Through the heart of Manehattan, there ran the stately Fifth Avenue, built atop the smouldering ruins of Fourth Avenue several centuries ago, which in turn had been built after Third Avenue had been carried off by a flock of rocs, and so on into the negatives.
Along the rapidly-emptying length of Fifth Avenue, there careened a hapless and increasingly out-of-sorts Dweller Below, which had been having the rottenest day of its life. It still hadn’t found a nice, natural ceiling to cover up all that awful emptiness above, all the little sub-caverns it had tried to burrow into had collapsed whenever they were so much as leaned on, and untold numbers of the little alien creatures loomed out or incomprehensibly gibbered or poked at it wherever it went. And it still hadn’t been able to get a proper handle on whatever that entrancing, glowing thing high up was. The eldritch rules of this epiterranean realm eluded it, and all it could do was blunder onwards in bewilderment and horror.
It had picked up a coating of miscellany. This included, but wasn’t limited to, the fragments of three fruitcarts and a lot of pulped fruit; two ship tickets; bits of glass; the mulched shreds of Rarity’s Autumn Range; most of the contents and bricks of the eastern wing of the Manehattan Royal Museum; an excited pegasus filly who’d alighted on its back and who’d found herself the best steed ever; parts from a dozen wagons; four trapped and wailing constables of the Manehattan City Watch who’d charged right in and had had the misfortune to make contact with an especially sticky polyp; and a set of parking clamps left by a terrified traffic warden who had screwed up his courage to the sticking point and dived in to be a hero in the way he knew best.
It had also picked up an entourage, comprising a terrified pair of pegasus parents imploring their little poppet to stop riding the subterranean abomination; a traffic warden desperately trying to get his clamps back; several dozen other city constables brandishing truncheons and wishing for equipment with more of an ordnance quality to it; and a thousand-strong mob of assorted Manehattanites who knew the role expected of them at this juncture and bore pitchforks and torches. Due to being borne by city-dwellers, the former were few and far between and often held the wrong way round, but it was the thought that counted.
“Keep at it! Keep after it!”
“Where’s it even going?”
“Who knows? Just keep at it!”
“Jet Stream, sweetie, please flap off the stygian horror and come to Mommy this instant!”
“‘Don’t be silly, constables,’ he said. ‘What would you even do with a ballista,’ he said. What indeed, chief.”
“Aagh! My hoof! The prongs went in my hoof!”
The Dweller Below flolloped onwards, high-rise buildings rising ever-higher about it as it went, while the crowd poured after it like a river discovering a downwards slope. Shouts and burbles and the occasional crash from a carriage encountering a Dweller Below going the opposite way to it rose up into the sky.
Out from a side-alley, all but unnoticed at first, a large figure trotted out, as bulky and shiny as any battle-ready pony knight of old. He stopped briefly to adjust his fondue pot, and then looked right. Under the pot’s rim, his gimlet eyes glinted, and the second after, Mr Stripes lurched into the fray, clattering like Hell’s own cutlery drawer.
The kitchenware had proven tricky in the donning, and even now a spatula was riding up into places a spatula had no business being. But with assistance from Plaid and the dragooned pegasus, he’d managed at last. Once he’d stepped outside and listened for the sound of the Dweller Below making its way through the city, which was a fairly unmistakable sound, pursuing it through every known short-cut had been foal’s play. And now he was on the same street as it, he could all but smell the tickets, and he had a clear run at the creature, give or take the odd crowd.
“OUT OF WAY!” boomed Mr Stripes as he gathered speed like an angry locomotive, nearing the crowd’s back. “TICKETS!” And then, as higher sentiments fell by the wayside altogether, “RRAAARGH!”
Those rear elements of the crowd who hadn’t heeded the warning in time found themselves ploughed to one side and left yelping insensibly on the road as Mr Stripes blew through them like an avalanche. He hardly noticed the weight of ironmongery with his blood up, and his onwards momentum threatened to only be checked by an oncoming continent or another Mr Stripes. Ponies in his way did their best impersonation of pins in the wake of a bowling ball, and Mr Stripes kept going.
“GANGWAY!” he thundered, barging forwards to the front of the crowd, sending a couple of constables flying. The lumbering back of the beast filled his vision, framed by the high and saw-toothed skyline on either side. The Dweller Below trumpeted, unheeding. Ahead of it, at the end of Fifth Avenue before it turned off to the left, Mr Stripes saw the vast shape of the Principality Building, the tallest building in a city already brimming over with compensating architects. A hundred floors of glass and limestone rose up and up, and at its peak, several tethered airships bobbed around a cloud-menacing spire.
Past the roiling thunderstorm that filled his mind, Mr Stripes’ brain clawed out some room for forethought. If the Dweller kept going that way, then it could only turn left down 34th Street, the history of which had been even longer and filled with excitement than the Avenue’s. That would give him a good, clear run at the beast, and give him plenty of time to catch up, and when he did, he’d…
...he’d do something, that was for sure. For now, he kept galloping. Ahead, the Dweller Below swerved left and right, drawing a delighted whoop from the filly on its back. Mr Stripes’ gaze shot upwards at the sound, and practised paternal instincts briefly seized control of his brain. “Wha— what are you doing up there, little one!?”
“I’m riding him! He’s Destructotron!” chirped the filly. “He makes all the things go squish!”
“Eh?”
“Go, Destructotron! Squish the world! Whee!”
“Shwrrzl-floog?” burbled Destructotron bewilderedly as it laminated a abandoned carriage across the street. Splinters flew, and Mr Stripes threw himself into an ungainly leap to avoid a wheel that came spinning out at him. Yelps from behind marked the wheel’s plunge into the crowd’s front ranks, and Mr Stripes kept galloping. His eyes combed over the inchoate hulk for any sign of the tickets, any scraps of paper, anything useful…
The creature jackknifed then, lurching over to the left side of the street and accidentally shaking free the four stuck constables. They tumbled aside with several sticky wails. The filly atop it whooped, and Mr Stripes cursed as he jumped over a constable and adjusted his heading to keep it dead within his sights. Let it lead a merry chase, he reckoned. There was only one way for it to go in the end, and he would catch it.
Behind him, the crowd was in an uproar as they galloped, and vaguely-intelligible snippets drifted out here and there.
“Wait, is that my landlord up ahead? What’s he even wearing? It’s fabulous.”
“Please, somepony help me get my clamps off it! That pile of kindling back there looked improperly parked!”
“Aagh! My other hoof!”
The leading constables had struck up an argument as well.
“Look, we’re not equipped for this. Just get out the messenger-paper, raise the alarm with the princesses or the Wonderbolts or the Guard or whoever! Get out your codebook!”
“Right-ho!” There was the sound of a small, heavy tome being whipped out and rifled through. “Er, one problem.”
“What?”
“What sort of code goes with all this? I mean there’s a section for ‘Eldritch Incursions’, but there’s all these subtypes—”
Mr Stripes ignored them all, as his gaze triumphantly alighted on two slips of paper nestled in a bifurcated polyp. “TICKETS!” he thundered. A mass at the ever-nearing mouth of 34th Street caught his attention briefly, a press of bodies and gleaming metal. But they were probably unimportant. The creature was slowing down as it came to the bottom of the Principality Building and the end of the avenue. He had it.
“Fzlbl-mleerk?” the Dweller Below tooted as countless eye-stalks angled upwards, to where the sun hung high over the building. A tentacle flailed up into mid-air momentarily, and then its various gazes turned upon the mouth of 34th Street. It wibbled and wobbled in place there for a few moments, as if pondering its next move.
“Get ready, dogth! Thpearth thtraight! Thtantheth firm!” someone called from that direction. “Canary-bearerth, hold until my thignal!”
Distracted though he may be, Mr Stripes glanced that way as well as he implacably advanced on the Dweller Below. The flurry of ‘th’s jangled memory’s bell, and he recognised that voice.
What he saw there maybe wasn’t the oddest thing in Manehattan that day, but only due to an abundance of competition. The mass of bodies and metal he’d seen earlier resolved itself into a whole pack of Diamond Dogs, drawn up into a phalanx. Many of them held short spears, though others held scavenged boathooks, the pointier sorts of street-signs, and garden gnomes lashed to the ends of sticks. He recognised Patches at their centre, gesticulating with his own spear and barking orders wildly. A couple of other dogs nervously hefted big cages holding large canaries, their red eyes blazing as they flapped at their cage bars and cheeped with bloodlust.
The array of points jangled, the gems on their waistcoats trembled, and despite the Dweller Below before them, the ranks of dogs kept glancing to their back with undisguised fear. The subject of their glances revealed itself as the phalanx shuffled, and there stood Rarity at their back. She coldly looked over their heads at the looming Dweller Below, her narrow gaze alighting on the pegasus filly and widening briefly. “Wait, hold on,” she said. “Darling! Please get down from there at once! It’s not safe!”
“Shan’t! He’s Destructotron, and he’s going to… to...” The filly trailed off as she squinted thoughtfully down at Rarity. “Hey, you’re one of those Eleme… Rainbo… famous ponies! You save Equestria a lot!”
No matter what icy lagoon of wrath Rarity may have been afloat in, the opportunity to preen would never be declined. She smiled. “Well, one doesn’t like to brag—”
“Could you get me Rainbow Dash’s autograph? She’s the coolest!”
Rarity’s smile flickered momentarily. “… get down from there, darling, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Neat!” The filly flapped clear of Destructotron, and a frantic parent came flapping in the moment after to seize her mid-air.
That jolt of sensation was what it took to kick the Dweller Below into motion. For the last few moments, it had merely burbled and held stock-still, eye-stalks flitting between the dog phalanx and the oncoming crowd, and sending the occasional plaintive glance skywards at the sun, up past the Principality Building. Unhappy, uncertain “Bloop?” and “K’drth?” noises had escaped it all the while. But now it threw itself right at the phalanx in a blur of motion, tentacles hammering at the street to propel it onwards. Mr Stripes jumped aside just in time to avoid getting concussed by a whip-fast protuberance. “Brathe!” he heard Patches shout. “Hold fast!” came the cry from Rarity.
The crash of impact rang out as the black, blubbery mass of tentacles slammed into the wall of spears, and yelps and groans resounded as every dog was forced bodily back several inches. Their line held, though, and spears and hooks and signs and repurposed gnomes pricked into the horror’s hide and held it fast. As it writhed and gibbered and wrenched itself backwards, Mr Stripes heard Patches roar, “Canarieth!”
The crowd ooh’ed. Dogs yelped and metal cage doors clanged open, and there was then the flapping of wings and a rising and maddened cheeping. And at that point, the symphony on all sides beggared all description.
Mr Stripes saw the towering form of the eldritch thing reel away from the phalanx and now very much on the back-hoof … or back-tentacle, or whatever appendage applied. If a given section of its hide wasn’t being jabbed by a terrified dog wielding a gnome on a stick, it was being mauled by a huge and enraged canary, and if it was a section of hide that must have perpetrated the most exquisite of sins in some past life, it was experiencing both at once. A medley of high-pitched and distinctly blasphemous hoots and burbles escaped the Dweller Below.
Whatever else you could conjecture about the creature’s current outlook on life and state of mind, you could at least reasonably presume this: it was distracted. Mr Stripes crouched, clawed the ground, and prepared to charge in.
“Daddy, wait!”
He turned back towards the call, and saw that Plaid had inveigled her way to the forefront of the agog, heaving crowd. She looked right at him, her shining eyes full of concern, and then at the Dweller Below with mixed parts bewilderment and pity, and then back to Mr Stripes. “Please, be careful!”
He smiled his most reassuring smile and adjusted his pot. “Fret not, furniture of my dollhouse. Daddy shall.” And with that, he turned around and plunged face-first into the storm of spearheads and canaries and tentacles, leaping at its inchoate mass with steel-shod hooves outstretched.
He belly-flopped onto its side, armour jangling as he scrabbled for a hoof-hold, and peered up in search of the tickets. There—a flash of white, nestled in the same polyp he’d seen them last. “Vleep-shwr-vwm?” the Dweller Below squealed indignantly as Mr Stripes added himself to its list of complaints. A flailing tentacle clouted the stallion as he clung on, and constellations wheeled across his vision as he struggled to keep his position.
Angry cheeping rang out at his back, and Mr Stripes’ position was made even more precarious as an berserk canary tried to dismember its own reflection in one of his saucepans. “Gah!” he spat, as a beak slammed repeatedly into his withers. “Scat! Shoo! Cursed thing!” The great wobbling mass of the Dweller Below swayed and wriggled before him, and even as he twisted to try and shoo off the canary with one forehoof, his other three hooves clawed a way upwards through its slimy tendrils and folds.
“Mr Stripes, what on earth—get down from there, I implore you!” he heard Rarity cry out.
“Get off it, you thtupid berk!” screeched Patches, somewhat less diplomatically. Mr Stripes ignored them both. The roar of the crowd filled the world at his back, the assembled citizens of Manehattan having forgone their role as an angry mob in favour of not disturbing a decent piece of street theatre. Shouts and queries flew at him like hail.
“Hey, that really is my landlord! What the hay’s he doing on it?”
“Go for it, Mr Stripes! Kick it in the vulnerables!”
“Does it even have vulnerables?”
“Good point! Kick everything!”
“—so here’s the list of codes for Incursions (Eldritch Types: A through M) but which one should we classify it as? I’m leaning towards a 37-L. That’s the one for ‘Like The Creator Started Making An Octopus And Forgot To Stop’.”
“Just put it down as 99-X for ‘Miscellaneous’, blast it! We’ll classify it after!”
“Look, if you want to look vague and incompetent in front of anypony who shows up, that’s your prerogative, but I’ve got the codebook, and I’d sooner be specific—”
Their chatter faded into the background as Mr Stripes gritted his teeth and redoubled his efforts, scrabbling up the side of the Dweller Below. His hooves skidded and dug into whatever folds and appendages presented themselves, a mix of undefinable musks choked up his snout, and the only parts of him that weren’t getting plastered with cthonic mulch were those parts inside him. He gagged, cursed, and grappled his way ever upwards. The tickets wobbled above him, five hoofspans away, four, three, all but within biting distance, if he could just scrabble and stretch that little bit further…
At that point, the Dweller Below came to a decision. At its back, a baying mass of the alien little things, jabbering and brandishing pokey things. Before it, an even pokier mass of baying things. Winged creatures screeched and flapped all around, and on all sides, irregular cavern walls ran up into chasmic, yawning nothingness. No good options…
...but one ray of hope, at least. One vast wall, running up to a point, and at the end of that point, the strange high glow, that beautiful and distant shine. It could be the way to a nice enclosed cavern. It might be food. It might just have some answers to all this madness, if it could just be grasped.
The Dweller Below dithered in place. Its eyes angled upwards. And then a broadside of tentacles stabbed out into the stone of the Principality Building, dug in, and the Dweller Below heaved itself up onto the building’s side and started slithering up.
The agog crowd watched it rise, cameras flashing. Constables bent and arguing over their codebook boggled, and then started arguing anew. Canaries, deprived of their most immediate soft target, turned upon other random targets, and scattered screams rang out in their wake. Above them all, the Dweller Below steady slithered onwards and upwards, an array of tentacles and claws and organic hooks constantly uncoiling, digging into the limestone, and pulling it up. Chips of stone scattered down in its wake, and there floated up the shrieks of office workers who’d had their day become that little bit more exciting just by looking out their window.
And as the Dweller Below rose, there rose also an armoured stallion.
The sensation of rising didn’t occur to Mr Stripes for a moment, at least not until the world past the tickets started falling rather than just rocking like a storm-caught ship, and the air on his back grew a little colder. He glanced around, and saw that the crowd had been replaced with pointed roofs and confused pigeons. And then he looked down. Horrible, horrible realisation dawned, seasoned well with vertigo.
“Gah!” he spluttered, which didn’t seem too unreasonable a reaction to finding oneself at an unhealthy height above street level. An answering cry of “Daddy!” drifted up amidst the general hubbub as the upwards motion of the Dweller Below bore him ever higher.
“Good heavens, he’s caught on it!” came the voice of Rarity on Plaid’s heels. “Bring it down, somehow, anyhow!”
“Oh, for thod’s thake.” A pause, and then the sound that might be produced by a gnome-on-a-stick flying up like a javelin and smashing through a window a few storeys below Mr Stripes and the Dweller Below, followed in turn by a concussed ‘Unk!’ from an unlucky office worker.
“...Bring it down better!”
“Lithen, pony, there’th not much I can exactly do from thith pothithion! Do you have a ballithta on your perthon? I don’t have a ballithta on my...”
And at that point, the voices faded into indistinctiveness, as Mr Stripes rose higher and yet higher. His hooves dug into the Dweller Below for dear life, skittered and slipped free, and only a panicked champ forwards onto a sturdy-looking tentacle saved him from splattering over the pavement. The taste of the tentacle and its coating of ooze filled his mouth, defying all adjectives. He bit down regardless, and maintained his hold even when the tentacle swung round and clouted him against the side of the building. “Gnk!” he gasped as air escaped him, for all that Plaid’s armour may have taken the brunt. His pot fell loose, and he tried to not watch it descend all the way down to the ground.
For the first time, the tickets found themselves dislodged from being Mr Stripes’ foremost concern in life. A strange and unfamiliar emotion sparked to life in his mind, that of regret over the decisions that had led him to this point. “Might not have been optimal to plunge right in,” he wheezed to himself, past the tentacle and ooze. “Oh, might not have been exactly optimal.”
“Ploothoon-kh-drrhg?” crooned the Dweller Below absently, still training all of its eyestalks on the distant sun.
The ghastly rise continued for a few minutes yet, and all Mr Stripes could do was cling on like grim death. The noises of the city diminished, became one great and muted roar from far below, and in the chilly almost-hush afforded at this height, Mtr Stripes usual single-track line of thought splintered apart. His heart would have been in his mouth if there hadn’t already been a piece of eldritch monstrosity there, and however he dared twist his head around, there was no sign of the tickets.
But eventually, the motion of the creature ceased, and Mr Stripes became aware of it clambering up over the topmost ledge of the Principality Building. Only the thin, high spire remained above them still, and in the cold, high breeze, tethered airships bobbed and made the spire creak. Above them, an expanse of blue. And in the middle of that expanse, beginning its long and gentle descent to the western horizon, there shone the sun, minding its own business.
Mr Stripes released his bite and flopped gratefully onto the stone of the roof, coughing and gasping and spitting out the taste of the Dweller Below, and otherwise trying to coax enthusiasm back into his bruised and jangled frame. The creature itself wobbled past him, slithering over to the westernmost corner of the building, eyes still fixed on the sun. It came to a rest right on the edge, hung still for a moment, and then groped futiley out into the sky with its tentacles once more. There rose from it a deep, confused, doleful sound, like a bassoon discovering its spouse in bed with a flute.
“Tickets,” muttered Mr Stripes, rising to his hooves, and trying to spark his inner fire once more with what he came for. Vertigo still assailed him, and the skyline had no business being so low-down as it was. “Tickets.” He stood straight and eyed the Dweller up and down. And there, after all this, the tickets still nestled against its frame, up near the top. His one-track mind knitted itself back together, and great internal engines roared. “Shine of my jewel will have sunshine and old cutlery for special day!”
He lunged once again at the Dweller Below, determined to climb it once again—and this time, it couldn’t go wrong, what was left for it to climb up in turn?—but just as he drew near, several eyestalks snapped round in his direction. One small tentacle uncoiled and whirled out at him, and before he entirely apprehended what was happening, Mr Stripes found himself coiled up in the tentacle’s clutches, pots and pans creaking and pressing painfully into him from all sides. The tentacle pulled back in, pinning Mr Stripes harmlessly against the creature with unnatural strength, leaving him unable to do much more than cast aspersions on the creature’s moral character and flail with his rear legs against the roof.
“Thrck-ython?” came the plaintive toot from far above, apparently unheeding of Mr Stripes. The stallion was aware of the Dweller Below stretching up and out one more time, leaning out into the sky as its tentacles tried to clasp around the sun’s outline.
Mr Stripes struggled, ceased, and drew in as deep a breath as he could. “Come on,” he hissed to himself. “Is surely not impossible situation. Has to be way to get free, to get to tickets, has to —”
He stopped. He looked around with a critical eye, and checked his vast internal list. Engines growled to life once again.
He drew another breath. “Creature! Whatever name is! Attend!”
Though most of the Dweller Below’s attention remained fixed on the impossible sun, one or two eye-stalks turned in his direction. “Floop?”
“Attend. I am Mr Stripes, and am best landlord in this city! And if you release me and relinquish Plaid’s tickets now, then I shall exercise a trait landlords don’t exercise for just anypony. I shall be merciful. Agreed?”
One eyestalk tilted, in the way that only eyestalks belonging to a creature with no experience of property and landlording and the quality of mercy having all of said domains explained to it in a language it didn’t understand could. “Yg-drth-wlg?”
“Ah. Have it your way, then.” Mr Stripes closed his eyes, mentally ran through each item on the finest plan he’d ever had once more, and then stared right at the eyestalk. “Am landlord. And as best landlord, I have investigated possibility of shareholding in this very building. With me so far, yes?”
“...Blorp?”
“And as past of investigating,” growled Mr Stripes, struggling within the tentacle’s grasp, tapping tentatively at the roof edge with his hooves, “I looked up the building’s paperwork. Its history! What systems and plumbing and suchlike were like, what materials were used, conditions of most things. What needs checking, and who does checking. Am responsible landlord! Did research.”
He paused, panting, double-checking his position once more. “Learned what went right, what went wrong, and … what corners were cut.” He bent up his rear legs. “Most specifically, this one!”
And with that, he slammed down his rear hooves with all the might afforded a strapping earth pony stallion with the weight of Bucephalus on his legs—or a kitchen-themed variant thereof—and cracked right through the rough limestone at the very edge of the roof. The cracks rippled out. The ledge creaked. And the second later, the whole edge collapsed free, pitching the Dweller Below right off the building. It flailed in mid-air for an instant, groping out for a hold too late, and then fell like a comet sent by a god who wanted to leave no illusions about the quality of the omen.
Mr Stripes exulted, right up until he realised that in the excitement of the plan, he’d not entirely budgeted for the Dweller Below maintaining a grip on him. “HurraaaAAAAAGH!” escaped him, kicking himself free of the flapping tentacle just in time for the crumbling ledge to recede up into the sky and for gravity to claim him as its own.
The world flew past him in one prolonged, terrifying blur—sky, buildings, Dweller Below, Principality Building, sky, &c. He careened off one hardened window of the skyscraper, resulting in a poor office worker undergoing her second nervous breakdown in as many minutes, and sprackled and whirled atop the burbling Dweller Below. Plaid’s much-abused armour rattled and shed implements with every stray knock against the building and every flailing wallop from a tentacle, and all Mr Stripes could do in whatever remained of his sensate world was feverishly wish for the ride to stop, he’d had quite enough—
Then the ride stopped with an almighty crash, and Mr Stripe’s sensate world decided to take a few minutes out to recover.
When it recovered, Mr Stripes was dimly aware of a great hubbub of voices on all sides, and of lying atop something soft and blubbery. He was in the grips of a full-body ache, as if he’d been bundled into a sack full of bricks and then rolled down a hill, and as memories of the last few minutes unspooled, he groaned faintly. It didn’t help much, so he groaned harder. That helped, and he groggily tried to raise his head. A second into the effort, he decided otherwise, and slumped.
Then a familiar voice cried out, “Oh, Daddy, you’re alright!” and that cleared out more cobwebs than a hundred heartfelt groans. He groaned anyway, just to be on the safe side, and flopped over onto his side to meet Plaid’s concerned gaze.
“Plaid?” he managed. She stood at the front of Manehattan’s amassed multitude, with Rarity and Patches just to her rear. Most of the crowd looked awed, and more than a few were nodding in appreciation for a decent few minute’s entertainment. Here and there, unhappy dogs tried to push canaries back into cages, a process which the canaries had no intention of making easy or without bloodshed. Quite a few amongst the crowd still sported pitchforks and torches, though, and were guardedly watching Mr Stripes—or watching something in his general direction, at any rate.
The blubbery mass under Mr Stripes wobbled slightly and emitted a somewhat bleary and unenthusiastic, “Cthun-thg-blb?” The Dweller Below sat in a substantial crater in the street, surrounded by scattered bits of whatever miscellany had previously coated it, and seemed to have no great interest in rising. Eyestalks vaguely wobbled this way and that as if drunk. “Glllrg?”
“Come on, get off it, you thtupid and impoththibly lucky twerp,” said Patches, ambling up and rolling Mr Stripes off the Dweller Below, who fell to the ground with all the grace of a brick. “You’ve thurely had your fun by now.”
“Fun?” replied Mr Stripes, struggling up into a sitting position as more memories jostled back into his mental world. “Ach, no, was not for fun. Was for, was for ...” His eyes scanned across the Dweller Below’s frame. Then across the ground. Panic mounted. “Tickets?”
Then he saw them. Or rather, what was left of them. Little off-white scraps, torn and smeared to the point of indecipherability, lying to one side in a small puddle of unspecified cthonic matter. The fall had been even less kind to them than to Mr Stripes, and everything about the stallion slumped at the sight. “Ach.”
“What is it, Daddy? Daddy?” Plaid looked in the same direction as Mr Stripes, and when she caught sight of them, she only hugged him closer. “Oh, that’s alright, Daddy. You’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”
“Bah,” he said wearily. “Were your birthday gift. What sort of stallion am I, that had to get them last-minute and lost them and couldn’t even keep them safe in the end? None at all, is what.”
Plaid didn’t show even the slightest sign of agreeing with any of that line of self-recrimination. “I don’t care about the tickets, Daddy. So long as you’re okay.”
“Am mediocre at best,” he moaned. He looked down at himself. “Ach, and your project! Your barding of Bucephalus, done with all your utensils, now dented and shaken apart! I’ve ruined it!”
Plaid looked the barding up and down, clocking it for the first time, and offered up a reassuring smile. “It’s okay! It’s okay! I’ll just … restyle it a bit. Say it’s his barding after the Battle of Gorgonmela.”
“Ruined your birthday gift, and your special project.” Mr Stripes’ gaze fell to between his hooves. “If your mother was not long-absent and busy pirating ships and terrorising foreign shores and plundering and such things, is likely she would skin me.”
“Daddy—”
“I mean, is likely she would skin me anyway, just on general principle, but —”
As Mr Stripes subsided into gloom, all his illusions of being the best stallion and best father and best landlord as shredded as the tickets, the crowd saw that his entertainment value was likely to be at a low ebb for the next while and turned its attention towards another discussion central to proceedings, involving Rarity, the Diamond Dogs, and assorted leading citizenry.
“It does look rather … pacified,” came Rarity’s voice. The Dweller Below burbled something faint to itself. “What now, though?”
“Now?” replied Patches. “Fire’th generally good for dealing with them for good. If only we had thome fire-lanthes. We’ll have to make do. Do any of you ponieth have any oil, or naptha, or …?”
“I’ve got a newspaper! That could make for good kindling!” said an enthusiastic onlooker.
“A newthpa— thut up. Anypony got thomething utheful?”
“Wait, hang on, fire?” said Rarity. “You’re not proposing to kill the poor thing, are you? I thought you could just … take it back below ground. Corral it. However this sort of thing works.”
“Pony, there’th no way we’re jutht going to let that thing loothe below ground again. They’re utter menathes! We want to deal with it now, while it’th vulnerable!”
“That’s barbaric!”
“Pragmatic is the proper pronunthiation. Anyway, why do you care? It’th dethtroyed your property, your … Autumn Range, or whatever it wath!”
“Well, yes!” Rarity blinked. “But now that it’s been mobbed through the streets, run into your phalanx, had your war-canaries set on it, and fallen from a great height, I think proportionate justice has been meted out!”
“It’s alright, Ms Rarity, we quite understand,” another bystander interjected, soothingly. “You’re a national heroine, we get it, that comes with obligations, as it were. You’ve got to resolve problems in an ethical manner. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be a national heroine. Stands to reason.”
“It … does?” Rarity hesitantly replied, while other members of the crowd voiced their agreement.
“Yep! But it’s alright. You’ve done more than enough in your national heroine capacity. So what you can do, see, is clock out for the day, and we can handle things from here without reference to ethics at all. See? Agreeable to everypony, and you don’t have to compromise your national heroining at all.”
“That .. that’s not even slightly how ‘national heroining’ works!” Rarity started, and while some members of the crowd voiced agreement with the bystander, others broke into confused murmurs trying to follow the logic, and a couple of hoof-fights broke out to try and get ahead of the coming fashion. Voices and tempers rose on all sides.
“Daddy?” whispered Plaid.
“Yes, flash of my firework?” Mr Stripes replied, weary with himself and the day in general. As if from a distance, he heard Patches calling for anything flammable or inthendiary, and Rarity threatening to whine at him, and the ruckus building towards a fever-pitch. Not a ruckus that concerned him, though.
“Daddy, I can’t watch.”
“Watch what?”
“What’s about to happen to the creature, whatever it is! I, I mean … it’s just a confused creature that’s come up from underground, isn’t it? It doesn’t know it’s done anything wrong. I can’t watch it get hurt, or … or ...”
Mr Stripes regarded his daughter. He’d be lying if he claimed to totally understand where she was coming from, his emotions somewhat fogged by the enduring fact of the Dweller Below having ruined the tickets. But her distress seemed entirely real, and for Mr Stripes, his daughter’s emotions were catching. And liable to spark productive new ones in his head.
“Don’t want to see it hurt?” he said slowly, thoughtfully.
“I don’t want it hurt at all!” She looked desperately from Mr Stripes to the slumped Dweller Below to the madding crowd, held at bay by Rarity and other dissenters for now. “I … can you … anything?”
The words may not have been all there, but the sentiment was. And something else to achieve for his daughter’s sake in the day had neatly presented itself. Slowly, but with a force no weight could have ever flattened, Mr Stripes rose to his hooves, a delighted fire in his eyes.
“Anything?” he said to himself. “Oh yes. A definite something, even.”
He looked down at the Dweller Below. It seemed numb to the world and the clamour around it, though one eyestalk swivelled towards Mr Stripes. As he watched, the eyestalk blinked, and a sound too low and forlorn for typical vowels and consonants mewled out from the creature.
“Feeling like scared and battered failure, eh?” Mr Stripes said softly. “I understand, I think.” His expression hardened. “But not for much longer. Is only enough room for one of us in this city, and will not be me any longer! ATTENTION, PONIES!”
The bellow ripped out at the top of his lungs, loud enough to seize the whole gathering’s attention, and Mr Stripes leapt up on top of the Dweller Below for a better vantage point, his aches no object. “Attention, all! Is no need to debate about horrible creature’s fate, for I shall attend to said fate! Disperse to your homes or work or families! I have matter well in hoof!”
“What?” said the bystander who’d spoken to Rarity. “What do you mean? What are you going to do to it?”
Mr Stripes shrugged, having not planned to that point, but seeing that as no reason to stop. “Take to my abode. Maybe put on leash. See is tended to. Consult on matter of release into wild. But not kill. No, I think not.”
“Blow that! It’s a utter public hazard! Did you not see the trail of devasta—”
“See, bah. Shall not be hazard while held by me!”
“But … you’re not qualified to keep that sort of creature. I … I assume you’re not—”
“And neither are you qualified to kill creature! But my non-qualifications are better than your non-qualifications, eh?”
The bystander looked around for help, and appealed to the group of constables, who had long since whipped out paper and jotted out diagrams detailing various codes, angles, crude sketches of octopi reproduction, and had more recently discarded said diagrams in favour of arguing and trying to hit each other with the codebook. “Um, officers?”
They turned with guilty starts, and one cleared his throat as he assumed authority. “Now, Mr Stripes, you must see the sense in...”
Mr Stripes narrowed his eyes. His mental list blurred as the pages flickered. “Officer Mulberry, your station is between two buildings of mine, yes? Terrible if I felt the need to call in a fumigation for stoneworms ahead of schedule for both of them. The fumes for them are awful, so am told.”
There was a vast and echoing silence. Some other pony in the crowd broke it first with an indignant exclamation of “Did you just—”
“Ah, Summer Solstice!” Mr Stripes rounded on this latest interlocutor. “How is rent on flat? Not high enough, I presume?”
“I … you son of a—!”
“And you, Navy Blue,” Mr Stripes turned on the first, the bystander who’d called upon the officers. The big stallion’s eyes narrowed. “How is shop premises?”
Navy Blue’s eyes narrowed as well, though there were none who could narrow quite so well as Mr Stripes. “Doing quite well, enough to accommodate a rise in rent, let me tell you.”
“Oh? Well enough to accommodate a hundredfold rise? Am in the mood for yet more revenue. Miniature furniture collection could always grow larger.”
Navy Blue seethed, the agitated crowd murmured, and yet another bystander rose up. “Here, no, this is absolutely blatant abuse of your landlordliness!” she said. “You can’t just—”
“Can and do!” thundered Mr Stripes. “I have had rough day, and shall abuse position of landlord all day more if need be! Leave this creature in my hooves, and shoo!”
The bystander spluttered, and turned back to the constables. “Officers, are you seeing this?”
The officers, however, were preoccupied with looking at the ground and awkwardly shuffling their hooves. “I,” the leader among them started. “Well, um. I … the fumes suck.”
“Thcrew it,” declared Patches, throwing his paws in the air and marching off. “On your own headth be it. Come on, dogth. We’re going back underground and thtaying there.”
“Very good!” growled Mr Stripes. “And same to you all. No flames, no killing monstrosities, no nothing, just nice and civilised home-going! I will handle this creature! It is under my protection! And whatever pony should think to defy that ...” His voice pitched to a growl a crocodile would have respected. “On your rents be it.”
And ponies thought to defy it. The collective indignation of Manehattan broke upon Mr Stripes like a storm, tossing down bolts of bickering, more indignant interjections, aspersions on the big stallion’s moral character and parentage and personal hygiene. But Hell had no staying power like a Mr Stripes with his daughter’s happiness on the line, and his wolfish smile sharpened as he turned on every complaint and shot back a cheerful threat concerning the residence or workplace of the complainer or complainer’s loved ones. Many dispersed when he fended them off, grinding their teeth and intending to double-check Manehattan’s arcane property laws. Others ambled off to find the next piece of entertainment. The embarrassed constables slunk off to report a completely quiet patrol without any incident whatsoever to their chief, and Patches and the pack excused themselves from proceedings altogether.
When hush of a sort finally returned to the streets outside the Principality Building, it found Mr Stripes, Plaid, Rarity, and the Dweller Below with—at long last—ample room to breath.
The pages of Mr Stripes mental catalogue ceased flapping as if caught in a whirlwind. His tired, bruised legs wobbled. He panted with a throat roughened by more prolonged shouting and threatening he’d ever done in his life, and his mind was aglow with victory.
“Cthllrglk?” ventured the Dweller Below, which had understood nothing and continued to do so.
Rarity breathed out. “Well.”
“Oh, Daddy, thank you!” Plaid gushed, throwing her forelegs around Mr Stripes’ neck and planting a kiss on his cheek. “That was wonderful!”
“I’m not sure whether this is a victory to boast about,” Rarity said to herself, kneading her brow. “I mean … an innocent albeit destructive creature saved in the name of nepotism via threats and exploitation? How does the moral calculus work here? Oh, this is going to be a woeful evening spent contemplating ends and the means by which they’re achieved, I can tell.”
“You really think so, Plaid?” said Mr Stripes, ears only for his daughter. His voice was hoarse, but a tired smile flickered around his features.
“You stared them all down! Like, all of Manehattan! And you saved the creature’s life!”
“—I’d talk about the ethics of all this with dear Twilight, but oh heavens, suppose she was obliged by her position to step in and do something. Would that risk merely negating—”
“Creature’s life,” Mr Stripes mumbled to himself. “Hmm, yes. May have to actually consider penning arrangements now.”
“Flloobrk-i-kdath?”
“—I’m going to have to not talk about this at all, aren’t I?”
“I’ll help, Daddy! It’ll be my responsibility.” Plaid looked Mr Stripes right in the eye. “And you know what doing all this was?”
“What was it, quills of my hedgehog?”
“Way better than any ship ticket.” Plaid Stripes grinned fiercely. “I’d even say, best birthday present ever.”
And it didn’t take anything more than his daughter trying to crush him with a hug to remind Mr Stripes that yes, he was the best landlord in Manehattan, the best father, and, in general, the best.
Bah. As if he’d ever let it be in doubt.
Some weeks later, in a park that had been bustling before Mr Stripes showed up, yet was now curiously deserted:
“Do not know why Plaid insists you get walked here, rather than in park nearer to home.”
“Kthlg,” the Dweller Below absently replied, as Mr Stripes pulled it on through the park with a lead attached to one tendril. A collar ran around that tendril. It sported the legend Fluffles.
“She thinks this is more open. Less trees, more sunshine, thinks you prefer that. Curious conclusion. Maybe is right, though.”
“Mthirgn-zthchk,” concurred Fluffles.
“Hmmph. Is mystery.” Mr Stripes looked around. “Parks should all be of equal niceness, though, yes? City council should see to it they are. Why else do I … mostly … pay taxes?”
“Cthoogl?”
“Exactly so!” Mr Stripes shook his head at the state of modern civilisation, and then perked up as they came to another bend in the trail. “Come, one more circuit! I shall expound upon proper use of city taxes, in humble opinion.”
It was, he would confess to himself, not entirely clear how this had become his job rather than Plaid’s. But for getting thoughts in order, it was much better than just pacing up and down Bridleway. And goodness knows the best stallion had plenty of thoughts to assemble.