//------------------------------// // 23 - Walking a Tightrope of Knives // Story: The Amulet Job // by Rambling Writer //------------------------------// Maybe it was paranoia talking, but overnight, Starlight had a revelation about Goumada. A bad one, but one they’d tackled already and forgotten about. So that morning at breakfast, she sat down across from Lyra. “You still have to attend those band rehearsals, right?” asked Starlight. “Yeah. Why?” said Lyra. “If Goumada gets paranoid about infiltrators, she might try her mind-control spell on the band to get them to talk, since they’re all outside ponies. So I want to cast that anti-mind-control spell we came up with a few days ago on you, just to be sure she can’t get anything. Is that okay?” Lyra blinked. “Gee, I dunno. Why would keeping me from being mind-controlled not be good?” “Experience has taught me that casting spells on people without their permission is…” Starlight clenched her teeth together and sucked in a breath. “…not a good thing.” Lyra looked like she was going to make a joke, but she quickly closed her mouth before that happened. Instead, she said, “Alright, then. Go ahead.” Luckily, Starlight remembered the spell clearly; it was cast in moments. “There. You should be all set.” “Huh.” Lyra rubbed the side of her head, rapped it with a hoof. “I thought I’d feel different. Don’t ask me why. But I guess when it comes to mental magic, not feeling anything is a good thing. Except when it’s a bad thing.” She saw the look on Starlight’s face and quickly added, “But this is one of the times it’s a good thing!” Doing her best to prevent any philosophizing on a topic she didn’t want to touch, Starlight said, “We need to find Rainbow Dash, too. She might-” “Why do you need me?” asked Rainbow from two feet away, making Starlight jump. It was amazing how somepony that blunt could be that quiet. “Mind control resistance,” said Lyra. “In case Goumada tries to get into your head.” Then she blinked and turned her attention to Starlight. “You really think she needs it? She’s barely even been at the casino at all. Will Goumada try anything on her?” “Probably, even if it’s just the day of the anniversary celebration,” said Starlight. “She got the Alicorn Amulet from Ponyville, she knows that Rainbow’s from Ponyville, things start getting weird not long after Rainbow shows up… Anypony could put two and two together.” To Rainbow, she said, “So, yeah. If you don’t mind…” Rainbow snorted. “Psht, come on!” she said. “You really think I couldn’t throw it off? I’m strong-willed! I’m Loyalty! I can resist mind control like that!” She stomped on the ground and flared her wings. “Boom.” “Just like last time, hmm?” asked Lyra, grinning. “Allllthoooouuuugh,” Rainbow said, not looking at Starlight or Lyra, “IIII… guess it wouldn’t hurt to do it… just, just, y’know, just in caaaase…” Starlight rolled her eyes and readied the spell. Meat meat meat meat meat. Griffon restaurants had a lot of meat. A lot of different kinds of meat. And, supposedly, each one was different from the others. Bon Bon wasn’t so sure; it wasn’t like cabbage and lettuce, where the differences were obvious. Unfortunately, the location meant that, for a mostly-plant-eater like herself, her options were limited. Luckily, ponies being the dominant species in Equestria still meant something, and so the restaurant still had an okay variety of meat-free foods. Bon Bon had decided to tag along with Gilda and Starlight to the lunch that was his fee; she knew the questions she wanted to ask better than either of them. The restaurant Gus had chosen was (hopefully) one of those where the budget for presentation was a few scraps of belly button lint (griffons probably didn’t even have belly buttons, considering they hatched) and a neat bug one guy’s kid found, with all the rest going to the food. The place was plain and a bit dirty, but the non-meat stuff Bon Bon sniffed at smelled good enough. And the descriptions on the menus sounded good. Usually. “So it’s Prench toast stuffed with whipped cream?” Bon Bon asked as she stared at one order. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to puke or order ten. Probably the latter. “Pretty much, yeah,” said Gus. “Pretty awesome if you’re into sweet stuff.” He hadn’t even glanced at his menu, apparently already knowing what he wanted to order. “Oh, and their pancakes? Dang. Even the plain ones are some of the best pancakes I’ve ever had.” Pancakes sounded good. Simple but delicious. Bon Bon folded up her menu. Gilda nudged Gus in the ribs. “So, how’s it going? Guarding gotten any less boring yet?” Gus’s good mood evaporated like spit on a stove. “Unfortunately,” he growled. He took a long drink of orange juice like it was alcohol. “She’s gotten so-” Their waiter chose that minute to return. His uniform managed to be prim and ratty at the same time. He clicked a pen and said, “I take it you’re all ready to order?” “Right,” said Bon Bon. “I’ll have the pancake stack.” “Prench toast,” said Starlight. “Regular.” “Sausage biscuit,” said Gilda. “Squishy Nuggets,” said Gus, the Capital Letters clearly Audible. Bon Bon didn’t get it, but literally everyone else stared at Gus, who stared defiantly back at the waiter. After a second, the waiter coughed and said, “Classic or homestyle?” “Homestyle, obviously.” It might’ve been Bon Bon’s imagination, but it looked like the waiter twitched as he pushed his pen back into the notepad’s ring. “I see. I’ll be out with your food shortly.” Once the waiter was gone, Starlight raised an eyebrow. “You ordered from the kids’ menu?” Gus shrugged. “Comfort food.” He lowered his voice. “Because, holy guacamole, from the way Goumada went on at the start of my shift, you’d think someone had gutted her family and danced through the streets bathed in their blood. And that she actually liked her family enough to care about them.” Bon Bon cringed internally while Starlight cringed externally. “That bad, huh?” muttered Starlight. “She was raaaaaaaaaaanTY,” said Gus with a whistle. “And not just ‘drop a lot of curse words’ ranty, I mean, like, Shakespintoan-florid ranty, the kind where it takes five paragraphs to tell someone that they’re a mean person.” He cleared his throat and began in a bad falsetto, “‘Those miserable curs shall rue the day their parents first breathed the air of this world, first drank the water of life, first suckled their mothers’ teat! Their pleasure shall turn to ash in their-’” Gilda clouted Gus with a wing. “Hey! Can the theatricality, would ya?” “I ain’t theatrical, she is,” protested Gus. “Anyway, Goumada just went on and on and on about what terrible people you were. I bet she’s still going.” He took a sip of orange juice. “And that means you’re alright.” “So what’s security like?” Bon Bon did her best to not get in Gus’s face. “She’d’ve doubled the amount of guards if she’d had enough,” said Gus. “But she had to settle for one-point-fiving it and increasing the length of shifts.” He rolled his eyes. “Yaaaaaaaaay.” “Sorry.” Bon Bon’s response was almost reflexive. “Eh, don’t worry about it. I only have to put up with it for like a week, anyway. But, yeah, lots more guards everywhere, especially at the entrances to the staff rooms. Less so at the entrance to the casino itself — y’know, the place where a changeling is most likely to be.” Gus snorted. “Gotta make that money somehow, right?” Maybe it was just paranoia talking, but Bon Bon wasn’t so sure. It didn’t take a genius to ask what Thorax had been doing disguised as Goumada, of all ponies. She was big, obvious, and hadn’t even been restrained. Meanwhile, ponies on the casino floor weren’t looking for company, but jackpots. Just about the worst possible pony to disguise yourself as in the worst possible place to look for targets… but only if you were trying to get love. If you were trying to get something else… And Goumada had also noticed Bon Bon that day. A fake guard being escorted out by a fake Goumada. Definitely not a typical changeling. What if the guards weren’t meant for changelings at all, but for thieves? They were all right at the most important weak points. Anyone trying to get in would have a harder time bluffing their way past the guards at the staff entrance. Goumada had seen the little incongruities in everything and decided to take a gamble that the changeling she’d seen was working with the thieves she’d seen. And that gamble was paying off; Bon Bon had to reshuffle her assumptions for her plan again. Of course, you’d think Goumada would also put up a little more defense against the usual sorts of changelings, just in case. But Bon Bon wasn’t going to complain. Gus was still talking. “And if you’re gonna try to get into the staff rooms, you gotta be careful — Goumada’s having the guards get a good look at everyone who enters. If they don’t recognize you, you’re not getting in, even if your key works. Speaking of which…” Gus dropped a keygem on the table and slid it to Starlight. “Rented it from a friend. Get it back to me, same time as yesterday, and everything’s hunky-dory. Yes, it opens the hub; tested it myself. Now, my bits?” Starlight set a few high-value coins in front of him, totalling a hundred. Gus counted them — thrice — and pocketed them. “Thaaaaaank you,” he said. “So do you have anything specific? Any details?” asked Bon Bon. She was practically jumping in place. Briefing was usually quicker than this, which meant she could start planning faster. She felt every second she lost and held her breath for the moment when Gus would say he couldn’t remember. Which never came. “Sure,” said Gus. “Like, just outside the entrance…” The wait for their food passed quickly. Bon Bon used her napkin (and Starlight’s, and Gilda’s, and Gus’s…) to take notes as Gus laid out all he remembered. (“I mean, Goumada went over them so many times, I better remember them all!”) It was only slightly less bad than she’d feared. Guard numbers upped, guard shifts lengthened, guard densities increased, the works. If she or Starlight were on the infiltration team, the front entrance wasn’t just out, it was banned from ever re-entering her thoughts. The closest thing to a positive would be if Gus’s not-infrequent tangents were right and the higher workload would make the guards more tired and less alert. Someone coughed; the waiter had returned with their food. But one of the four plates was empty. Bon Bon kept her eye on it as the food was passed out; Gus wound up being the one without a plate before the waiter said, “And, finally, your nuggets.” He pounded on his chest for a moment, picked up the empty plate, and vomited onto it. Bon Bon pushed away from the table; nobody else batted an eye. The waiter retched, puked up another mass of half-digested… stuff, and handed Gus’s plate to him. “Thanks,” said Gus. “Uh-huh.” The waiter took what Bon Bon sincerely hoped was some kind of sterilizing cloth from a container on his belt and wiped his beak down. “I’ll be around in a few minutes if you need anything more.” “Yep,” said Gus. And everyone dug into their food. Except for Bon Bon, who kept staring at Gus in morbid, bilious fascination. “That’s barf,” she said unhelpfully. “You’re eating barf.” Gus gave Bon Bon a confused look. “Well, yeah, what did ya think ‘homestyle’ meant?” he said. He nibbled at a slimy glob of something. “Mmm. Just like Mom used to puke.” “Eh-heh.” Bon Bon pushed her own plate away. Her appetite had committed suicide. Gilda snickered. “Not everything’s as neat as you ponies like to pretend it is, you know.” “Yeah. Right. Sure.” And Bon Bon’s stomach continued its gold-medal gymnastics routine. Lyra tried to stay focused during band practice. She really did. But with the threat of possible attempted mind control hanging over her, her playing suffered a little. Luckily, as third lyre, she could rip half the strings off her instrument and still play just fine, then rip half the remainder off and play well enough to at least escape notice. So she played and prayed nothing would happen. But once the rehearsal was done, a security guard blocked her from leaving. “Goumada would like to see you.” Swallowing and doing her best to look innocent, Lyra said, “Why me? I’m just a lyrist.” “Dunno,” the guard replied with a shrug. “But she wants to see you.” Lyra let herself get led to Goumada’s office, an opulent place that Lyra almost wanted for herself. The guard waited outside as Lyra and Goumada took their seats. Lyra’s chair was just a little uncomfortable. Knowing Goumada, that was probably deliberate. Before Lyra could say anything, Goumada’s horn glowed and a wave of… something washed lightly over her mind. She felt… kind of mellow? Maybe a little buzzed. Definitely not super-great, like Starlight had said it felt like. Yeah, she could resist this, easy. “Now,” said Goumada. “When you were first hired to play in my band, you came… late.” Part of Lyra’s head said Goumada was right and smart. The vast majority of Lyra’s head said Goumada was right and so obvious it didn’t bear mentioning. She went with the latter. “Shortly after you arrived, my security started experiencing some… Let’s call them ‘difficulties’. This might be a coincidence. It might not be.” Annoyed by the intrusion on her mind, Lyra took a moment to channel her inner Twilight. “It’s a coincidence,” she said, recalling long-gone lessons from CSGU. “By definition. It’s two events that happened at the same time. They’re co… incidences. Really, it’s just basic etymology!” She smiled and, before Goumada could regain control of the conversation, said, “Now, whether they’re correlated…” Goumada blinked once, twice, and scowled. “These two events may or may not be correlated. Are you familiar with a pony named Starlight?” Holy flagstaff, was Goumada blunt. Normally, mind control would probably make the victim go along with her, but did she just think they’d forget about their head being played like a harmonica? Maybe she thought they’d be too scared to do anything about it. Whatever. Lyra already had a story lined up. (Being a spy and making up histories was fun!) “Oh- Oh, yeah, Starlight!” she said brightly. “Yeah, I remember him! Kinda.” Goumada smirked, just a little. “Good. What can you tell me about-” The smirk vanished as quickly as it had arrived. “-him?” “Starlight Shade’s an astrologer!” said Lyra. “And no, I don’t mean astronomer. I mean astrologer, with the signs of the zodiac and horoscopes and telling the future and all.” “Starlight… Shade,” said Goumada tonelessly. “He went on and on about his ‘job’ a lot. And also the animal years in Chaidamu culture.” Lyra began ticking them off. “Rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake-” “Can we return to the topic at hoof?” Goumada’s voice was strained. “-goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig!” Lyra finished triumphantly. Ish. “Wait. That’s only eleven. There was always one I could never remember… What was it?…” “Starlight,” snapped Goumada. Her spell fruitlessly pushed a little harder at Lyra’s mind. “Can we return to her?” “But Starlight’s a dude,” said Lyra. “Kind of a cute one, too.” (Real Starlight was kind of cute, too, if she was being honest. Not very cute, though.) “Very well. Can we return to him?” “Well, he was an alright guy as long as you didn’t try to point out the inconsistencies in astrology. Like, the Equestrian zodiac predicts different things from the Chaidamun one, but apparently they’re both true?” Lyra grinned broadly. “Seriously, whatup with that?” “Is that all you can remember of him?” Goumada put her hooves on the table and leaned forward. “He wasn’t, for example, a mage of great renown and might?” “Why the booger would he be a super-powerful mage?” Lyra asked, cocking her head. “He was a pegasus.” Goumada took a long breath in through her nose. She leaned back in her chair and sighed. “We seem to be thinking of different ponies.” “Hey, not my fault. You just gave me a name, and different ponies can have the same name.” “Indeed.” Goumada didn’t smile. She bared her teeth while the sides of her mouth curled upward. Lyra’s demeanor changed in an instant; it was all she could do to not shudder and bolt. She managed to stay in her chair and keep looking vaguely curious. Goumada waved Lyra to the door. “You may go. I seem to have been mistaken.” As she got up, that not-smile meant Lyra handily resisted the urge to chirp, “You got that right!” Instead, she just shrugged and walked out. As she was being escorted back to the casino, she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing. The possibility that she was in the clear grew more and more with every step. Then she was shoved onto the casino floor, the door slammed shut behind her, and that possibility hit 100%. Lyra grinned to herself as she strode to the exit. Easy. And once she was out-out, that feeling nearly exploded as the wind ran through her mane. She threw back her head and laughed, drawing quizzical stares from everyone around her. She’d just outsmarted a crime boss and gotten away scott-free! Nothing could stop her! She was- Was she being followed? She quickly glanced behind herself. No, she was not. Her skin wasn’t crawling with a Bad Feeling, anyway. And as she kept walking, she still wasn’t followed. Very good. Very good. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. In spite of having free access to the entire casino, Sunburst had no interest in being a voyeur. Pony-watching was boring. No, he was flipping through cameras purely through the joy of flipping through cameras. The arcanotechnology in the casino’s security system was nothing short of incredible. It had required almost no work on his end to sort the different views out. Categorizing them was going to be a pain, but he could do that later. Now, he just wanted to look at his handiwork. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Well, technically it wasn’t all his handiwork — he hadn’t actually cast the spells for it — but he’d come up with the designs. So, ninety percent his handiwork, then. It’d turned out just as good as he’d imagined. It was kind of amazing, really, how well the magic responded to just a touch. And considering it’d responded just as well to Bon Bon, it didn’t even have anything to do with him being a unicorn. Perfect. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. View after view flashed past. Sunburst didn’t linger on any of them for more than a second. “You know,” the Doctor said with a cough, “if you do that for long enough, you’ll go blind.” Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. “…Actually, I think this is looking more like an addiction than anything else.” Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. “…You do know I’m talking to you, yes?” “Absolutely,” said Sunburst. He didn’t turn away from the mirror. “I also do not care.” Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. “Derpy, any chance I could get some help?” Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. “Hey, swiper,” said Derpy. Something soft bounced off Sunburst’s head. “No swiping.” Sunburst blinked himself out of his swipe-induced haze and looked down. A muffin was at his feet. Scowling, he turned to the Doctor and Derpy. The latter had the blueprints folded beneath a wing. “Do, do you need something?” he asked. “We were, ah, wondering if we could do some actual work with the resources at our disposal,” said the Doctor, “rather than drooling over them like… that.” “It’s really unbecoming,” Derpy said sagely. She flared a wing and unfolded the blueprints on the floor before retrieving the discarded muffin. “Right, right,” mumbled Sunburst. He gave one last forlorn look at the mirror that was a Haytonic ideal of arcane engineering and stepped away from it. “So, ah, just move your hoof left or right, was it?” the Doctor asked. He stepped up and delicately dragged a hoof across one of the images. It flipped to the next camera. “Ah! Perfect. So-” He spun around. “Where should we start?” he asked the other two. “The back rooms,” Derpy said promptly. She wasn’t looking at anypony, instead picking dust off her muffin with more care than somepony sifting for gold. “We need to see if there’s any more security there, too, and not just outside.” She held the muffin up to the light and began appraising it. “Just in case.” “Perfect!” The Doctor picked a frame and began swiping through it. And swiping and swiping and swiping. He coughed. “Ah, Sunburst? Where are the back-room views? These are all casino floors or hotel halls.” “Dunno,” Sunburst said with a shrug. “I haven’t gotten around to, to sorting everything yet. It’s, um, all just kinda…” He made some vague gestures with his hooves. “…jumbled up.” “Joy.” But the Doctor persisted and eventually found a shot that Sunburst recognized as from the staff section. “Ah! Here we are. So…” The Doctor squinted at the image on the mirror, stroking his chin, and looked at the blueprints. “Where do you think this is actually pointed?” The camera was aimed at a four-way intersection. All they had to do was find a four-way intersection and they were good to go. Sunburst looked at the blueprints and saw four four-way intersections without even searching. Hooray. So… if this door was here… and that door was there… But, no, that couldn’t be, because there wasn’t- Derpy glanced up. She glanced at the blueprints. “That camera’s right here, pointing this way,” she said casually. “See, these doors match, and so do these, and no one’s coming out from under the camera because there really isn’t anything in this hallway, and you can see the elevator doors that don’t appear on the blueprints right over there. Also, this door here and this room on the blueprints share the same label.” Sunburst and the Doctor stared at Derpy. “I’m a mailmare! I know how to read maps! Geez…” Derpy rolled her eyes in opposite directions. Sunburst and the Doctor looked at each other. The Doctor shrugged. “She surprises you a lot. Now, you were back here before; how many guards did you see then?” Sunburst blinked, shook his head, and returned his attention back to the mirror. “Well, uh, not, not this many… I think, um, two-thirds? And the ponies standing at, standing guard at this door, they weren’t there before…”