//------------------------------// // Case Twelve, Chapter Two: House of the Dead // Story: Ponyville Noire: Kriegspiel—Black, White, and Scarlet // by PonyJosiah13 //------------------------------// “See, I told you my parents would like you,” Phillip said the next morning, massaging Daring’s back.  “Okay, you were right,” she groaned contentedly, sprawling further out on the couch as he dug into a particularly tight knot; the soreness from their workout was slowly giving way to a contented tiredness that seeped into her muscles, his hooves slowly spreading it across her body with his touch. “I was silly for being worried. Little lower and to the left, please.”  Phillip smiled as he obeyed, rubbing in circles. “Mom and dad invited us to lunch later today.”  “Not having to make food myself always sounds good,” Daring sighed, extending a wing as he rubbed the kinks out of her back. “You know, I wouldn’t expect you to be so eager to spend time with another pony. Little lower, please.”  “I only get to see my parents once a year,” Phillip stated, accepting the invitation to preen Daring’s wings: the gentle warmth of his breath over her pinions as he softly nuzzled and tugged the feathers back into place elicited another contented sigh from Daring. “And it’s important to me that you be a part of this.” He paused in his preening to plant a kiss on the back of her head: the smell of her sweaty mane was a price he was more than willing to pay for this. “You’re part of my family now, too.”  “You are such a dork,” Daring sniggered, playfully swatting Phillip with her tail. She remained silent while he continued to massage and preen her, then let out another sigh, this one not of contentment, but of contemplation.  “You’re thinking about the last time you had a family,” Phillip said solemnly. “About how they changed. Turned you into something you didn’t want to be.”  Daring let out a huff. “You sure you’re not psychic or something?”  “I am the greatest detective in Ponyville,” Phillip said. “And that’s not bragging, it’s a statement of fact. I still have the highest clearance rate in the PPD.”  She shot him a quirked eyebrow over her shoulder. “Right,” Phillip caught himself. “In any case, this family has about as much chance as hurting you as we would of...demanding you wear bananas on your nose.”  Daring blinked. “What?”  “You’re being silly,” Phillip replied. “I care about you, my parents care about you. And none of us are ever going to hurt you or abandon you or anything like that.”  Daring allowed herself to smile and laid her head back down. “Lower, you sappy dork,” she said.  “Whatever you say,” Phillip said, continuing his circular rubbing.  “Lower,” Daring commanded, her smile growing wider and her eyes twinkling beneath lidded lashes. “Lower…”  “Uh…” Phillip paused, his hooves on her flanks.  Daring gave him a half-lidded look over her shoulder, slowly drawing her tail up his perfectly sculpted, still slightly sweaty chest and playfully tickling his chin. “You heard me,” she purred, slowly turning over so she was laying on her back. “Lower. And deeper.”  Phillip’s slightly hanging jaw closed up into a smile, and he leaned down to kiss her. She moaned back into his mouth, wrapping her wings around his torso and running a hoof through his damp mane… And then, of course, the doorbell rang. Both ponies paused, then groaned in annoyance. Phillip climbed off Daring with great reluctance and went to the door.  “Hello!” Rarity chirped, carrying two medium gift boxes in her magic as she bounced into the house. Twilight followed her inside.  “Sorry, were we interrupting something?” Twilight asked as she passed Phillip. Her eyes drifted down, then quickly darted away as her face turned red and a yelp escaped her throat.  “Does that answer your question?” Daring grunted from the couch as Phillip clenched his hind legs together and thought of cold water and desert plains.  Rarity coughed, blushing as well. “I, uh, do apologize for our timing, but as I promised, I come bearing gifts.” She opened up the boxes to reveal their contents: a green fishing vest and a dark olive cargo shirt. Both of them were slightly bulkier than before, and there was not a single sign of any wear or tear on the fabric.  “Ta-da!” she declared, handing both detectives their clothes. “Twilight and I were just putting the finishing touches on them. Behold!” She pulled out what looked like a swatch of purple material made of overlapping ovoid circles.  “These are a lot lighter than I thought they’d be,” Daring commented, swinging her cargo shirt onto her body and fitting her wings through the holes.  “Dragon scales are a lot lighter than you’d think,” Twilight explained.  “Did Spike shed enough for these?” Daring asked, running a hoof down the firm but flexible and surprisingly thin layer of armor that had been woven into the fabric.  “No, I made enough with a duplication spell,” Twilight explained. “It’s slightly weaker than normal scales, but still pretty tough. It doesn’t cover everything—Rarity and I designed it to protect the vital areas while still being flexible and light enough for easy movement—but it’ll stop most knives and anything short of a point-blank .45 round; it even has some protection against magic. It’ll still sting quite a bit, though.”  “So not quite as good as a bulletproof vest, but lighter and more flexible,” Phillip summed up. He stepped back a bit to give himself some room, then jumped and did a standing backflip into a forward roll. “Works great. Thanks, sheilas.”  “You are quite welcome!” Rarity smiled. “This project has given me so many ideas on a new market for armored clothing!”  “Now, about your payment,” Phillip started to say, frowning a bit.  “Tut-tut! I won’t hear a word of it!” Rarity declared, waving a hoof. “It’s a gift to two friends who just so happen to be amongst this city’s biggest heroes. It’s the least I can do to help you out.”  “Thank you,” Phillip nodded, not without some relief in his tone.  “Now, I must get back to work. Toodles!” Rarity waved and exited.  “I did do some touch-ups on your shield wards,” Twilight added as Rarity left. “The dragon scales might help them last longer, but I still want to check the trigger mechanism.”  “Here we go again,” Daring muttered, rolling her eyes.  “Phillip, would you like to go first?” Twilight asked. Phillip grunted and stepped forward. He took a breath to focus himself, then nodded.  Twilight lit up her horn, then fired a relatively slow-moving spell at Phillip. “Wandjina!” Phillip shouted, and the spell bounced harmlessly off of the invisible shield, fizzling out in midair.  “Excellent!” Twilight clapped her hooves. “Daring, your turn.”  Sighing, Daring stepped forward. “You’ll get it this time,” Twilight encouraged her with a wide smile. “Just remember: gather energy, focus your emotions, and channel that energy into the spell.”  “Right, right,” Daring nodded. She closed her eyes and focused, trying to gather up her emotions. But after her workout and the annoyance of being interrupted, she didn’t have much energy to draw upon: even her low simmering frustration was recalcitrant, slow to be restrained and focused as she tried to mix it with her tingling flight magic drawn in through her wings.  You can do it. You’ve done magic before: you can do one simple ward. Even if you’ve failed a couple dozen times before… Finally, she managed to get herself to a point where she thought she was ready. Opening her eyes, she nodded at Twilight. Twilight charged up her horn, and a spark of magic streaked towards Daring.  “Wandjina!” Daring shouted, trying to force the word to work, the trigger to activate. She could feel the energy squeeze itself out of her gut, like the last bit of toothpaste being forced from the nearly empty tube, and a sudden warmth spread across her body as the ward woven into the cloth flickered like a dying neon sign.  The magical spell struck her foreleg, and she felt a sharp sting like that of a bumblebee, instinctively flinching away from the unexpected pain, but most of the energy bounced off her and fizzled out in midair. The ward instantly died out again. “Yes!” Twilight cried in delight, rearing up into the air and kicking her forelegs in excitement as Phillip smiled and nodded approvingly.  “Well, that was better than the last few times,” Daring admitted, managing a weak grin: the little expenditure of energy had cost her more than she thought.  “That was brilliant! Not many ponies who aren’t classically trained in magical theory can pull this off, especially not on their first few tries,” Twilight encouraged her. “I had a feeling you two would be able to pull it off. Now, there are a few things I want to test—”  Twilight was thankfully interrupted by another ring at the doorbell. Phillip trotted down the hallway and looked out the window of the door.  A familiar Hayson Commander was parked outside on the street, and Trace and Red were standing before the door. “Hey, Finder, you busy in there?” Red called.  “We were,” Phillip opened the door. “But now I’m guessing we’re busier.”  “We got something you need to take a look at,” Trace replied. “All three of you.”  The house on the southern bank of the Maresippi with a pair of boats docked near the porch would’ve been completely innocuous on any other day. On this day, it looked like the site of a battlefield. Part of the white trim had been burned, smoke still rising from the rafters that were pockmarked with bullet holes.  Police surrounded the entire building: Doctor Suunkii had already set up a tracking wand and was marking out paths of hoofprints. Dozens of trails of hoofprints lead into and out of the house, many of them overlapping each other.  “Somepony called in the fire around sunrise,” Trace explained as he pulled up. “Fire department called us when they noticed the bullet marks.”  “And after destroying much of the evidence from the outside,” Suunkii grumbled, following a group of hoofprints that led first towards, then away from the house. “From my best estimate, there were approximately a dozen intruders, though less than half a dozen survived, and they were teleported in and out. Most likely with a teleportation crystal.” He leaned closer, tilting the tracking wand to illuminate different tracks. “That’s interesting…”  Phillip leaned in as well, studying the tracks. “Odd. One of the tracks coming away from the house is different than the ones coming in.”  “And look here,” Red said, pointing at a small trench dug into the ground. Inside was a thin length of silver; the metal had been snapped in half and pulled from the ground, each of the two ends jutting from the dirt like the rib bones of some ancient fossil. The silver band had been cleanly sliced through. “Silver magic circle around the house, broken in half,” Red stated. “Whoever put it there had money. And whoever broke it knew it was there and needed to break it for some reason.”  “Is there anypony inside?” Twilight asked, examining the tracks herself.  “There are a few bodies,” Trace reported, exchanging glances with Red. “That’s...partially why we called you. You’re gonna want to take a look.”  Daring, Phillip and Twilight proceeded indoors through a doorway that had been forced open, ducking underneath the “CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS” tape; the splinters that remained of the door were scattered all across the hallway. The glowing trails of hoofprints led up to the door, becoming a dense tangle that were impossible to distinguish from one another, then stopped. The inside of the house was still littered with the signs of a battle: the walls were marked with blood spatters and bullet marks. Deformed bullets and cartridges littered the floor: Daring bent to pick one up and studied it.  “Thirty-aught-six,” she confirmed her suspicion, putting the cartridge down.  “Detectives, down here,” Doctor Mortis called from down the stairs. “Have I got a doozy today!”  Retreating down the stairs, they found themselves in a basement. Everywhere there were crates, many of them stamped “Equestrian Army.” In the corner was a pile of burnt scraps of paper, the writing now illegible, though they looked like they might once have been a map of Ponyville with some markings on it. A shattered full-length mirror, its bejeweled frame laying faceup amidst the glass shards, lay in one corner of the room: an empty easel stood next to it. On the floor was a large map of Ponyville, with a small mound of salt in the center: four small circles, each connected by a line, were drawn around the map in chalk that emanated a faint burning odor.  Six corpses were scattered around the room, limbs sprawled as if simply lying down in exhaustion. Doctor Mortis was bent over a corpse that lay spread out across the floor, her eyes carrying a dull sheen of befuddlement over her face mask. The cream-colored earth pony mare had multiple bullet wounds puncturing her body and one in her head, the hole in her forehead partially covered by her chocolate brown hair; her crystal blue eyes were dull, set deep in an expressionless face. The dark red streaks on her hooves, gunshot residue that had reacted to Mortis’ potion, confirmed that she had fired a gun recently.  But Daring’s eyes were immediately drawn to her flank, to her cutie mark. A familiar mark on a familiar mare: a notebook with a dark brown quill. Her eyes then went to the body’s neck.  It was there: the red marks from the rope that she had hanged herself with.  “That’s…” she stammered out, her mind shuddering to a halt like a car stalling. “That’s Scribbled Note.”  “It is,” Phillip confirmed, his eyes wide.  “But she’s dead,” Daring protested. She remembered it well: the corpse hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom, legs discolored with lividity, tongue hanging out of her purple face. Her very first case.  “She is now,” Mortis confirmed. “Suunkii already matched her hoofprints to one of the tracks coming in.” She glanced up at Phillip and Daring. “No offense, but when you discovered her, you’re sure she was actually dead and not just holding her breath?”  “She was dead, doctor,” Phillip said, bending down next to the body.  “Well, there goes that theory,” Mortis shrugged. “So, the question is, how did a pony who has been dead for almost a year now walk into a house? How did any of them?” She gestured around at the other bodies. Daring slowly turned and her eyes got larger and larger with every face she recognized. “Twisted Root...Silent Step...Charcoal...Chilled Tumbler…” she breathed aloud. “These ponies have been dead for months!”   “Can you establish a time of death?” Phillip asked, giving a brief shake of his head as he forced himself to focus on the here and now. It didn’t matter that these ponies had been killed so long ago. What mattered now was that they had died here...again. “I got nothing,” Mortis shrugged. “It’s been several hours since they were discovered, but there’s no sign of any livor mortis or rigor mortis. All of their core temps are below room temperature. And did you notice the wounds?” She pointed to the bullet injuries on Scribbled’s torso, all of them with only a few thin slivers of red having leaked from the holes, staining the coat like sap marking a tap into a tree. “There’s hardly any bleeding: not nearly as much as there should be. It’s like the blood was already coagulated inside them.” She threw her hooves up. “I am completely stumped! Twilight, you got any ideas?”  Twilight scanned the corpse with her magic, sweeping her purple aura from tail to head. She frowned in concentration, then swept again at a slower pace. She abruptly shuddered and withdrew from the corpse.  “That...didn’t feel right,” she breathed, shaking her head and stumbling. “Whatever was done to that...it was dark magic.”  Phillip and Daring both looked at each other. “Lazarus,” they breathed as one.  Twilight gasped. “Didn’t you say that Whitestone had that?”  “Yes,” Phillip confirmed. “And then Zugzwang stole it, since it wasn’t anywhere on the Talon.” He recalled the open safe in the captain's cabin. “Wait,” Mortis said slowly, sitting down. “So...you’re saying that we’re dealing with an actual zombie invasion?” She let out a breath and ran her gloved hooves through her mane. “I...whoa. I, wow. I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified!”  “If anything, this at least demonstrates that they can die,” Daring pointed out, looking around at the bodies. “Hmph. All of them were shot in the head.”  “Nothing beats the classics,” Mortis chirped, returning to her work.  “So,” Phillip summated. “We have several dead bodies and we don’t know where they came from. We have a battleground, but we don’t know who was shooting, or where they went.” He looked around at the army crates. “And we have a house that was once full of illegal weapons, and no one to claim them.”  Daring frowned and looked up, then proceeded upstairs. As she trotted up the stairwell, she passed a large stain of dark red blood splashed across the wall; the conical pattern told her it was castoff from a swing, and a long line with smaller drip trails dangling from it was from an arterial spray. Somepony here had had their throat slashed.  “That might explain the extra hoofprints out front,” Phillip commented, coming to the same conclusion as her. Repressing a shudder, Daring continued upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, passing some officers that were busily photographing and cataloging the rooms’ contents.  Two featured a set of cots and a small, motley collection of personal items that would no doubt be thoroughly studied for clues. But one had an empty crib next to the cot, the blankets on which had been roughly tossed aside, and a few jars of Smilin’ Day baby food on the floor next to it. On the cot were some loose receipts and hastily and scribbled notes, but Daring's eyes were drawn to a letter, the quick hornwriting upon it familiar to Daring’s eyes. “Sparks,” Daring said, striding over to pick up the letter. She sat down on the cot and read the message upon it, covered in scrawled-over letters and hastily erased words.  Daring, I know the others would hate me if they knew I was writing this, but for the sake of everything, you have to understand what’s going on.  When we stole the Innsbeak Statues, we placed them in four positions around the city, according to a design in The Treachery of Images (including one in City Hall; that whole stunt with Zugzwang trying to blow up the mayor? His way of getting in there. The others were in the addiction treatment center Scarlet opened in the Everfree District and two factories in the Industrial District). The idea was that we could use them in a ritual to concentrate the magical power that lay dormant inside the statues into a single object: the jade fox necklace that Shifting Tone stole from Silvertongue.  It went wrong. Zugzwang broke in here and stole the necklace, and the four gems that we were using in the ritual. Then he stole back the statues, too.  That’s bad for all of us. That necklace is empowered with a lot of ancient magic; as long as he’s got it and the statues, he’s going to have what is essentially a huge battery of magic to draw upon.  We’re trying to find him by tracking the statues with the gems, but I thought that if you knew what was going on, you could try to find him: after all, how many ancient treasures did we find in the Family? If we can destroy the statues, the necklace will start to run out of power; of course, destroying the necklace and killing him is ideal.  I don’t know how, but you’ve got to find him. We’ve managed to narrow down his hiding place to “Dammit,” Daring growled to herself. Sparks must’ve been cut off by the attack.  Taking the letter, she descended back down to the basement to find the others in discussion. “But where did the ponies who were here go?” Mortis was saying. “You think they all got turned into zombies?”  “No, there’d be more hoofprints coming out,” Phillip stated.  Daring looked around and her eyes fell on the shattered mirror in the corner. Something clicked in her mind. “That mirror,” she said, pointing. “There was one like it in Sparks’ other hideout in the city, the one Rainbow and I found.”  Twilight walked over and panned her horn back and forth across the glass shards. Each of them lit up bright gold and red beneath her examination.  “A transport mirror!” Twilight cried. “That’s a tricky spell, but it would explain how they got out.”  “So where does it come out?” Phillip asked.  “I can’t tell, unfortunately,” Twilight sighed. “Not with this mirror smashed: the last one out probably broke it while they were retreating.”  “It was Sparks and her friends,” Daring said, handing the letter to Phillip. He studied it, his frown deepening with every line.  “Twilight,” he said. “When we recovered the gems that had been taken off of the Innsbeak statues, you said that four were missing, right?”  “Right,” Twilight nodded slowly, her head tilted back as she recalled the information from her memory. “One from each of the four statues.”  Phillip looked around. “So where are they now?”  “The letter said that they were tracking the statues,” Twilight mused, turning to the map of Ponyville lying on the floor. “I’m willing to bet that they used to be in that circle there.”  “That must be why the zombies attacked,” Mortis concluded. “Zugzwang the puppetmaster didn’t want these ponies to find the statues.”  “If he grabbed them…” Daring said, allowing the weight of the silence to finish her sentence for her.  “There has to be a way to find them,” Twilight said, her face creased with worry.  “Wait a minute,” Phillip said, looking up towards the back of the room. The back door had been forced open and there was a pair of glowing hoofprints leading outside, beginning at the threshold of the door.  “Why did only two ponies leave out the back?” he wondered, trotting over to examine the trail. “G’day.” He plucked a set of dark brown hairs tinged with green from the doorjamb. “Twilight, can you use this to—?”  “Smile!” Mortis said, holding up a camera and snapping a pic of the hairs, triggering a blinding flash of light. Phillip grunted in pain and blinked rapidly, shaking his head and glaring at Mortis. “Sorry,” she said with a sheepish grin.  “Twilight, can you use this to narrow down just this bloke’s hoofprints?” Phillip asked.  “It’s got his magical signature on it, so yes,” Twilight said. She scanned the hairs for a moment, then cast a spell over the hoofprints. A single trail of prints glowed bright purple, standing out from the others.  Phillip bent down to examine the trail. “He came down the stairs, paused at the bottom, then ran out the back, with somepony else following him.”  They followed the trail up the back stairs and down to the docks where one boat remained tied to a rusty cleat. The trail led up to a second cleat, which had some coarse rope still loosely wrapped around it, and halted.  “He got on a boat,” Phillip concluded.  “Look at these,” Daring said, pointing to some shotgun shells that were laying on the wet slats. “Looks like whoever was following him was firing at him as he drove away.”  “Why?” Twilight pondered.  “Because…” Daring thought for a moment, then the obvious answer clicked in her head. “It was a still-living goon and he stole the gems for himself!”  “It makes sense,” Phillip nodded, already studying the edge of the dock with a magnifying glass. “And if he’s taken them for himself, then we’ve got a chance of finding them again. We just need to find that boat he stole. Ah, white paint, that’s a clue.” He studied the rope left behind on the cleat, noting the smooth cut on the end of the rope. “He had a sharp knife.” He started measuring the distance between hoofprints. “Around four feet. And since he didn’t go near the gems before stealing them, he’s probably a unicorn…”  “Hey, Sherlock Hooves,” Daring pointed out. “You do know that we have a unicorn who can do a tracking spell and some of their hair, right?”  Phillip opened his mouth, then closed it, his ears turning faintly pink. “Just gathering more evidence,” he mumbled.  “What are you up to?” Trace asked, trotting up with Red.  Twilight gave them a brief rundown of what they’d found. “Do either of you have a map of Ponyville?” she asked.  “I got one in my trunk, hang on,” Trace nodded, zipping off.  Red shook his head and let out a breath. “Magic statues, necromancy...whatever happened to just bank robbers and backstreet thugs?”  “Whole city’s gone bloody mad,” Phillip agreed, continuing to scan the docks for any clues.  Trace returned a bit later with a map of Ponyville. Twilight set it down on the ground a distance off and crushed a bit of chalk with her magic, pouring it into a mound over the center of the map. Taking the hairs, she closed her eyes and began to focus her magic.  “Quearite. Sequor. Indago,” she intoned in a low voice. “Quearite. Sequor. Indago…”  Nothing happened. The chalk didn’t even twitch. Twilight frowned and began her chant anew, but still nothing.  “I can’t find his trail,” she reported. “Which means one of two things: one, he’s dead…”  “Or two, he’s hiding somewhere,” Daring stated. “Hopefully the latter.”  “Well, whoever this pony is, we need to find him before Zugzwang does,” Trace stated, looking towards the northern banks of the Maresippi, the skyline of Ponyville small enough to look like a model from this far away. “And until we do, we’re all in big trouble.”  Safe. He was safe here. He couldn’t find him, down here in the cold and the damp. Few knew about this place, not that many ever dared venture down into the dark tunnels beneath the city.  Looking around by the light of his horn, Red Clover briefly allowed his mind to go back to his days with the Mob. He’d walked the walk and talked the talk, him and the rest of his crew, all to keep Coin Toss happy: free Mareland from Equestrian tyranny, money and guns for a righteous cause. But at the end of the day, it was all about the money for them. Drugs brought in money, but the Mareish Mob strictly prohibited the sale and manufacture of narcotics. So they’d left, struck out on their own. It had been harsh, clawing out their own corner of the city underneath everything else, but it was worth it once the bits started rolling in.  And now, all of that was gone. At least this place was still here, even though all that was left were some empty bottles and snubbed cigarettes.  He shook his head and refocused on the four gems on the ground in front of him. He sucked in a long, grateful breath of the cigarettes he’d managed to snatch. The gems—red, blue, green, and yellow-orange—stared back pitilessly at him.  Clover didn’t know why Zugzwang specifically wanted those gems, but what he cared about was that they’d pay for him to get out of this city and start over again.  All he needed was a pony who could help him get out. He started wracking his brains. Now, what was that ex-cop’s name…?