//------------------------------// // They Breed Like Rabbits // Story: How Bunnies Almost Took Over the World // by SirNotAppearingInThisFic //------------------------------// Every day or so, the hawks would manage to catch a new bunny.  Angel and Constance would meet them at the Everfree tunnel entrance, pick up the prisoner, and start interrogating.  Angel was thankful that most critters either avoided the Everfree side of the tunnels or would happily attribute the growing pile of bunny corpses to an unpleasant creature from the forest itself.  To minimize their chances of being discovered, though, Constance spread the rumor that an unknown predator had been active near the edge of the forest. After the third bunny, Angel settled into a bit of a routine: he’d ask the bunny his questions, they would refuse to answer, then he would show them the remains of their peers and ask his questions again.  The bunnies had reacted to the remains, but they didn’t break. Phoebe, for her part, appeared to be enjoying the opportunity to play with a new bunny every day. The bunnies enjoyed their playdates considerably less so. Constance still attended all of the interrogations, though she made no attempt to hide her discomfort at the end of each meeting.  Angel and Constance had gleaned enough from the bunnies’ denials and taunts to start piecing the situation together, though they were a long way off from fully understanding what was going on. Most of the bunnies had refused to confirm anything beyond the fact that the Whitetail Warren was definitely acting on some sort of plan.  Angel had gathered that the four factions had stopped warring, quite possibly through an amount of backstabbing similar to what he had employed to start it.  One of the bunnies had gone so far as to threaten him with the statement that the four faction leaders had united against him, and that he was a dead bunny. Angel wasted no time in pointing out that of the two bunnies in the den, he wasn’t, in fact, the dead one. The special committee took in what evidence Angel and Constance had scraped together.  With almost a dozen interrogations completed, the committee agreed to take special action to investigate a potential threat to Fluttershy’s safety.  That’s what they said publicly, at least. Privately, Constance had won over almost the whole committee, and they had started organizing a larger, still-secret operation.  The committee consisted of many more species of critter, so their commitment presented new opportunities. The bunny interception operation greatly benefited from the support of the local snake population.  The squirrels, much as Constance had jested, had offered to front the expenses of paying a larger team of predators.  Angel noted that Phoebe couldn’t eat as many bunnies as the snakes could catch, and the excess of their remains could be used to pay the snakes in part. Some of the bunny corpses that Phoebe hadn’t eaten had started to decompose.  Angel found that these more-intact partially-decomposed remains worked nicely with the growing pile of bones to strike fear into each new bunny’s heart.  The most intact remains were a little more relatable, after all, and Angel thought that the quantity of remains was starting to show that they were pretty successful.  He was certain that it wouldn’t be much longer before bunnies started to break during interrogation. All the while, most of the critters – and especially Fluttershy – had no idea.  Fluttershy even still trusted Angel to organize meetings for the Furry Friends book club. The trio of bunny operatives were still around, but they hadn’t been up to much since Constance assigned a few songbirds on them to keep an eye on them every moment of the day.  While they were under Fluttershy’s protection, or at least periodically receiving her direct attention, they weren’t worth confronting. As the days passed by, Angel began to grow a little anxious about the actions of the Whitetail Warren.  His standard interrogation methods hadn’t yielded any new results, no matter how terrified the captives were.  Angel had lost track of the body count, but they didn’t have any new information. After watching Phoebe tear the head off of a particularly smug bunny, Constance asked Angel if they were going to keep trying.  Angel protested, but Constance reminded him that the last half-of-a-pile of bunnies hadn’t broken like he had been so sure they would.  She suggested that a change of tactics was in order, or else the particularly gruesome side-effects of interrogating bunnies might draw somecritter’s attention. Angel had to concede; he knew that if Fluttershy got reports of a fearsome predator too close to her cottage, she would probably want to convince it to hunt farther away.  Rather than finding a predator, of course, her nose would lead her to a pile of bunny corpses in varying states of decay. Whether she suspected Phoebe or not, she would probably notice the oddly-specific nature of a dead-bunny pile. Angel agreed to discuss other options before they made their way back to the cottage. Constance started with the basics:  They knew that Whitetail Warren was interested in Fluttershy, but how dangerous were they? Angel said that there was something that Fluttershy couldn’t comprehend and most critters didn’t realize about bunnies:  They were always evil. He explained that it wasn’t about who they were or how they were raised, because it was a feature of literally all bunnies.  Even himself. Especially him, Constance noted. Angel continued, emphasising that bunnies were born evil and that if you imagined every one of them to be like the worst villains they had ever read about in book club, it wouldn’t be far off.  He noted that they sometimes disagreed in their goals, but those were often differences such as ‘organized exploitation’ versus ‘flat-out destruction’. Those differences, he said, were actually how he incited a civil war between the four primary factions at the Whitetail Warren. He warned Constance that because they were united now – something which he had never seen or heard of before – they were more dangerous than ever.  So far as he could tell, they wanted to know how Fluttershy talked to critters to reverse-engineer it, and they might even have the resources to pull it off. Constance agreed that this would be bad, and asked how that translated into harming Fluttershy. Angel shuddered and said that bunnies weren’t very good at magic; if they managed to figure something out, it would probably involve a lot of brute force and sacrifice, which was evidently the primary strength of a bunny population.  Fluttershy might be their only example of pony-critter communication, but if they had reason to believe that her sacrifice would help them understand, they wouldn’t hesitate because that’s usually how bunny organizations approached difficult problems. Constance had a wing held up to her beak and asked Angel why she should trust him if all that were true. Angel admitted that he had been enjoying himself during the interrogations, but Fluttershy gave him ample opportunity to be evil, whether she knew it or not.  He said the biggest difference between him and the Whitetail Warren bunnies was that he had learned to regard his fellow critters with a modicum of respect, so he didn’t go about killing on a whim. Constance held a wing to her head and said that she felt so much more assured now.  She asked Angel if he was trying to be effective with his interrogations or if he just enjoyed playing with the captives. Angel stayed silent for a moment. Constance asked if bunnies were always evil and used to sacrifice, why he thought that demanding critical information and threatening them with death would yield positive results. Angel buried his face in his paws for a moment before admitting that it didn’t sound like the smartest plan anymore. Constance told him that she would take what he had told her and devise a new interrogation routine, and that he had better follow it. The next morning, Constance and Angel were called out for another interrogation.  On their way, Angel asked if the other critters on the special committee were ever going to take part in the interrogations, but Constance assured him that not only did they want to pretend that the interrogations weren’t happening for their own comfort, she would not allow it if any of them had the guts to consider it anyway. In turn, she asked Angel if Fluttershy had noticed how much time he had been spending outside of the cottage or if he’d had to miss any outings with her. Angel said that he’d been slipping in and out unnoticed by her, and he hadn’t admitted to anything yet and he hoped he wouldn’t have to.  Fluttershy hadn’t gone anywhere overnight since they had started, but he had considered what he would do if she wanted to bring him anywhere for very long.  He didn’t have any clear plans yet regarding that. Constance said that the committee fully agreed that Fluttershy wouldn’t handle the truth well and for her safety they might as well avoid letting her know.  Perhaps an important factor in that decision was the threat that Fluttershy would disown any or all the critters if she did comprehend the threat. Angel said that was why they needed to settle the issue as quickly as possible; if they could dismantle the Whitetail Warren’s plans, they might never reach such a unified state again and Fluttershy would stay safe and never need to know. Constance agreed. They met with the delivery hawk and accepted the captive.  Constance congratulated him on his success rate before they dragged the bunny into the tunnels. After propping the captive against the wall opposite the bone pile, Angel took a deep breath.  What Constance told him to do was probably one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. He played the role of a dumb, overconfident leader. Constance swore it’d take advantage of the bunnies’ gloating nature, a side-effect of poorly-developed evil, which was something that the book club had taught her.  Some of the bunnies might not take the bait, but she’d seen enough variance to know that some of them wouldn’t be able to resist. Angel started by claiming that they had been onto the Whitetail Warren for years and that they had no hope of completing their dastardly plans. He made a note to bring a mustache he could twirl for next time. He followed that up with ridiculous assumptions about what their plans were and how they would thwart them.  He had a dark appreciation for the fact that Constance had insisted he overplay the death threat, seeing as the captives themselves knew that it wouldn’t work. By the time he had gotten around to loudly ordering somecritter to bring in the beast, their captive was snickering. As ashamed as he felt playing dumb, Angel kept up the facade and insisted that the bunny was doomed. He raised a fluffy eyebrow when the bunny insisted that his information was hilariously far off and claimed that the Warren didn’t have bunny operatives in several of the regions that Angel’s fake-assumptions had centered on.  After stating that those regions didn’t have anything of interest to the Warren, the bunny’s eyes bugged and it clamped its mouth shut. With Phoebe behind him by then, Angel put on a most gracious and spiteful smile as he thanked the bunny for its assistance.  He snapped his paws to let Phoebe know it was her turn. As Angel listened to the bunny’s death throes while he strutted out of the room, his self-satisfied smile grew even larger. Constance organized what they had learned and presented Angel with a longer-term interrogation plan.  The bunnies proved susceptible to leaking information in their smug denials when they had been presented with absurd claims.  To maximize their gains, she crafted a specific set of absurdities for each interrogation. Less than a week later, they made a presentation to the special committee. They reported that the bunnies appeared to have special interest in Fluttershy’s communication abilities because it would enable them to read and write – which was dangerous enough on its own – and also to influence ponies directly.  It appeared that the Whitetail Warren’s long-term plans included predator control of some sort, which they suggested may be related to influencing ponies. Angel took a moment to highlight how damning it would be if the Whitetail Warren not only could read and write but also multiply without limit.  At that point, he warned, the scope of the threat went beyond Fluttershy’s safety: every critter had a stake in the outcome of their plans, and failure to act would spell doom for all of Equestria. The committee inquired as to how they had produced this information, but their questioning didn’t last long after Angel and Constance started to explain the interrogation methods they had to use.  All critters in the den agreed on the severity and reliability of the information. Then one of them voiced the important question:  What should they do to prevent the Whitetail Warren from achieving its goals? To Angel’s surprise, Constance had a rather drastic answer.