The Queen is Dead

by Meep the Changeling


5 Skip the montage.

Jade - 17th of Megan '15 EoH - Night

“Awww come on!” I whined doing my best to give David puppydog eyes, “Please teach me how to use a dagger like that?”

“No.” David grunted, turning his attention back to the alchemy kit he had been working at for the last hour.

“But you’re amazing with one! We could be attacked again, you believe that yourself! I would be able to help a lot better if I could use a blade that good too!” I pleaded, levering myself up onto the edge of the cart to get a better look at the overly stubborn diamond dog.

I’d gotten a lot better over the last few days. My regeneration had kicked in a few more times. “I can probably walk now. I’m totally fine to train, it’s not like I’ll be using my hooves for it. I don't need to move to copy the martial art!”

“Which is why I can’t train you.” David groaned setting down a mortar and pestle to turn and face me.

“I can do any movement with a blade you can, what’s hands of magic have to do with anything?” I demanded in a firm tone. The argument was starting to get me angry.

David shook his head and sighed, “This isn’t like kung fu, or karate, or whatever martial art from some far off land you know of. Yes, you could mimic my hand motions, but you can’t learn a skill from me which I don’t have.”

“That is a load of horseapples!” I grumbled. “You took out the griffons with that dagger of yours that takes skill!”

He nodded, “Yes. But it’s not knife skills. It’s killing skills. I used my knife because I didn’t have any other tool for the job. I don’t know any martial art, I don’t know any historical melee techniques. What I know is what I learned in the Marines, they don’t teach you how to use a weapon, they turn you into one.”

I blinked and tilted my head to one side, “What do you mean?”

“What I said.” David grumbled.

I gave him a look of annoyance.

“Oh fine…” He sighed before standing up.

“You want to know how I use my knife?” He asked as he pulled the blade from its sheath and spun it around in his hand. The blade flashed as he flipped the point around in a full circle, so the blade skimmed past his forearm as it rotated, then caught it expertly in a normal grip.

“Yes! I’ve only been asking for like a day now!” I said nodding eagerly.

“I know what this blade can do. I spent a week doing nothing but cutting, chopping, thrusting prying, and hitting everything under the sun with it.” David said, flipping the blade into a half dozen different grips as he spoke. “I know it can rip a man’s guts clean out with a back slice, go right between the ribs, clean into a shoulder and pry the joint loose… I know what this tool can do to meat. The only trick then is to apply it to the enemy as the situation calls for. That’s it, and it can’t be taught.”

I rubbed my head with my hooves, “But it totally can! You learned to do it!”

David growled in annoyance and sheathed his knife, “No I did not! Look my people like things to be fast, hard hitting, and clean. Instinctively we love fair play. It’s built up from childhood, give the other guy an even break, let him play the game on the level, don’t hit a man when he’s down. There’s a fifteen yard penalty for clipping, and the fighter who hit’s below the belt get’s tossed out of the ring. We like it fast, and hard hitting, and we like it clean.”

“What’s that have to do with you stubbornly refusing to help us both live through this?” I demanded actual anger starting to throb in my forehead.

David narrowed his eyes and made a gesture with his hand to point to them, “Look me in the eyes, I want you to know I’m telling you the truth.”

“Fine…” I looked as closely into his eye as I could without being distracted by the mismatched colors.

“When you step off the gridiron onto the battlefield, the rulebook is burned, buried, and forgotten.” He said bitterly. “There are no penalties except the one for losing, and it’s not measured in yards. It’s measured in lives. War is the law of the jungle, kill or be killed. There is no guidebook, no referee, and no honor. You have to turn your instincts inside out to play soldier, because war is play to win, or die.

“The goal is destruction, pure and simple. Your mind has to be tuned to a new pitch. No holds barred, to hurt, to cripple, to kill. It’s war, you are not fighting for a gold medal or a fancy belt, but for survival. The enemy is going to kill you so you have to do him in as quickly as possible with whatever you have at hand.

“If you’re lucky you use the right tool for the job. But you had damn well better also be able to use a rock, some dirt, your hands. You need to be prepared to bite someone's tongue off if you have to. Your weapon isn’t in your hand or magic, it’s in your skull.

“I could show you every which way to Sunday you can use a Bowie knife, you could practice those moves all day every day, and the first time you fought a seasoned fighter you would die expecting him to counter your strike with the textbook correct counter to whatever you threw. Real war isn’t like that, training goes out the window with that rulebook. If you want to survive you learn what your tools can do and you do them to the enemy in whatever way presents itself in battle.” David finished, then sat down and turned back to his alchemy kit.

I was quiet for a while as I tried to understand what he meant. It sounded like he didn’t want to give me a false sense of confidence, like he thought that teaching me would just get me killed. That didn’t seem logical, surely if you trained you would be better right? “But… In chess practice makes you bet-”

“That’s exactly why I won't train you. That mindset that the average civilian has will just get you killed if I show you any trick of the trade.” David sighed, “Look, do you know how to use that shortsword?”

I pulled the short blade out of it’s sheath with my magic and held it in front of me to look at. It was a slender blade, not very long, just about as long as my forearm and hoof. It wasn't made for changelings, and had a simple guard and hilt, just a little disk shaped pommel and a small clover pattern tipped crossguard.

“Yeah, I guess.” I said as I recalled all the different things we were shown in class that the blade could do. “But I’ve never used it before, except on that griffon. We don’t have magic till we’re grown up. They showed us the moves in school though.”

David grunted again. “Mmm… Right, that’s different then. You need to know what you personally can do with that thing, but that’s it. Learning a specific fighting style just locks you into that style. You will think in set patterns, not with your full range of tricks. That will get you killed. Tell you what, those three rabbits I caught earlier, I want you to butcher them.”

“What?” I asked, eyes widening in alarm.

“I’m going to make a stew. They need to be gutted, skinned, and the bones stripped. Go do it. use your sword for it, and work out how it cuts stabs and pries.” David ordered in a firm tone, not even looking up from his work.

I gulped lightly, the through to cutting even a dead animal appart was pretty gross. “D-do I have to?”

“Yeah. I can’t exactly make ballistics gel for you to cut up.” David answered simply.

His words stuck in my ears. There was an alternative thing to practice on? “Why can’t you?” I asked hopefully.

“Well,” David said cautiously, “the key ingredient is a sapient life form here… As far as I can tell rabbits are still just rabbits, so it’s morally okay to eat them, and therefore to have you practice cutting on them.”

I winched, “Uh… do I even want to know what-”

“No. It’s a Soylent Green type of thing, but for ponies.” David muttered. “I’m pretty sure I’d be hunted down for making it.”

“Oh.” I said simply. That sort of made senc-

“Oh!” I said wincing as I understood what he meant properly.

Then my brain added two and two together. “Wait! Drop everything! Ponies are animals where you come from? And used for… parts, so not like, slaves that are called animals, but animals… Are you from another plane?” I asked curiously.

David turned and gave me a blank look of bafflement.

“You know, planes. The layers of reality stacked atop each other which are all different but similar and connected?” I asked.

“Oh… Uh, probably.” David said in the tone of someone hearing about a concept for the first time.

“Probably?” I exclaimed raising a non existent eyebrow.

“Well, to be fair my people have proven that life is a byproduct of planetary formation so it’s completely possible that I’m still in my own universe, or plane as you call it.” David answered giving me a shrug.

I instinctively felt the urge to faceplant, and slipped off the cart. Fortunately my wings instinctively buzzed, catching me mid air as I groaned, “How the bucking hay do you not even know how you got here?”

David sighed and rested his face against his hand for a long minute. “Look… I wasn't always so happy, okay? All I know is that before I got here I was out for a walk after a good long visit from my friends Jack and Morgan.”

“Are they like, wizards, or what?” I asked. At this point I simply had to know. It was mammeling me.

David laughed, actually falling over onto his back. “Yep! Enchanter’s extraordinaire, removing memories one blackout night at a time, and causing bouts of sickness the morning after each night around the world!” He giggled for a few moments before sitting back up with a grin, “Those are brands of booze, Jay. I was blind drunk when I got here, last thing I remember is trying to light a cigarette somewhere near the train station.”

“Oh… So you were really drunk and woke up here?” I asked, just to clarify.

“Yep! Still in the old uniform, these boots, pants, jacket, tailored to fit this body but still the same. Had my knife, watch, Pocket Ref, everything but my Lucky Strikes and my Zippo.” David sighed. “That was a hell of a three months… Never quit anything cold turkey.”

If there was one thing I had learned David did, it was ramble. Maybe if I got him to ramble on enough, I could make him forget he wanted me to go cut up some dead things! It was a good plan, and I was happy to be a part of it.

“Quit? What did you quit?” I asked.

David hunched back over his alchemy kit and tapped a glass bottle with a rod, watching the liquid inside bubble. “Smoking, tobacco specifically.”

“Wait, but isn’t that terrible for you?” I remembered a bunch of long speeches about smoking and why not to do it. One Zebra in the hive had smoked a pipe a lot and he was pretty cool so everyling had kept telling us not to do it.

David shrugged, “Eh, for most people yeah. But most of its negative effects don’t affect a small number of people due to a number of genetic factors. Not to advocate you picking it up but I was pretty much fine. Sure got the stained teeth, and I might have had a cancer or three, never checked for them. But my lungs were just fine. Ran five miles every day, breath never short. Which was good, I liked the flavor, bitter things have always been my favorite.”

“Oh.” I’d never thought about that.

I’d seen pegasi eat fish, and then a unicorn try the same thing, but get sick. Different things did affect different species differently, why wouldn’t different things affect people within a species differently too?

“If you liked it and it didn’t hurt you… You’re making something druggy right now, why not make your own?” I asked genuinely seriously, but also hoping to avoid cutting practice.

“Because for the life of me I just couldn’t find any god damned tobacco plants!” David grumbled. “Now I’m not feeling the need to smoke, so I don’t care much.”

“I guess that makes sense… So, whatcha making?” The mysterious bubbling yellow and white liquids could no longer be ignored. Last time David had set up that kit he made a clear liquid that tasted like oranges to perk me up a bit. The dog was a wizard with an alembic.

“I’m whipping up an old gem called guncotton.” he answered cheerfully, “I’ll need it to use a weapon I’ve been trying to build for five years now. I’m pretty sure that Applewood’s smith will be willing to work with me and all I need is for someone to weld the barrels together. Then I’ll have my people’s sacred weapon, and defending us on the way to Equestria will be a million times easier… Long as I make plenty of guncotton and we don't run out of lead.”

“Cool!” I landed on the ground, my chest starting to hurt from hovering beside the cart. The ground felt a bit weird under my hooves after so long laying down, but standing didn’t hurt too bad. Hopefully I’d be fine by tomorrow.

“Yes, very cool.” David agreed. “So cool, that you will want to try it, and I’m not going to let you try it until you know your sword inside and out.”

I stamped a hoof in frustration. “It can't be that cool!”

“Oh really?” David asked, giving me a smug grin and raising an eyebrow.

“Really!” I answered, humphing angrily.

“Ask yourself this, Jay.” David said smugly as he turned back to his work, “How cool is a type of weapon that you have never seen before, that totally changed how an entire species fought their wars, and is so culturally ingrained that I’ve spent five years and four attempts to make a working one with the technology available to me here knowing that with one I can survive anywhere on this rock as long as I keep making ammunition?”

I grumbled angrily to myself as I picked my sword up from atop the cart with my magic. He hadn’t lied to me yet, and that did sound pretty cool. “Ugh… fine… where are the rabbits?”

“Good bug girl.” David chuckled. “They are on the back of the cart. Now, go learn how to take organic things apart.”