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The great and powerful Trixie studied the bark of a nearby tree intently. She focused her gaze on the dark brown scales and tried to find some sort of pattern. After a while, she looked over her shoulder towards the still-dead lake, only to quckly look back again.
“The great and powerful Trixie, the great and powerful mass murderer...” she muttered to herself while parts of her mind tried to distract her with thoughts of how interesting tree bark was. Well, what was she going to do? She couldn't just leave them there. The idea of killing all these fish and letting them rot was somehow worse than the act of killing them in the first place.
Back at her wagon, she looked around for something to catch them with. But the only thing that even remotely resembled a scoop in her wagon was her net stockings. She held them up with a ponderous expression, but the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to blush. There were at least a dozen things wrong with the idea of using underwear to catch dead fish, and the fact that it probably wouldn't work was far from the first item on that list.
“No, no no no! I can't use these!” she concluded. “Why do I even have net stockings?”
She looked around for anything she could use as a net, until eventually she found one of her spare bed-sheets. It had a few holes in it, and a smell of sweat and neglect that simply refused to wash out. But other than that, it was the perfect candidate.
Trixie tied each end of the sheet to a log and tossed it into the cursed waters. Her makeshift net refused to behave. But with some difficulty, she could sort of skim the surface of the lake, gathering in the dead fishes ten or so at a time. The real problem came when she had to somehow get the fishes up on land.
She tried levitation, but all she could muster was to imbue the pile of corpses with a cyan glow that lasted for a few seconds. She briefly considered picking the fish up by hoof but shot down that idea once her mind started to speculate on how the texture of a dead fish feels. Trixie would prefer to stay ignorant on the subject, thank you very much.
Eventually she realized that she could grab a hold of the log and roll the fishes into the sheet, like extremely unappetizing sushi. (Of course, to her, most sushi was unappetizing.) The roll oozed dirty water, there was no way in Tartarus she'd want to put this thing in her wagon in this state. As she waited for it to dry, she thought what to do with her harvest.
She thought about selling it on the black market, but she was in enough trouble with the law already. Equestrian law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. And besides, pescetarian ponies crept her out.
You'd get one or two ponies here and there that got a cause of carnivore-envy and tried to “advance trough the food chain.” This urge lasted for about two months, then they generally got tired of the stomach ache. These ponies where generally quite mad in ways which had nothing to do with fighting a losing battle against heir own gastrointestinal system, and dwelled in places that were quite unsafe for a pony like Trixie.
There were only a few locations in Equestria where it was legal to sell meat, and only because they didn't actually fall under Equestrian law, being sovereign territory of the griffins. But according to her maps, there was a settlement not too far from Hoofington, only a slight detour away.
She could breathe a little easier knowing this. Sure, griffins were obligate carnivores, but at least they could generally be trusted to stay away from food that talked.... It was around this time she realized that she was standing right next to a a pile of dead fish in a forest populated by hungry monsters that generally didn’t make a distinction between sapient and non-sapient when fresh meat was on the table.
“Hurry up and dry!” Trixie demanded to the soggy, disgusting bale. She paced back and forth, half of her wanting to stay far away from the sheet that smelled like prey and the other half wanting to protect a boon that would help her stay afloat to at least the end of the month once she sold it.
A rustle in the bushes seemed to confirm her fears. Images of being ripped apart by timber wolves ran across her mind and adrenaline forced her heart to kick into overdrive. She heard the voice of a filly from the other side of the shrubs and for one excruciating moment, Trixie thought she was about to witness a poor defenceless foal being devoured by a timberwolf and suddenly got an overwhelming urge to flee.
This moment soon passed, however. From the other side of the bush, a pair of young fillies appeared, unmolested by monsters. They came face to face with Trixie, stared into her haunted eyes and nearly ran the other way in sheer terror. Trixie was just about to do the same, and it was only the brief time they all stood paralyzed with fear that prevented her from screaming in terror. Once thier mutual ears settled, they were faced with a rather awkward situation. This wasn't exactly the ideal first impression to build on
“Uhm... hello...” one of the fillies tried, a white unicorn looking like a proper Canterlot-filly.
“...hi?” Trixie responded after a moment of perplexed silence. The two ponies looked at each other and decided that if this strange pony before them was a threat, she was so incredibly bad at it that they had little to fear.
“What are you doin' here?” the other filly asked, a yellow earth-pony with an accent that obviously grew up on a farm. Trixie tensed up at the question. She eyed the slowly drying fish roll before looking back at the filly.
“Nothing, Tixie is most definitely not killing fishes!” she exclaimed, speaking just a little too fast and too loud. This was entierly the wrong thing to say and she grasped after some diversion, something she could say to prove that she wasn't an axe-weilding filly-murderer or else they'd run to their parents and call the guards, and then neither of them would get any sleep.
“Anyway,” she continued, sounding supernaturally calm. “What's two young fillies doing this deep into the forest? Trixie's not really supposed to be here, you definitely shouldn't be.” That was absolutely true, and now it was the two fillies' turn to look guilty. The farmfilly stepped forward with a defensive expression
“We're too supposed to be here,” she claimed. “We're pickin' mushrooms!”
Sure enough, the unicorn filly was carrying a basket filled with orange, yellow and brownish lumps. Trixie studied them with an interest that went beyond polite curiosity, and then let out a “hmmm”.
“Not these mushrooms, Trixie hopes,” she said to the two ponies. “You'll be sick!” she added when they seemed to take it the wrong way and began covering the basket. The farmpony raised an eyebrow at this statement.
“Is there's something wrong with our chanterelles?” she wondered.
“Nothing, the chanterelles looks fine, the false chanterelles on the other hoof...”
“There's false chantarelles?” the unicorn asked in disbelief. At once, Trixie turned from a scared vagabond to a confident teeacher.
“Yes, look at this.” she picked one of their mushrooms with her magic, too quick for the them to protest.“ This is a true chantarelle.. But this-” She picked up yet another mushroom. “This is a false chantarelle, notice that this one is orange, not yellow. Also, see how the gills are slightly different? You'll want to avoid these. You can still eat them, but they taste awful.”
The two fillies soaked the lecture in, but afterwards, they went aside and Trixie could hear them converse in whipsers that were not as quiet as they'd like to think.
“What do ya think, is she tryin' to cheat us?”
“Well, she said this one was supposed to taste bad, right?”
There was a brief moment of silence, followed by violent spitting.
“Yuck, no, she's tellin' the truth!” The two fillies appeared again, and Trixie did her best to pretend she hadn't heard anything of their conversation.
“Thank you kindly for your advice” the farmpony said. “We'll be more careful next time.” The two ponies began to trot away while Trixie's hungry eyes followed the little basket filled at least halfway with edible mushroom.
“one more thing,” Trixie said with a humble voice that didn't fit her at all. “Could Trixie possibly get some of those chanterelles? Surely you wouldn't miss one or two?”
That seemed to be enough to trigger their alarms and before Trixie knew it, the two fillies had turned on her completely. They covered the basket up with their hooves and gave trixie a toxic stare.
“No way, they are ours!” the unicorn shouted at her while the farmpony filled in with “yeah!”
“Yes I know but...” Trixie began, but her protests fell on deaf ears.
“Theif! Thief!” They both yelled and galloped away, leaving Trixie looking perplexed and lonely in the dark forest.
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