Blending in was a novelty for me; being one of the most recognisable ponies around, save for my two regal aunties and maybe Sapphire Shores depending on how her career has waxed and waned over the years, I am usually recognised by whenever I venture out amongst the great unwashed general public, though whether or not I am met with quiet, awed stares, demands for my autograph, or intense opprobrium for some perceived slight that I barely remember largely depended on the ponies around me and their varied opinions of my character. I understand, merely from observation, that the majority of ponies out there would be uncomfortable without the veil of anonymity cloaking them throughout their day-to-day lives, but I, a prince of the realm, scion of an ancient and regal line, Celestia’s nephew, and the most eligible bachelor in Canterlot, had known no other way of navigating the world around me except that I must always be singled out for special attention, whether for good or ill and whether I wanted it or not. So, to walk through a busy city street, even under the watchful gaze of those grey-shirted Changelings, and to be completely and utterly ignored was strangely unsettling to me.
Spring Rain was wise to have forced me to hasten my morning grooming, and her bathroom had lacked much of the necessary assortment of razors, tweezers, brushes, combs, soaps, creams, and oils that I required to look my best anyway. I still did not look quite like a native, being rather taller than most ponies of this part of the world and one cannot abandon a lifetime of regal bearing quite so readily, but after the quick splash in her bathtub and a comb through my mane, tail, and coat, I at least looked presentable enough to pass as a slightly unusual local to anypony or any Changeling at first glance. Second and third glances might have given the game away, should said creatures know to look for me, of course.
There remained, however, the matter of my cutie mark, which is often always the first place one looks when hunting for a wanted pony and has given away many criminals and outlaws on the run from the authorities, at least in those silly adventure stories I used to enjoy. For that, Spring Rain instructed me to first roll about in the dirt in her garden, which consisted more of a small, walled-off space engulfed with abundant vegetation and inhabited by an entomologist’s dream of all manner of buzzing insects, so it all resembled more of the jungle beyond the city than it did any sort of ordered expression of civilisation’s mastery over nature. There was a rather large stove up against the garden wall, sheltered by a sort of veranda, which I understood to be some sort of outdoor kitchen area. If any of her neighbours thought it odd to see a pony rolling around in the dirt like a dog they kept it to themselves; it is a useful quirk of equine psychology that upon seeing somepony act a little strangely, they will more often than not choose to ignore it than get involved.
The dirt dyed my coat, mane, and tail a dusty and uneven shade of pale brown, and my cutie mark was partially covered, but still faintly visible through the layer of dust and dry earth. For this, Spring Rain disappeared back inside her small home, and moments later returned with a set of paints and brushes, and judging by the bright colours I’d have said that they had belonged to a foal more than any serious artist. The odd, slightly sad look she pulled when she arranged the small tins and brushes, only very brief and fleeting, was not lost upon me, and the presence of the much smaller scorch marks in her living room led me to mentally put together the pieces of the puzzle. I was not about to ask her where her foal was, as that would have been quite insensitive even by my own standards of putting my hoof in my mouth at inopportune moments.
“You’re putting a lot of effort into helping me,” I said, as I watched her dip a brush into a tin of red paint and then use it to describe a misshapen circle over the compass rose.
“Like I said,” she said, sticking her tongue out and furrowing her brow in concentration, “I do something nice for you and you do something nice for me, like give me gold, lah. Now hold still; canvas shouldn’t move.”
Something, call it intuition if you will but it was mostly just an abstract feeling that I could not adequately place, told me that there was a little more to that than mere greed, and that this was merely a front to cover up something darker. It certainly wasn’t loyalty to the Twin Crowns of Equestria, being rather distant and absent concepts to a non-pony race a terribly long way away from the alicorns who wore them, but, I thought, something much more personal that pushed this strange kirin to risk everything to help me, beyond simply being ‘nice’ to a lost pony, that is.
“What cutie mark are you painting on me?” I asked; I thought that I really ought to know if this was to be my cover here.
“A plum,” she said. “It represents cooking, or plum wine, or something, lah, I don’t know how these silly things work.”
She had finished with my left side, so I turned my head to take a look at the fruits of her artistic talent. “That’s a pair of flanks you’ve painted on my flank.” I probably didn’t want to know what special talent that was supposed to represent.
“No, it’s a plum,” snapped Spring Rain, as she moved around to repeat the process on the other side. “Your special thing is plum wine.”
“But it really looks like-”
“Aiya, it’s a plum!”
I suppose I’ve been in less dignified situations than this before, so I let her carry on with my other flank until I had a rather suggestive depiction of a plum painted on each. Those would have to do, and I would have to hope that any Blackhorns hunting for me would think that the famed Commissar Prince Blueblood would never dare to appear in public with so ridiculous a disguise, and completely reject the possibility that this dishevelled unicorn with fruit painted on his flanks could be whom they were searching for.
As for Cannon Fodder, his disregard for the niceties of personal grooming would invariably make him stand out on body odour alone, even in what I imagined would be a marketplace already brimming with olfactory overload from all of the various exotic spices and such for sale. I warned Spring Rain not to bother even attempting to bathe him, and she readily agreed that not only would such a thing be completely fruitless, but also render her bathroom thoroughly unfit for further use. He would simply have to do without for now, unless we could find the sort of high pressure hoses used to scrub dirt off the hulls of yachts and solvents strong enough to melt away years of caked-on filth. In truth, him being clean for the first time in his life would have been the most effective disguise possible. With luck, he might have escaped the notice of the enemy now hunting us, and if I was any judge of character I trusted that Dorylus would be so very fixated on both ensuring that Operation: Sunburn proceeds swimmingly and on shoving me back inside a cocoon, that he might completely forget that a certain preternaturally malodorous unicorn with a dodgy horn had been instrumental in my escape.
At any rate, I was all out of alternatives, not that I was in much of a state of mind to think things through properly, and so in the absence of any other course of action to take I went along with Spring Rain’s plan. Cannon Fodder and I were yoked to her cart in what was merely next in a series of indignities I had been forced to suffer through that day, and were instructed to follow her through the streets and to not say a word to anypony. We were also instructed to ‘act natural, lah’, as she had put it, which had the additional effect of making me feel very conscious about the precise manner in which I walked.
By the time we ventured out into the city the curfew had been lifted fully, and despite the vicious attack on the convoy that had just happened an hour ago, the occupying forces had seen fit to allow the city’s inhabitants to carry on with their day. The city was bustling with ponies of all sorts, and kirins too, albeit all under the careful watch of both the Changeling occupiers and ponies who appeared to have been police officers pressed into service; any occupying force invariably takes advantage of any collaboration from the oppressed locals, willing or otherwise, to make up for their own deficient numbers and to maintain some semblance of continuity to keep them sedate. Still, the sight and the noise of the crowds - my ears picking up any variation of Marelay, Ponish, Cathaynese, and Coltcuttan all at once - gave me some measure of hope; it would all provide the perfect screen from anypony on the watch for fugitive princes.
It turned out that I was quite hopeless at pulling the cart, to Spring Rain’s amusement and the annoyance of ponies I bumped into. Well, I could pull it in something approximating a straight line, but steering the damned thing around the dense traffic was another matter entirely. I tend not to be in the habit of pulling my own carts, as that is what servants are for, but it was much trickier than they had made it look. At least I had Cannon Fodder’s dogged stubbornness keeping us all in a relatively straight line, and I hoped that no drone could possibly think that this bumbling buffoon could possibly be the esteemed Lord Commissar Prince Blueblood, Hero of Equestria and all that rot.
The trek to the market was not a short one, which at least gave me sufficient time to practise pretending to be a common pony, at least one common to here. Despite my misgivings, and the fact that I towered over the majority of other ponies here by a clear head, it seemed to be working; none paid me too much attention, save for the few brief, odd looks that nevertheless kept me on edge. Indeed, anxiety was making its familiar home in my gut and making its presence felt in the usual means of inducing nausea. The feelings only sharpened whenever I received a grim reminder that we were in the manticore’s den, so to speak - drones continued to watch the dense crowds, always in groups of no less than three perched on like ravens atop lamp posts and tall buildings, whose walls were often plastered with posters depicting a smiling, welcoming drone with hooves outstretched and open to the viewer, with accompanying text in the local language.
We stopped off at a roadside stall and picked up a quick breakfast of fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaves, served wrapped up in banana leaves with a boiled egg, sliced cucumber, and chilli paste. [Based on Blueblood’s description, this would be Nasi Lemak.] While I quietly ate my breakfast by the side of the road, only now realising just how hungry I felt after having merely absorbed nutrients in the cocoon like some kind of bloody plant, and Cannon Fodder devoured his noisily, Spring Rain exchanged what sounded like idle gossip in Marelay with the unicorn running the stall. However, I barely had time to finish breakfast and ask for seconds, for my recently un-cocooned body still craved solid food, our ‘boss’ decided that our break was over and hurried us down the street.
“Interesting,” said Spring Rain. I made a noise, still having a mouth full of rice as I trotted along the road, to indicate that I was paying attention and would like to know more. “The Changelings took more ponies to work in the docks with the airships this morning. Ah, not only do the Changelings take my city but they take my customers also!”
That was interesting. Judging from what I had picked up about what passed for their society, the Changelings seemed to think that physical labour was beneath them, which made sense for a race that thought itself superior to all others and had a rather large slave population to do all of the unpleasant and demanding jobs that they didn’t want to do. It might sound a tad hypocritical of me, a prince, to point this out as laziness and cruelty on their part, but I do treat and pay my staff, who, I might add have always been free to leave, unlike these pony slaves, a damned sight better. Nevertheless, I knew of the importance of this Operation Sunburn, and this news hinted to me that Dorylus’ acceleration of his daring plan had run into the problem of not having enough hooves on deck to make it happen; I struggled to think that he would leave it up to members of an unwilling at best, downright hostile and defiant at worse, population to undertake something that his life now very much depended upon. Chrysalis did not seem like a ruler particularly forgiving of failure, and I would like nothing more than to contribute in some small way to his inevitable punishment.
We arrived at the market a few minutes later. If one has never been to such a market in a far off land before, then very little can be done to prepare oneself for the assault upon the senses: the sights of so many different ponies, kirins, and other creatures together; the sounds of vendors calling out for attention and of customers haggling over prices; and the smells of spices and fruit and food in seemingly infinite variety. I had only seen them before, as in Coltcutta nearby, with sufficient guards and staff to keep the riff-raff safely away, but now I was thoroughly immersed in it, rubbing shoulders quite literally with the peasants. It would have been quite exciting were it not for the threat of discovery hanging over my head.
[Markets form an important cultural and economic function in any society. That the Changelings allowed it to continue despite the insurgent attack that had freed Blueblood and on-going rebel activity, lends credence to his theory that they lacked the numbers sufficient to shut it down, and had judged it was not worth risking the ire of the local population any more than their invasion had caused.]
“Aiya, my spot’s already taken!” hissed Spring Rain. “You made me late! I must take this out of your wages.”
Her annoyance aside, I dare say that I had the impression that Spring Rain was enjoying bossing me around a little too much. She directed us to an empty spot between a noodle stall and another selling furniture made from bamboo, and then began to set everything up; the cart opened up into a sort of large stove for a wok wide enough to saute Princess Luna and a preparation area where she arranged out the various ingredients - day-old cold, cooked rice, various sauces with unpronounceable names, eggs, and so on.
“Well?” Spring Rain held up two large cleavers and a bundle of spring onions in the sort of threatening manner that had me instinctively reaching for a sword that was not there. “Get to it, lah!”
While food is of course one of life’s great pleasures, I never thought that it was entirely necessary for me to know the various jobs necessary to craft meals fit for a prince; one can appreciate the majestic architecture of Canterlot Cathedral, for instance, without having to first learn how to lay bricks. However, it turned out that I was quite good at chopping spring onions, and only after a false start or two I managed to work out how to use the cleaver properly; it was, in a manner of speaking, rather like any other blade, and I fancied it would be an appropriately deadly weapon wielded by a skilled duellist such as I. As we did that, Spring Rain stood before the wok, took a moment to apparently centre herself, and then her horn flickered with those dancing blue and red sparks again. There was a roar of ignition, a blast of heat that overpowered the warmth of the day, and her entire body became engulfed in fire - she had become a nirik. I hadn’t seen one before, not in the flesh, so I was rather alarmed at this, but she seemed to be fully in control of herself, and projected the white-hot flames into the stove on her scorched cart. Though she grumbled and hissed to herself to keep herself at a certain level of anger necessary for her purposes, she was able to carry on cooking, using the flames from her own burning body, which made my skin smart being this close to her, to directly heat the wok.
Things seemed to be carrying on merrily, and after a while I thought I was getting into the rhythm of chopping vegetables; if I’d ever lost my royal title in a coming proletarian revolution and would have to find gainful employment or face the guillotine, then I might, at a pinch, consider ‘preparer of spring onions’ for a job. However, after the first few customers came and went, each unfazed that the creature they had just bought breakfast from was on fire or that the banana leaves it came wrapped in was quite singed, our little stall was approached by two pony police officers. Both were stallions, and one was a unicorn and the other was a pegasus. They still wore the tan shirts and peaked caps of the old colonial police force, but any insignia that marked them as loyal to Equestria had been removed; indeed, I could make out where the embroidered patch bearing the emblem of our realm was torn out by the circular stitch marks on their left breasts.
The two police officers barked something in the local parlance at Spring Rain, who snapped back with equal venom, and hers was enhanced by a certain gravelly tone imparted to her voice by being in nirik-form. My grasp of Marelay was shaky, not having spent sufficient time in brothels to pick up enough of the tongue of the street to get by, but it was clear that they were unhappy with her over something. The hectoring carried on until, with great reluctance, the nirik extinguished her flames and returned to her normal, un-burning self. I tried to avoid looking like I was paying them too much close attention, not that I understood what was being said in their heated conversation, and appear as though I was focused entirely on the repetitive task of chopping vegetables into tiny slices. Evidently, I failed, as my none-too-subtle stares caught the attention of one of the officers, the pegasus, who strode on over to me, around the stall, and asked me what I took to be a rather pointed question.
Of course, I had no idea what I had just been asked, and I was well aware that the wrong answer could land me stuck in another cocoon again for my troubles. Responding in Ponish, especially in my ‘natural’ accent, which had been beaten into me from a young age, might as well have been pinning a badge to my chest saying ‘Hello, my name is Prince Blueblood, please arrest me’. Spring Rain tried to answer on my behalf, but was silenced by a loud, sharp exclamation from the other officer.
That left only one other option, and it was a bit of a gamble, but I had no other options. I responded in Coltcuttan: “Sorry, sahib, but I don’t understand.”
The officer stared with a sort of dull vacancy in his eyes, devoid of imagination and wit as the sorts of ponies who become enforcers of the law tend to be, and then repeated the question in a slower and louder fashion as though that might encourage me to suddenly pick up the language instantly. Alas for him, it did not work, and I shook my head in what I hoped was a suitably apologetic manner and repeated that I didn’t understand in Coltcuttan. This continued a few times, and I noted that they gave Cannon Fodder a suitably wide berth, not bothering to even attempt to interrogate him, as his body odour overpowered even the pungent smell of the fermented shrimp paste that Spring Rain used in her cooking. After a bit more of the old back-and-forth, he finally understood that I was not about to do in two minutes what normally took most ponies at least a month or two, and gave up, muttering what I took to be obscenities and aspersions about my intelligence and lineage under his breath.
The two carried on with Spring Rain for a bit, and then, after another fairly heated exchange, she brought a small purse of coins out from inside her cart and offered it with two servings of fried rice to the officers. This ‘donation’, as it were, encouraged them to leave us alone, and they slinked away into the shifting, noisy crowd, laughing to themselves at some private joke.
“Ah, that was smart,” said Spring Rain in Ponish, her voice hushed and almost drowned out by the bellowing voice of the furniture salespony next to us. “I didn’t know you speak that language.”
“I used to live there,” I explained, then nodded my head in the direction of the retreating officers. “What was that about?”
“They always want a bribe, lah, every morning, or they find a reason to shut down my stall.” She shrugged, and poked around with the rapidly-cooling wok. “Wanted to know if I knew anything about the attack this morning, as if all kirins knew each other, and wanted to know why two ponies were working for a kirin.”
“How odd. Is that not allowed?”
Spring Rain paused, thinking it over. “It’s allowed, but not normal,” she said, her voice hushed and barely audible above the noise of the crowd all around. “The Changelings say they came to liberate Marelacca from Equestrian imperialism, and to return Marelacca to the Marelaccans. Kirins aren’t included in that. Aiya, you Equestrians took my city’s wealth for yourselves, but at least you didn’t play favourites. It was never this bad for us until the Changelings came and ruined everything, now the ponies will blame us for the hardship the war makes for us and not the invaders.”
“Divide and conquer,” I said. “I hate to say it, but that’s really damned clever of them, and entirely the sort of evil thing they would do. It doesn’t help that your sort have a tendency to burst into flames at the slightest provocation.”
Spring Rain gave me a queer look, as though I’d somehow insulted her with that little remark, but shook her head and cursed in her peculiar dialect under breath; it did not sound flattering.
“Exactly, but what choice do kirins have now?” She sighed forlornly, shook her head, and then apparently having had enough of this, took her wok in her magic and snapped at me, “Aiya, enough lollygagging! Break is over, and back to work, you two!”
Back to maintaining our cover then, and I carried on chopping the spring onions. After a while of this quite repetitive but oddly relaxing task, my ‘boss’ saw fit to promote me to slicing up shallots and garlic and Cannon Fodder to pounding the spice paste in a large mortar and pestle, which he managed with greater efficiency and alacrity than the more delicate tasks of vegetable preparation, though I would personally avoid eating anything that he had any involvement in making. She did not turn into a nirik for the rest of the day, though the occasional flickering of her horn illustrated that it was rather a close thing; instead, she heated the wok with straightforward fire magic, which the chef declared numerous times did not produce the necessary intense heat needed for ‘wok hei’, whatever that was.
Surveying the scene from behind the stall, I was struck by how thoroughly normal it all seemed, or at least what I would think would pass for ‘normal’ in this exotic part of the world. I could only contrast it with what I had seen of the wretches who lived under the occupation of Virion Hive, who had suffered under the cruel hoof of Queen Chrysalis for nearly a century, such that none of their number who remembered life before her oppression still lived. The haunted, gaunt faces, devoid of the merest flicker of joy and life and culture, all of which had been stamped out of them by the decades of a systematic destruction of a unique and hardy culture by a regime that saw them merely as livestock, were still vivid in my mind, and as I observed the sea of equine life before more, I feared that if Equestria were to somehow lose this war, then that would be the fate of all of these free creatures. Whatever I might have said about the conduct of this war in these writings, I had no doubt after witnessing the privations of Virion Hive that our cause was the just one.
The enemy had a process for this, as we would later discover from further interviews with captured and defecting Purestrains disillusioned with their Queen’s increasingly erratic style of leadership, and it was rather a long one - they euphemistically referred to it is as ‘alignment’, and a village, town, city, or other such settlement of ponies that had been successfully brought to a state of utter despondency and dependency by their occupation, to the point that any real resistance on a level greater than a lone, brave individual rebelling on their own was unthinkable, was said to be ‘aligned’. It would take decades, and the Changelings had had time to perfect and refine this process; it happened by degrees, with such slow and tiny increments in their control that though the population may protest at such injustices, these could all be placated with the usual platitudes of the tyrant - that it is for their own protection, that it is necessary due to the war that they claim Equestria started, and that it is only temporary. Of course, anypony in a position to provide a more active resistance to what was happening would be done away with, and others willing to collaborate, either through coercion or selfishness, would be rewarded. All the while, the quota of love they would ‘tax’ from the steadily defeated population would increase gradually, starting small and ‘reasonable’ and ramping up in an inverse correlation to their loss of Harmony and independence, until the ponies were rendered thoroughly helpless and sedate enough not to pose any further threat.
The process was an insidious one, they’d had a great deal of practice in it, but even it was not perfect and there would always be those gallant, if deluded, souls who would rather die than kneel before Chrysalis. Here, I could already see the first signs that it had already started; a poster was plastered on the wall of a department store directly opposite us, depicting a Changeling and a pony, apparently a native to Marelacca, both swinging their hooves to punch a grotesquely obese caricature of Princess Celestia (complete with cake icing around her mouth; I always thought their artists were rather skilled) in the face. Though I couldn’t read the words, the messaging was clear; the Changelings were here to liberate them from Equestrian imperial ‘oppression’, thus appealing to those here who thought they could run their own affairs and were deluded enough by that desire to believe the words of a race whose primary mode of operation in everything was deception. Picking on the kirins, too, was a stroke of genius in its most malicious and cowardly manner, for any further hardship and violence could be blamed entirely on this minority that they were brutalising.
While I certainly wanted to return home for my own safety and comfort, I had enough affection for this remarkable part of the world that I did not want to see it suffer. I simply had to return to Equestria and pass on the warning of Operation: Sunburn, for their sake as well as my own, if that would help encourage these resistance fighters along to do their civic duty. However, all the while I still expected to see a tall, dark, shadowy figure approach the stall, preferably in a trench coat and a fedora hat despite the intense heat of the day, utter a ridiculous code phrase like ‘the naga sleeps under the lake’, and everything would spring into action and before I’m know it I’m on a boat off to Equestria. We paused for a short lunch break where, for the first time in my life, I had the novel experience of borrowing money, for Cannon Fodder had been relieved of any currency he usually carried for me by the Changelings, in order to buy char kway teow [A popular stir-fried noodle dish] from the noodle stall next to us. The gruff pony who spoke only limited Ponish was completely unaware that his little shop could now qualify for displaying a coveted royal warrant.
As the afternoon wore on and there seemed to be no sign of these resistance contacts that Spring Rain had spoken of, I started to get rather anxious about their continued failure to show up. I began to expect the worst; that the enemy had been considerably more competent in rounding up the perpetrators of that ambush than my miraculous escape had otherwise implied, and thus over the course of the past few hours there was no longer a resistance group to speak of. Inevitably, I grew too impatient and asked the kirin how much longer I would have to wait to see them.
“They were already here,” she said, with no small amount of smugness in her voice and facial expression.
“When?” I asked, rather irritated that I’d missed them. “I didn’t see them.”
“That’s the point, remember?” Her focus was still very much on the task of cooking, not once looking up from the hot, sizzling wok before her, and the rice swirling around like a vortex under the skilful ministrations of her ladle. The customer, a pony labourer of some sort tapping his hoof impatiently for his meal, stood right before her, but despite the presence of this eavesdropper, who was evidently more concerned about his lunch than our talk about secret anti-Changeling resistance groups, she carried on: “I told you, if you could pick them out then they wouldn’t be resistance anymore; they’d all be in camps by now, lah.”
Of course, it was obvious; much like those Changeling saboteurs I had to deal with during my brief tenure as the military governor of Virion Hive, these local resistance cells would have to rely on blending in with the local population in order to survive and wage war. Still, I could not help but feel a little put out that formal introductions had not been made, in whatever form they take in these lands.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Spring Rain finished attending to her customer before answering. “Can arrange a meeting with the boss,” she said. “Tonight, after curfew. I know the place and can take you there.”
“This is all a bit much, and you needn’t put yourself at risk on my account,” I said, knowing full well that she’d say otherwise; it paid to remind ponies putting their own lives on the line for my selfish benefit that they chose to help me, and should things not go the way they had intended then it would go some small way to assuaging any guilt I might feel.
“Ah, I can’t have you wandering the city alone at night.” Spring Rain was already preparing the order for the next customer, a pony labourer of sorts in overalls heavily stained in what looked like disconcertingly flammable grease, as she spoke. “You won’t know where it is, lah. I’ll have to show you.”
Well, she did have me there. Unless it was in the governor’s palace, which was very unlikely, I had no chance of finding it, wherever it was. Still, the rest of the day passed without incident, aside from a few brief scares when those groups of patrolling Blackhorns veered rather too close to our little stall for comfort, however, either due to my thoroughly convincing disguise, which had started to streak and become splotchy as I sweated not only from the heat of the day but also the cooker, nirik or otherwise, so that I started to resemble a zebra, or that they had somehow forgotten what I had looked like, I seemed to escape their notice. I could not, of course, fully reject the thought that I had indeed been spotted and recognised, but the enemy had simply thought it more prudent to pick me up when not surrounded by hundreds of ponies and kirins going about their daily business. However, despite the fear of recapture making me jump at every shimmer of polished chitin I saw, the work itself, when it was busy enough to give me something else to focus on other than my fearful predicament, was suitably calming in its dull, repetitive nature; I’d made a game of trying to slice the various ingredients as finely as possible, and imagining that I was working my cleaver on Dorylus’ neck instead gave me some much needed amusement.
The sun was setting when we packed up for the day, and now when ponies accuse me of never having worked a day in my life, and for some reason they often seemed to think that my time in Their Highnesses’ service doesn’t count, I can look them square in the eye and tell that, in fact, I have. The curfew was starting to come into effect, and the occupiers were rather strict in enforcing it; the presence of those grey-clad thugs and their collaborators, exclusively all ponies I am rather ashamed to say, had increased, and they had started moving through the increasingly despondent crowd of unhappy civilians, some of whom I observed receiving a blow with a hoof and a menacing snarl for any defiance, real or merely perceived as such.
Spring Rain placed the various woks, spatulas, knives, and assorted cooking implements I could only guess the purposes of inside the wagon. I’d offered to help, only out of politeness, and she had informed me that I’d only get in her way and make a mess. The chap with the noodle stall next to us likewise followed suit, while a pony in a police uniform with the Equestrian insignia stripped from it shouted at him to get a move on; it would be our turn soon, I expected, and as I’d rather avoid as much attention as possible, our kirin host was quite speedy with her packing, with the sort of efficiency that came with doing this countless times over and over.
“It means no more pasar malam [The night market], lah,” she complained bitterly, without pausing at all in her work; again, another step in the process of ‘alignment’, and one more unique, cultural touchstone was in the process of being erased by the Changelings for the relentless need for love. “After we finished work, I used to meet there with…” She trailed off, holding the grease-stained spatula in mid-air, before shaking her head and placing it in its proper place. “Aiya, never mind. Come on, let’s go, lah!”
***
We spent the rest of the evening back at Spring Rain’s quite meagre little home. She passed the time with ‘meditation’, as she put it, which involved her locking herself in her bedroom; I observed some sort of smoke, heavily scented like incense, seeping through the cracks in the door, and I wondered if I ought to be concerned by that. With her giving up on her duties as a host, Cannon Fodder and I were left to our own devices to amuse ourselves. My aide decided to nap, as all soldiers invariably tend to do when given the rare opportunity to do nothing and catch up on lost sleep, snoring away like a buzzsaw going through an elephant, and though I had been asleep in that cocoon for days on end I made a half-hearted attempt to follow suit.
That, however, proved to be rather difficult; while Cannon Fodder was content to simply curl up on the hard, stone floor like a Diamond Dog and slip effortlessly off into Luna’s realm of dreams as easily as stepping from one room to another, my stay in Camp Joy, with its beds softer than Spring Rain’s old sofa here and the hard military cots I had eventually became used to before, had ruined what little acclimatisation to discomfort and hardship my soft, pampered body had become used to over the course of my unhappy career. Indeed, as the sun was setting outside and the shadows in the corners of the room deepened, I was left alone, of sorts. I had been granted a rare moment of peace, and I felt oddly at ease at that; granted, the burden of the news I carried still weighed heavily on my mind, and the feeling that the fate of this war depended on me delivering it to Equestria was not a pleasant one, but I perched by the window and peered through the slats in the shutters to watch the city outside and found a certain queer serenity in the empty quiet. The curfew was well in effect by now, and Marelacca beyond appeared as a ghost town; aside from the pi dogs roaming around, who all seemed very confused as to where everypony had disappeared to, the birds, and the ever-present insects who love this climate, there was no other sign of life. The stark contrast to the loud and vibrant market scene I had witnessed, and indeed taken part in for the first time in my sheltered life, was more than merely stark. Always in such climates, the Badlands included, the locals will shelter through the appalling heat and humidity of the day and then venture out in the relatively cooler night, yet the streets outside were utterly bare.
I watched the sun set below the tall, square homes, throwing the sky into deepening and vibrant shades of orange, red, purple, and then finally black. In my years I might have forgotten the simple pleasures of watching the sunset, having filled my life with the usual sorts of elaborate debauchery and indulgence expected of a young prince, but I suppose having one’s life constantly hurled into danger against one’s will forces one to find pleasure whenever and wherever it could be found. Once darkness had fully descended upon the city like a velvet cloth, Luna’s moon high in the sky like a watchful sentinel and her stars glittering like spilled diamonds, Spring Rain finally ventured out of her bedroom, looking noticeably calmer and more relaxed than she had done before.
“Ready, Prince?” she asked, getting straight to it. She stood in the centre of her living room, and though I was rather curious as to what exactly she was getting up to in her solitude, my febrile imagination already coming up with all manner of quite sordid theories, I also wanted to get this over and done with quickly.
I nodded. “About as ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. “So, who am I meeting?”
“Uncle,” she said, as if that made any sense.
“Your uncle?”
“Aiya, no. The Uncle, that’s what we call him.”
Of course, the creatures of this part of the world tended to call anyone significantly older than them as ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’ as some sort of honorific, and I wondered if I should have been addressing Spring Rain as ‘auntie’ all this time. “Values his privacy, I take it? Have you met him?”
“I might have served him nasi goreng once,” she said. “All I know is he’s their boss. Now let’s get going or we’ll be late.”
With that, I woke up Cannon Fodder with a gentle nudge; though he had been in a deep sleep and apparently dreaming in the way that dogs do, he was awake and alert immediately, as far as ‘alert’ goes with his rather dull and languid demeanour. Spring Rain gave him a set of large saddlebags, which we stuffed full with as many muskets and cartridges as he could be expected to reasonably carry as a ‘gift’ to the resistance, in case they needed a bit more of a material incentive to help their prince. As for me, having white fur, though now stained a pale, dusty grey thanks to my rolling around in the dirt earlier, would mean that I might stand out somewhat in the darkness, and so I spent some time removing the shiny brass buttons and glittering medals until it remained a solid black jacket. The rest of me was then concealed by rubbing some burnt ash from her food stall to dull down my coat a little more. As for my aide, there was little that could be masked any better than the unique biome that already inhabited his coat, and none of us were particularly keen on interfering in case whatever it was that caused his peculiar affliction might spread.
We were about as ready as we would ever be, and so we ventured out into the night. As predicted, the temperature and humidity had barely dropped by any appreciable degree with the setting of the sun, at least according to my senses. Still, being out of the sun’s rays did help somewhat. The streets were as empty as before, with nary a sign of life save for the sort of vermin that inevitably coexist with civilised creatures in any urban environment, and all seemed to be rather enjoying having the run of the place now that everypony was locked up inside; feral dogs, cats, rats, and birds were everywhere, though they scattered as we crept through the streets. In the still of the night, I felt acutely aware of just how much noise I was making, though the kirin and my aide seemed utterly silent; my breath was sharp and ragged, my hoofsteps seemed clumsy and awkward, and even my heart pounded loud enough that I thought others must be able to hear it.
Spring Rain led the way, first towards the end of her street and down to a high road of sorts, where either side of this broad thoroughfare were narrow but deep trenches dug between the pavement and the houses, with short bridges to allow ponies not gifted with flight the ability to enter and leave their homes without too much risk of injury. Our guide leapt down into the trench with a sense of practised ease that implied she had done this before, over and over. Cannon Fodder was next, and didn’t so much leap down the trench as fall in it, but he was rather unperturbed by his little tumble and was perfectly fine once he picked himself up off the bottom. I tried to ease myself in gently, only for my hooves to slip as I attempted to brace myself against the sides of the trench, and I fell. When I tell this story to other ponies, who rather irritatingly never seem to tire of me trotting out the same tedious and heavily-censored anecdotes at parties, I say that Cannon Fodder, the ever-faithful aide, had caught me, but really I landed right on top on him and he was much too polite and obedient to complain.
Once I had extricated myself from Cannon Fodder and we both got ourselves in order inside the trench, I found that the bottom was very damp, and the soft ground squelched unpleasantly under my hooves. I found that this was some sort of gutter on the side of the street, somewhat deeper than Princess Celestia is tall and barely wide enough for her ample flanks, designed to deal with excess rain during what the locals aptly referred to as the rainy season, which I also imagined kept kirin-related fires down to an appropriate minimum during that time. It stank down here, as all manner of filth and detritus found its way into this deep gutter and had thus festered. This made it a perfect environment for all manner of creepy-crawlies and germs, no doubt, and almost as soon as I’d stood up I was attacked by a veritable horde of mosquitoes. Here, however, we were quite safe from the prying eyes of any Changelings or collaborationist police on patrol, unless the bugs had decided to take on the form of their nickname and hide in gutters for any fugitive princes to sneak through.
That the enemy could have taken on the forms of inanimate objects to better observe the ponies and kirins here, as they had done to great effect in that appalling battle that precipitated this whole affair, which felt very distant now, had occurred to me. As I followed Cannon Fodder, who followed Spring Rain and therefore was the one to enjoy the view ahead, I thought about every single little stone, lamppost, bin, cart, and so on that, unbeknownst to me, could have been a drone in disguise who would rush back to tell the nearest Purestrain that he’d found me, his heart filled with the anticipation of the extra love rations he would get as a just reward for bringing in an enemy of the Hive. There was no way I could possibly tell, until I found myself forced inside another cocoon again, but it would continue to gnaw at me as I trudged, being eaten alive by mosquitoes all the while, through that dingy, miserable gutter. It was, again, quite intelligent of them, in their usual evil manner; if absolutely anything could be a Changeling, from a dog in the street to the book one is reading to one’s own beloved cousin, and there was no way to know for certain, then certainly most sane and intelligent ponies under the hoof of occupation would behave as if they are being watched even in the privacy of their own homes. They could not watch everypony all the time, but the thought that one could be watched, entirely without one knowing, would, in time, inspire a sense of hopeless obedience.
We forged ahead through the gutter, like lost tourists through a labyrinth, but I had to trust that Spring Rain knew the way. She took us this way and that, in what to my special talent felt like a winding, circuitous route that twisted and turned through the streets, through dark tunnels where we daren’t light horns and so had to feel our way through with our hooves. It was interminable and relentless, and all the more so after a full day of work where I still hadn’t fully recovered from my stint in the cocoon. Every so often she would stop, and we would stand in tense silence, each pressed against the filthy sides of the gutter, holding our breaths and willing our pounding hearts to slow as a dark, faceless shape, silhouetted by the light of a torch, appeared at the edge. They might simply walk on, entirely oblivious of the three fugitives mere inches away from them, and we would breathe a sigh of relief and carry on. Others would stop, peering around in the darkened streets or chattering aimlessly with whomever else had been selected for this clearly unpopular duty, and we would have to wait a little before they would move on. Most were ponies, speaking in their native tongue. It seemed incredible that none of them would consider that we would hide in the gutters, but, looking back now, I suppose the problem with an occupying regime relying on collaboration is that said collaborators are often just as unenthusiastic about this state of affairs as everypony else and will, in their own small way, resist by being just lazy and incompetent enough to be a nuisance, but not so much so as to put themselves and their loved ones in danger. I rather admired that, in a way.
I was thoroughly miserable by the time we emerged out of the gutter. Cannon Fodder had to help pull me up, which he did without complaint or comment as usual, as though I had lost weight my limbs appeared to have been weakened by my long sleep in the cocoon by an almost equal amount. Spring Rain was curiously silent, despite her previously talkative nature, looking around with clear but unvoiced impatience as I struggled out of the gutter, covered in filth and insect bites. Here, we had emerged into another empty street, just next to a closed kopi tiam [A coffee shop]; the lights were off, the door was shut and locked, and a glance through the window, where the light from the nearby street lamps revealed rows of tables and plastic chairs arranged in a haphazard way that bore no resemblance to any sort of organised cafe layout that I recognised. It hardly seemed to be the headquarters of a well-organised and armed resistance group, but, as Spring Rain would say, that was entirely the point.
We slipped into a dark alley to the rear of the shop, where there was a set of stairs leading down into a basement in a way that reminded me of the beer cellars of Trottingham pubs. A quick look around revealed no ponies and no Changelings that we could see, so we rushed down the steps, my hooves making rather too much noise on the stone for my liking, to a shut door. Spring Rain’s horn glowed momentarily, and I understood that she had used magic to manipulate something behind the door to call for attention, for after a few hushed moments where the anxiety-induced urge to vomit was becoming more and more intolerable, the door opened by a fraction of an inch, letting out a thin beam of dim light. A kirin peered through the gap.
“Kaya delivery,” whispered Spring Rain. It was some sort of codeword, for the other kirin nodded and opened the door just wide enough to allow us all inside. We darted inside, one after the other, with me last for having stood at the back, and the door was shut and locked behind us. The basement was quite dark, lit only by a few candles dotted around on tables and shelves, and otherwise very sparsely furnished; a few kirins slept on the floor on bedrolls, three others played a quiet game of mahjong on one table, and another, an older kirin with a short wispy beard and moustache, read a book in the corner. None were particularly surprised to see me; in fact, I felt quite annoyed at being ignored like that, and I wasn’t terribly used to that sort of reaction. Proper etiquette, of course, dictated that everypony stands up and bows when royalty enters a room, but though I didn’t expect quite that level for formality here, a little courtesy would not have gone amiss.
I have to confess, I was not terribly impressed by what I saw, but it would have to do; there were likely other such cells dotted around the place, so that if one was captured then at least the entire resistance movement would not be unduly compromised, I assumed. However, I had at least expected to see a few more kirins and even a pony or two among their number, and certainly more weapons too. This was not going according to how I had envisaged such a meeting would take place. One kirin at the mahjong table I took to be their leader, this ‘Uncle’ as they called him, partly because he appeared to be winning this incredibly complex board game but mostly because he was the biggest and strongest one of the lot, and thus seemed to fit the bill as a tough leader of a embattled team of partisans fighting a hopeless war of resistance. I paid the elderly kirin no heed; presumably one of their grandparents brought along so they could keep an eye on him, I thought.
“Hello,” I said politely; that would be a good start.
The kirins playing mahjong ignored me, carrying on with their game as though I wasn’t there, and the ones sleeping didn’t even so much as stir, but the elder here closed his book, only after finishing the page he was on first, and stood up from his seat. “Prince Blueblood,” he said, smiling and with a smart, stiff bow. “Call me Uncle. I’ve been waiting for you.”