//------------------------------//
// Part I 
// Story: Aureax Ferri 
// by Integral Archer 
//------------------------------//

	On July the second, 181 BC, the employees at the headquarters of the Department of Magic and Defense heard a frightful cry from the lobby. Whether they were on the top floor of the building or in the basement, they heard it clearly, for the sound caused the very walls of the building to vibrate. The artificial impediments to such distractions proved impotent against its fury, and it made its way through the building, if not through windows carelessly left open, via the ventilation system. It was a sound unlike anything they had heard before. It was not quite the scream of a wild beast, nor was it the battle cry of a soldier of the Union Army, but the closest comparison they could make was that it was simultaneously a blend of both while being neither. In its tones, it carried insistence, imperativeness, arrogance, and egoism—but, above all, it conveyed malice and anger, like in those of the wails of an impuissant prey thrashing insanely, wantonly, in the jaws of a hungry, powerful animal.

The movement of ponies on the stairs of the building was jammed to a standstill with a flowing mass of curious, slightly unnerved employees; each one of them had heard the sound, and each one of them wanted to know its source. If an employee was aggressive enough and managed to shove aside his coworkers to make it into the lobby, he would have seen a sight perhaps more terrifying than the reports of the destruction caused by the engagements of the Union Army with the Army of the Friendship near the city of Los Pegasus; for this sight was corporeal, immediate, and brought the emotions, the fears, and the apprehensions of the conflict right to the doorstep of those who would rather turn away and help its progress from behind closed shutters.

“You’re idiots! Do you hear me? Do you even want to listen? All of you, complete idiots! Don’t you know what you’re throwing away? You’re going to die, all of your soldiers are going to die—your esteemed army of the Union, wiped out—because of you worthless, wretched bureaucrats! You don’t see genius!”

Across the floor of the spacious lobby of the Department of Magic and Defense, a unicorn with a deep shade of blue-green fur and with limbs and bones as thin as wire, with a leather sash bearing multiple pockets slung across his body, and whose golden-brown mane sprawled messily across his face, had both of his forelegs grasped firmly by two large, muscular gendarmes and was being dragged backwards toward the main doors. The unicorn was thrashing his hindlegs madly, trying in vain to find some sufficient friction on the marble floor in order to slow his advance or trying to plant a kick on the steel face of one of the two gendarmes, who simply leaned their heads slightly away from the crazed animal and walked with unfazed stares as the hindlegs cut past their ears, catching nothing but air. As the unicorn screamed these words, his head twisted from left to right in sharp, intermittent, convulsive jerks—as if trying to propel the words in every single direction in order for more ears to hear his pleas—and every time it turned, the rays of the sun, pouring in from the lobby’s skylight, bounced off an iron band on the base of the unicorn’s horn.

“Where’s the director of this sorry excuse for a department?” the unicorn wailed. “I want to see the director!”

There was another unicorn on the floor as well: A tall, auburn unicorn with a pince-nez sitting on her short nose, the tails of her coat twirling behind her as she made her exaggerated strides, and a silver necklace dangling a small diamond over her chest. She was walking behind the two gendarmes, cool, calm, collected despite the insults being thrown at her by the pony with the iron band. The smug smirk and the pompous march that the auburn pony assumed made those who were observing the scene instantly recognize her as Vice Director June Ripples; and the way she walked mere feet behind the convoy, the way she maintained eye contact and looked down on the pony being dragged helplessly, embarrassingly, backwards out of the building, made those that were watching realize that she was in one of her moods again—that mood, caused by various, unknown sources and triggered by the absence of her only superior, the diffident director, which compels her to humiliate one of her subordinates while in the Department’s hallways for her own amusement; and now that the director was gone, inexplicably vanished, this mood became more pervasive, the norm; for this was now her territory, her domain, the only place where she had any real power; and she glanced dogmatically at those who were watching, a supercilious smile creeping onto her lips, a smile that is only given when one knows that there is nopony above her, nopony who could contest or patronize her—and when she took a deep breath of satisfaction, the employees of the Department of Magic and Defense turned away and muttered silent prayers, begging some unknown, unseeable force to bring their director safely home to save them from this officious substitute.

The onlookers could see Vice Director Ripple’s horn glowing with light and a strange-looking rifle, surrounded by the same color of light, hovering slightly to the side of her. The vice director, yawning, twirled the odd rifle—a rifle that had no ramrod seated under its muzzle, a short barrel, and a peculiar-looking latch under its stock—in the air like a baton, and the more it spun, the louder and angrier the blue-green unicorn became.

As soon as the front door was opened, the blue-green unicorn was thrown, by the muscular forelegs of the gendarmes, several feet into the air; and he landed, chin-first, on the concrete sidewalk in front of the building. The impact of his body on the ground broke the buckle on one of the pockets on his sash, and from the pocket erupted a flow of bright conical tubes tipped with lead, their bodies made of brass. One after the other, they clattered to the ground, scattering, as if they were the physical manifestations of the pieces of the blue-green unicorn’s ego, and rolled slowly, unhurriedly, down the slightly sloped incline of the sidewalk. Two of them banked off the curb and fell into the narrow cracks of a street gutter, winking out of existence with two, almost silent, splashes.  

The unicorn sat up, turned around, and clasped a forehoof to his mouth, trying to catch the stream of blood that was now flowing freely from his bottom gums. As he sat on the concrete, looking up at the gendarmes who had thrown him, their expressions unchanged, as if they had just performed a task menially equivalent to taking out the trash, he saw the auburn unicorn emerge from behind them.

Vice Director Ripples yawned again. Her horn stopped glowing, and her magic released the rifle and allowed it to crash with a loud noise to the ground. The blue-green unicorn, on the concrete, unable to hide the blood coming from his mouth, let out a stifled cry and held his other hoof out, as if to stop the vice director, as if to ask her to spare him from something.

This caused the vice director to laugh derisively. “You know, Mr. Miner,” she said, her horn starting to glow again, “I could easily have you arrested for this.” The pince-nez that had been sitting on her nose began to levitate, and from out of her coat’s breast pocket flew an off-white rag. As the rag began to wipe the rims of the glasses, she added: “And no pony would ever hear from you again. I must say, although I disagree with the president on many things, I could not agree more with his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. It allows us to be more efficient, and no time is wasted in those petty, unstimulating trials, while hooligans such as you are left running around on the street and stirring up ruckus.”

The blue-green pony’s brow furrowed, and he removed his hoof from his mouth, showing his bared teeth and the blood that was coming from them.

“But,” continued the vice director, “your performance was absolutely remarkable! Never have I, nor my employees, gotten a better laugh! You know, with all the hardship we’ve had lately, with all the killing and destruction and whatnot, we really did need a jester like you to come and lighten up our day. Bravo, Mr. Miner, bravo! Please come back sometime and entertain us with your inanities and absurdities! But I must ask you not to put on this performance again; when you come back, come up with a new routine, something that’s a bit more realistic and plausible.” She laughed one more time before putting her glasses back on and the rag back in her pocket; and, motioning to the gendarmes, she turned back toward the building, the tails of her coat flipping around with an audible gust of air.

The vice director heard a whimper from behind her and turned back. The pony was gesturing to something on the concrete. The vice director looked down and saw the rifle, battered and scratched, lying near her feet, and she smirked as her horn began to levitate the rifle again. “Oh, and take your stupid toy with you. I don’t want to see your scrapyard waste again. If you want to help the Union, stop trying to waste our time and money, and go get killed in a volunteer infantry regiment instead.” With a nod of her horn, the vice director thrust the rifle rapidly toward the pony on the ground; it hit him in the chest, and he fell backwards, writhing on the ground and wheezing in pain.

He heard the gendarmes laughing as he rolled on the ground, as he tried desperately to inhale while pleading with his body to allow him his breath back. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the vice director walking away, and he opened his mouth to say something in protest, but no words formed in his breathless throat.

He spent five minutes in that pathetic pose on the ground before he felt his diaphragm begin to move again. He felt his breath returning, his muscles regaining their peremptory will to move forward, and his mind becoming cold, calculating—clear. Finally, he rose onto all four of his hooves—shaky at first, but steadying as his thoughts became more lucid—and looked at the front entrance of the Department of Magic and Defense.

He shook the dust off his hooves and looked around. A few meters behind him, a smooth iron band was lying on a leaf on the concrete, shuddering as the leaf attempted to rise in the wind filling it. The leaf blew into the street as soon as the band was lifted by an aura of light, cast from the unicorn’s horn. It rose to his mouth, and he gently blew the dust off of it. He had no water to clean it with; instead, he allowed a tear to fall onto it, and he rubbed it vigorously against his fur—pausing the motion at times, holding it still against his chest, as if trying to use the cold iron to suppress his sobs. When he saw it begin to shine again, when he could see his warped face in its gleam, he raised it over his horn and allowed to fall.

As soon as he felt the iron settle onto the base of his horn, the tears in his eyes vanished, and he turned back to face the doors of the Department of Magic and Defense. His horn began to glow again, and the rifle lifted off the ground, smoothly, comfortably, with the expert twirls of one who had maneuvered the machine many times before; and he held it, its barrel pointing toward the sky, crossed in front of his face in a revolutionary stance, as he shouted, his voice clear and imperious: “You’ve thrown a patriot onto the street today like a worthless pile of trash, a pony who was only so eager to devote his life and his effort to defending his country. With him, you threw out his intellect, his life’s work, and you told him that you rejected his innovations in favor of stagnation. But I’m not done. You can’t squander my patriotism so easily, nor will I stand by and allow the soldiers who defend this great nation—and who, despite your drooling, sniveling pretension and arrogance, still take up arms to protect you against those who wish to see your destruction—fall while holding their rusting, outdated rifles, because you were too ignorant, too elitist to see the superiority, the efficiency, and the genius of my invention. I brought you a gift, a consummate machine, as consummate as my life and the effort that I put into it over the course of five years, and you’ll accept it. You’ll buy my rifle, make it standard-issue to the ranks of the Union Army, if I have to shove it down your throats! Do you hear me? Nopony rejects the genius of Crystal Miner!”