//------------------------------//
// All Bottled Up 
// Story: A Dream 
// by totallynotabrony 
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	Cold-calling Santa Claus was both a pun and also a thing I could do in my position as chief naughty/nice arbiter.
Unfortunately, I had to go through his secretary.
Wachowski, who I’d nicknamed the North Pole because I’m still struggling with this Christmas pun thing, was not pleased to hear from me.
“What?  Speak up!  You’re barely audible,” Wachowski said.  “Is there something wrong with your connection?”
I was calling from Tin Mare’s comms suite.  “I’ll agree that the sound quality is terrible, but the problem isn’t on my end,” I said.  “You’re insulting my airplane.”
“Hella,” Tin Mare privately agreed.
“It’s probably the inter-universe FTL voice manipulator,” I said.  “I told you that you can’t restrict the connection, no matter what you think you need for bandwidth.”
“Which one of us has more alternate-universe experience?” Wachowski argued.
“Which one of us is so good at building things that Santa himself asked him to build a naughty/nice list from scratch because this universe is new and doesn’t have one in place?” I said.  “And speaking of that, get the big man on the phone.”
I’d been trying to find a serial killer, which was proving difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that I was reduced to asking for help.
“Can’t,” Wachowski replied.
“Why not?”
“Because I already know what you’re calling about and Santa doesn’t do homicide investigations.”
“How did you know what I was calling - oh right, Santa with the whole ‘he sees if you’ve been bad or good’ thing.  Well, then why can’t he just tell me who the killer is?”
“We both know that isn’t how it works.”
Of course not.  Magic is really goddamned frustrating sometimes.  The limits seem unlimited until you actually find a limit, and then it’s infuriating to search for an arbitrary workaround.  Magic, you see, doesn’t obey natural laws.  Shit doesn’t make sense.
“Well, thanks for nothing,” I said.
“Hey, you too,” Wachowski shot back.  We both hung up.
I let out an extended sigh.  Tin Mare said, “The tequila is on ice.”
“Thanks.”  I opened the cooler and poured myself a glass.  It helped.
After Heaven, Hell, and Starlight Glimmer had teamed up to kill me, it took an even more powerful force to bring me back.  Santa Claus, despite being fictional, still had power because people believed in him.  As a result, by selling my soul to Santa, I had been restored to at least some fraction of my former glory.
Oh, but of course I had plans to change that.
In the meantime, however, I still kind of had to do my job.  As I had told Twilight, ideally we could reduce the naughty list to zero.  Reforming, imprisoning, or killing, I wasn’t really particular.
I had even put “naughty” and “nice” on each of my front hooves with permanent marker, so I could stamp somebody with either one, should that be required.  It hadn’t yet.  Plus, I didn’t have enough room to write the whole word, so I abbreviated.  Which unfortunately left me with just N on each hoof.
It was still a great excuse to punch people in the face, though with me trying to be nicer, it hadn’t come up very often.
At least I still had the sweet red and white pimp coat.
I drank myself into a stupor that night.  Fortunately, nothing bad happened that I should have been lucid for, like another murder.
That would a perfect time for irony to strike, but I’m being serious.  It was a good day.  
The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, Pinkie and Fluttershy were not having public sex, Sir Win was out riding his bicycle, Trixie and Daring were off on an adventure, and it was in general just a really good day.  So good, in fact, that the girls decided to go to Manehattan to visit an escape room.
I was not invited, because I have a problem playing by the rules, according to Twilight.  Okay, but usually because they’re stupid.
At any rate, escape rooms seemed kind of pointless.  If you have to escape, you’re doing it wrong.  If you have to look for clues to facilitate solving puzzles to escape, you’re doing it wrong.  If you have no other options to get through a door except unlocking it with a key, you’re doing it wrong.
Maybe I’m biased because I carry breach-and-clear tools with me wherever I go.  Endless bag of toys, bitches.
So anyway, when the girls went to Manehattan, they would leave their secondary cohorts at home.  Spike would be left at the library.  As usual, Guinness would stay with Skyla, because Rainbow wasn’t around.  I guessed the Coloraturas would keep to themselves.
Coloratura’s twin sister had recently come to live with her.  I didn’t know much about her except that she wasn’t nearly as interesting or important as Coloratura despite looking almost exactly alike.  I hadn’t bothered to learn her name and just treated her like another Coloratura.
But...going with the group to Manehattan and challenging inanimate rooms to battles of wits could be a good opportunity to show that I’d changed.  Not a fun opportunity, but this wasn’t really about me.
Still, I thought there might be more important things we could be doing.  Like checking in on that Las Pegasus casino that we’d eminent domain’d a while back.  As far as I knew, the Flim Flam Brothers were still running it after Columbia, their presidential candidate, had not become president.
Or we could be investigating the new, mobile farmers’ market that had rolled into town on a local train.  It had a lot of fruits and vegetables, natural stuff, but a few home-crafted items and goodies as well.  Lots of grapes, for some reason.
Or we could be checking in on that new annex of Equestria, Yakyakistan, which had been renamed Silent Hill and which Twilight had been appointed governor of, a duty she had never actually done.
Instead, what we ended up doing was searching for a kidnapper.
Shortly after the girls had left, Shining Armor and Princess Cadance teleported in, frantic.
“Where’s Twilight?!” Shining demanded of me as the two of them burst into the library.
I was dusting the small snow globe collection on the shelf.  “They left for Manehattan.  Why?”
“Where in Manehattan?” Shining pressed.  “Come on, this is life or death!”
“It’s called Manehattan Escapes.  I don’t know where it is.  What is life and death?  Can I help?”
“Help?!” shouted Cadance.  “Are you serious?  Why would we trust you with finding Flurry Heart?!”
“...because I have an extensive surveillance network, lots of resources, and a soft spot for kids?”
Shining stared at me.  “You have to be joking.  A mass-murdering psychopath like you has a soft spot for kids.”
“First of all, I take no pleasure in killing, I just happen to do it a lot.  Second of all, I’m doing my best to be a nicer guy.  Thirdly, name one kid I’ve ever hurt.”
They couldn’t.
“That’s what I thought.  So let me help, or else.”
Probably shouldn’t have said that last part.  Old habits die hard.  But as the two of them swelled with rage, I quickly changed tactics.
“By which I mean to say, or else Flurry won’t be getting all the help she deserves.”
They reluctantly agreed.  I took them over to my command center and picked up the phone.
“Santa Claus’ office.”
“Hey Wachowski, I need an APB on a kidnapped kid.”
“Santa Claus doesn’t do missing persons cases,” Wachowski snapped.
“What happened to ‘He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake?’”
“That’s when, not where.  Stop bothering me.”  I heard a click, followed by the dial tone.
I decided to put Wachowski on the naughty list.  If nothing else, it would finally get Santa’s attention.
At any rate, it looked like I was going to have to help myself.  I activated the satellite terminal and pulled up the imagery from space.  “Okay, so when was the last time you saw Flurry?”
“We put her down for a nap this morning, and when we came back, she was gone,” said Cadance.
I pulled up their residence on the overhead feed.  “Nothing to it.  We’ll just see where she went.”
“She was kidnapped,” Shining insisted.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.  You know what a handful she was when she was born.  She probably just got out.”
I immediately ate those words when a pony in a mask snuck up to the window, opened it, and carried Flurry’s baby basket away.  “Shit.”
I tracked the unknown figure as he made his way into the nearby forest, where the trees blocked the view.
I touched the comms panel on the side.  “Tin Mare, get warmed up.  We’ve got a job.  I’m passing you a video.”
“Hella.”
We heard her engines begin turning outside.  I stood up from the console.  “Get to the chopper.  We’re going to go after them.”
Shining and Cadance didn’t waste any time.  I was about to follow them, when I saw something else on the screen.  Turning back, I watched the recording of a pony wearing a cape inspecting the window where Flurry had been snatched.  After a moment, they moved away in the same direction as the kidnapper.
If I didn’t know better, I would think…
I shook my head and got going.