Redemption (Mulberry Guardian 1)
Twilight’s night had been the hardest of all of the involved parties, but she had probably deserved it.
To describe teleporting over long distances as taxing was like describing a marathon as a stroll, and yet she had done it multiple times and including additional passengers as well. By the time she had transported Rainbow to the farm, gotten Aegis, and went to the hospital to make an appointment for Scootaloo, she had been on her last legs, missing her location by more than a just a few yards on her jump back to Applejack’s kitchen, only a few inches of air remaining between her jaw and the counter, resulting in a ban of magic for Twilight.
It had been the first time in years she had turned a page by hoof. Luckily for her, there hadn’t been much work left to do anyway. The multitude of letters for Celestia, containing all possible combinations of future events and an explanation of the current situation, had already been written up beforehand. She certainly wouldn’t have made it through the first one after her last trip.
As a matter of precaution for events not related to this night at all, she had spent a lot of time last month in Zecora’s hut researching and brewing magical restorers. Well, Zecora had done the brewing. Twilight hadn’t even touched the boiling cauldron.
The result of their work had been a liquid nearly thick enough to pass as solid. Its shade of green had the unusual ability to turn your stomach on the spot if you made the mistake of looking at it. The taste could only by described by words disregarded by society, most of them bad enough she didn’t even dared to mentally verbalized them. It was possible to drink it, but far from being fun and only using a combination of a nose clip, closed eyes and a strong will to fight your own body’s reaction to such vile substances.
If and only if you managed to keep it in for long enough - she had failed the first three times in a row, making a mess out of Zecora’s hut that she later had to scrub for several hours - the effect was amazing. They had originally created it for emergency situations when Equestria was under attack of some kind of villain, but it was cheap to create and therefore equally great for days like today.
The bad news was that it was stored at the library. In the morning she had had to ask Applejack to accompany her to the hollowed-out tree house. Her fear to pass out on the way had been far too great to move alone despite the tension still lingering between her and the farm pony.
Not having enough energy left to throw up anymore, Twilight had managed to keep it down in the end and was feeling much better now, good enough to give Spike a ride to the police station. This is where Rainbow should be arriving any minute now, and she was surely not going to miss the appointment.
Accusing your friends of vile things while physically hurting them for no reason but your own ego wasn’t exactly something nice to do. She did not deserve forgiveness right now. Applejack had made that very clear. She even thought so herself. Hard work for a friend’s cause was only the beginning of making up for it, especially since it was not just about one of the countless quick ideas of Dash, but rather a cause that involved a group of helpless foals and possibly high politics with corrupt officials and incapable police ponies. A cause she felt obliged to follow regardless of its origin.
She yearned for a way to end the hollow feeling eating her up from inside. Guilt was a monster and something entirely new to her. Her friends weren’t just a Celestia-given mission, they were her life. The only one she loved more than them was Spike. He wasn’t just an assistant, but her best friend and sometimes she even felt like his mother. She had hatched him, so maybe she really was, even though she had been far too young to care for him on her own in the first years.
Losing him would mean losing a part of herself. The same was true for all of her friends. At the end of the day this would make a perfect letter to the princess. Hopefully one with a happy end.
The police station was an old wooden shack located in a narrow muddy byroad, this time of the year more ice than road in the freezing early morning hours.
Not unusual for any time of the day, the street was empty except for herself and her dragon rider. Overall good living conditions and just and generous rulers had resulted into low crime rates and a cooperative atmosphere throughout the country for many hundred years, reducing visitors to a slow stream of ponies complaining about petty theft and other minor offences, leaving just enough work to keep the only police pony of Ponyville busy enough not to sleep through his working days.
The few notices right next to the entry spoke the same language, mostly consisting of outdated public letters from the mayor and warnings about the Everfree forest.
As hardworking as some police officers were, the possibility of incidents greater than the capabilities of just one pony can never be fully dismissed, no matter how peaceful the inhabitants of a district were. Whenever there was an emergency, a squadron of pegasi responsible for an entire district of multiple cities could be deployed within half an hour.
No matter how big the areas they had to cover, they hardly got any work at all, passing most of their standby duty playing card games, delivering important court orders or simply drilling, much like most of the Royal Army. As Twilight had read in reports to Celestia, some officers even described the execution of an arrest as a catharsis, a chance to escape from their boring job.
At the moment there should be work for the squad. There should have been work for a year now, searching every inch of Equestria for the missing foal, and yet no one had seen them in the skies. No one had alerted the Royal Army to assist after Scootaloo had been missing for more than one week. There wasn’t even a notice pinned to the board she was staring at. Nothing that should have been done, had been done, leaving a bad foretaste for the whole undertaking.
An impact next to the waiting mare brought the ice to break, sending splinters into all directions. Rainbow had not intended to land that hard, but a night without any sleep had a bad influence on her flying skills. Too bad there wouldn’t be time for a nap today.
Dash lowered her head to the dragon in greeting. “Good morning Spike. Thanks for helping. I guess Twilight already let you in on our little undertaking?”
Spike took a bow and lifted an imaginary hat as he replied. “Spike is at your service” He slightly paused before he continued in a more serious manner. ”And yes. I know.”
“OK then. I know haven’t said so yet, but thank you very much for being there as well, Twilight. I am sorry to have woken you a tad early today.” Rainbow gestured towards the entrance and took a few steps forward, but stopped again when Twilight didn’t move.
“Hmm, Twilight, shouldn’t we go inside?” Spike interjected, but his mount didn’t move and instead stared at the pegasus, stammering more to herself than to anypony else.
“Why are you sorry? I am the one who is sorry! I am the one who misbehaved. You did nothing wrong. I... I... no...”
Rainbow put a cyan hoof under Twilight’s chin and raised her friend’s head. Deep rose coloured eyes made contact to their violet counterparts.
“I will not say you've been nice to be around the last two weeks. I won’t say I appreciate or understand your actions. But we are friends, you helped a lot tonight and I can forgive you. Now. We got a helluva lot more important issue right now. Could we please go inside? I for my part am scared and want to be done with it.”
Surprise overtook Twilight like a rogue wave from the ocean you didn’t see coming, splashing all over you in seconds and leaving a drenched version of the former you behind. Rainbow was never afraid, not while fighting dragons, not while performing dangerous stunts. She was confident enough to laugh in the face of the most sinister creatures.
Of course all of them but Rarity had witnessed Rainbow’s serious bouts of self-doubt right before the Best Young Flyer competition. Dash didn’t take even the possibility of damage to her personality lightly.
Most of the time Rainbow was a normal dedicated and ambitious pony, working hard for her dreams, but now and then Twilight felt like talking to a fake Dash, as if her companion was just playing a role that was normally true. Rainbow’s last statement was a crack in crumbling facade, big enough to look at the true, insecure pony behind it. Twilight couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not, but she fathomed Scootaloo wasn’t the only one in need of a stable and loving family.
She vowed to have a deeper look into it later on. She had been a bad friend long enough, although Rainbow might not have realized it herself. Scootaloo was first, though.
The three of them went through the small door into the reception area and only room of the building. Years of neglect to the inventory showed in faded colours on worn furniture and walls alike, huge fluffs of dust moving like tumbleweed over the floor on every light breeze. Stacks of paper concealed the only desk in the room and nearly hid the middle-aged blue stallion sitting behind it, taking notes on even more paper. Keeping files in order clearly wasn’t a big bar on his personality chart.
“What an unusual time for a visit. Good morning!” the officer greeted them in a deep and pleasant voice. “How may I be of any help?”
Rainbow took a step forward to stand directly in front of the table at the only available position to stretch her head through the large columns of documents in order to have a look at the policepony’s face.
“We are here to inform you that we have discovered the whereabouts of the missing foal Scootaloo with a request that I take immediate custody for her. We have the needed paperwork ready,” Dash addressed the stallion.
She rummaged through her saddlebag and retrieved the paperwork they had put together during the night. Rainbow had to take a step backwards again in order to make enough space to hand over the stack, but it was wasted energy as the officer refused to take what was given to him and began talking again instead.
“Let me find the records of the case first, please.”
Rainbow retracted the forms and what had already been a mess, became now a torrent of chaos. Mountains disappeared and rose again, as if the beholder was witnessing the miniature version of the driving forces of geology, just that millennia turned to minutes and back to millennia again in the eyes of Rainbow, Twilight and Spike.
What should have taken no more than a minute stretched to half an hour, leaving Rainbow sleeping on the ground and Twilight growing angrier to the point she couldn’t take it anymore. In a sudden burst of energy she sacked every piece of paper in the room at once with an unnerved scream and let them skip past her head reading them and sorting them into alphabetical order within seconds in her own very special kind of a data highway.
Spike wondered how she could keep her concentration up against the raving stallion shouting at the top of his lungs that she was not allowed to touch the files, threatening her with ridiculous penalties ranging from fines worth multiple thousand bits up to years in prison. Twilight had bothered to answer the first three times that she was entitled to see every single document in all of Equestria as a bearer of an Element of Harmony, but seeing that her efforts were completely ignored, she kept silent after that in contrast to the officer who had decided to extend his verbal harassment with physical action.
Step by step he crept closer to the working unicorn, a hoof held high to strike out. Too much for the newly awoken pegasus, immediately placing herself between the two of them, posing in a threatening stature, snarling and hissing.
The police pony retreated to corner followed by Dash blocking him still screaming in his location. It surely hadn’t been their intention to cause a ruckus, but the amount of incapacity left them no choice.
When Twilight was done, the room had changed beyond recognition to a place where a pony could actually work in without missing out information or risking a serious depression. Missing out the usual shelving used by authorities, she had resorted to building up piles of paper not unlike the officer had done, but opposed to his sluggish attempts aligning them neatly next to each other, sorted alphabetically and categorized into closed and open cases. She had even found the capacities to write up new file jackets on the fly, the old ones suspiciously missing for most cases.
Scootaloo’s record consisted of three parts, all located in different parts of the mess, probably lost for a long time, not important enough to immediately act upon it. Small wonder he hadn’t done anything to help the foal.
Twilight skimmed through the file before magically throwing it in front of the police pony’s hooves and gesturing Dash to back away. “Explain this to me this instant,” she demanded forcefully.
Gaining new confidence, he took up the files and read them, taking his time to the annoyance of everypony else. Especially Rainbow was anxious to find out what was inside, pacing the room and receiving no clarification from her friends.
“Well, it is clear to me. You tell me where the foal is and you’re done with this case and will not see her again.” His words contained more venom than a pit of snakes ready to attack.
Before Rainbow could react Twilight already was at it again. A strong aura surrounded her, erupting like gas explosions on every stressed syllable: “I am afraid this is not possible for various reasons you might see for yourself if you did your job properly. Be warned this will have consequences. You alone decide how severe they are.”
He brought his hoof down on a big red button located under the desk. Normally this was thought to be a secret action, but there was no way of not noticing it, not with the smug grin on his face that wrote in glowing letters he thought he was invincible. The pegasi squadron was underway.
“You will see the consequences then. I hereby arrest you for foal-napping, attempted battery and forcing access to classified information,” he spoke, producing a sets of hoof cuffs and additional sets of horn and wing cuffs, shining brightly as if polished every day.
Rainbow was already back in attack mode, but she was stopped by a gentle stream of magic tugging at her tail and the silently spoken word “no” forming on her friend’s lips.
Twilight simply stayed at her spot, stretching out her hoof for the first cuff. The visible magic enveloping her had already dissipated when the policepony was close enough to begin the procedure.
“Sir, I hereby inform you that it is forbidden by the highest law passed by Celestia herself to arrest the bearers of the Elements of Harmony. Stop now and I will forget it. Proceed and you will face more than just disciplinary proceedings.”
Twilight’s challenge was answered by the clicking sound of metal joining her hooves in pairs and wrapping her horn into a thick layer of metal designed to absorb all kinds of energy. As Celestia’s student she had been trained to break free of them more than once, as had been the rest of her friends. She could literally disintegrate them into a thousand pieces in mere seconds. It was her own free will binding her, nothing more.
The same was true for Rainbow who was up next, following Twilight’s lead by giving no resistance despite the way the metal cut into her feathers, linking the tips of her wings with a chain that was tighter than necessary stretched over her back.
This certainly wasn’t how she had planned things to go, but the fact that Twilight seemed to have a tactic ready greatly calmed her nerves. In fact it was the only thing keeping her from screaming and flailing, breaking her chains or plainly breaking down crying. She had failed Scootaloo so far.
As soon as the last limb of Rainbow was secured, Twilight turned over to her friend and levitated ink and quill as well and an empty and one already written to parchment out of Rainbow’s saddlebags. Fear etched in his features, the officer slowly retreated to the back of the room, his eyes widened in surprise, his mouth opened to a gaping abyss. Never in his life had he seen, nor even heard of somepony working magic through a horn cuff. Yet, his captive was clearly doing it, a purple aura shining through the thick sheets of metal, reaching for objects throughout the room.
Feather screeched over paper, leaving hasty notes Twilight didn’t even look at while writing. Instead she focused on the angry and irritated stallion who seemingly couldn’t decide whether to run or to stay, swaying back and forth, head jerking to all directions in search of an escape route. It was probably best to help him in his decision.
“I told you twice not to mess with us. Now stay here or I will have you dragged back by a couple of Royal Guards who aren’t as nice as I am,” she stated matter-of-factly, already finishing her work and handing it to Spike who had remained next to the door all the time, waiting for orders.
Green flames engulfed the two sheets, sending them to their destination in no time at all.
Ignoring the officer now repeatedly hammering the panic button, Twilight turned to Rainbow again, loosening the grip of her wing cuffs and nuzzling her distressed friend.
“Rainbow, I am sorry. I sent letter number sixteen, and I requested for Celestia and Luna to come here personally. I want them to see this feeble attempt to restrain us.”
Rainbow closed her eyes. All letters had the same basic layout, describing the past events followed by a different anticipated future, sparing them the need of writing long explanations in situations like this. Sixteen meant that Ms Birch was no longer the headmistress, but that she was still free despite on-going investigation. With unknown consequences.