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// Chapter 13: Pretty Pattern's Predicament 
// Story: Ichor 
// by Ice Star 
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Pretty Pattern had a fierce stomachache and a freshly sharpened axe leaning beside her night-side table. Only one of those things was good, and she still wasn’t sure if it was good enough. It was not that she was unable to afford a proper weapon, but even a simple sword was expensive. None of her kitchen knives were anything close to menacing, nor would they do her any good in a fight against a living, breathing monster. So, she had bought an ax. One that was weighty in her telekinesis and horribly sharp, like something both a lumberjack and a mercenary could use with ease. She had practiced swinging with it properly.

She had to, of course. Manehatten had become the capital of nightmares, for Patti could not recall the last time she opened the paper and saw something other than the dangers posed by murderers and whores. The years when she had moved here had faded, back when she was daisy fresh for her first year of university and still believed earth pony charm was real. Now the neighbors had plastic smiles and whispered about her being a ‘tricky stickhead’, ‘frou-frou magic fool’, and other far more awful things when they thought she couldn’t hear. 

Never in her life would Pretty Pattern have come to believe that ponies could say such things, and certainly not try to hide those kinds of words with smiles. She was taught that earth ponies were the industrious blessings of Equestria, whose character was vital, humble, and kind. To believe that they would hiss about her as ‘bit-hoarding waste’ or insist that she was espousing ‘typical unicorn demands’ and controlling the banks earth ponies claimed were robbing them would have gotten Patti branded as a racist in any other city. In Manehatten, Patti had come to know that this was what the sun-faring earth ponies of the concrete jungles thought about her race. 

All because she was a unicorn, too. It broke her heart that the city she was forced to call home had tried to make her feel inferior because of that which could not be altered. Gods knew that she would move if she could, especially with the rise of these bloody murders. The was a mare that she had fallen in love with — an earth pony, no less — that had long since dumped Patti and left her to mind her sewing shop on her own. Now her life’s ambitions weren’t to marry the sweetheart she had since her university days but to scrape together enough bits to leave the city that had brought the two mares together. Pretty Pattern no longer wanted the urban bustle she thought would invigorate her, for Manehatten was devoid of the chicness she had wanted, and it had taken years to realize that. Being a student had hidden so much from her. 

In the meantime, she had bought herself the axe. She bought it because while she knew she could always trust the Royal Guard, she could not trust them to be fast enough to save her from a monster. After much hemming and hawing, Pretty had invested in the only self-defense within her budget. Having it nearby had eased the paralyzing fear that had been transforming her weeks into never-ending dives into the fount of constant anxiety. With it, she knew that it was now quite possible she could render any who might wish to harm her naught but dragon-chow upon the floor.

The truth was, Patti hadn’t bought the axe out of fear of being slain by the Blood Mage. Not really. She knew full well to keep her muzzle in the papers, the Royal Guard releases, and in the wealth of research that the libraries had. The killer worked by night and targeted sex offenders in self-exploitation, with the occasional wayward soul. Pretty Pattern was no ghastly whore. She did not resemble one in the slightest, in looks or in manner. She was educated, without a cruel bone in her body, and free of perversions. None of her flaws were so great that they consumed her. She was quiet, gods-fearing, strove for kindness, employed, and was not out past dusk. She lived far enough away from the neighborhoods where these horrors were playing out. Her greatest wish was that there would be a sewing club in Manehatten that accepted unicorns instead of refusing them with those Celestia-mimicking smiles and honeyed words about why unicorns couldn’t join woven in every way that managed to avoid direct racism.

Pretty Pattern knew she had a likely chance of avoiding being butchered though, not because she was cocky but because she fell so far outside of the target victim of the Blood Mage.  She was sure to educate herself on that; it was how she had come to know there were more types of monsters than blood-crazed sadists cantering about the night. In doing all her research, her true fear had become all the more realized with every flip of a page. What she should fear most was not the diabolical butcher stalking the streets, but the desperate fiends of self-exploitation. 

That knowledge had chilled her to the bone, sitting in the pit of her stomach colder than iron could have been. Every branch of the libraries of Manehatten was stocked with resources informing ponies on all the ruin brought by self-exploitation, with hundreds of headlines, studies, and so much more cramming the shelves and archives. Mares Against Monsters chapters supplied large donations of information and the sapient monster division of S.M.I.L.E that focused on capturing criminals published weighty intelligence papers on the matter.

Patti was a mare close to thirty who was a teacup next to a well when it came to how she felt about her height. She still had all the fragile delicacy of a filly in slenderness and stature. She had never dabbled much with makeup, lending to an unshakeable look of girlishness. Her clothes were always bright, lovely things a mother would secure for a daughter’s birthday. Every bit of her looked like a teen filly. Her whisper of a voice even made her sound like one. She had librarians ask her for identification on every visit when she requested material deemed adult, as though one day she might suddenly be lying.

All of this made her the perfect potential victim for a prostitute.

It was Patti’s research that had damn near slammed this burden into her skull. When a pony was deluded into thinking self-exploitation was desirable, there was so much greed to account for. The number one culprits behind vanishing minors across the nation were not disgruntled family members, but the cruel hooves of streetwalkers snatching up foals to traffic for pocket bits. This was how they expanded their income and ‘selected’ their ‘successors’ for their awful crimes. That young victim would then be forced out when they were deemed too much of a nuisance.

After that, the research spoke where Pretty Pattern never could. Two paths emerged: the victim could go to the Royal Guard and see their abuser hunted down and done away with, or they could do the unthinkable: start up the cycle again.

Suffice it to say, there were enough former victims who engaged in the sadism of their once-captors and kept that cycle alive enough for it to find its way into scholarly studies. 

Poor Pretty Pattern was well-aware that despite the national rarity of these vanishings, she was the perfect victim for potential equine trafficking. There was little to stop a whore so desperate for a ‘successor’ once they got it in their head to get one. Somepony so unhinged would do anything they could to snatch her up if they really want to, long past all the moral restraints a civilized pony would have. If a slut wanted to slide into Pretty Pattern’s apartment and sabotage her, the only thing stopping them was windows, shutters, locks, and a door. 

All the ponies in the newspaper stories and survivor tales had no means to defend themselves except hooves and feathers. Unicorns with limited or weak magic like Patti had a hard time charging up teleportation and other spells if they were being assaulted, slipped a potion, or robbed of focus.

None of them had ever had an axe.

Now Pretty Pattern did, and she would be ready to take back the night, one swing at a time if any prostitute dares breach her home. She would not show mercy to the merciless, and any invaders would be disposed of properly. Her axe was for her friends, her neighbors, her city, and her nation as much as it was for herself.