//------------------------------// // Chapter 2 // Story: The Edge of Madness // by SaltyJustice //------------------------------// As per usual, Celestia had made all the preparations for my visit. As per usual, she had failed to run any of them by me before doing so. As usual, I was a mere passenger on the vessel of fate, as Tia guided us around the rocks and currents that threatened us and felt like she was a master of destiny for having done so. "Can you believe it? Full scholarships, from out of nowhere! I mean, my grades are good, but not that good, right?" Minty shouted at me to cover the din. As we sat in the air taxi with all our luggage stowed safely in the storage compartment, the flow of the air around us made conversation impossible, though that never stopped Minty from trying. "It wasn't your grades, it was mine. You're part of the package deal, I said they can take us both or take neither of us," Squeaky shouted back. "There is no way you know that," Minty said. I merely observed this back and forth. More than likely, this sudden acceptance with a full scholarship to Los Pegasus University for the twins was the work of my sister, which would conveniently give me a place to stay while remaining undercover. Not that the twins didn't deserve it, just that a full scholarship was a bit much. Somehow, subtlety was too subtle for Celestia. "What about you Cadence? What's your deal?" Squeaky asked me. "It's too loud to talk, can't you wait until we land?" I said back. Squeaky and Minty looked at each other, then down at the cloud layer as we began our descent. Only when the wheels of the cart touched down did they resume the endless conversation the twins were always engaged in. "So, what's your deal? What does Princess Cadence need to live with us for?" Squeaky asked again. The sarcasm dripped off her pronunciation of Princess. Was I a joke now? I pulled up my roll of clothes, which conveniently wrapped around my sword and disguised it from onlookers. In truth I wouldn't need clothes for the job I was doing, I really just brought these to keep ponies from gawking as I carried a deadly weapon through the streets. One of my overcoats was large enough to cover the sheath and would allow me to walk around in public without attracting any attention. I decided that I was going to be straight and honest with my friends, a courtesy that nopony ever bothered to repay. Damn it, if Celestia would never tell me what was going on, my friends would at least know. "I'm here to deal with a plague outbreak, and to keep my eyes out for the ponies who may save the world, one day," I said. That was about as close as I could get to total honesty. "Fine, you don't have to tell us if you don't want to," Squeaky said back. Damn it. Even the truth is a cover story now. The flight school was beginning its fall semester, and I was the latest recruit. We had fudged the records so I was now a transferring senior from a different school, and even managed to get me a respectable name of Miamore Autrena, my mother's maiden name. The newspapers always called me Princess Cadence, so I figured nopony would make that connection. I also had a trick up my sleeve. "All right, check this out," I said to the twins as we stood on the landing pad. The taxi drivers took back off into the air, presumably to find another fare, and left us mostly alone outside the terminal building. I wanted to butter my performance up, so I said some mystical words like "Abra-kadabra" and "Shmoopaly Woopaly" before waving my hooves around and casting the spell Celestia had shown me. My horn faded and disappeared before their very eyes. They were not impressed. Minty walked up and tapped her hoof on my head where my horn had been, connecting with it invisibly in the air. "Didn't work" she said passively. "Of course it worked, it's just invisible now. Pretty neat huh?" I said. My magic was terrible, was I the only one who was impressed I could cast this spell? I practiced for an hour last night! "Why don't you just wear a hat?" she asked me. "Because hats aren't cool magic, Minty! Can't you just let me have this?" I said, getting flustered. Minty and Squeaky exchanged a look, then put on a great show of fake enthusiasm. "Oh wow, so amazing! How'd you do that?" Minty said, mockingly fainting. "Never have I seen such a feat! You truly are the greatest," Squeaky said. "Oh shut up," I said. They laughed. "Get a load of Cadence, mightiest magician of the realm! O true master, thou art so powerful and great, teach us! Teach us thy mighty skill so we might be one one-thousandth the pony thou art!" Squeaky continued, really milking it. I just muttered under my breath and picked my clothes wrap back up. I was now, for all appearances, just another Pegasus pony in Los Pegasus. Perfectly incognito, unless somepony whacked me in the head. So long as I didn't cast any magic spells, nopony would give me a second glance, and that was fine with me since I much preferred to do things the manual way. Magic is overrated if you're not good at it. I wasn't too hot at flying either, my wings never felt quite as natural as they must to somepony who was born with them. Surely I would get used to them in time, but as long as I could avoid it, I'd walk everywhere I went. In this city, most of the residents could fly, but not all of them; as per Goverment of Equestria regulations, every part of the city was accessible without wings. The twins instinctively kept their hooves on the clouds as we walked, since this was just like old times to them. The habits we had developed over the years would not be broken so easily. Our house, if you could call it that, was a one-story building somewhere on the south side of town. We had gotten it on extremely short notice, luckily it wasn't my money I was spending. The semester didn't start immediately, but I wanted to get some investigating done before I got caught up pretending to be a student, again. I also wanted to stop whatever was causing the outbreak before anypony else got hurt, though that was wishful thinking. Still, the longer I dallied on unimportant stuff like housing, the more innocent ponies would lose everything, least of all their minds. We passed the house at first, not because we couldn't read the numbers but because we didn't want them to be right. The roof was partially caved in, not that it mattered in a cloud home since it never rained up here. There were no windows, which was very curious, as anypony with a spare afternoon can make a window anywhere they wanted. There were none. I wondered who had used the place before we got a hold of it. "This is the place?" I said. Minty had been hovering over us while holding the map. She dropped it on top of me, I looked up to see the shocked expression on her face. "The ad made it seem, more, uh..." she started. "Livable?" I offered. "Structurally sound?" Squeaky tried. "Comfortable, was what I was going to say. We're going to have spend the rest of the week just fixing this dump up," Minty said. "That'll give you two a project until classes start. Aren't you glad we're in this together?" I said, trying to liven up the mood. We had the key to the house, though it didn't matter much since the collapsed roof let the twins soar right on in while I unlocked it. Minty spent a few minutes just surveying the damage, somepony had either been having a lot of fun with a lightning cloud, or else purposefully tore the support stratus out and let the roof collapse. Squeaky and I checked out the rest of the rooms of the house. The kitchen was really just a room with a desk in it that was meant to be the counter. It was made of wood, one of the few non-cloud objects in the house. There were no doors except the front one, the bedrooms could well have been living rooms or studies for all I knew. There was a strange smell coming from the laundry room, so I let Squeaky go check it out while I started unpacking our stuff. I had only brought my clothes and sword, while the twins had brought some clothes, school supplies, and a few flashlights I had asked them to bring. I didn't have any myself, but since I was now going to be undercover as a Pegasus, I couldn't rely on conventional light spells. Their father had a wide range of old flashlights in their basement in Canterlot for some reason, flashlights seemed like a strange thing to collect, but really no stranger than hoofball trading cards. Everypony needs a hobby. I had gotten two that really fit the work I would need to do. One was a strapped light that hung around your neck, like a camera, with an additional strap to hold it to the chest. I could walk or fly with it on and it would shine straight ahead of me, very useful for navigating at night. The other was a light your strap to your leg, right above the hoof. Apparently these were used by Pegasus construction workers for nighttime jobs, and it was perfectly suited for me when holding a weapon. There wasn't a lot of charge in the batteries, as the flashlights were very old. I had considered charging them up myself before Squeaky had yelled at me. "No, you can't charge these, they're electrical batteries!" she shouted, shoving the flashlight away as I tried my magic on it. "What's the difference? A battery is a battery" I said. "What difference? Try huge! Magic batteries work totally differently, these ones require a potential moving across a circuit, like a chemical reaction that discharges voltage at a controlled rate," she said, holding up the battery in front of me. My eyes glazed over. Have I mentioned I'm no good at science? "What's the difference?" I asked again. "Just, don't try to charge them yourself okay? You'll hurt somepony. Let me, like, build you a charger," she said. I heard Minty speaking from the room next to the flashlight collection. "Have you ever built a charger, Squeaks?" She poked her head around the corner to look at us. "No, but I know the theory," Squeaky said. "I know how the theory is too, doesn't mean I can build one. Remember the tomato cannon?" Minty said back. "The cannon was sound, Gabby just has a weak grip. It would have worked!" Squeaky protested. Gabby has an excellent grip. We bought a wind-up battery charger at the hardware store that afternoon. "Which room do you guys want? Wide open over here," I shouted at them, making sure I was loud enough that the sound would carry down the short hallway. "Don't care," came Minty from the living room, or maybe it was the outside, since the roof was collapsed. Squeaky didn't say anything. "Squeaky?" I said. "BY CELESTIA'S BEARD, WHAT IS THAT THING?" I heard her scream from the laundry room. Minty and I ran in as soon as we could, to see the laundry room covered in moss and lichen. I think it might have been moving, and that wasn't even the disturbing part. Lichen doesn't normally grow up in the clouds, though there's nothing strictly impossible about it, just the spores don't get this high up in the atmosphere. Whatever the previous owners had been storing here must have been filthy. What had set Squeaky off was the giant insect perched atop a particularly large patch of moss. I couldn't begin to identify the species, all I knew was that it was bigger than a hoofball and looked like it had claws all over it. As we entered the room, Squeaky backed up and nearly bumped into us. The insect turned to look at us. Minty was paralyzed with fear. Instinct took over and I shot out of the room, back into the bedroom where I had left my clothes roll. I grabbed my sword and unsheathed it as I charged back toward the laundry room. The twins had remained remarkably calm this whole time, not panicking and staying still to avoid setting the creature off. As I dashed into the room with my sword, they moved up against the wall and left me as much space as possible. I could see the beast tense up as I stood on my hind legs and raised the sword proper. It leaped, and I leaped at the same time. We collided in midair, my sword arcing and slicing the creature neatly in two through its thick black carapace. I landed near the moss pile on three legs, with my sword held in one hoof, as I turned around to see the creature land as well, before the stress became too much and it fell apart from the blow. Yellow insect guts stained my sword and had splattered all over the walls and ceiling, with the twins staring at the display before them and refusing to comprehend it. The vacant look on their faces reminded me of something, though I couldn't place what. We skipped grocery shopping that evening and instead bought a few tonnes of bleaches, cleaners, sponges, brushes, and everything else imaginable that would remove the terror that had grown in our new cloud home. When we were done, we wrapped all the supplies and garbage in a big bag we had bought to carry them, flew it down to the ground, dug a hole, then set the hole on fire and let it burn out. Once the flames had died down we covered the remains in rocks and soil, then replaced the grasses atop the mound and prayed the evil would never trouble another pony again. We also ate some delightful cabbage rolls that night. All in all it was a good day.