//------------------------------// // Chapter 23: Birth of the Stare (Abacus Cinch, P. Fluttershy) // Story: On the Fine Art of Giving Yourself Advice // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Abacus Cinch—Earth, An abandoned warehouse at the edge of The Heights. 1:38 p.m. on Day Three. An old woman with pointed features sat at the rickety table, drinking coffee and mostly-ignoring the cold danish on the little Styrofoam plate in front of her. She had on a black rain slicker; water dripped down its sides constantly, but strangely those raindrops never managed to reach the floor. The door to the side room opened, and through it emerged the figures of Hulk and Venom. Before the door closed, the old woman was able to look through it to the room beyond, where Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy were lying unconscious on two tables, completely tied down. Once the door closed, each of the three figures touched the inside of their right wrists, which caused their solid hologram disguises to disappear, and revealed the wrist computers they were wearing. The old woman became Principal Cinch, Venom became Jeremiah and Hulk became Thomas. The two mercenaries sat down in chairs opposite their current employer. “What time did you administer the tranquilizer?” Cinch asked. Jeremiah consulted an app on his cell phone. “The initial darts were shot at 1:03, and the injections were at 1:05, after we got the kids into the van.” Cinch looked at her watch and nodded. “Then we’ve got twenty minutes before we can administer the truth serum.” She pushed forward the small medical bag containing the drug and syringes. “Any earlier and they’ll never wake up. Why did you pick those disguises?” “Well when we initially tracked down their signals thanks to these bad boys, they were playing Marvel vs. Capcom in a mini arcade,” Thomas explained. “I gotta say, that Fluttershy girl was crazy good at playing Morrigan.” By “bad boys” he was referring to the wrist computers, both the ones the mercenaries used to do the tracking, as well as the ones the unconscious girls were wearing that unknowingly acted as beacons. “By the way, you have turned their signals off, right?” Cinch shook her head in contempt. “I turned them all off as soon as I saw that the four of you were within a ten-foot radius of each other. Did anybody see you?” “No,” said Jeremiah. “We only had the disguises on in the alley we had lured the girls into and in the warehouse, both times at his insistence. The rest of the time we used the disguises you assigned to us.” “Good,” said Cinch. “Hey, you gotta admit that those Marvel characters shocked the girls enough that we were able to dart them easily,” Thomas bragged. “And they could have woken up when we moved them and tied them up.” “Yeah,” Jeremiah with some reluctance. “One of your few good ideas.” Thomas brushed off the insult, still proud of his contribution. “So what happens now?” he asked. “We wait,” said Principal Cinch. Ten minutes passed. “What are you going to do to them when the truth serum takes hold?” asked Thomas. Cinch tossed back the last of the coffee. Not once in the ten minutes of silence had she offered to get them anything. “Then I interrogate them to find out why the Church is so interested in them,” she said calmly. “Are you going to use the disguise we saw you in before?” Thomas asked. “No,” Cinch said, rising to her feet. “I’m going to use the most-intimidating disguise I have.” She pressed a few buttons on her wrist computer, and her form was replaced by that of a tall figure in the reddish-purple peaked robes of an officer of the Klu Klux Klan. Jeremiah became very still. After a moment, he said, “That disguise looks very specific. Who is it?” “My grandfather,” Cinch responded, or rather the Klansman responded, with pride. The device changed her voice along with her appearance, to that of a man even more contemptuous of humanity than she had been. “I spent a lot of time getting this one just right.” “Yeah, I bet you have,” Jeremiah said quietly. “And after the interrogation, then what?” Thomas asked. He seemed oblivious to his partner’s discomfort. “Then we inject the second part of my special cocktail,” the Klansman said, patting the medical bag. “Uh huh. And then what?” Thomas asked. The Klansman rolled his eyes. “Then we dispose of the bodies.” “What?!” Thomas exclaimed. “Well you didn’t think I paid you all that money for just a retrieval mission, did you?” the Klansman asked with a cruel smile. “Yeah, but they’re just innocent kids!” “Nobody is innocent!” Cinch replied. “They wanted to leave the Academy! Do you know what that would do to my reputation, to the Academy’s reputation? Well thanks to this little cocktail, nobody has ever left the Academy...and lived. And the coroner has ruled the deaths an accident. Every. Single. Time.” P. Fluttershy. Fluttershy woke up to find herself tied up to a hard wooden slab in a darkened room. She heard a sound, which she soon identified as a number of rats nibbling at the ropes tying her down. “Oh are you helping me?” she asked the unseen animals. “Thank you so much!” As soon as the rope securing her head from moving was eaten away, she turned to see the source of a second sound, that of light tapping on the grimy outer window of the room. The tapping was caused by the beaks of little songbirds, the same birds she had befriended when they had arrived at this place. “Oh and thank you, too!” she said. One of the birds squeezed through a broken corner of the glass. Fluttershy listened as it told her what had happened. “Oh, so they’re in the next room?” she asked, even quieter than normal. Fluttershy was grateful at that moment that her voice was naturally so quiet that it couldn’t carry. With her hands now free, she worked to finish untying herself. There was a groaning by her side. Fluttershy froze in fear, but then she forced herself to speak. “Rainbow Dash,” she said with as much authority as she could muster, “I need you to be quiet. We’ve been ponynapped by that scary Principal Cinch lady.” Rainbow Dash, whose head had also been freed from its restraint by this time, turned to look wide-eyed at Fluttershy. “What?!” she asked in a strangled gasp. (Not literally strangled, mind you. You can’t perform a good interrogation upon a subject with a rope around their throat.) “I’m not free yet! They’ll be here any second!” “No they won’t,” Fluttershy said at a carefully-judged volume. “They shot us with a tranquilizer, and we unconsciously used our magic to counteract it. I woke up first because I’ve been using less magic than you. And since they don’t have magic, they won’t expect us to be awake yet.” By this time, she was now free from her bonds, although Rainbow Dash still had a few ropes left to sever. She got up, and snuck over to the only door. Rainbow Dash wondered if the animals had told Fluttershy about the tranquilizer. She knew about the other part: how Fluttershy knew that ponies unconsciously used their magic to counteract tranquilizers, and even how long that took. It was because Fluttershy experimented with using tranquilizers on herself, at first to fight her panic attacks, and later because she liked being unconscious. Rainbow Dash knew all this, although she wasn’t sure that Fluttershy knew that she knew. Rainbow shook her head incredulously. ‘That filly could get up to some weird stuff sometimes,’ she thought to herself. Fluttershy cautiously put her head against the door and listened. “What are you going to do to them when the truth serum takes hold?” she heard after a few seconds. And then she heard everything that followed: How the human Rainbow Dash’s wonderful deed of throwing away her athletic career for human Fluttershy—who, like her, was worthless—was to be rewarded with death. Fluttershy felt herself fill with a towering rage. Without even knowing what she was doing, she ripped open the door and floated out to face the three foalnappers, eyes blazing. The two men rapidly turned themselves back into video game characters. “How dare you!” she screamed, pointing an accusing finger at the man in the hood—it wasn’t hard to figure out that this must be Principal Cinch. “You’re not human, you’re a monster!” She floated over so that she could look down upon him. “How are you doing that?” the Klansman asked in complete confusion. “I demand—” “You demand nothing!” Fluttershy shouted. “I...demand...nothing,” the Klansman said slowly. “You will release us, and never go after us again,” Fluttershy ordered. The Klansman repeated her order. “Make her forget,” Hulk said. Fluttershy briefly turned her blazing eyes upon the two Marvel characters, causing them to wilt in fear. Then she turned her dominating gaze back upon the disguised Cinch. “You didn’t ponynap...you didn’t take us captive. Instead you realized that sooner or later you were going to get caught murdering little children!” (The Klansman howled briefly in terror.) “So you decided to let us transfer in peace to Canterlot High. Oh, and you’re going to give these two men back their money.” “I will forget,” the Klansman said dully. “And I will give Jeremiah and Thomas back their money.” “Now take that disguise off and go to sleep.” The Klansman became Principal Cinch, and then Principal Cinch dropped unconscious. Fluttershy lowered herself back down to the ground. She turned to the two men—for they too had dropped their disguises—and the glow in her eyes faded out. “I overheard everything,” she told them. “And although you are still bad men, I know that you didn’t want to kill us.” “Are...are you going to turn us in to the police?” Thomas asked fearfully. Fluttershy took in a deep breath and sighed. “No,” she told them. “Just so long as you never do your wicked deeds in Canterlot or any other Markist city ever again.” “Agreed!” Jeremiah said gladly. He picked up the frail form of Principal Cinch, throwing her over his shoulder. “No one else will ever know what happened here today.” Fluttershy watched as the two men walked out of the warehouse, leaving the door open behind them. She looked over at a stunned Rainbow Dash, who was standing in the doorway of the room they had been imprisoned in. “Your mother said that human jails don’t work at making criminals into better people, and even if there were a human Tartarus, it would be too much for those two,” she explained. “So that’s why I let them go.” “That...that was incredible!” Rainbow exclaimed. “No!” Fluttershy screamed in sudden torment, sinking to her knees. “That was terrible! I took over that human’s mind, and it was so easy! I’m guessing that power went with the cutie mark, to dominate angry animals and keep them from doing things that would be bad for them long-term. But I don’t want to be able to do that to humans, ponies, or any sentient creature! That would make me no better than the bullies. No, it would make me worse! I’m the monster, Rainbow Dash! Why have I been given the power to do things that are so cruel?!” She put her face into her hands, sobbing. Rainbow Dash walked over and then sat down next to Fluttershy, pulling her into a fierce hug. “Because out of all the ponies in the world, I know that you would use that power the most responsibly,” she told her. “The fact that you feel so guilty and scared about it is a good thing!” “I’m never using this power again!” Fluttershy cried out. Rainbow Dash shook her head with a rueful smile. “You’re moving to the Everfree, right? That’s what you told me.” Fluttershy nodded her head, which was still enveloped in Rainbow’s hug. “And the Everfree’s within a bucked pebble’s flight from Canterlot. So I guarantee you’ll have to use it on at least one crazy unicorn.” Fluttershy began sobbing again. “What...what if it’s Rarity?” she sob-asked. “I like her.” “It probably won’t be Rarity,” Rainbow replied. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders.” At that moment, with a terrific tearing sound, the roof of the entire warehouse was removed, revealing a furious Princess Celestia in alicorn battle armor floating above, complete with eyes glowing brighter than the sun. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY LITTLE PONIES?!!” she demanded. The eye glow went out and she blinked as she saw that the two ponies in human form were alone in the warehouse. (She failed to notice all of the rats and birds.) She landed awkwardly next to the pair. “I tracked your magic to this location,” she explained. Fluttershy wiped a sleeve across her messy face. “Thank you for rescuing us,” she said with a kind smile. Abacus Cinch woke up in her own bed, in her own house. She cried, laying there for hours, her memories and her beliefs at war in her mind, until she noted she was hungry. As though a new muscle was flexing in her mind she suddenly stood. Her mind was filled with a determined thought: It would be unkind not to feed herself. As she ate dry cereal, numb and unfocused, her phone rang and she answered it immediately. “Principal Cinch,” she whispered into the phone. “Sorry if I caught you on a day off, Ma’am. We’re ready to pull the trigger on the pollution investigation at the Church. Stored the Cobalt-60 source near their shiny greenhouse. Just say the word.” Abacus swallowed her fears, and barely hesitating she replied: “Pull the plug on it. Dispose of the evidence, we’re not going to do it.” There was silence for a few seconds. “Alright, boss, I’ll get rid of it,” the other voice replied with a hint of relief, before hanging up. Principal Cinch put her phone down with shaking hands, before whispering to herself: “It wouldn’t be kind.” There was so much more she needed to do to make up for what she had done before she had woken up. More than enough to fill a lifetime of good deeds. She didn’t mind revealing everything, going behind bars for the rest of her life for what she did to those poor students. Cinch sobbed into her hands. But would doing that hurt the academy more? Hurt the current students more? Should she correct the practices she had instituted, put the academy on the right track first, and then turn herself in? What would Fluttershy advise her to do?