Chapter 27
Cobblestone streets, Kelso could hardly keep her eyes off them, and it wasn’t for the fact that she though they were pretty. Kelso was tired, she could barely keep her eyes open, and she wanted so badly to sleep. Instead, she smacked herself across her face to cure her drowsiness. This was a problem, to be this tired; several hours had to have passed. They had to be well into the night, and soon enough it would be morning.
When morning came, it would be back to work for the employees of the Ghastly Gorge Industrial Complex. If they were still hanging about in the room containing the psionic resonator on the complex’s fifth sublevel when the employees came in for work...
Kelso didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think about how tired she was. Instead, she focused on the actual memory. Walking down the street was a single pony, cheval, by the looks of him. He was tall, compared to an equestrian pegasus, he had a grey coat and was clad in a brown overcoat and hat. The more they looked at him, the more they were sure. This cheval was no one that looked even at all familiar to any of the passive observers.
‘Psst!’ came an odd sound from seemingly nowhere in particular.
The cheval stopped and looked around. In the memory, it was late in the evening, the street lamps had already been lit, and as he looked around at his surroundings, he found nothing. Kelso and company couldn’t tell anything about the area either, nothing short of the obvious anyway. Of the few people that were out and about, which weren’t many, all of them had wings. Kelso figured that they had to be in La Seine, the capital city of the Cheval Fourth Republic.
They also had to figure that this was where Twilight Sparkle had run off to; they certainly weren’t here reliving the memory of some random cheval on the street that they had not seen before in a previous memory.
‘Psst!’ came the noise again. The cheval turned his head and looked down an alleyway to discover that a cloaked figure was waving for him to come over to them. The cheval cocked his head in curiosity, and stepped forward into the alley and began to walk towards the cloaked figure.
‘Oh buddy, you’re making a big mistake!’ Hopely said as she turned to look at the cloaked figure, taking a guess who she thought it was.
‘And they say the cheval are smart’, the cloaked figure said, certainly not disappointing Hopely’s expectations in the least bit.
‘Quoi?’ the cheval asked, cocking his head to the left and raising an eyebrow in confusion.
‘Poor sod’, Viola said shaking her head. ‘He’s got no sense at all’.
The cloaked figure leapt at the cheval, tackling him to the ground, and with a quick flash of the cloak, there was a gun to his head. The cloaked figure’s hood fell back and relieved none other than Twilight Sparkle, standing over her unsuspecting victim and pinning him to the ground. ‘I know you understand me, cheval, don’t play dumb with me’, she in a harsh whisper that was only just loud enough for the passive observers to hear.
‘Y... yes’, the cheval said nodding his head in affirmation, taking care to look as unthreatening as possible, lest his assailant shoot him dead.
‘Good!’ Twilight said, an insincere smile forming on her face. ‘Get up, empty your pockets!’ she commanded as she rose to her hooves, not taking her revolver off him for a single moment.
The cheval wasted no time, and quickly emptied his pockets of a wallet, a chequebook, a gold pocket watch, and several coins of varying denominations, which in total added up to sixty eight centime, a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter. Twilight picked up the variously assorted goods that she had taken for herself and smiled with even more insincerity than she had the last time. She opened the pack of cigarettes and pulled one from the box, placing it between her lips and lighting up. She took a long drag on the cigarette before blowing the smoke into the cheval’s face. ‘Thank you’, she said with a sort of false sweetness, before bashing him over the head with the grip of her revolver, and knocking him out cold. Twilight enveloped him in her telekinesis and dragged him back further into the alleyway before tossing him into a pile of rubbish bins, chuckling slightly as she examined her handiwork. She took another drag on the cigarette before flicking it off into the alley, discarding it without a second thought. This was Twilight Sparkle now, guilty of armed robbery, assault, and littering.
It was safe to say, that the Tome of Alhazred had poisoned her mind completely.
...
With a hiss of steam and a roaring whistle from a locomotive, the passive observers found themselves in the middle of a train station, a highly fancy and ornate building with marble floors, above them were several large crystalline chandeliers, lit the room. The room was filled with noise as the clip clop of hooves continued to strike the marble floor.
Twilight Sparkle was easy to pick out among the crowd, even with her cloak on. Her coat colour stuck out among the earth tones of the cheval, as she walked she continued to garner a number of strange looks, she was most definitely the odd one out here, She turned her head towards one of the cheval on lookers and called out to them. ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ she cried out.
The cheval onlookers all turned away, and Twilight went back to her business. She walked up to the ticket counter, and took a look at the cheval mare behind the glass.
The cheval mare looked incredibly bored with her job, and almost didn’t noticed Twilight, and wouldn’t have had the unicorn mare not cleared her throat. Twilight pulled the Tome of Alhazred out from her saddlebag and opened it up. She read from the book for a moment before looking back up at the mare behind the glass. ‘Bon après-midi, un billet pour Trotterdam s'il vous plaît’, Twilight said, pronouncing the cheval language perfectly, surprising the mare behind the counter.
The mare handed over a ticket without saying anything, and Twilight gladly took it. ‘Such a useful little spell!’ Twilight proclaimed as she closed the Tome of Alhazred and returned it to her bag.
‘What was that about?’ Dizzy asked.
‘Say what you will about this magic nonsense’, Sparky said. ‘That book has power’.
Kelso nodded her head in agreement, and the passive observers broke out into a brisk trot after the rogue unicorn mare, lest they lose her in the crowd. Was that even possible? This was Twilight Sparkle’s memory after all, how far could they really wander from her? Kelso didn’t know, but she didn’t particularly have any inclination to find out either she was far too interested in what she had come here to do.
They caught up with Twilight as she showed her ticket to a conductor, who immediately pointed her to the boarding platform for her train. Twilight Sparkle had booked a seat on the Evening Express between La Seine, Cheval Fourth Republic and Trotterdam, Kingdom of the Nederlands.
‘Sparky?’ Dizzy asked as she took notice of the sign indicating where the train was going. ‘Didn’t the Trotterdam city council pass a law that prohibits your grandmother and any of her descendants from ever setting hoof inside the city?’
‘Yes’, Sparky said with a sigh. ‘Completely ruined my holiday plans for next summer’.
They followed Twilight Sparkle onto the train, and into a rear compartment. Which Twilight had taken for her own, she sat down in a seat and pulled the Tome of Alhazred out of her saddlebags and opened it up and began to read from it. ‘Heh’, Twilight said with a small chuckle. ‘It’s a good thing Vinyl Scratch isn’t here, she’d probably burn down the whole fucking town again’, she added out loud to no one in particular. Twilight suddenly looked over to her saddlebags and opened them up; pulling the pack of cigarettes that she had stolen from the poor sod on the street. She opened the box and pulled out a single cigarette, placing it between her lips, she took the lighter and lit the cigarette, taking a long drag from it and blowing the smoke into the air without a second thought.
‘Doesn’t she know that’s unhealthy?’ Dizzy asked, frowning as she watched Twilight take another drag from the cigarette, tapping the ashes into an ash tray built into the armrest.
‘Probably so, probably doesn’t care either’, Hopely said with a shrug.
The door suddenly flashed open and then shut again as someone else entered the compartment. Twilight looked up and gave the newcomer an annoyed look. A task that was either very brave, or very stupid, considering who had just walked into the room. It was a schäferhund, seemingly of the officer type, considering his apparel. He was wearing a schirmmütze cap, clad in a storm harness with two submachine guns clipped in. Hidden in dark grey fur was two small, beady eyes, and they had not taken their gaze of the sole unicorn pony (not counting Sparky and Dizzy) in the room.
‘I hope you don’t mind’, the schäferhund said in thickly accented wallish. ‘Everywhere else is full’.
‘I guess I don’t have much of a choice, do I?’ Twilight said with a smirk as she took another drag on her cigarette, tapping the ashes into the ashtray, she pointed towards the seat across from her and gestured for the schäferhund to sit. ‘What are you, a soldier?’ she asked mockingly as she looked him over
‘I am schäferhund; we are all soldiers’, the schäferhund said simply, not picking up on the fact that Twilight had just insulted him. ‘I am retired from active service though, have been since the end of the Hispaña Civil War’.
‘Oh?’ Twilight asked taking what seemed to be a sincere interest in the schäferhund’s story.
‘Ja’, the schäferhund said with a nod. ‘I was a hauptfeldwebel in the Legion Adler. We fought on the side of the nationalists; we came close to winning to, and were it not for the cheval intervention...’
‘You don’t like the cheval, do you?’ Twilight asked as she finished her cigarette, rubbing it into the ashtray to extinguish it.
‘I am schäferhund, we have been at odds with the cheval for more than two hundred years...’ the schäferhund said simply.
Twilight offered him a small smirk. ‘I have no love for the cheval either... well, that’s not entirely true, I do have a certain fondness of their cigarettes. Tell me though if you aren’t a soldier anymore, than what do you do walking around with all that?’ Twilight asked, as she pointed towards the schäferhund’s weapons.
‘I am schäferhund, we are always armed’, the schäferhund said with a smirk, but he could tell what she was trying to get at. ‘I am a gunsmith, fully licensed by Rijnmetall, Sauser, Sturm, and Vollmer Maschinenfabrik, to produce their weapons for clients outside of Bundesrepublik Schäferhund. Though I keep my operations restricted to Trotterdam, most of my weapons end up being traded on the black market... leading to huge profits for both myself and the corporations’, the schäferhund said with a small smile.
‘And this doesn’t bother you?’ Twilight asked.
‘Not at all’, the schäferhund said. ‘Everything I do... even selling on a foreign black market, is completely legal in Bundesrepublik corporate law’.
‘Hmm’, Twilight said, curling her lips into an eerie smile. ‘I like you already Mr...?’
‘Heinrich,’ the schäferhund said simply. ‘Heinrich Büchsenmacher’.
‘I’m Twilight Sparkle’, Twilight said with a smile. Using her telekinesis, she pulled another cigarette out of her pack, and then offered one to Heinrich. ‘Cigarette?’ she asked.
‘Ja, danke’, Heinrich said with a smile. Twilight got up from her seat and crossed the compartment and took up a new seat next to the schäferhund, she pulled a second cigarette out of the box and passed it over to him, lighting both of them at the same time with her lighter. Twilight took a drag from the cigarette and blew the smoke softly into Heinrich’s face.
‘I think you and I... are going to get along quite well’, Twilight said with a grin. The two of them let out a small chuckle, and smoked their cigarettes in peace.