because she wasn't real, there was nothing morally wrong with killing the hallucination. You see it differently?
3181828
Happy one thousandth comment! That's right! You win nothing, but you're still comment #1000~!
3180192 3177125
Messoria! Who taught you how to read? Get back in your cage and continue knitting me sweaters and withstanding my palavering. I'm so sorry, Ioanness; I'll make he knows the meaning of pain in his clavicle this night...
3182118
Ooh, stream-of-consciencene comments! Love these.
Aye, that be a firefly reference. And Jericho now reminds you vaguely of a character based of yourself? I think you should be worried that this point. But, for the record, his faith is in-universe referred to as "Konfessionismus" (Confessionism), und Jericho ist ein "Konfessionist" (Confessionist). That comes up in chapter 16.
Lightning Dust? Yes. Yes indeed.
Speak ye of the Mare Laurentia? Not the Mother but the Prophet. (Is mentioned later.)
3183958
3184187
Typo? I just corrected to what you said, "Le mauvais étalon".
And you can be any type of French you want so long as you're not Parisian. Because damn-to-hell people in Paris. Orléans is best French city. New Orleans is best named-after-best-place-in-France city.
3186041
Aye, I'd count them as WHAM episodes, since they are technically in different acts—just be sure to explain why they both WHAM'd you, eh?
You know, halfway through reading this I had to look back at the story main page, just to see if it said "completed" or not, I was that unsure if he was going to die this chapter.
3186220
I'm glad I made you think that! But that fact is: if he died, he couldn't suffer. And I want to make him suffer. I'm a very sick man, you see... very sick... muhahaha!
Knowing a Latin based language is awesome. It means I can sort-of guess the meaning of sentences in other Latin based languages, and be correct sometimes.
Another fucking great chapter, Crushric. Glad to see Jericho (relatively) alive and kicking. As for your question, I always thought that Jericho was in his early to mid 30's, mostly because he's a veteran of at least one conflict. He just seems younger because of his juvenile humor and mannerisms.
So, with all the expectations Jericho has built up of Celestia, will he ever end up meeting her?
3186256 Speaking of that, I've taken the liberty of doing a quick MS Paint edit to your avatar to reflect recent changes: i44.tinypic.com/s45cg2.png
3183958 Yes and no. While I don't see it as morally wrong to kill a hallucination (it would be about as morally wrong as, say, you killing off Lightning Dust) the simple fact that he didn't wait, didn't hesitate, hell he didn't even try to find out if she was a hallucination. He just killed her. Of course, it would be highly illogical for Cards and Lightning to have been there at all, but if it HAD turned out to be Cards then she would be highly illogical, and highly dead. That this doesn't even occur to Jericho is almost as worrying as the fact that he's lost count of the amount of innocent ponies that he's killed.....
3186760
Gonna be honest here: I dunno. Jericho tends to do its own thing: I'll try to steer it that way may it so hap, but more than this cannot I promise. It all depends on whim and what seems reasonable at the time as I try to get from point A (chapter 17) to Point B (whatever chapter that might be)
3186923
Bahaha—that's awesome.
3187012
Meiner Meinung nach, Vater Unser auf Deutsch ist ja sehr geil.
3188187
As I and my editors saw it, Jericho was just genre savvy enough to basically know they weren't real; he knew he was suffering infection-based hallucinations, so he just made the logical conclusion. Alternatively, his infected mind means he wasn't thinking too clearly. You're free to have your opinion—in fact, I encourage unique opinions and interpretations of the events of Jericho—but we at Team Jericho generally keep the mindset that Jericho is genre savvy enough to avoid the normal Scheiße that heroes get bogged down with, and hence here was so absolutely sure that the mares were hallucinations that he didn't think twice.
Nopony is innocentEr, what I meant was...His Pipbuck keeps track of his kills in the stats menu.Who keeps track of all the people they've killed? No sane pony, no siree.I believe I saw some Sabaton references. I can do nothing but approve of them.
3193095 ...Sabaton references? I love every song I've heard by that band! What did you see?
3193095
Aye, inspiration from 'em taken.
3195917
Well, I hatched the idea for Elkington's Caroleans by listening to to the album Carolus Rex, although why they're called that does make in-universe sense. Oh, and I may or may not have—for future reference—rewritten The Carolean's Prayer into The Celestial Orison, a pony- and Duke Elkington-themed version of that song with a French chorus.
3196012
When I was writing that scene, I just couldn't resist.
3195917 I saw a bit of Carolus Rex and the term "Carolean". Now then, have a picture. 3197081 too.
mlpchan.net/oat/src/1376574685801.png
3197238 That is EPIC! Where did you find it?
3199948 I saw it in a video, then did an image search. Here's the video.
Yes, Jericho. Never mind the extended omnicidal rampages or graphic fantasies of dismembering Cards for no reason. No -- briefly imagining a swordfight with Futalestia in a top hat -- that's the last straw.
Mid 30's to early 40's. I love how your chapters end with a videogame slash tabletop RPG level and perk thing, it's funny in a trolling way kinda'.
I had such an amazing little moment when I suddenly found The Dark Tower by Stephen King today and I was like, "some of these terms sound familiar..." Now everyone is kind of worried because I face palmed for seemingly no reason and now I'm smiling like an idiot.
That is all.
I'm just going to say it now, I am going to be disappointed if Jericho doesn't meet back up with Dust and Cards. I also want to see him bitchslap that guy who I forgot the name of, but he was annoying!
i made an account here just so i can comment and add to the authors fetish for feedback. (its merely the grindstone through witch and artist hones his weaponry)
i found this story as a lurker, i had too much cake in clopfic... and clicked around randomly for a change in pace of my increasingly disturbing escapist behaviour...
first off i need to say, something about an anti hero like jericho puts me off, always has... i think it has to do with the over the top-ness... and in my perversion i find it hard to swallow the fact he abstains so readily from mares even though they practically throw themselves at him...
that said, the duality of mann shines through.
i love this story...
im now finally done with the first act... im one of those binge reading types (and i haven't payed much attention... but i'm at 17. i know there many more lengthy chapters in this).... im effing exsausted, and my head feels exactly like one of the many hilarious clown metaphors.
reading this is like that experiment with the rat thats had the pleasure center of his brains wired to a button. no food, no sleep just jericho.
i absolutely enjoy how he dances the moral grayness line.
only thing thats been tripping me up is there will be a random ¨s¨ missing, or some other random single letter typo. if your anything like me, im sure you hunt stuff like that down so you can skin it alive and throw it in a tub of lemon juice....
boy im glad im on a vacation!
thanks for sharing this with the world, and ill be glad to post moar feedback
I'm going to take a random guess at the name of the "holy" weapon that Jericho just received more ammo for -
"A Light Shining In Darkness"
Considering that you've shown to be a Bethesda fan, and that you gave him a .45 Auto (based on descriptions, the engravement on the side [being carved on Joshua Graham's unique .45 auto] and the munitions he's received for it), I'm guessing that you ripped the Burned Man's weapon off.
You also mentioned a twin weapon - was it Benny's unique 9mm, Maria?
6342835
You forget. There's the normal .45 round, which is what you're thinking of. But there's also .45 long colt, a much stronger round used in revolvers. And since the weapons are twins, they naturally look alike. The ones from Fallout don't really look alike.