Tattered Wing sat on the steps of town hall shortly before dawn. On the street before her construction equipment rumbled by. The first round of equipment had arrived late last night and this was now the forth round of arrivals since that first one. There would be more arriving again for the next two days, and more over the coming weeks. They had a city to build and they had very little time to do it.
Off to her side some humans were posting up signs on the walls of town hall advertising the need for construction workers and promises of good pay. The main meeting hall in town hall now had an army of architects laying out the plans for construction and there were blueprints everywhere you looked when you walked in. Suprisingly there were a few tired earth ponies, unicorns, a lone pegasus among those architects--all up early along with the humans laying out plans.
Some of the plans made her raise an eyebrow. One of the signs that was now hanging on the doors of town hall was a request to buy shit...literal pony shit. They even had positions for full time shitters where all they wanted a pony to do was eat and shit all day long. At first she had thought this was for farming, but this was for building materials. They were going to use pony shit as a building material. She had no idea how they were going to do that, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know.
All of this was things that might spark her interest normally. This place was her home now for better or for worse, so of course she wanted to know how it was going to be built. The thing that weighed on her mind though was the first clearing of land that would happen in just an hour or so. In a few hours there would be no physical evidence that Swift Strike had been murdered or any evidence beyond Tonya and Number Crunch's testimonies. They were going to escape justice and there wasn't a thing she could do to stop it.
Sure, she could probably get enough evidence together that they had helped him escape. The problem was that at the time he was being held she technically had no legal authority to hold him prisoner. She had no legal authority to hold Number Crunch and Tonya right now to tell the truth, everypony...everyone-she was trying to stop herself from ponifying everything when humans were included--just went along with it. The confessions she took she had taken with no legal authority either. They didn't stand up in court. Well, they could be used as evidence, but they didn't hold the same weight as they might have.
By noon the paperwork to give her legal authority would be signed, but by noon it would be too late; clearing of those woods started at dawn, and dawn was almost here. She'd told Melissa that everything would be resolved before noon, she just hadn't said how.
She looked around at the tops of buildings at all the night ponies that she was responsible for. She was supposed to give them legitimacy as law enforcement, but this whole thing was rotten. Technically the only illegitimate thing that she had done was the disposal of the remains under pressure from the government, a crime in itself, but that like everything else was going to have a blind eye turned to it.
The government was right. If she went out of line and did the right thing she risked everything that was being built here; which would hurt thousands of ponies. There was more to it than that too. Number Crunch was as much a victim as Swift Strike, perhaps more of one since Swift Strike was a legitimate wrongdoer without having anything be done to him to make him so. If she did what was right Number Crunch would be treated as a criminal. Doing the wrong thing was clearly wrong, but doing the right thing felt wrong too. She just wanted to protect. Why couldn't it be simple and there was just a clear right thing where the guilty were punished and those that were innocent didn't get hurt any further?
At least justice would come to Tonya. Tonya would escape justice from law enforcement, but she wouldn't escape the Dreamwardens. Scary and disturbing as the Dreamwardens could be, there was something comforting in knowing that they would be there to punish the guilty and no legal loopholes or government interference could stop them.
"That was a good few hours sleep. Could do with a little coffee though," Starlight's voice came from behind her.
Tattered turned to see Starlight come up next to her. The unicorn looked a little bleary eyed, but otherwise in a good mood.
"You know, I don't know why this town is called Riverview if the thing everyone can see from everywhere in town is that big tree," Starlight said as she pointed with a hoof over at Skytree.
Tattered smirked. "The tree is a recent addition, hasn't been here as long as even the ponies."
Starlight raised an eyebrow at her. "I've done a lot of reading about your world. I didn't read anything about trees that grew that big that fast or transplanting trees of that size."
Tattered chuckled. "Because there aren't trees that grow that fast and we wouldn't have a clue how to transplant a tree that big. No, that tree was grown with pony magic. I would thought you have heard about it."
Starlight looked back at the tree and frowned. "That's pretty impressive. It probably took a lot of earth ponies working in conjunction to do that. I didn't know any of you knew how to pool your powers like that, and that would have taken a lot of earth ponies to do even that way."
"Um, one earth pony did that," Tattered said while still smirking. "She also grew miles of crops at once in the same go. Right now I have her under house arrest for causing a localized earthquake that leveled a building. Can't hold her anywhere and crystal ponies look at me like I'm stupid when I suggest getting a large team of them to try to keep her under control. Told me flat out that the idea of a team of crystal ponies making a dent in her is a joke."
Starlight went wide-eyed and didn't look sleepy now. "You're joking, you have to be joking. There hasn't been an earth pony that strong since... it's been at least six hundred years and probably at least another eight hundred before that one. And a lot of what they say about them are believed to just be exaggerations."
Tattered looked out at the tree and pointed at it. "Seeing is believing. There's your evidence right over there. That damn filly has more power than the rest of town combined. Think we have a sense of pride that an Earth pony can do that and no Equestrian pony can."
"A filly?! You mean she hasn't fully come into her power yet?" Starlight said in shock.
Tattered shrugged. "She's seventeen so she's basically full grown. Can't have much growth left. Her name's Wild Growth by the way; green earth pony with a purple mane. Don't think we'd have so many businesses ready to invest in us without her around. They're counting on her to supply us with pretty much unlimited trees."
Starlight blinked and went back to staring at Skytree again. Then seemed to go deep into thought. "Well, I suppose statistically that it isn't unlikely that some pony would come out as the next Starswirl, or in her case, Mountain Crusher. There is a huge amount of ponies on this planet now."
"Mountain Crusher? That's the name of the last earth pony you had like this?" Tattered asked.
Starlight nodded. "Yeah, allegedly he was capable of doing just that, leveling whole mountains--the power of earth at his hooves. I always thought they were foals' tales."
"What kinds of stories are there about him?" Tattered asked out of curiosity.
Starlight kept looking at the tree while she spoke. "There's this place back home called the Ghastly Gorge. There were apparently some caverns there a thousand years ago instead of the gorge, and there are still plenty of caverns down in the gorge. I always thought that erosion just carved it out but my friend Maud told me that erosion doesn't work that fast. He did it way back when. He just split everything for miles on end with one mighty stomp of his hoof."
Tattered felt a mild sense of dread. Wild Growth had said that she had held back when she leveled the clinic. Could she have done the same thing as that legendary pony? Something would have to be done so that couldn't happen.
"Wild leveled that clinic in one short bout of temper..." Tattered said slowly. "I think as part of her punishment I'm going to highly recommend some anger management classes, for the good of the town."
Starlight nodded. "That sounds like a good idea. Having your town leveled because a filly threw a temper tantrum is not something that would help with human-pony relations."
"Ya think?" Tattered said with a shake of her head. "Screw human-pony relations, I'm concerned about who could be killed."
Starlight blushed with embarrassment. "Yeah, that should have probably been my first thought instead of how it could impact relations. I've been on kind of a single lane mind for the last week."
Tattered looked at the unicorn. "It's called one-tracked mind."
"That's essentially what I said," Starlight replied.
"It's a common phrase, people with look at you funny if you say it like that," Tattered explained.
Starlight looked up at the night ponies perched on the buildings. "They are looking at me funny now. The Middletons said they think it's the Shimmerists who don't like me much. Is there that many Shimmerists in town?"
Tattered looked up at the ponies and the dawn that was now slowly breaking. "There's a lot of them, and the number keeps growing. The town leader is a Shimmerist. She is also a preacher. One of her big planned projects is a huge church so she can spout off her Shimmerist views to a larger audience all at once. Think the only reason she isn't doing that now is she doesn't have the venue for it."
"But there's no friction with the humans? I figured that would increase hostility," Starlight asked in confusion.
Tattered shook her head again. "Naw, humans are their primary targets for winning over to Shimmerist views. They treat the humans better than they treat other ponies. Sunset Blessing will do all kinds of crap to ponies, even those working with her, but she'll just smile sweetly and act like the most helpful pony ever for a human. I hate that unicorn's guts."
"Because she's cruel to ponies and nice to humans?" Starlight asked with a frown.
Tattered grit her teeth. "Because she is just so duplicitous and two-faced. I honestly couldn't care less about her stupid drive to make humans want to be ponies; what does that really matter anyway? She's a racist, but that's nothing new around here--even if it's been repackaged. No, it's the fact that behind closed doors she's filthy and she puts herself up as God's special pony. She does things that should have her in jail but the government keeps letting her get away with...with all kinds of crap."
"So do you think there are a lot of Shimmerists here because of previous racist views? " Starlight asked. "Sorry just trying to understand how it takes hold and grows."
Tattered sighed. "Racism is maybe part of it, but it's bigger than that. The thing you need to understand is Us versus Them mentality. It can take a lot of forms, racism is one of those forms, but hardly the only. My family was really into politics and they played to that Us versus Them line--most the big politicians do. You can play it about political beliefs, religious beliefs, race, gender, nationality, sexuality, level of wealth, even fucking sports teams you like. The basic thing is always the same though; what we--whoever we are--are right and proper and them--anyone who doesn't fit our whatever--are inheriently wrong and less than us. There's simply a new us and them now with humans and ponies. Of course ponies are going to flock to Shimmerist thinking, it reaffirms that they are better and right, just like they've always been taught and reaffirmed when they were human. It's the same crap it's always been, just with new us's and thems."
Starlight gave her a long look. "You've clearly been thinking about this a lot."
Tattered chuckled sadly. "Not really. I thought all this stuff years ago when watching my dad play to it as a politician. I was so disgusted by all of it I told him he could fuck off and I'd never follow in his footsteps."
"Yet here you are in a position that holds political power," Starlight observed.
"I just want to protect everypony...everyone. I don't want to be involved with all of that political bullshit, yet I keep getting pulled in," Tattered said as she looked out at the sun peaking over the roofs. In the distance she could hear the first sounds of the woods being felled to the ground, probably waking a lot of ponies in the tents nearby. Only minutes now and things would be settled.
"Sometimes you don't get a choice if you care," Starlight said quietly. "That's why I'm even on this world. Something wrong was happening and something needed to be done."
Tattered looked down. "A part of me wishes you hadn't. If the whole world had been consumed by ETS and all the brainwashing had stuck with everypony there might not be any more us versus them. I don't think ponies are superior, or what the vision gave us was a necessarily better way of life, but at least that us versus them mentality might have finally stopped."
"Do you hate me as well then?" Starlight asked sadly.
Tattered shook her head without hesitation. "No, you were just trying to protect and do right. I understand and respect that. Sometimes the right thing can end up doing harm though. Sometimes there just isn't a clear right thing to do and you just have to make a decision and live with it."
"I think the right thing to do was pretty clear cut in this case," Starlight asserted. "It's been my experience that there is always clearly a right thing to do after observing for a while."
Tattered looked at the unicorn with a blank expression.
"Well then, welcome to Earth, where we will give you plenty of new experiences not having a right thing to do."