//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3: In Which The Term "Economic Depression" Takes On A New Meaning 
// Story: Breaking Bricks 
// by Aquaman 
//------------------------------//


Chapter 3: In Which The Term "Economic Depression" Takes On A New Meaning


I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: being a private investigator isn't really as exciting as it's cracked up to be. I guess ponies look at us like they do knights and spies and black-bearded pirate captains: as dangerous, devil-may-care mavericks, riding by the hairs of their tails and living life on the edge. I've never really figured out whether I'm the exception or the rule when it comes to PIs, but regardless it's safe to say that I'm falling down on the job as far as keeping up that image is concerned. "Devil-may-care", I've got covered; "dangerous", not so much.

Mostly, what I spend my days doing is thinking. Usually, it's about important things, like what I'm going to have for dinner or where I left my good umbrella or why the hell Poseidon decided to give the equine race nice, long, luxurious backs and little stubby hooves that were too short to scratch them where they itched. Occasionally, I thought about my cases, the things I was presumably paid to think really, really hard about. Very rarely did I ever think about why I even took a case at all. I guess today was just one of those days too, though, because I was sure as salt thinking about that now.

I suppose "thinking" wasn't the most appropriate term for what I was doing. "Thinking" usually implied progress; "thinking" meant that I was deeply considering every aspect of this new development in my life and finding insightful solutions to practical problems, or whatever it was the Home Ec teacher in junior high had told us about decision-making. A slightly better word was "reflecting"; the ideal one was "vegetating". Just sort of sitting there, staring off into space, slowly coming around to realizing that I'd just taken on a job where a little filly's life hung in the balance. A relatively simple concept, sure, but it felt thick as molasses and about as heavy while I was letting it trickle through my brain.

It's funny how sometimes your brain is smarter than you are. It wasn't my brain that got me into this situation; my brain had been that little voice in the back of my mind that had threatened to castrate me with a diamond-spiked mace if I even thought about saying yes to this case. I guess that's because the brain doesn't feel guilt, or sympathy, or fear. That's all the heart and the stomach and, on a really bad day, the bowels. What the brain does feel, though, is the sensation of having absolutely no clue what to do next. My brain has something of a talent for that, if you want to know the truth.

Gradually, the urge to get up and do something began to solidify in my stomach as a hot, tingly ball of what felt a lot like lead. I tend to get impulsive when I'm confused, drunk, or otherwise mentally incapacitated, so about fifteen minutes after Valencia left, I swung my forehooves off my desk and trotted to the door, breaking my stride only to grab the envelope she had left behind. At least I had a couple wits still bouncing around someplace upstairs. And if all that covered was the knowledge that money equaled food and sleep and cold, frosty drinks that made all the bad, scary things go away between four and six P.M., I could live with that.

I nosed the door open and walked face-first into a blast of icy September wind, which helped to clear my head more than I would've expected. The shock was only enough to buy me a few seconds of coherence, but that was enough time for me to remember a little white piece of paper with big red letters on it tacked to the door of my apartment. I'd been evicted not even two hours ago because I'd barely been bringing in enough cash to keep myself from starving, let alone to keep the landlord happy. But as I shut my eyes against the breeze and flattered my ears against my skull, I remembered something else: as of twenty minutes ago, I had another little piece of paper in my saddlebag, one worth about ten times what I usually made in a month. Enough to pay my rent for the next twenty months. Probably enough to just buy the whole apartment straight up. I'm not entirely sure about this, but in most circles I believe that's what they call a godsend. And all I had to do to earn it was find one little foal. Actually, if you thought about it, I didn't even have to do that. Another thing worth saying twice: perspective is a wonderful thing.

It was like I hadn't quite woken up yet that morning, and now I'd finally managed to get my hooves on a double shot of espresso. I had my life back under control again, and a whole plan for the day began to shape up as I started walking again. Step One: find a bank. Step Two: get money out of said bank. Step Three: spend said money, which would then lead into Step Four: sleep in my own bed that night. Forget what the old wives said; I was about to buy me some freaking happiness. And it felt great.

I pulled the bank statement back out of my bag just to look at it one more time, and this time I finally let out the stupidly wide grin I'd had to hold back while Valencia was watching. Pay to the order of Brick Breaker. Beautiful words. Poetic, even. If I could carry a tune, I would've sang it: pay to the order of Brick Breaker, pay to the order of me. 

And what was that at the top of the page there? An address for the central branch of Equestrian First National Bank, that's what. An address that just so happened to be right smack in the middle of Bell Street, which just so happened to be the next street over from Halter. "Godsend" didn't even cover this anymore. I wasn't just hired for this case, I was meant for it. I was ready, I was able, I was probably still hung over and just a touch on the loopy side now, but right now was not the time to be worried about that. That time would come later, during the inevitable moment when the mental espresso wore out and the other horseshoe dropped. Right now, it was time to go to the bank. My grin snuck back onto my lips again, even wider and stupider than before.

"This is insane," I whispered to myself, right before I turned the corner and headed off to the heart of Manehattan with my head held high and my hooves practically buzzing with whatever it was that was jetting through down my spine and leaking out onto my face. I felt free. I felt wealthy. I felt invincible, baby.

That feeling lasted about ten minutes. But in retrospect, that was a pretty awesome ten minutes.

• • •

When you're in a big city, there are a lot of things about it that any idiot can see. Ask anypony the right questions, and they'll always give you the same answers. What size are the buildings? Big. How packed are the sidewalks? Very. How many licks does it take to get to the peppermint center of a Party Pop? Who the hay wants to know?

But when you live in one for a while, especially one as big as Manehattan, you start to notice other things that the Corncob Family visiting from Hitchita probably won't pick up on. Usually, it's little things, like how the hot dog vendor on Fourth and Trotsdale likes to drop a pinch of parsley into the veggie grinder on Saturdays, or how it's not only possible but fully expected of you to walk from one end of the city to the other without ever making eye contact with anypony. Stick around for long enough, though, and eventually the picture widens, and you see one single big thing that you can't believe nopony else ever brought up before. I had that moment a year and a half ago, after I took a wrong turn about an hour after midnight and found myself in the kind of place thieves and muggers tell their foals about to scare them into staying in bed at night, and what I realized then was this: different parts of the city say different things to you when you're walking into them.

For example, the lovely district I found myself strolling through on that eventful night a year and a half ago said, "Hello, Brick. Ponies call me the Broncs, and I call you dinner." Meanwhile, a more pleasant locale like Hoofington Heights is a bit more succinct: "Why, hello there, young fella! Come on in, take a load off, and mind your hooves on the new carpet, won't you, dearie?" Every part of town has its own little slice of personality it just can't wait to share with you, and most of them fall somewhere close to one of those two extremes. The neighborhood where I live, Sugarcube Hill, seems to be right in the middle as far as I can tell. It's not openly hostile at first glance, but after a while you realize that's only because it doesn't particularly care that you're there in the first place. Kind of as if it's saying, "Yes, there you are. I see you. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. Keep walking, bub." Everypony has their own agenda, and that suits them all just fine. Suits me fine, too. A lot of things are simpler when you're just a face in the background, and investigating is definitely one of them.

The district I was walking into now, though, was unlike any other I'd ever passed through. It didn't just say something; it had a voice all its own, one that commanded attention and made damn sure you followed orders when it did. It was the Manehattan financial district, and every cobblestone and every brick in it said quite distinctly, "I am bigger than you, I am richer than you, and I am better than you. And if you'd care to still have your head attached to your shoulders come the morning tomorrow, you'd do well not to forget it, sir." I'd never really spent any time in this area before, and with good reason: I was the only pony in sight who wasn't practically glowing with jewelry.

Although the ponies in this part of town loved to coat every square inch of fur they had with all kinds of trinkets and baubles, the gemstones themselves weren't really a symbol of wealth anymore. Today, they were about as common as a good cup of coffee. Take back the clock a hundred years or so, though, and a single diamond could buy you a mansion big enough to house a whole polo team. Ponies made and lost their fortunes on who could find the most rubies and sapphires, and who would dare to search for them where nopony had ever searched before. And eventually, what that led to was one unicorn by the name of Rocky Feller searching a bit too far and stumbling across a spell that could make gemstones grow like weeds straight out of solid rock. Once he woke up the next morning to find a cluster of opals sprouting in his kitchen and realized the disgusting amount of moola he could squeeze out of it, he turned the accidental discovery into a countrywide gemstone empire, and for about six months he was the richest pony Equestria had ever seen.

Then one lovely fall day, Rocky's in-laws got a little too generous with the birthday champagne, and just like that his secret was out. The spell was duplicated, gemstones started cropping up everywhere, and everything pretty much went to shit in a saddlebag. The economy died a magnificent fiery death and took its benefactors down with it, Rocky skipped town in a yacht headed for Bearmuda, and everypony everywhere panicked: anarchy in the streets, brawls in the alleyways, dogs and cats living together, the whole nine yards. They tried to shut down the liquor stores for about three days, and Canterlot nearly burned to the ground.

After a week of frantic negotiations and about ten minutes after she was nearly brained by an emerald-studded horseshoe, Celestia ceased with the pedantics and created the Equestrian bit that we all use today. The stars only know how she did it. The popular story is that she spit out some kind of time-warping spell and set up the whole system while the entire nation was frozen in mid-riot. The official story from Celestia was that those sorts of rumors were exactly what got us in this situation in the first place, and that fiddling with the fabric of space and time was never a good idea and she would never condone it, and for the record she doesn't just spit out the spells that fix all the thousands of things you little lunatics have to blow up into big, gigantic-

Apparently, the press conference ended abruptly at that point after Celestia visibly bit her tongue and then teleported out of the room. Being a monarch is stressful sometimes, I guess.

In any case, things got back to normal surprisingly quickly after that. The old elite fell out of favor and spread out across the countryside to try—and mostly fail—to rebuild, and the savvy ponies who were quick enough to get in on the ground floor of the new financial market stepped right into the gilded horseshoes they left behind. After twenty years, the capital of Equestria might as well have been Manehattan for all the banks and treasuries centered there, and for all the absolutely filthy rich banking families that called it home. Eighty years later, the picture was mostly the same, save for the addition of one crimson-haired, slightly disheveled earth pony without so much as a garnet to his name, who stuck out much in the same way a pony with an extra head would. Oddly enough, the filthy rich banking families of Manehattan aren't known for their cordiality. After spending a few minutes walking among them with their eyes all locked on my flank the whole way, I realized that they weren't very good with subtlety either. By the time I finally reached Equestrian First National, I'm pretty sure there wasn't a single pony left in Rocky Feller Plaza who hadn't silently judged me for everything under the sun.

I stood outside the front steps of the bank and craned my neck up to where the EFN corporate headquarters tapered off somewhere around Saturn. The front half of the bank was a relic from an older time: a short flight of steps led up to a row of polished granite columns, each one as thick around as a redwood and standing twenty feet tall under a regal domed roof. It was an image that didn't suggest "bank" so much as define it; ponies put their whole lives into this place, and it was more than happy to keep an eye out for them.

Conversely, the back half was the new generation's assurance that accessibility just wasn't gonna cut it anymore. Not even ten feet behind the rotunda in the front rose sixty stories of glass, steel, and the very best in modern magical engineering. At least, I liked to think that was what made it look like the building leaned out over you when you stood right under it. Sometimes, life's a lot simpler when you can just blame an evil sorcerer or something for all the things that bother you. Or, in this case, just make you wish you'd just stayed in bed this morning.

"Come on, Brick," I hissed at myself without looking down. "It's just a building. It's just a bank."

Right. Just a bank. When was the last time I'd even been in a bank? Probably around the time I took two grand off a filthy rich loan shark in a horseshoes game eight months ago, when it took me twenty minutes to put the money away and about two weeks to burn it all away. And that hadn't been a bank so much as a cardboard box shoved in a hole in the drywall behind my bed. I'm not really all that good with finances, to be honest.

Yeah. Like that's really the only thing I'm worried about right now.

I blinked hard, then turned my gaze back down towards the main entrance of the bank. Okay, deep breath, Brick. You have money here. You have power here. You belong here. No, you moron, of course you don't. But they don't know that, do they? And they don't need to. So chin up, neck straight, chest out, and keep it cool. Money, power, control. Swagger. You have swagger, Brick.

Lord Poseidon in Heaven, I thought for the second time that day. And then I set my jaw, sucked in a deep breath, and marched up the steps and into the bank.

I hardly even looked around once I got inside, though I could feel the eyes of the other ponies in the foyer on me as much as I could feel every molecule of air around me slamming into my skin at something close to terminal velocity. My own eyes, meanwhile, stayed zeroed in on the row of windows lining the back wall. That was my destination; everything else was just scenery. Everything else was just things that weren't as important as me, things that weren't as important as Brick Breaker, the new big shot in this town.

Keep walking. Don't look around. Don't slow down. Swagger. Swagger swagger swagger swagger horseapplesonacrapsandwich swagger.

I was halfway across the foyer now, a strange gravelly noise ringing in my ears. 

Keep walking. 

It disappeared for a moment, then came again ten paces later. 

You got this. 

This time, it was even louder than before. 

Piece'a cake.

What the hell even was that noise? Gears gearing? Someone clearing their throat? 

No, don't think about it. Ignore it. You're almost there. Almo-

"Sir!"

"What?" I nearly screamed as I spun around to face the scowling brown unicorn behind me, who was snappily dressed in a suit coat and tie and whose echoing shout had been about an octave short of putting me in traction. Add to the list of things I wasn't good at: management of stress.

"Exactly where do you think you're going?" he asked in a tone that made me feel like a little colt caught stealing from the cookie jar. Oh, no you didn't, the lingering vestiges of my swagger said.

"What's it to ya?" I almost said, right before the rest of my brain realized what it had been missing this whole time. Namely, the fact that there was a nice, neat, orderly line of ponies snaking back and forth across the left side of the room that ended up at the row of tellers and began about ten feet in front of the unicorn stallion. Now he was glaring at me too, as were a few of the ponies in line. The ponies who I'd just about skipped right on past while the impulsive part of my brain had had full control over my body.

"Well?" the unicorn said.

Still had full control over my body, actually. "I know what I'm doing," I snapped back, self-restraint utterly abandoned in the panic of the moment. "I'm…

Swagger.

"I'm a preferred customer." Stars above, what in the holy hell are you doing?, my self-restraint asked during the brief moment when it decided to grow a pair and show up for roll call. For lack of any better ideas, I kept talking anyway. "Yeah, I'm a frickin' gold member over here," I said. "So just…cool it, all right, buddy?"

I think everyone in the room was surprised when the unicorn's eyebrows shot up. "You don't say?" he gasped. "My apologies, good sir. If I had only known, I never would've spoken."

I spent a moment or two glancing frantically around for an escape route before I fully understood that I might very well have just bullshitted my way out of this. "I…yeah," I finally stuttered. "Yeah, I'll…all right, then. I'll forgive you this time, I gue-"

"I mean, think of all the special privileges a gold member receives!" the unicorn continued, sounding like a foal who'd just discovered that his mom really was the Tooth Fairy.

"Yeah, great, so I'm just gonna…"

"The rewards, the benefits, the desperate jealousy of the stallions and burning desire of the mares…"

He's screwing with you, Brick.

"And of course, who could forget the best part of all…"

"You're screwing with me, aren't you?" I said.

"…the honor, no, the privilege, of standing in line with all us common folk and gracing us with the immeasurable gift of your presence," the unicorn finished in a deadpan, his glare back to stay this time. Somewhere behind me, a mare snickered.

"Yeah," I muttered. "All right, look, I don't know any of you and I'm in kind of a hurry…"

"Wonderful!" Freddy Flankhole exclaimed, every syllable soaked through with derision. "Then by all means, you may have the spot in front of me."

Now I really had a dilemma. Exactly half of me wanted to just mumble some apology and shuffle on over into line, and the other half wanted to spout some corny one-liner before bucking this guy straight to the moon. One would be the submissive, wimpy, rational thing to do, and the other would be freaking awesome and probably enough to get me arrested. I chewed on my lip for a second or two, then looked the unicorn straight in the eye and made my decision.

Forty-five minutes later, I was starting to wish I'd just gone ahead and went with the one that involved jail time. At least then I could've stood around waiting forever all by myself.

"Next pony, please," the teller all the way over on the left, a matronly pink earth mare with a sky-blue mane and matching spectacles perched on her nose, called out.

"After you," offered Freddy, with what he must've known was an infuriating sneer. I mouthed my thanks with a toothy grin, and fully resisted the urge to use his skull as a kickball.

"Name?" the mare behind the desk asked almost before I got all the way over to her.

"Brick Breaker," I replied, with one eye still on today's entry on my personal list of ponies I wouldn't mind banishing to Neptune for a millennium or two. Still smirking at me from his place back in line, of course.

"Account number?"

"I…just a sec."

The teller pursed her lips, but didn't say anything as I swung my saddlebag around to my front and started digging around for Valencia's letter. The pony at the window to my left finished up as I rifled through old receipts and what looked to be either a fossilized half of a bagel or a very oddly shaped rock, and who should take his place but Sir Snobby himself, my unicorn friend I'd just spent almost an hour simmering in front of. I found the envelope with the bank statement in it just as he reached the window, and I couldn't help but watch him out of the corner of my eye as I dropped it in front of my teller.

"Birthday gift?" he chuckled.

"Gratuity," I growled back. "Your mother's been very generous lately." 

Some ponies might tell me it was wrong to take so much pleasure from seeing the unicorn grit his teeth and shoot me a harrowingly dirty look. Those ponies can stick it where Celestia's sun don't shine. "Brick Breaker, was it?" my teller asked after scanning the bank statement I'd given her.

"It was," I replied airily. She glanced down at the paper again and then back up at me with more than a little sarcasm, but I was suddenly in such a good mood that I hardly even noticed. As she asked me to wait for a moment and then trotted away to figure out something-or-other, I craned my head casually back and flawlessly mimicked the smirk my companion had been wearing just a moment before.

"Payment, actually," I told him. "From the Orange family. Y'know, one of the richest, most powerful families in all of Equestria? You've probably heard of them."

After a moment, the unicorn stallion smiled back. "Indeed," he murmured before turning to face his own teller, who had been waiting patiently for him the whole time. "Afternoon, George," he said, pushing an envelope identical to mine under the window.

"Good afternoon, sir," his teller replied as he peered inside only briefly, as if he already knew exactly what he'd see in it. "Another deposit?"

The unicorn's eyes flicked over to me for a moment, then back at the teller. "As a matter of fact, I'll take it now, if you don't mind," he said. "In cash, please." He turned to me again as the teller's brow shot up. I took a mint from the dispenser on the counter and ignored him.

"All of it, sir?" the teller asked hesitantly.

"Yes, thank you, George," the unicorn replied without looking at him, a simpering smile starting to creep onto his face. I rolled my mint onto my back of my tongue and shot back a smirk on my own. Not this time, buddy, I told him inside my head.

The unicorn's teller stared at the both of us for a bit, and then shrugged. "So be it," he said crisply. "One hundred thousand bits in cash for Mr. Neighman."

Whatever I had to say about that was lost thanks to an untimely incident involving a peppermint candy suddenly lodging itself in the back of my throat, during which I did a very good impersonation of a pony trying to cough out his small intestine in full view of the good patrons of Equestrian First National. Mr. Neighman watched the whole time without even the decency to laugh openly, but I wasn't really focusing on him at the time. Mostly, I was occupied with wondering how in the strawberry-scented hell it was even legal to make a withdrawal that big from any kind of normal bank, and to a lesser extent with taking comfort in realizing that I'd probably pass out before I could come up with a valid reason. And then somewhere in there was the fact that I was seriously about to choke to death on a goddamn bank mint. Funny what the mind prioritizes sometimes.

After a few seconds of wheezing, hacking, and a general mishmash of noises one might expect to hear from a hemorrhaging water buffalo, out popped the mint onto the now slightly less polished floor, no thanks at all to the virtual horde of ponies behind me who did a fantastic job standing there and watching me suffocate. I watched the mint as it skittered away and came to a stop between a sea-green mare's pedicured front hooves, then looked up at Neighman, whose face was completely inoffensive save for the one part that started around his chin and stretched up to just above his ears. I remember that part being the one I thought would look very nice mounted on the wall over my dresser.

"Curiously strong, aren't they?" I coughed with as much dignity as I could manage, which was kind of a hilarious concept even on days where I wasn't saying it directly after my first ever near-death-by-candy experience. Neighman pulled his lips back into a bemused look and nodded slowly, then turned back to his teller, whose eyes were wide behind the generously stuffed manila envelope he was holding in his teeth.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said, his horn glowing softly as he signed his name on something and levitated the envelope out of the teller's grasp. Before he dropped it into his chest pocket, he let it hang in the air in front of me for a bit.

"Salary," he said. "Monthly, actually. Courtesy of Neighman Brothers Holdings. Biggest investment bank in Equestria? I'm sure you've heard of it."

Yes, I had heard of it. Everypony within five hundred miles had heard of it. I had even seen it outside this bank, spelled out in glinting gold letters right under the Equestrian First National Bank sign: "Subsidiary of Neighman Brothers Inc." And here I was, just about ready to throw down with the freaking CEO. For the first time in my life, I actually regretted choosing not to lie on the couch and starve to death.

"Good day to you," Mr. Leighman said with one last nod before turning on his hoof and striding regally away, and this time he didn't even bother to try to hide the grin on his face. Well, that was just fine by me. Chasing after him would've just shredded up the last little morsel of dignity I was imagining I still possessed somewhere, and in any case beating the ever-loving piss out of him would've probably just lead to me discovering that he had a double black belt in jujitsu or a bodyguard the size of the Liberty Mare or the ability to set ponies on fire with his mind. I'm pretty sure the air I was sucking down like a five-bit wine cooler hadn't hit my brain by then, so I wasn't ruling anything out just yet.

"What're you lookin' at?" I muttered in the general direction of the other customers, all of whom were quite busy looking at the flowery designs carved into the ceiling and not at me. Make that two things I was one-hundred-percent okay with. Maybe if I didn't look at them, they'd disappear too.

"Sorry about that," somepony sighed. I forced my head up and saw that my teller was back. "Just needed to clear up some procedural things. But in any case, everything's ready now. Your current balance is thirty thousand bits on the nose. Would you like to make a withdrawal?"

"Why not?" I sighed back.

"Okay, then. How much would you like?"

In the distance, the sound of hooves and wheels clattering against cobblestone reverberated into the bank for just a moment. Mr. Neighman had left the building. And I was still here, staring at the biggest paycheck of my life and realizing it meant precisely jack to everyone in attendance. How much did I want? How much did I really even freaking have?

"Sir?" the teller started to say before I cut her off.

"Just drain the damn thing," I told her. The teller gave me the kind of look that I could tell was just a more polite substitute for what she really wanted to say, but whatever she was thinking, I never heard it. Two minutes and a couple forms later, I had a manila folder just like Leighman's, except mine only had six packs of crisp fifty one-hundred-bit bills. Y'know, instead of twenty.

"Have a nice day," the teller said to me, and at least they paid her enough to act like she meant it. It didn't much matter either way to me by then, though. I was already done with interpersonal communication for the day, and possibly for the next ten years or so. But nopony was going to look me in the eye and tell me that wasn't justified, because this case had officially passed the threshold of "shit I make it a practice to deal with at some point" a long time ago, and everything that happened after that was just another nail that I'd have to pry out of its coffin someday if I ever wanted that second half of my payment. As in, the half that would make the whole experience worth about as much as a month of board meetings and dinner parties for the more well-off members of society.

As I finally escaped the aristocratic jungle inside the bank and reentered the concrete one outside, I found myself staring morosely at the crinkled corner of the envelope poking out of my saddlebag. What the hell's wrong with you?, I asked myself. You're loaded, you moron! You've got thirty thousand bits strapped right to your back! The world's your goddamn oyster, Brick!

Yeah. It was, wasn't it? Except my oyster was the runt of the litter. And I could get all the jobs and liquor and drunk, horny mares my loaded little heart desired, and I'd still be playing second fiddle to jerkasses like Neighman. I'd acted like an idiot in front of ponies worth a hundred times more than me. I'd followed my impulses, just like I'd been when I'd taken Valencia's case and when I'd swiped my breakfast from Pony Steve and when I'd spent all the money I managed to scrap together on drinking and partying because I couldn't stand to deal with the rest of my life any longer than I had to, because at the end of the day I still hated being poor. The rest of Equestria could have their hopes and dreams and wishes on rainbows; in Manehattan, you either had money or you wanted it. And I was just now realizing that I was gonna be on the wrong side of that equation for the rest of my freaking life.

Somewhere off in the distance, a old, familiar voice piped up: "Remember, Brick, money can't buy happiness."

"Shut the hell up, Leo," I growled in the back of my throat. And with that, my mind was made up. Little Miss Clementine was just going to have to wait. It was one in the afternoon, my hooves were sore and my head was splitting right around the center, and I was a regular ol' mortal pony with no place to go but anywhere he hadn't just been. I needed peace. I needed someplace quiet. I needed someplace where I felt like somepony gave at least half a crap that I existed.

Mostly, though, I needed a drink. And if that following that impulse was the only good thing that was going to come out of today, then that was just going to have to be good enough.