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// Watermark 
// Story: More Dreams 
// by totallynotabrony 
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	The serial killer had struck again.
I wish I’d been surprised, but no, I’d seen this coming.
And it was totally pissing off Twilight.
She tried to say that the modus operandi of the last death didn’t fit this one, but really, who else could it be?  Serial killers weren’t really a thing in Equestria.  Usually, if there was death and destruction, it was for a reason.  Equestrian villains were nice like that.
Down in the morgue at the hospital, we examined the latest body.  It was a pegasus stallion.
“His name was Sightseer,” said the morgue pony, raising his voice over my electric guitar.
I nodded thoughtfully.  “Have you identified the cause of death, or did he just bleed out from a thousand cuts?”
The body was absolutely covered in squiggly lines cut into the skin.
“Probably that, yeah,” said the morgue pony.
“Well, there’s victim number two,” I said.  “I told you so, Twilight.”
“I didn’t explicitly doubt you!” she protested.  “You don’t get to say ‘I told you so’ if I never disagreed with you in the first place!”
She had to shout above the guitar.
I kept playing.  It helped me think of new ways to needle her.  Yeah, I was still trying to be a nicer guy, but Twilight was always an exception.  She would be suspicious if I didn’t.
“We could just pack up and move,” I said.  “I’m sure there are other, bigger libraries where you could live and work in towns that don’t get half the monster attacks.”
“I can’t just move away from Ponyville!” Twilight protested.  “We should find this killer.”
“Okay, but you just set yourself up for another I told you so.”
“You can’t preempt that!  That’s not how it works!”
“Oh, and you’re the expert on social interaction?”
“I’m an expert on friendship, as certified by the ruler of Equestria.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I gave the amp an extra kick, because I knew she was about to scream at me and I’d rather not hear it.
I turned my mind back to the body on the table.  Did those squiggles look like code?  Some sort of letters?
“Hey, could you clean this up?” I asked the morgue pony.
“Sure.”  He fetched a hose and within a few minutes had washed off the dried blood.  Twilight, distracted by what had been revealed, leaned closer.
“Those look like runes,” I said.  “Some sort of foreign language, or maybe an ancient one lost to time?  Twilight, what does it say?”
“What, you just assume I can read any highly complex prehistoric language?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
She grumbled, not sure if that was a compliment or if I was taking her for granted.  Either way, she read it.  However, “It’s gibberish.  The runes are real, but whoever carved them isn’t familiar with the language.”
“Any idea what they were trying to do?”
Twilight shook her head.  “It’s not arranged properly for a spell, or for spelling words.”
“I get the feeling that it’ll change soon, though.  Want to bet?  Next body - nah, I’ll give them one.  The body after next will have a full set of comprehensible runes.”
“What do you mean ‘the body after next?’  We’ve got to stop whoever is doing this!”
“Twilight, if I could, don’t you think I would have?”
She paused, her mouth dropping open.  “It...it’s that serious?”
I said nothing and kept playing.  Yes, it was that serious.  I hadn’t been able to glean enough clues from the first murder to catch the killer.  I had a bad feeling that this one would also come up empty.  Whoever was doing this was good.  The best.
Well no, not better than me, but I had never tried to be stealthy about it, though, so it wasn’t really a fair comparison.
Having seen the body, we left the morgue.  I gave the morgue pony a candy cane on the way out.  Despite gaining pleasure from trolling Twilight, I was genuinely trying to be nicer to everyone else.
Except that guy hitting on some girl in the waiting room.
He’d been trying to put the moves on some mare that was clearly pregnant.  Based on the looks she’d been giving him, she wasn’t interested.  Despite that, he was sitting on the chair next to her, scooting ever closer and seriously infringing on personal space.
I stood there playing guitar.
It only took him a moment to notice.  Probably because I was standing between them infringing on personal space.
“Do you mind?” he said.
“I do.  That’s why I’m here.  Just trying to do anything a concerned citizen would and be a nice guy.”
“By getting in the way of me and this girl?”
“Cockblocking you, yes.”
“Why?”
“I’ve blocked more cock than the inventor of chicken wire.  You can call me the cockblockerino.  It’s on my business card.”
He didn’t believe me, so I showed him my business card.