//------------------------------// // Akihabara - ThatGuyVex // Story: Operation Westhorse // by PropMaster //------------------------------// Being hungry sucked. Being hungry while on the wing sucked even harder. It double-sucked. But Rainbow Dash was a trooper! Her stomach could gnaw its way out of her gut like a living blender made out of chainsaws, and she’d just grit her teeth and keep flying west! She was a mare on a missio- Grrrrrrruuurrrrgle “Uugh... freakin’... frackin’... okay! Fine! You win, ‘biology’, if that is your real name! I’ll get some food.” Rainbow Dash grumbled and proceeded to actually pay attention to what was below her for the first time in, like, at least several chapters. Magenta eyes popped a bit wider, reflecting the neon shine of a thousand colorful electrical signs posted along an expanse of towering glass and steel towers. She’d been flying over a city vast enough that you could fart the entirety of Canterlot into the middle of it and it might take up a bit of parking space. A city that big had to have food! Unless it’s residents were robots. Which was a possibility, all things considered, but nothing ventured, nothing punctured. With her customary determination Dash bent wing and dived down into the most colorful part of the neon coated city she could see, landing on a concrete sidewalk filled to the brim with enough humans to fill a Stratopolis or ten. Most of the humans alternated between google eyeing the prismatic pegasus in their midst, or politely pretending to ignore her while muttering something about “Guy Jin”, whoever the hay that was. Dash followed her keen, primal horse senses, sniffing the air to search out the nearest source of deliciousity, while her stomach still pretended it was an irate panther in both the noise it was making and its attempts to claw her insides. Just trotting down this one street already clued her into this place being a bit odd. It looked like every ten feet some excruciatingly colorful cartoon character with eyes bigger than her head was plastered on walls, on billboards, on street posts, most of them either adorable enough to make less awesome ponies pause and squee (which Dash did not do, and there’s no photo evidence to the contrary!...That she knows of) or in revealing outfits that looked about as comfortable to wear as rubber bands over one’s junk. Not in a million years would Dash ever be caught, dead or alive, in such a skimpy outfit! Nope! Wasn’t going to happen. Not to this Easthorse! Finally finding the source of the tummylicious food smells Dash trotted into an open front restaurant/bar type place where a human dude was serving up bowls of mouth watering noodles. Sure some of the bowls had meat in them, but others had veggies, and Dash was entranced enough by food delirium to set aside her prejudices. Plopping herself onto a seat at the bar, much to the confused yet completely polite nod of the soup dude, Dash said, “Soup! No meat.” Hunger was a universal language, as was pleading horse noises, so in short order Dash had a steaming bowl of noodles and soup, thick with crunchy veggies. She proceeded to destroy the meal with the kind of vengeance usually reserved for mortal foes. It was brutal. And filling. Dash’s ravenous appetite demanded more, and the human running the counter provided. About four bowls later Dash was blissfully enjoying the afterglow when the man slapped something on the counter in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked, looking at the chicken scrawl on the paper, which she had a sneaking feeling involved numbers. The human fellow held out one of his hairless hand things with too many digits. “Okane, kudasai.” “Oakwhat?” At Dash’s confused look the dude pointed at other people at the bar who provided slips of paper to wave about, and Dash suddenly understood that while hunger was a universal language... so was money. “Eeeeeh...heheh...sooooo, I don’t suppose we could call this one a freebie?” Wow, human faces could get seriously red when they were pissed off. The veins were pretty impressive too. Before things degenerated into violence, however, an adorable female human with pigtails who’d been seated at the bar nearby proceeded to get into a swift and incomprehensible argument with the noodle soup dude. In the span of an eyeblink Dash found herself being ushered out by the small human girl, who knelt down to speak with Dash eye to eye. “Hello! I’m Miki! Will you help me?” “Hey! Somebody who speaks horse words! Sweetness. Uh, wait, Mickey? That sounds like somebody familiar. Whatever, not important. Um, you need help?” Miki bounced her head like a bobble, pigtails flying. “Yes! You are just what the cafe needs. I helped you with Goro, so can you please, please, please help me!?” Dash wasn’t exactly on a schedule, and Miki had just calmed the angry noodle dude down, so she gave a shrug. “Fair’s fair. I ain’t in a rush. Whaddya need?” “The cafe needs lots of business this week to make rent. Be our special attraction! You’re super cute and nobody in town has done a pony theme yet! It’ll be perfect! We even have an outfit that’s just the right size!” “Outfit?” Dash asked with a sinking feeling, a feeling that grew to titanic proportions as Miki produced a photo of herself in a dress that looked as if Rarity had manifested the power to puke fabulous frills and lace onto a person and tighten it around a skirt just short enough to suggest ideas that didn’t belong in a TV-Y rated situation. “Yeeeeeah, I, uh, you know I’d love to help out but I just forgot I got a train wreck I got to attend elsewhere. SUPER important Austraeoh junk. Sooooo-” Miki pouted. She put on the blubbery eyes. It was... incredibly annoying in its effectiveness. “Just one day! I’ll buy you more ramen.” Assuming that ramen was the delicious concoction of noodle soup she’d just enjoyed too much of, Dash’s resistance was crumbling. With a final sigh she nodded, “Fine. One day only, with ramen at the end! Ugh, can’t believe I’m agreeing to this. This is so not my thing...” Four hours later... “Okaerinasai, goshujin-sama! Or in horse-speak, later dudes!” Dash cried with enthusiastic glee, totally in character as she waved goodbye to the last set of customers at the Blueberry Maid Cafe. Normally it was more traditional to bow to the customers as they left, but Dash was the “Bokukko”, or “tomboy” persona of the maid lineup, so she was expected to be more outgoing a rough around the edges. Good thing too, because there was no way she was going to pull off any of the other maid types. Like, Miki did the whole “Dojikko” schickt, which near as Dash could tell meant she paid to fall flat on her face and bump into things. Dudes seemed to didg the clumsy chick. Then there were the “Tsundere” types, who every time Dash saw one of those maids in action her mind went straight to Roarke. In a maid outfit. With those short skirts riding up juuuuuust enough... “Dassshuuu-chan!” Miki bounced up to her like a pig-tailed dolphin, somehow going from faux clumsy to absurdly graceful in the span of an eyeblink. “Ara? Why is your nose bleeding?” “Wha!?” Dash wiped her nose, along with thoughts of Roarke and garter belts. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Uh, so I’m having a blast here, which shocks me beyond belief, but how much longer am I gonna be wearing this?” She gestured at the frilly get up that surprisingly fit her like a snug glove, with a tastefully short train and matching socks that Dash was thinking about asking to keep because the black and magenta striping really did match her eyes and... and she was channeling Rarity, which disturbed her in ways she didn’t care to think too hard about. She could’ve done without the lacey as hell hat, and Miki insisted her mane looked good in a ponytail, but that just seemed redundant on an actual pony. Miki smiled, a touch of sadness in it, “Hai, you brought in more business in four hours then we get in a week! I promised you ramen before you left, so I’ll pay up. Shift is over in just half an hour. Meet you there?” “You know it! Guess I’ll get out of this froo-froo costume.” She zipped back into the changing room, pausing only to wave to some of the other customers, and then proceeded to strip out of the maid outfit in front of one of the changing room mirrors. As she did so she slowed down, eyeing herself in the mirror, and after glancing around to make sure none were looking... she turned back to the mirror with what Dash surmised was a seductive pose. “So, uh, Roarke, I see you’ve got a lot of blood on you from, like, conquering the Goblin Kingdoms or some junk. Shall I... polish you off?” She drifted closer to the mirror, batting her eyelashes and running a hoof over the edges of her skirt, “I know all sorts of ways to serve you, goshujin-sama.” Giving the mirror a kiss she murmured, “And once I’ve finished polishing you, you can polish me. Mmm, it may take all night. But plenty of time, my sweet, plenty of ti-” “Dash-chan? You still in here?” Miki asked, poking her head through the door. She spotted a frozen statue of a pegasus, mid-kiss upon her own reflection. “What are you doing?” Miki’s head titled a tick, eyes blinking with shining innocence. “Umm... making out with myself?” “For half an hour?” “I’ve been in here that long!?” About ten minutes later she was chowing down on her second bowl of noodles, Miki sitting at the bar next to her, glancing at her prismatic companion curiously. “Dash-kun, may I ask something?” Face going into full blush-mode, Dash hid half-way behind her ramen bowl and said, “Shoot.” “Who is Roarke?” “...Someone I really miss.” “Oh.” Miki was silent for a second, then smiled encouragingly, “I hope you get to see them again.” Dash stared into her soup, unblinking. “You and me both.” “When you do, I’m sure she’ll like seeing you in a maid outfit. Super cute!” Miki said, giggling and patting Dash on the head. “Ugh, forget you ever saw that. Scrub it from your mind! It will never happen again!” Miki hid her mouth as she kept laughing, “You ever come back this way then feel free to drop by the cafe anytime! You are a natural at being a maid! Amazing even!” Dash, face blazing like a cherry, slurped the last of her soup and stepped away from the bar, turning to give Miki a quick, semi-formal bow. “Well, as usual wrong A-word, but I’ll take it. This was more fun than I thought it’d be. Keep it real Miki-chan.” Before she could do anything else she found herself being subjected to a crushing hug, almost making her spit up her soup. “Ja ne, Dash-chan.” “Yeah, check ya later, maid-girl.” Dash, once free of the fierce bear-hug, trotted back out into the shining Akihabara evening, and took to the air, a slip of blue in an ocean of neon. With a full belly and a good mood stretching her wings out to catch the wind, Dash banked towards the setting sun and flew west.