//------------------------------// // Act 3 Chapter 23 : Sit By The Fire And I'll Tell You A Yarn // Story: Starlight Over Detrot: A Noir Tale // by Chessie //------------------------------// There are only a few beings in the world who can predict the future and even fewer who bother trying. Most don’t bother predicting the present because of one problematic truth about prescience; most of the time the world is just having breakfast, taking out the garbage, voiding it’s bowels, sleeping off a hangover, and then repeating the activity ad-nauseum. There’s a whole world out there and the vast majority of it is quite dull, mundane, and tending towards unshaven. In a span of two hundred years, there might be a year worth of solid, continuous action if you knew exactly where to look and even that will mostly be people standing around waiting for things to happen with frightened expressions. Even knowing this to be the case, plenty of people have tried to peer into the future. On a long enough timeline, you’ll always find an idiot willing to try out any foolish endeavor in the hopes of either getting rich quickly or avoiding death. In Equestria, those two events are about as likely. -The Scholar Standing in the doorway, I quickly did battle with the urge to slip into ‘cop’ mode. Cop mode doesn’t work on old ladies and it usually gets you hit with a hoofbag. Considering one of them looked to be partially bionic, I didn’t particularly want a beating from her. “You’re going to tell me how you knew my grandfather, right?” I asked, leaning on the doorframe.          “Yep! The finest of us, he was! Come sit by the fire here, and we’ll visit,” the yellow mare said, indicating a straight backed wicker chair in front of her. I cautiously moved over to the seat, still expecting something to jump out at me as I sat down. “Now! Isn’t that better? Mah name is Apple Bloom. The grump who refuses to sit down and be polite no matter how many years ah kick her tail is Scootaloo, and this lovely lady is Miss Sweetie Belle.”          The elder named ‘Scootaloo’ folded one mechanical leg over the other and huffed. “Sitting is for ponies with spare time. Busy mares need to be on their hooves.”          “Darling, you weren’t on your hooves for almost two years,” Sweetie Belle pointed out, levitating a glass of wine into her forelegs and taking a little sip.          “Getting your legs bitten off doesn’t count!”          “Yes, it does, when you’re being a nit. Now hush a minute.”          I thought Scootaloo might object, but instead she turned up her nose and glared at the corner of the room.          Apple Bloom shifted in her rocker and said, “Sorry about Scoots. She’s been sour since Ah didn’t bring ya in that first day, but Ah figured it was prolly best ya made yer own way here.” Clearing her throat she continued, in an exaggerated version of Wisteria’s patois, “So...We be de mighty Ancestors! We be de holy trine! Ever Free!”          “Oh do stop that,” Sweetie admonished, setting her wine back on a little table beside the couch. “I know we needed a cohering mechanism, but that atrocious verbal mush was the worst of all available options.”          “It’s the one that worked, weren’t it?”          “Wasn’t, darling. It wasn’t...oh never mind,” the unicorn grumbled, then turned to me. “Mister Hard Boiled. It’s excellent to meet you. We’ve been lightly encouraging you in our direction for some time now, but you have achieved some amazing things without our interference, it must be said. The system did suggest your talent would be better left to its own devices rather than guided by three old biddies, though the models needed a full raft of updates just to accommodate your presence.”          “What models would those be?” I asked, my lip quirking with amusement.          Scootaloo turned her skinny, still-quite-muscular hip in my direction. Her cutie mark was a tricolor shield in red, purple, and pink with a lightning bolt through it. “Our talents are all about helping ponies with their talent-related problems, but there were so many talent-related problems that we did eventually require some mathematical models to help us. Those models turned out to have...other applications. Military applications. During the war we were all part of an organization—”          “—called the Crusaders,” I interrupted, leaning on the end of the rocker as it slowly clicked who I was actually speaking to. “You were Princess Luna’s covert ops group. Spies. Espionage experts. Wizards. Dragon slayers. Assassins.”          Oh, that was a look I liked being on the receiving end of: jaws hanging, eyes wide, ears laid back.          “H-how?!” Scootaloo demanded, stomping one forehoof so hard the boards let out distressed creaks.          I tugged the sleeve of my coat back and tapped the exposed surface of the Crusader. It seemed to shine like it was lit from inside, the circuitry along the surface flashing in the firelight.          “It was that little nickname you gave me with the Aroyos. I decided to do a bit of digging. There are only a few groups who know about these weapons. I seriously doubt anyone besides a dragon, a very fussy librarian, or a Crusader would recognize one in person. I already know the only dragon running a gang in this city, and the librarian is dead. That narrowed things down considerably.”          “You...How did you pull the protective skin off?” Apple Bloom asked as she gazed at my gun. “Your grandfather had us develop that from the spit of Queen Chrysalis herself!”          “I got shot with a prototype weapon, or rather, my gun did. It ran on ‘moonlight’. Sound familiar?”          Apple Bloom frowned, the wrinkles around her eyes drawing down into ferocious crows feet. “Phewy! Don’t ask questions ya know the answer to! Yer alive, so Ah’m bettin’ whoever shot ya isn’t. Yer grandfather...well, Ah suppose ya know he was one of us, don’tcha?”          “I know well enough,” I replied. “A friend of mine spent a few years looking into the Crusaders. He showed me a list with the names. There were four ponies who were the only members of your group not accounted for. One of them was my grandfather. I assume that makes you three the others, right?” “You betcha!” Scootaloo replied, then clapped a hoof against her chest in a funny sort of salute. “The Demolisher! Still awesome and still ready to wreck!” She waved towards Sweetie Belle, who shifted on her lounge, modestly adjusting her skirt with a flicker of magic. “Must we do introductions in this manner?” Sweetie sighed, running her toe around the edge of her glass. “Oh, very well, then. I will say it is too bad I couldn’t have used ‘The Sweet Embrace’ as a stage name. It’s ever so much better than any of those titles the Equestrian War Office came up with when we were between missions. I performed for the troops, you know.” She gave me a sultry wink that somehow still held a bit of that old fire, then nodded towards the mare in the rocker. “Uh...Awww shucks. Ah weren’t never too attached to it, but I guess they still call me ‘The Bloomin’ Death’ in the dragon lands,” Apple Bloom muttered, plucking at the arm of her chair with the edge of her hoof. “It’s what Ah get for bein’ the pony to find out there actually is something that’ll burn a dragon. Enchant some thermite to burn like spell-fire and it does the job.” A flicker of a mischievous smile crossed her face, and she added, “It makes a real purrty explosion when it hits their guts, too!” “Don’t be vulgar, Apple Bloom! We’re not in the war anymore!” Sweetie snapped, and her friend had the grace to look embarrassed. “Now then, Detective Hard Boiled...would you mind if we took a look at your Crusader?” “Why? Don’t you have your own?” I asked. “Sadly, no...I had to have ‘Beauty’ destroyed,” she replied, stroking her foreleg in the same place I usually wore my revolver. “It was part of the peace accord. You understand, I’m sure. Your grandfather never entirely trusted the dragons nor the peace. It seems, considering the current state of affairs, that he was wise to ask us to hide his weapon and pass it on to his son.” I shifted my chair around to face the fire, the leaping flame. It was an old fashioned wood fire, and the heat felt good on my muzzle. “You know...I know almost nothing about him. My grandfather, I mean,” I mused, picking up one of the pokers beside the hearth to gently stir the logs. “I’ve got a few stories here and there that my father told me, plus what little Don Tome of the Archivists had in his files. Grandpa and grandma were together a long time. I know he didn’t want my father going anywhere near the military, and I know that he killed the King of Dragons. I expect you’ll want to fill in the blanks, right?” Unsnapping my gun from the holster, I held it out for Apple Bloom, who took it reverently in her hooves, gently stroking the inlaid circuits on the surface. “Ah...Ah really thought Ah’d never hold one of these again,” she whispered, twisting it to peer down at the switch on the side. A few creases appeared on her forehead. “Yer grandpappy locked it in stealth mode a’fore he passed it on. Probably caused more than a couple of security outages in Detrot down through the years when your pa got scared of somethin’. Firin’ mechanism is some kinda weird, too. Ol’Egg Head never did like the basic receivers. Ah wish Ah could test fire this thing...” “Oooh, I’d love to see that!” Scootaloo cackled, stepping away from the wall to examine my gun. “Last time I fired ‘Wrecking Ball’, I was so mad I fell into a coma for two days straight!” “And Ah told ya not to be angry when ya fire or ya might break a blood vessel in yer brain, and then where’d ya be?” Apple Bloom snapped. “Waking up with a syringe sticking out of my chest and you standing over me with a scalpel in your teeth, same as the last three times I almost died,” Scootaloo tittered. A tiny door on the side of one of her metal legs opened, and a short arm on a gimbaled joint popped out, holding up a digestive biscuit. She bit off a big mouthfull, and the arm retracted. “Beshides, ish not like he’sh got the ammo for it.” Sweetie Belle’s horn flicked in Scootaloo’s direction, scooping the crumbs from her snack out of midair and depositing them in a garbage can at the end of the couch before they could hit the carpet. “True, but the other features could be quite—” Digging into my pocket, I plucked out the magazine that’d been in Don Tome’s personal stash, holding it up by the lanyard. “You mean one of these?” “Stars above, where’d ya get that?!” Apple Bloom gasped. “Ah thought we accounted for every last shell!” I set the black crystal bullets down on the small end table beside her. “Don Tome. Head of the Archivists. I have no clue where he got it. The Crusaders were one of his many pet projects. He tried to buy my gun for years.” “Hah! As if someone could just buy a Crusader Class weapon!” Scootaloo scoffed. “They can only be given freely to one who would protect Equestria.” Tucking my tail under myself, I rolled the ammo back and forth as I said, “Tome was a funny old geezer, but I suspect he would have been a good person to hold on to it. Either way, I admit to having a couple of questions.” “Well, darling, that is why we let you in,” Sweetie Belle said. “We can’t tell you everything of importance, since we don’t have all week—if there can even be said to be ‘weeks’ anymore, without the sun—but I think we can make a solid start and maybe begin planning our next actions. There is a city to retake, and with enough unicorn power, we might even manage to move the moon and sun again, once whatever magic is keeping them from moving in the first place is gone. It originates here, after all.” She gave me a look like she expected shock, but she didn’t get it. I clicked my tongue. “You might or might not be pleased to hear this...but I have reason to believe the Princesses are alive.” There was a collective intake of breath, and then Sweetie narrowed her eyes at me. “You have...learned something in Canterlot, yes? Something pertinent to our situation?” Easing the Emblem of Harmony out of the top of my armor, I jiggled the glass amulet in front of them. “You could say that.” “T-the Princesses! They gave you an Emblem?!” Sweetie squeaked, sitting up so quickly she almost fell off her couch. “They’re alive? They’re back? I broke my Emblem almost a week ago, but I didn’t hear anything!” She hesitated, then asked, “Did you meet Cadence in Canterlot? I thought she had barricaded the Crystal Empire.” I shook my head. “No...just one Princess. Twilight Sparkle. I won’t blame you if you don’t know who I’m talking about, but—” “Of course we know who you’re talking about! Our sisters were some of the Elements of Harmony!” Scootaloo exclaimed, tapping her chest. “She must know Detrot is the...what was that word you used, Sweetie Belle?” “Epicenter, darling,” Sweetie murmured. “Epicenter! She has to know Detrot is the epicenter of what’s happening. Why isn’t she here?” There was a long, stony silence as I sorted my thoughts from one another, studying the amulet as it hung from my hoof. Finally, I tucked it back into my armor and raised my chin to address three expectant sets of eyes. “She would be if she could,” I answered. “The same magic that made Canterlot vanish is...keeping all the alicorns, changelings, and anyone else who could help us out of the city. We’re on our own. Before we get onto that, you promised me some answers.” “Ah, yes. Well, it is the end of the world, and I think there are few answers we could give that would make things worse. What would you like to know?” Sweetie asked, tipping back her wine and swallowing it down in one gulp. “I guess the most basic one first. You’ve been in Detrot at least thirty years. Why this crazy set up?” I asked, waving at the ceiling as though to encompass the whole of the Skids. There was another silence laden with nervous guilt. Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom both looked at the old pegasus in the corner who was trying desperately not to be seen as she edged further into the corner. Finally, when it was clear nopony was going to answer me, Apple Bloom coughed into her hoof. “Eh...Scootaloo, Ah think ya just got asked a question. Why did we start this nutty project again?” Scootaloo swallowed a couple of times, tugging at her wrinkled cheek with one forehoof. “I...um...during the war, a few years after it began, I went on a tour of Equestrian cities. One day I got away from my guards and decided to take a wander around the city.” Her cheeks flushed. “I...well, I stumbled into the Skids and...eh...I got mugged by a gang and I beat them up, but...I decided from that moment to change this whole city and—” “Ugh, what my fellow Crusader means with that watered down blather is that dear little Wisteria stole her bit-purse out from under her nose, then almost out-flew her,” Sweetie interjected. “Wisteria was quite fast, even at a young age, and Scoots left her wing augmentations in her hotel room.” “Hey! Are you telling this story, or am I? Cuz if you’re just going to tell the embarrassing parts, I’m going to go make some dinner...and I’ll make you extra broccoli!” The elegant unicorn let out a snort of disgust and lowered her cheek onto the arm of her lounge. “Fine, fine. Just keep to the facts of the matter. Your usual embellishments do make for a good story, but I suspect the Detective won’t require them.” Scootaloo tapped the side of her head with her mechanical hoof and grumbled. “What was I saying? Oh...right. Well, Wisteria did steal my bit-purse, and I caught her. She had a little gang of ponies she was working with at the time who’d followed us into an alleyway. I had a gun and a great deal of training, of course, and they were barely out of puberty. We fought. I won. Then I gave them my purse and took them out to get some food.” I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Wait...you kicked their flanks and then bought them dinner?” “Hard Boiled, if you saw the state of these kids, you’d have done exactly the same thing,” she admonished, waggling a hoof at me. “Anyway, I told them I’d be back and that when I came back, I’d make sure that they’d never need to starve again. I told them not to hurt ponies younger or weaker, to be kind, and to try to protect their loved ones. I told them that soon all their mothers and fathers would be home...and if they weren’t, then I would take care of them. Me and Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom.” “And they took you at your word?” I asked, skeptically. “After the trouncing I gave them? Yeah, they kinda did,” she snickered, flicking her braided tail back and forth against her weathered flanks. “When the war ended, the three of us were being hunted by draconic assassins intent on a little bit of revenge. I suppose I can’t blame them. My kill count was in the dozens, and Apple Bloom built most of our weapons. Sweetie’s kills were...erm...I don’t even know how many. More than me. More than anybody else in the Crusaders.” “It isn’t important, Scoots. It would be poor form of me to keep track of such a thing. We were doing our jobs. Nothing else,” the unicorn muttered guiltily. Staring down at her hooves, she rubbed the tips of her toes together as though trying to clean something off of them. “Anyway...I remembered my promise, and when we came back, we found Wisteria still here, still holding these same few blocks,” Scootaloo continued, nodding at the ceiling. “She took my words to heart. She was taking care of the young and protecting her loved ones. Outsiders didn’t rate quite the same ‘kindness’ I was hoping she might learn, but then, once you are an Aroyo, they will lay down their lives for you.” “How about that name?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me saying, ‘Aroyos’ is a strange nom de guerre for a gang of street kids to pick up.” “It’s Griffonic, darling. Atop all of these outlandish promises, our dear ‘savior of the poor and weak’ also let slip that we were going to the ‘Aroyo Canyon’ deep in the Badlands,” Sweetie explained, shooting Scootaloo a disapproving look which the other mare pointedly ignored. “That mission was very classified, mind you, but...who are a bunch of very poor children going to tell? She’d given them something to hope for.” “Now, Ah don’t know what Ah was thinkin’ followin’ Scoots out here hopin’ we could hide with some gang of kids, but she takes a promise real serious. Ah didn’t want to build weapons no more, but Ah’d been poisoned twice, shot in the butt, and lost half an ear, all inside of a month. Public life was gettin’ old,” Apple Bloom added, turning her head so I could see where a ragged portion of one of her ears poked out from under her hat. Scootaloo edged over to the fire and sat, a distant smile on her muzzle. “I remember when we first came back. Wisteria almost didn’t believe it was me. I found her sitting on the roof of this building. She was crying like a little girl and holding that funny bag of hers. It had one of my loose feathers in it. It’d only been a few years, but I’d become some kind of...myth to them, a fairy tale she told the kids to put them to bed.” “It was rather sad,” Sweetie murmured. “They numbered barely twenty back then and were scrambling against several other small gangs in adjacent blocks. Five of their number had died to violence in under two years.” “Pardon, but how did you three drive out a bunch of gangs?” “We were…” Apple Bloom hesitated, shuffling her hooves underneath her blanket. “We were younger. Stronger. Stupider.” “What my friend means is that we were the three most heavily trained, magically and technologically augmented soldiers who remained after the Crusades,” Sweetie explained, reaching up to pull her heavily styled mane away from her neck. Something that looked like a section of an extension cord seemed to be growing from the flesh above her shoulder joint, and it vanished behind one of her ears. The skin around it was puckered with scar tissue, but it looked quite old. “The rest of the Crusaders—except your grandfather of course—were dead or missing. Against small groups of untrained civilians with only the barest knowledge of tactics or strategy, it was only a matter of time.” “It...it weren’t even a real fight,” Apple Bloom said, shaking her head. “After we beat the tar out of the first few, groups started wantin’ to join the Aroyos. It were kinda crazy, but...Wisteria’s really good at what she does. Once she knew everythin’ we were willing to teach her, we just slid into the background.” Her expression sank, and she pulled her ancient, thready blanket up to her chin. “That...that was before everythin’ got bad...” “Wisteria said you were attacked,” I prompted. “I almost wish it were an attack, Detective,” Sweetie said, softly. “We are quite used to direct attacks. We might have defended ourselves against those. Rather, our opponents used subterfuge. Powerful, well connected, untraceable acts of subterfuge.” Scootaloo kicked the baseboard beside her angrily and stalked across the room to press her forehead against the opposite wall. I could hear her teeth grinding as she glared at her hooves. “The first thing was the Jewelers. One of their toughs burned one of our tenements, but not before sealing it with spells. A lot of ponies died. Our ponies. Civilians.” “How do you know it was them?” I asked. Reaching up, Sweetie tapped her horn. “We tracked the fool who set the blaze. He was a low level Jeweler who’d been given the order by...well, I’m afraid we never found out. Whoever gave him the order cast a spell on him that made his lungs explode before he could tell us. Quite an efficient means of covering one’s tracks.” “That was just the start,” Apple Bloom said, closing her eyes as a few stray tears started to creep down her cheeks. “The police came and...then city inspectors. They had half the Skids condemned fer problems with the electrics. These were buildings we’d been fixing. Ah know wires! Weren’t nothin’ wrong with ‘em! Still, they drove a bunch of our people out. We couldn’t do nothin’. We had too much territory by then. Then...other gangs...big gangs of Cyclones started showin’ up. They wouldn’t even talk or negotiate or nothing! ” “And...they drove you back here?” She nodded, quickly using her blanket to blot her face dry. “Almost a hundred and thirty dead in two years. Dyin’ in accidents at their jobs or muggings ‘gone bad’ or ‘suicide’ or just missin’. Don’t make no account. We couldn’t expand no more above ground...so...so Ah called all the Aroyos back to these blocks. Ah knew we had enough to hold’em, but...they cut us off. Everypony who had a job outside lost it all’a sudden...” “Wait...couldn’t you have appealed to...I don’t know? The crown? Princess Celestia or Princess Luna? Maybe even Twilight?” I asked, holding up my hooves. “You still had your connections, right? The Elements of Harmony or the law—” “We tried, Detective,” Sweetie whispered, clutching the hem of her dress with one hoof. “What could we bring them? An electrical fire, a dead thug, and a city they already knew was barely holding itself together? This was only a few years after the war. Cloudsdale was still in ruins. Los Pegasus hadn’t recovered. The Elements were all half out of their minds trying to keep the country from falling apart. I couldn’t even show my face in court, else the dragons would have known precisely where to send their assassins.” “And nopony knew where Twilight went after the war,” Apple Bloom murmured, putting her hooves on her temples and rubbing them in slow circles. “She jus’ vanished. Ah tried to find her castle, but...but Ah couldn’t remember where it was! Ah know she cast some kinda memory spell on everypony and Ah remember her...sort of...but there’s all these holes where she oughta be in mah head!” “We appealed to the powers that be,” Sweetie said, wrapping her forelegs around her barrel and hugging herself. “Unfortunately, those powers would all rather their wartime assassination squad be quietly consigned to the pages of history. Still, we had our knowledge and our skills from the war. We could hold...and we could prepare.” “Prepare for what?” I asked. Scootaloo chuckled, tracing a circle on the carpet with her toe. “We used some special forces tricks to get the different groups to work together; yahknow, social psychology? If we’d had another five years, our numbers might have been great enough to start really rocking the boat. I just wish we hadn’t had to work with all those Cyclone groups to keep them from attacking us. We wasted way too many resources on territorial disputes with the Jewelers. Alliances are expensive.” I reached for my gun, and Apple Bloom passed it back to me. “What about the weapons? I saw the Aroyos carrying a bunch of heavy ordinance. I take it you made that stuff?” “Ah did,” the earth pony replied. “Ah didn’t wanna draw no attention to us by havin’ big guns. There’s a real difference between fightin’ street gangs and fightin’ the cops or the monster killers. Somea the stuff in mah head is made for killin’ big things. If Ah’d have given our people those, ya can bet sure the police woulda done more than run us into homeless shelters and the sewers...” “But once the sun was gone, it didn’t matter anymore,” Sweetie concluded. “Now, that is our story. Can I perchance convince you to tell us yours, dahling?” “Wait!” Scootaloo interrupted. “We should do this in the weaving room! We can take what he tells us and add it to the tapestry! It might even give us an identity for whoever has been causing all of this!” I pulled myself out of my chair and stood, stretching my slightly cramped calves. “Weaving room?” “It’s not so bad as ya think,” Apple Bloom replied. Sweeping aside her blanket, she revealed a set of spindly rear legs that were only slightly less mechanical than Scootaloo’s forelegs. One of her thighs had been entirely replaced with shiny chrome, while the hoof below it was healthy flesh wired into a frame that supported the calf. The other leg was draped in some form of metallic skeleton full of wires that seemed to burrow into her muscles in a way that made my stomach twitch with dismay. Noticing I was staring, the old mare cackled and rolled onto her front legs, giving her back knees a little shake that set the mechanisms clacking and rattling. “Don’t mind the extra bits none. Ah know they ain’t as lovely as Scoots’ over there, but she just got purtier ones cuz she got her legs chomped off all neat-like instead of bein’ chewed on. Ah got good practice buildin’ these a’fore she lost hers, too.” Scootaloo snorted, pawing at the carpet with her polished toe. “Good practice she says. I still need to oil myself three times a week, and both knees stick when it’s humid.” “Yer the one who said the teflon coatin’ made’em smell funny!” As the two mares bickered, Sweetie Belle rose gracefully and sidled up to my side. I offered her my foreleg, and she smiled, resting her leg over my knee. “Oh, a gentlecolt! There are simply too few of those these days. Just ignore those two. They’ll be at it another five minutes. Come along. The weaving room is just below.” Leaving Scootaloo and Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle guided me towards the end of the hall, past a little kitchenette, a bathroom, and a closet until and we stopped at a simple wooden door tucked behind a staircase that led up to the second floor. It would have been completely unremarkable were it not for the complete lack of a handle or visible means of opening it and the electronic keypad mounted on the wall alongside. Sweetie’s horn lit up, the pad flashed through a series of numbers too fast for me to comprehend, much less remember, and then the door shuddered and let out a chunky ‘clang’. “Excuse the security, darling,” the elderly mare apologized. “Even our dear Aroyos would be best not seeing this. Too many of them have destinies that are closer-at-hoof than they would like them to be.” “You mean—” “Their deaths, yes. We try not to predict such things, but statistical models all end more or less the same way on a long enough timeframe.” “Alright, lemme back up three steps. What exactly am I going to see down here?” “If I’m completely honest, I have no idea. When we model probability, we develop a unique structure for each pony. I could say ‘You’ll see us weave’, but I doubt that’s what you’re asking me.” The door sank into the wall an inch or so, then dropped straight into the floor. While the facade might have been wood, behind it there was a six inch steel plate that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank vault. Sweetie stepped across the threshold, resting one hoof on a rail as she descended a long staircase into the darkness, taking it slowly as her black dress swirled around her hooves. “Honestly? I’ve no idea. That’s why we brought you here. You need to tell us as much as you know of what is going on, and we will add it to our models and see what pops out.” “These...models. Where do I fit into them?” I asked, hesitantly following her. Lights began to flick on overhead when she reached the bottom, illuminating a corridor with every inch of wall covered with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny icons painted in painstaking detail. It took me a second to realize they were all cutie marks, hundreds and hundreds of cutie marks, no two alike. “What do you mean?” Sweetie asked, stopping in front of another door at the end of the hall and quickly waving her horn over another keypad. The second door made no bones about being present for security purposes; it was solid metal and marked with enough runes of power around the edges that even a dragon would need to stop and have a breather before they might even make a dent. “Well, you say you have these...mathematical systems, right? They told you to leave me alone until very lately or something like that? What else do they say about me? I’m curious.” “Nothing,” she replied, a little bitterly. “They said nothing at all.” I stumbled over a patch of particularly stubborn air and caught myself on the door. “Wait...what?” “Detective...you are a probabilistic disaster,” she answered, glancing back over her shoulder. At my bemused look, she added, “It really would be easier if I just showed you.” Pressing the keypad with her toe, she stepped back as the door swung inward with a screech of metal on metal. Mage-lights, sensing life, began to sputter and glow at even intervals around the walls of a completely spherical room. What was in the room took my eyes fifteen or twenty seconds to begin sorting and categorizing; being presented with too much visual information is about as bad as being presented with none, and the interior of the ‘weaving room’ looked like a riot in a yarn factory. The center of the room was filled to capacity with a knitting experiment gone wrong, like a three dimensional diagram of an exploding quilt. “Ah! Pardon me, I forgot to put away our latest formula tweak. Thankfully, that’s not an actual pony being modeled there. Sorry, this will just take a moment,” Sweetie apologized, her horn lighting up. Improbably, the enormous jungle of thread began to unwind itself, spiraling out from a tangled core into thousands of little spools which lined the walls, each mounted on its own bracket by color and pattern. I couldn’t have fixed that mess with an hour and a machete, but she seemed to know precisely where each thread went. As the pattern began to unravel, it revealed a short wooden catwalk that stretched into the middle of the room, leading up to a circular platform with three badly painted wicker chairs perched on it. A few notepads and books lay beside each one. “Now, then! That’s better. The others will be along shortly, once they finish arguing. At our age, they take a certain glee in being contrarian with one another, but then, they weren’t any different as foals,” Sweetie murmured, heading down the catwalk and settling herself gracefully into one of the seats, which creaked under her weight. “What am I looking at, here?” I asked, following her down and setting myself between the chairs, studying the ceiling. “Have you perchance heard of a ‘computer’?” she asked. “You mean somepony who spends all their time crunching numbers?” “Oh...yes, well, in this case I mean a machine that crunches numbers,” Sweetie replied, arranging her dress around her rear hooves as she levitated a single strand of thread from one of the nearby walls, spinning it around her outstretched hoof. “The word fell into a bit of disuse since ‘computer’ tends to refer specifically to persons, but it can also be applied to mechanical machines. There are plenty of machines which will do sums and so on. Most pocket calculators and cash registers are ‘computers’. That said, they have their limitations unless one wishes to fill up a thousand blackboards with proofs. When you’re calculating problems with ponies, you need some wiggle room that nothing but numbers just won’t provide.” “Wiggle room I understand, but...string?” “It’s yarn. Real special yarn, too. Ah don’t think any kinda string could do what our stuff does!” a voice said from over my shoulder. Turning, I found Apple Bloom and Scootaloo coming down the hallway out of the main house. As soon as she came through the door, Scootaloo’s wings buzzed, lifting her over the catwalk and into one of the chairs while Bloom trudged forward, half-walking, half limping into her seat, climbing up into it and rearranging her blanket over her legs. “We weave destinies!” Scootaloo explained with a big grin that showed a couple of missing teeth. “Destinies are harder than numbers. We have to put together all the stuff that might happen. For that, you need magic, and enough yarn to choke a mule. Thankfully, we used to live somewhere that star spiders were pretty common...and they’re really friendly if you bring them milk and honey on a regular basis!” “Alright, so you knew who I was the second I set hoof here. You knew my grandfather. Show me the trick.” “Hrmph...no appreciation for good theatrics, then?” Sweetie huffed. “None.” “Then, Detective...tell us yer story,” Apple Bloom murmured, picking up her notepad and pencil in her teeth. “Don’t leave anythin’ out. If yer talent said anythin’ to ya, then ya say so, okay?” “Phew...I’ve got some secrets—” “Not here!” she interrupted, waving the pencil in my direction. “Ya came for the truth. Ah promise, nothin’ ya tell us will leave this room. Heck, we got our own memory spells cause there’s a few things we’ve seen in this yarn that we don’t wanna remember. Believe me, there’s stuff here that’ll keep ya up at night. If ya want us to forget...we’ll forget...but it’s gotta be the truth and nothin’ but, or we can’t do ya no good.” “Then...I think I need a drink.” Sweetie levitated a flask from somewhere under the folds of her dress and into my forelegs. “Darling, when we are done here, I suspect we will all need a drink. Tonight, we’ll get to see the many fates and destinies of everypony you’ve interacted with since the day your quest began.” “That includes us,” Apple Bloom said, jabbing her toe at me. “So, where’d it all start?” ---- I hadn’t even told Twilight the whole truth. Oh, I’d given her the highlights, but there were some things you just don’t say to anypony. The dream, for instance. I hadn’t told her about the dream from that first day when I rolled off the couch and answered the telephone. I’d also neglected to mention my repeated visits from Juniper Shores. Mercy, where was that old coot? I could have done with his advice just then. The three mares seemed to have an endless reservoir of patience, and when I considered leaving some tiny element out to save some face or maybe avoid a potential criminal prosecution, they would give me indulgent smiles and wait until I went back and corrected myself. They seemed to know when I was lying or at least omitting something. It was almost uncanny, watching the model take shape as Apple Bloom scribbled down note after note, Scootaloo translated them into a mathematical notation on her own pages, and Sweetie Belle took both of their notebooks and compared them with her own. At some point, Sweetie picked up a juju bag of her own and made a call out to Supermax, letting them know we’d be a while longer, but once that was done, the hours slid by with me sitting there talking and the three crones pounding questions to fill in every last blank. I’d like to think it was the bourbon that loosened my tongue so completely, but more likely it was the total impassivity of my audience. They’d seen it all, and there was more blood on their hooves than most ponies would ever experience in their lifetimes. I had that sensation that I suppose most people only get after they’ve committed a really hideous crime and found themselves caught, prosecuted, and heading for the gallows. A year or so before Juniper died, I’d gotten a call from this pony who the papers called ‘The Cartwright Street Slayer’. One day, seemingly out of the blue, he’d killed his mother and father with a shotgun, burned the house to the ground, and then gone next door to the neighbor’s house and murdered the parents of two little girls too. Juni and me caught him three weeks later living in a storm drain, hugging his empty gun and his teddy bear. By then, the media had got hold of the story and made him out to be a bad seed who finally showed his true colors. He was a few weeks shy of adulthood at the time of the crime, but when we caught him he was an adult under the law and so went to Tartarus Correctional. The week before he was sent to the prison, he used one of his scant few phone calls to get me down to the jail where they were holding him. He’d sat in absolute silence through the whole trial, and even when the jury gave him life without parole, he didn’t say so much as a word. As one might imagine, I was a little skeptical of a 3:00 AM call from a pony headed for the big house who ‘just wanted to talk’. I found the kid sitting there in the jail visitation room in a stripey jumper, still hugging the damn bear. He’d asked for some privacy with me. It was against policy, but I knew the guard, and the guy was chained up. Once we were alone, he’d immediately began bawling like a foal, and the real story started to come out. His parents and the neighbors had these so-called ‘poker nights’ in the basement. His dad had picked up a book of dark magic in some antique shop somewhere, and they were all getting their kicks eating the souls of stray animals. The week before his killing spree, the father had sacrificed the family pet. The guy swore me to silence, and the sentence was already on the books, so there was nothing I could do. There wasn’t any evidence to corroborate his story in the burnt out hulk of his former home. The neighbors’ two fillies—the only ones he spared—didn’t know what their parents were doing, and he didn’t want them to know. He’d found his father’s diary, and it indicated the two of them were next on the altar. I had nightmares about his face for a long time. He’d finished his confession, and then the poor son of a bitch had smiled at me, a relieved kind of smile. In the end, he’d just wanted somebody to know what really happened, even if it made no difference. ---- “That’s it, really. We got off the train, drove to Supermax, I had Wisteria go get a cart for the dragon, I gave Mags a hug, and we took the sewer route here. I think that’s everything,” I finished, taking another sip from the almost empty hip flask to wet my muzzle. “Any questions?” Apple Bloom grunted, tapping her pencil against her notepad. She worked her jaw a little, then spat out her writing utensil. “Girls? Mah math looks pretty tight. Ah think we have enough. What about ya’ll?” “Well, there are some minor issues with the presence of this ‘Juniper Shores’ character and the changeling heart in his chest, but nothing that should twist us too far off course,” Sweetie replied. “This will be, by far, the most complex model we’ve attempted since the war, and those were always a mess. This one is probably worse.” I chuckled, shaking the last of the flask out, then passing it back to the unicorn. My cheeks were still pleasantly burning and my head felt fuzzy, but it was a far cry from the hypertensive mess I’d been when we sat down. “You used the words ‘probabilistic disaster’, earlier. Are you going to tell me what that meant now?” I asked. I will say it’d been awhile since I saw three ponies exchange that look which says ‘how do we communicate brutally insulting information to this pony without actually hurting his feelings?’. It’s a very specific expression and difficult to describe, but if you’re ever on the receiving end, you’ll know it. “Ahem,” Sweetie began, then paused, gathering her thoughts. “It’s...complex, and we won’t know exactly until the spells that make this system work begin to take shape.” “I sense a ‘but’ here,” I said. Scootaloo carefully set her notepad down and crossed her forelegs. “Keep in mind, this isn’t perfect! I mean, just by telling you this stuff, we’re probably changing things.” “And...Ah doubt it could all be as bad as—” Apple Bloom started to say, but I cut her off with a stomp on the wooden catwalk. “Tell me. The build up isn’t helping my eventual reaction.” “Erm…Detective, this is simply an overview, but...every indicator says you shouldn’t have been born or must have died many years ago,” Sweetie said, hesitantly. I settled onto my belly, crossing my forelegs over each other. “That’s what your math says?” “Yes. Now, we have to see what the model says. Ready, girls.? It’s time to weave.” Sweetie shooed me back with a flick of both hooves. “Detective, go stand by the door until we’re finished, and don’t move. This will take about five minutes.” I backed up onto the catwalk as the Ancestors began to gently rock in their chairs. Sweetie Belle’s horn began to glow, and Scootaloo started to fan her slightly undersized wings, creating a little breeze and an undulating sound straight out of the deep jungle or the hot savannah, like the snarl of a lion chasing prey. Apple Bloom had produced a small drum from somewhere and was setting a quick beat that reminded me of a zebra war dance Taxi played for me once upon a time. I could feel arcane energies building in the air, but still nothing happened. My fur was standing on end as Sweetie Belle began to sing. Her voice was haunting, beautiful, and full of a thousand stories. The sweet tenor was joined a moment later by her friends, who fell into harmony with her like they’d been born there. I couldn’t have told you if there was a melody, but there was a definite tune that rose and fell as a flood of images started welling up inside my head: waves rolling on a beach under cloudy skies, a soldier lying in a muddy puddle, blood dripping from brilliant blue flowers, and a hundred others moments from places far removed and times long gone. My eyes were burning and blurry, so I almost missed the moment when yarn began to unspool from a thousand places on the walls to suddenly leap towards the middle of the room like a wave of color, filling the space above the Crusaders’ heads with a dense tangle of thread. It wound and coiled, winding into knots or snaking into tight patterns which the finest seamstress in the world couldn’t untie. As quickly as it began, the shape slowed to a crawl, flowing inward upon itself, growing tighter and tighter. I found myself unable to look directly at it as it moved, as though I were seeing something not entirely real. After several minutes, the music crawled to a stop, leaving the ugliest web of color I’d ever seen hanging above the three Crusaders. Cautiously, I approached the dangling disaster, peering up at it. Something about the design was viscerally disturbing, like looking at spilled intestines. “Was that supposed to happen?” I asked. Sweetie Belle coughed, then quickly lifted her flask out of her dress and took a quick sip as she looked up at the mess. “It worked...well enough. It’s not usually that awful looking, though.” “Yuck...it’s worse than the last time we tried to map him!” Apple Bloom said, sticking out her tongue. “Are you sure? Last time it looked like somepony had chewed up and swallowed a rainbow colored quilt, then got sick,” Scootaloo added, shaking her head. “That looks like somepony ate a bowl of quilt spaghetti and worms, then drank three pints of kerosine and vodka...” I murmured. “Oh...huh...you’re right. Kinda does.” “Sooo...what’s it mean?” Sweetie Belle rocked herself out of her seat and stood, ducking under the shape hanging in the air. Reaching up, she grabbed one of the thickest cords, a pink strand with a few knots in it which was wound tightly around a red and purple strand. “Well...this is the three of us. Hrm, don’t remember seeing my own death in so many different ways before. Never mind. If that’s us, then that means…” She trailed off, following the yarn until it intersected with a dark grey knot that seemed to be composed entirely of other knots. An explosion of colors radiated from that nexus, but the center of it was only a few shades lighter than my pelt. “Heavens save us...Apple Bloom, is that really what the weave says his destiny looks like, or am I reading this wrong?” “Naw, that’s it. Look. That yellow one is his driver. We had Diamond Ace steal her file from the police department, remember?...Gosh, I never saw a pony kill so many people. What circumstance does that outcome happen?” Scootaloo gulped as she touched my driver’s line. “Lots of them. I mean, that’s my string right there,” she murmured, pointing at a purple strand that wove all through the construction from end to end. “She kills the three of us an awful lot...and almost all of those happen if Hard Boiled dies. I had to put in a compression algorithm for all the killing that mare does if he dies.” Sweetie’s horn lit, and she picked up a salmon pink bit of yarn which was tangled tightly with my own. “Whose is this? His partner? She’s dead in almost every circumstance! That or she’s almost as bad as the driver.” “Gods, there’s five or six here where the librarian goes insane and...sweet mother of Celestia, what sort of weaponry does that pony have access to?!” Scootaloo erupted, gawping at a single black string leading off of the blue that I took to represent Limerence. “What’s the black?” I asked, pointing to one of a huge number of places in the odd system where that particular color radiated off various strands. All three mares suddenly found different parts of the room to look at, and none anywhere near me. The silence stretched until I was about ready to start checking pulses when Apple Bloom finally replied, “Th-that’s everypony in Detrot bein’ dead, probably followed by extinction of life on the whole world. Ah’ve seen it a couplea times durin’ the war. Never so much in one place, though.” I stared at my own thin, grey thread. There were dozens of black stands stretching off of it, usually wrapped around a knot of some kind. “The knots are spots where I die, aren’t they?” Scootaloo nodded. “Why am I important here?” “Ah...Ah’ve got no idea,” Apple Bloom muttered, shaking her head. “Detective, ya gotta understand. The probabilities are so crazy Ah don’t even know where to begin!” “Your partner should have been tossed out of all policing duty before she finished the Academy! Everything here says she’s too unstable to last more than a week,” Scootaloo added, rubbing her hooves together, “My kinda mare, actually, considering how many people she might end up taking with her.. If she dies, though, you die. It’s here again and again. You’d be better off locking her in a room at her grandmare’s place.” “Believe me, I’ve had the thought. Too bad it wouldn’t work.” “The librarian should have died, alone and friendless,” Sweetie continued, waving towards Limerence’s section of the pattern. “All indicators say he’s incapable of working with other people except in the direst of circumstances, and then he reverts to self-interest.” “And...there’s your driver,” the pegasus explained, grabbing Taxi’s thread and giving it a rough shake that made everything jiggle in the air. “Sweet Shine should have died in childhood. Again and again, she should have died...and now, almost half the strands that pre-date the Darkening say she should have been killed trying to murder Princess Celestia and Princess Luna! She’s one of the most dangerous things left in Equestria! She had a better than twenty percent chance of success.” “That...leaves me,” I said, closing my eyes and trying to prepare myself. Apple Bloom nodded, rocking out of her seat and stretching her legs. “Ya shoulda died before ya were born and...and hundreds of times between. Yer an alcoholic. Yer crazier than a barrel of Beam-soaked monkeys. Ah...Ah don’t know what help we can be fer ya on that front. Yer still probably gonna die. Heck...look there. There’s two strands that say yer dead before ya leave this house.” “So, nothing helpful, then. I knew my odds were never good,” I grunted. “Ah didn’t say that.” Apple Bloom’s back legs clicked and tottered as she lifted herself up on them, standing in a way that reminded me of one of Taxi’s zebra exercise poses. Reaching up, she began brushing aside parts of the pattern until she revealed a pony-skull-sized wad of material. “Oooh, yikes. Girls, it happened again.” “I’ll go get the scissors,” Sweetie said with a sigh, ducking under the pattern and heading for the hallway. “What is it?” I asked. “Stupid glitch in the model,” Scootaloo grumbled. “It’s happened every time we try to model what’s been going on in Detrot.” “Are you sure it’s a glitch?” “What else could it be?” Grabbing the compacted bundle of yarn in both hooves, the pegasus gave it a little tug, but it wouldn’t budge. “Sweetie’s magic doesn’t unwind the stupid thing, either! We get them sometimes. I mean, they started showing up ever since we started modeling Detrot, years and years ago. It’s weird, because they always look the same.” As I studied the bunching of the knots and snarls, it seemed to be tickling some part of my brain that didn’t usually get much use. I’m good with hunches, but math and I have never been on friendly terms. Still, I had a hunch that something was being missed. Something important. ‘Three dimensions,’ I thought, feeling my mind start to jog down a particular line of reasoning a little faster than I could keep up. ‘This is a map of destiny in three dimensions. Or four dimensions, since it applies time. But it could be lots of different possible destinies across lots of timelines, right? So...what is that? That makes it five dimensions mapped in three? Why would one thing reappear consistently through all of the different possible maps unless it was a permanent presence in all of them? Possible maps. It’s a map. It’s the map.’ “Oh...fudge.” Scootaloo glanced up from her examination of some of the yarn. “Did you say something, Detective?” Jamming a hoof in my pocket, I pulled out my map of Detrot. “Get Sweetie Belle back in here. You need to see this.” ---- Scootaloo held the map with the Shield pylons each circled with a red marker, staring at it with her muzzle hanging open. “How did we miss this?!” she demanded, slapping the map with the back of her hoof. “This isn’t a stupid decimal out of place! That's not a glitch! That's...that's the whole freakin' city!” “You know, I said that same exact thing? Took me a while to figure it out,” I replied, and at their quizzical looks, I elaborated, “It’s like the frog in a pot of hot water. If you heat the water up quickly, the frog jumps out. Heat it up slowly, and it’ll cook. These pylons were so useful that nopony thought to take a look at a map of them, and anypony who did probably thought there was some really good reason for the distribution.” Sweetie chewed her tongue a little, thinking. “You say this thing managed to transport Canterlot to the Moon and is keeping the alicorns out?” “Among other things.” Apple Bloom pushed her cheek in beside Scootaloo’s, taking one edge of the map in her hoof. “Hrm...yah know, Ah...huh. That’s funny. Been awhile since Ah thought of that mess, but lookin’ at it, don’t it look an awful lot like Project Sixty-Six?” “I mean...a little, yeah,” the pegasus murmured, then shook her head. “We never got the power requirements for that spell matrix worked out, though. It was too big! Too crazy! It would have taken—” “—a whole city,” Sweetie finished, her eyes wide. Reaching up, she blotted a bit of perspiration off of her forehead with the back of one forelock, careful to avoid her mascara. “Somepony really did it, didn’t they? They built Project Sixty-Six…” “What is ‘Project Sixty-Six’?” I asked. “A dumb idea Ah came up with durin’ the war,” Apple Bloom replied, musingly. “Ah wanted some way to cast any spell, anythin’ Ah could come up with. A universal spell. If yah could think it, this thing coulda cast it. Didn’t work, though.” “And...why didn’t it work? You’ll excuse me if I’m a little bit behind on my magical theory courses.” “It...well...I mean, it’s really complicated, but the short answer is ‘the math’. We couldn’t do the math,” Sweetie answered, tugging at the hem of her dress. Looking up at the ‘glitch’ in the tangles of yarn, she flicked an ear in my direction. “The Crusaders’ entire research and development team with a hundred calculators couldn’t code the magic in any way that would compress it into a reasonable space. Of course, we didn’t have a whole city and more than half a century to do it in. The parts we did have were pulled from one specific thousand-year-old book of spell theory.” “Somepony a thousand years ago worked out what you couldn’t?” I asked. “Not...not somepony,” Sweetie replied, with a slightly dismissive gesture. “You and she are well acquainted by now if what you told us was all accurate. At least, you’re acquainted with her armor. A certain evil mare who terrorized Equestria and spent a millennium in Princessly time-out?” I cocked my head. “Princess Luna?” “No, darling. I’m speaking of Nightmare Moon. It was her personal grimoire,” she clarified. “It contained just one spell, a spell to remake the night sky, or at least to remake parts of it. Therefrom, supposedly, one could grant themselves anything they might desire. Considering that the Nightmare has apparently been involved in our current situation from the beginning, it seems likely this isn’t the first time somepony has been tempted by this power. That is, if everything you told us is true, of course.” “What was the name of this spellbook you used?” I asked, though I had a suspicion I already knew the answer. “Ah...yes. Well, the translation was a bit arcane, but Nightmare Moon’s grimoire was called ‘The Web of Dark Wishes’.”