It was the day after the day Twilight and her friends had analyzed the scene of the crime.
Most of the girls had trouble sleeping after seeing the corpses strewn across the ground of the scorched warehouse. The bodies had been taken out of it for examination at the Manehatten Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious places of scientific advancement in all of Equestria. The following day Twilight and the others ate breakfast and came to visit the laboratory at ten o' clock that morning.
Twilight and her friends were now in lab coats, at the Manehatten Institute of Technology located on the southern tip of the massive island of Manehatten. The laboratory itself was the size of a hoofball field, crowded with tables that were covered in objects like petri dishes, cotton swabs coated in griffon blood, microscopes, and pipettes of bodily fluids extracted from the crime scene. The room was a sterile white, with pure unfiltered white light from the overhanging fixtures reflecting off of the spotless whitewashed walls. At one end of the massive room, half a dozen ponies were crowded around a gun taken from a crate the griffons had, trying to dissect the weapon and see how it worked. On another wall was the body of a griffon who had been riddled with bullets and was ripped to pieces because of it.
Twilight and her friends were gathered around the body of the barely-recognizable griffon. Some of the more sensitive mares, like Rarity and Fluttershy, tried to hold their breath as an expertly trained medical unicorn used her magic to carefully, carefully lift a squashed brass cylinder out of one of the many wounds in the griffon's body. The bullet was the color of wet, raw clay, a result of being left in the body and soaking in the griffon's blood. The light green aura around the bullet shifted over to a spot under a nearby microscope and the aura settled the bullet down under the device.
"Let's clean off the bullet," Dr. Brainstem ordered the nurse. The nurse lifted a soaked cotton ball over to the bullet and rubbed the disgusting projectile down. There remained a bit of maroon staining in the crevices of the bullet, but it was otherwise clean.
Dr. Brainstem looked through the microscope with a scrutinizing eye.
"Whaddaya see? Huh? Whaddaya see?" Pinkie asked feverishly, bouncing all around the doctor. "Do you see any marks?"
"Pinkie! Be quiet!" Twilight ordered. "He's trying to do his work."
The doctor looked for a few more seconds, adjusting the bullet under the microscope as needed. Then he looked up. "It's as we feared. The logo on the bottom of the bullet matches the one found in the crate of weapons the griffons were carrying. The Night Terror and the griffons are getting their supplies from the same source."
"Looks like you were right, Applejack," Rainbow complimented her, slapping her on the back. "You figured it all out!"
"What does the logo look like?" Rarity asked. "I wonder if it has any beauty to it."
Dr. Brainstem shook his head in remorse. "It's a peace sign, Rarity. The worst possible thing that can be associated with such deadly weapons."
"Oh." Rarity's face fell. "My goodness. That's rather counterintuitive, don't you say?"
"Indeed." Dr. Brainstem looked through the microscope again. "But what's more interesting is that there are no hoofprints on the bullet anywhere. Undoubtedly, the Night Terror had to load the weapons into the gun in the first place, but he obviously did it with gloves, because there aren't any marks on the bullet other than the blood."
"Unless he loaded the gun with magic," came a hard voice. "Furthering my theory that the Night Terror was a unicorn." Case File came over to the work station and inclined his head. "Princess Twilight, I hope you're enjoying the Manehatten Institute lab?"
"I certainly am!" Twilight exclaimed, tapping her hooves together. "It's one of the most advanced labs in all of Equestria and I finally get to visit it!"
Dr. Brainstem chuckled. "The lab in Canterlot where we first made the guns was even more advanced than this," he told them. "I remember all of the advances we made...before the accident." His voice dropped. "And now the weapons I helped create are causing terror in this city," he whispered, and he turned away.
Twilight thought for a little bit. This would be a good time to ask about the initial invention of the guns. After five seconds, Twilight came next to the doctor. "Dr. Brainstem? Can you tell me about Bright Mind? The pony that first created the guns?"
Dr. Brainstem put a hoof to his chin in thought, his emerald eyes narrowing. "Bright Mind, you say? My goodness, that's a trip down memory lane."
"Please just tell us all you know," Twilight told him. "Anything helps."
Dr. Brainstem pondered before responding. "Bright Mind...was isolated. He wasn't the kind of pony that went out with other scientists on their parties on breaks. Sat by himself in the lunchroom. Pretended like nopony else existed or mattered to him. Focused completely on his work, never going home until everypony else was gone."
"So he was aloof? Mysterious?" Rarity asked for clarification.
Dr. Brainstem snorted. "Hardly. He was alone for a reason. None of the others really liked him all that much. They treated him with barely-concealed contempt."
"But why?" Fluttershy asked. "Nopony deserves to be bullied."
"It may have been that he was so much smarter than the other scientists," Dr. Brainstem theorized. "When you're smarter than other ponies, you stand out. And standing out makes you a target. A target for scorn and ridicule. Nopony likes ponies that are better than them. Whenever I saw the pony, he was being mocked by his coworkers because he was better than them. They liked to say he had a dirty mind instead of a bright one, and kept asking him, "Why are you thinking dirty thoughts? Don't you know scientists aren't supposed to think about that kind of stuff? Focus on your work, not on your dirty mind! Oh, right, nopony will want to bone you anyway. Those thoughts I know you have are all you'll ever get, so I suppose you'll have to enjoy them." One of their reasons for continuing their slander was, and I quote, "You're so smart. Figure out a way to stop us." Apparently you can be smart and incredibly thick-skulled at the same time." He shook his head.
"That...that's awful!" Rarity said to him.
"He was smaller and weaker than them, too," he continued. "It wasn't as though he chose to not hurt them back. He was physically incapable of it. In all my work experience, I never saw a more lonely soul. No friends to help him, because they thought he was arrogant enough to not make friends. But the only reason he never opened up to others was because he knew they'd just be in a position to hurt him further, to have him trust as a friend somepony who was in reality an enemy. I was in a separate part of the project, but when I saw him, he was either looking severely down or he was trying to work. He did it feverishly, like it was the only thing that mattered to him."
"But why?" Twilight asked.
"I don't know. But this went on for years, during which we were instructed to construct a weapon that could help easily defend Equestria from attacks. And all of a sudden two years into the project, he discovered an element called gunpowder, which is essential for a gun to function. After that, our project picked up speed. He became more and more isolated. The teasing grew at a more rapid pace. He stayed after work later and later. He practically lived at the lab, almost never going home. It became an inside joke of ours to talk about him. He was certainly the odd duck out.
"Finally, after six months of hard work, the first successful prototype of the weapon was assembled. Bright Mind was the one who had created it, because the other scientists he worked with were more than content to lounge back and let him do all the work for them. But after it was created and tested, the other ponies had reputably stolen his credit for it. He tried to tell them that, but they ignored him. He let them know that he had gotten so little credit for it when he had done all of the work, but they told him to shut up and let the big ponies work."
Dr. Brainstem wiped his forehead. "Then he exposed their fraud in front of everypony and denounced them as liars and thieves. And that night, as he went home for the first time in weeks, the ponies attacked him and beat him to a pulp. They bruised his gonads. Dented his skull. Gave him a scar across his face." He drew a line with his hoof from the top of his right forehead to the bottom of his left jawbone. The girls gasped in horror. "They spat on him. They knocked out a tooth. They broke two of his ribs. And they whispered, "What are you going to do about it? What have you learned? You've learned to stay out of our business." And they called his mother a Whorse, and laughed at him."
Twilight felt sick to her stomach at the descriptions. It felt terrible to learn about him, terrible to know the truth about the pony who had made the weapons in the first place. In a trembling voice she asked, "How do you know this?"
"I was the one that discovered him," Dr. Brainstem said morosely. "I took him back to the lab and patched him up. I did the best I could, but...the wounds stayed with him for the rest of his shortened life span."
"What do you mean?" Rainbow asked suspiciously.
"There was a period of time between the discovery of the weapon and the distribution of it to the military to use. During that time, Bright Mind came in to work as usual, but would not look at any of the coworkers that hurt him that night. He grew hard. Bitter. Cold. Silent.He worked harder than ever. He had that hideous scar on his face, but he never explained it to anypony who asked. "An accident," was all he said to questions as to how it happened. I have to say, I admire his courage."
"Courage?" Rarity asked incredulously. "If he had courage, he would have told somepony about it!"
Case File intervened. "And if he had told somepony, that would have told the bullies that he was weak, that he was too unstable to be worthy of being called strong. That he could not stand up to them without help. And it must have taken him some courage to not run and get help."
"The day before we distributed the early models to the military, Bright Mind was in his lab, locked in there alone with the storehouse of guns. And all of a sudden there was an explosion in his lab that ripped through the entire compound and killed him. When emergency crews got to the scene, we found Bright Mind's body. It was...burned and mutilated beyond my ability to describe it. It's so ghastly to recall. I felt such a pang of sorrow when I saw it. But when the body was shown to the others...well, they hid their pleasure well. I knew what they were thinking. I knew what they knew: that the annoying runt was no longer there to hinder them. I know for a fact that a few others, after work that day, went and got drinks to celebrate."
His voice grew hard, and dark. "I hated them for that. I hated them for treating another pony with such contempt. I resigned the next day in a fit of rage and moved to Manehatten after we discovered that the weapon stockpile had been pillaged. With two leading scientists on the project gone, and the weapons all looted and the pony who had taken them disappeared, the entire project had to be shut down. When that happened, the pony that had funded the project was furious. He didn't even know what he was funding in the first place because the details were to be kept secret, and when it shut down, he had lost hundreds of thousands of bits along with it."
"Who was the pony that funded the project?" Applejack asked.
A dangerous glint came into the doctor's emerald eyes. "The current head of the Committee of Internal Affairs for Manehatten. Count Rich Privilege, a pony with more bits than brain cells."
Case File looked at his watch and his scarlet eyes bulged. "I have to be somewhere," he whispered hurriedly. "I have to go. It'll close soon and I want to be there before it closes." He dashed out the door, flinging off his lab coat.
"Before what closes?" Rarity called after him, but he was already gone.
Dr. Brainstem shifted the work station over just a little. "He's just got an appointment. He didn't say anything about it, but you know how forensics experts are."
He gave a glance out of the window. The sunset lit the twin rivers on either side of Manehatten so it looked like a river of fiery lava. The sun itself was just above the torch held in the hoof of the Mare Statue on Equis Island, making the gold-plated torch look like it was really burning. The sun reflected off the glass-plated buildings, making it look like the whole city was burning, a dark foreshadowing of events to come with the Night Terror now on the loose in Manehatten. When the thought entered Dr. Brainstem's head, he rebuked himself silently for thinking such a jinxing thought.
"I think we should go to our apartment now," Twilight said after a lull in the conversation. "It's getting late, and we should be ready to work tomorrow."
"You do that," Dr. Brainstem said with a kind smile. "You're more precious than us. You need the sleep. We'll be wrapping things up here." He looked through the microscope again.
As the girls filed out, Dr. Brainstem looked out the window at the dusk sky, eerily apocalyptic in the bright orange color settling over the city. "May Celestia have mercy on this city," he whispered.
The Night Terror would strike again tonight. He just knew it, like it came naturally to him to know. There had been gaps in between attacks of about two to three days. And it had been two days since the griffons were found dead in the destroyed warehouse.
The Night Terror would surface again to wreak havoc tonight. He was certain of that. But where? He let his eyes travel around the city's many landmarks; Bridleway, the Chrystaller building, the Bronclyn Bridge. Where would he go? What would he do?
On the horizon, a small dot appeared on the ocean, unbeknownst to Dr. Brainstem. It was a private yacht, heading for the docks, which were about to close. It was loaded with weapons...and a special surprise for the ponies that would unload it at the docks.
The six girls and Spike returned their lab coats and goggles to the front of the desk where they came in. They then walked out of the massive building and onto the grounds of the laboratory. When the last pony, Applejack, filtered out of the lab, she asked Twilight, "Ah'ma guess we ain't goin' back ta our apartment, now are we, Twi?"
"No we aren't, Applejack," Twilight answered with determination. "We're keeping an eye out on the city tonight."
"What?!" Fluttershy exclaimed, leaping a foot in the air. "B-b-but the N-n-night Terror..."
"That's probably the reason we're staying out, Fluttershy," Rainbow patiently explained, flapping three feet in the air above their heads. "We're gonna catch this guy, whoever it is, and we're gonna kick his flank!"
"Well, maybe not in those terms," Twilight said, "But we are going to keep a watch for any suspicious activity tonight. Rainbow, I want you to patrol the skies above the city tonight and keep your eyes peeled for any loud noises or explosions. The Night Terror might show himself tonight."
"Twilight?" Rarity asked out of nowhere. "What was Case File late for exactly?"
Twilight craned her head to look at her. "Huh?"
"What was Case File so desperate to leave for?" she reiterated. "Was he going to leave somewhere for his forensics appointment, or was it for some other business?"
Twilight narrowed her eyes. "What are you suggesting?" she slowly asked.
"Nothing, Dahling. I was simply curious, that's all."
Unknown location
The Night Terror sharpened and loaded his weapons as he looked around the small space he was in. His body quivered with the anticipation of the fight ahead of him. He was like this every time he went out in the night. For it was in the night that he must operate. Nopony must see him. If they discovered who he truly was...well, he didn't want to think about what it would mean for him. So much of his life, undercut away from him in an instant, is what it would mean. So much work, so much secrecy, so much of his effort would be wasted if anypony...specifically, Dr. Brainstem or Count Privilege...found out the truth. He would be hated, and hunted to the ends of the planet.
But he loved it, the feeling of being almost caught. He loved the feeling of being a threat, of mattering to ponies who needed to recognize his power...
He smiled cruelly. Tonight blood would be shed. Tonight justice would be delivered. Swift justice. Fair justice.
Permanent justice.
He looked out of the small window next to him. Night was falling quickly. The sun had almost disappeared.
That was the signal for his game to begin. His game of warfare against crime.
He made sure all of his weapons were operational, then he sat cross-legged on the ground he was in. He settled down in the dark space and did his ritualistic breathing exercises. His calm before the battle. He whispered to himself, in such a calming voice.
Your anger must be cold. My anger is cold, and so I use it. Their anger is hot, and so it uses them.
I am stronger than them. I am faster than them. They are dangerous. But so am I.
I am the avatar of punishment. I am the angel of death.
I will never be weakened. I am free. My power has freed me.
He opened his scarlet eyes.
I am the Night Terror. I am the only power that really matters.
And every last traitorous soul shall bow in my shadow.