//------------------------------// // 3. The Insane One (rev. Apr 20, 22) // Story: The Dark Expanse // by Oceansama //------------------------------// The Dark Expanse. 3. The Insane One. "My name is Aurelia Burke, call me Aurie." She happily shook the Minotaur's hand, grimacing as she felt her fingers being crushed in his vice-like grip. She reciprocated with every ounce of strength that she could muster. "Iron Will, at your service." he returned with a slight bow, and a knowing smirk as his hand was being crushed under the Terran's death grip. Eventually, they had to end it, and Iron Will emerged the victor as Aurie had to cuddle her aching hand under her armpit. "Fuck you." she cursed him; there was no malice, just humor in her eyes. The Minotaur answered with a deep and hearty laugh that shook the very earth. "Iron Will is intrigued," he wiggled his eyebrows, "but it is unwise to tempt him. He is curious at what brings a Terran out here, and after so long?" "I don't know what you want me to say." Aurie shrugged, "My whole life I was taught that we were on our own. That no one cared about us." "Iron Will disagrees, the scholars say that Minotaurs and Terrans share branches of the same family." He then snorted, "Iron Will doubts that but it does not change the fact that Minotaur tales are filled with Minotaur-Terran friendships. Even if no Terran remembers them." "Honestly, I've been all over the world." she lied, "and I've never heard about anything like that before. I've read all sorts of stories, tried new things, collected souvenirs because they're shiny and I can't help but hoard everything I can". She had to stifle a school-girl giggle, she couldn't stop staring at those muscles. "Mostly I just make a nuisance of myself." "Then Aurie and Iron Will share a lot in common. He has also traveled the world far and wide." He emphasized this by trailing his hand over the horizon, "Assertiveness classes, cooking tutorials, do-it-yourself workshops, ship rides, air tours with pony royalty; if it can be done, Iron Will has done it." "You're a jack of all trades, then." "Iron Will knows he is." "That's impressive. Wish I could've done all that," a sigh, "but right now I just want to get into the city and find someplace to settle in. It's been a long trip." "Iron Will understands, and he knows of a coffee shop on Dalerun Avenue." He pointed into the city center, "Iron Will would be honored if Aurie would join him for lunch at noon tomorrow." "Ehh...," Aurie stumbled on how to respond, feeling that the blood had rushed back into her face. She wanted to accept the offer but was also afraid of what it might lead to. Her mission gave her a window of two weeks in Los Pegasus. A mere fourteen days to gather what information she could on the ponies and then run. While banging a Minotaur could be fun, it would only make her job harder in the long run. She then reconsidered as Iron Will was clearly educated and possibly well connected. There was a good chance he might prove to be an excellent source of insight into Equestrian culture, possibly even their defenses. "I'll be there." She gave herself a light slap on the cheek, to recenter her focus on the job ahead. The sun was already beginning to go down by the time she'd passed through Los Pegasus customs. Seemed government bureaucracy was the same everywhere; slow, unhelpful, non-commital, and just a massive pain. While the guards at the desk hadn't asked about her species, their confused faces said that they had no clue what she was. Their repulsed glances at her leg prosthetics showed that they wanted to turn her away, but had no legal standing to do so since to since she hadn't done anything illegal. Yet. They just handed her a pile of documents to fill out with a quill and ink. The forms had the usual array of questions such as name, birthdate, address, and so on. But also had sections asking her about how long she wanted to stay, if she was coming for work, did she have diplomatic clearance, did she have family here, any known medical conditions, and so forth. Then it came to the area where they wanted her to indicate if she had a cutie mark and then illustrate it. Aurie was tempted to respond with something obscene. Thinking about it she felt the payout wasn't worth the effort and simply filled in the box for no cutie mark. "Don't do anything we wouldn't do." the last guard had said to her as he handed her a temporary visitor's pass. Again Aurie had to bite back a scathing remark as antagonizing security would have been counter-productive. There was just something so punchable about the guard's faces. She walked out of the immigration office and nearly tripped over a young colt that had been standing at the street corner. He'd been waving a newspaper around in front of a stall selling all sorts of books, magazines, and pamphlets for the tourist crowd. After she had apologized, Aurie pulled out several bits and promptly bought the newspaper from the colt; giving him a friendly smile. Then had done the same for a dozen magazines. One had a white unicorn on the cover, whipping her permed purple mane around and giving a 'come hither' stare; it was a fashion magazine. Another had a blond maned stallion, in a chef's outfit, screaming obscenities at some poor lackey. She didn't need to read the title to know it was a periodical dedicated to cooking. Aurie just stashed all of them in her bag with the newspaper. She didn't care about what the ponies wrote; that was a matter best left to the big brains back home to decipher and catalog. In the light of early evening, the sun had painted everything in an otherworldly orange tint. The hum of neon lights switching on heralded the awakening nightlife. Los Pegasus was an amazing city, she'd never seen anything like it. Terrans had the advantage technologically, but the ponies had an eye for aesthetics and large-scale engineering. The city was comprised of two massive halves; the ground was where most of the stores, inns, and average public life were found. Then there were the rides, coasters, carnivals, arcades, zoos, and conventions centers that had been built atop a playground of clouds. If you weren't a pegasus, you had to either rent your balloon or take the public skyhook up. She had also noticed the smell and wondered how the air could be so clean and fresh. It smelled like newly cut grass, despite it being more crowded than any Terran city. There were the cries of delight from the carnival rides, merchants peddling their products, the bang and clang of the games, hundreds of conversations, and the sheer number of hooves pounding the pavement. The noise was overwhelming and she had to retreat out of fear she might go deaf. Several ponies gave her concerned looks as she blindly sprinted from the main roads. Somehow having managed to find her way deep into the bowels of the metroplex. The sun was now below the horizon, if she didn't want to sleep on the streets she had to find shelter now. The cheap incandescent light of a building advertising itself as the "Heart O' The City Hotel," blinked sporadically. It was a grimy, roach-infested, crap-hole that smelled of too much bleach and bodily fluids. Five ponies lounged in the hotel's reception, minding their own business and not paying her any mind. "I want your cheapest room," Aurie walked right up to the clerk's desk and announced herself. She hadn't bothered with a proper greeting as the dirty brown stallion behind the counter gave her a look that could curdle milk. He was the tallest pony she'd seen so far, mare or stallion, standing at four and five. Which meant she had a superior height of six inches over him, not that he had seemed to notice or care. "Room 103," he spoke plainly, and placed a key in front of her, "assuming you don't mind two roommates." "I don't." "Private bathrooms are extra," he then pointed down an unlit hallway, save for the flash of a malfunctioning lightbulb, "the common latrine is down that way. Checkout is at eleven in the morning and we do not do breakfast. Full payment is to be upfront, and don't bother to ask about credit." Only when Aurie slapped down the appropriate payment, did the stallion relax, if only slightly. "Any other questions?" "Nope." she took the key and left without another word. It would have been possible, easy even, to find a more pleasant hostel than this, but a place like this had the twin advantage of being cheap and being out of sight. Room 103 was fairly spacious for a place that should have been condemned years ago. Somehow it reminded her of a little bit of home. Space in the underground was tightly controlled and a group of four bunked Terrans would either be extremely lucky or very rich, to find something comparable to this. That was the only advantage the room had; there were cobwebs in the corners, an inch of filth seemed to cover everything, and her bed had some very suspicious stains on it that were either blood or urine from a very dehydrated creature. She just assumed someone had spilled fruit juice on it. It was easier to ignore it. Her two roommates, both earth-pony mares, were sharing the same bed, cuddled against each other. Aurie didn't want to disturb them, so she carefully slid her large backpack under her bed, hiding the shotgun under it. She then inspected her pistol and realized she had loaded it but hadn't chambered the first round. Click And then she put it back into the holster; then and laid herself down upon the bed. She had to check the time on her tablet and found it had only been twenty minutes. Aurie was bloody bored and considered messing with the two mares that had already woken up. The two of them just stuck to their corners and were quietly whispering to each other. Not hiding the fact that they'd been talking about the strange creature in their presence. With particular emphasis on her prosthetic legs. Aurie obliged by stretching herself causing several of her joints to pop, but also caused her dress to roll up slightly past her knees. Exposing the artificial knee joints to the mares who recoiled in horror at the sight. Aurie quietly observed this with a silent chuckle. Her playtime came to a halt as someone knocked on the bedroom door. A stallion dressed in a fine pin-strips suit and a fedora hat strutted into the room without any further announcement. "Welcome, welcome to Los Pegasus," the suit sporting stud warmly greeted, but with an air of malice "I don't recognize any of you, and you probably don't know who I am; it's alright if you don't." He then removed his hat and turned it upside down. "But I've come on behalf of the local...community awareness foundation, and we have a new service to offer you; accident protection insurance." he gave a look of concern, "Los Pegasus is a dangerous place, you never know what'll happen." "But," the mare with a peach coat, and a lime green mane, protested while drawing her partner into a tight embrace, "we paid the guards before coming into the city." "That one was for entry, this is new insurance. Pay only if you want to, nopony will force you. But you never know what might happen in the future, and in this part of the city there aren't many Royal Guards around." He held his hat out and eagerly awaited their payment. The two terrified mares shared a look, one that showed they were beaten and there was no point in resisting. For a moment Aurie couldn't help but feel a spark of sympathy for them. Even though they were the enemy, they were just civilians caught under the heel of a very shady organization. "I remember this one time I was ambushed by a couple of cats." Aurie began to speak, not caring if anyone in the room was paying attention. But she knew they were as their heads turned towards her "The two of them were pitch black and had managed to sneak deep into my home city; a suicide mission to take me out. So I was cornered in this hallway, right next door to this big-ass reactor, with a sabotaged coolant pipe. They wanted to trap me there, and that coolant shit is radioactive as fuck. If it gets on your skin you should be alright, assuming you can wash it off immediately...," she pantomimed running a bar of soap up her torso and over her breasts. "yeah, you'll mostly be alright." "What are you talking about?" The mobster nearly dropped his hat. Seemingly unable to mentally process what the strange creature was saying to him. "Problem is, as soon as that shit hits the air it aerosolizes. If you breathe it in it'll melt you from the inside. Thankfully you'll drown in your own fluids before realizing your squeezing blood out of places you didn't know you had." "Sounds terrible." the pony rolled his eyes, and still took several steps back from the girl, while the two mares looked to be on the verge of vomiting. "I had to sprint a hundred yards to reach an emergency station, strap a mask on, all the while fighting off the cats that wanted me dead in the worst possible way." Aurie pushed herself off the bed and turned to look at her captive audience. The two mares made a valiant attempt to merge with the wall, while the mobster had nearly retreated out the door. "I learned an important lesson that day; two, in fact. That radiation makes spell weaving a bitch and that coolant mist clings to cat fur like a fly on stink." Aurie then frowned severely, and shuddered "Good thing I wasn't the one who had to clean up that mess afterward." "So?" The mobster made a gesture as if signaling for reinforcements. "So," Aurie stood from the bed and bore down on the stallion. Not once displaying an ounce of fear or hesitation. "If I can survive all that, what are the odds any 'accident' you throw at me will?" "Is there a problem?" said the stallion from the reception desk, unsure of what was going on. "I was just telling our friend here," she pointed at the male with the expensive suit, "that no one in this room is paying for anything, and the two of you can suck it and take your bullshit elsewhere." Several minutes after the two stallions had beat a hasty retreat, Aurie was still facing the door with her back to the two mares. She pulled out her pistol and double-checked that it was loaded and the safety was off. "You didn't have to do that." the peach mare said, "Now they'll come for us, and you as well." She'd started to shake and her partner couldn't stop it cause she was also quaking in terror. "Yup." Aurie droned as she opened the door out of the room. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to the bathroom, maybe grab some dinner in the meantime." "But...but, you'll never make it out of here, they're going to get you." "Exactly, that's what I want them to do." Aurie walked into the public restroom and saw it was a unisex room. She wondered if it was because there wasn't enough space for two restrooms or the ponies didn't care about separating the genders. She risked a peek inside and then had immediate regret. There were three stallions in there displaying things she didn't want to see nor did she want to know what they'd been up to. She placed her hands on the side of her face, like blinders, and focused on the flow of water and soap flowing down the drain. Then spotted that there was a door that had a wooden exit sign above it. Indeed the door had led outside. There was dirt and trash everywhere, but what stood out the most was a large shipping crate made out of wood. It had been placed on its side with rusty nails still poking out from where the top had been. There was a moth-eaten sleeping bag inside, alongside many empty food containers, several crushed juice boxes, and a mason jar that was being used as an improvised urinal. There was no sign of whoever was using the crate as a home. Aurie just stood there, tapping her tipped prosthetics in time with the seconds, both out of impatience and to also signal of her presence. Mentally she'd checked out until something interesting happened, or she just called the whole affair off. A few minutes later she wasn't disappointed. The suit stallion was there along with three other ponies that she recognized from the hotel lobby. Two earth-ponies, a pegasus, and a unicorn had blocked her way out of the alley, and they were pissed. "Why did you interfere?" Mr. pinstripe asked with genuine curiosity, "They were gonna pay, but you just had to make all our lives harder." The four ponies approached several steps, "What even are you?" "Perhaps what I am is not what you should be concerned about." "It makes no difference to us, we'll carve the money out of your hide anyway." "You're free to try, but you see;" she took a step forward, "I have no love for ponies, but I know your kind. Your dick gets hard when you can take advantage of those beneath you, and I hate you even more for it." The mobster then lunged at her, drawing a switchblade from a hidden pocket. He made a thrust at her stomach, but Aurie easily sidestepped the lethal blow. Then grabbed the earth stallion by the hoof, and shattered his leg over the top of the crate. She felt the magic pulse down her veins and into her fingertips as she cast a wind spell that launched the other earth-pony into the air. Aurie then followed up with a second blast of magical wind that buried that same pony right back into the ground. The pavement cratered under the impact. The Unicorn ignited her horn and tried to sweep the Terran's legs out from under her. The bipedal mage simply canceled out the attack with a quick barrier spell. Then reached out with her telekinetic grip, and seized the pony by the throat. Aurelia's fist clenched and then twisted; the pony's neck gave a sickening crunch as the mare's head rotated at an unnatural angle. The corpse was then smashed against the wall. The fight was now down to just one Terran and one Pony pegasus. The pony's muzzle was twisted in abject terror as his flight response kicked in and he tried to fly away. The iron sights of Aurie's pistol were lined up before she'd realized what she'd done. With a pull of the trigger, a split-second hum of a capacitor discharging, a metal slug popped the pegasus' head like an overripe cherry, leaving the body to drop like wet cement. Then there was silence, a silence as profound as when the whale swallowed Jonah. Only to then be broken by the ping of a glass bottle falling over. Aurie turned, gun held at the ready as she looked for the source of the disturbance. The gun's capacitor charged for another shot. Only she was greeted by a small filly that had stuck her head out from behind the wooden crate. The tiny child was shivering, her large golden eyes reflecting the horror that she'd witnessed as she stared down the barrel of the Terran's gun. Aurie had to blink in surprise at the undersized equine. The foal had dark gray fur with a mane of midnight blue. She couldn't have been more than a foot-and-a-half tall, emaciated, and (Aurie couldn't judge ages) the foal must have been only ten or nine years old. That wasn't even the strangest thing about the filly, her eyes were slit like a cat's, or a dragon's, and she had a pair of leathery wings like a bat. The mage's finger danced over the trigger, the filly was a witness and Aurie didn't know any mind spells that would have allowed her to erase memories. A dark corner of her mind said it would be best if she ended the little pony right then and there. A single shot, a fleeting moment of regret, but the problem would have been solved. A cleaner approach would be grabbing the pony, a twist, and the snap of the spine. After all, the homeless child meant nothing to her or anyone, but Aurie found herself hesitating. Then the more rational part of her argued that even if the pony went straight to the police, or to the Royal Guards, who'd believe her. So, Aurie lowered her weapon and placed a single finger on her lips. "Shhhhh..." The filly seemed to understand and gave a submissive nod. Aurelia left the bodies where they laid, hovering herself over them to avoid getting blood on her clothes. At the door, the one that crossed into the inn's bathroom, she gave one more sweep for any other witnesses that might be hiding in the dark corners. Seeing no one, other than the bat filly, Aurie returned herself to her room and to her bed. The two mares that had shared her room were nowhere to be found. As for what she'd done, Aurie felt no remorse. She didn't feel much of anything as she succumbed to a dreamless sleep.