Daring Do and the Quest for the Gryphon’s Goblet

by Yura

Chapter Three

At eight thirty in the evening, the sun was finally beginning to slip down below the horizon. The sky was awash with colour: purples, reds, oranges, yellows and pinks. It was absolutely beautiful, as sunsets are so often prone to being. Daring would have loved to go out with her camera and take a picture; except for two things. First off, she didn’t really own a camera, which definitely soiled her plans. Second, she was currently busy banging her head against her desk.

She sat up straight and looked down at the small stack of books on the table top, all of them about the Rawal Trading Corporation. At this point, she’d already booked a cabin on a ship heading for India, and there was nothing left to do but wait until morning. Which was proving to be more difficult than she’d ever anticipated. She’d thought maybe a little research would slacken her taut nerves, but all it did was make her even more anxious. She’d looked over every book she owned that had anything to do with the RTC (or just India in general) and had found out absolutely nothing new or even close to being helpful. Naturally, that irritated her to no end because, as helpful as Parquetry and his information was, she still hadn’t the slightest clue where she’d heard the word ‘Kathiawari’ before.

Grudgingly, she wandered back over to her shelves and scanned them for anything else that might be remotely interesting. Nothing. She’d flipped through everything she could think of, and for what? Absolutely nothing. Not even a minor consolation prize.

She groaned and banged her head against the bookshelf, frustrated and exhausted – and yet, there was no way she was going to sleep, not now, and probably not tonight. Her eyes flashed over the shelves one more time, hunting for something, anything that might refresh her memory. Maybe she had imagined it? Maybe she had been so excited by the prospect of a new adventure that she had talked herself into believing the word was one she knew… it made sense, she supposed, considering she couldn’t find not even one word about it, and Parquetry, with his massive collection of antique everythings, had had nothing more than one paragraph in one book.

But then again, maybe someone had said something to her. Maybe. It was possible someone could have spoken the word at some point. Yes, yes that had to be it! She wasn’t insane and delirious after all! But wait… who?! The only one she could think of who would know something like this was… well, to be perfectly frank, Parquetry. And possibly the curator, but he spent most of his time sleeping in the storage room as he pretended to ‘take inventory’. Over the course of the past five years, Daring had seen the ancient pony perhaps a dozen times, and spoken to him maybe twice. No, it couldn’t be him. She was pretty sure he was just a crazy old man, in any case.

She groaned and flopped dramatically onto her desk, so that she was staring at the ceiling as her back hooves dangled in mid-air. She watched the ceiling for a while, staring at the rafters almost expectantly, as though any moment they might open up and drop the answer down onto her unsuspecting head. When nothing happened, she let out a defeated sigh. “Oooooof course not,” she muttered irately as she rolled over and slid off the desk. “Because that would be way too easy.”

She wandered into her kitchen, grumbling curses under her breath as she pulled out a large piece of chocolate cake from her fridge and started munching. “Okay, what do I know?” she muttered to herself, taking in the chocolate deliciousness in the hopes that it would help her memory; chocolate was supposed to do that, wasn’t it? “Kathiawari, RTC, India, Pone, stolen goblet. Evil intentions. End of the world as we know it. Oh dear god, kill me now!” she growled in frustration as a loud knocking almost busted down her front door. “I’m coming!” she called out, trotting back through her study and into her neat, pristine foyer. She pulled open the front door and stopped. “Who ‘er you?” she wondered, her manners forgotten for the moment.

Standing before her was a stallion with black sunglasses (she hated morons who wore sunglasses at night) and a very impressive moustache. She was one hundred per cent sure she had never seen him before. And yet here he was, on her doorstep. His moustache perfectly waxed and his blue bowtie hanging messily about his neck. “I’ve been sent here by my employer,” he told her. His voice was deep and weirdly mysterious – normally, a combination of these few aspects on any one pony would be enough to give anyone the shivers. However, on this particular pony… it was just ridiculous. Daring half wanted to boot him back where he came from so she could get on with the far more important tasks at hand – like pacing. And talking to herself.

“Your wha?” she asked, not taking her eyes off his tinted sunglasses. She was far more occupied by the fact that she couldn’t see his eyes than by what he seemed to be saying.

“My employer has a message for you,” he added, apparently ignoring Daring’s scrutinizing magenta eyes.

“Does he now?” she asked distractedly. That was a ridiculous bowtie. Wait, were those rubber ducks?

“My employer implores you to cancel your trip to India. It does not exist. Neither do the Kathiawari Goodponies. Any further action upon either topic will result in lots of pain,” he told her, his monotonous, robotic voice not changing the whole while. Maybe he was a robot. After all, that moustache was… unreal.

“Your employer huh?” she asked, shaking her head lightly as his previous statement replayed in her head. “Wait, what? Your employer? What does he know about the Goodponies? And how the heck does he know I’m going to India?! …wait, what do you mean ‘India does not exist’? It’s a continent, continents don’t just poof over night, Stachie,” she told him, both angered and baffled his words. “Who are you?!” she asked more forcefully, moving forward in an attempt to get him to back out of her foyer.

“My employer would like your consent, as well as your signature agreeing to these terms. You will be handsomely rewarded,” the moustache pony told her, unrolling a long piece of parchment and laying a quill at her hooves. “Failure to comply will result in maiming and possible death.”

“Oh, will it?!” Daring asked angrily. “Well, you can just… shove it up your … Gimme that!” she snapped, pulling the parchment from his teeth and tearing it apart. “Tell that to your employer and get the heck off my porch! I don’t know how you found me, or what you do know about the Kathiawari Goodponies, but I do know this: no amount of ‘maiming’ will ever put me off. Especially now. I mean, seriously! Did you really think that this of all things was gonna put me off, and not make me like… ten times more curious? You suck at this.”

“My employer will be most distressed at this news,” Mr. Moustache told her flatly, watching as the last shred of his contract floated to the floor.

Daring huffed at him angrily. “Good,” she told him, trampling the contract shreds beneath her hooves for good measure. “Tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Now get off my porch you hooligan!” she told him, ducking back into her house and slamming the door on him.

Really, the nerve of some ponies, she thought furiously to herself; though she had to admit, the idea that Mr. Moustache knew about her and her goal was rather unsettling (as was the fact that he apparently didn’t believe in India); she wondered if he and his ‘employer’ knew about the Goblet too, and if they did….

She shook the thought away. No, that was ridiculous. No one else knew about that tunnel. It was just her and the Lily girls. She wasn’t even sure if their parents knew about it. But then, the thief knew about it too, didn’t he? So could it be possible that…

A loud shattering sound made her jump, and she whirled around to face the door. Or… well, it used to be a door. Now it was a pile of splinters, with an indifferent looking Mr. Moustache standing over it, as though it were the most common of courtesies to knock down other ponies’ front doors.

“You broke my door!” she exclaimed angrily, digging her hooves into the Persian carpet beneath them. “I loved that door! I brought it all the way from Venice!” she told him, adrenaline coursing through her body, every muscle taut as she stood ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.

“In all fairness, Miss Do, you broke my contract,” he told her, climbing over the shredded door and into her brightly lit foyer.

“Yeah, well your contract stinks! My door was epic!” she spat at him, backing out into the middle of the room as he attempted to close in on her.

“My employer wishes me to relieve you of your charge in any way possible Miss Do,” Mr. Moustache told her, his hooves clopping emptily against her polished marble floor. “I’m afraid, since you’ve destroyed my contract and show no intention of doing the right thing, that I now am obligated to kill you. Try to escape or don’t, you will die either way. Terribly sorry, Miss Do.”

If he’s not a robot, I’ll eat my hat, she promised herself in the moments before Mr. Moustache hurled himself at her, teeth flashing as they aimed for her jugular. She leapt into the air, beating her wings and talking off towards the ceiling – thank goodness for high ceilings.

She sent a priceless bust crashing to the floor as he leapt at her, trying to ensnare her fetlock between his pointed teeth. However, try as he might, he was rather wingless, and reaching her waaaaay up here was nearly impossible. She smiled down at him cockily. “Didn’t think this all the way through, did ya?” she asked him teasingly, shaking her tail mockingly at him.

“Au contraire, mon petite cheval,” Mr Moustache replied; why was he smiling?

“Wha?” Daring asked, frowning down at him. “Stop talking fancy! If you’re gonna try and kill me, do it in Englooooooh boy,” she said to herself as a metallic glint caught her eye.

The gun cocked itself, and Mr Moustache aimed it at her head. “I’m a very good shot, Miss Do,” he warned her, “so I’ll give you a five second head start. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…”

Daring had never run away from anything in her life. Except giant boulders, but those didn’t count. Instead, her eyes locked on the whip hanging on the wall above Mr Moustache’s head, and she dove for it. She didn’t often use a whip – especially this one; it was a ceremonial whip, used by the Fallabela Tribe in Maregentina for roles in traditional dances, which told stories of peace and harmony. However, considering the situation, she figured the Fallabelas would forgive her.

She snatched the whip off the wall as Mr Moustache called out five, and whirled around. His first bullet whizzed past her head, shattering a crystal chandelier behind her and sending it crashing to the ground, the shards ricocheting off the walls like shrapnel, digging into anything they could. She yelped as one lodged itself deep into her hind leg, and let out a frustrated cry through the handle as she cracked the whip at his neck.

Mr Moustache leapt out of the way, several pieces of the world’s most expensive shrapnel lodged into his shoulder, and the whip wrapped itself around the table leg behind him. Daring yanked it free and folded her wings against her body as the second bullet zipped toward her, streaking through her mane as she dropped a foot out of the way. She snapped them out quickly and with one massive beat, carried herself to the top of the ceiling, barely managing to duck out of the way as the third bullet shot at her chest. She swooped down like a bird of prey and aimed the whip for his fetlock; she let out an triumphant, wordless exclamation as it hit home and snaked itself around his ankle, cutting so deeply that she could see beads of red blossoming at it’s touch. So he wasn’t a cyborg; she’d have to remember to try and eat her pith helmet later on.

Mr Moustache howled in pain as Daring pulled him up toward the vaulted ceiling, until he was hanging upside down ten feet above the ground. She looked down just in time to see him take aim for her underbelly, and she gasped with alarm as she flicked the whip as hard as she could, sending his head crashing into the bannister so hard that the ancient oak cracked right down the middle. Once more she heard him cry out, which meant he was neither dead nor passed out at this point, and she chanced a glance down. He was regrouping (as well one could when dangling upside down in mid air), his gun trying to aim at her once more. But his magic was shaky now; he was tired, or disoriented, it really didn’t matter which. Daring smiled at herself and flapped her wings as hard as she could speeding around the big, circular room, knocking his head into each and every object she passed in an attempt to knock him out cold.

“Oh for Celestia’s sake, pass out you cyborg!” she yelled at him as he pulled the trigger. Her eyes widened and she dropped the whip as she sped sideways, leaving the bullet that was meant for her heart to do nothing but graze her barrel, leaving a shallow line of raw flesh and blood in it’s wake. Which was definitely better than being dead.

She heard Mr Moustache’s head slam down hard on the marble floor, a loud crack resonating through the room. When she looked down, he wasn’t moving. Whether he was passed out or actually dead, she wasn’t entirely sure. However, she was sure that whoever he worked for knew where she lived, and it wouldn’t take him long to send back up, if he hadn’t done already.

Without stopping to check on him, Daring swept over the banister and flew up the stairs into her bedroom, yanked her emergency pack out from under her bed, and bolted out the open window into the inky night sky. There were no stars tonight, and Canterlot looked amazingly different with nothing but the moon to light her, but nonetheless Daring knew exactly where she was going.

When she got to the familiar street, she landed lightly and immediately broke into a run, scanning each shop for the one she needed. There it was, as it had been for the past ten years.

She banged so violently on the front door that the cowbells jangled of their own accord, but still it was a few minutes before she got any sort of response. When she finally saw something – the halo of lamplight – she released the breath she hadn’t realised she had been holding. A drowsy head followed the floating lamp, and then a white body clad in oddly nautical pyjamas.

Parquetry squinted out at her through sleep-addled eyes and the door unlocked itself. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” he asked tiredly, hardly able to keep his eyes open.

She glanced quickly at one of the many clocks on the wall as she shut the mahogany door and pulled the blinds down over his display window. “Eleven o’clock,” she whispered to him, standing perfectly still with her ear pressed against the door, listening for any sign of life in the alleyway outside.

“Right. What are you doing in my house at eleven o’clock? I closed like… seven and a half hours ago,” he told her, pausing to add up how long it had been since four o’clock. Parquetry lived in a flat above his shop, thank goodness, so she always knew where to find him. “I’m sleepy,” he told her, trying to hint that she should leave him be and come back tomorrow morning.

She didn’t move, nor breathe a word, and he dropped his head in defeat. “I’ll make the couch up for you,” he muttered, sounding less than enthusiastic as he began to drag himself back up the winding staircase. He stopped after a moment and turned back, holding the lamp up higher so it’s light washed over her. “You’re all red,” he said, giving her a puzzled frown.

“Shhhh!” she told him (a little too loudly to be dubbed as a whisper). “And shut that lamp off, if they’re out there, they’ll see us.

Quickly, Parquetry blew out the flickering candlelight (he was the only one she knew who actually used priceless antiques the way they were supposed to be used; why he couldn’t get his hooves on a torch was beyond her) and the whole of the shop was plunged into darkness.

They stood in silence for a couple of minutes, both ponies listening hard and barely daring to breathe. At one point, they heard the clatter of a bin lid and Daring almost burst through the door, figurative guns blazing, before her pursuers had a chance to take them by surprise – but the strangled ‘meow’ that followed not a moment later told them that it was just some alley cat, and she ‘relaxed’ again. Parquetry didn’t; she had seen him leap nearly a foot into the air and saw him out of the corner of her eye, standing rigid as a plank.

After another few minutes, she pulled her ear from the door and turned to look at him. “Keep the blinds down tonight, okay?” she told him, a command disguised as a question. “And put that lamp back on; I think we’re safe.”

Parquetry did as he was told, fumbling with the flint and sparking the lamp back to life. As the warm yellow glow bathed all but the farthest reaches of the big room, she could see that the mess she had left the shop in had been ‘righted’ – meaning everything was back in piles, or leaning against piles, or sitting on top of piles.

She gave Parquetry a puzzled look as her eyes landed on his terrified face. “Geez, what happened to you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something!” she announced, trotting past him daintily as though nothing had happened and she was here, as always, to pick up another map.

Parquetry’s mouth opened, then shut, and then she was almost certain that he was going to yell something at her – but he shut his mouth once more and made a frustrated growling noise. “Never mind!” he said, turning and following her up the stairs to his flat.

The flat, much like the room below it, was filled with antiques. Unlike his shop though, one could move around in here, and everything was… generally neat. Piles of books and papers covered every available table top, but other than that, everything was put away more or less nicely. One could actually breathe up here, which was shy she liked it so much better than down in his maze of… whatever. She trotted into the kitchen and pulled open a cabinet, took down a big packet of crisps and brought them into the living room, where she proceeded to sit herself down on his couch, making herself feel very much at home, and began to munch on his food in silence.

The whole while, Parquetry stood at the top of the steps, following her with his naturally inquisitive green eyes. He waited for a moment or two after she had sat down, ready for her to offer up some sort of explanation. When she didn’t, he managed to choke out his objection: “Words!” he told her loudly, frozen in place and clearly still in a panic over what had just happened. “Tell me words!”

Daring knit her brow at him for a moment, then her eyes lit up with enlightenment. “Right!” she exclaimed, dropping her bag onto the floor beside the couch. “I’m spending the night, kay? It’s just tonight, I promise. I mean, I am going to India tomorrow, so you’ll be rid of me soon enough! You got any ice cream?” she asked, as though that were a perfectly satisfactory explanation for scaring him out of his wits.

“Not good enough!” he told her angrily, apparently articulate again as he stomped one hoof defiantly against the wood floor. “Why am I terrified?!” he asked.

She chomped down a couple more of the crisps and set the bag on the coffee table, then looked at him sombrely. “So that’s a no to the ice cream then?” she asked.

Parquetry looked like he was about to explode as his face contorted, showing off a million different emotions in the span of two and a half seconds – frustration, irritation, anger, defeat, concern, and red-hot hatred were only a few.

“All right, all right! Geez Parq, have a sense of humour or something,” she told him, waving at the comfortable armchair to her left as though he were the guest in her house, instead of the other way around. “Okay, lemme bring you up to speed,” she told him as he plopped himself down into the squishy chair. “Apparently someone wants to kill me. Congratulations! You are now, up to speed.”

Sheer terror flashed across his face. “Someone what?!” he asked, sinking down into the armchair so deeply that half of him was sprawled across the floor. “Why?! How?! Who?! Whooo-AAAAAH! THE KATHIAWARI GOODMEN EXIST!” he shouted, leaping to his feet on top of the floral cushion with surprising agility for a vampiric book nerd (it was a well known fact that Parquetry avoided the sun like the plague). “Oh my god! Gfferanernickertgaraf was right!”

“Okay one,” Daring said, straightening up and leaning towards him, “I don’t think that was his name. And two, STOP BEING SO LOUD! I’m running from seasoned killers! Screaming nonsense to the night is just begging for trouble. So! If you value your life and your stupid antiques, you’ll hush!” she chastised him harshly.

The broad, triumphant smile on his face melted into the stubborn look of a child forced into submission as he slithered back down into his chair, forelegs folded across his chest. “Who are you, my mum?” he asked defiantly, though noticeably quieter than he had been seconds before.

Daring relaxed and dropped back against the couch cushions again. “Thank you,” she told him. “And yeah, they do exist. Garfernerfnickernislav was right, conspiracy theorist or no. At least… he was right about that. I dunno about the rest of it.”

Parquetry leaned forward eagerly, both terrified and enchanted by the news. “And why do they want to kill you?! Is it because we know they exist?! No, they’d come after me to. Oh god! You’re not still going to Pone are you? They’re going to kill you. They’re going to KILL you! Oh yes! You’ve got red on you. I can now cross that off my ‘quotes to use in conversation before I die’ list,” he told her, reaching over to a small chest of drawers and pulling out a big notebook, opening it to the centre, and crossing something off.

Daring looked down at her hind leg, where the bit of crystal shrapnel had buried itself. “Forgot about that,” she said with a frown, then looked over at the scratch across her barrel that had been left by the bullet. It hadn’t hurt while she was running for her life, but now it began to throb. “Could I borrow a band aid?” she asked him.

“I don’t think a plaster’s gonna cut it,” Parquetry told her, pushing himself off his comfy armchair and clopping to his bathroom. When he came back, it was with a (what else?) very old antique case. He set it down on the coffee table and snapped open the lid to reveal a miniature hospital. “Shut up, I can do it,” he told her when he noted the worried expression on her face. He pulled out a needle and some surgery thread, as well as a pair of miniature prongs and a bottle of what looked like whisky.

“No,” she told him definitively. “NonononononoNOnonono,” she spat out quickly, trying to climb over the sofa to get away with him. He latched onto her tail and dragged her back, and she cursed the fact that he was a unicorn. “You are NOT a doctor Parquetry! NO!” she told him, still trying to scramble away.

He pushed the thread through the eye of the needle and looked at it contentedly. “It’s okay! I’ve read all their textbooks, so it’s practically the same thing. Don’t worry about it!” He used his magic to levitate the whisky into the air and pry open her mouth (it was strangely involuntary). Before she had a chance to worm away, he forced a couple of gulps down her throat.

She coughed and sputtered when the bottle was torn from her lips, her throat on fire as the room started to spin around her. She felt like she was going to be sick; but on the bright side, the pain in her leg had definitely stopped. “Wha the heck was that fer?” she asked, trying to make the world stay still.

“Makeshift anaesthesia,” he told her, the needle floating into the air. “They wouldn’t sell me the real stuff. Apparently you need a license. Doesn’t matter though; a little whisky works wonders!”

“A little?!” she asked. “A little?! That was … a lot,” she told him. A more in depth analysis of exactly how much was beyond her at the moment. She saw the tweezers hover into the air, glowing green as they floated towards her leg. “Did you know,” she started, wincing as she felt the cold metal digging into her flesh – it didn’t hurt. It just… felt funny. “Did you know that when stuff glows by your mane, you look like Christmas?” she asked him, giggling drunkenly.

He looked up at her inquisitively, his eyes wandering away from his work. “I look like what?” he asked.

She shrugged widely, her arms flailing about in the air. “I dunno,” she told him. “Stop being so lazy and finish the potatoes. You know what would be great right now? Ice cream. You know what would be creepy? A talking shrunken head. Though I guess it could be kind of cool since it could talk and it’s dead. But really. That’s creepy. What’cha sewin’?” she asked, her words starting to slur. “Are you making me a dress?!” she asked eagerly, a wide smile on her face. “I didn’t know you could sew.”

“Not now; yes that would be cool and creepy. You, no, and I don’t,” he replied to all her questions as the needle worked it’s way in and out of her skin, closing up the small but deep wound the crystal had left. “All done!” he announced triumphantly as the needle and left over thread flew back into the medical kit, sterilizing itself on the way, and a pair of gauzy bandages pressed themselves over her now clean wounds. “Now it’s time for be—”

Beef? Beer? Be-Ice cream? She had no idea what it was time for, because just as the word was crossing his lips, the deep black of sleep swept over her. Thank Celestia for whiskey.

Comments

[Trivial]

Daring Do confirmed for badass!

[MLPFan12]

Ah, old fasion whiskey to save the day. Absolute genius! Keep at it!

[Shadowed Rainbow]

How is this not getting more comments?! Oh well, I'm loving this! Poor Daring Do, hope she can get to India safe and sound!

[Sebbaa]

Well, more plot and action in this chapter. But that killer pony and guns in Equestria? How would an earth pony even use a gun?
This is not my kind of fic.

[Lens Flare]

203266

She (or he?) doesn't say it directly, but I'm sure Mr Moustache is a unicorn considering 'The gun cocked itself' and then later on she mentions 'But his magic was shaky now'.

Anyway, love it! I forsee a hangover in the next chapter Unless SHE's a robot pony. As a side note: the world would be a better place if no one every woke up with a hangover.