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// Chapter 6: In Which I Learn To Fly 
// Story: Breaking Bricks 
// by Aquaman 
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Chapter 6 – In Which I Learn To Fly

There’s only one thing worse than waking up early on a Saturday.  And that thing is waking up early on a Saturday when you have nothing at all to do.
I had a plan for mornings like this, and it involved a lot of yanking the comforter back up under my chin and usually very little movement.  Today, though, I was up on my hooves as soon as my eyes were open.  Something wasn’t right.  Something I could feel deep in my stomach.
I pushed the bedroom door open, and a warm, heady scent washed over me.  Coffee.  There was coffee in my apartment.  I didn’t have a coffeemaker.  I also didn’t have any neighbors with spare keys.
The living room was twice the size of the bedroom, and painted gold with sunlight from the open balcony doors.  To the left, I could see the snow-white rump of an orange-tailed pegasus standing in the kitchen, a pair of wingtips just barely visible over the fridge door blocking off the rest of his body.
“This is just depressing, Brick,” Leo sighed as he lifted his head back up and glanced over in my direction.  When I didn’t move, he craned his neck back down behind the door again.  “How does any sort of self-respecting bachelor not have eggs in his fridge?”
My lips were glued shut, and even if I’d wanted to open them nothing would’ve slipped out between them.  The air felt like it was charged with electricity.  The scent of ozone burned in the back of my nose.  
“I got coffee,” Leo called out.  “You like cinnamon, right?”
I turned my head.  On the coffee table in the living room, two paper cups were steaming in the morning light.  Next to them sat a white paper bag, the cursive pink logo on the front too sun-washed to read anymore.
“You gotta get out of here, Brick.”
My neck jerked, and I faced the kitchen again.  Every hair on my body was standing on end.
“I mean, look at it out there!” Leo said as he nudged the fridge closed with his flank, two slices of bread and a half-dozen thistles on a plate clamped between his teeth.  His eyes were pointed towards the balcony door.  “Beautiful day.  Damn near perfect day.  You gonna waste it loafing around in here?”
I couldn’t speak.  I couldn’t move.  I couldn’t tell whether the room was caving in around me or my lungs just thought it was.  He was right: I needed to get out of here.  Out of this room.  Out of this city.  Out of this nightmare.
Leo was on the couch now, his sandwich built but still untouched next to the coffee cups.  I hadn’t even heard him sit down.  “Brick, sooner or later you’re gonna have to make a choice,” he said, his auburn eyes wide and sympathetic.
For a long time, all I could do was stare, unable to tear my gaze away from Leo’s.  I blinked hard, took a step forward, and an almost silent splash nearly knocked me off my hooves.
One of the coffee cups had tipped over onto Leo’s sandwich, the frothy brown liquid soaking into the bread and spreading away from the plate like a pool of blood.  Where the cup had stood untouched before, a creamy yellow envelope lay with its back side up, too thick to see through even in the glaring light and sealed by a glimmering gold sticker garnished with a blue and white shield.  It was a perfectly normal, everyday, five-by-seven-inch envelope, and every second I spent looking at it was enough time for another cubic yard of air to be sucked out of the room.  The coffee table was on the other end of a long, dark tunnel, and yet I was still close enough to see the thin parallel stripes imprinted into the flap of the envelope and the tiny valleys and crests lining the edge of the seal.  The world faded to gray in the same instant it flashed a blinding white.  Now I could taste the ozone too.
Leo made no movement to pick up the cup, even as the spill reached the end of the table and started dripping off it onto the floor below.  He glanced down stoically at the envelope, then blinked once and turned his gaze back up to me.  The piercing look in his eyes never changed.
“You gonna open that, or what?” he said.
I tried to swallow, but my muscles were no longer under my control.  I tried to run, but my legs were at the mercy of something else’s will.  I tried to kick, growl, fight back, do anything but step forward and reach out and take that envelope between my hooves, but this dream was no longer my own.  It was something else entirely.
With a gentle pop, the seal unstuck from the envelope and fluttered down to the ground to land in the coffee puddle still collecting there.  With a quiet sigh, Leo closed his eyes and lied back against the couch.  With trembling hooves, I nosed the envelope open and pushed out a single sheet of pure white cardstock dominated by three short sentences typed out in neat black ink. 
And with absolutely no warning whatsoever, a wave of ice-cold water hit me smack in the face.
I woke up sputtering like a cat in a wading pool, water streaming off my mane and dripping into my eyes and mouth.  The room around me was pitch-dark, so for a second or two I thought I’d gone blind while I was out, which would’ve seriously put a damper on my day.  Or morning.  Or whatever the hell it was now.  It’d been the middle of the night the last time I’d been kicked in the head, right?  Yes, it had.  At least, that’s what my flash-fried brain was telling me.  Of course, it was also pointing out that I had now officially started measuring time in instances of cranial trauma, so in all honesty I wasn’t too interested in listening to what my brain had to say at the moment.
“Morning, sunshine,” a high-pitched, mocking voice sang as I shook the hair off my forehead.  “Ooh, I bet that wasn’t fun, was it?  Here, I think I got something that might fix that…”
For a second or two, I actually thought the voice might be about to help me out.  That should give you a very good indication of my mental state at the time.  So should my shock and confusion when I got another bucket of ice-cold water dumped onto my head before I could even so much as say “please”.
“You awake yet?” the voice continued, the words taking on a much more exasperated tone this time.  “C’mon, bucko, hop to.  Let’s go.”
I shut my eyes tight and tried unsuccessfully to squeeze the ache out of the back of my skull, then forced them open and looked around.  My vision had started to refocus on its own, so I could see now that the room wasn’t as dark as I’d thought before.  It wasn’t dark at all around me, actually: about twenty feet up on the right-hand wall, a grimy window let in a single rectangular block of light that was honed in right to where I was sitting and glinted off my soaked fur in a wonderfully blinding way.  Most of the rest of the room was still too shadowy to see clearly, but my eyes had adjusted enough to pick out a few stacks of wooden boxes lining either wall and what looked like a manager’s desk shoved crudely between two of the larger crates.  I could also pick out the distinctly disheveled mane and wavy dark tail of the pony standing in front of me, who had a recently emptied bucket sitting between his forehooves and was wearing nothing but a ratty white jacket and a wide smile tinged with just the slightest hint of bloodlust.
“Well, there’s our happy camper,” Springs chuckled.  “Enjoy your nap?”
I shot him a tight-lipped smile and tried to run a forehoof through my mane, only to have both of them come up when I’d only meant to lift one.  I gave them a closer look, and realized that they were tied together.  “Where am I?” I asked as calmly as I could.  Despite my best efforts, Springs still found it funny.
“Boy, there’s a lotta answers I could give to that, aren’t there?” he giggled.  “Where do you think you are?”
I raised an eyebrow, then let my breath drift slowly out of my lungs and stared up at the ceiling.  This guy was starting to run out of nerves to step on.  “Well, judging by the position of the sun and the humidity this morning, I’m gonna go ahead and guess we’re still in Manehattan.  And seeing as you don’t strike me as the type to plan ahead for these sort of things, I’ll bet we’re not all that far from where we were last night.”  I leveled my gaze on Springs again and clicked my tongue thoughtfully.  “Which means, given that you’re a slimy, inconsiderate wingnut with a face your mother couldn’t look at even if she was a mirror, odds are we haven’t even left that same block.”
Springs’ eyes were set firmly on “broil”, but the tendons in his jaw were visible even in the virtually nonexistent light.  “How did you know that?” he asked slowly and quietly.
I couldn’t help but smirk.  “I didn’t,” I replied.  “You’re just terrible at calling bluffs.”
It took Springs a little bit to realize what had just happened, and the look on his face when he figured it out was the kind of thing that made entire days worth waking up for.  Granted, this particular day was probably going to make up the difference sooner rather than later, but for the moment at least, I was in control again.
“Gotta say, you are quite the real estate mogul,” I went on, taking a quick gander around the room while feeling around with my back hooves to see if they were tied up too.  They were.  “I love what you’ve done with the place.  Very nice air of Mid-Equestrian Shitheap to it, and just a hint of Federal Crime Colonial in the sidings.  Nice touch.  No, wait, don’t tell me: we’re in that old textile mill a little ways up the block, right?”
“Wrong,” Springs assured me immediately, his face redder than a schoolfilly with her dress up around her ears.
“Uh-huh,” I murmured back.  “I bet.  So when do the rest of the boys show up, hmm?  Gonna rough me up a bit, pick my brain, mash my bones to make your cakes?  Aw, geez, you can’t be the only one here, can you?  And with me all trussed up with nopony to impress.  Well, if that isn’t the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what i-“
Under normal circumstances, I probably could’ve knocked the bucket away before it went careening off my temple.  Under normal circumstances, though, my front and back hooves wouldn’t have been tied together with two tight coils of inch-thick rope, and I wouldn’t have half a dozen welts and bruises from when a very clean-shaven gorilla had played kick-the-can with my skull.  My neck snapped back from the force of the impact, but by then whiplash was the least of my worries.  Ever since I’d woken up, I’d felt like somepony had tried amateur brain surgery on me with a ball peen hammer, but now I was pretty sure my whole head had just outright exploded and sent gray matter splattering across the ceiling above me.  With no legs to steady myself and my sense of balance floating somewhere around Jupiter, I tipped over helplessly onto my back and hit the concrete floor hard, the last glancing blow not adding a lot to my vast assortment of injuries but doing plenty in the way of insult.
 As I rolled onto my side and tried to block out the keening shriek echoing behind my eyes, Springs walked slowly over to me and pressed his hoof down on my neck right beneath the curve of my chin.  “Let’s go over a few ground rules here,” he muttered in my ear once he was sure I was still conscious.  “Number one, you don’t talk unless there’s something I want you to tell me.  Number two, you don’t move unless there’s somewhere I want you to go.  And number three, in this room here, I’m king, sultan, and president for life.  You screw with me again, and I will make every second of your miserable life a living hell.  You understand me?”
Funny.  He actually thought he could make my life more of a living hell after this.  Clearly, my new pal Springs had never had a migraine.  “You gonna kill me?” I growled in between coughs.  “’Cause I’ve got better things to do if you aren’t.”
Springs tried to kick me over onto my back, but only my neck was mobile enough to turn fully in his direction.  “Maybe I will,” he hissed.  “Maybe I’ll just leave your body here and wait for the rats to save me the trouble of hiding it.  Maybe you have no idea who you’re dealing with.  Maybe you have no idea what I am.”
“What are you, then?” I growled.  “Maybe?”
Springs raised his eyebrows, paused just long enough to let me know he was doing it on purpose, and grinned.  “Me?” he chuckled.  “I’m your worst nightma-”
A distant buzz lopped off the end of Springs’ dramatic monologue, and then the room was flooded with light.  Thankfully, the stars in my eyes stopped twinkling soon enough for me to follow Springs’ magnificently irate gaze over towards the entrance to the room, where a hulking mass of a stallion was standing in the doorway with two bulging saddlebags hanging off his back and an almost adorably clueless look on his face.
“Oh…hey, Springs,” Cinder said, his forehoof still hovering over the switch on the wall that activated the lamps overhead.  “I got the sandwiches and the juice and ev’rything, and I couldn’t remember whether you wanted extra daisies or buttercups, so…I got both.  And they had these big, like, double fudge brownies fresh out of the oven, and I know you love brownies so I got a bunch’a those too.  So that’s, uh…”
        Cinder blinked, and somewhere within his mind a crucial gear clicked into place.  “…not okay.  Is that not okay?”
If I’d only had a few stalks of wheat to stick in between Springs’ teeth, I could’ve had flour in less than twenty seconds.  Cinder, meanwhile, settled for chewing on his lip.  “This is a bad time, isn’t i-”
“It’s a bad time, Cinder,” Springs hissed.
        “Oh,” Cinder replied after a long moment of thoughtful silence.  “So…” he continued a few seconds later.  “I’ma go ahead and eat, if that’s all ri-”
        “Just get in here, Cinder,” Springs interrupted once he had his hoof set firmly in between his eyes.
        “Right now?”
        “Yes, right now.”
        “Do you want your sandwich, or…”
        “Cinder, I swear to…”
        Springs clenched his teeth together in mid-blast, then sighed despondently and glanced at me while I did everything I could not to laugh.  In retrospect, I probably could’ve done a little bit more.   “Yes, I want my sandwich, please,” Cinder mumbled, refusing to make eye contact with any of us even after he tugged the wrapping off his breakfast and ate nearly half of it in a single grumpy bite.
        “Well, now that that’s all squared away, let’s go ahead and redefine our terms here,” I said once everypony else had their mouths full.  “First off: you’re not gonna kill me.”
        “Nope,” Cinder replied before Springs could even be bothered to glare, spraying brownie crumbs all over the place in the process.  His sandwich was still lying untouched on top of the white bag it had come in, and the longer I stared at it the louder my stomach complained about the treatment it had gotten yesterday.  It’d been at least a full day since I’d last left home, and since then I’d been running on nothing but a stale loaf of bread, three packages of peanuts, and half a glass of low-grade whiskey I wouldn’t have forced down a tax pony’s throat.  I needed to get out of here and I needed to do it now.  If not to deny myself the pleasure of Springs’ company, at least to get some decent food.
        “And second…” I continued, trying to buy myself enough time to remember whatever it was I’d been thinking about before food.  “You’re not keeping me for ransom either.”
        “That wasn’t the original plan, no,” Springs answered sullenly.  “But I’m flexible.”
        “Yeah, you’re a long way from fooling anyone with that, hotshot,” I cut back in a monotone.  For that, I got another look of unbridled contempt, and the agony of seeing Springs down the rest of his sandwich without hardly even chewing it.  “So if you’re not gonna kill me and you’re not gonna hold me for ransom, what exactly are you going to do with me?  Is this just a playdate gone wrong, or what?”
        “My plan about what I’m going to do with you is for me to know and you to find out,” Springs replied slowly and deliberately.
        “So…you don’t have a plan, then?”
        “It’s none of your business.”
        “So you don’t have a plan, then.”
        Apparently, he didn’t.  Judging by his silence and the way his lips flattened against his teeth, he also didn’t have a plan for how to convince me otherwise.
        “I don’t have a plan either,” Cinder added, after hesitantly raising one hoof as if he’d been waiting to be called on to speak.  “But I could make one if you want.”
        “So lemme see if I got this straight,” I said, once again fighting a losing battle against the urge to roll around on the floor giggling like a schoolcolt.  “You knocked me out, dragged me a good half-dozen blocks into this factory, and left me hogtied in the middle of a pitch-dark storage room, and now you have absolutely no clue what you’re going to do next.”
        “Is that funny to you?” Springs asked pointedly, pushing himself back onto his hooves with his trademark glower running at maximum capacity.
        “What, the fact that I got myself taken hostage by two ponies who couldn’t find their butts with both hooves?  Yeah, kinda.  For several reasons, actually.”
        “Well, Mister…”  Springs’ response caught in his throat as he glanced over towards the giant lug of a stallion sitting to his right, who was using both forelegs to grasp at something behind him.  “Seriously?” the smaller pony muttered to his partner, who flushed red and mouthed an apology as he slid his hooves back around into his lap.  After a brief pause and a very poorly concealed roll of his eyes, Springs continued.  “Well, Mister Funny Bone, how’s this for a punch line: as soon as you’re done mouthing off, I’m gonna send a letter to the boss and ask him what he wants to do with you.”
        “Oh, you will, huh?” I intoned.  “Does ‘the boss’ have a name?”
        “Not one you need to know,” Springs replied casually.  “But I’ll bet he’d like to know yours.  And I’ll also bet that he’d be real interested to hear about your tendency to stick your nose in places it doesn’t belong.”
        And if I had two bits for every time I’d heard someone whine about that particular trait of mine, I’d have enough pocket change on me right now to put your foals through college.  All this smoke-and-mirrors crap piled on top of yet another splitting headache, and the whole damn thing was just about some PO’d blue-collar nut who’d never forgotten who caught him with his saddle off.  “Stars above, you guys are just grunt labor?” I groaned up at the ceiling.  “Who put you up to this?  Crazy Eights?”
        “The…who?”
        “No, wait, that ice cream vendor in Midtown who stole his grandma’s charm bracelet.  Oh, geez, what was his name…Tasty Freeze.  That’s it.  It’s him, isn’t it?”
        “I…”
        “I got it.  Royal Flush.  Crazy bastard’s been after me since…”
        “Hey!”  Predictably enough, Springs was mad again.  “I’m trying to issue an ultimatum here.  You wanna shut up and let me finish?”
        “Oh, by all means,” I implored him.
        “Like I was saying,” Springs continued after a heavy sigh, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a tiny scroll of paper and a pencil as he spoke.  “As delightful as it’d be to spend the whole day locked in this room with you, I too have better things to do with my time, and the boss has better things to do with you.”  He unfurled the scroll and laid it flat on the floor in front of him, and lifted the pencil up to grip it behind his teeth.  “So since you’ve been so patient up till now, I’m not gonna keep you waiting any longer.”
Springs fell silent as he leaned down over the paper, Cinder sitting up on his haunches to peer over his friend’s shoulder like a little colt trying to cheat on a test.  After scribbling a few quick lines that I couldn’t quite make out, Springs spat out the pencil and swiped his hoof once across the bottom of the note.  The paper flashed white for a second, and then evaporated in a brilliant flash of green flames.  I kept a self-confident smirk on my face the whole time, but on the inside I was starting to get just the slightest bit queasy.
“You want to know what we’re going to do with you?” Springs said once the paper had vanished, returning my fading smile with a fiery smirk.  “Well, wish granted, my friend.  ‘Cause in, oh, about a half-hour or so, you’re gonna learn more about what this world has to offer than they ever taught you at that fancy, stuck-up college of yours.  And about an hour after that, you’re gonna wish you’d just sat tight and stayed there.”
Springs stood up and stretched nonchalantly, and suddenly my queasiness got promoted up to full-blown nausea.  Maybe these guys here were more likely to trip over their own hooves than actually do anything serious to me, and maybe one of them in particular was still talking out his ass even now.  But that breed of enchanted paper cost quite a few pretty pennies, and if the pony in charge of these idiots had enough money to just hoof it out to his goons, it was a safe bet that he’d be a bit more dangerous of an enemy to have going for my throat.  And unless Springs had a second cutie mark for mind-reading or he’d just gotten really good at inferring things in the last five minutes, somepony had told him way more about my past than I would’ve expected him to know, and that somepony was most likely this boss he’d presumably just sent a letter to.  I could feel the concrete hardening around my ankles already.  This was not good.  I really, really needed to get out of here ASAP.
“Well,” I announced after a long pause and a hearty yawn.  “I gotta take a leak.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Springs replied a moment later from his position near the door.  He’d moved over there a couple minutes after he sent his letter, and had been watching me ever since like a hawk sizing up his dinner.
“No, I don’t think you understand,” I went on.  “This is an emergency.”
“Well, I suppose that makes it extra unfortunate, then,” Springs snipped right back.  “Now if you’d be so kind, put a cork in it.”
“So what, I’m supposed to just sit here and hold it?”
“That’s the general idea, yes.”
“You really think that’s the best plan here?”
“What I really think is that you should shut up and keep your whining to yourself before I come over there and tie your tongue in a knot.  Capisce?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.  Read you loud and clear, partner.”  I paused just long enough to let Springs think I’d dropped the issue.  “But just so you know, I don’t really have that strong of a bladder.”
“I’m sorry, what part of ‘shut your mouth and quit your bitching’ wasn’t clear?”
“And I tend to get jittery when I’m stressed.”
“So?” Springs growled.  “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that if I don’t get to the little colts’ room within the next two-and-a-half minutes, you’re gonna have a lot more to deal with over here than a little moaning and groaning,” I said, punctuating my assertion with a forceful glare.  “And if your boss wants to stay in an stuffy, poorly ventilated room with me for any longer than it takes to ask me my name, he’s probably not gonna be too happy with you if I smell like the wall behind a gentlecolt’s club after Happy Hour.”
        The next few seconds passed in an unspoken staring contest, Springs furrowing his brow as I sent his searching glare right back at him with just as much force and a touch more bluster.  I mouthed, “Your move,” and let my eyebrows arch up, and soon enough Springs let out a heavy sigh and let his head fall against the wall behind him with a heavy thunk.
        “Yes, stars, fine.  Whatever,” he groaned, rubbing his hooves hard into his eyes.  “Cinder, there’s a empty storage closet three doors down the hall on the right.  Whatever he has to do, he can do in there.”  He kept his forelegs raised, and didn’t notice until he dropped them down a minute later that I wasn’t moving.  “Are you going, or what?”
        I lifted my still tied forehooves up where Springs could see them.  “I don’t know,” I said, my eyebrows still arched.  “Am I?”
        If I’d listened just a little bit closer, I’m pretty sure I could’ve actually heard the last strand of Springs’ patience snap in two.  With his face visibly red even through his fur, he stomped over to me like a toddler being sent to his room and chomped down on the ropes around my legs, yanking on them for all he was worth and huffing and puffing like an asthmatic wolf.
“Go straight there and then straight back,” he grunted to Cinder.  “If he takes longer than two minutes, drag him out by the ears.  And he tries anything stupid, buck him into next week and aim for the teeth.” 
“Are you this charming all the time, or am I just one of your favorites?” I asked as my bonds finally came loose and the pins and needles started to creep back into my soles again.  Springs shot me his filthiest look yet and didn’t answer.
        “Two minutes,” he told Cinder again.  “Then I’m coming back there and murdering you both.”
        Cinder and I looked at each other, and one of us looked a lot less concerned than the other.  “Lead the way, big guy,” I said.  Cinder stared at me, then stared at Springs, then started towards the door without checking to see if I was following.  I’m honestly not sure how these guys got their shoes on the right hooves in the morning.
        The hallway was even less exciting than the office I’d been tied up in, and that was saying something.  Cinder and I came out at one end, and at the other end was a T-junction highlighted by a dusty gray bulletin board with a few ancient posters and timesheets still tacked onto it.  In the thirty feet of space in between, there were four closed doors and absolutely nothing else.  No broken two-by-fours or cement blocks I could knock a kidnapper senseless with, no crumbling drywall I could kick through, not even a decent motivational poster.  For all his other numerous shortcomings, at least Springs had picked a good place to set up a secret lair.  In a few minutes, though, I was hoping that his choice of location wouldn’t even matter.
        “So what’s down at the end of the hall?” I shouted ahead to Cinder, who I was at least seventy percent sure had completely forgotten I was behind him.
        “Stuff,” he said as he passed the first door on the left.
        “What kind of stuff?  Cool stuff?”
        “I dunno,” he mumbled, his forelegs just shy of the second door on the right.
        “Can I see the cool stuff you don’t know is there?”
        Halfway between the second and third doors, Cinder stopped.  “I don’t think you’re supposed t’ be talkin’,” he said, his inflection making it sound like he was asking a question.
        “Eh, talking probably doesn’t fall under ‘doing something stupid’ yet, so we’re probably fine,” I reasoned once I reached the third door.
        Cinder considered that for a moment, then nodded.  “Sorry,” he said with a toothy grin.  “I ain’t real good at this.  I never been a kidnapper before.”
        “Well, I’ve never been a kidnappee before,” I replied as I stepped around him and pushed the third door open, finding nothing on the other side but a very tiny and, more importantly, very empty closet.  “First time for everything, I suppose.”
        “Yeah.  I s’pose.”
        I sighed and nodded to myself, and tried to figure out how long Springs’ definition of “two minutes” was likely to be.  Initial prediction: not too long.  “So, you pay any attention to the newspaper these days?” I said.
        “Not really,” Cinder replied.
        “I was in the paper once.  Got on the front page and everything.  ‘Course, that was a long time ago, before all this Elements of Harmony stuff started.  You hear about any of that?”
        “Little bit, yeah.”
        “You know, not a lot of ponies know this, but there actually aren’t just six Elements.”
        “There…aren’t?” Cinder asked, in a tone that made it abundantly clear he had no idea what I was talking about.  A little voice in the back of my head did, though, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore it every second.
        “Oh, yeah.  Turns out, there are actually seven.  You believe that?”
        “Um…”
        “You’ve got Magic, Honor, Freedom, and…and the other three.”
        “Aren’t you supposed to be, uh…”
        “But the seventh, the biggest and most important of them all…”
        The hallway to my left was empty, and the stallion to my right was oblivious.  I wouldn’t get a better chance than this for the rest of the day.  And yet, I almost felt bad about what I was about to do.  Springs might’ve been a class-A scumbag, but if Cinder hadn’t been the size of a steam engine I would’ve thought he was just the little brother tagging along with nothing else better to do.  Then again, he was also aware of the fact that he was the size of a steam engine and knew how to use that size, so my sympathy was short-lived.
        “The most important one of all…” I repeated slowly.  Somewhere behind me, a door creaked open, but I was too far gone to stop now.  I took a deep breath, checked one last time to make sure Cinder still hadn’t caught on…
        “…is the Element of Surprise!”
        …and bucked Cinder as hard as I could right in the kisser.
         Or at least, that’s where I’d been planning on hitting him.  As it happened, Cinder’s face was a little bit higher than I’d guessed, so my kick ended up landing somewhere around his collarbone.  And he didn’t really do the whole “fall over and pass out” thing I’d been gunning for either.  Actually, I’m pretty sure he didn’t move at all.  All of which added credence to my new theory that I’d missed Cinder Block entirely and kicked straight into a block of solid concrete.  This was going to turn into one of those weeks soon enough.
        Just to confirm what I already knew, I turned around to see what kind of damage I’d done.  Cinder was still parked in the same spot looking very put-out, and his partner Springs was standing in front of the third door down the hall with the first few stages of abject rage trickling into his eyes.
        “Ow,” Cinder said, sounding more offended than hurt.
        “You know,” I thought out loud a moment later, “that seemed like a much better idea inside my head.”
        It also seemed a lot less stupid, the little voice in the back of my voice finally got a chance to add.  I had about half a second to tell Leo where he could stick his next brain blast before Springs’ curse reached my ears and the sight of him charging down the hallway at me registered in my brain.
        I made a snap decision to make Springs earn the right to beat the ever-loving tar out of me and tried to leg it towards the bulletin board, but ended up almost bouncing forward for a few dozen feet just to keep my balance.  The impact against Cinder’s chest had knocked both my back hooves numb, and I could feel my heartbeat pulsing through every bit of my hind legs that wasn’t.  Who the hell names their foal Cinder Block?, I asked myself through clenched teeth.  Clearly, somepony with better foresight than you, came the inevitable silent reply a moment later.
        Through a mixture of frantic hopping and a steady stream of curses, I made it to the end of the hallway and hung a left, trusting blind instinct to keep me from running into a dead end.  Amazingly, that worked long enough to get me to a flight of ancient metal stairs lit by a single lamp hanging by the door.  The only way to go from there was down, and I didn’t hesitate to take it.  If it was just Springs chasing me by himself, I probably had at least an honest chance at giving the slip.  The culmination of my brilliant escape plan, however, meant that Cinder Block was pissed off with me too, and that meant that there was at least one pony after me right now who could literally rip me limb from limb if he so chose.  In my line of work, we call that kind of thing “motive”, and right now I was pretty damn motivated to put as much distance between me and the two stallions chasing me as I could.
        I took the steps at a full gallop, and my hopes soared for a moment as I saw the thin stripe of light sneaking into the stairwell underneath the exit door.  Instead of bursting through the door into a blaze of morning sunlight, though, I found myself in a massive room at least three hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet wide.  Cracked and chipped windows lined both walls, and the entire floor was occupied by hulking gray machines with a bunch of yarn tangled up inside them and about a thousand other moving parts beyond that.  It took me a few seconds to realize where I was, and by the time I did there were hoofsteps echoing on the stairs behind me.  I was on the main production floor of the factory, and I had about twenty seconds to get back off it before two very, very mad stallions made what was left of my life very, very difficult.
        I swore again, and as the curse echoed back and forth among the rows of looms, I got to thinking.  Okay, Springs and Cinder are coming down that stairwell I just left, I told myself, and I can’t see the ground outside those windows.  That means I can’t go back the way I came, and that I’m not on the bottom floor right now.  So if the stairwell behind me didn’t go all the way down, then there has to be another one that does.  And that stairwell has to connect to this factory floor some way or another.  Which means there has to be at least one other door out of here.
        An angry shout reverberated out from somewhere behind me, and I kicked the exit door shut just as something large and heavy ran smack into it.  Which means that if I want to get through that door with all my internal organs in the right places, the time to start moving is right freaking now.
        I took a gamble and assumed that the impact I’d just heard meant that at least one of my pursuers was going to be out of commission for a few seconds, and I used those seconds to go find something heavy enough to block the door with.  Unfortunately, all I had to work with were a few empty crates and two boxes of machine parts, and the sneezing fit I went into while shoving them all over to where I needed them didn’t help matters any.  Still, they seemed like they’d be enough to do the job, and within thirty seconds I had my makeshift barrier all set up, just in time to hear somepony slam against the door again.  Judging by the fact that my stack of crap in front of it didn’t move, I figured it had been Springs both times.  Cinder would’ve barged straight through the whole mess already.  Probably through most of the wall too.
        With one way out blocked, I trotted off down the first row of machines I came to looking for the second.  The whole way down that aisle and the next one too, my mind was still spinning almost too fast for me to keep track of it.  Most of my thoughts were just broken fragments of words, a constant and nearly incomprehensible stream of kidnapped running factory escape how did I get into this how do I get out of this I’m out of ideas out of space out of time time time time time.  I’d bought myself maybe a minute if I was lucky, and if you really thought about it, the only thing keeping Springs and Cinder out at all was my own dumb luck.  If this factory had been built ten years later, those exit doors would’ve swung outwards from the production floor, and I’d have been cornered like a rabbit in a garden maze.  And if I wasn’t gone at the end of that quickly disappearing minute I’d stolen, it would hardly even make a difference which way the doors swung.
        I can’t imagine it was skill that led to me finding the other exit, so I just chalked it up to luck again when I saw it twenty feet off to the left as I reached the end of the second row.  This time, I knew I’d hit gold; the stripe of light beneath the door wasn’t just bright, it was nearly luminescent.  This was my way out for sure, and I wasn’t about to waste any time figuring out how to block off this one too.  The breath I’d been holding in rushed out of my lungs, and thanked the stars for my good fortune sticking around just long enough to get me over to this door.
        Which, of course, meant that it was right around when I got to the door that it finally ran out.
        In retrospect, I should’ve known that they wouldn’t have just left the factory open for anypony to go waltzing around in once they closed it down for good.  I should’ve known that they’d lock as many doors as they could, and put chains the size of my ankle around the rest.  I should’ve known that Springs wouldn’t have picked such a big place to hang out in unless he knew he could control when and where other ponies got into it.  All of that should’ve occurred to me before I realized that the chain on the door that led to my freedom wasn’t going to move, and before the tips of my ears went numb, and before my blood ran cold from my nose all the way down to the backs of my hooves, but it didn’t.  And knowing it now didn’t leave me any less screwed, nor did it keep a splintering crash and a torrent of fast and heavy hoofsteps from revealing that my barricade had finally caved in.  And most of all, it didn’t change the fact that I was an achy, exhausted, and completely unarmed private eye stuck in an abandoned textile factory with two insatiably pissed-off kidnappers, and I now officially had no foreseeable way to get away from them and escape.
        I ducked behind one of the looms and pressed my shoulder into its base, my skin crawling and every hair on my body standing on end.  I couldn’t see anything from where I was, but I could certainly hear more than I wanted to: Springs telling Cinder to take the right side and draw me towards the middle of the room, Cinder’s hooves thudding against the concrete floor, my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.  Think, Brick, think.  Could I possibly work my way back over to where I’d come into the room?  Not likely.  And even if I did, there was no guarantee there’d be any better options up there.  I could fight off Springs if I got the jump on him, but there still left Cinder to deal with, and Cinder was the kind of pony you didn’t “deal with” so much as just hope he didn’t feel the need to “deal with” you.  I pressed my head against the loom and gritted my teeth.  My hooves might as well have been tied again, and I wasn’t going to talk my way out of them this time.  PIs have a word for that kind of situation too, and that word is “screwed”.
        A sudden clatter sent me diving back out of the aisle and into one of the rows, and not a moment too soon.  Cinder was walking by six rows down the way, and a few seconds later Springs appeared in the one right next to mine.  Neither of them looked to their left closely enough to see me, but I had a feeling that was the last close call that was going to go my way today.  If I was going to have a sudden stroke of genius and pull myself out of this place, I needed to have it about thirty seconds ago.  And still, all I could think about was how trapped I was, and how stupid I was for chasing after Springs when it wasn’t even part of a job, and how galling it was that I could still taste freedom all the while in the sunlight streaming through the windows.
        Sunlight streaming through the windows.  Blinding sunlight.  Morning sunlight.
        I poked my neck out into the aisle and stared down all the way to the other end, where the path ended at a dusty glass picture window built in a rusty wooden lattice frame.  What was it Sherlock Hooves always said?  “The simplest solution is usually the best.”  Well, it wasn’t an intelligent solution I was looking at now, but it sure as hell was a simple one.  The list of things I knew about my situation rushed through my head again: I was in Amity Park City, this place used to be a textile mill, there were no doors out of here, and I wasn’t on the ground floor.  But I wasn’t on the top floor either.  And while a three-story fall would just spread my brains all over the parking lot, a two-story fall…we were talking a sprained ankle, maybe a broken leg if I landed wrong.  I could live with that.  I could live with anything that didn’t involve me staying in here until Springs hunted me down and fed me to Cinder one limb at a time.
        I’d need a good running start to smash the window, and I was in the middle of judging whether the windows on the far side of the room would give me enough space when the absurdity of the situation stopped me dead in my tracks.  I was about to jump out of a window and fall who-knew-how-far to escape a pair of ponies who had burned my apartment down, kidnapped me, and might be actively trying to kill me at this point.  I hadn’t even jumped off so much as a diving board in three years.  This was insane.  I was insane.  My whole life had been insane ever since I took this stupid freaking job in the first place.
        Yes.  Yes, it has, I told myself.  But whatever craziness you’ve gotten yourself into, you’re stuck with it now.  And if you want to escape crazy things, you’ve gotta think crazy thoughts.  And that means you’re jumping out this window and getting out of this one way or another.
        I knew that if I thought about it any longer after that, I wasn’t going to do it.  So I stood up and took in a deep breath, and by the time I let it out I was galloping down the aisle, and then sprinting once I heard Springs shout out behind me.  Twenty feet from the window, I saw Cinder charging down the row next to the wall and aiming straight for my target, but I was going to get there before he did.  I had to get there before he did.  I lowered my head and dug into whatever energy I had left, and I reached the window a split-second before Cinder did.  I leapt into the air, a numbing blow to my flank sent me spinning off course, and then the air was filled with shattered glass and searing light and somepony was screaming and I was falling.
        I bounced when I hit the ground, and the pain that jolted through my body at the moment of impact was the best thing I’d felt all day.  Tiny scratches and cuts covered my face and every single part of me ached, but I was alive, and lucid enough to feel that I was bruised but not broken.  Once I rolled to a stop and got my bearings, I saw that the pavement I’d been expecting to hit was still about twenty feet below me, and that the ground around me was made of blazing hot corrugated iron.  I was on the roof of another building.  I wasn’t safe just yet.
        I knew I only had a few seconds before at least one of my kidnappers followed me outside, so I jumped up and kept running before I saw either of them come through the window, trusting my hearing to judge my lead for me.  Once the sound of somepony grunting with exertion became louder than my own breath, my best guess about how close Springs and Cinder were was “way too damn”.
        The row of buildings I was running across was split into several tiers, a flight of metal stairs connecting each roof to the one below it.  I took the steps three at a time and lined myself up to take every set without breaking stride, and didn’t stop until suddenly there wasn’t any more roof to run on.  I skidded to a stop about three inches short of careening out into space, and as the dust and pebbles I’d kicked up cleared, I found myself staring four stories straight down into a churning abyss of brownish-gray water.  I couldn’t believe my eyes until I remembered where I was, and then the situation was all too clear.  Of course there was water below me.  The Hostler River flowed right next to the factory, and the factory ran up right next to the river so they could dump all their waste into it.  And now I’d just painted myself into a corner right next to it.  Stars above, I was an idiot.  Vertigo spun in my stomach and mixed with the ill-timed realization that I’d just jumped out a freaking window to get out here, and I backed away from the edge with my heart almost weightless in my chest.  Once again, I was trapped.
I turned back and caught a glimpse of what I was about to have to face.  Springs was about two hundred feet behind me and closing fast, his teeth bared and his head already lowered into a charge, and way off in the distance I could see Cinder lumbering out from the factory window to join him.  Reality hit me like a thousand-pound anvil: this was going to end in a fight, and it was going to be a fight I wouldn’t walk away from.  Cinder would break me clean in two, or Springs would kick me off the side of the building, or I’d have to push him off first…
The rooftop shimmered beneath my hooves, and this time the knot on my stomach was almost enough to make me sick on the spot.  I had ten seconds to make a choice, and there were no options left that I could possibly bring myself to take.  I took an involuntary step back, and goosebumps rolled up my legs as my hoof slipped for a moment and scraped against the side of the building.  What the hell had I gotten myself into?  Why were these guys so desperate to keep me from getting away?  Why was the sun so damn bright?
I turned and faced the water again.  Was this what insanity felt like?  Standing on top of a building and realizing your best bet for survival was jumping off of it?  No, that’s not it, I told myself.  Insanity is jumping off a building to keep yourself alive, making it through in one piece by the hairs of your tail, and then doing it again thirty seconds later.  Well, blind fate had gotten me this far.  It was going to have to get me one step further.
Celestia only knows why I thought of Leo right then.  I could’ve thought about my mother, shaking her head and telling me she knew I could’ve done better with my life.  I could’ve thought about Clementine, the little filly with the twinkling eyes who was locked in a basement somewhere and was about to get me killed.  My burned-out brain could’ve flashed through any part of my life it pleased, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was a snow-white pegasus with a golden-orange mane, his eyebrows cocked and his lips curled into a cocky grin, stepping up to the edge and flaring his wings and diving off like the pegasus he was.  Like the pegasus I wasn’t.  
Was he responsible for this somehow?  Was this his way of getting me on my feet, getting me out of the office, teaching me to live my life the way a private eye ought to?  I blinked hard, and shook my head hard despite the stabbing pain that shot through my skull because of it.  You want to know what insanity is, Brick? I told myself.  Insanity is jumping off a building because an imaginary pony in your head is telling you to do it.
Three seconds.  Sixty feet back.  Fifty feet straight down.  Leo was already halfway down, wings open and forelegs spread.  I watched him tilt his feathers and pull up to skim across the water, and then I watched him soar off into the sky and fly.  And I watched my own hooves step closer to the edge, and felt my own mind make its final decision.  I closed my eyes, sucked in a breath, felt the words “I need a new job,” slip off my tongue, and then I ducked forward and pushed upwards and lifted my forelegs and opened my eyes.
And I flew.

*A/N: An explanation for why this chapter took approximately forever to finish is located on my most recent blog post for anyone who wants it.