//------------------------------//
// Chapter 5: Loose Ends 
// Story: Breakdown 
// by McPoodle 
//------------------------------//


Breakdown



Chapter 5: Loose Ends





Day 11: Wagnesday (Halloween), 5:45 PM PDT




“Benjamin?” I asked the pony who was approaching me. “Do you know where your real parents are?”

With a blink, the pony before me switched personalities. And Benjamin the pony sat down hard and started to sniffle. “I...I don’t know,” he choked out.

I sat down and put my arm around him.

“Mr. and Mrs. Castillo said that my parents were called away in the middle of the night,” he explained between sniffs. “That my grandma was dying and they needed to be there. And that the planes wouldn’t let ponies on board. They said they were business friends of my Dad, and that they were going to take me to my parents as soon as they took care of business on the ranch. I don’t know how I could have fallen for something so stupid!” He stamped one hoof at the ground in frustration.

“There, there,” I said gently. “Your life had just turned upside down. And you were probably worried for your grandmother.”

“But that’s not good enough,” Benjamin grumbled. “I was planning to run away, to help Rain Shimmer find his girlfriend, and maybe even go to New York to help the other ponies. And...and I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad to run away from babysitters, compared to running away from my parents, especially after the mean way they kept treating us. But—” (and here the tears started coming back to his eyes) “—all that time I was planning to go on an adventure, Mom and Dad were being kept who knows where, and by now they could get, they could get—”

“Your parents are going to be fine,” I told Benjamin with absolute certainty. I rose to my feet, and got out my cell phone. “If there is one thing the Los Angeles Police Department excels in, it’s finding missing persons. Believe me...I’ve been involved in my fair share of cases.” I shook my head to clear it of memories. “Of course, most of the ones I was involved in were runaways, but the principle still stands.”

The next thing I did was call Officer Wiggum and Miss Minchin in quick succession, to report a kidnapping and begin the process of arranging temporary foster parents for Benjamin.

“But why can’t you take care of us?” Benjamin asked. “Shh, Rain Shimmer,” he added sotto voce, no doubt to the stallion’s assurance that the pair were better off with no adult supervision whatsoever.

“Becoming a foster parent is somewhat arduous process,” I explained to the boy, “and in any case I would not be able to get qualified in less than a day; you need somebody to care for you now.”

“So...Rain Shimmer wants to know if you’re going to just abandon us, now that the humans who hired you turned out to be fakes.”

“He has a point,” I said, dusting myself off as I started walking back to the ranch house. I heard the sound of Benjamin’s hooves slowly following me. I waited until we were nearly at the porch before continuing. “Legally, I have no further obligation over you.” I stopped to look back over my shoulder. “But I intend to see this through. You two could both still use my help, and I’m willing to provide it, at no cost.”

Benjamin looked at me curiously.

I smiled. “Rain Shimmer wants to know what the catch is, right?”

Benjamin nodded.

“This is a big thing, humans and ponies meeting like this,” I said, as I sat down on the porch step in order to be at the pony’s level. “There’s people that oppose it, there’s other people that have thought through a lot of the legal ramifications. Heck, I’ve heard of a few inventors rushing to put out products to help ponies to be able to do the things that humans take for granted, like that artificial hand on TV. But no one’s been thinking about what’s going on, in here.” I punctuated that last bit with a gentle tap of a finger against the pony’s cranium. “This is nothing that you could have possibly prepared for, no matter how imaginative you might be. And the world, this world, could be a very scary place for an unprepared visitor. I think, I hope, that I might be able to help. But to do that, I need your help.”

Rain Shimmer (and it most definitely was Rain Shimmer) looked at me with skepticism.

“Do you have doctor-patient confidentiality back in Equestria?” I asked.

“...Yes,” he replied.

“We have the same thing on Earth,” I said, “and that means that you know I will not try to take advantage of this situation. I will make sure that Benjamin is cared for, I will make sure that every effort is being made to find his parents, and I will do whatever I can to find your Cerulean Sunrise.”

“You...you don’t have to look for Sunrise,” Rain Shimmer said gruffly, “not before you find Benjamin’s parents. I think she can take care of herself for a few more days.”

I gave him an approving smile. “You don’t have to worry, sir. I think I can help Benjamin, and help you at the same time. After all, the tasks I am performing for both of you largely consist of waiting for leads, and then following up on them. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The stallion looked away, at the setting sun, undoubtedly pondering how long all of this was going to take. “Yes,” he finally said between clenched teeth.

“That means, in between everything I’m doing for you, I can also put together the resources to help others in the same situation as you. There’s a lot of confusion that I would like to resolve, answers to questions you had to work through the hard way. For example, when you arrived, who was initially in charge?”

“Benjamin was,” Rain Shimmer answered.

“And did he know that you were in there?”

The stallion shook his head. “I was trapped at first, unable to do anything but watch through my eyes, hear through my ears, as this...stranger controlled my body.” He turned back to look at me, with the first genuine smile I ever saw on him. “But then I began to get glimpses of his mind, got to see his hopes and dreams, and I realized that I could have been a lot worse off than I am.”

“Well there you go,” I said with a smile of my own, “Your case may be typical, or maybe it’s not. But I’m sure the information would be useful to some other newly-arrived pony. What happened after that?”


(% % %)


We spoke for several more minutes, going over Benjamin and Rain Shimmer’s first few days together, from both of their perspectives. Along the way I collected several clues from things said by the two kidnappers to them that suggested that the boy’s parents were being kept somewhere nearby, and that the captives were being consulted at frequent intervals to maintain the “babysitters’” deception.

I also heard a wide variety of curses regarding human stubbornness and stupidity.

I’ll let you guess which one of the pair said them.

Eventually, the police arrived.

I shall skip over the following scene, as it practically writes itself: there’s the fumbling over this being a pony case, the confusion over my being hired under false pretenses, and then there was the biggest red herring of them all (at least in regards to the kidnapping): Discord.

“As far as I’m concerned,” I told Sergeant Lou, “this Discord business is an entirely different charge than the kidnapping. Neither I nor Benjamin ever saw Discord associated with the kidnappers. He just seemed to drop in at random to torture a random pony.” Let me just note how extremely convenient the word “seemed” is. “I hear that he likes doing that.” (I “heard” that based on my viewing of “The Return of Harmony”—I had no idea if he had done that to anybody other than Queen Chrysalis here on Earth.)

Let me try to be clear: I wasn’t defending Discord at that moment, far from it. And my motive was only somewhat self-serving, as I didn’t want my connection to him to be discovered. But mostly it was because I thought it would be a dead end, a waste of valuable time that could be better used to find Benjamin’s parents.

I mean, why would he have kidnapped this one pony? And not even one of the Bearers? It didn’t make any sense.

And as for looking for a deeper connection, at the possibility that Discord was secretly behind PAPA—well that was completely ridiculous. What could he have possibly gained from that alliance? I mean, I know that there’s such a thing as underestimating an adversary, but it’s also possible to dig yourself pretty deeply into a pit lined with your own paranoia if you indulge in overestimating an adversary as well.

Speaking of pits...

“Hey Lou!” Office Eddie called out, “Look what I found at the bottom of this abandoned well!”

You might be making your own Lassie jokes at this point. If you are, then stop—you’d be insulting the collie breed to compare Officer Eddie’s intellect to one of theirs.

“Don’t call me ‘Lou’ on duty,” Lou said as he swatted the back of Eddie’s head with a clipboard. “It’s Sergeant Lou, or just Sergeant.”

“OK, Sergeant,” said Officer Eddie. “But hey, Lou, don’t that look like the kidnappers down there?”

And so they were. I’ll give them this: they had done an awful good job of remaining quiet all this time in hope that they wouldn’t be found. Too bad for them that Officer Eddie had a chewing tobacco habit that his superior disapproved of, and needed someplace inconspicuous to spit his wad.

After being rescued, the Castillos kept rather strictly to their right against self-incrimination, which included revealing nothing about how they had managed to get to the bottom of a six foot well without a rope and without breaking or straining anything on the way down. So either they had PAPA confederates on the ranch who hid them down there and then successfully fled the premises (which makes no sense), or else Discord just stuck them down there so they wouldn’t be in his way.


(% % %)


Anyway, more compression:

After providing our testimony, Benjamin and the Castillos were taken back to the nearest station to be processed—in different police cars of course, and destined for two entirely different kinds of processing. I followed in my Lexus, determined to do everything I could to help Benjamin and Rain Shimmer, as I had been the entire day.

The Jekyll-to-Hyde makeup case on the passenger seat seemed to glare accusingly at me the entire ride.

At the station, there was a good deal of repetition, as our stories were trotted out yet again. (Heh, “trotted”.) Miss Minchin got permission to put Benjamin in the custody of Henry and Alice Mitchell, a couple that had taken care of several teenaged boys in the past. I imagine they thought themselves prepared for anything that age and gender could throw at them.

I didn’t want their job at that moment for all money in the world. I may have been an excellent therapist, but that had nothing whatsoever with being a good parent, or for putting up with Rain Shimmer’s beef with humanity.

Come to think of it, Rain Shimmer’s personality was probably closer to the Mitchells’ usual type of charge than Benjamin’s was.

I made my services available to the two flabbergasted fosters, and perhaps implied that I knew far more about pony psychology than I did.

I had long since sent in my regrets to the organizers of the Halloween party I was supposed to perform at, so I went straight from the police station back to my not-so-humble abode.