//------------------------------// // Old Reflexes // Story: Twilight In Plain Sight // by Mitch H //------------------------------// Twilight Sparkle bent over her workbench, chaining the chunky crystalline elements together as she'd planned. The whole array slotted, well, not neatly, but solidly within a box built out of chickenwire. She pulled out the earphones from the tangle of cords and wiring on the shelf next to her, plugging it into the array, and threaded the cords out of a narrow slot she'd left along the side of the box. The likewise chickenwire-lined lid shut firmly over the whole, and Twilight took one of the cords with its attached earbud, and put it in her left ear. The random background noise of a janitor going about her evening business was faintly detectable through the bud. Here, sir! I've got a signal now. Put these on. Twilight handed the earphone set to the dark figure who had been waiting patiently in her workshop, and he slipped them over his long, styled dark hair. Cadance's father was still a handsome man, even after all of these years, and still wore his hair long as he had in his youth. Twilight could hear the subjects opening the door into the 'wired' offices she had placed her device earlier in the day, and the sound of the janitor's vacuum suddenly became oppressively loud through her ear-bud. Sombra laughed with delight as he listened in on the auxiliary headphones. His subordinates in the accounting offices began arguing over who had cleaned the coffee-maker last, as clear as a bell, half a county away in the Crystal Ministries office in downtown Port Crystal. My dear, you did it. No electrical components whatsoever? Only crystal elements and your little… special treatments? Yessir! This array is Faraday cage-shielded! The null hypothesis is definitively disproved. It isn't even a matter of P testing, it works one hundred attempts out of a hundred, as long as I use the same geometries, and the base silicate materials. Gain's a little weak with these unrefined crystals, but I think that if I use gem-quality silicates, I can get perfect clarity. No EM fields, no transmissions, no wires – just resonance and the principle of similitude! Sombra beamed at his prize student, looking down at Twilight Sparkle. Nothing but crystals and pure magic! Indetectable by scientific means! Do you know what this means, my dear Twilight? All of our doctrines, all of Blessed Amore's teachings... Magic is real, sir! Oh, I have so much to learn… Twilight! Aunt Twilight, wake up! The Master's approval filled Twilight with a warm buzz of self-satisfaction, with the feeling that the world was bright and full of wonders… Auntie, wake up! Twilight never wanted this moment to end. "Momma Shine! Wake the heck up! It's morning, we're gonna be late!” Twilight Sparkle jerked awake, and there was a clatter as some of the kibble her face had been pressed into fell back onto the dining table. She looked around in groggy confusion, surrounded by the fruits of her long night's work, everything scattered about and nothing in their proper trays or boxes or – "Skyla! What time is it? When did I fall asleep?” "How would I know? And six-thirty!” "Augh! We're gonna be late. Come here!” Twilight buried her nose in Flurry Heart's hair, sniffing deep. "You need to get washed up, go take a quick shower. Quick! No dawdling, and don't use up all the hot water, I'll be in right behind you!” Twilight shoved Flurry Heart back into the hallway, and turned around to put away all of her supplies. The array and its chained recording gems and power-crystals were safely pushed to the back of the table, and she didn't have to worry about any of that. It would keep storing all of the feed from the bug in the police station until someone broke the bracelet or seriously disturbed it. Maybe coming into a contact with a person with a strong natural destiny-field? Some of Twilight's projects over the years had just failed for no apparent reason, and she'd only been able to theorize about what could and could not disturb her devices… Finally, enough of the table was clear that she could feed Flurry Heart once she got out of the shower, and Twilight put out the breakfast fixings so that the little girl could eat while Twilight took a quick shower and put on Dusk Shine's face. They couldn't afford to miss school, not on the second day, no matter what was going on otherwise in their lives. Twilight thought about what she'd put together before passing out the night before. Well, morning, really, but the hours of darkness had always sort of blurred together for Twilight Sparkle when she was in the middle of a research project. In the bad old days, in the good old days that had birthed the bad, today – it was all the same. Twilight Sparkle could change her name, but she couldn't change herself. She got absorbed. As Twilight rushed through her shower and her morning ablutions, though, she mulled over what she had captured and overheard. It was too bad she hadn't been able to bug all of the interrogations that the police must have conducted last night. With all of those people in the police station, she'd only been able to listen in to a half-dozen or so. Luckily, the detectives had conducted all of their high-priority interrogations in the same room as the one Skyla and she had been in, so maybe it didn't matter? As Twilight painted herself into the semblance of a Dusk Shine, she thought about the interviews. Mostly biker elders, but also the director of the funeral home. So, Thunderlane, the so-called 'sergeant at arms'. His boss, the chapter president, a gravel-voiced old coot named Wind Rider. Three other chapter presidents from neighboring towns and cities that hadn't sounded really all that relevant. And the director, Lost Wax. Dusk Shine struggled into an outfit which really wasn't suitable for work, but was the best she could muster with her current wardrobe. Khakis and a button-up shirt. Made her look kind of mannish, in Twilight's opinion, but Dusk Shine figured that she wasn't exactly looking to impress anyone today. She thought about the rumors almost certainly already circulating, and figured that she shouldn't look too good today. Tomorrow? She'd have to show the flag, but today, it would be OK to look a little rough. Twilight made a mental note: Dusk Shine needed to get that dry-cleaner she'd found to take care of the pant-suit. And buy more suitable clothes for her Dusk persona. As she bolted her own breakfast at the table, and made sure that the recording array wasn't visible from the nearly-ground-level window in their tiny 'dining room', she checked Dusk Shine's smart phone, whose battery was nearly dead. Poppy Seed had left her a couple of texts, and Twilight scrolled through them quickly. Nothing specific – Seed knew better than to commit anything sensitive to texts, after all – but enough to let her know that the deputy marshal was deep into the investigation, and that she wanted to talk, tonight. "Skyla! Get your bag! We're taking the car today, I have a bunch of errands we need to get done before school!” ”OK, Mommy!” Classes were uncomfortable, to say the least. The kids had no idea what was going on, so they were fine, and Dusk Shine was getting a handle on who would be a problem, and who could be relied upon to not cause problems. She hadn't identified the kids who would be key to bringing the rest of them into line, but she was starting to get some ideas. Children herded like adults, really. Find the bellwethers, and the rest would follow, eagerly. The only question was identifying which ones were the natural leaders, and then co-opting them into your reign of terror. Er, cooperative mutualism for common educational attainment, that is. It was Dusk Shine's co-workers who kept 'happening by' as Dusk did her best to get her kids on target and on task, interrupting, dropping off paperwork, or just sticking their curious heads into her classroom. Bah. It was enough to make Dusk Shine think dark thoughts about extending her behavior-modification techniques to her co-workers as well as her students. It didn't even have to be actual black magic! Although sometimes you might think neuro-linguistic programming was black magic, from the results obtained… But no, Twilight Sparkle had never been able to test out her adaptations of NLP techniques to pedagogy except in the course of experimenting with Flurry Heart, and she didn't need to pollute her testing environment by using said techniques on adults in tandem with her plans for the children. She already knew it worked on adults. Well, drug-addled cultists and drug-dealers and police, but those qualified as adults, right? Mostly. She hadn't been able to think about her surveillance during morning classes, the children required all of her attention, but after she retrieved her now-charged phone and chucked it into her purse, Dusk Shine hurried out to the parking lot. She jumped into the Beetle and hurried on down into the Switch Yard to retrieve her pantsuit from the dry-cleaners, pick up some supplies from the dollar-store and the Hobby Lobby, and to get herself a rushed lunch. Dusk did her best to think through what she'd learned in between her errands and the wait in line at the sandwich-shop. From the questions that the detectives asked Wind Rider and the other bikers, Rider's deceased son Soarin had died under more than questionable circumstances in Texas, in some town she'd never heard of out past Carl's Corner down towards Waco. And by 'questionable circumstances', they apparently meant a gun-battle over a blown meth deal between Salvajes and another biker club Twilight had never heard of, the 'Hussars'. Silver Back had claimed that the dead boy hadn't been riding with an outlaw club, but gun-battles and crystal meth deals didn't exactly sound law-abiding to Twilight. The deceased Soarin had been delivered to the funeral home early the previous morning, according to the interrogation of Lost Wax. That panel van that Dusk Shine and Skyla had passed as they left for school on the way out of the parking lot must have been the casket arriving from Texas. Twilight strained her memory, trying to recall details of what she'd seen, but she had been paying more attention to Skyla and her worries about the new job, than anything going on in the street or with the van they'd walked past. Had there been the sound of motorcycle engines as they walked out to the corner? There might have been, but Twilight Sparkle knew all about the mutability of memory, and one's brain's capacity for self-modification under even the slightest suggestive pressure. Damnit. The older detective, Soft Eyes, had spent most of his time interrogating the dead boy's father, Wind Rider. He was the most obvious suspect in the death of a Salvaje on his own doorstep, after they murdered his son. There had been a great deal of talk about his movements, times and places, people he had been with. Twilight remembered all the chaos after the murders, and cringed to remember how badly she'd let down everyone in that. Much of the arrangements had been left to a distant cousin, and then an estranged aunt, who'd had to fly into the country from Quebec. For most of the period in question, Twilight had been on the run, or in hiding. Or… doing more questionable things. In self-defense, of course. Dusk Shine, sitting at a sandwich shop in one of the strip-malls that dotted the Switch Yard, shook her head, and dismissed Twilight Sparkle's pointless reminiscences. She had more important things to consider. Such as paying for her lunch, and parsing her memories of the interrogations. Dusk wished that she could chance pulling out her notes, but she was in public. Soft Eyes had as good as accused Wind Rider of getting his son killed in the course of expanding his supposed drug-empire's connections and supply chains. Something about transshipments of amphetamines? Or, as they called it on the street, 'crystal meth'. Twilight Sparkle didn't like that slang, it reminded her too much of Sombra's poisons, although she was well aware that they had absolutely no relation to each other, in origins, function or street character. If there were two sets of drugs with more polar opposition than crystal meth and crystal molly, she'd never heard of them. The whole story struck Dusk Shine as horribly squalid and sad, but none of it sounded like anything that the Crystallers would be involved in. Meth deals and shootouts were not the way that the cult did things. They preferred sweet seductions and happy customers. Mind-controlled, empty-headed customers, ripe for recruitment into membership, mind you, but wired, paranoid, crazed meth-heads were really not people the cult's leadership cared to pursue. As Dusk Shine drained her soda-cup, and began putting together her lunch-trash in preparation to leave, that clique of railroad-retirees came clucking into the restaurant like a flock of gregarious geese. "Miss Shine!” squeaked Gentle Grade, waddling over to Dusk's table. "We heard all about your frightening experience. Such a terrible thing, for a mother and her child to find death on your steps! You must have been so terrified, so scared.” "Miss Shine, I'm so sorry that my fool of a nephew let such a thing happen to you and your little girl,” Bees Wax added. "I'm sure that it's all some sort of ghastly filing mistake. One of his worthless employees will no doubt have just mis-placed a body for the next day's work while they were looking for their keys or something mundane like that. You'd be amazed the foolish things that these children get up to when they don't think the public are paying attention to how they handle the dead. Shockingly careless, all of them.” "Bees! It couldn't have been something like that, didn't you hear? The young man Miss Shine found had his throat cut! How can that have been an accident, or some bureaucratic fumble with a misplaced body? You don't just leave corpses laying about in the employee parking lot, do you?” It occurred to Dusk Shine that these innocent old ladies knew more about the situation than she did after a night bent over a surveillance rig, and having found the body in the first damn place. The jungle telegraph was truly awe-inspiring in its velocity and all-encompassing capacity for information collection and dispersal! It was a shame that Dusk didn't have time to debrief these mistresses of the gossip world about everything they'd learned and knew, she was sure it would be an education. "Thank you both for your concern, we're doing fine. Skyla was frightened, of course, but they're resilient at that age, and she didn't see that much. I just want to put it past her as quickly as possible. Could we talk about this later? I'll be late for my afternoon classes if I don't get going right now. Can't be slacking off on my second day on the job!” The laughing little old ladies waved Dusk Shine on her way, and she rushed off to collect the Beetle and to get back to her students. As she did, she checked her phone again. She agreed to meet Poppy Seed for dinner at a restaurant in College Heights later that night; she'd have to arrange with Bubble Berry for Skyla to be taken care of while Dusk was meeting with her WitSec handler. It was already a long day, and it wasn't more than half over yet.