When I opened my eyes, the world around me was dark and blurry. My head swam, and I could hear someone muttering something unintelligible. I shook my head to clear my thoughts and found that the bright red object almost right in front of me was a face belonging to none other than Pullmare’s personal stooge, Orange Peece. On each side of her stood a burly, blue unicorn.
“Rise and shine, sweetheart!” Peece sang when she saw my eyes fly open. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you!”
I yelped in surprise and tried to jump back, but found that I couldn’t. Looking down, I saw that my hind legs, forelegs, and wings were all tied to a wooden chair, forcing me to sit perfectly upright. I had to struggle to keep my breathing down as the Pegasi instinct to panic if my wings weren’t functioning started to rise up.
Still not quite sure that I wasn’t stuck in some sort of bad trip, I asked, “What, uh...what happened?” I looked around the dirty room, filled with piles of trash and discarded machine parts. “And where am I?”
Peece hit one of the guards on the back of his head, though it didn’t really have much of an effect. “I told you not to use so much chloroform! Ms. Pullmare will be very angry if her subject isn’t fully awake when she gets here...” She turned to me and sneered. “We caught you looking for your little inventor friend; you’re in his house right now.”
The memories of walking into Sterling’s house, only to find it dark and occupied with a very large pony holding a white rag came flooding back. They were pushed aside quickly, however, at the mention of the mayor’s name.
“P- Pullmare is coming?” I asked, suddenly fully awake and alert.
Peece giggled. “That’s right,” she said. “She was mad; even fired the entire police staff that let her brother save you. The only reason I have a job still is because I agreed to mess up the Weather Corps contact and you.” She used one forehoof to gently brush away some of my mane that had fallen over my eyes, and I shivered in revulsion at her touch. “I even have me special orders not to harm you.” She winked. “Ms. Pullmare wants you for herself.”
My thoughts straying to my recent “session” with mayor, I looked up at her pleadingly and begged, “C- could you just let me go? I’ll do anything...just please don’t let her near me!”
If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought the expression on her face was sincere. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, leaning in close to me. “I’m sure she’ll be very gentle.”
No more to say, Peece turned and walked out of the tiny room, the guards staying behind briefly before following. One of them shut the door shut with a dreadful sense of finality.
* * *
Once I’d calmed down a little bit, I turned as far around in my seat as I could and asked, “Sterling, are you awake?”
He took so long to answer that I had started to assume that the chloro-whatever was still working on him. Eventually, though, he replied with a simple, “Yeah.”
“Good,” I said. I paused. “Did you, uh, hear all of what Peece said, just now?”
“Yeah,” he said. I felt my face flush; of course he had had to witness me whimpering like a little foal. After a second, he sighed and asked, “She’s going to hurt us, isn’t she?”
I did my best to inject the same confidence in my voice that Grapevine would have in our situation; we couldn’t afford having both of us act scared. “No, Pullmare’s not even going to get a chance to hurt us,” I said confidently. “Because we’re going to escape before she even gets here.”
“Um, how?”
Thinking fast, I said, “Well, Peece didn’t tie my wings very tightly...” I pushed my wings against the ropes, slacker than the rest, for effect. “...so if I can get those free, I can grab something sharp and cut us out.”
“Okay,” he said quietly, though with a little less fear in his voice.
I got to work, trying to slip my wings up and over the bonds around my midsection. In theory, I could tuck one wing under the other and use the top one to push the ropes out far enough to get the bottom one out. Of course, the idea was harder to do in practice.
“Uh, Minty,” Sterling said, after several minutes of silently listening to me struggle against my bonds and get absolutely nowhere.
“It’s all a process,” I said, answering his perceived question. “We’ll be close to escaping before you know it, just wait and see.”
He coughed. “Well, uh, that’s good,” he said, “But I was just going to ask why you came here in the first place.”
I briefly stopped trying to escape to consider my answer. One one hoof, I didn’t want to tell a story that might make me look weak to him; on the other, I didn’t have much of a chance of getting him to like me if I wasn’t very truthful. “It’s a long story,” I said eventually, hoping he would take the bait.
He didn’t. “It’s not like we don’t have the time...” he said. “Besides, Peece already told me what, uh, happened between you and the mayor.”
I sighed. Of course she had told him, and almost certainly in the most unflattering way towards me. “Well, the story really starts when I got back to my friend Joya’s house, and I had no idea what I was going to do...”
* * *
It was truth, too; even on the flight down from Serenity I hadn’t had a clue of what I was going to do or say once we arrived at the shop.
Grapevine’s hug ended as suddenly as it had come, with her nervously brushing it off as elation that she didn’t have to find a new photographer. I rolled my eyes and let Joya lead us inside. I followed Grapevine and Marshmallow toward the kitchen, while Lightning stood awkwardly in the doorway until Joya led her in by her claw, chattering about flight harnesses the whole way.
The heat coming from Joya’s kitchen was as sweltering as plowing the fields on a summer’s day. Tins of brownies and cupcakes were set out on the crowded, wooden counters. Grapevine and I walked over to a table shoved in one corner while Marshmallow turned to tend the cooking food.
“Sorry about the temperature,” Marshmallow said. She looked sheepishly at the wood-burning stove, and the fire raging inside. “It’s been awhile since I’ve cooked on one of these, and I may have gotten carried away.” Large banks of ashes were spread in a rough semicircle around the front of the stove, further proving her point.
“Who are you making these for, anyway?” I asked, looking enviously at a pan of brownies. “I don’t think even I could eat all of these.” Most of the baked goods were too hot to eat, but I was thinking about taking the risk.
Marshmallow shook her head. “Oh no, these are for the library’s annual baking giveaway: we give away sweets to the less fortunate.” I sighed and kept my hooves off the food.
* * *
“So you came over here because of brownies?” Sterling asked, cutting off my nostalgia trip.
I groaned inwardly and mumbled, “No.” I needed him to understand, but how could the story make sense if he didn’t know the context first? I don’t know, maybe I was getting too off-task.
Before I could start again, however, my left wing suddenly freed itself from the ropes. I’d almost given up on my previous plan to get them out, so it came as quite a surprise to me. With one wing free, the bonds fell away from the other, being too loose to hold in just one.
“Alright, now we’re back in business!” I cried. “My wings are out,” I explained before Sterling could ask just what in the hay I was shouting about.
With them free, I could move on to the second part of my plan: cutting the ropes. I looked around the room until I spotted a pile of sharp-looking machine parts relatively close to the left my chair. If I could just tip myself over, I could reach them.
I took a deep breath, counted to three, and shoved myself to the side as hard as I could. I closed my eyes and waited for an impact on the wooden floor. Nothing. I looked down, only to see that the legs of my chair had been hastily melded into the floor with magic. I groaned inwardly: back to step one.
“You okay?” Sterling asked after I didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just going to have to find a new way to cut these ropes...” An idea popped into my head. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have any tools on you, would you?”
Sterling, mumbling as he tried to think, said, “Not anything sharp, no...” My heart sank until he resumed, “...but I still have a screwdriver in the pocket of my uniform, I believe.”
I scrunched my eyebrows together. “Please, please, please tell me your uniform isn’t outside with Peece,” I said. If I couldn’t free both of us soon, the situation was going to get nasty when Pullmare showed up. My best chance of defending myself at that current time was to ineffectually flail my wings in her general direction; at best, I could make her have a heart attack from an extra-strong fit of laughter.
“I’m actually, uh, wearing my uniform right now,” Sterling said.
“What?” I half-yelled, trying to turn around in my chair. “Why didn’t you try to escape earlier?!”
“T- Those guards-” he said. I stopped him and shook my head.
“Which pocket is the screwdriver in?”
“Back right,” he said, then added, “My right.”
“Alright, just give me a second,” I said. I concentrated on stretching out the wingtips on my left wing and moving them along the chair to the edges of Sterling’s uniform. It was always a weird sensation when I tried to use them like a dragon with his claws; I had to focus on feeling each feather as its own appendage, instead of a larger part of my wing.
I tentatively reached down and felt around to find the right area. Sterling coughed. “That’s, um, not a pocket,” he said when I missed my mark by going a little too low. Totally by accident, of course.
“Oh, right,” I said, trying to force a laugh. I refocused my efforts and reached into the uniform until I felt the wooden head of the screwdriver.
“I got it,” I said. I pulled the tool out and dragged it back to my chair before dropping it into my outstretched hooves, still tied behind me. “See, I’ll have us out of here in no time,” I said, starting to saw away at the rope with the metal end of the screwdriver.
* * *
Marshmallow eventually extinguished the stove with a little help from Grapevine’s magic, and we all settled around Joya’s kitchen table. The donkey herself escorted Lightning into the room, who was now sporting a very frilly hat topped with a large, black feather.
“Not. One. Word,” Lightning growled when she saw Grapevine and I struggling to control our laughter.
Once everyone was seated at the table, the attention turned to me. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I was picking up some bad vibrations. I knew that, by then, Marshmallow and Joya weren’t buying the story they had been fed: they’d seen the scars. Grapevine, too, knew that I had done more than simply come back to Joya’s. Of course, Lightning stayed silent through the whole affair.
“So we were, um, wondering about last night,” Marshmallow began quietly.
Taking the reins as usual, Grapevine blurted, “What the hay happened to you?” Lightning cringed for me, but I shook it off. I’d made up my mind: if I wanted Pullmare’s voice to stop nagging at me from the inside, I’d have to tell my friends what happened. Once and for all, I would know where they stood; or, that was my plan anyway.
So, I took a deep breath and told them. I told them everything, from my capture in the factory to my arrival at Joya’s. Their faces showed the proper reactions--anger in Pullmare, elation at my rescue by Rainbow Remedy, sadness from the breaking of Starshine--but they all remained uncharacteristically silent the entire time. Not the peaceful, harmonious kind of silence, mind, but the kind of silence that comes when laying in bed late at night with the realization that something important was forgotten, but you can’t remember what.
Of course, my less-than-enthusiastic response may have been due to the fact that I glossed over Pullmare’s insults to my friends like Princess Luna when asked about her past. Indeed, the first words out of Marshmallow’s mouth, once the period of silence had finally passed, were, “Did Pullmare say anything about us?”
I grinned, badly, and said, “Uh, what do you mean?”
Marshmallow smiled sweetly. “Ms. Pullmare has let Grapevine and I know several times how much she, um...really, really doesn’t like us.”
When I didn’t answer for a few seconds, I saw, from the corner of my eye, Lightning take a step toward the doorway. It was a subtle move, barely noticeable, but it sent a clear message: I was going to have to tell them, or I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
I sighed. “Okay, yeah, she said some...things.”
“Like what?” she asked. Though she still spoke gently, her tone was rough; more forceful. It was like a queen giving kind orders to her subject; or, in this case, a princess.
“Well, like, uh...” I said. I bit my lip. “Like you were, kind of, using me to get back into Canterlot...” I winced, and braced myself for the worst; that nagging doubt was practically ringing in my ears.
Instead of either quietly denouncing Pullmare’s claims or brazenly accepting them as fact, Marshmallow began to giggle; softly at first, then rising in volume. Briefly, my eyes flicked between Joya and Grapevine to try to tell if I had missed out on the joke. When she had calmed down a little, Marshmallow explained, “I’m sorry Minty, but Ms. Pullmare has been saying the same thing about me since I arrived in the city.” She scratched the top of her head. “She seems to be under the impression that I never wanted to come here in the first place, and that I’ve been trying to go back.”
“But...weren’t you actually banned from going back?” I asked.
Marshmallow smiled. “Technically; though, that was mostly my doing.” She puffed out her chest a little. “I was the one who gave the speech about Canterlot’s homeless at the Princess’s Ball.” She tapped Grapevine on one shoulder. “Don’t you remember? You were there, after all.”
For the first time since I had stopped talking, I really noticed Grapevine. Her face had grown hard, showing even less emotion than usual. Her hooves kept a tight grip on the wooden table, which she stared down at with such intensity that I was afraid the entire thing was going to catch fire. When her head snapped up so she could look at me, I jerked back so hard in my chair I almost fell over.
“What did Ms. Pullmare say about me?” she said evenly. Her face and tone remained neutral, and I almost answered the same as I had with Marshmallow, until I looked into her eyes. Something in them told me that she already knew exactly what the mayor had said, and was pleading with me to lie to everyone else so they wouldn’t know what had been said--because they couldn’t know.
“Oh, she just said that you wanted to use Marshmallow and I to get your position on the Chronicler back,” I said as convincingly as I could. “Pretty silly, huh?”
A smile finally fought its way to Grapevine’s face as she said, “Yeah, pretty ridiculous.” The tension in the room almost visibly eased as everyone began talking at once, while Lightning stepped away from the doorway and back to the kitchen table.
Lightning smiled. “It seems our mayor is not as clever as she thinks she is,” she said, putting one taloned-claw on my shoulder.
Briefly, my gaze met Grapevine’s. “Right,” I said. “Far from it.”
* * *
“So it was Grapevine that brought you here,” Sterling said. “Correct?”
I sighed. “No, I haven’t gotten to the reason why yet.” I was able to speak easier, as my forehooves had finally been let loose, and I had begun work on the heavier ropes around my back legs. Once they were undone, I would be free.
“Shouldn’t you just skip ahead?” he said.
“Well, I could,” I said. “But then you wouldn’t know the context.” I had to keep switching between hooves for sawing the ropes so neither would cramp up.
“Seems like a silly way to tell a story,” he mumbled.
I rolled my eyes and began talking again. With any luck, I could free myself before I was done.
* * *
Though a more jovial mood had settled in the kitchen, there was still one question that hung in the air, begging to be asked: What were we going to do about Pullmare? From Starshine’s condition, it was obvious that something had to be done about the mayor sooner or later, lest she find a way to strike at all of us.
The others seemed happy to ignore the question, but I eventually forced myself to ask it. I, after all, had a vested interest at getting the mayor before she could get me. For some reason, thinking of that almost had me feeling courageous.
“So, how are we going to take down Pullmare?” I finally asked. The current conversation, a debate between Marshmallow and Grapevine about the merits of living in Canterlot, ceased while all eyes turned to me once more.
“You’re planning on taking down the mayor? Are you crazy?” Joya said with an exaggerated surprise. She knew it had been coming; I guessed she was just surprised I had been the one to suggest it.
Marshmallow nodded. “You’re right,” she said, “But Joya does have a point. How are we going to kick out the most powerful mare in the city?”
Silence reigned as everyone fought to come up with a good answer, but found they didn’t have one. After my period in the jail cell, I didn’t want to even think about confronting her head on.
It was Grapevine who was the first to speak, asking, “Why don’t we set a trap?”
“What do you mean, a trap?” I asked, quick to latch on to any new idea.
Grapevine leaned back and crossed her forelegs. Just talking about bringing an end to Pullmare had put her in a better mood. “There’s no way we could ever remove her in the usual way: with elections, lawsuits, or just plain threats,” she said. “But, if we could get her to confess how bad she is in front of, say, the Princesses, then maybe we could force her out of power.”
“And exactly how are we supposed to do that?” I asked.
Marshmallow answered for her. “The Summer Sun Festival!” she said. “It’s being held in City Hall: she has to show up.”
Grapevine smiled. “Bingo.”
I scratched my head. Technically, that could work; if we did it right, anyway. There was one problem, though. “How do we get her to admit she’s doing something wrong?” I asked. “We don’t even know what exactly it is that she’s doing that’s so bad.”
Grapevine smiled. “We use you.”
“M- Me?” I said. I gulped. “Uh, why, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“You’re good at making Pullmare mad,” Grapevine said simply. Lightning, who had up to that point been stoically listening in, nodded. “We get her talking to you, ask the right questions, and we can get her to say anything,” Grapevine finished. I started to get the feeling that it might have been better to have kept my mouth shut about the whole affair.
Marshmallow, idly tracing one hoof through her blonde mane, asked Grapevine, “Have you ever been to one of Fillydelphia’s Summer Sun Festivals? They’re so loud it’s hard to hear the pony next to you, let alone get everypony, the Princesses included, to hear one mare.”
The statement gave Grapevine pause, and from the look on her face, she didn’t know how to respond. I had just assumed that we would get her to confess near the Princesses, but I when I thought about it, I knew Pullmare wasn’t that dumb.
Lightning picked up the slack when she suggested, “What about that inventor-friend of Starshine’s: the one who made her wings?” She tapped one talon on the wooden floor, letting the sound echo through the room. “Can he not come up with something to amplify her voice?”
Grapevine and I looked at each other. We both shrugged. “Yeah, probably,” I said. “We can always ask him.”
“Then it’s settled,” Lightning said with what passed for a smile.
“Yay, we have a plan!” Joya cried, flying out of her chair and hoofpumping the air. Suddenly, she looked around and her lower lip quivered. “But what’s my part?”
Marshmallow put one hoof on her shoulder and gently lowered Joya back into her chair. “You can make the dresses,” she said brightly. She turned to the rest of us. “And I’ll get the tickets to the festival; I’m sure I still have some of my father’s money lying around somewhere.”
I nodded. “What about you, Lightning?” I asked.
She stretched her wings a little before answering, “I will do exactly as Pullmare expects me to do: keep the skies clear over City Hall. We don’t want her to expect anything is unusual,” I agreed with her, but I wished that she could come with us; it would have been nice to have a griffin backing me up when confronting Pullmare.
One by one, everyone broke off from the table, promising to get started on their separate jobs. Eventually, only Grapevine and I were left alone in the kitchen. I had been waiting for her to move, but she didn’t budge.
Eventually, once everyone was out of ear range, she said, “Thanks...back there.” She twiddled her hooves. “I just, uh, didn’t want everypony to know.”
“You act like you know what I was going to say,” I said. I briefly wondered if unicorns could read minds.
Grapevine sighed. “She told you I was using you as a replacement for Spotlight, right?” I blinked. I started to think that maybe mind-reading wasn’t that far-fetched.
When she saw the look on my face, she said, “Rainbow Remedy talked to me for a while before he went to find you.” She looked away. “He told me what she would say.”
“Well then what’s the problem?” I said. I tapped one hoof on my skull, which made a worrying, hollow sound. “She was just trying to get into my head; you saw, she even lied about Marshmallow.” I tried to smile, but it didn’t have much of an effect on her.
I must have developed mind-reading powers, too, because I could tell what Grapevine was going to say before the words came out of her mouth. “Not everything Ms. Pullmare says is a lie, Minty,” she said.
When the conflict raging between my brain and my tongue--whether I should try to comfort her or yell at her--kept me from speaking, Grapevine looked down and said. “I’ll go find Rainbow Remedy and tell him what we decided: he’ll want to know.” I didn’t act to stop her while she walked out of the kitchen.
I waited until she had left before walking into the shop’s main room. Joya herself was nowhere to be found, though I could hear the whirring of her hoof-powered sewing machine coming from behind her work room’s door.
Lightning Sprint was waiting for me, standing on her hind legs and leaning against the sales counter with her arms crossed. “Good job,” she said, half-sarcastically. “You managed to skip having a confrontation with Grapevine...again.”
I shook my head. “I’ll get around to it; we just need time to talk, and we don’t have that right now.” I started walking toward the front door.
“You’re going already?” Lightning asked, though she didn’t try to stop me.
Without looking back, I nodded. “The Festival’s the day after tomorrow, I might as well let him know as soon as I can.” I think Lightning might have tried to say something else, but the door shut behind me before I could here.
* * *
“And that...” I said, finishing cutting the last length of rope keeping my tied to the chair, “Is how Equestria was made.”
“What?” Sterling asked, confused.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s an old joke; I don’t think anypony’s found it funny in a long time.” I kicked away the cut ropes and heaved myself off the chair and onto the floor. To describe how it felt to be free after being tied up for hours would have been foolish. Simply said, it was amazing.
“Alright, time to get out of here,” I said. I walked around the room until I was face-to-face with the young inventor. Besides his green mane looking disheveled, though not much different from the last time I saw him, he looked fine.
He blinked when he saw me, before using his head to indicate the binds that still held him. “I’m, uh, still a little tied up here...”
Instead of trying to use the screwdriver again, I rooted around in a pile of scrap metal in one corner of the room until I found a suitably sharp piece. Taking care not to cut myself, I grabbed the shard and sliced through Sterling’s ropes like a plow through wet earth.
He shook himself off and stood up. “Thanks,” he said. He looked around the little room. “So what now?”
I crept toward the door and smiled. “Now, we escape.”
Slowly, carefully, I creaked open the wooden door. Mercifully, Sterling had kept the hinges cleaner than the room the door guarded. Outside, I couldn’t see any sign of Peece. The only thing in front of me was a wide hallway that stopped just a few feet ahead.
“You want to show me where to go in, you know, your house?” I whispered when Sterling lined up behind me. His face reddened as he took the lead and led me down the unlit hall. We reached the end and, together, peaked around the corner.
The hall opened up into a large, central room lit by a half-dozen loose lightbulbs hanging on chains from the ceiling. In the middle was a smattering of mismatched furniture amid more piles of trash and old machine parts; it seemed his spare closet was just a microcosm of his entire house. Even the paint on the walls, a once-calming blue, was chipping and peeling all over the place. In the middle of the wall farthest away from us was the front door: our ticket out.
“Follow me,” Sterling whispered. He crept softly into the room, keeping as low to the ground as possible. I followed, keeping an eye out for Pullmare. We stuck close to the far left wall until we reached one of the room’s many trash piles and hid behind it. I kept myself continuously on the lookout for one of the guards. Though I didn’t spot them, I gradually realized that I could hear a faint snoring coming from one of the thread-worn loveseats. I stuck my head slightly above the top of our cover, and could barely make out Peece, sprawled across one couch with a magazine resting on top of her face.
“She’s asleep,” I whispered to Sterling, sticking my head back down. “If we keep quiet, we’re home free.”
“Do you see any of the guards?” he asked, his voice so low that even sitting next to him I had to strain my ears to hear.
I took a quick look above the trash before saying, “No, but they’re probably close by; we need to hurry.”
Sterling nodded in agreement and we both snuck around the trash pile and moved along the wall until reaching our next cover. We used the same pattern to move low across the wooden floors of the main room until, finally, we had passed by the furniture with the sleeping Peece and reached the front door.
We hid behind a stack of unread newspapers, sneaking glances at the still-snoring mare on the couch. “She’s probably going to wake up when we open the door,” I said. “So we’re going to have to run for it.”
Sterling looked down at his hooves then nodded. “Alright, let’s do it.”
Glancing back one last time for any sign of guards, tiphoofed to the door and slowly opened it, gently pulling on the brass handle. I breathed a sigh of relief as the hinges on this door, too, made no sound as they swung open. I almost thought we would make it.
Unfortunately, our opportunity to escape was as short-lived as clean clothes on a farmer; when I opened the door, I found the two unicorn guards standing watch on the front porch. Before I could get out of the way, or at least slam the door shut in their faces, they turned to face me. Instantly, I was lifted off my feet and shoved across the empty space of the living room as the two walked inside.
“Boss, we got ‘em,” one of the unicorns said in a thick Manehattan accent.
Peece awoke with a start, throwing the magazine across the floor. “What do you want?” she growled. Her expression changed when she saw Sterling and I floating in the air. Her face didn’t fill with anger, though; it was consumed with absolute glee. Suddenly, I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Well, well, well, what do you have here?” she said, casually cantering over to her guards. “Minty and her little inventor friend trying to escape from me? On my watch?” She pretended to act surprised. “I guess it’s more likely than I thought.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know the whole spiel; just put us back in the room and we promise to play nice.” Betting on the idea that Peece wouldn’t hurt us as long as Pullmare told her not to was dangerous, but I was willing to chance it just to make her mad. Unsurprisingly, the plan backfired almost immediately.
“Boys?” Peece said, turning to the guards. “Fry them.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but each guard now wore a small machine on their back, almost hidden by their manes. The little, black boxes sputtered to life, and the aura around the guards’s horns changed. The usual, soothing colour of magic was replaced by sparks of lightning.
The sparks spread to the magical fields Sterling and I were trapped in. When the reached us, I prepared for the worst. Instead of hurting, however, I just felt a sort of tingling sensation; like I was a lightbulb being screwed into a socket. Though it didn’t hurt, I lost most of the feeling in my body.
After a few long seconds, Peece ordered them to stop. We were unceremoniously dropped to the ground, where we laid like rag dolls. I couldn’t move anything more than my head from the neck up.
“You like these?” Peece asked me, patting the mechanical contraption on one guard’s back. “It’s a new magic amplifier, shipped straight from Canterlot.” She smiled: a very frightening affair with her face lit up by the steady glow of small lights on the metal boxes. “It creates a magic field to allow a unicorn to use their horn as an amplifier for electricity, which they can use against anything, or anypony.” She sighed. “It’s too bad Ms. Pullmare is only letting me use them on the stun setting until she gets here...” Peece winked. “We could have so much fun.”
“So, what, you’re just going to use that...thing on us until Pullmare gets here?” I spat. Slowly, feeling had started to return to me, though I still couldn’t move my extremities. I shuddered at the thought of the machines being turned to full power.
Peece shook her head. “Stunning you with electricity is only fun for a little while, and Ms. Pullmare wouldn’t be very happy if she arrived to find damaged goods.” She waved to the guards. “Throw them in the basement and guard the door; if anything tries to come through, zap it.” The burly unicorns nodded and one flung me across his back.
* * *
They carried us down a side hall I hadn’t seen before, not stopping until we reached an out-of-place metal door. The guard carrying Sterling’s limp form kicked open the door and tossed him inside, and I followed soon after.
Still numb, I tumbled down the wooden stairs, powerless to stop myself. Once I slid to a stop at the bottom of the steps, the door above us shut with a clang, and the room went dark.
“That’s going to hurt,” Sterling moaned.
The effects of the electricity eventually wore off; just in time for the feeling of being tossed into a basement to take hold. Slowly, I stumbled to my feet and tried to look around. There wasn’t much to see; the entire room invisible past the end of my nose. Standing as still as I could to avoid bumping into anything, I called, “Sterling, where are you?”
“Over here,” he answered, his voice carrying from somewhere closer to the stairs. I was going to ask if feeling had returned to him, too, but dozens of lights mounted on the ceiling turned on simultaneously, bathing the entire basement in a harsh, white light.
When I took away the hoof shielding my eyes, I could see Sterling standing by the stairs, next to a large, red lever. Glancing around the now-lit room, I realized just how large the basement was; it was almost like a small cavern. Though it was just as crowded as the house above, the mess consisted of scattered, unfinished projects rather than trash. Steam engines without pistons, half-done wing contraptions like the ones on Starshine’s back were the only ones familiar to me; I couldn’t even begin to guess at the purpose of the rest.
“Sorry, I’ve been meaning to clean up in here for a while now,” Sterling said sheepishly. He walked over to a nearby table and sat down on a bench beside it after clearing away a pile of rusty tools. “I could try to clean up, if you wanted I mean...”
I sighed and shook my head. “It’s not like it matters; Pullmare’s going to be here any time now to take us away.” I growled and kicked the blackened concrete beneath my hooves. “It’s not fair; we were so close!” I looked up to the door at the top of the stairs. “How did I let her beat me?”
“Maybe it was the huge unicorns with the magitek devices?” Sterling suggested helpfully.
“Not helping.” I absentmindedly traced a hoof in a figure-eight pattern on the floor. “There just has to be some way out...this can’t be how it ends between me and Pullmare,” I said.
Sterling used a wrench to fiddle with some strange machine on his worktable. “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he said brightly.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. I continued to idly trace patterns on the floor while I tried to think of a plan, until I coughed when something gritty entered my mouth. Confused, I looked down to see black dust rising from where my hoof scratched the dark spot on the floor. When I inhaled again, the powder smelled familiar; almost like Derbyshire when they cleared land for a dam...
“Hey, uh, Sterling?” I said. “Where did this black mark come from?”
He looked up from his work. “Oh, that?” he said. “That was just from trying to test out some new types of explosives, but I never got the formula quite right.” He shrugged. “I scrapped the project a while back and handed it off to a contact in Stalliongrad.”
“Well do you still have the materials?” I yelled, running over to his worktable.
Startled, he replied, “Um, well, yeah; I’m sure they’re around here somewhere...why do you ask?”
I stared at him. “You have explosives. In this basement. That you’re trapped in.” I waved my hoof around. “That could help us escape...”
The proverbial light turned on in Sterling’s head, and his eyes widened. “Ohhh, I get it!” he said. He scrambled up from the wooden bench and ran over to a group of metal cabinets in one corner of the basement.
I followed Sterling across the room and watched as he began to root through one of the metal lockers, pulling out various boxes and vials. When he kicked the door to the cabinet shut, his forehooves were piled high with the stuff.
“Don’t you have any, like, sticks of dynamite?” I asked.
He shook his head and set the supplies down on the ground. “I never got around to placing them into wrappings; I only tested the mixed powder.” He opened one vial and sniffed the contents before putting it to one side. “Besides, this isn’t dynamite.”
I looked at a beaker that appeared to, for all intents and purposes, be glowing. “Then what is it?”
He smiled. “The client, a construction team from Canterlot, ordered them specifically.” He shook the glowing vial. “Magically-activated high explosives.”
* * *
The few minutes I’d thought Sterling would need to create the explosive had turned into an hour, and my neck was growing sore from constantly switching between watching the basement door and watching him work.
“Are you close to finishing?” I asked. He was biting his lips in concentration, and I had to shake him and ask the question again before I got a response.
“Yeah, pretty close,” he said. “I think...”
“You think?” I asked nervously.
Sterling scratched his head. “Remember, I never quite got the formula right; the explosion was always too large or too small, and it depended on the unicorn I got to try it...”
I looked at the, now glowing, pile of powder spread on a mat at his feet. “Well, I’m sure this will cause at least enough of a distraction for us to get out of here and back to Joya’s.”
He went back to work, carefully mixing ingredients. Not looking up, he asked, “Speaking of your friends, didn’t they have something for you to ask me?”
I gulped as I remembered the supposed reason for coming to see Sterling. “Oh, uh, we wanted to know if you could help us build something.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“A machine to amplify somepony’s voice,” I said. “Could you build us one that’s small enough to be carried around, but powerful for an entire crowd to hear?”
He looked up and gave his familiar, awkward smile. “Once we clear the henchmares out, I’ll see what I can do.” He began to wrap the gray-ish explosives powder into a paper tube. “Though, I’ll probably need to teach somepony how to use it before you all go to the festival,” he said.
I coughed as I remembered the other reason I had wanted to see Sterling. “Or, you could accompany me, I mean us, to the Summer Sun Festival and teach, um, somepony how to use it while we’re there.” I flicked a hoof in the air. “You know, so nopony forgets how to use it.”
“Alright,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, while I tried to contain myself from shouting for joy. Sure, he hadn’t agreed to go with me specifically, but he hadn’t not agreed to go with me.
He finished wrapping the powder and inserted some little piece of metal into the top, which he referred to as a “blasting cap.” He assured me it was magically activated, and wouldn’t go off in my hooves unless I spontaneously grew a horn.
I took the offered the explosive into my hooves and smiled. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
“Okay, you ready for this?” he asked nervously as we stood at the bottom of the stairs. I nodded as I peered up at the metal door. According to him, it only locked from the inside, so we would be able to open it, if only for a moment.
“Remember,” he said, “Open the door, toss the stick, and quickly close it again; that should be enough to shield you from the blast. Though you probably won’t have to worry too much; I made sure that magical stimulant was only enough for a small, stunning explosion.”
I turned to him. “And once it’s over, be ready to run.” Our general plan hinged on the fact that the guards would be too bewildered by the blast, and Peece too surprised by our plan, to stop us from bursting out the front door that we hoped was unlocked. It was a reckless plan, but we couldn’t afford to wait any longer with Pullmare almost surely close to the house.
Taking a big gulp to try to calm my beating heart, I began to climb the wooden staircase. Slats groaned under the weight of my hooves, and I was glad for the heavy, metal door to block sound to the outside.
Finally, I was gripping the cold, steel door handle. “Okay, just like Sterling said,” I whispered to myself, “Open and toss, open and toss...” I let out a deep breath that I hoped wouldn’t be my last and opened the door. Quickly as I could, I threw the stick of explosives through the crack and slammed it shut again.
Pullmare had ordered her guards to zap anything that came out of the basement with their magical electricity, and they dutifully followed their orders to the last. Waiting at the top of the stairs for the sound of the small explosion proved unwise, however, as I was blown back down into the basement as the house erupted.
Instead of a small blast to stun the guards, Sterling had created an explosion so massive it seemed like Celestia herself was bringing the sun down on our heads. I had barely managed to avoid being hit by the metal door as it went flying past me, imbedding itself into a concrete wall. Somehow, my Pegasi instincts had taken over and I had used my wings to slow my rapid acceleration towards the basement floor. Even with slowing down, I still felt like I was going to bruise at the base of my tail.
Parts of the house had fallen into what was once the basement but was now a hole in the ground, but most of Sterling’s home had been blown out. When the roar from the explosion subsided, I stuck my head out from beneath a piece of plaster that I had been hiding under.
“Sterling?” I called across the wreckage. A full moon shone down on the remains of his house, showering the basement in natural light for the first time. Luckily, Sterling lived relatively secluded from the rest of Fillydelphia, so no houses were destroyed in the blast, though I could see lights begin to flicker on all around the now-vacant lot.
To my relief, the young inventor popped his head out from underneath one of his work tables not far from me. “Minty, are you okay?” he asked.
I made my way over to him, mindful of the wreckage, and helped him out from beneath the wooden furniture. We crawled out of the remains of the basement together, using a pile of what used to be furniture as a ramp.
Standing on the lip of the hole, looking out across the wreckage, Sterling said in a dazed way, “M- My house...it’s gone!”
“Well, um, yeah...it is,” I said, trying to steer him away from the smoldering crater. “But hey, we beat Pullmare’s stooges, right?”
I expected an answer, but not the one I received. Instead of Sterling acknowledging my brilliant tactic of using my own achievements to take his mind off the destruction of his home, a regal voice answered, “And you did such a wonderful job!”
My eyes widened: I knew that voice. I spun around to behold Pullmare standing no more than two feet away from us. She stood tall, like my worst nightmare come to life. The effect was helped by the small tongue of flame that she kept lit at the end of her horn, making her silver coat sparkle. An idling steamcar was parked a dozen or so paces behind her, painted all in black.
“Y- You?!” I sputtered. I was already too surprised to move, but if I wouldn’t have been able to if I had wanted to. The glow of Pullmare’s magic surrounded mine and Sterling’s feet, keeping us rooted in place.
“Well of course me,” she said, pouting. “What, did you think because you dispatched a few of my henchmares that I would suddenly back off?” She gritted her teeth and concentrated on something before laughing. “Though it appears you didn’t quite finish the job.” With a pop, the limp, but still breathing, body of Peece appeared beside her. She glared down at the unconscious mare before turning to us. “I’ll deal with her later...but first, the two of you.”
No matter how hard I pulled, I couldn’t break the magic that kept my legs from moving. “What, uh, are you going to do to us?” I asked nervously. “I mean, maybe we could just call this one even?”
Pullmare saddled up next to me and patted me on the head. “I’m sorry, Minty,” she cooed, “I would really like to; and if this was the first time we had met, that is.” Her magic clenched around my neck and brought my face so close that it was touching hers. “But you, you didn’t take my advice to leave town: you listened to my brother.” Her eyes started to glow like a burning inferno was lit from within. “And now you will pay.”
Struggling to speak, I asked, “W- What are you g- going to do?” I glanced over at Sterling, but it looked like his entire body was held in place by her magic.
Pullmare grinned in a gleeful, maniacal way at me. “Oh, I don’t know...” she said, “How about we see how hot it can get before your brain starts to boil? She lightly kissed me on the forehead, an act I didn’t even notice while I tried to register what she had just said. “I’d like to see how long before you stop screaming,” she whispered.
My body was shoved to the ground as Pullmare stood over me, triumphant. She laughed as her horn began to glow, and a magical field started to encase my head. I tried to beg and plead for my life, but my tongue refused to make words as my brain reacting in terror and fear.
“I wish all of your friends could see this,” Pullmare crowed. “Minty: the mare on fire!”
A fiery pain started at my temples, and began to slowly make its way inward. The pain continued as I tried to think colder thoughts, and struggled not to give her the satisfaction of screaming for mercy, which I just barely held back. Any longer, though, and there wouldn’t have been any willpower in me left to resist.
However, Luna must have been looking out for me that night, because I could vaguely hear a voice calling out from somewhere, “Hey, I think somepony over here survived!”
The pain stopped and the magical field died away as a colorful group of ponies came running up the hill, lanterns swaying in their hooves. “Are you folks okay?” one of them asked. “We saw the explosion and just thought...”
Pullmare, stepping into the light, replied with an official-looking smile, “These two are going to be perfectly okay; I pulled them out of the fires just in time.” Sadness and regret passed over her face with such realism that even I would have had a hard time doubting it. She pointed to Peece. “Alas, I wasn’t able to reach her until the flames had already reached her.”
“Oh no, Miss Mayor, I’m sure you did the best you could,” a stallion said quickly. “We can find sompony to take her to the hospital for you.”
“No, no,” Pullmare said, holding out one hoof. “I consider this my responsibility; this is what you elected me for, after all.” She indicated to where her new-looking steamcar sat. “I’ll take her to the hospital personally in the official car: we’ll get there faster that way.”
Compassion for their duly elected official shone on the faces of the ever-increasing crowd of onlookers as Pullmare gently gathered Orange Peece on her back. Murmurs of encouragement followed her until she reached the car, where she looked back at us.
To the ponies in the crowd, it would have looked like a gaze of joy, happy for us to be alive. I knew better, though. When she looked at me, her eyes told me that now no matter how I spun it, she was the hero of the day; no one would believe me if I said she was a psychotic monster. She knew that, despite every setback Sterling and I had given her, she had still managed to come out victorious.
I sighed and walked over to where Sterling stood as the mayor’s car pulled away. He watched it disappear into the sea of rowhouses before whispering, “Should we tell them?”
To avoid anypony listening in, I only very slightly shook my head. He gave a slight nod, so I hoped he had gotten the message.
A chuckling stallion walked up to us. “Boy, you two sure are lucky the mayor got to you in time,” he said. “Our mayor’s a real hero, she is.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking out over the dark suburbs to the glowing city center. The building that stood out as the brightest-lit of them all was the city hall, its massive, ivory tower visible from all over Fillydelphia. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been spared from Pullmare’s wrath because of luck, but because the burning remains of Sterling’s house wasn’t the place our final confrontation was supposed to be; if we were to have a last battle, it was going to be in Fillydelphia City Hall on the night of the Summer Sun Festival.
“The mayor is a hero,” I continued for the waiting stallion. “The exact kind of hero this city deserves.”