Kestrel didn’t know when exactly she’d passed out, though whenever it was, it had come both much too soon and much too late. Having what felt like one last good night with the Gang, one last lighthearted celebration in spite of everything that faced them, had been good for everypony’s nerves. And as much as Kestrel hadn’t wanted it to end, when she woke up the following morning, she was already deeply regretting staying up so late and drinking so much last night.
Oh well. Nothing coffee and a smoke couldn’t fix.
Kestrel is now Tired, suffering a -1 penalty to Athletic checks until finding time to rest.
Kestrel set about the latter after a moment to stretch and work out some of the stifness in her back and wings from sleeping awkwardly on her bedroll, then made her way to the center of camp to see about the former. Sure enough, she could smell freshly brewing coffee as she shouldered her way into the main building, and she saw Miss Irons hard at work preparing breakfast and coffee for everypony. It was exactly what Kestrel needed to start her day off right, considering the long day that awaited her.
“Mornin’,” she managed to Miss Irons, even touching the brim of her hat, despite her exhaustion from last night’s good times. She slid out a chair and sat down, grunting as she did so, and she pressed her hooves into her eyes to try and massage out some of the short-on-sleep achiness.
“Morning, Kestrel,” Miss Irons answered in kind, and after a few moments, brought over a mug of coffee and some scrambled eggs for the gunslinger. “Eat up. You’ll need energy for the flight, especially after last night.”
“You don’t need to remind me,” Kestrel grumbled, and she gratefully took the offered breakfast. “A nap’s in order when I get back, and maybe an early bedtime as well.”
“Tumbleweed will want to talk your ear off before you do,” Miss Irons said, and she went back to the stove to continue working on breakfast for anypony else who wandered in. “Either that, or maybe you send Miss Silvie to do it for you.”
“If she’s feelin’ better,” Kestrel said with a shrug. “She was doin’ her best to try and stay up late with the rest of us. Cigarette smoke and drinkin’ and yowlin’ probably weren’t the best for her. Might be on my lonesome today if she ain’t feelin’ up to it.”
Miss Irons nodded in agreement. “If she is, make sure she puts something in her belly before she heads out. That filly needs to put some weight on her bones, especially after fighting off a cold.”
“Will do, ma’am.” Kestrel briefly touched the tip of her wing to her temple, then went back to her breakfast. At least putting some food in her belly helped to settle some of the uneasiness lingering from last night’s drinking and smoking. Even still, she only ate what she needed to curb her hunger and get her enough energy for the morning’s flight. The last thing she needed was all that food weighing her down if she needed to flee danger.
When she was finished with breakfast, she left the main building behind and stood outside in the morning light, already groaning inwardly when she felt the humid air start clinging to her face and feathers. The heat, the humidity, and the mosquitos had become an uncomfortably familiar nuisance in the Gang’s brief time staying down in the bayou, and Kestrel was looking forward to leaving it behind and going someplace nicer. Sure, the tropics might also be hot, humid, and home to biting flies and mosquitos, but sandy beaches and the blue ocean would make up for it. At least it wouldn’t have the rotting bayou stink that seemed to hang over the stagnant water like a pestilent fog.
Has Silver recovered from her illness? Critical No
That pestilent fog, figurative or not, didn’t seem to be helping Silvie as Kestrel made her way to the shack the younger mare had picked out for herself. Even from this far away, she could hear sickly coughing coming from the old structure. Kestrel could only pause outside the door, close her eyes, and sigh in sympathy for her fellow pegasus. Even though nopony would blame Silver from being unable to join her in scouting out the rival moonshiner group, she knew the silver pegasus would blame herself if Kestrel made her stay.
“Silvie?” Kestrel asked as she slowly opened the door and stuck her head inside. She saw the silver pegasus curled up under he blankets in the dim light slipping through the cracks in the ceiling, and at her name, Silver poked her head up and winced into the doorway with feverish eyes. “You doin’ alright, girl?”
It was a stupid question, Kestrel knew, though Silver tried to seize on it and shrug her way out of her blankets. “I-I’m fine,” she insisted even as a visible shiver ran down her spine from head to tail. “I’m just—” Her words were interrupted by coughing, and after several seconds, she spit a wad of yellowish phleghm onto the floor and rubbed at her nose with the back of her wing. “Just a little cough…”
Kestrel shook her head and stepped inside the hut, shutting it behind her. “We shoulda let you get your rest earlier last night,” she said. “The last thing you needed was smokin’ and drinkin’ on lack of sleep.”
“I weren’t gonna miss that for nothin’!” Silver insisted, and Kestrel knew she was right. She hardly blamed the younger mare for that; the party was something they all had needed, despite the consequences. The silver mare tried to stand up, but Kestrel swiftly closed the distance between them and forced Silver back onto her haunches with a firm hoof. “I’m fine, Kessie, I’m f—!”
Coughing once more stole away Silver’s words, and Kestrel waited until the wheezy mare caught her gurgling breath as she struggled to get air into fluid-filled lungs. “You ain’t in no state to walk ‘cross camp, let alone go flyin’ out into danger with me,” Kestrel told her. “You sound worse than ever. I’m gonna get Miss Irons to look out for you, get you somethin’ warm to eat. Then we sit you down in front of the fire. We gotta keep your lungs warm and dry if you wanna stave off pneumonia.”
“I ain’t got pneumonia,” Silver insisted, though it was only a weak defiance.
“Then let’s keep it that way,” Kestrel said, giving Silvie a pat on the shoulder. “Go get some sleep best you can. And if you don’t behave, I’m gonna get that robot to make sure you don’t do nothin’ foolish.”
Silver sighed and hung her head. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, staring down at the floor.
“You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry about,” Kestrel reassured her. Then, backing up a step, Kestrel bowed her head and turned toward the door. “You just worry ‘bout gettin’ better. I’ll be back to check in on you when I’m home.”
“Stay safe, Kessie,” Silver said, slumping back to the ground in a shivering ball of defeat.
“I will.”
-----
Kestrel took her time as she flew out over the bayou on her lonesome, both as a precaution and by necessity. The map Pinpoint had drawn for her didn’t help all that much when the only thing she could see from up above was an unending expanse of sickly green trees. Even the rivers and swamps were hard to pick out from above, as the dense foliage did its best to hide the ground from any intruders in the skies. But the last thing Kestrel needed was to blunder over the fort unprepared, and even if she wanted to move faster, she knew she couldn’t burn all her energy flying to the fort when she might need to flee if she got caught. She’d already almost swallowed a mosquito when she yawned mid-flight; it was that sort of morning.
As she drew closer to the fort (or at least, so she thought, going by the crude map), Kestrel stopped long enough to alight on a cloud and propel it toward her destination as a sort of inconspicuous aerial observation platform. Thankfully there wasn’t much wind in the sky at the moment, or a small cloud moving against the winds would easily be spotted by any pegasi on the ground or in the skies. With the air mostly still, slowly pushing a cloud to her intended destination would be much less noticeable from the ground. And having something to perch on would give her ample time to safely study the situation at the fort in detail.
All she needed to do was resist the extremely soft and comfortable plushiness of the cloud calling for her to lie down and take a nap…
Eventually, Kestrel saw what she believed was the fort through a break in the trees, and maneuvered her small cloud upwind so that the lazy air currents would let it drift naturally past the fort while she reconnoitered the ground below. Then, perching herself just back from the edge of the cloud so she could look down with only her face at the most being visible from the ground, Kestrel took a deep breath, tried to clear some of the hangover fog from her mind with a rough shake of her head, and let her eyes take in the situation below her.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how defensible is the moonshiners’ fort? 1
As Kestrel observed the ruined and abandoned fort that the moonshiners had made their base of operations, she found herself agreeing with what Tin Cup had said: if the griffons had tried to invade Equestria through New Oatleans instead of Tailahassee, they wouldn’t have had any difficulty forcing their way up the Maressissippi. The fort had been built on a spur of dry land protruding into a swampy delta in the river, and maybe when it had been freshly built its stone walls and wooden palisades would have made for some kind of defensible position, but time and decay had not been kind to the old fort. The moist bayou air had long since rotted the palisades away into the mossy nubs, and the damage from an old gunpowder explosion had scattered the stones of the south-facing wall across the ground and into the swamp, leaving a massive hole easily approachable by small boat. The buildings within the compound had all mostly collapsed, and what was left standing of the walls wouldn’t provide any measure of protection against attacks from above. What defenses remained in the fort’s walls were a pair of rusty copper cannons turned bright green through time and corrosion, and only useful as a convenient place for a bird to make a nest.
How many ponies does Kestrel see in the camp presently? 3
As for the defenders of the camp, they were few and far between, at least as far as Kestrel could see from her perch. Three ponies sat around a small fire in the center of the camp, preparing breakfast for themselves and maybe some additional compatriots Kestrel couldn’t see from above. At the very least, she doubted that there were only three ponies inside of this fort; Tin Cup had alleged there’d be around twenty, and Kestrel genuinely doubted that he’d be that far off the mark. Still, she wondered if most of the moonshiners had better accommodations out of the fort and back in the city, and only ventured to their stills to ready deliveries and prepare the next batch. And if the leader of this gang of shiners was in league with New Oatleans’ mayor, then surely he would enjoy someplace better to stay at then a ruined fort in the middle of the bayou that couldn’t keep out a hungry alligator.
Are the stills easy to get to? Yes
It wasn’t too hard for Kestrel to spot the stills from up above, either. They had been placed in the center of the camp, probably on the driest bit of land the shiners could find that wasn’t a dangerously crumbling stone wall, and somepony had erected a tarp over them to keep the rain out and maybe obscure them from anypony flying by overhead. But the tarp was pulled back at the moment, and Kestrel had a clear view of the copper stills out in the open. There were eight in all, and large as well, certainly allowing for a sizable batch of brew to be distilled at once or in shifts. It definitely was far more than Tin Cup’s shiner gang had at their disposal, and given these shiners’ larger operation, it made sense as to how they could easily undercut the smaller shiners’ business.
As for the rest of the surroundings around the fort, Kestrel couldn’t get a clear look at them—the trees were too dense, and any roads leading up to the fort were too obscured from up above for her to plot them out. But the ruined wall and the lack of cover in the middle of the fort meant that an approach from the water into a close-ish engagement was a viable option if the Gang wanted to take apart the fort with force. Alternatively, the stills were out in the open, and possibly vulnerable to sabotage. Kestrel knew that the Gang still had many of Trixie’s fireworks tucked away, even if the magician herself was gone, and they might be able to make an improvised bomb out of them—assuming, of course, they didn’t blow themselves up in the process. But Kestrel did wonder how permanent sabotage would be. If these shiners had the funds lying around, and more importantly the connections, destroying their stills would only take them out of action temporarily. As it stood, she didn’t know whether that would be sufficient to satisfy Tin Cup or not.
Still, as her cloud finally drifted past the fort and safely off into the distance, Kestrel yawned and laid back on its soft, fluffy surface. For now, she needed a nap after a better-than-expected scouting mission. Maybe when she drifted back into camp she’d have a good idea of which approach to recommend to Tumbleweed and the rest of the Gang.
1. Attack the fort in force from the river. If we can catch these shiners off guard, then a well-coordinated attack will take them apart before they can leverage any advantage of numbers against us. And besides, killin’ ponies is more like to shut them down for good than takin’ out their stills.
2. Sabotage the stills with improvised explosives. A lone mare approach from the air under the cover of darkness could be all we need to drop some bombs in the stills and take ‘em out of action. Means it’ll probably be just me goin’ in and outta there by myself with Silvie outta commission, but supposin’ I don’t get caught, could be the safest option for the Gang.