Flotsam’s eyes opened to near total darkness. The air was warm and heavy with the scent of his evening. The lingering stars of the early dawn showed as a washed out gray through the window, and the sound of his breathing was matched by that of Harpoon’s.
They laid in each others’ grip. He was awake and she was not. Flotsam was in no rush to change this; he almost didn’t leave the bed at all. But he did, slowly extricating himself from the pegasus’ grip and pulled himself slowly to the edge of the bed. Flotsam felt rested as anything, despite the scant few hours that had been left for sleeping. He felt rested and calm and even clear-headed on a level that was unfamiliar to him, as if for a first time he were a still body of water, with perfect reflections of above and perfect visibility of below. The waves slept like the mare.
The room was not cold, but felt that way on Flotsam’s so-recently indulged senses. His actions stirred the air a little and the musky air stirred him a little in turn.
He stared at the sleeping pegasus a few minutes more, less attaching significance or impression to any of it than just letting it work its way into him, the moments of the hear and now becoming memories of a time and place. He traced the detail of her body in the wan light, her sleeping features and the bed they’d shared. These would be well-founded memories, Flotsam decided. He would remember the prickle of sweat and the catch of their breathing, all of it. If he was going to have precious little else, he was going to have this.
The blackened light of his horn barely registered in the grayed starlight; Flotsam reached out and, finding something appropriate, brought it back. There was a slight shift in the air as the weapon appeared, hovering silent and ready in Flotsam’s grip. It whirled quick, baton-like arcs in his hold.
Harpoon’s cudgel. Flotsam had seen it in Charming Booty’s keeping, she’d said Harpoon had thought it lost, keeping it herself only for what Flotsam considered it to be the thrill of a secret. Charming Booty could go on bluffing, that didn’t matter. This belonged to Harpoon though, and for Flotsam it felt an appropriate gesture to return it to her.
Hers... and perhaps just a little more, too. Drawing a little deeper on his magic — it felt more natural now, manipulating the sombre stone — Flotsam studded the weapon with the tiniest seeds of black stone. They spread like frost on glass, covering the head of the weapon and reaching a ways down the heft of it, before Flotsam cut the flow of power.
Harpoon moaned softly and reached into the empty side of the bed. Flotsam set the cudgel on a dresser, for her to find.
“Everything changes a little bit,” he mused. He gathered up his tricorn cap, stole from the room and from the Turncoat, and went skulking about in the false dawn’s light.
What he found was a very lazy mugging. By way of one of the smaller waterfront alleys, two ponies were working over a third, an expression that usually suggests violence but here involved a bored and lacklustre prodding, the sort employed when tentatively checking if something had gone off or not. This was perhaps due to the third pony’s ignorance about the exciting economic prospect of being a victim, instead; he was in a stupor, grunting more from habit than pain as the feeble prods touched him.
They froze up as Flotsam approached a nearby junction of backways. “Don’t mind me,” he said, dipping his hat slightly in friendly salute, “I’m just passing through.”
“Just passing through?” said the one dispirited mugger, turning to his cohort, perhaps, for a better appraising of the words uttered. “Just passing through?”
The mugger prodder shared in the exchange, then was quick to prod his second pony that morning and raise his voice needlessly. “Ah!” he intoned, “a vigilante. Of the night! Has come to. Do justice on...” there was a furtive glance to a hoof’d scrap of paper, “...justice on our villainous hides. Let’s, leg it!”
The duo made a legging-it motion but, seeing any and all lack of Flotsam’s supposed heroic aggression, got stuck in place doing a sort of furiously suggestive wiggle.
“No, no,” said Flotsam cheerfully. “I’m hardly going to interfere in your business. Really, don’t mind me.” He made for the junction at a jaunty clip.
“Wait!” called mugger prodder the second, a higher pitch coming into his voice. “You’re not going to come rescue this pony here, this poor pony fallen afoul of foul pilfering?”
“No?”
The aforementioned pony falling afoul of foul pilfering sat up, a tone of affront in his gruff voice. “Doesn’t my being viciously beaten and robbed of my worldly possessions offend your senses of virtue and justice?”
“I suppose it does,” mused Flotsam, “A little. But it’s hardly right for me to step in and start dictating to Riváplutians how to live their Riváplut lives. Far as I know, they might be the lawful authority and you the foul pony pilferer.”
“Well they’re not,” huffed the mug proddee in a sulk. Stirring, he cried, “Look, they’re getting away!”
The supposed getting away had taken the muggers two steps further, whereby they continued with their running away any minute now pantomime.
“We couldn’t persuade you to just, you know, jump in for the sake of the thing, could we?” said the higher pitched mugger. “Run down this alley after us, like? Only, it’s gone a bit ploin-shaped here, I think we’re all in agreement on that, and makes things go much easier for us if things work out naturally, as it were.”
Flotsam frowned. “But I’m going this way,” he said, gesturing the junction.
“Aw, blast it,” cursed the supposed victim, pulling himself to his hooves. “I tolds youse lot we needed them acting classes. Jump ‘im, boys!”
“Oh,” said Flotsam, surprised but not in the least worried, catching an assailant from above by way of his back hooves, their stomach and a pained groan, “here we go.”
A thrown hook took Flotsam straight in the jaw, jarring his head aside. He swung back a reply of his own, catching them with a hit that bowled the pony over on the cobbled ground. Flotsam was frowning. That had stung.
More of the gang were surging up from the alley the three ponies in need of acting classes had been so eager to lead Flotsam down, no doubt where they would have had him surrounded in tight quarters. Well, no time like the present to oblige a stranger a kindness.
Flotsam hefted the stunned foe towards the oncoming pack and charged. Two were dropped under the flailing weight of their compatriot, and three more rushed on. Flotsam checked the first with his shoulder, driving that mugger off his course and so crashing headlong into a water barrel; a sure way to dampen one’s spirits.
The second Flotsam couldn’t tackle; he ducked a whirling buck, bringing his shoulders up hard as he could into that pony’s breastbone. Wrapping a hoof around his opponent’s and having him suitably cross-mounted Flotsam jumped, twisted and pulled hard.
The result was Flotsam’s shoulder had the full weight of Flotsam and foe falling down to drive it home.
“AAaaiiiii!” the mugger screamed, curling up and gasping for breath. “Rib! He bust me rib!”
The third pony bowled Flotsam over. He grappled blindly and three more piled on.
“A proper Riváplut welcome’s in order, boys!” On his back, it was all Flotsam could do to keep his face shielded as blows rained down. A stomp to his gut knocked the breath from him and set him howling with pain.
A second stomp met magical light and a down payment of pain. In an instant ponies were slammed to the stones and crushed flat. Not so literally flat as to be an act of horror and require chalk outlines that climbed the walls, but flat enough to keep muggers’ heads and hooves pressed flat. They grumbled and grunted, unable to squeeze words passed their lips.
“This is where things get outright unfair,” Flotsam confessed, slurring a little on the words as he pulled himself upright. He wobbled unevenly towards Mr. Stompy and peeled back the magic from the mugger’s face
“One minute you’re getting badly enacted street entertainment...” Flotsam looked Mr. Stompy in his panic-struck eyes, then kicked him a vicious blow to the side of the head. He rolled that stricken pony away with a heave and lumbered to the next.
“The next, this.. Life takes these little turns,” he mused aloud, bruised jaw and swelling lips making his words less than eloquent to hear. The remaining muggers were pinned and helpless beneath him, struggling in vain against a force Flotsam fully was aware could crush ships into compact little spheres of mangled debris. “Siren’s tits, but this really is unfair, isn’t it?”
He set the next pony free entirely, sidestepped a desperate retaliatory swipe and two seconds later had the mugger up against the wall, slamming him two, three, four times, until he fell in a limp, unresisting daze at Flotsam’s hooves.
“These little turns,” he said again, stalking the subdued row of struggling ponies. “Life shakes you around, leaves you open to questions of who you are. What to do. What you want. What you want to do. Am I making sense?”
He peeled back the magic from another mugger, dragged him by his hooves and, spinning around, flung him out to the open street. “Make a choice!” Flotsam roared. “Run away, or come and fight me!”
The mugger rushed to his hooves. A quick glance to his friends, to Flotsam, to the prospect of freedom...
“There he goes,” Flotsam sighed. “Honour among thieves, eh? So, these little turns...” He prowled the remaining three muggers, his original three bad actors. “You get all these choices, don’t you find? And you’re not even sure what they mean, what the context is or what the choices are. But you use them, best you can, to make sense of those questions. All those...” Flotsam waved a hoof vaguely, “all those identity ones. It’s kind of my deal, I know.”
He peeled back the restraining magic and planted a hoof firmly in the chest of the original mugger prodder, staring him in the whites of his eyes. “Have you ever had a moment where, without any grain of doubt in your mind, you realize your choices aren’t enough, and your life relies entirely on the mercy of strangers?”
“No..?”
Flotsam ground his hoof down harder.
“Yes! Yes!”
“Remember this feeling of helplessness,” Flotsam gently encouraged them, before magically flinging them each into the ocean.
The ocean which lay a full three blocks away.
Flotsam fell to his rump and propped his skull, for once aching for tangible reasons, against the blessedly cool stones. He allowed himself a short rest in the alley and watched the sun come up.
Then he went to fetch his tricorn cap, which had blown off in the fighting, and set it once more on his head. He gave his earring a flick and set about walking with as little a limp as possible as he continued his journey into Riváplut.
“Acting classes. Heh.”
It was worth a chuckle.