//------------------------------//
// To 
// Story: Stroll 
// by re- Yamsmos 
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	Octavia's bowtie was, without a doubt—in the entire wide world of Equestria that she so desired to reside in—one of the things that she treasured the most. There, of course, was her refined, polished, practically legendary double bass (as painfully egotistical it felt to think so), with its finely crafted scroll and its sleek brown-orange finish inspired by the various works of Stradimarius hundreds of years prior to Octavia's state of both living and breathing, however challenging it may be. There was her bow, imported from Germaney in part for its more comfortable frog that was definitely more hoof-friendly to her, and made from the finest Ipê wood, hoofcrafted ebony, and silk bits could buy without feeling even the least bit ashamed of herself. To be fair, it was a magnificent and astoundingly beautiful looking bow, almost too enchanting to use on a day-to-day basis for simple Gala concerts where the aroma of food haunted her or packed opera houses where the smell of perfume gagged her.

To both herself and to the other ponies around her, Octavia did so, and always left her personal bow locked up as tightly as an oyster's super-glued shell back at her apartment, instead opting on simply using a standard bow she had bought on a random whim while perusing Canterlot's local music shop, with its surfer-esque stallion manning the register with eyes that spoke many years of either well-deserved fatigue, or hardcore drugs Octavia was sure she'd be arrested for if she simply smelled like them. Suffice to say, she didn't go back to that music shop a second longer after buying her bow, unless it was a Tuesday or a Friday—the days she'd learned as being the stallion's time off. She'd felt immensely proud of herself for sleuthing about and discovering this fact, but the idea of one simple slip-up on her calendar or her mind being the end of her music career told her to cram it down and shut the hell up. She couldn't compete with that.

Now, her bowtie... huh.

Her bowtie was a... very different story. Neckties were a necessity in the Canterlot Symphony, standardly issued whenever a new pony joined up with their violin, viola, cello, or bass in tow to the sight of raised eyebrows and scrutinizing looks that would have surely killed any other pony if they were just the slightest bit happier with themselves. The ties came in many different colors, and—to Octavia's confusion—were completely up to the preferred choice of the pony picking one out. Stallions, favoring more masculine colors, generally strayed more toward the red ties. Frederic seemingly started the trend, with others like Nandermane and Concerto quickly following suit and discarding their pretty pink ties into the pile always sitting inside the corner box facing the Orchestra as they played, its sagging sides and faded lettering reminding them that changing colors now was more than just a simple few steps. Mares like Beauty Brass, Ballad, and Octavia herself had chosen said pink ties, mostly because it set them apart, but more due to the fact that Octavia felt a lot more... special with an unstereotypical tie. Symphony—the mare, not the group—chose a purple tie, most likely so she could yet again feel like the popular kid in a sea of popular kids.

The ties themselves—no matter the color—were not actually bowties at birth. Bowties were the standard, most popular type of knot for concerts in the Symphony, and so ties usually stayed in that knot unless another one was either desired or required. Eldredge knots were intended for use in areas with not-as-well-kempt floors, as the knot itself required a long amount of tie and rose the fat end itself higher toward the neck region. Trinity knots were for ceremonies, like royal babies or crownings, as their simple looking design symbolized all three pony races interlocked with one another. Half-Windsors were what the new ponies believed as the standard if they hadn't read a sentence into the Symphony's history, and were the source of uproariously rude laughter that felt dangerously close to popping blood vessels and beginning bloody brawls.

Octavia's bowtie was special to her, in the same way that an infant was special to their mother, or similar to the onslaught of corny remarks from a boyfriend to a girlfriend or vice versa. Bright pink, made of soft silk and secured in its little knot as securely as the royal vault deep under Canterlot Castle. In fact, when her mother had been in the Symphony–

"Sputnik dammit!"

Octavia's ears flew upward, slapping the sides of her head as she pressed a frown against her cheeks and stared Valkyrie's way. The griffon, grinding her white teeth together so incredibly hard in her dark bronze beak that Octavia half-wished they would snap, was turning her head to face her left shoulder, a single talon flicking away incredible amounts of absolutely nothing. Octavia shot down the hearty bit of laughter that threatened to erupt from her mouth. That one talon alone could easily be the decider of whether or not she'd pass for a butcher's next delivery. Valkyrie growled, hissed, and snarled continuously, her talon now joined by its cousins and acting as one giant flyswatter, fanning the crisp air around her entire body as if she were aflame.

Not that Octavia wasn't wishing it were so...

"What's wrong now, Val?" L asked, a rolling of her eyes accompanying her about-face.

"These–" the griffon took a second to shout sweet, sweet nothings at something, fanning harder and more violently, "–God damned bugs! Biting at my skin, the little bastards..."

L sucked on her beak, flexing her shoulders as well before turning back and replying, "Yeah, it's the, uh, sweat y'know?" L raised a brow. "They like the sweat of a hot griffon. Can't blame 'em."

There were a few things wrong with that claim. Octavia hoped that L meant "hot" as in "temperature-wise hot". She really didn't need that image in her head.

"You know, if you didn't pick at 'em, they'd probably just go away–"

"The bugs?! You just said–"

"No," L responded, shaking her head dismissively. The long feathers atop her head bobbed with her movement like an octopus trying to three-sixty in the water. "I meant the bites." The griffon scratched at the back of her neck. Octavia's eyes darted to her left to find that Valkyrie was now giving L her full attention, as menacingly opposing it appeared to be. She looked back in time to both listen and see the light yellow griffon's continuation. "If you don't scratch them, they'll go away in, like, a day or two. Like a mosquito bite, basically."

"You do know how hard that is, right L?" Valkyrie asked, dark green eyes narrowed and nonexistent smile downside-dialed. Suddenly casting her sights to the dirt below them, she mumbled something to herself and added, "Hang on..."

"It's not that hard, Val," L stated matter-of-factly, a look of general unsupportiveness plastered on her deadpan delivery, like that of a parent being told that their kid isn't good with sugar. "Self-control, you ever heard of it? I mean, I know it was a bit hard for you back in Los Pegasus, but I'm telling you that that guy was infested with worms up to," she waggled her eyebrows toward the blue sky, "here."

"He was not...! I– I was not..! No! Piss off, La—"

Octavia had bore witness to many a catfight in her years of school, starting in elementary with simple exchanges of "poopyhead" and "loser" on the crowded playground sets, continuing on and into middle school with infinitely more aggressive curse words and a few brawls in the commons every now and then in the bluest of blue moons, and going even further into high school with broken bones and slurs thrown around aplenty, like wet paper towels freshly doused in a one-star hotel sink. There had been the rising feud between Candy Cane and Cottage Cheese in the tenth grade, when Candy had been dating the local jock Pig Skin and expected him to ask her to the prom, but he instead asked out Cottage Cheese on the night before the event. The long, winding battle that ensued—as Octavia had been told, since she didn't go to her prom and hadn't been there to witness it—was dubbed the CC fight, and consisted of spilled punch on expensive lace dresses and part of the gymnasium almost burning down in a lovely orange blaze of angry Unicorn glory.

She was glad that she wouldn't have to bear witness to another. Seeing as how both Valkyrie and L had armor, claws, and guns, Octavia held a bit of a gut feeling that if something went wrong it wouldn't be attractive even in the slightest way.

"Valkyrie! L! Quit it, both of you!"

A hiss and a growl. Valkyrie, no doubt.

"You're not my dad, W! Don't tell me what to do!"

W turned his head, an expression on his face that reflected one of a father raising three bickering girls. He adjusted his Magicarm, a presumably subtle telling of promises better left imagined. "If I had the odd fortune of being your dad, Valkyrie, I probably would have flown into the Abysmal Abyss when the ultrasound came in."

Something in Octavia's stomach twitched. Involuntarily, she sucked in a gulp of air and realized that it caught somewhere in her trachea, then raised a hoof up to her shut mouth to suppress the sound that she would have surely made if she wasn't quick on the draw. She might've keeled over and fell into the grass if it weren't for L's abrupt, uproarious wails of laughter, high-pitched and almost squeaking like some kind of chew toy from the dollar store.

A sigh escaped her mind's lips.

She missed Buddy.

A small whisper shot through the air next to her, one that sounded vaguely, possibly, like Valkyrie spitting the word, "Asshole," to a certain dark brown griffon ahead of her, L, and Octavia. Though she was sure that Valkyrie wouldn't do anything to actually hurt her—sticks and stones, as it went—the current status of the griffon's being very pissed and very dangerous led Octavia to think twice about standing near the hulking bird. She had a question on her mind, anyway. Increasing her trot to a light canter, the mare trod forward, stepped past L—who still stood giggling—and T—who regarded her with a simple expressionless shrug—and stepped to W's side.

The frown on the griffon's face shifted immediately as he turned his head to the sound, a small smile and a cocked eyebrow replacing a heavy scowl of utter annoyance.

"Well, you made a good decision coming up here," he said, chuckling to himself and shaking his armor plating. "It's not wise to stand anywhere near Val when she's mad. Ten yards just aren't enough."

She snorted out of her nose. "A ticking time bomb isn't something you'd want to mess with, I'm afraid."

W didn't laugh as she'd hoped, instead widening his grin to obviously amused levels. "Of course not. Anyway, why else did you come up here? Wanted to see the city before all of us, did ya?"

"Actually," Octavia began, pursing her lips, "I'm a little curious about this Tall Tale we're entering."

"Ah," W spoke, "can't say I know a lot about it, but I'll help you as much as I can."

Splendid. Octavia shut her eyes and nodded happily. "First off..." she had to ask, even though it most likely led to an obvious answer, "...what exactly is it?"

"A city," W replied, straightening his face.

Octavia blinked.

His expression softened, "Apparently, it's home to the largest diverse community you'll see in Equestria. You see all kinds of people here–" he stuck out his black eagle claw and lifted a talon as he went, "–Diamond Dogs, dragons, Yaks, bison..." He now held up a completely open claw. Looking at it, he raised a brow, frowned, and unfurled his right wing, adding, "...griffons. Hell, even heard a story about a huge group of Changelings coming here after that wedding in Canterlot."

Ugh. She wished he hadn't reminded her of that.

"In fact, Octavia," W resumed, looking down at her out of the corner of his eyes, "ponies are... kind of the minority in Tall Tale. Make up about, what, five percent of the population. You'll be hard fixed to find a pony there at all."

Her eyes widened and her pupils shrank. "You're certain?"

"Yes."

"Which means that I'll most likely be stared at for more than the fact that I'm accompanied by a band of heavily-armored, heavily-armed griffons."

W scrunched his bottom beak for a time, looked to the left and right side of the sky, and replied matter-of-factly, "Looks like."

Octavia turned her head, the weight of the train conductor's messenger bag suddenly feeling double. T was currently preoccupied with mimicking her maneuver, observing as Valkyrie and L talked with one another in a mildly vicious manner, the same way two fillies would speak if they were under adult supervision on a field trip to the zoo and couldn't do anything too obvious. The former's expression was one of outright hatred and anger, while the latter's appeared to be more unimpressed and casual. She was sure this wasn't a normal occurrence.

Turning back, her earlier hallucination called to her from the back of her mind. Clearing her throat, Octavia asked, "And once we get there, where shall we head to find these train ponies?" Though train pony wasn't a race as far as she knew, she still felt slightly racist saying this.

W hummed to himself—a low C, unimpressive considering his normally gruff voice—deep in thought. Expecting an answer, Octavia didn't notice the collection of stones and mud until she had stepped in it. Lulling her tongue out, she took a second to seethe and curse the Gods high above. She'd have to wash up once they got into Tall Tale, make sure her mane was still presentable at least. An undermining revelation went through her head. She stowed it down, but began to really hope that it was indeed mud she had plodded through. 

"Might be best to check the hospital. One of them was injured; that'd probably be our first step. Though after that, we'll have to get some food." Beating the plating on his chest and eliciting a low, metallic bang, he claimed, "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling kind of hungry, and I don't think a pony sandwich will be enough to sate me."

Octavia slowly stretched her neck forward and more toward her own chest, eyes wide. Slowly craning her neck around, she stared W blankly in the face and asked, "Seriously?"

The gurgling from W's stomach sounded a lot more menacing than she would have liked.