Buggy and the Beast
Time Well Wasted
The sound of the apartment door security chain rattling woke Beets from a fitful slumber in the chair he had dragged into the living room. Yesterday should have been some sort of horrible nightmare, but as he blinked away the crusts and stumbled for the door to keep Nectarine from rattling himself into a frenzy, Beets could still see the dry and empty shell of his insect roommate standing almost comically against the wall, as well as the glowing mass of green gelatin housing her present location. He had spent far too much of the day yesterday just sitting and staring, trying to figure out what was going on inside the green lump as well as what was going on in his own heart, and giving up on both concepts before dozing off. He fumbled with his magic to unlatch the security chain on the apartment door and stood to one side as Nectarine lunged into the room, waving one wing.
“Whew, Beets. It smells like—” His friend looked around the room, taking in the glowing lump of green goo in the corner and the pale violet shell of the changeling tilted up against the wall. “Oh…”
“I need to brush my teeth and grab lunch,” muttered Beets as he shuffled off towards the bathroom. “Don’t touch her. I left the note for you over on the counter.”
By the time Beets had brushed his teeth and felt a little more equine, he emerged back into the living room to find Nectarine staring at the glowing green cocoon against the wall and holding a canister of insecticide. His friend gave a little startled squeak when Beets began rummaging around in the icebox and Beets found himself staring down the nozzle of a bottle of BugOut when he straightened up with a sack lunch in his magic.
“What did you do with Beet Salad?” asked Nectarine with a little tremor to the nozzle of his bottle. “What did you do with my friend, bug?”
It was such a touching moment that Beet Salad could not talk for a moment, and when he could, it was only in a rough voice which really did not sound like himself. “Nek? I’m really me. The changeling is in the cocoon. Honest.”
“Prove it.” Nectarine jabbed the insecticide nozzle closer to Beets.
“In school when you had braces and you got them locked with Prissy back in the little filly’s room, I was the one who busted Crusty Crumbs in the face and got hauled off to the principal’s office as a distraction.”
Nectarine backed up just a step but still kept an eye on Beets. “Anypony could have known that.”
“Well, yeah.” Beets scratched behind one ear. “You told everypony in school. Crusty thought it was awesome. He said I could bust him in the face anytime you needed a distraction. You have weird friends.”
“You could say that again.” Nectarine put the insecticide container back inside his jacket and took another look at the glowing green lump of changeling goo in the corner of Beet Salad’s living room.
“Yeah,” said Beets. “At least she put down papers first.”
~ ~ ~ ♥ ~ ~ ~
Work gave Beets a long time to think as he walked his long path through the docks. It would have felt good to find a teenage thug trying to make off with some loose cargo or a drunken sailor looking for a fight, but the night remained dark and uneventful. Even Nectarine refused to rise to his baiting during lunch. Instead, he just sat with his bag of alfalfa sprouts and took the bran muffin which Beets floated over without comment.
As dawn approached, it was a long walk home with Nectarine, and very quiet too until the apartment door was closed behind him and the two stallions stood staring at the changeling-created mess that remained unchanged in Beets’ living room.
“I blame you,” said Beets.
“Only fair,” said Nectarine. “You’ve blamed me for your own failures for years. She’s your bug. Stallion up and take responsibility for your actions.”
“Right.” Beets eyed his friend. “How many illegitimate foals are you supporting now?”
Nectarine shrugged. “How many parasitic bugs are you supporting? With mine, at least I can show off their pictures.”
Beets grunted. “I’m just damned glad I’ve got you for a friend, Nek. Worst comes to worst, you’ll help me hide a body.”
Nectarine sat down on the floor and paged through the collection of books he had loaned Beets on the previous day. “I don’t remember any insect who makes a cocoon exactly like this. Grab a pizza and we’ll work our way through the books to see if there’s anything we can do.”
“The bug left a lasagna in the icebox, “ said Beets, pulling out an aluminum pan and reading the attached note. “Oven settings, time, leftovers go into the fridge boxes, yeah, yeah.”
“No little love notes?”
Beets turned the paper over. “Don’t forget to take out the trash before it attracts roaches.”
“I now pronounce you stallion and insectum. You may now nibble on each other’s maxilla.” Nectarine flipped the page on his book. “Bring me over a beer, would you?”
Once the lasagna was in the oven, Beets rummaged around in the fridge and straightened up with two dark glass bottles in his magical field and a rather perturbed expression on his face which made Nectarine look up from his books.
“Don’t tell me. Light beer?”
“Yeah. Of all the bugs in the world, I got one on a diet.” After popping off the tops, Beets sat the beers on the new coasters which seemed to have magically appeared on his endtable before turning to the books.
Research turned out to be a bust. Educational, but still a bust. The way wasps stung their prey and dragged the paralyzed bodies into sealed cells for the little wasps to devour alive drew a cold chill up Beet Salad’s spine, and some of the things ants did were just gruesome. There were a few underwater creatures like tube worms and moray eels who kept to small holes, and some creatures who used photoluminescence to generate light, which made much more relieving reading. Some flying bugs even used their own light sources, like the lightning bugs used in lamps in the more rural areas.
Although Nectarine would not go near the cocoon, a more direct examination of the object in question gave more positive results. The green goo making up the majority of the lumpy cocoon felt tacky and warm, with a faint scent of dark earth and truffles in a fungus-like underscent, which sounded weird but it was the only way he could describe it. The substance was soft enough that he might have been able to push a hoof into it, but when he was standing there while touching it, he felt the bump of a matching soft hoof from inside which made him recoil across the room.
“I think all we can do is to wait this one out,” said Beets once he had caught his breath.
After they had finished a quiet dinner and Nectarine had gone home, Beet Salad was left alone with his new house decoration. He spent a little time taking a long-delayed shower complete with conditioning in order to distract himself from the changeling’s transformation, but in the end, it was just him and the glowing pile of goo in the corner of his living room. Again.
“I liked it better when you were a snarky little bitch,” groused Beets.
It was still early in the morning, far too early to go to bed and he did not feel like leafing through any more of the useless books. He put on a record to amuse himself while picking up the apartment a little, as it seemed a shame to waste Buggy’s hard work. Last night was just a blur to him now, filled with unreasonable worry and hours worth of quiet singing to the sound of the record player in the hopes he would be able to give some small sliver of love to the cocooned changeling, much like Sleeping Black Beauty in her vine-wrapped castle…
On second thought, nothing like that at all.
Even on the other side of her cocoon, it had seemed as if the changeling had liked his playing, and more probably would not hurt. He got out the guitar again and settled down on a cushion next to the green glow, determined this time not to get all panicked like last night. After a few tunes to warm up, he considered the stack of records he had not played yet. Several he put into the back of the stack, as they had been Bean Sprout’s favorites, and he was not sure he could listen to them without breaking into tears.
Buck it. Buck it to Tartarus.
He put a short stack of the cheery yellow records onto the automatic feeder and pulled a cushion over to the cocoon as the tinny notes of a song about a duck going to a lemonade stand began to play. Despite his original pledge never to play the songs again after his brother had died, it was a good pain, and yielded good tears. Just him, the records, and the thankfully silent changeling cocoon.
It was a very long morning.
~ ~ ~ ♥ ~ ~ ~
“Good evening, Nek.” Beet Salad flipped the eggs over as Nectarine poked his nose into the living room, obviously keeping his line of retreat open in case something horrible and pony-eating had hatched out of the glowing green goop over the afternoon. “One egg or two?”
“Two.” Nectarine settled down in his chair at the table as Beets floated his eggs over and sat down next to him with a bowl of instant oatmeal. “So why are you cooking eggs and not eating them?” asked Nectarine.
“To prove I can. That’s Dad’s pan. I’ve been blaming a hunk of metal for his heart attack instead of his exercise habits and job stress.”
As Beets shoveled down some instant oats, Nectarine took a skeptical look at the dripping egg he had just impaled on a fork. “You blamed eggs for your dad’s heart attack, and now you’re feeding me the same eggs. I’m touched.” He still ate the eggs, but rolled his eyes while doing it.
“I’m just hoping Sultry survives,” added Beets as he cleaned up the bottom of his bowl. “She helped me get my head on straight. How long do you think she’ll be in there, anyway?”
“Now I know you’ve been replaced by a changeling,” said Nectarine while finishing off his eggs. “The Beets I know never cared a whit about anypony, including himself.”
“Maybe… I was wrong,” admitted Beets. He tossed the disposable plastic bowl and spoon in the trash before giving the table a quick wipedown. Nectarine hoofed over a breakfast muffin from his early-morning raid of a nearby doughnut shop while Beets gathered his things for work, and the two stallions proceeded along their traditional evening path to the docks. As much as Beets tried to ignore it, there was a constant worry in the back of his mind about whatever was going on inside the changeling’s cocoon, and if the changeling would really be all right.
Those things really need a viewing window. Or a timer.
Supervisor Fits greeted him at the punch card rack before he even had a chance to punch in. There was a bothered look about him which Beets had never seen before, a barely discernable twitch to his bottom lip and a reluctance to look directly into Beet Salad’s eyes. “Mister Salad,” he started, “if I could have a private word with you this evening?”
“Sure,” said Beets. “Just let me punch in first.”
“Right.” His supervisor continued to look in any direction except his as Beets punched his card and trailed along until they were in an office corridor presently unoccupied by any other ponies. All of the suspicious buttons on Beets’ instincts were being pushed at once, and as Fits turned around to talk, Beets held up a hoof.
“First, I need to check something, Supervisor Fits. If you are Mister Fits.” Beets launched into the first changeling detection spell he had learned, the one which would not drive Fits into a fit of agony if he had recently been through surgery or lost a tooth. A few pale-green patches of changeling magic across Supervisor Fits’ coat were the only sign of changeling influence, although Beets was less than happy at the multiple shades of changeling green blotching along his own coat, including a bright green patch on one forehoof where he had recently poked the changeling cocoon.
“That’s… odd,” said Fits, looking at Beet Salad’s forehoof. “Is that the changeling detection spell you learned from Prince Armor?”
“Yeah.” He shook his hoof and tried to wipe it on the ground, but the spell still made it a bright lime green. “Musta stepped in some changeling poop or something, I guess. You know, everypony I’ve used the spell on shows some green on them somewhere.”
“If there are changelings in Baltimare, they must be keeping their heads down.” Supervisor Fits coughed into one hoof. “Actually… that’s what I was wanting to talk to you about.”
“What, do you know one?” Dropping the spell, Beets checked both ways down the corridor and lowered his voice. “I was talking to a Royal Guard yesterday. Unless the bug has put some poor pony into a cocoon and are impersonating them, the Crown is just putting them under observation.”
“Um… Not exactly.” Fits looked up and down the corridor too. “The Board wants me to fire you. They think you’re a changeling.”
“What?” Beets was actually set back a step. “Did they even think that Prince Shining Armor taught me the changeling detection spell? If there’s one pony who has a hard-on for pounding any bug he finds into the ground like a fence post, it’s him. The creep who was suing the Port Authority tried to attack him in court yesterday, pulled a knife and everything. Shining put him into the wall.”
“Oh, I didn’t hear about that,” said Fits. “We were in a staff meeting with Corporate for several hours. They pulled your entire file and all of your employee evaluations, as well as your employment application.”
“I see.” And Beets did. “I presume Blue Plate Special was there too. I’ll bet he’s still sulking. He tried his darndest to get Shining Armor to bust him in the face during our training. He’s going to get his double-dipping retirement if it kills him. Or us.”
Fits hesitated before responding. “Yes, it sounds like him. He certainly pretended to be quite concerned about your reaction to the changeling detection spell. You know, I’m not even supposed to be talking to you about this.”
“Yeah. Thanks for sticking your neck out for me, Fits. I owe you one.”
The supervisor shrugged with a tight frown. “What else are friends for? You’d do the same for me. Still, once the Board makes up its mind to fire somepony, they’re going to get rid of them, one way or another.”
“How long do you think I have? A month?” Beets rolled his eyes. “Sheesh, I sound like I’m dying.”
“Better just take this one day at a time. Don’t talk to Special unless you’ve got a witness, don’t beat up any burglars on the docks unless you’ve got no other choice, and most importantly, no more beating up mindless drones from Corporate.”
“So, roughly what I’m already doing.” Beets let out a sigh. “How long do I have to dance?”
“It’s six months until your next evaluation. Keep your nose clean and out of Blue Plate’s path. Who knows, they may forget all about you.”
* ♥ *
It was probably not worth praying for a sudden case of amnesia to sweep over the board of directors, but he did make a mental note to buy a lottery ticket as he was walking his way along the path between the various concrete and steel towers of the airship docks and the piles of cargo in the process of loading and unloading. It was familiar and comforting in a strange way, and Beets could have walked his normal route with his eyes closed if not for the way cargo wranglers tended to make piles and collections of freight in seemingly random places. Just because a few tons of widgets arrive from Sãn Horsé does not mean the airship to take them elsewhere has gotten into port yet. Of course, if those crates contain a few hundred less widgets when they left than when they arrived, the night watchponies tended to collect the blame.
Normally, the sounds of pilferage were what keyed Beets to an ongoing redistribution of wealth. It was startling just how far the sound of a crowbar opening a crate traveled through the night air. Also normally, when a night watchpony found anypony breaking into a crate, the first thing they were supposed to do was blow on their whistle just as hard as possible. The crooks would run, the other guards would show up, and everypony was happy. Well, except whoever had the crate and was missing the stuff the crooks had taken off with. They would whine and moan about the night watchpony and how there was probably some sort of conspiracy between him and the crooks to split the take. To be honest, there were a few in the night watch who pulled that kind of crap.
Beets much preferred the rest of the night watch to show up after the crooks had been suitably subdued, before they had removed any of their ill-gotten booty, and with much of their own booty black-and-blue. He had never actually been ambushed before at work. Once or twice on the way home from a bar he had found a few ‘friends’ of somebody he had met inside said bar, where ‘met’ meant ‘beat up.’ Normally, there were warning signs, from irate glances to an odd number of ponies clearing out of the bar in a group.
Tonight, the only warning he got was the rank scent of cigarette smoke in the air.
Still, it was enough.
The shadow between two crates shifted as Beet Salad began to walk past it, and a stocky earth pony with a brass boot over one hoof lurched out in his direction. Lurched, because just a moment before he had started to move, Beets had grasped his own truncheon in his magic and slammed it into the seemingly empty space. The truncheon caught the earth pony in the ribs, and then across the back of the head with a loud crack as Beets spun in place. The other earth pony with a chain wrapped around his foreleg swung by so close Beets could feel links of the chain part the hairs on the side of his cheek. Still, he could not get balanced quickly enough after having used the truncheon on the first pony, so the slamming hoof he managed to put into the side of his second assailant merely scraped along ribs instead of fracturing them.
Beets wanted for there to be only two thugs involved in the ambush. He knew better. The sound of hooves from behind him made Beets duck the next chain-wrapped hoof swinging in his direction and back up as quickly as he could. Unfortunately, his concerns were valid, and a third thug emerged from the shadows with the sounds of feathers above him indicating yet a fourth assailant.
I hope that’s not a griffon, or I’m royally—
A quick feint at one of the chain-wielding thugs and a quick magical bolt at the second would only allow the flier a clear shot at the ground-bound guard, so Beets kept his horn lit while pressing his tail up against a solid crate. His night stick had broken over the first thug’s thick head, so he tossed the stub of it out into the darkness and called out the first thing he could think of.
“Sergeant Roquefort, I’ve got changelings here!”
It did seem to set the two earth pony thugs back a step, but after an exchanged glance, they began to stalk closer again. That is, until an unconscious pegasus dropped onto one of them, and a quite conscious and very energetic Royal Guard dropped on the other.
After that, it was only the matter of moments before Beets and the panting Nocturne stood side by side over the unconscious bodies of the four thugs. Roquefort had an aura of unbridled menace in his Night Guard armor, much different than the lean and casual stallion he had always been around Nectarine’s clan house. Beets had never actually considered the easygoing stallion a threat before, but now it seemed almost as if the guard was considering just how much easier the situation would be with five unconcious bodies to report. “Changelings?” asked Roquefort.
“Well, they could have been,” said Beets, still leaning up against the crate for support. He lit his horn and looked as the greenish glow of changeling magic flickered weakly from all four of the thugs, one of whom had almost bright green lips in the light of the spell. “At least that one has been playing kissy-face with one, but nothing serious, it seems. False alarm, I suppose. You can go back to looking for air traffic violations again, officer.”
“Fat chance.” The Night Guard checked each one of the fallen thugs and shook his head. “They’re all breathing, at least. Any idea why they jumped you?”
“Let’s find out.” Beets pounded one hoof into the other, but paused at the look he was getting from Roquefort. “Just kidding. I know you can’t interrogate ‘em without reading their rights. I promise I won’t even touch them.” One of the thugs looked vaguely familiar, as if he had been the pony who had carried Fire Brand off to the hospital after his unfortunate ‘accident’ with a flaming bottle of fuel. After removing his own water bottle, Beets upended it over the unconscious earth pony with a very disingenuous “Oops.”
The pony stirred, spluttering and blinking several times until he looked up at Beet Salad. “Wha happened?”
“Your friend I hit with the stick’s dead. Broken neck. And that means you’re going to be facing a murder trial unless you talk quick.” Beets bared his teeth in a feral grin. “Talk fast.”
The earth pony’s eyes got really huge and white. “Dead? But we were just going to rough you up a little. Fire Brand’s been sent to Canterlot under guard and we thought we could jog your memory a little to get him sprung. It wasn’t supposed to get—”
Beets cut him off. “How did you get onto the docks?”
“There’s a pony we know. Lets us in if we skim part of the take to him. Look, I don’t want—”
“What’s his name? The judge will probably go easier on you if we’ve got a name.”
“I don’t know his name! He’s blue, with a white dish or something for a cutie mark.”
“Like a plate?” Beets sighed as the thug nodded his head. “Skinny earth pony?”
“No, he’s a fat unicorn slob. Always eating something. That’s all I know! Honest!” The sound of a low groan from where the first ambusher had been dropped made the frightened thug look up. “You said Mayhem was dead!”
Beets blew a long blast into his whistle and the distant sound of alerted guards replying with sharp tweets of their own filled the air. “I lied,” he added, baring his teeth. “Be grateful.”
“Now if you don’t mind,” said Roquefort, who had previously vanished into a nearby shadow with only his yellow eyes peering out to betray his position, “I need to read the prisoner his rights.”
“If they’ve got the faintest speck of sense, they’ll sing like birds,” growled Beets. “We’ve got a fatter fish to fry. Sergeant Roquefort, I believe the pony in question is Blue Plate Special, our union representative. You want a couple of us on the night watch to go bring him into your office? Intact, of course.”
* ♥ *
It took most of the evening before the Royal Guard had finished scraping the four thugs off the docks and Beets had finished answering ‘Just one more question, Mister Beet Salad.’ Nectarine had landed a few lengths away as Beets finished his deposition to the Royal Guard clerk, and picked up a position to his left side as they walked back to the main office for him to clock out. Normally, Nectarine walked on his right side, but as that spot was taken by Roquefort, who showed no intent of leaving it, he simply remained in his alternate place without comment.
Superintendent Fits did have a comment as Beets was clocking out, although it seemed slightly truncated due to his dark escorts. He simply said, “Not subtle, Mister Salad.” and passed him a folder consisting of a blank Port Authority incident form with a small note asking for it be filled out and returned within a week, much as his somewhat sketchy report for Fire Brand had.
His two dark and silent escorts remained by his sides as he plodded home in the bright dawn, and did not even leave when Beet Salad stopped at his apartment door. He paused with his key in the last lock, tired, mentally fried, and still feeling a throbbing ache across his collarbone where one hoof had grazed him during the fight, but suddenly aware that behind the door was a glowing green testament to his involvement with changeling kind and most probably a jail sentence of some sort.
“Thank you for walking me home, Officer Roquefort,” said Beets. “Goodbye.”
“Thank you for being so cooperative with the investigation,” said Roquefort. “Open the door.”
“Once you show me your search warrant,” replied Beets.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me and invite me in for a few drinks?” asked Roquefort with tongue firmly planted in his cheek.
“You’re planning on screwing me over anyway,” said Beets. “Take Nek and go hit a gay bar if you’re into that.”
“Don’t get cute with me,” snapped Roquefort. “You’re harboring a changeling. I know it, you know it, and if you really didn’t want anypony to know, you shouldn’t have told Nectarine.”
“Hey!” objected the pony in question. “I didn’t say a thing about — I mean why do you think there’s a changeling in there? Which there isn’t.”
“Go home, Sergeant Roquefort.” Beets fixed his unwelcome guest with his most uncompromising glare.
“Buck you,” hissed the obviously irritated Nocturne. “I’m not leaving until you let me search your quarters. You’re not the same Beet Salad who has been over to our clan house. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you, but Nectarine is my idiot cousin, and I don’t want to see him hurt.”
“Wait a second,” interrupted Nectarine, keeping his voice to a whisper to avoid attracting attention from any of the other apartment doors along the corridor. “You think Beets is a changeling? Your own guard unicorns must have zapped him with the spell three or four times just while I was there.”
“I don’t know what to believe any more,” said Roquefort, although he lowered his voice too, and looked up and down the empty hallway of Beet Salad’s apartment building for any curious eavesdroppers.
“I do.” Nectarine sat down on his rump so he could cross his forelegs. “I believe my friend is acting like a real pony for the first time in years. He reached out to a critically wounded… pony of sorts and helped her when she needed it most. He’s shown a lot more heart than you have, cuz. What would Princess Luna say if you went storming into a wounded pony’s house and dragged her off to jail because her relatives hundreds of miles away committed a crime?”
“I’m not… It’s not like that,” spluttered Roquefort.
“Good day, Sergeant Roquefort,” said Beets. “Go home. I promise Nectarine won’t get into any trouble, and I’ll tell you all about it once my ‘guest’ is gone.”
Although he obviously did not like the idea, the dark Royal Guard eventually gave in and slunk away. Still, Beet Salad waited until the flutter of membranous wings outside had died out before opening up his apartment door, although he stopped and held a hoof across Nectarine’s chest when he tried to follow.
“You should probably go home too, Nek.” Beets took a quick look over his shoulder at the lump of goo in his living room, still unchanged from when he left it last night. Somehow the low green glow seemed lonely, casting his room into an eerie light like some sort of huge night light. “I mean it. There’s really nothing you can do here until she’s done. Go home and try to keep your cousin from going nuts.”
“Too late,” said Nectarine, giving one last halfhearted attempt at sneaking into the apartment to look at the glowing green lump of goo in Beet Salad’s living room. “All that steel around his head has soaked into his skull. Are you sure you don’t need any help with your houseguest?”
“I’m sure. And… thanks.” Beets patted his friend on the shoulder. “We’ll be fine.”
Beet Salad closed the door to his apartment, leaving Nectarine alone in the hallway.