//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10 — Stories 
// Story: Jericho 
// by Crushric 
//------------------------------//


Chapter Ten: Stories


“Okay, maybe it’s the second best story you’ve ever heard. But probably still the scariest. You like scary stories, right?”


Kreuz.

That was our word for it, the cross. Pronounced as one syllable, like “Kroits”. See, something about this whole little... ghetto, for lack of a better term, just rubbed me the wrong way, and I had pulled the Iron Cross out from my shirt and let it hang freely over my breast. If we didn’t get mugged at least once, I owed the voice in my head five Bits. So with a dark expression on my face, I sauntered through the gloomy streets of the zebra enclave, Lightning Dust hovering alongside me.

“So, what’s with that necklace?” Lightning Dust asked.

“Hmm? Mein Eisernes Kreuz?” I replied.

“I, uh, yeah. That thing. What’s it for?”

I looked around the street bathed in the evening’s light. Long shadows threw themselves all over, lit braziers only making the shadows dance. Dust and I were the only ponies there. Not the only people, for zebras went about here and there, letting us know that we weren’t alone, but I got the feeling that my ponied nature meant I was a strange sight in this part of Songnam. “Zebra witchcraft,” I muttered.

“What?” she asked, and I looked at her. Dust was flying upside down, arms pillowed behind her head and legs crossed as she looked back at me. What a damn cherub...

“It’s simply an Iron Cross, a gift from my father,” I said as a zebra stallion walked by us, heading up the street as we went down it. “But assuming Solari have no understanding of it, I should tell you that it is a symbol of strength, dominance, power, militarism, masculinity, and of the Reich. It’s even on some of our flags. If, for example, you saw our war ensign, you’d see a flag with the Schwarz-Weiß-Rot, the Iron Cross, and the Teutschfalke.”

“Um, oookay, but why are you wearing it?” She rolled over, still hovering, and now rested her chin over her hooves.

“Because it wards off dark magic, so they say. And this is something of a good luck charm, so they also say,” I said. “This ghetto is giving off zebra magic vibes, and zebra magic is nothing but vile witchcraft.”

She frowned. “Wait. You’re saying that zebras can use magic? I mean, I don’t really know the first thing about zebras other than that they have stripes, but I thought only ponies could—”

“Ponies are unique for their affinity for it. We are the only race that is born with an inherently possible magical ability. That’s why we’re so vulnerable to evil, so easily tempted by demons, so weak to corruption. But zebras?” I shook my head. “Zebras aren’t born with it, they must learn. Sadly, they all too often make pacts with demons, for all zebra magic is evil. They use charms, fetishes, and dark rituals to enchant objects, to bring forth magic. Under teutschem law, this is a witchcraft, a capital offense punished via public execution. Well, saying it’s ‘public’ is already assumed, since all punishment is public in Teutschland.”

“Public?” Dust asked, setting her hooves on the ground and now walking alongside me.

“Of course. We see it as the most reasonable thing to do.” I looked down the shady alleyways we were passing. “We pride ourselves on our cruel and unusual punishments. Like, one of the most common forms of punishment in Teutschland is flogging, a punishment which mostly relies on publicly humiliating you; they strip you naked and whip you until you bleed, making sure as many people as possible know who you are while they brutally beat you. It’s kind of neat to watch, in a real ‘I’m a terrible person at heart’ sort of way.”

“That just sounds horrible!”

I shrugged as I tried to recall an argument from one of my favorite books. “It’s supposed to be horrible; that’s why the punishment works. If punishments weren’t cruel and unusual, it would be pointless; you’d never learn anything, and it wouldn’t be a real deterrent against crime. After all, pain’s a basic survival mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution, safeguarding us with warnings against things that threaten our survival. Teutschland simply uses this highly perfect survival mechanism for its intended purpose when we punish people, and what’s wrong with that?” Do Equestrians even have a theory of evolution? “I mean, not to try to change your opinion or anything, but as I was taught in Geschichte und Moralphilosophie, punishment must be so unusual as to matter, to stick out in your mind, to deter, to instruct. That’s how we see it, anyways. I’m not preaching it, just stating the Teutsche viewpoint.”

“Why is that even a thing?”

“Well, it’s all a matter of perspective, really, Dust. Just like morals. Morals all derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level—not unlike a father who dies to save his children. Culture will affect this. So, what is immoral to one culture is perfectly moral in others. Same idea applies here.”

“But-how-I—?”

“For example, you think that magic is fine. My opinion is that all magi are evil and should be executed on principle. Trained psychics, like die Bibliothekar, are fine, however. They are what the Reich uses. Of course, to be fair, I’m from a part of the world where we’ve proven that magi are untrustworthy by looking back at history; you live in a world where magic is just a harmless thing. Who’s right? In the grand scheme of things, both of us. You ideology works for you, mine works for Teutschland.” I took a breath. Doesn’t change the fact that Equestria’s use of magic is just downright irresponsible and will get them all killed sooner or later. “So, where is this dark little shop?”

“Um... I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But it’s in this little area, I think. At least, that’s what I was told.”

We reached the end of a street, and it branched off left and right. The left lead to a little area where a bunch of zebras were. To the right was some sort of market area, an area with both ponies and zebras. “I’ll take left, you go right,” I said. “Try to get your super sleuthing skills on, alright, Miss Dust? We’ll meet back here in half an hour.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll—ooh, a squirrel!” She pointed to a withered tree planted in front of some house. An albino squirrel leapt off the tree and onto the cobblestone street.

“Yes, it is one of those animals, whatever they are.”

“A squirrel, GB.”

“I know what they’re called.”

“Well, then call it by its name.” She inclined her head. “Never seen an albino squirrel before. That’s kinda neat.”

“I don’t wish to call it by its name,” I grumbled.

Dust looked at me, cocking a brow. “Squirrel. Come on, say it with me. Squirr-el.”

I narrowed my eyes. “No; it is a stupid word.”

“Squirrel,” she repeated.

“No.”

“Do it!”

I sighed. Remember how squirrel is pronounced! It is said in this particular Equestrian dialect as ‘skwɝ.əl’. Slowly, I said, “Squirrel.” Ha! Those years of studying the International Phonetic Alphabet and being called a nerd have finally paid off!

“Yay!” Dust clopped her hooves together. “You’ve gotten over your fear of the word squirrel!”

“It’s a shibboleth; do you have any idea how hard that word is to pronounce for us Teutsche? It contains three sounds in row that we do not have. I bet you ten Marken that I can ask ten average Teutsche to say it, and they’ll all get it wrong.” I blinked. “Ooh! My ability to speak Equestrian is now beyond the shadow of a doubt perfect!” I pumped my arm. “Yes, now I am the king of your language!”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, hotshot,” Dust chuckled. She rocked herself towards and away from me, repeatedly saying squirrel.

I gave her light push. “Oh, sod off. I’m going this way, you go that way, alright?” Dust continued to rock back and forth on her hooves, mocking me with her flawless pronunciation of squirrel. “Quit it. I said the word right, okay?”

“Well, if it’s such an uber problem for—”

“No!” I snapped.

Dust took a step back, ears flopping. “Uh...”

“I don’t know where you got that word from, but I know what you were trying to say, and you did it all wrong. It is pronounced über, not ‘oo-ber’. The -er is pronounced like the second A in ‘gangsta’, since we Teutsche don’t pronounce our ending R’s, much like they don’t in Northern Equestrian accents,” I said rapidly. “And the Ü... well, in this case, it’s pretty much just like the I in ‘is’, except that you round your lips while saying it. Are we clear? Mister Welch used to make that same mistake all the time and it really bugged me, but now you know and shall never say it wrong again.” I put a hoof to my chin. “Speaking of which, how the hell did that word ever cross the ocean and make its way into the Equestrian vocabulary?” I shook my head. “In any case, that lecture was my vengeance for the word ‘squirrel’. Ohh, said it right again!”

I gave her a lone wink as I shuffled backwards down the street. She stared at me, then burst out laughing. Now half a street away from the mare, I turned around and went over to the seediest looking zebra I could find. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, and he grunted at me. “I’m looking for a certain place. Might you have any local knowledge?”

He cocked a brow as he leaned against his stoop. “Depends. Whatchu after?”

Hmm. Strange. He didn’t pronounce his R. I wonder if dropping your R’s is a part of the Equestrian zebra accent, too. “A little place where I can find me some information about, ooh, sensitive magics. I’m trying to find ghost-chili-pepper-scented eye drops.” The zebra cocked a brow. “Have you ever put that in your eyes before?” He shook his head. “Because I’m trying to make my ex-girlfriend blind. Because she—”

“Dude, why you tryin’ to make her blind for?” he asked, cocking a brow. “You don’t do foul shit like that, pony.”

“Well, it’s because she cheated on me, like, five times! So, I mean, what do I do but blind her for life?”

He shook his head as two zebra foals kicked a ball around the street. “You stay the fuck away from her, that’s what.”

“Like, mares in general?”

“What I think about mares?”

I hesitated, pretty sure that his last sentence was somehow completely wrong. It needed at least two more verbs and a pronoun. “Um, what?”

“Buck, mares are a dime a damn dozen. When you find a bad one, they’re like a bad apple; ya dig through the Celestia-damned barrel till you find a good one.”

Doctor Z. Bra’s words of wisdom. “You’re right,” I sighed.

Half an hour and at least fifteen zebras alarmed later, I found myself back at the street corner. I groaned and checked my watch; Dust was late by twenty seconds, the fiend! Shifting my weight, I felt the dagger and its sheath I’d strapped to my right leg. Feeling its presence gave me a modicum of comfort. Together with my Iron Cross, I would be safe from any dark magics—if not by proxy, then in ability to gouge out the throats of any witch. Of course, there was still my sword, but a quick dagger slash was always so stylish and delicious.

I fondled my cross again, remembering my father’s words when he gave it to me. But just as I was about to have a lovely flashback, an acoustic guitar sounded up from above. “Hmm?” I hummed, looking for the guitarist. It was a smooth but loud melody, not bad, but not what I’d expect coming out of the blue. “Um, hello?” I called up, wondering if the guitarist would show themselves. “If that’s you, Dust, where’d you learn to play the guitar? In fact, how were you carrying one? Or did you just buy one?”

A minute passed, and still the guitarist played. I growled to myself, then shouted, “Shut up! You’re a good player, but I can’t very well appreciate ghosts! Or-or...” I looked down the street and yelled, “Can someone tell God to stop playing his guitar?” I jerked my attention skywards. “Listen, God, I know you get bored with being omnipotently impotent and everything, and I honestly suspect you get some kind of perverse enjoyment out of making my life hell, but can you—” I sighed, shaking my head. “Great. God picked up a hobby, and now the only way to stop him is to commit a sacrilege and kick my deity in the dick.” I looked off to the side and pointed into the empty space. “Because, as my dad used to say that Mom used to say: ‘God must be a stallion. If he were a mare, God wouldn’t have given his own sex such a hell of a time giving birth.’ Nevermind how Dad thought that was really funny up until I was born, then it became a cruel joke. I still find it funny, though, if only to spite my old stallion.”

The guitarist didn’t stop. “Gott, sprichst du Teutsch? Parles-tu Francais? ¿Hablas Hespañol? Speak’st thou Equestrian?! Do you maybe take requests? If so, an acoustic version of ‘Miststück’ von Megaherz? Bitte?” The guitarist was unswayed by my kindly request for a song whose title roughly translated into a gender-neutral version of ‘bitch’. “Du bist ein Miststück!” I bellowed up at the heavens. “Du bist ein Stück Mist!” I was so going to the ninth circle of Hell for that comment...

“Squirrel,” a mare whispered into my ear. I yelped, launching my body in the voice’s direction out of a reflexive urge to attack, and not because I was an idiot who just so happened to jump in that direction, nope. I tumbled on top of a very surprised-looking Lightning Dust. “Hello,” she squeaked as I practically pinned her to the ground.

I rolled off her and bounced up to my hooves. “Eh, sorry about that,” I said, offering her a hoof and helping her up. “Now, where is this damn music coming from?”

“Um, the Duke’s speakers?” she offered.

I deflated. “Oh. Well then. I am a stupid pony. Had forgotten that those speakers existed.” I cleared my throat, pretending to dust myself. “So, um, you find anything? I only got weird looks and accidentally made a foal cry.” I wonder if I can hack into the speakers and start blasting some Neue Teutsche Härte all across Songnam.

“Mmhmm!” she chirped. “Found out exactly where we can look, even. Care to follow me?”

“Sure. I mean, my only other option is just to sit here and make an ass out of myself some more.” I put a hoof to my chin. “And, you know, that’s a really appealing prospect.”

Dust chuckled, rolling her eyes. “You know, it’s so appealing that I might just join you.”

“Oh please. A companion is always nice. All you’ve got to do is shake your hoof at things and scream stupid things. Like so: you promised me strawberry-banana yogurt and instead I got soup that is too hot, soup which then hit my abused shoulder! Tod dem Sakrileg!” I put my hoof down and looked at the pegasus. “Subsequently, it is an undeniable fact that strawberry-banana is the best fruity flavor ever.”

She shrugged. “I like raspberries.”

I narrowed my eyes and growled, “You’re dead to me...”

Dust laughed at me, and I laughed back at her. Neither of us spoke—I, waiting for her to speak, and her, just staying silent. The song playing on the speakers shifted sometime in the last minute or so, and I hadn’t noticed until then. It was a soft, vocal song, hints of a guitar off in the background. Someone please break this awkward silence.

She looked off to the side. “Ooh, finally! There’s some good pop music playing.” I was about to complain that the song’s style was about a hundred years out of date, but then Dust said, “You know, you have pretty eyes.”

I blinked. “I-uh-what prompted that?”

Dust shrugged her wings. “Just something. Your eyes are just kinda nice.” Saying ‘you have pretty eyes’ is pretty much a tell for a serial killer; it’s like saying, ‘Hey, I hear you’ll be home alone in the dark tonight, and that you have no weapons. Hot.’ Suddenly, the song’s vocals got heavier as two stallions took lead of the soft song for just two lines before returning to the vocal solo.

“Someone’s rocking my dreamboat,
Someone’s invading my dream;
We were sailing along,
So peaceful and calm,
Suddenly, something went wrong.”

“So this is what Equestrians call pop music?” I asked, and Dust nodded.

“Well, it doesn’t burst.” Was that a joke? Because it sucked. “This song’s awesome, huh? I know all the lyrics and everything.” Dust reached down and tugged on my hoof. “Come on, GB—I don’t wanna stand out here in the cold and dark forever.” She turned around and walked down the streets, humming to herself. I failed trying not to look too closely at Dust, and saw that she was walking with a bit more spring than usual; her hips swung a little more than usual.

As the song went on, I followed Dust, listening to her sing along with it.

“Someone’s rocking my dreamboat,
Disturbing a beautiful dream;
It’s a mystery to me,
This mutiny at sea,
Who can it be? (Who can it be?)”

Dust went right, down the road to the little market. If this somehow ends with me waking up in a bathtub of ice and missing a kidney, I’m going to choke Lightning Dust to death with her ovaries.


|— ☩ —|


“I am so losing a kidney,” I muttered as I looked at the building’s façade. Dark windows, dark bricks, located in a dark alley. The only question at this point was, where did they keep the bathtub full of ice? Dust herself was peering in through the windows.

“I think it’s open,” she said, not sounding all too confident.

“How about we find out?” I asked, starting for the door. “And I better come out of this with as many organs as I had coming in, understood?” Somewhere in the distance, more of those old-sounding songs were playing as Dust simply cocked a brow at me. “Glad we had this talk.”

Stepping into the dimly-lit interior, I was first struck with the scent of lavender incense. Then, as Dust entered in behind me and closed the door, I took stock of the store’s merchandise. There were strange furs, shrunken heads, dreamcatchers, bone charms, voodoo dolls, jars with all manners of nasty things, a collection of mummified animals, a tusk of ivory that’d been carved and decorated with all sorts of evil-looking symbols, and just about every dark magic fetish imaginable. It was the very epitome of what a dark magic shop should look like. It was for that precise reason that I immediately doubted the validity of the shopkeeper. This place was more like some kind of tourist shop than your one-stop shop for all things unholy. Think about it: if you sold illicit drugs in your store, would you really decorate your shop with every imaginable sort of drug paraphernalia?

Dust and I made our way through the musty store, glancing at all the strange charms and items the shopkeeper offered. There was even a discount shelf—everything under five Bits, hot damn! Finally, after turning a corner, we put the counter in our sights. There was a zebra stallion standing behind it, a pencil in his mouth as he wrote something down on a notepad. I observed that he was wearing a set of robes. The only thing he was missing was his trusty wizard hat, then he could go out and cast his magic spells by rolling his twenty-sided dice. Ah, I missed those days when I played Dunkelheit und Drachen. I should try to see if I could convince Dust and Cards to play a game with me. I’d love to be their Spielmeister as they went on an epic campaign and slew dragons. Or maybe I could teach one of them to be a Spielmeister, and then I could be a mighty bard once again.

I was suddenly struck with the image of Cards as a mighty paladin, clad in plate steel and with a powerful magic blade, but still just as short. And then there was me, a super sexy bard with a feathered cap and a leather duster. We were in the deep, dark, and absurdly spacious sewers beneath some epic city, we were surrounded by the legions of evil and demons and bad popstars.

“Cards,” I said with a dark expression, “hold onto thy face. I’m going to save the world.” I threw my D20s and sexily pulled out my guitar as Cards held onto her face. The dice landed. “Super critical hit,” I growled, and played my guitar. I played heavy metal so hard and with so much love, soul, and passion, dancing with the funkiest, freshest, sexiest dance moves throughout my epic solo. It was so epic, so raw, so sexy that everyone’s face melted off and they died.

Paladin Cards stomped her armored booties, unaware that I knew she was wearing her socks beneath them. “Forsooth, thou spoony bard—!”

“Huh?” the zebra said, looking up at us and snapping me out of my pleasant fantasy. And I was almost at the part where my bardic skills made me the god of music and sexiness, too. “Ah, a couple of ponies. What can good old Bigs do for you?”

“Your name is Bigs?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“My mother was a very creative lady, you see.”

I thought back to what Cards had said about her own mother. “Yeah, I think I’m starting to see a trend with Equestria’s last generation,” I mumbled. I affixed the buck—assuming ‘buck’ could be used for non-ponies—a hard look. “They tell me you’re the guy to visit about magic of a darker art.”

He gave me an almost sinister look. “Ah, but of course. You have heard most correctly.” Bigs looked between us. “I do not get many couples, so you must be looking for something odd. Perhaps some sort of charm? Something to make your love bloom brightly, hmm?”

I put a hoof on the counter. “No.”

“Ah, of course. Different pony races don’t often intermingle, right? I often forget—sometimes have trouble telling ponies apart.”

Wait. Is he saying that Equestrian unicorns, earthers, and pegasi don’t often interdate? Wow. That’s... wow. That’s racist. “Listen, we just have no interests in romantic charms, Doc.”

Bigs blinked at me. “Doctor?” Then he smiled. “Witchdoctor, you mean? Am I that obvious?”

If I could, I’d execute you here for the sin of dark magic. Lucky for you, I don’t think you’re really a witchdoctor. “You decorate so obviously that you’re either real or a complete quack. Shall we find out which of the two you are?” I reached into a pocket and pulled out the purple talisman. His eyes nearly bulged out of his sockets and rolled around the counter, but by sheer apparent force of will, they stayed in his skull. “Exactly, Doc.”

The zebra took a breath, collecting himself. “You are not normal patrons here, are you? I-I mostly just get tourists and young locals looking for little things. But that? No, you are here for the big spells, are you not? Certainly know how to reach the top of the price range.”

I slammed down a gold coin. “I pay in cash.”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head, “I am not to whom you should talk.”

“Then to who?” Dust asked. Don’t you mean, to whom? Silly Equestrians, not even knowing how to speak their own language.

“My second I,” Bigs said, turning around. I noticed that he was wearing some sort of pack on his side—That’s no pack! As he removed his robes, I saw a small face and body where I’d thought there’d been a bag. It was a like a little zebra fetus surgically attached into his side, his little limbs just hanging there, his head a bit too large and bald. The fetus’ eyes opened up as he smacked his lips.

“The hell!?” Dust gasped, flinging herself backwards.

“Ugh, Bigs,” the fetus groaned in a voice scratchier than but not unlike the zebra’s, “why’d you wake me up?” He looked at me. “Oh, we have guests, do we?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” I replied, looking him in the eyes.

“Ah, and such a polite one, unlike his lady friend,” the fetus groused. He slammed his hooves on the counter. “Mister,” he said to me, “would to be so kind as to grab me my wardrobe. It’s right over here.” He pointed to a white fedora and shirt so short that it looked like it belonged to a doll. I did as asked, and he promptly managed to put the hat and shirt on. “Much better! My name is Chausiku, never mind you that it’s a filly’s name.”

Well, now we know where all his mother’s creativity went. “Chausiku?”

“Yes, yes. If Mother is to be believed, it means ‘born at night’ in the old tongue.” Chausiku shook his head. “Mother never taught us much about the old tongue, figuring there wasn’t much point in teaching it to a monster.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give to know more about the homeland, but all we could learn were its dark secrets. But Momma said that the old homeland was destroyed, so...” He shrugged. “She was a crazy old bat, in any case.”

“Destroyed?” I asked.

Chausiku smirked, baring just a few too many of his ill-shapen teeth. “Oh, it’s probably just a legend. I may consult with the dark arts, but I don’t put much stock in legends.” I looked at him, nodding for him to go on. He sighed. “Look, asking me for a history lesson is like asking a cobbler for marriage counseling: I am but a mender of soles. If you want to hear the old stories about Vikuta and his Legion of the North, head on down to the Île-de-Nippun here in Songnam.

Nippun? Sounds almost exactly like Nippön, except that this word’s Ö-sound is more nasal. “Then I’ll have to go there later.”

He nodded. “Now then, why did you want to see little ol’ me, hmm?”

I jostled the talisman around. “You know about the dark arts?”

Chausiku leaned his head towards me, pulling on Bigs’ skin. Then he grabbed some sort of cane from under the counter and held it out towards the talisman. I put the chain on the stick, and he brought it up close to his face. For some reason, I wondered if punching Chausiku would cause Bigs pain.

Dust hesitantly stepped up towards the counter, looking as if she might vomit. “What... are you?” she asked, and Chausiku shot her a dry look.

“Conjoined twins, I’d imagine,” I said before anything got ugly. “Unusual, yes, but nothing to be bothered by. I’ve seen strange things in my time, and in the grand scheme of things, conjoined twins aren’t that strange. So don’t treat Bigs or Chausiku as if they were a monster, got it, Dust? That’s rude and insensitive of you!”

Chausiku smiled. “My, aren’t you the heroic type, Mister...?”

“Maximus Doomhammer Freud,” I offered, “advocate of prostate exams and knight of the pentagonal table. But, please, just call me Max.” At this point, using my real full name would probably sound like just another random mish-mash of sounds.

“Right, Max. You’re the first pony to not only look at me as if I were normal, but also to chastise somepony for thinking odd of me. Kudos to you.” He bowed his head. “I like me a pony who’s got manners. So, tell you what, I’ll help you out. And it’s not every day some buck brings in such a charm.”

I leaned in an inch towards him. “What can you tell me about it?”

Chausiku squinted at the talisman. “Well, it’s enchanted, but you already knew that. The feel of the magic is... neither zebra nor pony. This here is a dark object, and you don’t strike me as the kind who knows much magic.” He put his forehooves on the counter. “Tell me, where’d you get it?”

“Found it on a corpse,” Dust said. “We were out in the forest when we found a body with it. Couldn’t figure out who the dead stallion was, and we thought maybe you could help us figure out who he was so we can inform the family. But... this appears to be something more than we’d thought.” Hmm... You lied fairly well. Good on you, Dust. Too bad you looked in the wrong direction; anypony who knows about lying would likely see that you were probably making that up.

The fetus nodded, rubbing his chin. Then, with a jerking motion, he pointed the charm off into an empty corner of the room. The talisman blinked, and for a single, fleeting second, something tall and dark stood in the corner and leered at me and me alone. It was gone as quick as it had appeared. “This is pony magic,” Chausiku concluded.

“How can you tell?” Dust asked.

“Because unicorn magi don’t usually think about us non-unicorns when they make magical charms. If it had been made by a zebra, I could have used the charm, and so could a pegasus, griffon, earth pony, and so forth.” He frowned. “This is the kind of charm that, in order to work, would need the magical charge of a unicorn’s horn running through it. So, it’s a fair bet that it was made by a unicorn.”

I thought back to that strange mare Jeepers had controlled. If it was the kind of charm only a unicorn could use, that would explain the poppet. The thing was some sort of prototype, according to that list of instructions Jeepers had, which might have meant... almost anything, really. Perhaps Duke Elkington was trying to make it so his non-unicorn agents could use magical charms like that. But if so, why not just use magic that didn’t need unicorns? Every damn question answered raised several new ones.

“I often wonder what it would be like if we were born as unicorns, Chaskiku and I,” Bigs mused dreamily. “I’d love to levitate things, and I bet he would, too.”

“Bigs, you needn’t speak,” Chausiku snapped. “I’ve got this all covered.”

“Yeah, and besides, being a pegasus is better,” Dust said, jostling her wings. “Magic, shmagic—I couldn’t live without these babies. Who needs levitation when you can fly?”

“Right,” the fetus dryly commented. “So then, what did you to want with this talisman?”

Dust frowned. “I told you already, we wanted to find the family of its owner.”

Chausiku frowned harder than Dust. “See now, there’s a problem with that story.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Few problems therein, you see. One is that it means that you looted a dead body, and ponies what would do that ain’t exactly the kind to look for a body’s family. Another is that Max here gave us a coin worth far, far more than what simple country ponies would ever have. Now, I might myself just be a small town, country fetus attached to the side of this big guy behind me, but I know a rat when I smell one.”

I put my right hoof up on the counter. “You’re correct. However, the lady and I are not in a position to discuss the why of it all. Sorry if you smell a rat, but that’s just how things are.”

“Hmm.” A dark expression on his face, Chausiku elbowed Bigs, and the zebra turned to face me.

“Um, hey, can I get the amulet back?” I asked.

Bigs fished for something under his side of the counter. “My second I is wondering what to do with you.” He leaned to the side, looking to something at the far end of the store. “You say your name is Max?”

A little well of dread sprang up and spread from my spine out as I looked at Bigs. Whatever had just happened had suddenly shifted the mood to something decidedly hostile. “Can I get the damn amulet back?” I insisted, and Bigs only frowned at me. The dagger around my leg reminded me of its existence as I shifted my weight. I could draw my weapon and make him give me the amulet back, because something told me that was the most reasonable course of options. Or I could just do nothing; perhaps the problem would resolve itself. Maybe I was just being a little paranoid.

“Um, hey, are you two deaf?” Dust said in an annoyed tone. “Give it back to us; it’s not yours.”

“Oh, yes, yes, give us a moment,” Bigs replied, showing no indication of actually giving it back. You’d think a guy with a fetus attached to his side couldn’t manage to ever look menacing, but you’d be wrong. With just one flash of a smirk, he managed to look downright evil. Evil in that way of nefarious doctor’s lobby, reveling in the pleasure that it was making everyone feel impatient because their appointment was a half hour ago and they were still waiting. The thought of that sent shivers down my back.

We need to get out of here, dammit. I pounded my hoof on the counter. “Listen here, buddy, just—” I screamed as a dagger plunged into my wrist. I felt it pierce fur and flesh. Stab through muscle. Bounce off the bone. Drive through more muscle. Exit flesh and put a dent in the counter. Pain. Lots of pain. Blood, too. Bigs smiled as he ran through a door far behind the counter.

“Oh my goodness!” Lightning Dust gasped. “Are you okay?!”

“He better have washed this blade before stabbing me!” I grunted. “I don’t want to get an infected wound.” With more force than necessity, I tore the dagger out of the counter. The weapon still stuck in one side of my wrist and bloodily out the other. “If I get gangrene from there, so help me God...”

The windows exploded, showering the whole store with glass. “Freeze!” a stallion barked as a griffon and three lightly armored ponies charged into the building, only one of them having the civility to actually go through the front door.

“Well, there goes my weekend,” I muttered as I turned to face them. They were armored not unlike Songnam’s finest, just black cloth. In fact, I was sure I could read ‘Songnam Security’ on their armor. Several question immediately ran through my mind, and several questions were immediately knocked out of my mind when I was rammed by a particularly miffed griffon.

Part eagle, part lion, and all rage, the griffon’s weight sent me skidding across the floor. The bastard was quick, too, pouncing on top of me before I even stopped moving. “Now, stay down and this’ll go smoothly,” she growled, her beak looking particularly sharp, as did her talons.

Without even thinking, I reared up my legs and kicked her in the gut. She gasped, giving me enough time to scramble away and jump to my hooves. Okay, the counter was now to my left, and the windows were a ways to the right. I could see Dust getting accosted by the stallions and their batons, but that mare was not going down easily. Of course, neither was the griffon. She flapped her wings and tore at me.

“Scheiße,” I groaned the second before she tackled me with all her weight and speed. The blow knocked me into some sort of closet. The door was open, and a dusty broom fell on my head. Then several small unidentified boxes joined in on the party, followed by another broom, a stepladder, and a record player, nearly burying me in an avalanche of junk. To top it off, a little bottle of Juggernog rolled up to the side to my face, mocking me with its lack of an ingredient label. 

I grunted, punched, kicked, but mostly flailed as I tried to get out of the junk pile. Each movement tore at the dagger in my hoof, cutting deeper and deeper. It was so going to get infected, I just knew it. The griffon, not burdened by having been buried by everything ever, casually grabbed my legs and pulled half of me out, her talons digging into my flesh.

 “Hey, did you wash your talons before this?” I asked, and the griffon only growled at me. Great. Unwashed talons. Yet another thing to worry about. Still half-buried, I jerked my legs around, her claws digging deeper and deeper.

“Hold still while I tie you up, dammit!” she commanded. “Don’t wanna have to hurt ya.”

Her grip loosened for just an instant, and in that instant I tore from her grip and raised my legs. I bucked her clean in the face for all my pony legs were good for. Dust yelled from somewhere off as the griffon roared at me. “That’s it! No more Miss Nice Griffon!”

“And here I was thinking your name was Irritable Harlot,” I replied, and she slashed my legs. In response, I let her know just what the buck I thought about it. And let her know it a lot. And in the face. She didn’t like that, and this was communicated to me by how she pretty much gouged out strips of flesh from my legs until my lower body looked like some kind of twisted peppermint stick. It probably didn’t taste very minty, either. Of all possible nights, why did I have to pick this one to wear shorts!?

“Oh, what’s this then?” she chuckled, reaching for the sheath on my leg. Scheiße! I forgot about that! With all the bloodshed, there hadn’t even really been time to think, and the way my body was on the ground didn’t lend itself to helping me reach my sword. So when the griffon grabbed my knife in her talons and pulled it out, I did the only thing I could think of.

I reached out at her with my stabbed hoof and, with a twist of my magic and a scream, tore the knife out of my hoof and slashed her carotid artery with it.

With all the adrenaline that must have been pumping through her body, she was dead before she hit the ground. Correction: she was dead before her limp body landed on top of me. One good thing about having a common, if distant evolutionary ancestor was that if it had a neck, odds were that its weak points were in the same place.

The knife clattered to the floor as I just laid there, the weight of her body pressing down on my lungs. I saw the bloody hole in my wrist, centimeters above where the hoof proper began; I was tempted to jam the blade back in the wound just to stop the bleeding, but that would have almost certainly ended with me infecting my wound. I heard Dust yell, grunt, and then some stallion bark out, “Bitch broke my tooth!”

Groaning, I hefted the griffon’s body off me and ambled to my hooves. This was not a good idea, what with the fact that half of my legs were lying in little strips across the floor and on the griffon’s claws, plus the gaping hole above my hoof. I slipped on my own blood and faceplanted. At the rate I was going—ooh! There were five Bits in the griffon’s pockets. I was so taking those.

Bigs’ bloody knife was right there on the floor in front of my face. A split-second decision later and I held the knife in my teeth and stood on my hooves. Gritting my teeth over the weapon’s mouthgrip, I slogged across the floor and towards the counter, towards Dust and the stallions.

Seriously. What’s with this nation and socks? I mused, trying not to think of the pain. If I trussed up Princess Celestia in socks, stockings, and a corset, do you think all of Equestria’s stallions would just, uh, lose it then and there?

I put a hoof on the counter to steady myself as I turned a corner. There was a stallion right around the corner, holding his nose and grunting furiously. Had he actually bothered to look, he would have seen the griffon die, and he would have seen me creeping up behind him. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Wha’?” he asked, spinning to face me.

“Cleanup, aisle sree,” I grunted through the knife in my mouth, and slashed him across the throat, nicking both carotid artery and jugular. “Need us a mop and broom.”

There, on the ground in front of the counter, was Dust and another of the stallions. She was scrambling away from him as he hugged onto her legs and shouted, “Ah! Somepony tie her up, dammit!”

The last stallion came out from one of the aisles, a rope in his mouth. “Hello!” I chirped, and the blade found purchase across his neck. I could now taste blood from four different bodies: mine, the griffon’s, stallion number one’s, and now this guy’s. I prayed to God that none of them had hepatitis, or I was screwed. As his body fell to the ground I dramatically growled, “I have leveled up.”

Dust freed a leg and bucked her grabber straight across the mouth. He screamed as she kicked him again. In her struggle, Dust flipped herself onto her back. That’s when her eyes drank in my bloody visage as I picked up the rope and stumbled over to her. She gasped as I almost casually stabbed her attacker in the back and tore the weapon out, and he screamed. I tossed the knife off to the side.

“That’s a lovely story and I’d love to hear it later,” I said to him as I flipped him over, stepping onto his throat with my bad hoof. “Dust,” I said, affixing the mare with a hard look, “tie him up.” She remained motionless. “Now!”

“I... I... okay,” she muttered, crawling up to the armored stallion and grabbing the rope.

“Did he hurt you?” I demanded.

“N-no, I’m fine. I hurt him more than he hurt me, I’m sure.”

I nodded. “Good.” I helped tie him just enough that he couldn’t fight back. Then I collapsed to the ground.

“GB!” the pegasus gasped. Her eyes went wide as she looked at my legs. “Ohmygoodness, what happened!?”

“Griffons make poor dancing partners—I have learned this lesson the hard way tonight,” I groaned, fishing around in my bag. “Keep tying him, damn you.”

“Oh Celestia, you killed them!” the stallion gasped. “Oh Celestia! Oh Celestia!”

“There!” Dust shouted, finishing the knots. They were a bit sloppy. Were I her, I would have untied him and tried again. The stallion continued shouting and begging as Dust said, “GB, what the hell is going on?!”

“Well,” I said, looking at the ceiling, “Bigs and Chausiku appear to be evil—go figure. They betrayed us, and then a bunch of uncivilized jerks broke in through the windows because only one of them has ever heard of doors before. Oh, and I’m bleeding to death, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is checking everypony here for hepatitis.”

She blinked. “I... I think I saw some healing potions or something in the store. Wait here, okay?”

“And here I was, thinking of taking up ballroom dancing while you went,” I replied. She shot me a confused, hesitant look, and then bolted off. That damn stallion kept screaming. “Listen, buddy, if you keep screaming, I’ll tear out your eyes and testicles, shove your testicles into where your eyes should be, and glue your eyes where your testicles belong. Are we clear?” He bit his tongue, and I smiled. “I’m glad we had this little chat, much more productive than ‘the rapy’.”

Dust returned, panting as she knelt before me. “Found some!” she declared, reaching into her bag. It was a pear-shaped bottle filled with a pink liquid. Oh, and there was most certainly no list of ingredients on it.

“Is it getting cold and dark for anypony else?” I asked.

“Shh-shh-shh,” she cooed, holding the back of my head and putting the bottle to my lips. It tasted both weird yet kind of nice, sort of vaguely pumpkin-ish with hints of bubblegum. Speaking of which, I could have really gone for some pumpkin muffins right about now. They sounded much better than bleeding to death. Wonder if they have this potion’s flavor in non-healing potion form.

“Are you sure these are healing potions?” I said, fighting back a cough.

“I... yes, yes, I’m sure. Why?” she asked.

“Because they’re the wrong color. Tränke der Genesung, er, healing tonics are red. Everyone knows that.” She stuttered something, but I silenced her. “More, please. Sort of dying over here. And give him one, too.” Dust pulled out three more pear-shaped bottles. I grabbed two of them, pointing at the stallion when she tried to give me the third. I took a breath, popped the cork off the first bottle, then jammed it into the hole in my wrist. With the second one, I poured it into my leg wounds. If Equestrian healing tonics worked anything like they did back home, that would help those wounds specifically; if not, I just wasted two tonics. Wee!

I could feel the heat of localized fevers throughout my body, the heat of unnatural cell production. Gritting my teeth and closing my eyes, I panted as the pain and bloody wetness clawed for life, only to be replaced by a burning sensation mixed with the feeling of sitting in lukewarm maple syrup.

When I opened my eyes, I found Lighting Dust biting her wingtip, her eyes locked on me. I gave her a curt smile to let her know I was fine, but she didn’t look any better. Yes, Dust, keep biting your wing, showing off a pegasus’s ability to have more body language that I do. “Blitz Staub,” I muttered.

“What?” Dust prodded.

“That would be your name in Teutsch,” I said, looking at her. “Der Blitz is Lightning. Der Staub is Dust. Ergo, Blitz Staub. It’s funny because both are masculine nouns, so you sort of have a very masculine name.” I blinked. “I just realized that most Equestrian names that I’ve encountered have an exact translation into Teutsch. Cards would be Karten. Strong would be Stark. Blackout can go to hell.” I laughed. “Well, everything went better than expected, huh? Well, it went worse, but as far as worse goes, it was better than worst, right?”

“Um...”

“Attagirl!” I said, moving my legs around. They felt different, and I didn’t like that. I wondered if there was a chance I could somehow cut these newly healed legs and replace them with the old strips around the griffon’s claws. Then I thought that was stupid. Then I actually looked at my legs. They were not fully healed, infinitely better than they had been, yes, but they stilled needed to heal.

Muttering some pretty strong teutsche words, I reached into my pack and found a syringe. No, my wounds aren’t severe enough to warrant any teutsche Tränke der Genesung. I was only given a limited number of those Aufputschmittel, and I’d rather not waste any of them here. I pulled out several gauze strips and recounted my first aid training. Using my magic, mouth, and hooves, I dressed my leg wounds first. Unless I actually gave them more healing serum, they would likely get a few nasty scars. Then I paused.

“Scheiße,” I mumbled, undressing the wound. Taking deep breaths, I looked at Dust. “Could you please check the area where you found the healing potions—”

“There were no more,” she said, gritting her teeth.

I sighed. “Yeah, I figured that, but I want you to go and check if there is any ethanol with at least, uh, sixty percent alcohol, please. I need it.” She nodded, and left. I looked over at the stallion, his wide eyes staring back at me. “You know, you are not clever,” I said. “You’re like one of those criminals that tries to be evil by hiding in the general store until it’s closing time, then you’re trapped there. And they think, ‘Golly gee, it sure is dark here. They lock the registers, and I don’t know how to pick locks.’ Then they sigh, ‘Guess I’ll just wait here till the police arrive.’ That’s what you are. You’re that guy.”

Dust ambled back into sight, a glass bottle in her mouth. “Here,” she said giving me it.

“Ah, you’re a right proper dream,” I thanked. “I’d kiss you, but I’m covered in so much blood that I wonder if I now have hepatitis.” The bottle was of ninety percent ethanol, yes! Dust feigned cough and looked away as I uncorked the bottle. “To make sure I don’t get any infections,” I sighed, heart pounding. Then I used the bottle, pouring the alcohol onto my wounds, burning the nerve endings and purifying the flesh. Speaking of which, it turned out that using alcohol on wounds and burning nerve endings hurts. Just to distract myself from the pain, I burst out into a song I’d heard a few times before:

“It’s a long way to Tipperpony,
It’s a long way to go.
It’s a long way to Tipperpony,
To the sweetest girl I know!”

And now to pour it into the other leg. Oh, not to forget the gaping hole in my wrist. This was going to be fun!

“Goodbye, Piccafilly.
Farewell, Leicester Square!
It’s a long, long way to Tipperpony,
But my heart’s right there.”

The bottle was empty, leg and wrist wounds cleansed. I tossed the bottle aside and grabbed my gauze. Around my wrist and parts of my hoof several times, already it was soaking up blood. Then around my legs, ’round and ’round I went. There. It was done. Back in the bag went the gauze rolls I didn’t use. I leaned back against a shelf filled with the strange furs and sighed.

“You... did that fast,” Dust commented, looking away from me. I stumbled to my hooves, stretching my legs. It hurt to stand, the wounds burning but very tolerable compared to what they’d been minutes ago. “Are you sure you should even be walking, GB?”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I followed my trail of blood to the griffon, ignoring the strips of me lying all around her as I picked my dagger out of her talons. Remarkably, my dagger was the only thing not covered in gore. After putting the dagger back in its sheath, a sheath now put on top of the bandages, I slipped again on my own blood and fell to the ground. I expected Dust to gasp and rush over to my side, but she didn’t, so I had to get up all on my own.

Dust, it turned out, was staring at the two stallions I’d killed. When her eyes slowly crept to me, she saw the griffon, the blood, and the strips of me scattered around her body. That was all she could apparently take. She darted off and past a few aisles before vomiting out what I thought used to be a burger and fries.

When she was finished, she stumbled towards me, and I walked towards her. “Feeling better?” I asked, and she only gave me a thousand-yard stare.

“They’re dead,” she whispered. “You... you killed them.”

You only now realize this? “If I didn’t, they would have hurt you, Lightning Dust,” I said firmly. Well, they might have. I don’t know for sure, but seemed like it. “And I would have stumbled across torn and shredded legs, a hole in my wrist, and done horrible things to make sure you didn’t get hurt.”

Wow. That sures does sound chivalrous. Oh, and you and I both know she could’ve probably handled her own there, save for maybe the griffon.

Shut up, she’s buying it. I smiled. “In fact, I have done so.”

She gave me a lost look.

“Hey, hey, Lightning Dust. Frau Blitz Staub.” She cocked a brow. “Squirrel.” Dust blinked. “Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Sqvirl—dammit! I got it wrong.” I stamped my hooves on the ground in frustration, and she giggled. “Attagirl, Dust! Don’t be sad. If you’re sad, I’m sad. And if I’m sad, I’m boring, and no one wants that. No one.” Dust curtly laughed. There. Mission accomplished.

The stallion cleared his throat, and all eyes were on him. I walked up and knelt before him. “Oh yeah, you’re still alive. Miss Lightning Dust, would you please check the backroom for Bigs and Chausiku?” She gave me a hesitant nod, then trotted off. The buck gritted his teeth as I said, “You know, you Equestrians are remarkably stupid. The only one I’ve met with at least half a brain is my companion in yonder room.” I chuckled. “When I go to try to meet Princess Celestia, I’m probably just going to walk in and find her dead, having choked to death on a spoon or something. And then her guards will rush in and arrest me. And then they’re going to convict me because it’s kind of hard to pass off twenty cases of ‘self defense’ when those twenty ponies you killed were Celestia’s royal guards. Then Princess Luna, if she even exists, is going to get angry at me and send me to the moon, where I will promptly die because there is no oxygen on the moon, which is kind of why I’m pretty sure Luna doesn’t exist.”

I set a bag to the side and fished through it. “Hold on one second.” It took me at least ten times that number before I squee’d with joy. I brought out two D20s, my old twenty-sided dice. Hadn’t seen them in years, but now I knew they had a purpose once again. With great pizzaz, I rolled my dice. See, the trick to rolling dice is always to do it with flair, especially when playing Dunkelheit und Drachen. You had to be excited when doing it, you had to be “I wanna torture this stallion in the face!” and not “Oh boy. Let us engage in battle. Are we done yet?”

The dice bounced around and landed by my hooves. “Yes,” I said, “I rolled a seventeen.”

“Um...” the stallion droned.

“And you rolled a seven.” I made a hissing noise like I’d been burned. “Sorry. You lose.”

“Wha’?”

“We were rolling for initiative. I won. I attack first.” I pocketed the dice. Putting my right hoof on his knee, I leaned in close and whispered, “Now, here’s how it’s going to work. I’m a nice guy, and I’d rather not have to offend that nice girl over in yonder room by having to bash your head like a bag of carrots. So here’s the deal: you tell me what I want to know, and I’ll be nice to you. ‘Nice to you’, of course, means I won’t cut out a rib of yours and use it to stab your arm off.”

“B-but I don’t have any arms,” he muttered.

I sighed. “Your language is dumb. You call them forelegs, we call them Arme, arms. They have entirely different articulation than do our legs, you see.” I shook my head. “Don’t distract me. Do we have a deal?” He nodded. “Good. So, question one: what are you doing here?”

He swallowed. “Security, assigned to protect this little shop and its objects. Lotta folks don’t like zebra magic and stuff, ’kay? Duke Elkington won’t stand for racism, ya know?”

“Then why did you burst through the windows? That was needlessly destructive for security.”

“Little fetus creepy thing told us to.” He forced a chuckle. “It scares perps, ya know? Songnam Security chargin’ through the windows is enough to make most pony folk just give up, yeah? He told us he could repair the windows on his own, so it weren’t no problem!”

“And tie us up?” I asked, putting a little weight onto his knee. “What for?”

“He told us to!”

“Chausiku? He has you just tie up anybody he doesn’t like?” I asked. Something rattled around in the backroom, probably Lightning Dust. “Is that it?” I demanded.

“That what they told me—I don’t know why!”

“They? Who are ‘they’? Bigs and Chausuki? A moment ago you said ‘he’.” I brought my hoof up to his neck as I slid him onto his back. “You’re lying to me, friend.”

“No! They and he are both that zebra-thing who owns the place! They just told us that if anyone comes in here, tie them up and that the zebra-thing would know what to do! Our boss told us to work this little area, and, for some reason, to take some orders from that zebra-thing, okay? I don’t ask questions, I just serve and protect, alright?!”

“So, attacking us was not on the orders of, say, Duke Elkington?”

“No! Chausiku’s!” He shook like he was freezing.

“And so you’re just a grunt with no real knowledge?”

“Yes!” he cried. “Please don’t kill me!

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Look, the only reason you’re still alive is because you didn’t get a chance to hurt that nice girl in the other room. She comes from a fairly innocent world. But me? No, I come from a very bloody world.” I put more weight on his throat, and he whimpered.

“Please!” he sobbed. “Three of my friends are dead, I got bills to pay, and I don’t wanna die!” My hoof remained where it was. “Not everypony gets to be as lucky as you, pretty boy traveling with a model without any care in the world, some of us got bills to pay, families to feed... funerals to attend.”

I blinked. “Did you just call me ‘pretty boy’?” I inclined my head. “The hell did that come from? I mean, look at yourself; it’s like every buck in Equestria spends half the day working out. You’re buffer than me, even.”

He took a breath. “I...”

“No, really. I’m confused. Why did you call me that?” I took my hoof off him, putting it to my chin. “Unless ‘pretty boy’ is now an insult. That’d make a lot of sense, actually. When I say that everypony looks like they work out all the time, I’m not exaggerating too, too terribly. That is to say, I look at half of Equestria’s stallions and feel inadequate.” Perhaps it’s something in the water.

After a few seconds of twisting around, the stallion managed to sit his back up against the counter. “No, no, no, you totally look great!”

I frowned. “Are you coming onto me? Because I will have you know that, while appreciated, I am not in the habit of getting together with people I’m supposed to be holding captive.”

There was an almost hopeful look on his face. “No, I’m just being honest. Tall with a slender build? How are you not drowning in supermodels?” He smiled at me.

“Maybe Equestria just has different standards of male beauty?” I said, jousting with the idea. “It’s like how back home, uh, the ‘action figures’—that’s the term, right?” He nodded. “Right, it’s like how all the action figures are getting buffer and buffer. Like, I see those things and think, ‘There’s no way any pony could get that big without drugs’. But then I’m walking down a Songnam street and see a toy shop: all the dolls are either slender or sort of remind me vaguely of that mare in yonder room, yet all the stallion action figure look like they’ve been shoving boulders under their skin.” Kind of like how Boulder himself looked. I wonder if his orphans are hungry now.

“Just how toys are, y’know?” he said, his smile more forced. “Fillies either wanna look like your lady friend over there or like Princess Celestia. Colts wanna grow up to be big and strong, but the modern mare likes her a buck that looks exactly like you.”

“Maybe.” I lowered my voice and shoved my face into his. “Ooor you’re just screwing with me in the hopes of getting favorable treatment, and flattery is the lowest form of manipulation. That sounds like a much better bet, yeah?” 

The hope on his face was thoroughly dashed. “No, no, they really do! You’re-you’re totally handsome!”

“Riiight,” I sighed, looking over at the dead bodies I left. “Hold that thought for a second while I go drag all your friends’ bodies into the closet.” I did as I said, putting the two stallions and one griffon into the closet, though not before checking their pockets. I returned thirty Bits richer. “See, you’ve got to hide the bodies, or else folks will see them.”

“Um, GB!” Dust called out from yonder room. Took her long enough. “Could you come here? I need a hoof.”

“Sure thing, Miss Lightning Dust,” I called back before returning my attention to the buck. “You stay nice and calm, okay? If you do, tonight you might be able to sleep. Move, and I’ll force you to find sleep forever. Understood?” He gave me a weak nod. “Good boy.”

The back room was filled with more and more junk, just like the actual store itself minus any of the attempted organization, and with far more walls and little rooms branching off. Still, the floor was a neat concrete gray; the walls were brown and gray. As we all knew, dark colors meant gritty seriousness. No self-respecting witchdoctor would decorate his evil lair pink, now would he? If I ever became an evil overlord or something, I’d wear bright colors, have my evil fortress be a bright and happy place, and make all of my minions wear “World’s #1 Dad” shirts. Or “World’s #1 Mom” shirts, because my legion of evil wouldn’t sexually discriminate. Sexual discrimination was just terrible, and my legion was evil, not terrible.

Back in the real world, Dust just looked at me as I closed the door behind me. “Something wrong?” I asked.

She nodded. “Can’t find Bigs. I checked around, found a back door leading to a back alley, but he appears to have walled off the alley and turned it into a little empty garden.”

Don’t you need a permit to mess with things like that? Those two were clearly criminal masterminds. “So, no sign of them?”

Dust looked over her shoulder to a large crate. “Found a few locked boxes and, uh... Well, there’s this big locked door in one of the side rooms.”

“Hmm... and you think he’s hiding in there?” She didn’t reply in any way. Oh, God. Really? This is about me killing ponies, isn’t it?

“C-can we talk for a moment, just you and I,” she asked.

Well, I was hoping to hold a seance to call up the ghost of my long-dead the rapist, but I guess just the two of us works. “Of course, Dust. You know I’ve always got time for you.” Except, you know, when we’re chasing down witchdoctors.

“It’s about—” she hesitated “—what you did back out there.”

Called it! You owe me ten Marken, me. Woo, these Equestrians are so predictable! And I thought I dealt with this problem. “You mean, that they are now dead, right?” She nodded, biting a wingtip. “You are disturbed that I did it, correct?”

Same physical response as last time. “It only really sank in as I was standing there, listening to you and that buck talking.” She heard that? Wonder what she thought about it. “I know you said that you were prepared to ‘defend to their deaths’ back there in Sleepy Oaks, and I just sort of thought that was a metaphor.” She licked her lips. “Even when Cards killed that guy, that was an accident. And with Jeepers?” Dust shuddered. “But with those two stallions? That was...”

“Partially premeditated?” I offered, and she didn’t reply. Use your charisma here, Government Boy. Make her see it your way. “When ponies talk about heroes, what do you picture?”

She hesitated. “I imagine chivalrous knights in shining armor, rescuing fair maidens from towers, fighting dragons, romancing beautiful princesses. Isn’t that what you picture?”

That was both oddly stereotypical and the kind of myths associated with patriarchal cultures. Weird. I put a hoof on her shoulder, and she didn’t flinch. “I was once told that this world was no place for a hero. For a while, I believed them. I witnessed atrocities and horrors, have endured physical, mental, and emotional agony the likes of which your Equestrian mind is utterly powerless to comprehend. I have seen the home I grew up in destroyed by demons, its meager halls decked with the gore of ponies I’ve never met. I have seen and received the best this world has to offer, and I have seen and experienced the worst this earth has to offer. I have experienced great joy, and I have been on the verge of suicide. Attempted it, even.” Dust blinked at me. “I have had my heroic journey, and I have learned my heroic lessons.”

“And... what did you learn?” she asked timidly. Being timid did not suit her at all.

“I learned that the heroes of your fantasies are myths. In real life, a hero comes in many forms, but the kind of hero I like to try to be is one who is willing to do bad things so that others may remain pure, innocent, or just plain unharmed. I was trained and taught that in order to be this hero, I had to be willing to end the lives of evil people.” Or, in today’s case, the lives of ponies just a few shades grayer than me.

“I’m sorry to say that while we live in a world teeming with monsters, they are not storybook monsters, villains who are evil just because. You are not fighting some evil threatening to destroy the world, I don’t think; we are simply fighting ponies whose goals end up hurting good folk, and I cannot stand by that. But to defeat bad people, you have to be willing to be bad yourself. The question is where you draw the line.” I was silent for a moment. “Where do you draw the line, Dust? For you, what is ‘too far’ for the sake of preserving all that is good?”

She looked at her hooves. “I never wanted to hurt ponies.”

I rubbed her shoulder. “Hours ago you told me I was strong of heart. Well, my heart is capable of doing most anything save for two things, two things so utterly horrible that to even want to do them would be a sign that I was evil. They are where I draw the line.” She gasped as I grabbed her hoof. “Lightning Dust, I would not ask that you follow my path. I know I am on a dark path that ends with me landing a cozy spot in Hell. I am not asking that you take lives as I do, only that you know that when I take a life, it is because it is the only, most practical option. This is something I can do that neither you nor Cards could willingly emulate.”

Dust swallowed. “What made you go down this path?”

I paused. “Because I probably have masochistic self-destructive tendencies mixed with a hero complex and this strange thing where I put others before me, even if it means I’ll die or get hurt because I just want to help.” She blinked, and I sighed. “It is because I said ‘no’. I wasn’t born to be a hero. I wasn’t born with some mystical birthmark foretelling greatness. I was never part of some great prophecy. I was not born for greatness. I am not the ‘chosen one’, nor the only one capable of wielding some epic power. In fact, I don’t have any power to speak of. I’m just a normal guy capable of saying ‘no’. No, I will not allow monsters to destroy my home. No, I will not let you get away with such evil. No, I will not stand by and let an innocent be abused by some aristocratic ass, even if he is a Duke.

“That is what it is to be a hero, Dust, to declare ‘no’ when you see something wrong, and fight against that which is wrong. I’m not standing up right now to some epic, world-eating monster, I’m standing up to some crazy duke, standing up to just another pony. I went down this path because I can’t shut my mouth and let evil go unpunished.” I sighed. “It is all I know how to do anymore.”

“And that means you... you have to kill?”

“It is something I have done since seconds after my birth, when bearing me killed my mother.” Her eyes widened. “It is something I will have to do until my world comes to an end. I have this problem with wanting to help everypony, and it has landed me on this road I now walk. So I ask you, Lightning Dust, Ace Reporter, if you can accept that about me, about what I have to do to ensure that the pure and good like yourself can sleep soundly at night.” Also, I don’t want to keep having this conversation every time I need to kill somepony. I’m already annoyed.

There was a long, long silence. Then she looked into my eyes for the longest time. If not for my whole argument essentially boiling down to “Hey, I kill people; is that cool with you?”, it might have been a touching, personal moment. And the way she stared into my eyes might have been romantic. But as it turned out, the problem at hoof did involve getting over a very basic social compunction: not to kill. There was nothing romantic about this moment. There was only Lightning Dust’s thoughts and my words.

She nodded. “For you, Government Boy, I will. You stand by me, so I should stand by you. I-it’s the least I can do, right?”

Still clasping her hoof, I brought my head down and kissed it. She gasped in surprise, pulling her hoof back. “Thank you, Miss Lightning Dust. I know I practically come from a different dimension than you, and my methods violate your Equestrian sensibilities, but I assure you that they are the only way in this world.”

Dust took a step back, a slight flush on her cheeks. “I-I-I-um-well-I.” She stopped and collected herself. “Good. Now, can we go open that locked door and find these guys?”

“Of course, just give me a moment.” In that moment, I went out of the room, found that security stallion, then shoved him into the closet with his dead friends. He openly wept their names as I closed the door and locked it. Back in the backroom, I followed the mare to a heavy-looking door and pulled out my tools.

Tick. Tack. Tock.

Lock opened, door ajar. I stood up and put my tools back, looking down into the dark basement. There wasn’t much light getting into the room from out here. “Well, shall I go first?” I asked.

“If you want,” she said in hesitant tones.

I took a few steps onto the creaky wooden stairs. There is so going to be a trap down here. Now then, I think maybe I have a lamp somewhere in my—Dust gasped, and the next thing I knew, I was lying at the bottom of the stairs on dark, cold concrete.

“Ach,” I groaned, moving my various body parts to make sure nothing was broken. Thankfully, nothing broke, but now my legs were screaming as I felt them wetten with blood, and the rope bruise around my neck protested my actions. “You trip?”

She moaned. “Yeah, sorry. You hurt? I’m fine”

“Not hurt, just a bit sore. And it’s no problem, accidents happens.” At least you didn’t accidentally kill me, and I can’t afford to get mad at you at this exact moment. I moved my forehooves around as I felt for something to gauge my bearings with. I felt at something warm and soft and—

Dust yelped, and I felt a hoof buck me in the shoulder. “What the hell was that?!” As it happened to be, that thing I was feeling happened to move just when Dust had kicked me.

“I was feeling something and then you kicked me,” I said.

“Um... you were kinda massaging my cutie mark,” she replied, and I blinked. “Kind of a sensitive area, GB.”

“Sorry...”

“No, no, no, you couldn’t see. And neither can I.” She mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

With a sigh, I managed to find my way onto my hooves. “Hold that thought,” I said, looking out into the darkness. In a few seconds, my eyes adjusted enough for me to make out shapes. A few more seconds and I could see well enough to help Dust up. “There, on your feet.”

“Feet? That’s an oddly poetic term,” the mare muttered.

“Hooves, feet, Hände, Fäuste, Hufe, Füße—similar enough. Ask a dictionary. Not poetic, just me being more literal than I need to be. Solarische words are a bit odd.” I pointed at her. “And before you ask, solarisch is Teutsch for ‘Equestrian’.” I looked up the stairs, then I looked down the stairs. We were not on the real floor. In fact, it was just a little flat area before the stairs turned ninety degrees to the right and went down for what looked like another story. “Hmm. Looks like we have more stairs to go down.”

Dust groaned, hanging her head. “Great. Just great.”

“What, you’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

She let out a mirthless chuckle. “Who, me, the girl who spent most of her life in a flying city that had a critical shortness of dark, enclosed spaces, and instead has an overabundance of open skies? Not at all.”

“Good to know,” I said, and made my way down the stairs. Dust didn’t trip this time. This bottom floor was as real as the bits of random, unidentifiable junk lying around it were. I looked out across the room at a large, thick-looking window next to a metal door leading into a dull-lit chamber. There was no other way out of the room save the way we came, and this door was surely a trap. I contemplated dragging that security stallion down here and tossing him into the room to test it, but Dust would probably react negatively to that. Of course, I could’ve just sent Dust in there first, but that option was less-than favorable.

I grabbed a wooden mask off the wall and flung it through the door. Nothing happened, but I did notice an opened door in the chamber. “Okay, I think he’s in there,” I said, pointing into the chamber.

“Um, you first,” Dust mumbled.

Sighing, I walked up to the door. I looked around for any sort of tripwire or way the door could be shut on me, because I knew that was totally going to happen. It was too obvious not to happen. I drew my sword and stabbed at the air around the door, including bits on the inside of the room.

“What are you doing?” she asked as I sheathed my blade.

“Checking for traps.” I thought for a second. “Invisible traps, too.”

“Traps? It looks safe...ish.”

I gave her a dry look. “I get the feeling that Chausiku doesn’t read enough to get original ideas. On the other hoof, I’m pretty sure this is the only way to get to those two.” I put a hoof to my chin. “I wonder who built this basement. Diamonds dogs?” I recalled Dust mention that Songnam had a network of tunnels under the streets dug out by diamond dogs at the Duke’s command. Was this little basement a part of them? It just seemed a whole story deeper than any basement would reasonably be. “This would be much easier if I could somehow roll my dice to check for them.”

In the glow from the room, I could see Dust give me a weird look. “Dice? You gamble?”

“I gamble with my life every time I take a step forwards, but no. I was referring to, uh... role-playing games, the kind where you sit around with character sheets and roll dice to determine how well you’re slaying monsters, occasionally using math to make sure your character is as awesome as you want him or her to be.”

She blinked. For a brief moment, Dust couldn’t seem to figure out if she wanted to look betrayed, appalled, or just plain shocked. “That sounds kind of... nerdy.”

“Hmm. Yes, I suppose you could call it that. Rather proud it of, honestly. Get together with a few friends and play an imaginary campaign, slay made-up dragons, and level up your characters while getting the best armor and weapons. Life was a bit boring back then; between that, school, and working with a politician in the Reichstag, there wasn’t much to do.”

Her jaw dropped. “I-but-you-I-what?” she stammered, and I shrugged. “But-but that’s so nerdy, and you look so...”

“Look so what?” I prodded.

“I... you don’t look like a nerd at all! Nerds don’t look like you, nerds are, like, scrawny, short, have acne, wear glasses, can’t even talk to girls, and are just uncool and unattractive. No self-respecting girl would be seen near one.”

“Wow. I had no idea Equestrians would have such an... anti-intellectual attitude. Because what you did right there was just plain stereotyping.” I cocked a brow. “And what did you think I did when I was a colt?”

“I... I don’t know. Maybe played hoofball?”

I laughed. “I don’t even know what the sport is. In fact, I don’t know the first thing about sports.” Dust tilted her head, a baffled look on her face. “Seriously, I don’t. I can guess which side is which. Don’t know the names of any teutschen sports teams, nor where they play, nor how to play those sports.”

“I just-I just can’t believe you were a...” She shook her head. “Never in a million years would’ve guessed.” Dust looked around. “You look nothing like a nerd.”

“That’s nice,” I said, and trotted into the little chamber. “Wait. Why did I do this?” I asked as the large metal door closed itself. “Oh, hey, look. Cliché.”

Dust galloped over to the window. “GB? GB? What’s going on, GB?” She pounded a hoof on the window as the room outside lit up, torches on the walls seemingly lighting themselves. The other door in the room, I noticed, had also closed. Yippee. “GB?!”

A deep mechanical sound came from the metal walls of the chamber as a new window appeared in the room. It was at about knee-level; Chausiku looked out at me through it, an annoyed look on his face. “Finally!” the little fetus shouted as Dust shouted questions. Like Dust, his voice was muffled by the window. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been standing here, waiting for you to just walk in through the nice door? You ponies have no sense of decency, let me tell you!”

I looked around the room. “This is either the part where you try to kill me or you tell me your evil plan and then try to kill me, right? Because I’m curious, what are you doing down here? I imagine you’re in league with the Duke, right?”

Chausiku flustered as Bigs shifted his weight. “I have you in my trap—you dare mock me?”

I shrugged. “Of course I dare. What would I be if I didn’t?”

He sighed and adjusted his little white hat. “Okay, fine. Be that way. But tell me first, Max, have you ever heard of enervation? Not many have.” I gave a so-so shrug of sorts, and he smiled. “See, it’s this strange little force. Comes in a few different forms, they say. Very poorly understood, since it doesn’t occur naturally.” Bigs touched something on his side of the window. A strange black medal on the ceiling began to glow, bathing me in a pink light. “I got my grubby little hooves on a very, very strange talisman, one capable of generating little enervatic fields, and Bigs here just switched it on. And it will probably kill you.”

“What?!” Dust yelled, pounding on the glass.

A dark expression on my face, I stared at Chausiku. “Oh, yeah. I think I know of it, but our term is ‘Miasmatische Trübung’. Or ‘Miasmatische Lähme’, depending.”

He laughed and said, “Your lady, Bigs, and I will be fine. But you? Tsk tsk tsk. At the very least, you get to be my very first live pony test subject, and I do so want to figure out if the legends are true.”

More staring at Chausiku and Bigs, my look slowly shifting to a glare. Dust yelled, “Hold on—I’ll find you a way out of there!” She spun around and repeatedly bucked the window, the glass unfazed by what were doubtlessly powerful strikes.

I didn’t move, just glared at the zebra. Bigs frowned and asked, “Are you sure it’s working?”

“Of course I’m sure!” Chausiku snapped. “We tested this on animals; by now, his mind should be decaying. He should be getting paranoid, violent, even schizophrenic!

“Why are you doing this?!” Dust demanded. “Stop it—you’ll kill him!”

Somehow the fetus heard her, and he replied, “Well, there aren’t many avenues of employment for one such as... uh, ourselves. If I gotta be a little morally gray to put food on my—our table and do good, so be it. And for your second point,” he went on, shaking his head, “I’m not too sure what it’ll do to a fit stallion like Max there. This is my first test, and... my employer was wondering what the answer would be. I don’t want to dissatisfy the one putting that food on my plate.” Chausiku shrugged. “Sorry, kid.”

The little talisman in the ceiling pulsed and hummed, its pink light never once weakening. Dust, panting hard, stumbled to the window. She leaned on it, putting a hoof up to the glass, watching me. “I’m sorry,” she said, barely audible through the glass. I looked at her, shrugged, then went back to staring at the zebra. “I’m sorry,” she muttered again and again. Then, in a sudden burst of energy, she began pounding on the glass. “Break! Break damn you, break! Dammit, I am not losing you, GB!”

A minute went by. Dust couldn’t continuously keep up her furious assault for that long. She practically collapsed against the glass, nearly panting her lungs out.

“Um...” Chausiku droned, beads of sweat on his forehead. “You should really be in a bad way, Max. Like, mentally ruined. I know that this kind of enervation wouldn’t really physically ruin you, thanks to my tests on pigs, but...” He gritted in his teeth and in a bout of rage screamed, “Why aren’t you convulsing in mental anguish!?”

I felt a lone vein pulsing irregularly by my injured wrist. Four unusual pumps and then it went back to normal. I shifted my weight, trying to find a stance that didn’t hurt my legs too terribly. My Eisernes Kreuz jostled as I turned around and smiled at Dust, then I looked over at Chausiku. “Are we quite done here? I just figured out a way to get out.”

Bigs and the fetus both blinked at me. “What?” everypony but me asked in unison.

“Uh-huh,” I chirped, pulling out my dagger. “Zehn Marken say that I can throw my dagger up and break that talisman in the ceiling... eventually.”

“You’re bluffing!” Chausiku snarled.

“I don’t think that’s the right word, my friend.” I nodded. “Bluffing would be like saying, ‘If you don’t do this thing, I’ll kill your daughter.’ Meanwhile, I don’t have your daughter. I made a bet that I can do something, so that’s not really a bluff. I mean, were we playing some sort of card game, making a bet might be a bluff, but—”

“Stop lecturing me!”

I tossed my dagger up. It missed, and I had to jump out of its way while catching it. “Okay, take two. Eventually, I’m going to hit it. So, turn it off and open the doors.”

“Never!”

“Whenever,” I sighed, throwing the blade up again. Missed and caught it. Another throw. “I get the feeling that if I had retained my knowledge of juggling, I’d be more fit to do this.” Tossed and caught. “So tell me about enervation, Chausiku. I don’t really know much about it.”

The fetus slammed a hoof against the glass. “You are being bombarded by alpha enervation! Your brain should be leaking out of your skull right now!”

“What does it normally do?” More tosses, more catches.

He gritted his teeth and growled. “Alpha enervation affects the mind. Causes aggression, loss of reasoning and generally impaired judgment, paranoia, schizophrenia—mental trauma! Brain hemorrhages! Aneurysms! Something!”

“Yep, sounds like Miasmatische Trübung.” Also sounds like Sleepy Oaks just a little, especially what Deeohgee mentioned about the place. Perhaps it was there before or something, which prompted most everyone to act like jerks and lynch me. I wonder... Frowning, I tried to get a better angle. “And who gave you this medallion thing up there?”

“Eat shit and die!”

“That’s nice.” A toss. “Ooh! I dinged the side!” A catch. A throw, a crack, a pop, a showering of pink sparks, a sheathing. “There it goes!” I proudly declared as the torches flickered. The door inside the room clicked.

“No!” Chausiku shouted. He proceeded to scream obscenities mixed with his descriptions of how what I’d just done was impossible. I ignored it as I tried opening the outside door to avail. Trying the internal door actually got it open. There was some sort of failed safety feature at work here, I was sure.

“GB?” Dust asked from the window.

“Hey there, Miss Lightning Dust,” I said with a smile. “You just sit there and look awesome. I’ll be right back, okay?” She nodded. “Neat.” I trotted through the opened door and found a T-junction going left and right. Chausiku was somewhere to the right, which meant that to the left was where all the interesting stuff was.

So left I went. The hallway went on for a few yards before turning left again, ending in a wall. On the other side had to be the backroom, I figured. Why did this place even exist? I raised a hoof and pushed on the wall, and it fell forwards as if it... as it actually was a thick wooden stage prop. Dust peered back at me through the newly exposed doorway.

“Huh,” I muttered. “Wish I’d known about that earlier.” I knew having the front entrance to your evil lair be a testing chamber was stupid. I stepped onto the back of the false wall and gestured for Dust to follow me. “Come on, Ma’am. We’ve got a wizard’s ass to kick.” She blinked, rubbed her eyes, blinked again, then galloped after me. Before I could lead the way back into the tunnels, Dust reached me and nearly crushed my lungs in a hug.

“Okay, let’s go!” she cheered as I coughed for air.

A moment later and we were charging past the opened test chamber door. As Dust went by it, she froze and shivered hard. I paused to close the door because its openness was annoying me, but Dust already had a small nosebleed. “Anypony else got a headache?” the mare muttered as she collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath. Dust clutched her head as she rocked back and forth, groaning.

I just sort of stood there and blinked. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and Dust only shivered and moaned. “Miss Lightning Dust? Frau Blitz Staub?” Second response, same as the first, only she ruffled her feathers. It was as if a great chill had washed over her. Great. I glanced at the door, muttering, “Ist es Miasmatische Trübung?”

Dust took several sharp, sharp breaths. She rubbed her eyes as she continued shaking. “I think I just caught epilepsy...” she moaned. In all honestly, she’d gone from healthy and sporting to looking like the ebola virus came to her house, broke all her furniture, and kicked her ass bloody with the promise that it’d be back soon for its goddamn money.

“Hold tight, Dust. I’ve got you,” I said, picking the mare up and putting her onto my back. Sure that she was secure, I trotted down the hallway, short sword drawn. There were doorways in the little hallway, one at the end of the hall, and one on my upcoming right. The right one looked like my best bet. Mindful of the lady on my back, I ducked through the doorway and found a narrow set of stairs going up. At the top was the little room the zebra had been in. From my position, it looked a bit like some kind of cigar lounge, the little chairs, lamps, and odd few magazines. There was a little table with two Voixsons on it.

“Stay back, you freak!” Chausuki shouted at me, Bigs holding a sword in his mouth. They cowered in the farthest corner from me. I turned to them and smiled. “I-I don’t know what kinda freakshow you are, but you’re not gonna kill us!”

“Hey, do you know what happened to my associate here?” I asked, pointing at Dust, who groaned.

Chausiku, his neck twisted towards me because Bigs was directly facing me, swallowed. “She took a full blast of alpha enervation. My controlled enervation only lasts for a few minutes, but I hit you with literally everything the talisman was worth. By the-by the time she ran past it, the enervation was at half the strength it’d been at, further weakened by being farther from its center of effect and having lost all concentration!”

“So, is she going to get better?” I asked with a hopeful smile.

Bigs’ knees shook. He couldn’t talk with the sword in his maw, so Chausiku needed to speak for both of them. “You’re a monster, that’s what you are, Max! There’s no way you should even be standing. You were exposed to enough biomagical contamination to kill a hydra! What the hell are you!?”

“Ich bin ein Teutscher,” I growled, “ein Mann aus Stahl.”

The fetus elbowed Bigs, and the body turned slightly, giving him a better view of me. Chausiku squinted at my chest, then swore. “What is that thing on your chest?”

“Hmm? My Iron Cross?”

“Oh Celestia, no! No! No! No! No!” Chausiku begged hysterically, his head frantically shaking. He repeated “No!” over and over, Bigs’ knees shaking. “Oh, I’ve been an idiot! How didn’t I see that until now?!”

I tilted my head to the side. “Huh?”

“You can’t possibly be one of them!”

“One of whom?” I asked.

“A servant of the Devourer of Souls!” He wiped his brow. “Vikuta! The Northern King, the invincible slaughterer who led the Legion of the North. I thought he was a myth, just a legend told to foals to make them go to bed, to keep ponies from going east across the sea!”

I laughed. “Vikuta? You mean, König Viktor, King Viktor, the greatest of leaders, mightiest of heroes, and most brilliant of politicians? King Viktor, the pony whose selfless actions were directly responsible for saving the whole world? The very same pony who turned the Reich into the unrivaled superpower it is today?”

Chausiku swallowed hard, sweat dripping off both him and Bigs. “Oh Celestia, no... no... no...! He can’t be real! You can’t be real! You’re a myth! A horror story! You... you... if you’re here, then... then Equestria is doomed...”

I took a step towards him, and Bigs flinched. “Well, I do put the rave in depraved, after all,” I chuckled. “So tell me: will the girl recover?”

“I... I... I don’t-I-don’t—maybe! The talisman didn’t work with proper enervation, its effects just don’t last as long! Tests on hogs show they make it okay, b-b-but ponies ain’t piggies!” Ponies ain’t piggies, a little voice in my head snickered. “I-if her exposure was short enough, she’ll be fine... okay? Fine.”

“Good to know,” I sighed with relief. “Do you work for Duke Elkington?”

“I dunno, maybe! Some guy from the government pays me to do what I do, and I don’t question it, alright?”

“So, what do you know about your mysterious benefactor?”

“That they have power, political power,” he said so fast I only just barely understood him. “Lots of money. Open-minded. Knows I’ll keep my mouth shut, that no one will miss me if I die. Must have access to some pretty scary magi, often consults me on dark magical arts, and—” Bigs elbowed Chausiku. “He’s... you’re right, Bigs.” The fetus steadied himself. “I might not be a good zebra, and neither is my brother here, and we might mess with the laws in what we do, but we’ll be damned—damned—if we let you monsters destroy Equestria.”

Bigs charged. With an almost casual thrust, I impaled Big’s chest, the short sword clearly going into a lung. He screamed, gurgled, and fell to the floor. Chausiku, facing the ceiling, whinnied and neighed in terror as his brother died. I put a sword to his tiny, tiny chest.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Where did you learn to use the darker side of magic?”

“He-he who walks in the light,” Chausiku coughed. “The mad dealer... The dark tarot... Mom’s words... Old legends... Guesswork... A black book...” And with that, the fetus closed his eyes. Sighing, I pressed the sword into his body, crushing his entire chest beneath the sword.

“Well, that was needlessly cryptic,” I groused, looking around the empty room. “Why does everyone die before I can get anything truly useful out of them? Why can’t I just once meet a bad guy who can tell me everything I need to unravel the villain and save the day, and then he dies? And you know, that’s just rude of you to attack me before I can think of any clever puns, liiiiike...” I pretended to stab at and kill Chausiku again, then said in a deep, scratchy voice, “Welcome to the abortion clinic.”

You’re going to Hell for that. Like, they’ll need to make up an entirely new level of Hell just to put you in. It’ll be dark. And smell vaguely of cheese. And tomatoes, because you hate tomatoes.

For some reason as I looked at Chausiku, I had the strangest desire to surgically remove (read: brutally hack) him off Bigs, attach him to some strings, and turn him into a dapper puppet. I imagined myself taking my new puppet up to a children’s hospital, where I would find the most depressing ward, burst in, and yell, “Hey, kids, who wants to see a dead fetus!?” Then I’d beat somepony’s abusive mother half-to-death with Chausiku’s body like he was some kind of rubber chicken and—what the hell was wrong with my mind?

Dust groaned, wrapping her arms around my neck. Her legs shifted around as her tail curled itself around my upper leg. Stepping away from the dead witchdoctor, I sighed, “Quit it, Dust.” She only snuggled up to my neck in response. Rolling my eyes, I trotted over to the two Voixsons on the table. The zebra might be dead, but perhaps his things could point me in the right direction. One of them was labelled ‘Shipment Order # 321’, the other was ‘The Good Fight’. I pressed the play button on the second one.

Chausiku’s voice crackled to life. I thought it amusing that the now-dead fetus’ own voice spoke out loud enough for his own dead body to hear it. “It was dark, we were hungry, and it was raining. A black buck came out of the fog, wearing a black suit, his pale green eyes almost glowing in the streetlight. With a kind word he held out a hoof to Bigs and me, offering us a way out of the cold... Mother once told us she’d said ‘Fuck the world’, and Bigs and I were the product of the resulting pregnancy. Hell, I am learnéd in the darker art of magic because it was all a monster like me, like us, was fit for in this world.

“But this buck cooked us up a fine meal himself, and Bigs and I cried. He was the only one to ever treat us like a... like a person, like an equal. It was the greatest meal Bigs and I ever had. All it was were caramel-covered carrots and... some other sweet things. I asked why he helped me, and he told me, ‘Because I’m trying to save Equestria.’ I asked what he meant, and he told me that it meant putting smiles where frowns once were, filling stomachs that once were empty, making warm those that were cold, healing those that were injured and sick.

“I told him that I wanted to do this, to ‘fight the good fight’, as he called it. The buck smiled, told me that in this day and age, the only ones that are fighting the good fight anymore are those who work for Duke Elkington. Equestria’s greatest heroes nowadays are not the kinds of heroes that Equestria needs. If Equestria was to thrive, if we were all to smile earnestly, were all to be warm with full-bellies and be without wounds, we would have to be more than just people: we had to be the heroes Equestria needed, not the ones she wanted. He praised Princess Celestia’s name, but admitted that our beautiful, wise Princess is too kind, too nice, too loving, too good to do what Elkington is willing to do. He said that he envied the Princess, but if we wanted to serve the Princess and the kingdom, we had to work alongside Elkington.

“I told him that I wasn’t daunted, that I would do anything for the good fight... One way or another, I admitted my knowledge of the dark arts. The next morning, he gave me a staggering amount of Bits, told me to open a shop where I could ply my crafts. I opened up this dark magical store, and my rather unique business boomed. Soon, a mare came to my store at night, offering me a job with Elkington.”

Chausiku sighed. “I never learned the name of that buck, could never find his house after that night. But wherever he is, I want to thank him. Because of his kindness, his charity, a monster such as me now works for Elkington, now fights the good fight.” He hesitated. “And if I have to do dark things for a better future, then by Princess Celestia, I will.” The recording whirred out.

I sat there in thought. He’d said he wasn’t sure if he was working for Elkington, but that was clearly a lie. In fact, that recording raised more questions than it answered. Fighting the good fight? Was that what Elkington thought he was doing? If he thought himself so good, why was he using enervation against Sleepy Oaks? Assuming that was what he was doing. It made some sense, but then why wasn’t Cards or that nice bartender or Dust affected by it? This whole damn country, and this damn city, and that damn Duke! Ugh.

Pushing the thoughts to the side, I walked over to the dead zebra and rifled through his robe’s pockets. My talisman was in there, plus twenty Bits and a strange key. A moment later and I set Dust down on one of the lounge chairs, though her resting body seemed to fight me, her tail and arms still wrapped around parts of me. I picked up the zebra and dragged his body out of the room, setting his back against the interior metal door leading to the enervation chamber. I didn’t want his body to stink up Dust’s sleep.

God, everything was so damn depressing and serious now! It was as if killing bad guys was no longer as hilarious it used to be, so I resolved myself to putting the zebra into various silly positions until I was less depressed by everything. It turned out that with the right bodily cuts and creative bending, you could totally make it look like Chausiku was Big’s tiny, tiny prostitute wench. I was just about to go upstairs, get the rest of the dead bodies plus that one living guy, then bring them down here in an attempt to make it look like they were playing strip poker when I realized that, no, that would just be creepy.

So, I trudged down the hallway and checked that one door I hadn’t gone through. Locked. Of course, I just pulled out the zebra’s key and it opened the door without a problem. The other side reminded me of a metro tunnel, only instead of where the train tracks should have been, there was only a dark river of sewage flowing by. I gawked at it. “Oh my God, such absurdly spacious sewers actually exist outside the confines of an uncreative Spielmeister’s mind!”

I explored around the dark platform but found no way out but through the way I came. I entered back into the basement because I’d be damned if I had any more adventures in any more goddamn sewers. I didn’t care if Princess Celestia was trapped down here, willing to marry any proud stallion who rescued her and thus make him a sexy Prince of Equestria, I was not going into those sewers. Plus, I was pretty sure Celestia didn’t put out, especially not for stallions that caught dysentery from all the raw sewage they had to wade through to save her life. Also, elves. There were probably elves or something in these sewers because the stupid Spielmeister liked elves, and I hated elves. Rule #32 of adventuring: Kill all the elves. Well, no, rule #32 for me was “I cannot buy any animal in groups of 100 or over”.

“What the hell am I thinking about?” I said, closing the sewer door behind me. “I think I need pills or something.” I sighed, “I already miss Paladin Cards. Wonder what’s she up to now?” I trotted up the stairs to the little cigar lounge and found Dust asleep on the soft chair. I went up to her and knelt. “I hope you get better soon, because I already killed the one person I’d punish for hurting you. Or two persons, I’m not really sure what the correct pronoun to use for conjoined twins is, you see.” There’s still Elkington.

Her bloodshot orange eyes creaked open. “Hey there, GB,” Dust said, reaching out a hoof for me. She grabbed my cheek and smiled. “Why does my head hurt?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

“Oh... okay.”

I thought for a moment. “Dust, how often does Equestria experience multiple murders in dark magic shops?”

“I don’t think ever,” she mumbled.

“Would you like an idea for a great story?”

Her eyes perked up. “Yeah.”

“Report on the story of the strange killings in a dark magic shop here in Songnam. Report on the strange dark labs he had underneath the building, the dark purposes. Report that nopony knows who the killer was, but that the killer had slain a zebra working with the dark arts. Question who this killer was, their intent, if they’re a hero or a monster.”

“That’s...” She paused for a moment. “That’s freakin’ brilliant.”

“You wanted a story, Dust. This isn’t the story, but it’s a story, hmm? One that’ll surely put you in the spotlight.” She smiled, then reached out for me. “Um, something up?”

“I don’t like it here,” she said, looking out the windows and into the basement room beyond. “I wanna go back to the hotel room. Please, can you help me up?”

I playfully rolled my eyes. “Oh, I’ll do you one better,” I said, picking her up and putting her onto my back. She hugged my shoulder, tightening her legs against my sides. Her tail swayed around my backside as if searching for something. Before leaving, I grabbed the Voixson labeled ‘Order #321’, figuring I’d listen to it back at the hotel room.

“Hey, GB,” she yawned as I trotted out of the lounge, “where’s your tail? Isn’t it uncomfortable to jam it under all that clothing? Like, doesn’t it chafe?”

“Maybe, but I don’t have a tail,” I chuckled.

“What?” she gasped. “How is that—”

“We’re big on self-mutilation over in Teutschland, I suppose. In order to fight better, I had my tail removed. They do it at the end of any law enforcement or military training. After all, the tail is easily grabbed, so if you get rid of it, you get rid of a potentially critical weakness.” I recalled how I’d grabbed Cards’ tail when she tried to run away from me back in that museum. That was a perfect example of why I had no tail, that no one could do that to me. Dust didn’t reply after that, just sort of buried her face in my neck. Before I was even out of the basement, I heard her let out a cute little snore.

As I reached the storefront, I recalled the stallion in the closet. He was a loose end, he could talk, had certainly heard me use Lightning Dust’s name. I couldn’t let him live. Pulling out my knife I crept to the door, trying not to wake Dust. She wouldn't approve of this, I had no doubts, but if she wanted a good story, she couldn’t have any survivors that’d question it.

“S-somepony here to help me?” the buck asked as I opened the closet door. His face was stained with tears, and he’d somehow managed to arrange his friends’ bodies into respectable positions.

“Yes,” I said, slashing his jugular, and hot blood spurted across my emotionless face. “You can call me Herr Sandmann, and I bring you a dream.” Just like that, the loose end was tied. Dust would get her story, her reward for helping and trusting me so far. She would be happy. I would be happy. Cards would probably be depressed because she’s kind of a Debbie Downer like that. Everything would work out in the end.

I looked at the buck’s dead, muscular body. It did look like they were all taking some sort of steroids, at least a little bit. I frowned hard. If they all took steroids, that meant they probably had tiny penises. On the other side of things, I had never once taken any performance enhancing or muscle-building drugs... Did that mean that, by means of me being utterly unremarkable, I now had a titanic unit by Equestrian standards? Something about that thought made my skin crawl, so I closed the closet and walked out the front door. I had the mental image of a mare seeing me naked and screaming in horror, “It’s a monster!” To which I replied, “No, it’s not—that’s how they’re supposed to look!” I shook my head to get rid of the image.

Then I remembered that everypony was naked here, and that I could actually check my theory just by looking down at them. However, after brutally killing them, checking the size of their... masculinity seemed decidedly like a dick move, no pun intended. Oh, and it was also creepy of me. Instead, I wiped the blood off my face, quietly thanked the stallion for his sacrifice which would improve Dust’s live, and left the zebras’ ghetto.


|— ☩ —|


“Île-de-Nippun,” I muttered to myself, staring at the strange characters upon a little wooden building. They looked like the children of what happened when hieroglyphics got laid by a tic-tac-toe board. Night sky above me, I made sure to hide my Iron Cross under my shirt. A garden with patches of bamboo flanked the little path leading up to the building, I noticed as a little pale-blue mare opened the sliding wooden door and stepped out.

She turned from the door, saw me, and gasped. Not only was she a bit short, her eyes were... different in shape than my own, a trait evolved to help in an environment far, far from here. There was no doubt in my mind—she was eine Nippönische. “Oh, hello there, stranger,” she said in a warm but vaguely cautious tone. “Can I help you?”

“Nippunais, correct?” I prodded, the sleeping pegasus on my bad moaning softly.

The little mare nodded. “That is what I am, correct. Are... are you looking for my father?”

Behind me, the dark streets of the Île-de-Nippun felt almost abandoned. Songnam was falling asleep, readying for the next day of partying. “I heard he was something of a sage, the one who knows the legends from a hundred years ago, and that this was place was a kind of museum. I found myself curious and, despite the hour, was wondering if I could learn anything of those legends. If not, that is fine.” I walked here for nothing! “I simply got lost and arrived here late.”

She relaxed slightly. “Well, Father is asleep, but—” she hesitated “—but I am his apprentice. I was just about to water the garden, since I forgot to earlier, but I suppose I know the stories as well as he.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ayame.” She bowed her head. “And yours?”

“Folks call me that government boy, so you can just call me Government Boy.” I smiled. “Oh, and ignore the lady on my back. She got tired on the way here, so I offered to carry her.” I approached Ayame.

“Yes, and so you wanted to hear the stories?”

I wanted to understand how you, the losing side of that war, see things. “How did your people get to Equestria? You’re clearly not natives.”

Ayame magically picked up a watering can, gesturing me to follow as she went about her gardens. “It was about a hundred years ago, longer than anypony here can remember,” she said, watering a bed of flowers. Does it help at all to water flowers at night? “We came from boats fleeing a great monster the likes of which is only perhaps rivaled by Nightmare Moon, like many other peoples who fled the East and came here during that great war. There were only mares and foals on our boats, because the great monster executed all males. They traversed past aquatic beasts, pirates, and the vast ocean before crashing into Equestria, where the sun herself took us in, and so have we been ever since.”

“Executed all the males?” I asked, following her down the little garden path.

She needed. “Our stallions were often the ones who fought the great evil, our mares staying home and keeping the nation running.” Ayame looked at me with an almost sad look. “You know, our people used to have an emperor.”

“What happened?” Ooh! I loved this part of history class.

“The great monster himself took the entire imperial family and brutally, publicly tortured them to death for so-called ‘crimes against life’.” She sighed. “The last emperor himself helped us flee. He—alongside what was left of the imperial army, mostly our great-grandfathers—defended us after the Night of Tears. They paid in blood to allow us to escape, for the Legion of the North does not know defeat, does not know mercy.”

I fought the urge to smile. “Night of Tears?”

Ayama shuddered slightly. “Our homeland of Nippun is set on a series of large islands. We had never known a foreign threat because of that. That is, until the great monster and his Legion of the North came. In a single night, they ended thousands of years of peace and prosperity. In a single night, the Legion of the North invaded Nippun.” She looked at me. “They slaughtered mothers and fathers without hesitation, enslaving any child they deemed young enough, killing those too old to serve them. The great monster rained liquid fire from the sky, burned our homes. With an impossible speed, they stormed across our home islands, murdering any they saw. The earth was stained red, the rivers drowned in blood. That was the Night of Tears, because our nation was butchered to death in but a night. Yet the great monster wasn’t fast enough to stop my ancestors from fleeing, though he was fast enough to slay our emperor and great-grandfathers.” Ayama shook her head and went back to watering her flowers. “There is a reason why the sun herself does not bother with the affairs of the East—because it is ruled by monsters that would only hurt good ponies.”

“You speak often of a great monster. Who or what was this?” I asked. Strange how they view us literally coming in and saving the world from Nippön’s tyrant monarchs whose armies raped and pillaged peoples on two different continents.

“We call him... Vikuta, the Devourer of Souls. His symbols are the black falcon and this strange black... cross. He was the greatest of monsters. If not for the mercy of Princess Celestia and the braveness of my ancestors, we would be dead and—why are you smiling?”

“Because you tell the story so well, Fräulein,” I purred, and she went pale. “And it’s not Vikuta, his name was, in Equestrian, King Viktor. Those from whom you’ve learned your legends were rather biased, you see,” I said, pulling out my Iron Cross. Her jaw dropped, her knees shaking. “And they weren’t the ‘Legion of the North’; our army is ‘die Mobile Infanterie’, the direct translation being the ‘Mobile Infantry’.”

“You-you-you-you’re one of them... Impossible!”

“Impossible? No. Highly implausible? Perhaps. See, I’m a Teutscher, and that means I’m the good guy. We slaughter those who would do evil, such as your ancestors. We came in, stopped evil, and also got rid of your super annoying lettering system. I mean, really, I’m all for cultural relativism and such, but even I have to admit that your system of writing was just laughably inferior to an alphabet. That’s why if you go to Nippön today, you’ll find only proper alphabetical characters. Also, lots of teutschen military bases, because even after pretty much purging half your nation’s population and destroying your entire religion, replacing it with our own faith, we still don’t trust you. Plus, naval bases in Nippön allow us to project our power throughout the South Seas.”

She gawked at me, lips quivering me. Ayame had already dropped her watering can.

“Nippön’s a nice place, really, even if the people there are still brutally, brutally terrified of us Teutschen. I mean, I can’t blame them. Some historians have compared what Viktor did to Nippön to spanking a baby with an axe.” I laughed at that mental image. “Still, it was the right thing to do.” I tipped my hat and hid my cross. “Dankeschön, Frau. Your recounting of your history was most fascinating. Oh, and you can’t prove I was here, no one will believe you, and if you tell anypony about me, they’ll think you’re crazy. After all, I am just a ghost.” I pulled out a golden coin and gave it to her. “For your troubles, Frau.” And with that, I stalked off into the night.

As I walked through the streets of the Île-de-Nippun, I found myself dwelling on how not even history was immune to bias. Oh King Viktor Pendergast, greatest of heroes, yet too the so-called Devourer of Souls. Then some drunken mare ran past me and screamed, “I have combined a wrench with a spade! I am a genius!” That was also when I remembered that because I hadn’t been mugged, I owed the voice in my head some money.


|— ☩ —|


I set Lightning Dust down on the hotel room bed. With deft care, I put her head on the pillows and covered her up. As I went to pull away from her, the mare groaned and reached out a hoof. I ignored it as I stepped out into the main room of the suite. The main room was composed of a little kitchen and a small den with a sad-looking couch on it. Aside from the entrance, there were three doorways in this room: one leading to the master hotel bedroom, one leading to a bathroom, and one leading to a smaller bedroom. This suite was clearly meant for a small family, and I supposed that’s why we’d been given it.

I walked over to the couch and poked my head out the window near it. Far below me, I could see a couple swimming in the illuminated pool, flirtatiously splashing one another. I could never see why anyone would do anything romantic in pools: at their cleanest, public pools were filled with piss. Yes, I love you, mare, thus I shall splash you with mildly-toxic, certainly filled-with-urine water! Love me! Stupid young couples in love... I wasn’t bitter or anything because my first foray into romance completely collapsed because I chose my country over the girl, I swear! She was even cool with it, if more than a little creeped out, when I covered my living room with pictures of dead and mutilated victims whenever I got too, too obsessed with solving a case, which was super understanding of her and a totally rare must-have in my line of work. But I didn’t have any problems about how my own actions lost me that relationship. So, no bitterness there. None.

Now, I was bitter over certain things relating to Weihnachten, the Hallowed Night, Teutschland’s precious near-end-of-year celebration. All I wanted for Weihnachten was a goddamn hug from Daddy, but no! Oh, Daddy took me to church that morning, but nothing else... In fact, that was it: as of right now, I was officially blaming my father for everything bad I did. Oh, I killed five people (or six, if Chausiku and Bigs counted as two people) tonight? That was because my father never quite knew how to deal with single fatherhood, not for, you know, any sensible reason.

That’s stupid. You’re stupid.

“Shut up, you’re not real,” I sighed as I reclined onto the couch. If Mom were alive today, what would she have said about all of this? Probably ‘Help! Help! Get me out of this coffin!’ And then she’d suffocate to death because coffins don’t have much air in them. Then she’d come back to life again, only to die again. And that’d happen for a few more times until she slowly went insane. Then I’d dig up her body and say, ‘Mom, I’ve come to—’ And then she’d bite my neck because her insanity turned her into a crazy zombie-lady. Four painful years of the rapy later and she’d be capable of talking at a four-year-old’s level, but she’d never get over the post-traumatic stress disorder and would keep biting me every time I got near her. Also, my father would somehow find a way to choke to death on a spoon, just like Celestia was probably doing right now.

I rubbed my eyes and face. “Wonder if Paladin Cards is doing alright,” I muttered, looking at my legs. They still stung, so I dragged myself to the floor, my back to the master bedroom as I removed my duster and took off my bloodied shirt and ripped shorts. The bandages were sullen with blood and specks of grime. I sat there in my underwear, wondering whether or not I should remove the bandages and replace them with fresh, new ones. Ultimately, I decided that I should, and in a few minutes I had.

“Shorts are ruined,” I muttered. After a thought, I pulled out the Voixson from earlier, set it on a little table, then collapsed down onto the couch. I just laid there as I thought about tonight. I had stopped dark magic that seemed important to the Duke, then learned that there were Nippönische in Equestria, ones that never were properly helped by the Reich. While the Nippönishe stuff probably wouldn’t ever help me, I liked knowing it. It made me feel like a right proper explorer. Now, all I had to do was figure out just what the hell Elkington was doing messing around with Miasmatischen Trübung.

Sighing, I hit play and let Shipment Order # 321 come to life. Maybe it’d help me do... something. I didn’t know. The Voixson crackled to life. “Yes, the request,” the recorded stallion said, and my ear perked up.

“You really want such dark charms?” Chausiku asked.

The stallion hesitated. “Yes, in the form of earrings. I need to be able to use them in case something goes wrong, so some sort of remote activation before they are removed by the wearer would be nice.”

“I could make so that if removed without your approval, they’d also go off.” Chausiku sounded confident to me. Not so confident now that I put your dead body into a sexually compromising position, huh?! “Something of a deadpony’s trigger, too. Once you activate it, it’ll be a timed charge. Unless you set it otherwise, the only thing to make it go off earlier would be if they were removed. Would that be satisfying to you, my friend?”

“Yes, just so long as they’ll help me.”

“Don’t worry,” Chausiku chuckled, “it’ll be just as effective as holding a sword to the mare’s neck. I hope that you get this evil mare and show her what for.”

The stallion nervously chuckled back. “Yes, for we must do our part to fight the good fight.” The recording whirred to death.

I sat there for a few seconds. I sat up, I looked at the Voixson, my ear twitched, and a little sense of horror welled up in my gut. That voice... it had to be Social Grace’s voice. Those earrings he wanted must have been meant for Cards, one way or the other. Of course, because no one could possibly like Cards, she was too... Cards-y. While it raised questions such as “Were they meant for Cards specifically, or just for any girl he needed?” I figured it was the second one, since we hadn’t been in Songnam long enough to attract any real attention. Social Grace had to be evil, and that meant one thing and one thing only, a meaning that demanded vengeance.

The waffles had lied to me!