//------------------------------// // Souls, Unsettled // Story: The Game of Shadows // by Zytharros //------------------------------// Souls, Unsettled We had burned most of the day searching through the library, leaving the evening free and open. I couldn’t settle down, so Derpy and I took off into Phillydelphia to get some fresh air. We left with one of our pegasus guards who knew the area, giving our eyes and minds a break from the strenuous studying. We found a concert by a band named Dashcore at a bar in the area. It was dubbed “metal dinner theatre”, according to the band’s poster. However, they looked nothing like a traditional five-piece metal band. A deep black pegasus zebra, striped with purple instead of white with a matching purple bow in her mane, sat behind the drums. Her tail looked abnormally fluffy. Another, a red and white paint Earth pony played a wicked guitar and belted out mostly-cohesive tunes in amongst the clanking from all her black rings, her mane held back with a black headband. These two looked the most metal of anyone else on stage. A third, a pale-green Earth pony with ketchup-and-mustard hair, smiled idiotically from behind his bass. His white chest piece and white anklets destroyed his placement in the band. A pretty little freckle-faced sun-yellow unicorn keyboard-player with lavender hair highlighted with soft pink sang heavenly harmonized notes from behind her keyboard. She looked more the Katy Perry pop-princess type. The other guy was a white pegasus with black glasses and hooves and a mane and tail that looked caught in million-mile-an-hour winds, spiking out of everywhere away from his rump. He was playing guitar at cut-time rates compared to the rest of his crew. We entered into the bar and realized there were only about three seats occupied. We ordered our meals. I ordered a cheese-heavy Pegasian salad with extra olives and light on the dressing. Derpy requested a daisy burger. Sitting there, and being fairly sensitive to musical imperfections, I began to pick out elements of their sound that were off. Individually, they appeared to be very gifted musicians. However, when combined, the only ones who made sense as a part of the band were the drummer and the guitarists. That’s not to say the sound wasn’t interesting. It was as if Britney Spears had decided to suddenly become the front woman for Metallica, with Enya playing support vocals… a good example: Enter Toxman on Youtube, at least for the Britney Spears and Metallica part. This band, comparative to that video, sounded disjointed, off-key, and a little off-beat, especially as the drummer, who I overheard was named Boomdrop, got going. She transitioned from keeping tempo to doing her own thing, and from there the show dissolved into a chaotic mess of noise, confused keyboards, and… something of hideousness on the bass line I still cannot accurately describe without causing an aneurysm in my brain. Our accompaniment excused himself to stand outside the bar while we endured the assault. Eventually, the band left the drummer and lead guitarist alone on-stage, frustrated with their independence from the sound they were trying to make. Only then did the show get any good. The drumming was spectacular. She did more whirly cymbal hits, quintuple-kicks, and hat plays than I’ve ever seen a drummer do, and she kept it up for the rest of our meal, playing to a symphony only she heard in her head, long with the red pony standing beside her, belting out something reminiscent of Thousand Foot Krutch’s “New Drug”. When they finally stopped, we were the only ones in the shop – as in Derpy, myself, and Boomdrop. The red mare had exited the stage after several minutes to catch up with her friends. She was mortified, but from the look of her eyes as they dissolved into disappointment, this had happened to her before. Her back slumped as she slid off the stage with a look of grateful thanks that we, too, didn’t leave. I felt drawn to her, so I got up out of my seat and greeted her. She spoke with a thick Bronx-style accent. “Thanks for staying,” she said. I smiled. “No problem. I always appreciate a good drummer.” She blushed. “What’s your name?” “Zytharros. I hear you’re Boomdrop?” She nodded. “That’s right.” She slumped again. “Boomdrop… the biggest failure of a musician ever.” I brought her over to our table and ordered her some cider just as a mare I recognized as Octavia took the stage. She began to play her cello, clearly indignant that her audience had been driven away by the previous act with how she glared at the small dark mare. Boomdrop continued. “How do I keep up with the rest of the band? I hear the music start, then all I can hear is a symphony as I play my part. Once I get going, I just don’t stop.” “You’re not the biggest musical failure in history,” I said, attempting to cool her down. Derpy nodded. “Yeah. You should hear me try to play an instrument some time. I usually break it.” Boomdrop chuckled. “You can’t be that clumsy,” she said, passing on Derpy’s wandering eye as if it was nothing new and focussing her attention squarely on her good eye. “Instruments are hard to break.” The wall-eyed pegasus looked relieved and a little bewildered to not have someone ask about or insult her eye at first sight. “I’m a lot more clumsy than you’d think…” she said. “I destroyed a town hall once… I’m still not sure how that happened.” A cruel smile played across Boomdrop’s face. “That musta been some kinda cool… I wish I was there.” “I hurt a friend doing it… It wasn’t cool at all,” Derpy mumbled. Boomdrop’s cruel smile hadn’t left her. She was absorbed in… something I couldn’t quite figure out. Just as quickly, though, she dropped the smile. “So… do you have a place to crash?” she asked. “My pad’s just down the road.” I nodded. “We’re actually trying to find a way to get home.” “Oh?” she asked. “We were kicked out of our village, Ponyville, by a… something,” Derpy said, temporarily forgetting our common enemy. I nodded. “It’s an evil force that’s taken over Ponyville and Canterlot. There’s a magic barrier preventing us from returning home, and we need a way to breach that barrier.” “We have to see if our friends are alright,” Derpy said, getting a little more desperate. “The darkness in that magic dome has our friends trapped inside.” Boomdrop listened intently, then leaned back from her cup. “Ponyville, huh?” she asked. We nodded. Boomdrop smiled. “We ain’t toured there in ages,” she said excitedly. “I’m sure Razortongue would like to meet her old friend Fluttershy again. She keeps putting a hole in our schedule for this ‘Winter Wrap-Up Festival’ nonsense they hold, then disappears for a week.” Derpy and I looked at each other solemnly. I grimaced. “We’ll have to get Fluttershy back before… Razortongue, is it...? can do anything with her.” “Oh, right… evil capturing Ponyville and all that…” Boomdrop recalled. “Plus the fact I’m not on the best of terms with my band mates right now… This could be tougher than I thought.” She stomped her hoof. “That settles it. I’m going to make myself scarce from the band for a while to let them cool off.” Derpy looked at her quizzically. “You’re their drummer, right?” Boomdrop chuckled. “Last I checked…” “I think you should let them know what you’re doing,” Derpy spoke. “They are your friends, after all.” I nodded. “I’d rather see you leave the band for a while and have them kno-” The door burst open, a terribly angry red-and-white paint mare standing in the door and puffing. She groaned. “Don’t fuckin’ bother… we just broke up.” Our eyes shot over to the door. The mare approached our table, stomping and snorting. Boomdrop let out a gasp. “Boomdrop, you won’t believe what the fuck just happened,” she said, walking over, her rings clanking as noisily as her language. “We finished the show, then we got into this fuckin’ huge shit-fest backstage… We’re finished. Canuck Chuck’s fuckin’ taken off, Keytap Sweethorn’s signed with a damn pop label, and that bastard Emerald Thunder stormed off alone after the show… They wouldn’t listen to a damn word I said…” Boomdrop groaned. “Again, Razor!? That’s the fifth time this year…” She finished off the last word with a bit of a whine. Derpy’s mouth dropped at Razortongue’s language. This was the first time she’d heard this kind of language. Nopony in Ponyville spoke like Razortongue. My ears were reeling a little too. It seemed there was a black spot in Equestria’s utopian visage… besides Crystal Fist herself, of course. Razortongue seethed. “I was so fuckin’ sure we’d be hitting gold this year… We were so-o-o-o da-a-a-a-amn close!” Boomdrop face-planted into the table. “Dashcore… our dream… it’s over?” Razortongue stomped around and began bucking in ferocity, kicking over tables and chairs and generally making a mess of the restaurant, though she never touched the table or chair where Boomdrop sat. Derpy and I panicked as the shrapnel flew around all over the room, diving behind a table. The manager of the restaurant cowered from behind his bar in fear. Finally, after her ten minute temper tantrum, Razortongue cooled off. She looked around the restaurant, wide-eyed and embarrassed that she had obliterated all but two tables, three chairs, four bottles of miscellaneous beverages, a cash register, and a portrait of Princess Celestia on the only undamaged wall in the building. “…Maybe we should… talk about this… outside…” she whispered, her temperament crashing into a Fluttershy-esque mode of fear. So Boomdrop and Razortongue left the store. Derpy and I quickly followed. I looked back and threw a whole pile of bits at the manager. “Hopefully this pays for the damage…” I said as I turned my attention to the three mares in front of me. We proceeded to the drummer’s house. Twenty minutes of walking later, we arrived at Boomdrop’s sixth-floor studio apartment. It was small, containing just a purple bed, a black wood table, and a separate bathroom with a vanity that an amount of styling products that put most salons to shame. Let me put it another way: she had sixteen forty-bottle wine holders completely filled with extra-large bottles of different hair sprays, conditioners, shampoos, styling gels, combs, brushes, scissors… there was absolutely no hair health product that was missing. “Oh,” she said as I stood with my mouth agape, noticing how stunned I was at this wall of hair products. “Those are for my tail.” I must have frothed at the mouth a little… she looked at me concerned and waved a hoof in my face before just simply dragging me back into the main hall with her magic. I finally snapped out of my stupor, choosing to simply forget I had been in her bathroom. That’s the only sane way to cope with seeing that amount of hair product… I thought, smiling. Yes… I had never been in there… Razortongue laughed. “You, too?” I smiled, my eye twitching. “What?” “You walked into the Shrine of the Fuckin’ Tail, didn’t you?” she said, laughing again. I imagined all those hair products falling over onto poor Boomdrop, but with magic, the pony commanding the hair products to rise up and attack everyone without a perfect tail… I shuddered. Boomdrop glared at me. “It’s not that bad…” she said, a little insulted. Razortongue laughed harder. “This pony’s killin’ me!! I wish I knew what he was thinking! I bet it’s hilarious!” Derpy grew cross. “You don’t talk to my friend like that!” she demanded. Razortongue shrieked in laughter. “The dumbass is going to tell me to stop insulting her friends? That’s ri…” There was a sob from Derpy. I immediately forgot the bathroom, snapped out of my stupor, snapped Razortongue up with a levitation spell, upended her and slammed her into the ground hard. A shriek erupted from the shocked Earth pony. “You do not call Derpy Hooves a dumbass… ever!” I said, an evil snarl contorting my words to gaseous black acid as I stomped towards her. “She is my friend, and she will be talked to with respect at all times. Consider my wife is disabled. I cannot and never will tolerate that kind of bullshit from anyone.” Razortongue pissed herself. Seriously… I felt it on my foot. She shrank back and cowered. “Sorry…”she said meekly. “D-Derp…” I cooled down. Looking around, I saw a sad look of thankfulness from Derpy. Boomdrop shrunk back. I quickly glared at Razortongue again. “You get over there and apologize your sorry butt off,” I muttered, pointing at Derpy. “She’s put up with enough of that… b-u-l-l-c-r-a-p… in her life. She doesn’t need you adding to it.” Razortongue, puppy-dog-eyed, flipped into a Sweetie Belle-esque scoot belly slide, flopping herself in front of Derpy, who just proudly smiled a forgiving, tearful grin as she was profusely apologized to. Suddenly, a knock at the door drew our attention. “Miss Boomdrop? Your rent’s due.” Razortongue’s eyes bugged out. Boomdrop gestured to her frantically. The red pony shook her head and offered an apologetic bow. The purple pegasus facehoofed. “Miss Boomdrop?” the voice asked again. Boomdrop silently flipped out and began pacing. She was scheming how to fix… whatever mess she was in. Razortongue sighed, looking like she had let Boomdrop down in some way. We were about to find out how. “Miss Boomdrop, this is the sixth month you’ve missed your rent payment,” the voice said scornfully. “If you do not pay tonight, we will be forced to evict you, effective immediately.” Boomdrop froze, stunned, then collapsed onto her butt. She glared at Razortongue who felt the icy glare and slinked back. Boomdrop approached the door and opened it, revealing a mare with a pale green mane and tail and a deep brown coat… and a very Fran Drescher way of speaking. “Aima Landgrabber…” she said anxiously. “If you would only let me have a couple weeks more-” “I’ve let you have ten of those bloody ‘couple weeks more’…” Ms. Landgrabber snapped, clearly cross with her delinquent tenant. “If you don’t have the money, then move your shit elsewhere, you and your roommate both. I’ll be in 315, waiting to hear the lovely clank of bits through the damn mail slot.” She closed the door as her landlord trotted down the hall. Boomdrop slowly and tearfully walked to her bedroom. Razortongue slouched over, fighting back tears. Derpy and I looked at each other. Though no words were exchanged, we knew what we had to do. “You girls could stay with us,” Derpy said. Razortongue sniffled. “After what I did to you?” I nodded. “Some things are more important than insults and aggravation. One of those is having a roof over your head.” Boomdrop poked her head into the room. “Wait… you guys had a place to stay already?” We nodded. Derpy answered her question, telling her about how we were staying in Canterdam Castle as official guests of Princess Celestia as we researched how to defeat an enemy that had banished us from Ponyville. Razortongue frowned deeply. “My hometown…” she said, slipping into some small reminiscence I could only guess involved Fluttershy. “The one place in the world where I could let down my persona and feel… normal…” She smiled, closing her eyes and recalling some unknown memory. I smiled kindly. “Would you like to relive that memory?” Boomdrop looked at me with a thousand questions in her eyes. Only one emerged. “What are you talking about, Zytharros?” Razortongue closed her eyes. “I wish I could…” I recalled Thousand Foot Krutch’s “This is a Call” and casted a spell like the one I had used with Rarity last time I was in Ponyville on Razortongue. Instantly, her memory appeared on the floor for all to see – and Razortongue, Boomdrop, and Derpy gasped in awe. It opened with a sonic rainboom. She looked up at the sky, watching a race that would define the ages. She longed for the wings to fly, but could only dream, being born an Earth pony. Wonderbolts posters decorated her walls, but she had only seen them from afar, their fireworks and stunt displays viewed through a set of binoculars. “We’ll see them one day, honey…” That night. A young filly, snuggling in her mother’s arms. A black eye on her mother’s left side… the filly’s curiosity… what happened to mommy? A jump of one year ended with her body flung against a wall… her dad storming out… her mom crying and screaming at the doorway… a fight that ended badly… and her mom in hospital for weeks. She pulled out her ponytail, chopped off her long mane and donned her trademark black headband that day. Flash forward three years. She was the only pony in her class without a cutie mark, and she had no friends. She ran away from school, winding up outside Fluttershy’s cottage. She stared down at her reflection in the water, contemplating suicide. A hoof press on her shoulder. Teary-eyed, she turned to see a yellow pegasus hovering in front of her… an animated conversation… a lost, timid pony crying… Another year passes and Mother dies. This was a very black memory, one that weighed down every heart in the room. Her devil-may-care attitude developed then, as did most of her vocabulary. Constant, profanity-filled fights with Fluttershy. Running away and spending three lonely weeks in the Everfree Forest, finally being found by the one mare who cared to look. Then… Razortongue, forgiven and adopted by Fluttershy… and waking up animals on Fluttershy’s fifth Ponyville Winter Wrap Up… her very first… The memory at the end of that dream sequence, the hug she received from Fluttershy for helping… it shone with so much warmth I still tear up as I remember it. She had never experienced a hug until that day, and it changed everything. She finally had a place of acceptance, a place where she belonged. The memories faded away as the song finished, all four minutes of it. Razortongue blushed. “I didn’t mean to show that much of my past…” “It’s okay,” Derpy said, smiling. “I know why you insulted me now.” Derpy offered an embrace to Razortongue, but she smiled kindly. “If it’s all the same, a hoof-shake will do,” she said. “Don’t wanna get all sappy now…” Derpy and Razortongue shook hooves and smiled. A few seconds of silence passed as we revelled in the moment… but not all moments last forever. Boomdrop sighed. “We better get moving. She’s gonna want to see this place cleared up.” “Zytharros,” Razortongue began, getting a scheme in her eyes. “Can you do the ba-” I glared at her, interrupting her sentence. “I’m not packing up that bathroom! She can do that herself!” The three girls laughed as we began packing. I asked Derpy if she would mind resuming her mailmare role and delivering parcels to the two vacant rooms still in the castle instead of packing. We both understood this to be the best course of action, though Derpy did need to be reminded of why this was the case. We spent the rest of the evening moving Boomdrop and Razortongue’s stuff into our castle, retiring to bed shortly after moving. Derpy and Boomdrop were first to bed. Just as I settled into bed myself, Razortongue cracked the door to my room open a little. “Oh, hey, Raze,” I said, a little surprised. She smiled, then walked into my room. “I just wanted to say… thank you,” she said. “For corralling my fuckin’ temper, I mean. Celestia knows I need it.” I smiled. “You’re welcome.” “So, what’s your story?” she asked. I wasn’t sure how to answer. I hadn’t known her long enough to trust her and I wasn’t sure how important she would be to our mission, so I said, “If it’s all the same, I’ll… tell you at a later date.” She frowned. “Why?” I hated dishonesty… It always left a mealy taste in my mouth. “I…” But I didn’t have to be dishonest. “If you don’t want to fuckin’ tell me, that’s okay,” Razortongue said, smiling. “I still don’t fuckin’ know Boomdrop’s story and she’s been my friend since I left Ponyville two fuckin’ years ago. All I know is she’s from the shit-holes of Manehattan and had to kick some asses to get out of there.” I nodded anther thank you to her and asked, “What brings you to my bedside?” She bit her lip. “Is Fluttershy okay? What’s happening in Ponyville?” I recalled the first adventure I had in Equestria, then told her what happened this time and what Derpy and I had discovered about our enemy Crystal Fist just last night. Razortongue grew furious. “That little son of a bitch… she hurt Fluttershy.” She looked at me, serious and unrelenting in her decision. “I’m coming with you when you return to Ponyville. That fucker just messed with the wrong fuckin’ pony.” I nodded in confirmation. “Then you’ll need to know my origin… but keep it in our group.” She listened intently as I called forth memories of my life on Earth to support my story as a human come to Equestria at the behest of Her Majesty Princess Celestia. I also told her that I have already been penetrated by our enemy and will slowly deteriorate to a shadow over time, like Fluttershy had already done. “This bitch is badass…” Razortongue commented in amazement. “Nothing to fuck around with.” “Not in the least,” I said. “She’ll take you over if you’re not aware of yourself.” “I’m not sure if I can sleep now,” she said, looking outside the door. I nodded to the same door she looked at. “If you want, you can back out now and leave. If you still want to be involved but can’t sleep, the library is that way. Regardless, if you find you can sleep, then go ahead.” Razortongue thought for a second, then shook her head. “If I were to fuckin’ walk away now, I couldn’t call myself the toughest badass in Fillydelphia anymore. I’d have to let you have that shit, and I can’t stand being second-toughest badass.” She stood. “No. This Crystal Fist bitch will not get the best of Razortongue.” She left the room. “I’m off to read some fuckin’ books.” I chuckled to myself. She was an entertainer in the biggest sense of the word. That was clear. I settled down in bed, happy to have one more confirmed traveling partner. My head began ticking quietly as I fell asleep. Tick… Tick… Tick…