64 vs. The Underground

by Jman9877

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

64 POV

I looked at the doll and back at Trist, who was still sobbing into her hooves. I grabbed the doll and knelt down in front of Trist, who saw the doll in my hands.

“Give her back to me! I won’t let you take her!” She yelled out, reaching for it. I held her back from the doll until she stopped fighting for it, still not saying a word to her. I looked at the doll and gripped it in both hands, holding it in front of Trist’s face.

With a tug I ripped the doll in two, sending the cotton stuffing and cloth all over the room. Trist stared at me in shock as she sat there for a moment, before leaping to her hooves trying to grab all of the stuffing around the room.

“NO!! LILY NO! It’s gonna be ok! You’re gonna be alright!” She sobbed frantically, stumbling around the room with tears staining her face. I grabbed her by the shoulders and swatted the cotton out of her hooves, before shouting.

“Listen to me! This thing isn’t your daughter! This thing isn’t the filly that is probably scared out of her mind right now, wanting her mother to come and make everything ok! Your real daughter is somewhere out there scared and alone! And here you are trying to convince yourself that everything is ok when they obviously aren’t! You need to come back to reality before I can help you get her back!” I screamed in Trist’s face, before glaring into her eyes.

I really didn’t want to yell at her like this, but she needed a jump start on her sanity if she was going to be of any help to me.

She stared at me with tears streaming down her face, but her face wasn’t one of sadness, but one of clarity, as if she had just had an important truth revealed to her.

I heard hoofsteps stomping up the stairs before the door burst open, revealing Heavy Hoof standing there with a frightened look on his face.

“What’s goin’ on?! I heard gunshots!” He yelled, as Trist looked up at him. She slowly got to her hooves and slowly started take steps towards him, going painfully slow. “What’s the matter honey? Are ya ok?”

She simply wrapped her two forelegs around his neck and began to silently sob, as he stood there in shock for a few minutes. He then reciprocated the hug and started to cry along with her, as a sad smile came to my face.

I let them have their moment as Trist looked back to me, wiping her eyes and sniffling a little bit.

“Thank you… thank you so much… I just… I couldn’t deal with the pain of losing her.” She said quietly as I nodded in understanding.

“I get it, don’t worry about it. Look I won’t stay long, but I really need a few questions answered. Do you think you can do that for me?” I asked softly, as she nodded back at me. I flipped to the page that I had written Heavy’s statements in and asked my first question. “Alright, so Heavy already told me that your family was collecting feathers to try and make him a costume set of wings for Nightmare Night, so there’s no need to ask that. Is there a specific area where you might have been gather feathers?”

Trist looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking her head. “No, we walked up and down the roads looking for Black Feathers from the circling vultures overhead. We didn’t go anywhere outside of the city limits, but we were planning to. I was honestly feeling a bit nervous for some reason.”

I wrote down a few things before looking back up. “Could there be a reason for the nervousness you were feeling? Did it feel like a pair of eyes staring at you from behind?”

“It… felt like two pairs of eyes…”

I looked at her with my eyes squinted a bit, confused.

“Like two ponies staring at you from two different directions?”

Trist nodded and continued. “But… it was the strangest feeling. It was like the same pony looking at me from two different places at once. I just felt this feeling of I was being watched… but it was the same feeling from both directions…”

I wrote down the explanation and thought about her response, trying to think about anything about the strange feeling she said she was getting. I couldn’t think of anything at the moment that would cause a feeling like that, so I wrote it down and made sure that I would get back to it.

“Alright… Heavy said a colt came by and asked for Lily, was this colt Stomper?”

Heavy nodded. “Yup, comes by every now an’ then askin’ for her. He’s a sharp kid, but a bit reckless. They went out together to go find some feathers, but you know what happens after that…”

I wrote down the final statements and closed my notebook.

“Alright… now I’m gonna go have a word with Stomper’s parents. You said they lived next door right?” I asked, as Trist nodded.

I walked out the door and headed for the Leaf house, hoping that they would have something useful for me to go off of.

Ghost POV

I still don’t get Reggie. He’s always threatening me with pulling out of the investigation due to the lack of the suspect appearing at the scene of capture, but he always comes back the next day anyway, taking his seat across the Nightclub and looking out for any Diamond Dogs walking into the joint.

It had been a few days after he had threatened me with throwing me in jail, but nothing had come of it. After I had told him that the Dealer had actually holed up in his Cavern for a bit until the heat died down, Reggie suggested that we look for the cave and attack with all we had. After I explained to him that it was an incredibly bad idea, he swept me off like I was talking nonsense. The next day, who do you think is sitting across from me at the Nightclub?

I sighed as I was starting to become a bit restless too. The dealer was waiting us out until we gave up, and I wasn’t going to, but it was getting harder to play his game. I sipped at the Cola in front of me lazily, dozing off into space.

I had gotten word that 64 was awake now, and I was really happy about it, but I was hoping to have this job done before then. If he were here he would probably have the dealer in cuffs by now and halfway into Equestria.

“Agent 65… look alive…” I heard Reggie call out to me, as I looked up. There he was… Emerald Graves…

The Red Diamond Dog was standing at the front door with two Gryphon bodyguards at his sides, both sporting Sunglasses and Black Neckties. Emerald had a Golden spiked collar around his neck along with a black vest around his torso, his most prominent traits.

I saw Reggie getting antsy in his seat as if he was ready to pounce, but I knew now wasn’t the time.

“Calm down there Reggie… we can’t just go at him like this… I have to find out some things before we are able to book him.” I whispered, cracking my neck a few times casually as Emerald walked by my table.

“Are you fucking kidding me? He literally have our guy standing right in front of us, and you want to let him slip by? No fucking way.” He growled as I shot him a glare.

“Don’t be stupid. Have you ever been fishing before?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything right now?!”

“When you snag a fish… you have to give it a little slack. When it thinks it’s going to get away… that’s when you yank on the line and reel it in… Let Emerald get into a false sense of security before we act. It will only be a matter of time before he feel safe enough to where he won’t be on guard like he is now.”

Reggie looked at Emerald and saw what I was talking about. His shoulders were tensed as if he was watching everyone in the room, there was a sheen of sweat dripping on his forehead, and his fists were clenched tightly.

“Grr… Fine then… we’ll wait him out. I’ll give him 3 days… that’s it. Then we pounce.” Reggie growled, as I nodded and sighed, relaxing a bit. We finally had the bastard, and I was going to drab him back to Equestria by the feathers on his head.

“Don’t worry Reggie, we’ll get him.” I said encouragingly, to which he simply growled. His hoof grabbed the mug of Ale on his table as he chugged it angrily, before calling over the waitress and ordering another one.

Don’t worry 64, Emerald Grave is as good as captured.

64 POV

I walked out of the house and looked at the one neighboring it, seeing the sign ‘Leaf House’. Willow and Katrina Leaf were the mother and father of Stomper, who was last seen with Lily Wing. If they got foalnapped together, then it would make it a bit easier to track them down.

I walked onto the front porch and knocked on the door, as a male voice sounded from the other side.

“Yes, who is it?” The stallion said, not really having a ‘Appalosian’ accent.

“Hello? My name is Project 64, and I’m with the Equestrian Special Forces, I’m here to investigate the foalnapping of your son Stomper, can I come in?” I asked, as a few locks and switches were heard on the other side being undone.

The door opened to reveal a green coated stallion with a blonde mane, who had bags under his eyes. “You… you’re that human thing… aren’t you?” He asked me, to which I nodded.

“Yeah, all I need is for you to answer some questions and give me anything else I can use to help find your son.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes with a hoof, turning around to what looked like the living room area. “Kat! We have a visitor!”

From the room came a brown coated mare with an olive colored mane, who eyes had also seen better days.
“He says he’s here to help find Stomper. So he probably needs both of us to answer some questions.”

“Oh… ok. Hello there… by name is Katrina Leaf, but you can just call me Kat for short.”

I nodded to both of them as I pulled out my notebook, ready to write their responses on a new page. “Alright… first question. What were you and your family doing the day before Stomper went missing?”

Kat looked down at the ground for a few seconds before looking up at me. “We were helping make decorations for the Nightmare Night celebration in town square. I was in charge of making Cardboard bats to hand around the town, and Willow here was making fake spider webs.”

“We did that from dawn till dusk that day, and Stomper was off trying to find that filly he seems so fond of. I swear those two were inseparable.” Willow added, as I wrote their responses.

“So you were both in Town Square?”. They nodded. “Did you see anypony suspicious walking around? Like they didn’t belong there?”

Kat looked down at her hooves for a second in thought before shaking her head.

“No. And even if we did we couldn’t tell. With Nightmare Night coming soon everypony was in town trying on their costumes, so we couldn’t tell who was who.” Kat answered. I sighed at the answer and wrote it down.

“So what about the day Stomper went missing, what happened that morning?”

“The boy was always excitable. The first thing he did when he woke up was run next door to ask Lily if he could help her collect the feathers for her dad’s costume. When they didn’t show up later that night we went to the Sheriff and found out that Lily had gone missing too. Posse was rounded up and we all went searching. Nothing came of it though…” Willow said glumly.

I stared irritably at my notepad, realizing that I was getting nowhere near finding who stole these foals. I slapped it shut and sighed, placing it into my Satchel.

“Thank you for your time, I’ll let you know if anything pops up…” I said tiredly, failing to mask it up when I wanted to. I felt a hoof grab my sleeve and turned to see that Katrina had grabbed by me and had a soft smile on her face.

“Please sir, I can tell you’re tired. Come inside for a Cider or something, I think you need a little break.” She offered, as I grinned and shook my head.

“Thank you ma’am, but I really need to get going.”

“Ah… come on… a little break won’t kill you. Just set down for a spell in the kitchen and I’ll serve you something up real quick.”

I knew there was no getting out for Western Hospitality, so I sighed and nodded. “Alright then… just for a little bit though. I have places to go.”

Kat led me to the small kitchen where a round table sat, allowing me to sit down onto a small pillow on the floor. She went to another part of the kitchen which was out of sight, allowing me to relax a little bit.

“I can already tell Stomper is gonna come home.” Willow said, now sitting across from me a the table. He had a small grin on his face as he threw a newspaper at me, the same one that Chrysanthemum showed me in Las Pegasus. It was me unconscious on a hospital bed after I fought Discord.

“Any guy that is stupid or crazy enough to go face to face with the same thing that caused it to snow Ice Cream here, is definitely going to be able to find a few foals that have gone missing.” He encouraged me.

“Thanks… but I’m not anything special. I’m just doing what I think is right.” I replied.

“You’d be surprised how special that makes you in this world.”

The words hit me pretty hard as Willow just stared at me with a smile. I could see in his eyes that by looking at me and knowing that I was looking for his son, that everything was going to be ok. I never realized how much of an impact I made in this world, no matter how major or minor it was.

“I guess you’re right then…” I said with a smile. It was at this point that Kat had come back into the room and set down 3 mugs of Cider. I took mine with a grin and took a big swig, feeling the Apple and Cinnamon flavors go down my gullet.

“Ah… that hits the spot.” I sighed happily. I looked up at the walls and saw that there were photos of Willow standing next to a sign which read ‘Leaf’s Extermination Company’. I saw in the foreground of this photo there were skyscrapers and many other big buildings. Apparently he saw me eyeing this photo and grinned.

“I used to be a pest exterminator. Anything from Roaches to Parasprites wasn’t too big of a mess for me.” He said proudly, a little more boastful than an Exterminator should.

“Where are you from Willow? This picture was taken in Manehatten.”

“From the Big Apple itself. Worked there until Willow here got pregnant with Stomper, so we decided to move down here to Appaloosa to get away from the big city. I never really thought Manehatten was the right place to grow up.”

Willow looked as if he wanted to say something else but was holding it back.
“What happened Willow? I can tell something is eating you.” I said as a matter of factly. He fought with it for a little more before sighing and looking up at me.

“Look, I know there’s a huge difference between bugs and a wanted criminal… but do you think you can set a trap?” He asked pleadingly.

“What do you mean a trap?”

“…… Like…… you know… setting up…… you know… bait…?” He said nervously as if he was scared on how I was going to react. I took the suggestion to mind and looked up at the ceiling, trying to see how that would work. Apparently Willow was beating me to it.

“Because... whenever there was a rodent that needed clearing out I always used the same tactic, and it always worked.” He spoke quickly, pulling out a pen and paper if front of me. “There’s always one reason why a Rodent moves into someone’s home, it has something there it likes. Whether that thing is food, warmth, or anything else, I always did the same thing. Put the thing it wants into a perfect situation to be taken, then when it’s going in for it, I snatch that sucker up.”

He drew a situation where there was a small circular area with a bit of cheese in the middle, and a hole where the Rodent would come out of. There was a drawing of him standing behind a corner with a net, with arrows pointing to where he would go.

“All you have to do is cut off the escape routes…” He drew a small tripwire and wall which would close the mouse hole in the wall as the rodent stepped out.

“Confuse the target…” Lights above the cheese which strobed quickly.

“Capture.” Net over the Rodent.

“Easy as 1,2, and 3.”

I looked at the plan drawn out before me and was shocked to see how much real-world application could be applied to it. Using barrier spells I could block off all exits so the target couldn't escape, and illusionary spells to confuse and distract the target if they tried to make a run for it!

“Holy shit Willow… Holy shit! This could actually work! There’s so many ways I can change up this plan so it could be used to capture the Foalnapper, and they would both be completely discreet!” I exclaimed, actually seeing glimmer of hope for the missing foals. The location of the trap would need to be set in a place where the Foalnapper hadn’t already targeted yet, so they would definitely show up eventually.

But as soon as my hopes were raised, a single thought dashed everything.

“Wait… everything here makes sense… but what the fuck am I going to do about bait?”

Author's Note:

Stomper Leaf
Katrina Leaf
Willow Leaf

Comments

[lordofmyth]

4131579 they can just throw shit. look at maud.

[Jman9877]

4140046 She possesses what I like to call Pie Power. Pinkie has the Psychic Shit, and Maud has Super Pony strength, and was also somehow able to add explosive properties to the rock she threw.

[Changeling-Drone]

An illusion of a foal?

A shrunken guard with a spy camera?

[lordofmyth]

4140063 pretyt sure big mac and applejack are AS strong. but since they deal with buckign trees than breaking rocks, maud probably has less restraint in throwing in some earth pony strength. would also hint more that the share a common ancestor.

also that is what we call impact. a rock hit maximum velocity after being thrown and hit hard........ that or they blew up a train or something by accident.
taht or the whole super major impact creater thing was non diegetic. like the songs and the constant pop culture references in the comics.

[Jman9877]

4140116 What's the camera for?

[Changeling-Drone]

4140954 in case the thief gets away, they can get a video of how to get to the base

[Mexican Brony 101]

I wonder who is going to act as bait.
4140160
Bucking something like a tree is nothing compared to bucking a boulder miles away. There is no way that Maud is less strong, or AS stong.
4140063
I don't think it has any connection. Like Pinkie Pie, Cheese Sandwich also has a "sense". So i believe that it is determined my experience and cutie mark.

[Jman9877]

4141419 Cheese had a "party sense", nowhere near the caliber that of Pinkie Sense.

[lordofmyth]

4141419 throwing in that strenght againsta tree, you broke the tree.

[BureYaAkili]

Insert twilight with age spell!!!
Or the cmc?