//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7: Grimoire Ascendent 
// Story: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers (Enhanced & Augmented) 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

Thinking about Sunset Shimmer, I began to wonder whether Princess Celestia had taken on a second protégé because her first one didn't measure up. I chuckled. Maybe I ought ask to be taken on as her third protégé!

Fat chance of that!

I kept my good mood as I headed into the Lower and prepared to assume my Grimoire persona.

In an empty windowless alley, I took out a makeup compact and a stencil. I brushed on black, brown, and white powder to create the toothy-book cutie mark I had concocted. A puff of hairspray acted as a fixative between colors. I tied my tail into a bun and wrapped it in black ribbon, hiding the identifying green stripe and purple color. Last, I donned a hooded black cape that went as far as my haunches, and stepped into a light set of deceptively rusty horseshoes. 

I'd constructed them of thin steel and wood. I'd carved antlers scavenged from a thrift shop so that the complete giddy-up added over two hoof lengths to my height. The antler decoration mimicked the exposed hoof of a stallion with a sexy, very masculine fetlock. Pebbly rubber made the shoes stealthy and goat-sure. 

I put my hair up in a bouffant, spritzed the minimum of hairspray, and looped a loose ribbon around my chin to ensure the hood kept my face shadowed. That it looked faintly like a bridle just added to the distracting oddity of a costume I had designed to obscure the identity of Running Mead's enforcer. I ensured my saddlebags were secured under the cape and trotted off.

As I walked the shadowed streets in the gathering dusk, I thought about what I had read today. Perhaps I could actually shape my force spell. It might make an impressive show, and, unless I was confronted by an aggressive pony while I gave my little performance, it really wasn't about fighting or defending myself. It was more about breaking things.

Surrogate physical violence.

As I approached the address on the blue note, I started casting Don't Look Don't See Don't Hear. A brass mailbox on the old, soot-stained but still respectable, brownstone townhouse read "2202-A RYE BALD". The facing building, a more fancy brownstone apartment with a glassed-in multilevel stairwell, looked promising. I could certainly pick the unwarded lock at Rye Bald's, given sufficient time, and would have had if it had been past midnight on an empty street, but I liked to sleep so I decided not to wait out the evening. Don't Look Don't See Don't Hear was hard to juggle even with simple levitation so I had to choose between spells, and didn't want to be seen picking a lock.

The hoof traffic didn't disappoint. I quietly followed an office worker inside and soon stood on the stairway platform between the second and third floor. With nopony active nearby, or looking up from the street, maintaining the spell took minimal splendors and concentration.

For a half hour, I watched as the obviously stressed black-maned pink pony paced between his kitchen window and his living room, talking to himself. I spent most of the time looking through ratty yellowed lace drapery, assuring myself he was alone, occasionally having to plaster myself in a corner as a resident used the stairs. Every so often, he stirred a stock pot, once dumping in veg. He poured himself a brown drink from a clear bottle, twice. It calmed him. It wasn't apple juice. When I realized the earth pony addressed a shoulder-height metal pole, I understood he was practicing a speech.

No—

It was a shtick! He was a comedian.

When he bowed to the otherwise empty living room, I acted.

Teleporting through objects, even glass, carried a risk, but I was certain I knew the distance and layout of my target. I went through full spell prep. Somepony down on the second floor saw me and yelled, "Hey, where'd you come from!?"

I popped in on-target while Rye Bald was still bowing, taking in the applause of his imagined audience, "Thank you. I so love being adored..."

For a comedy club that Rye Bald imagined full of applause, it was incredibly quiet except for the bubbling of the garlicky concoction boiling in his kitchen. I could imagine how the overhead brass potion lamp shadowed me precisely, transforming my cowled face into a malevolent mask. The pink stallion backed into the wall with a bang, magenta eyes wide, whites flashing fear.

"First, the show." I clicked my tongue and triggered a special force spell that burst forth with an imaginary number component an infinitesimal moment before my intention struck the magic pulse. A sphere of green opened and spread out, truncated at its base by the threadbare avocado-green carpet, literally shoving and upending everything in its path. The tumbler of whiskey splashed upward as the glass coffee table twisted and lifted the tweed sofa so it tipped back and over, pushing a breakfront, causing the china inside to empty out and break. Opposite it, chairs launched at the outside wall, one of which broke the window, sending glass cascading to the street below. The fake mic stand launched itself spear-like at an exposed pink throat.

Triggering Levitation, I struck the projectile aside. The metal pole embedded itself in the manila-painted plaster wall.

Too close!

But I could work with it.

In my best low Grimoire voice, I said, "Somepony needs to pay his debts. Who might that be? You? But you work so hard! I suggest you pay or volunteer the boss some labor real soon, and stop drinking and smoking your life away. Next time," I waved a hoof horizontally across my neck, "this won't be a show."

I had edged toward the window, checking the street was clear. I stomped and ground glass below my horseshoe, then teleported away. Twice. Three times. To a dark alley even as I heard the twee-twee of a constable's whistle, the officer likely summoned by the bystander on the stairs across the street.

Frost evaporating above me in ribbons of steam, I pulled a quick change in the dead-end, levitating the cloak, ties, and shoes all at once. As I shoved them into the saddlebags, a splash of cold water on my flank and a rag dissolved the offensive cutie mark. I walked back to Rye Bald's street. I finished tying my pigtails as my bare hooves hit the cobblestones.

A blue-coated officer with a Prench police cap saw me and walked over. His copper badge flashed in the flickering light of a street lamp as he asked, "Did you see anypony suspicious, Filly?"

I pouted and shook my head, flapping my pigtails. "My special somepony didn't show up!"

He sighed and trotted off, his baton held in his yellow magic.

I thought about the momentary disgust I felt for Grimoire's cutie mark in the alley as I'd erased it. Though it wasn't really mine, it had nevertheless asserted its cutie mark magic, transforming me into somepony crazy and willingly violent. Somepony who'd almost committed accidental murder. An actor might call the transformation psychological, but I sensed a magical component as well.

I hated cutie marks.

Grimoire and his mark were a fabrication I originally came up with when I worked as a navigator and transporter for the Carne Asada Syndicate. Tellingly, Running Mead never mentioned Gelding, the name by which ponies who really knew me knew me by, as did my enemies— 

Gelding was both a verb and a threat. 

He never said the name Glitter, but I suspected he knew. Yet, never the high-value P-word title that went with it, which I found interesting. Personas: Grimoire, Gelding, Glitter, Glimmer. All starting with G. I felt unexpectedly glad, sensing that somewhere I still had the upper hoof.

An idea gelled incrementally in my subconscious. 

If the absence or presence of an imagined cutie mark changed a pony (as all my names had, did) that simply, I wondered idly as I walked home, could removing a real cutie mark have a curative effect?

Not something anypony could test, of course, short of painting it over, or doing something so unthinkably violent with a knife it would even repulse Grimoire. Still, I speculated happily that cutie marks themselves might be a magic separate from a pony—perhaps like a permanent parasite—as I walked.

I resolved to study pony psychology.