//------------------------------// // In Which Amethyst Gets Ambushed And Then Single-Hoofedly Defends Herself From Multiple Assailants // Story: Derpy Accidentally a Portal Gun VI: My Little Amethyst // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// My Little Amethyst Admiral Biscuit iPods and earbuds did not exist in Equestria. Like most bits of technology that don't exist somewhere, the inhabitants of that particular place don't fully understand the advantages or disadvantages of that particular innovation. It's well known what happens when you give a monkey a hand grenade; less well known is what happens when you give a pony earbuds. Music is nice when you're engaged in a task such as hoof-building a portal gun using whatever scraps you can find in a college student's house. It's less nice when an ambush comes, because it dulls the hearing. In fact, the first clue that Amethyst Star got that something was not as it should have been was when the jar of peanut butter was jammed onto her horn. This was no empty jar, either; it was a brand new never-been-opened jar of Jif. The lid had been removed in preparation, much like one might pull the pin from a grenade before tossing it. Her horn, while not alicorn sharp, was plenty sharp enough to pierce the silver foil tamper-proof seal, and from that moment onward, she might as well have been a mundane pony. Nevertheless, she was a pony with a particular set of skills, and any Equestrian combat instructor worth her salt lick covered non-magical combat, including how to break every single one of the 205 or so bones in the Equine body (this number obviously varies depending on tribe) using only physical attacks. Humans weren't ponies, but they did have a similar number of bones, and the general principle of breaking them translated across species. It's also worth mentioning that pony hooves are hard, and pony hooves with shoes are harder. ••• The poor bastard carrying the jar of peanut butter was the first to go down, victim of two hind hooves lashed out in extreme prejudice. Ponies lacked the 350° vision of Earth equines, and Sparkler had been caught completely by surprise, so her accuracy was somewhat diminished. That, and she had not fully studied human anatomy, so she wasn't aware that the knees were a particularly vulnerable spot, at least when it came to permanently eliminating a human as a moving threat. A shot to the junk was almost as good (and honestly, might make any red-blooded man wish for a kneecapping) and there Amethyst nearly scored. From a coldly anatomical perspective, she got him in the adductor longus and skidded off the gracilis with enough force to tear through his jeans and boxers. One thing that's often not appreciated in ponies is their ability to kick and run, something that Amethyst took full advantage of. Bad guys typically come in clusters, their bumbliness in direct relation to the plot. The second man, unencumbered with a jar of peanut butter had instead a switchblade knife—six inches of potentially lethal stainless steel more or less direct from China. He only had time to make one slash at Amethyst and as attacks went, it was completely ineffective. Earbuds were an unknown; not so much knives. She dodged the thrusting knife, spent one moment mentally debating if it was worth the effort to redirect her antagonist's attack into himself, and instead took the safer option of fleeing the scene of the crime to regroup and plan a proper defense sans horn. People betray you, she thought as she charged up the stairs, well ahead of the guy with the knife. Sooner or later. Defending an entire house against an onslaught of baddies was old hat to her. She'd taken in the layout over her brief time as a tenant, and knew where the strengths and weaknesses lay. Admittedly, they were mostly weaknesses; the house had never been designed to withstand a military-style assault, nor had it aged into that particular skillset. Truth was everything in the house was a drywall screw or strip of duct tape away from ultimate failure, a fact which had not gone unobserved by her. The walls were thin, the floors creaked, and doors would stand up to one shoulder check and no more; the less said about the recalcitrant plumbing the better. Over time, it could serve as a biological weapon, but that was more time than she was likely to have. Legionnaires disease wasn't quick. Nor was lead poisoning. On the plus side, Amethyst had a more direct way of administering lead poisoning, and since she was a true believer in the Boy Scout motto, her bedroom already contained a Mossberg 12-gauge double barrel shotgun tucked under the mattress. That was something her human host didn't know she had. Neither, apparently, did her assailants. The man with the knife kicked down the door; as predicted, it held up to exactly one assault. That was all the time she needed to set the stock firmly against her shoulder and aim it at the center of the door before the second kick blew the cheap latch right out of the doorframe. There was an instant of recognition as he took in the scene. Looking down the two barrels of the gun must have been like looking down the Lincoln Tunnel, if the Lincoln Tunnel ended in the brimstoney lakes of Hell. “Wait,” he said, and that was all he said before the gun spoke, because Amethyst played for keepsies. In a Hollywood movie he would have flown back into the hallway, perhaps sticking to the wall for just a moment before slumping down to the floor, and he might have lived long enough to utter out some poignant last words, such as 'I regret everything,' but this wasn't Hollywood. He tumbled forward into the spread of buckshot and expired on the floor. She opened the chamber and ejected the spent shells but that was as much a formality as anything; the trigger was complicated with hooves, and reloading moreso. Nowhere did her plans involve getting shot while stuffing shotgun shells in by mouth, and the only thing that would have been a more obvious sign of her current position was a cannon. The only other way out of the room was through the bathroom, and it wasn't much of a way out. Some houses had bathrooms that connected to a pair of bedrooms, but this wasn't one of them. At best, the shower wall connected to the closet in the bedroom next door via the wall. She figured rightly that the sound of a shotgun followed by the unmistakable thud of a falling body would be a clear sign to the rest of her assailants that she was not exactly unprepared, and would cause them some delay in charging her current fallback position. That was enough time to use several towels and a curling iron that happened to be in the medicine cabinet as a effective if nasty trap for the first person through the door. It was also a long enough respite for her to pull the offending jar of Jif off her horn and begin the tedious process of scrubbing chunky peanut butter off her horn. Since all the towels had been repurposed as a trap, she had to resort to toilet paper, which, while slightly humiliating, was at least slightly effective. She did not squeeze the TP, since the instructions on the package specifically forbade that. There wasn't enough time to clean her horn fully, however. She knew that there would be more raiders coming—there always were—and if she stayed in the bathroom, she'd die there. Amethyst had an aversion to dying in a bathroom. So she grabbed Fredrick’s toothbrush and stuck it in the usual place, then rummaged around under the sink for some supplies to open the wall. It didn't take her too long to MacGyver a shaped charge using a bottle of Drano, the foil out of a toothpaste tube, and two bottles of shampoo. The bathroom sink was sturdy enough to serve as cover. She ducked down behind it just in time. The bomb went off with a loud phwoomf and the room instantly smelled like hydrogen and cheap drywall powder. Her bomb hadn't been effective enough to completely clear the hole, so she punched a hoof through the cardboard backing, praying that there wasn't lath or asbestos insulation behind it. There wasn't, and in no time at all she'd made a big enough hole to crawl through. The towel rack had survived mostly intact—it was scorched and bent, but still clinging to the wall—and she draped the bathmat over it to cover her escape hole. That would further delay her assailants, assuming that they were smart enough to know that she had been in the bathroom. She did not open the closet doors straight away. Instead, she huddled among the hanging clothes, balanced on top of a Xerox box that contained old school papers, bills, and copies of adult magazines. Mostly Dominant Mystique, because Frederick had strange tastes in pornography. Those weren't of any use to her. She felt around the closet for something that would serve as a weapon, finally finding an old tub of Legos. She scattered those around the floor, Geneva Convention be damned. All the while, her ears were swivelling, taking in the noises in the house. There were at least three more of them. The man she'd kicked first was counted in that total; she could hear him limping, and that gave her a small bit of satisfaction. It would have been nice to clean off her horn, but her hooves were busy knotting T-shirts together. Her next destination was going to be out the window, since that would be unexpected. Ideally, she'd take one of them out with her, although he wasn't going to get the benefit of her makeshift rope. He'd serve to break the window, and provide a bit of a cushion for her landing. It worked just as she'd planned. They'd seen the body in the hallway and gone around it. Two of them charged into the bedroom. The first went down when he stepped on Legos; the second had thicker shoes and made it across the room, his gun darting around looking for threats. Bifold doors were no match for a charging unicorn; she tore them off their rollers as she came out of the closet, her rope trailing behind her. She expertly hooked the newel post on the bed with the loop she'd made in the end and then leapt at the poor clueless fool who had only now noticed death coming for him. He couldn't have been more perfectly situated. She bounded off the floor and caught him with both forehooves right in the middle of his chest. He stumbled backwards, banged against the windowsill, and for just an instant the glass held. But only for an instant, and then the two of them were falling in a tangle of venetian blinds, bullets whizzing by overhead. Amethyst's prison-style t-shirt rope pulled her up short, stretching and tearing and absorbing some of the energy of her fall; the rest was spent as she slammed down onto the body of the man she'd put through the window like a ton of bricks. “Eat your heart out, John McClane,” she muttered. But there was no more time for gloating; any moment his friend would be at the window, shooting down into the backyard. If she stayed in the open, he'd end her. A spray of gunfire followed her to the back door, peppering her hind legs and tail with sod. It took her a moment to open the back door—it was locked, and too strong for her to buck over. Luckily, the small porch roof protected her from small arms fire while she got out the key. She locked the door behind her and went into the kitchen. She had to work fast. Luckily, the kitchen opened into the laundry room and then the pantry, and that gave her lots of options. A bleach bomb in the oven, the entire contents of the knife block and the spare screws drawer precariously perched on the folding ironing board, and the tried-and-true paint cans on a string over the hall door. Amethyst was a little bit sloppy on the last one; she heard the sound of running footsteps on the stairs and didn't have time to properly measure the rope for an incapacitating strike. She galloped into the living room and slid under the coffee table. Three . . . two . . . one . . . the explosion from the kitchen was all that she could have hoped for, and the screams were a good indicator that she'd winged one of them. That same someone sprinted into the laundry room and found her ironing board trap. It sprang with a meaty, squishy thump, and the screams quickly diminished into a pathetic sort of gurgling which eventually died out. Any sensible person would have decided that this was a fight that could only end one way, and run off with their (proverbial) tail between their legs. Her final opponent was not sensible. Blinded by greed and perhaps also the thought that now any gold he got from her would be his alone, he persevered. The paint cans only slowed him for a moment; they missed anything particularly vital. “That the best you got?” he taunted, apparently forgetting that the fight had started out four to one and was now evenly matched. She didn't rise to his bait; instead, she scrubbed at her horn furiously. She'd snagged a bottle of Dawn from the sink on her way by, and while she wasn't entirely sure that it was horn-safe, she didn't have any better options at the moment. Given enough time, it might have worked. The bristles of the toothbrush kept getting clogged with chunky peanut butter, and she had no water to rinse the suds off with. Her final opponent began to indiscriminately shoot into the living room in the hopes of either flushing her out or hitting her, and her position quickly became untenable. Nintendo had foreseen that someone might use the Wiimotes as a makeshift bolo and padded them accordingly; they had not considered that somepony might use the actual console in that manner. While it was neither aerodynamic nor particularly heavy, the strain relief on the power cord performed a hero's task as she whipped it around, letting it sail free at just the right moment. Her opponent attempted to shoot it out of the air rather than sidestep it, and if he'd been using larger caliber ammunition that might have actually worked. Instead, while it did slow the console somewhat and also unintentionally ejected Alone in the Dark, he still took the bulk of the impact directly to the forehead. The game, at least, missed him. Amethyst followed the Wii, charging and screaming like she was mainlining a cocaine and epinephrine cocktail. It turns out that shooting at a unicorn who is charging directly at you with the intent of goring you with her horn is deceptively difficult, and virtually all of the robber's shots went wide. Two did score superficial hits, one gouging a furrow across her rump, and the second ripping a chunk off her left ear. ••• Unicorns are basically just horses that can stab you. With training, they can stab you and do a mid air backflip using their horn as a fulcrum and then give the hind hoof version of an uppercut directly into the jawbone. Amethyst had had that training, and while she preferred to not stick her horn into people, needs must when the devil drives.