It seemed prudent to report the mysterious message carved into the tree. It was vandalism, if nothing else.
Trixie and Melon headed back to Camp Driftwood. It was easy to locate from anywhere on the island, as the lighthouse was right in the center of the compound.
Aside from the lighthouse, there were two buildings and not much else. Trixie and Melon went into the headquarters building.
“Ma’am?” Trixie called, stepping inside.
“Back here,” called a voice. A door with a small plaque that read Cracked Mirror was slightly ajar and Trixie pushed it open.
A mare hung upside down from a water pipe near the ceiling. A small piece of string dangled from her mouth. She appeared as a bat pony, and Trixie had never seen her without the spell. This was Lieutenant Mirror, commander of the Wash Margin Guard Station.
She let go of the pipe and flipped into the chair behind the desk, spreading her wings to soften the landing. She put her hooves together and rested her forelegs on the desk. “How’s it going?”
“We found a mysterious message carved into a tree.” Trixie recited the carved sentences from memory.
“Is that word for word?” Mirror asked.
“More or less.”
Mirror leaned forward over the desk. “That’s a lot to remember. How is your memory so good?”
“Doing shows requires a lot of memorizing acts.”
“Impressive.” Mirror sat back. “Do a trick.”
“Ma’am, you keep asking me to do that and you’ve seen just about all of them by now.”
Mirror gestured for her to go on. Trixie sighed and popped a few colored sparks off her horn.
Mirror applauded and smiled. “So what do you think about this message?”
It took Trixie a fraction of a second to get back on topic. “Well ma’am, unleashing gods of war on Wash Margin seems a little over the top. Monsters never attack places nopony has ever heard of.”
Mirror chewed her string for a moment. “Could be a cult. This seems like the kind of shenanigans a cult would pull.”
“Ma’am, respectfully, Wash Margin is too much of a boring, kelp-farming town to have a cult problem.”
“That’s fine.” Mirror bobbed her head. “But just in case, I want you to investigate it. Take Private Melon Rind with you. Let me know if you need anything. Oh, and on your way out, if you see Sergeant Hasta let him know I’m looking for him.”
Trixie nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
She and Melon left the office. He had been silent during the whole exchange and looked slightly bewildered. Trixie had also felt that way during her early dealings with the Lieutenant.
They headed for the exit. Sergeant Hasta, the very angry unicorn who was the station’s second in command walked in. He gave them both a look. “What are you two doing here during the middle of your patrol?”
Melon spoke up. “We found a mysterious message carved into a tree and came to report it.”
“Did you forget to call me by my proper rank?” said Sergeant Hasta.
“Uh, yes I did, Sergeant.” Melon’s tough act evaporated.
Hasta looked like he was about to say something else when Mirror poked her head out of her office and said, “There you are, Sergeant. Stop looking at my Privates and come in here.”
Trixie and Melon went out the door, both subconsciously eager to leave the building.
“What did they do to get sent here?” Melon asked.
“Hasta doesn’t like anypony, and as it turns out, nopony likes him either. Mirror, not a clue. She’s been here longer than anypony. She may have actually asked for it.”
There was a light coming from under the door at the barracks, the other building in the compound. Meteor and Dusty were probably back from their own scheduled patrol now. The barracks had separate rooms for male and female. Trixie shared a bunk bed with Dusty. Melon probably had it worse, though, sleeping alongside Meteor and Hasta.
If Lieutenant Mirror slept, it was apparently in her office. That was fine with everypony else. The group of Guards seldom saw eye to eye on anything, but all of them agreed they didn’t want to sleep in the same room with that kind of crazy.
Trixie glanced up at the night sky, barely able to make out the stars because of the glowing lighthouse beam. Melon asked, “So what do we do now?”
“Are you still hungry?” she asked.
“I’m always hungry,” Melon replied.
“Paperwok’s place is open late.”
The two of them went to eat lo mein. Even as big as Melon was, he still surprised Trixie with his appetite.
“Do you come here a lot?” he asked between bites.
“Not really,” Trixie replied.
“Yeah. It’s not that great.”
“You’re still eating it,” she pointed out.
Melon shrugged. He took another bite and asked, “How do we investigate a cult?”
Trixie considered it, listlessly poking her noodles with chopsticks. “I’ve never led an investigation before. As a matter of fact, I’ve only ever been party to one or two.”
Melon looked up. “But you have some experience, right?”
A Private leading a Private. This was what six months’ experience got Trixie. She realized she was either going to have to step up and perform, or at least act like it. “We should go back to the scene and see if we can learn anything else.”
Melon nodded and finished his bowl of noodles. After leaving the restaurant, the two of them headed back to the carved tree. It was exactly how they’d left it.
“We can knock on doors and ask if anypony has seen anything,” Melon suggested.
Trixie smiled. “If you want to knock on ponies’ doors this late at night, be my guest.”
“It’s not that late,” Melon protested. As if to prove his point, he went to knock on the nearest door.
“That’s Strawberry Rhyme’s house,” Trixie pointed out. “You can practically hear her snoring from here.”
Melon shot her a look and marched across to the neighboring house. It was a little bit larger and older and even appeared to have a basement, quite a feat for a house built on a rock in the ocean.
Melon was about to knock a second time when they heard the old house’s boards creak with a slow step. The door opened to reveal an elderly earth pony with an expression devoid of enthusiasm on her face. “What?”
“Hello, we saw somepony had carved a threatening message on that tree over there.” Melon gestured. “We were wondering if you had seen anypony.”
“What are you talking about?” she barked.
Melon fumbled. Trixie stepped forward. “Ms. Share, if you saw anything suspicious we’d like to know. Do you have any idea who might have carved a message about gods of war taking over Equestria?”
“What kind of nonsense are you talking about?” The old mare shook her head. “I ain’t seen nothin.’”
“Do you know who owns the tree?” Melon asked.
“Ain’t nobody. Who would own that tree, anyway?”
Melon started to ask another question, but stopped. He looked at Trixie. The homeowner took the opportunity to shut the door.
“Who was that?” Melon asked.
“Her name is Sea’s Share,” Trixie replied.
“How do you know?”
“It’s on the mailbox. Also, I’ve seen her once or twice before. It’s a small island. She sells salt. I hear it gets shipped all over the world.”
The two of them went to have another look at the tree. Trixie lit her horn for a better look in the growing dusk.
“All those words, that had to have taken a while to carve,” Melon commented. “Somepony had to have seen something.”
“It could have been a unicorn,” said Trixie. “That would have made it a lot quicker job. Neater, too.”
“What if...there was some kind of acid or something?” Melon proposed. “Like, they could paint it on invisibly and it would eat the bark away after they were already gone?”
He actually impressed Trixie with the creativity of that idea. However, Trixie merely pointed to the wood chips around the base of the tree.
She took a closer look at the carving. “The tool used could have been a flat screwdriver, or, well, a wood chisel.”
“I wonder how long it’s been here,” said Melon.
“Strawberry could tell us when she first saw it. If we could wake her.” Trixie shrugged. “Let’s find her tomorrow.”
Trixie was more than happy to leave the job unfinished. If she could subsequently find a way to make it somepony else’s problem, so much the better.
She and Melon walked for a few more hours, and to Trixie’s great relief, saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.
They encountered Lieutenant Mirror in the early morning. She was waiting for them at the gate to the compound, snapping the cover on her lighter. There was a lit piece of string in her mouth. The sun breaking over the horizon revealed the gold rank stripes on her armor. She didn’t wear a helmet, which was probably because there wasn’t a spare one in the gear locker.
“How’s it going?” Mirror said.
“We didn’t learn a whole lot about the message carved in the tree,” Trixie admitted. “But we have a few things to check out later.”
Mirror nodded and set off to do her patrol.
“Was she smoking…?” Melon asked.
“Yeah. She went through a twine phase a while back. It smelled terrible,” Trixie replied.
The two of them went into the barracks, separating into the male and female rooms. Trixie saw that Dusty was still sleeping and kept quiet. Not the easiest thing to do when taking off plate armor.
The set Trixie wore was as incongruous as any of the others. It was all authentic Lunar Guard armor from the forge in Canterlot, but assembled from a mixture of different eras and variants. Frustratingly, nopony had ever found matching pieces of a complete set even after looking in the gear locker for hours. All the Guards at Camp Driftwood made do with plate and mail from who knew where.
The worst part of the armor was the tail wrap. It was supposed to keep tail hairs from getting caught in the interlocking rump plates, but it was more uncomfortable to have a band around the base of one’s tail. For some reason, it was also the enchanted item that activated the batpony spell. Given the choice, and considering there were never any formal events to attend, all of them save the Lieutenant chose to go without.
Trixie stowed her gear in the locker at the side of the bed. From her personal stash, she took out a package of instant macaroni and cheese and headed to the kitchenette.
Trixie was familiar with prepackaged food from her years of cooking for herself on the road. The only brand of macaroni and cheese available on the island was not a good one, and the label indicated it was made with “cheez” instead of real cheese. There also wasn’t equipment in the kitchenette or money in her Private’s salary to eat much else. She could get standard issue rations for free, but best not to even think about that. Prison food might even be better.
“Come on! Mix, you darn pseudo-cheese! The Great and Powerful Trixie commands it!” she grumbled, perhaps a little too loudly. She heard hooves behind her. They sounded angry.
“Private, if you’re going to waste your time in the Guard, at least keep it to yourself,” ordered Sergeant Hasta. Even talking about the weather, he could sound like he was giving orders.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Trixie replied automatically.
He didn’t go away, and Trixie could see him out of the corner of her eye as she mixed her macaroni. He began again. “You know your problem? You don’t care.”
Trixie glanced at him. “I don’t know what you mean, Sergeant.”
“You’re just here to do your time. You don’t care.”
“Well yes, Sergeant, I did commit a crime. I thought that was fairly common knowledge.”
“But you aren’t changing. You don’t care. You’re just here because you were told to be. You aren’t buying into the idea of the Guard at all.”
Trixie shrugged. “Sergeant, if I’m only here until my sentence is up, why buy in when I can rent?”
Trixie left the room with her macaroni before Hasta could reply. She was fully aware that she would pay for that remark eventually.
Back in the room, she ate in silence, sitting on her bunk with just the light from her horn. Occasionally Trixie thought about what she would do after she was free again. Probably go back to performing shows on the road. There certainly wasn’t anything she enjoyed about policing a rock in the middle of nowhere.
The rickety building made it easy to pick out noises from elsewhere, and she’d heard Hasta go back to his room, so Trixie got up to wash her utensils when she was finished eating. Then, it was into the shower.
Trixie paused in front of the bathroom mirror. She had to pay herself some attention, she reasoned. Nopony else around here did.
Well, then, if she had to treat herself, what did she deserve? Trixie glanced around at the tacky government facilities. She closed her eyes and envisioned the most extravagant bathroom she could. What wasn’t marble or mahogany was gold or crystal. The shower curtain was made of gem-encrusted silk. And it was clean.
She put some effort into the spell and opened her eyes. The magic had put a thin veneer on the walls, transforming the bathroom into her vision. If she didn’t look too closely she could almost believe it was real. It would probably fool most everypony else. Her special talent was illusions, after all.
She wanted to take a longer shower than she did, but after the night she’d had, bed was sounding better and better, After drying off, Trixie canceled the spell and the room reverted back to its previous state.
Back in the room, she slid into bed. The words of the carved tree went through her mind again. Trixie frowned. She shook her head. “Amateurs. If there was really a cult, they spoiled the performance by doing the reveal first.”
She rolled over and went to sleep.