//------------------------------// // Smash and Grab // Story: Pathfinder Ponies // by terrycloth //------------------------------// Applejack and the others met up back at Pie Manor at dawn. Igneous Pie was not at all shocked to see the rogue Surprise tied up and beaten unconscious, and showed them to the dungeon where he had a torture room with a table they could chain her to securely. “Torture won’t work on her,” he said. “Harmony won’t let them say anything it doesn’t want you to know.” “I don’t think I’d want to torture her anyway,” Pinkie Pie said. “She was almost like one of my aunts growing up. We need to fix her!” Using her alchemy set, she took a sample of Surprise’s blood to check for blue mud contamination, like Rarity had seen with the guards before they transformed. “What we need is a loyalty spell,” Twilight said. “I’m sorry, darling, but it’s not just that I don’t know any enchantment spells, it’s that I don’t cast enchantment spells,” Rarity said. “I control the dead, not the living.” “You could,” Pinkie Pie said. “But it’s so inefficient,” Rarity replied, with a frown. “Loyalty spells last about a week,” Twilight said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re inefficient to cast if you cast them on a day where you wouldn’t have used those spells anyway.” “So all I need to do is tell the future,” Rarity replied. “Child’s play.” “We’ve got a place to hunker down,” Applejack said. “What says we have to go out and get into trouble every single day?” “So, what, we’d just spend the whole day sitting around doing nothing?” Rainbow Dash asked. Applejack gave Rainbow Dash a bemused look. “Forget I asked.” ”Actually,” purred the leatherwing maid currently attending Igneous – not Dreamy, today – “I know some techniques that are excellent at freeing people from mind control. They’re not spells, they’re… techniques.” Igneous looked at her, frowning, but said nothing. “So… are we talking that ki stuff that I could never get the hang of?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Are you actually a ninja?” “Something like that?” she replied, with a smile and a shrug. “It’s a secret technique, so I’d need all of you to leave the room while I went to work.” “That’s fine,” Twilight said. “We can look over the papers Applejack recovered. Let us know when she’s ready to talk.” The list of names remained a list of names, with many crossed out with various symbols written next to them. Looking up specific names that the party recognized, they found: Themselves, near the end of the list, not crossed out and with no symbols next to them. Surprise and Wildfire, the flaming crow that Applejack had fought, crossed out with circles next to them. Right next to them was Cloudy Quartz, Pinkie Pie’s mother, crossed out with a spiral. Igneous Pie, crossed out with an infinity symbol. Scanning through the rest of the list, the infinity symbol was very rare. The only other name they could find with it was ‘House Rules’, which unlike Igneous had it inside a circle. The vast majority of names on the list that were crossed off had circles or a pair of parallel vertical lines. “Part of this is obvious,” Twilight said. “The crossed off names have been dealt with, most by forcing them to join the cult, marked with a circle. The other symbols must mean other methods of keeping people from interfering.” “The vertical lines mean death,” Fluttershy said quietly. “They use them more often than anything else aside from the circles.” “Wouldn’t it have to be the spirals?” Rainbow Dash asked. “Pie Lord said he was sure his wife was dead.” “Maybe they all mean dead, but different things done with the bodies,” Rarity suggested. “We can spend all day making wild-ass guesses, but we might as well wait and ask Surprise, assuming that maid isn’t just blowin’ smoke,” Applejack said. “In the meantime, I’ve got some other papers I grabbed off the desk. Haven’t had a chance to look at ‘em yet.” The papers were somewhat disappointing, and somewhat difficult to read, being handwritten personal notes. They weren’t encrypted, but they left out a lot of details that the writer already knew well. What they could make out from them was that they were part of the plans for the ongoing defense of the city. The ponies that used to live in Bright Valley knew that city was divided into nine districts: Government, Temple, Market, Residential, Slums, Docks, Mansions, Entertainment, and Industrial. Each district of the city had been assigned to a high-ranking cult member, and was essentially under their independent control. Each district leader had their own idea about how to protect their district from the Empire’s expected counterattack – Fizzik in the Industrial District was building something in his factory, for example, while the Government District was protected by converted city guards. There were no specifics, other than to mention that the writer’s own district was falling behind, and that he had to step up recruitment. While the adventurers were still digesting the information, the leatherwing maid emerged from the basement, along with Surprise – now out of her restraints. “I just want to say how sorry I am, Pinkie,” the pale-coated pegasus said, rushing forwards and giving her a hug. “Oh, little Pinkie – you’re so big now!” “I know!” Pinkie Pie said. “It’s so annoying! Everyone can shoot me and it’s so hard to dodge!” Surprise giggled. “What happened to mommy?” Pinkie asked. “Her name is crossed off, but she doesn’t have a circle.” Surprise shook her head. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember was going to sleep after getting a really good deal on a mithril shirt. I hadn’t talked to your mother in years… we’d kind of drifted apart. In distance, you know. She wanted to settle down, but I wasn’t done with being a pirate.” “So you don’t remember anything about being a part of the cult?” Twilight asked. Surprise pouted. “I didn’t even know there was a cult until Squirrel broke me out.” “Shade Tail,” said the maid. “Not ‘Squirrel’.” “Well, I guess this is a dead end,” Twilight said. “I’m not dead yet!” Surprise said. “And if I can’t answer all your questions, maybe I can still help you track down Cloudy. Anything I can do to help, just give the word.” “That include fighting the cult with us?” Rainbow Dash asked. Surprise grinned. “Sure! That’s the main thing I expected it to include, since you’ve already got another bandit on your team.” “Scout,” Applejack said. “Oooh, I like that one,” Surprise said. “So, who do you want me to kill?” Fluttershy frowned at her, and quietly said, “Yourself.” When everyone turned to stare at her, she dropped her gaze to stare at the floor, and tried to hide behind Twilight. “She’s still charmed,” she said. “She’s just faking being on our side.” Shade Tail stepped forward. “That’s expected. I’ve suppressed the cult’s hold on her, but I couldn’t break it. She’s… you can think of it as her being hypnotized into acting as if she wasn’t under their control.” She shrugged. “Actually breaking a magical spell would obviously take magic, and like I said, this isn’t a spell, just a technique.” “Can we trust her?” Twilight asked. Shade Tail smiled. “Oh, no, not at all. She’s a wonderfully unrepentant thief and murderer. But you can trust her not to revert to the cult’s control, as long as you don’t ask her to kill a close, personal friend.” Surpise huffed at Shade Tail. “Silly squirrel. You say ‘murderer’, I say ‘pony who’s going to get paid’.” She turned back to the party. “So, seriously. Who are we after.” “If you can’t give us the answers we need, then I reckon there’s only one other choice,” Applejack said. “We need to go back and oozenap the fake pony that wrote these here notes.” During the day, it was easy to move around without being noticed, so long as everypony was in disguise – even Surprise, who was borrowing Rarity’s hat of disguise. Rarity herself was packed in a lead-lined barrel that Macintosh was carrying. She was essential to the plan, but they couldn’t afford to have her detected. Surprise’s blood had shown the same blue-mud contamination that they’d seen in the guards before their transformation into ooze creatures, and Pinkie Pie wouldn’t be able to prepare a remove disease extract until the next day. Still, even if it wasn’t likely that the blue metal curse would wear off until she was purified, they figured it was best to keep the blue metal as far away from her as possible to keep any further damage from being done. That meant buying her a new suit of armor to wear, and some old-school alchemical fire bolts instead of using the cheap ones with blue-metal tips. “I didn’t even know they made crossbows for pegasi,” Pinkie Pie said. “I’m going to buy one for myself!” “It’s a long trip up to goblin country,” Surprise said. “But they have lots of neat stuff there! You should totally go get one.” While they were shopping, they sold the rest of their loot. They didn’t dare claim adventurer status to move the items they’d taken from the guards, but Surprise still registered to the other cult members as being ‘one of them’, and the merchants didn’t even ask where she’d gotten the equipment she sold for them. It still only worked out to a few hundred gold per person, but every little bit counted. Their plan didn’t really require any extra equipment (except for a customized iron bucket to hold the ooze, which Twilight spent a few hours making in Pie Manor’s small forge), so after that short stop in the Market District, they headed back to the Harmony Headquarters to look for a good place to enact their plan. Applejack was able to think back to the route she’d taken that morning, and point out the window for the director’s office, which looked out onto a small park full of children playing various games. “That’s not an alleyway,” Rainbow Dash said. “Oh, for pony’s sake,” Applejack said. “I assumed it looked out on an alleyway just because nine out of ten of the windows in the building did, but of course the one we care about has dozens of ponies watching it at all hours of the day.” “He probably picked the window with the best view because he was in charge,” Twilight said. “This doesn’t have to change the plan much. The strike team can go in invisibly, and while the ponies in the park might take note of the window bars’ removal, it’s unlikely to translate into a call to action until we’re done. We were always planning to dimension door away.” “We can have any disguise we want… how about if we pretend we’re supposed to be there, fixing the window?” Applejack suggested. “No one looks twice at a workpony. After you’re in, we can put it back on, even.” The strike team drank invisibility extracts, and were enchanted with shield and barkskin. Twilight and Rarity also drank potions of spider climb they’d taken from the rooftop-lurking guards. The two of them scuttled across the wall, with Rainbow Dash flying nearby, until they were near the window, where they waited for Applejack and Surprise to open it for them. The two arrived, disguised as a pair of pale blue pegasi wearing thick protective clothing in matching drab colors. It took seconds for the two rogues to unscrew the bars, and then they lifted it up onto the roof for ‘inspection’. Unfortunately, they did not go unnoticed. An ordinary looking earth pony on the ground shouted up at them, “Hey! Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” After carefully setting down the bars, Applejack descended to talk to him. “We’re, uh, the bars need to be fixed. Someone tried to bend them. We’re bending them back, then we’ll put them back on.” The guard frowned. “Who authorized this work? Why wasn’t I told?” “Dunno,” Applejack said, touching the fake blue metal amulet at her chest. “Just seemed like something that needed to be done. Everypony’s got to pitch in, right?” He sighed. “You’re new, aren’t you?” Applejack frowned. “Even if Harmony tells you what needs to be done, you still need to go through the proper channels, so that everyone else knows that it needs to be done, and that you’re not just some random burglar off the street trying to break into the building,” the guard explained, with a patronizing tone of voice. “Go to the front desk and get a work order before you do anything else.” Applejack nodded. “I will! Thank you sir!” “And have them check your indoctrination! I’m not getting anything for you,” the guard added, looking a bit confused. “They said that’d clear up in a few days,” Applejack said. “If it still hasn’t at the end of the week, I’ll go back.” “Oh, okay,” the guard said, shrugging. “Now scoot! Go get that work order! I want those bars back on that window within the hour!” Meanwhile, inside the office, the three invisible adventurers had slipped in and taken position. The director was there, sitting at his desk scribbling notes with a quill held in his mouth. He’d looked up a bit as Twilight scraped her armor against the window frame, but there was enough noise from the children playing outside that he must have written it off as part of the background, and went back to work. Then Rarity drank a potion of silence, which was the signal for Twilight and Rainbow Dash to attack. A fist and a hammer slammed into the pony from either side, breaking his back and his neck and killing him instantly -- by the time the invisibility broke an instant later, he was already dead. Of course, his ruined body immediately split open, disgorging a creature made of blue mud. It happened faster than it had with the guards, but Rainbow Dash was waiting, and smacked it with a claw, crackling with lightning. It responded immediately, lashing out with its tentacles at each of them, but couldn’t get a clean hit on either. Twilight smashed it twice with her hammer, not holding back at all, and while it struggled to reform, Rainbow Dash smacked it around with more electricity – and the creature collapsed in a heap. It was no longer moving, but it still seemed cohesive – hopefully, that meant that it was still alive. The two of them scooped it into the bucket, and secured the lid tightly, then Rainbow took hold of one of Twilight’s hooves and nodded to the empty space where Rarity was supposed to be standing. She didn’t appear, but the silence broke, and then Rainbow Dash and the bucket vanished, leaving Twilight Sparkle standing alone in the office. “This was not part of the plan,” she hissed, as she stood perfectly still, knowing that any move she made in her heavy armor was likely to draw a lot of attention, now that neither silence nor invisibility was shielding her. A couple hundred feet away, Rarity and Rainbow Dash appeared with the bucket, in an alleyway where Macintosh, Pinkie, and Fluttershy were waiting. “Where’s Twilight?” Fluttershy asked. “Eh heh heh heh,” Rarity said, “Apparently I forgot to take into account that the person we were kidnapping would count against the limit of my dimension door spell. But she’s a clever pony, I’m sure she’ll find her own way out.” Back in the office, Twilight’s plan to stand perfectly still until somepony came to rescue her failed almost immediately, when someone knocked on the door. The voice was familiar. “Director?” Wildfire asked. “May I come in?” Twilight stayed quiet. “Are you in there?” he asked, opening the door to peek. He and Twilight stared at each other. He was a large flaming wolf, at the moment, not having seen the need to wild shape to visit his boss. “Hi. I’m the new secretary?” Twilight said. Wildfire turned into a bird, and flew down the hallway, shouting, “Intruders! The intruders from last night are back!” “That’s completely unfair!” Twilight shouted as she chased after him. “I’m wearing an entirely different disguise!” She couldn’t quite reach him with her hammer, so she flung a tanglefoot bag at him, but it went wide and splattered against the wall. Most of the office workers hid in their offices – or in any office nearby – pulling the doors shut after them. Some of them started screaming. Wildfire burst into flame, and flicked a bit of it back at her before diving into the stairwell. The bolt smacked directly into Twilight’s chestplate, but the fire flowed around her armor to burn her, filling the hall with the scent of burning meat. She ignored it, and continued chasing the elusive bird, barreling down the staircase. Focusing entirely on running allowed her to catch up, and his attempt to set her on fire by smacking her in the face with his wings failed badly. She caught him with her hammer as he tried to put some distance between them, and kept right on his heels, smacking him again as the two wound their way through the building, leaving chaos in their wake. Battered and bleeding, the crow wobbled in midair, keeping his guard up as he cast a spell, then dropped to the floor and through the floor – or rather, through the tiny hole he’d shaped in the floor, too small for Twilight to follow. It took her about ten seconds to widen the hole with her hammer, using its spike to splinter the stone floor. She dropped into the basement, and picked herself up. The crow was nowhere to be seen, lost somewhere among the boxes and printing presses, and ponies working the presses, pouring blue mud instead of ink and printing small metal amulets, instead of newsletters. The ponies turned to stare at her, and at the hole she’d smashed in their ceiling. She ignored them. Then she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a spell being cast. Twilight shimmered, and disguised herself as one of the print ponies, vanishing into a group of them. “Act natural,” she hissed at them, as they started to back away. “Interesting,” Wildfire said, flying out into the middle of the room, most of his wounds healed. “Harmony says that stopping you is worth killing any number of the ponies in this room.” There was a streak of green light, and then a burning explosion of acid splashed over Twilight and the ponies around her, who screamed as they fell to the ground, dying, leaving her standing there, alive but badly burned. She growled as she charged, shouting, “Harmony is a lie!” Her hammer slammed into the crow, crushing him to the floor with bone-splintering force. She lifted her hammer for a finishing blow. “In the name of the Moon Princess, I will end you!” “I surrender!” Wildfire said, shielding himself with his wings. Twilight’s horn glowed brightly, a matching glow forming around the crow as she squeezed. He struggled, and thrashed, and then stopped moving. She squeezed him for another few seconds, just in case he was faking. When he turned back into a wolf, she lifted him and draped him over her back. “You’re lucky Surprise is on our side now. I’m letting you live for her sake,” Twilight said to the unconscious druid. She turned and pointed to one of the surviving bystanders. “Now, you! How do I get out of here?” The terrified press pony pointed to the stairs. At the top, a gaggle of ponies and griffons and an orc waited, clutching various weapons. At the sight of Wildfire unconscious, they took a step back. “Don’t get in my way,” Twilight said, shimmering into something approximating her true form, armor and all, although she did keep the colors different. “I haven’t killed anypony today, and I’m not in the mood to start, but I’m not letting you stop me.” “L-l-let her through,” said the earth pony in front, dropping the two-handed mace he’d been holding in his jaws. “But Harmony says –“ one of the others objected. “You felt all those people die down there, if we try to stop her we’ll be next!” Nopony stopped her as she walked out the front door, where she found herself facing a semicircle of city guards with lucerne hammers, more guards with bows lining the rooftops, and half a dozen pegasi hovering overhead. The doors behind her slammed shut. “Stand down!” said a Macintosh-sized earth pony from the center of the guard formation. “Surrender, and you won’t be harmed.” Twilight looked at them, and frowned. “It’s days like this that make me wish I was an orc.” Suddenly, a thirty foot tornado swooped over the edge of the roof, scattering the pegasus formation as they dove to the side to avoid being sucked into the whirlwind. It dipped down to lift Twilight up off her feet, then shot back up onto the roof, whisking her away.