Changes
In the two years since I moved in to Farrington, I started to notice changes in my life. Some of them, I enjoyed—like how I smiled more, or how I got to visit Dash in her town more often. Some changes, I struggled with—like every new time I found myself blanking on a word or phrase from my first language.
I only truly hated the worst ones, like how I no longer had a little audience waiting for me at the hospital.
However, because I started off as an outsider, most of the changes in my daily routine were small, neutral changes. Things like Iron’s kitchen etiquette or reading a daily newspaper became part of who I was, but I didn’t violently resist those changes anymore.
Somewhere, amidst all that change, I found a weird sense of stability.
Being a Farrington Guard definitely fell in line with that rigid sense of flow. I had my normal day-to-day routine—fifteen laps plus paperwork at the end—but that gave way to more interesting days, when I did my part on Farrington Guard’s Special Operations Squad.
F.G.S.O.S.—how it’d been engraved on my nifty silver-lined shoulderplates—was, in my ever-supportive boyfriend’s words, “a bruiser squad”. He’d taken it back once I mentioned I was invited and considering joining, but after working with them for over a year, I had to admit that it fit.
One of the most notable changes in the city that I’d had a hand in causing happened within the organized crime element. Long story short, organized crime tried to deal me a dirty death, so I shot its balls off. Or one of them. Anyway, during the aftermath, things had quieted down on that front while the new players in the underground game set down new rules. Once their activities started to have an impact on civilians’ daily lives, the Farrington Guard put together F.G.S.O.S.
Simply put, organized criminals liked to hole up in fortified houses, and it was our job to blast the door down and put an end to them.
That was why, on August fifteenth, my patrolling partner and I didn’t return to our Guard-designated route after lunch. Instead, we headed into the hustle and bustle of ponies in the Market District. There was more than shopping going on that afternoon: A reliable, if anonymous, source had tipped the Guard off on an illicit gemcrafting operation that was taking place.
On our way to the raid, I turned to Special-Sergeant Starfall and made conversation. “So, uh. Market District. That’s a weird place for criminals, isn’t it?”
He turned his armored, navy blue head and stared at me for a few steps. “It isn’t unheard of, but yeah. I don’t like having to clean out my backyard.”
That started a friendly, chatting debate of which district was best to live in—Starfall lived in the Market District, and I had a dusty apartment in the Business District since I spent most of my nights in the Residential District with Iron. It was easy to keep things light, since I really didn’t have a preference. If Iron lived in a shack in the Mining District, I’d probably end up calling that my home.
Our conversation tapered off as we neared the staging area for F.G.S.O.S. It was, smartly enough, a coffee shop a few blocks away from the target building. The shop’s owner was the wife of a patrolling officer who didn’t mind closing her doors to help us out, which was how we all got free, fancy coffees as we planned out that afternoon’s attack.
After getting briefed by our commanding officer, we had confirmation that the target building—an abandoned potted plant shop—had become the base of operations for some illicit unicorns who enchanted gems to hold dangerous and life-threatening spells.
It was a weapons factory, where explosions were one of the more boring things that might happen, and we got to kick down the front door. Fun times.
I wasn’t walking into the fire naked, though. After each run-in that I had with Farrington’s organized crime remnants, I’d made a habit of getting my armor repaired and retooled to better protect me from whatever I’d been unprepared for the last time. When I put my facemask down, unless some criminal got a very lucky tactical shot, I was bolt-proof, flame resistant, electrically grounded, and a whole bunch of other cool, expensive precautions.
Regardless, according to my armor enchantment guy, there was only a certain amount of passive protection one could get against magic spells. Barging into a building full of weapons-grade unicorns crafting weapons-grade magic artifacts probably wasn’t smart to do solo, which was why I was part of a team of guards who barged into stuff.
We got our orders and sub-team assignments, so Starfall and I made our way to one block north of the building. From our alleyway, we were hidden from the windows of the shop. I looked southeast, and after establishing visual contact with the eastern team, I patted Starfall on the shoulder. He used his signaling mirror to let the western team know we were in position.
After a few seconds, the signal completed its relay when the eastern team gave me three flashes. Everyone was in position.
The risky part of pre-breaching protocols was the importance of stealth and surprise. Even though the ten of us were technically sergeants, we wore mostly matte-gray armor that didn’t draw extra attention to us when we were on our normal patrols. Sure, our silver-lined shoulder pauldrons gave us away to anyone who looked closely, but when we were on patrol, we usually did a good job of blending into the background.
However, when we’d set up a two-block perimeter around the building, it wouldn’t take the sharpest mind to realize that the only ten bodies in the street were Farrington Guard.
Starfall and I moved up slowly, steadily, and silently—magic silently—to the building. We got to the door we were going to turn into a window, and Starfall did the “auditory confirmation of suspects’ presence”. Less fancily, he put his ear to the door and nodded. From whatever he’d heard, the bad guys were still inside and didn’t know we were coming.
I pulled my physical signal flare off my belt and fired it up into the air. Unlike a fire-based flare, the thing I shot was a quiet, spring-loaded tube that shot a weighted cylinder up into the air. About five hundred feet up in the air, a little yellow parachute opened, and as I watched, three different-colored parachutes joined mine.
Starfall and I switched positions, since this time, it was my turn to bust down the door. I had a gadget for that, too: a quintet of gems that magically grafted themselves to whatever surface they were on. I arranged them in a big X on the wooden door. The outer four glowed green, the inner one glowed red, and Starfall patted my butt.
I slid my facemask down and poked the red gem.
The five gems, when activated, abruptly clenched together like magnets. When attached to something like a wooden door, that had the added bonus of making it collapse on itself. Bits of wood flew out of the implosion, but I rushed through the ruined doorway and into the combat zone.
Corners.
Starfall and I had a system: whoever went into a room first went left, and the second one went right. Inside the shop, front was clear, so I turned left.
A stallion was already closing in with a knife.
I dove forward, clearing the doorway for Starfall in case someone was behind me. The stallion—beige guy with a death wish—swung down with his blade. I grabbed his wrist and stood up on my hind legs. As I lifted him, he grabbed my gauntlet with his free hoof. I punched him in the diaphragm and felt something inside him crack.
Behind me, Starfall called, “Clear.”
I dropped the body on the floor. I checked the rest of my side, then confirmed: “Clear.”
We made our way through the rest of the ground level; the only other contact we had were the other team members. Upstairs, southeast team called out that it was clear, which left northwest teams to the basement.
The five of us gathered around the trap door entrance to downstairs; breaching those was always tricky, especially after you lost the element of surprise on the primary entrance. On top of that, due to the volatile nature of everything down below, we couldn’t throw down anything like flash powder or stun gas canisters.
Well, I mean, we could. There just wouldn’t be much building left afterwards.
Starfall knelt down and put his ear to the door. “’S quiet. They’re waiting.”
“How’re we gettin’ down there?” Scales—one of the members of west team—whispered.
“How about down?” asked Aria, one of the two mares in F.G.S.O.S.
We watched as she broke away from the group and set up her breaching gems on the floor. Vigil Lance, the third member of west team, went to stand behind her. Starfall caught on to what she was doing and loaded his breaching gems on the trapdoor. Scales started a countdown; Lance and I shared a nod. In unison, Starfall and Aria pulled a pin and dropped a null-magic grenade on their red gems.
The floor and door shredded themselves, and the cooked bombs fell down. Commotion sounded from below, but got drowned out by two familiar wumpf sounds. Starfall, then me, then Scales went down our hole; when I landed, Starfall had a unicorn pinned to the wall by his throat.
Scales took out a guy on our right with a mean one-two punch, which left me to rush further into the cramped hallway to deal with the asshole with a freaking mace. He didn’t have combat training, so I ducked his blow and stunned him with a sharp, armored palm to the nose.
Moments later he was down; one after another, two male voices behind me sounded off: “On you.”
The doorway at the end of the hallway led to the main basement room where Aria and Scales fell in from; left was clear, behind me, right was cleared, and the five of us stepped over three more subdued criminals. Cursory checks—corners, tables, and other hiding places; finally, we reached a consensus of “Clear.”
The dank stone basement we were in had two tables that lined the opposite walls, and they were stocked with what looked like four runic workstations—they were different than what I’d seen in Twilight Sparkle’s library, but they had some of the familiar pieces: Metal clamps, magnifying glasses, and a platform of what I guessed was pewter, inset with solid gold circles and etchings.
The five of us set to work binding the three unicorns in the basement area; soon after, they joined the trio in the hallway to make half a dozen tied-up wannabe warlords.
Once the area was secure, Scales called up through the trapdoor, “Suspects cleared; checking the workshop.”
The second, more tedious part of our job was a preliminary survey of a suspected crime scene. While dangerous, it’d let the higher-ups know if they needed to send a more specialized team, like a bomb squad, to secure the place for the detectives.
Scales led us back into the large basement room. He headed over to the wall opposite the doorway, where crates were stacked, and he cracked one open with his multi-tool. I heard him chuckle in disbelief. “Shit, Star, take a look at this.”
Those two were long-time friends, so all four of us took it as an invitation to walk over. Inside the crate was what had to have been at least a thousand pink gems.
Starfall chuckled. “What’re garnets good for again? Love charms?”
Scales passed him a clipboard. “Shipping manifest says red diamonds. From Stalliongrad.”
A small wave of nausea hit me; from what little I knew about the rising amount of weaponized gems we were running into, diamonds had a massive capacity for whatever spell they were filled with, and they could blast it all out in a huge radius. I didn’t know what red meant, in terms of diamonds or spell potency, but I couldn’t imagine it meant good things for whomever they were used against.
Worse, I knew enough about Stalliongrad’s criminal climate to hazard a guess as to who had sent those gems.
We finished our quick, preliminary survey of the room; from what we didn’t find, it seemed that our breaching gem-grenade combos had been mostly unnecessary. Unless those criminals had been idiots of the highest caliber, none of the diamonds had been charged. Weaponized gems did not like to touch each other, and the remaining crates held many padded casings that hadn’t been filled yet.
So, we’d taken unnecessary precautions, but no one had died—not even the assholes we’d plowed through to get down to the basement. From the hole in the ceiling, Red Field looked down at us and laughed. “You guys blew through the floor?”
I nodded up at him. “And six bad guys.”
On that note, we started the long and arduous process of removing the shop’s inhabitants from their not-so-fortressy workshop. Moving unwilling bodies meant a lot of heavy lifting, but everyone’s—or at least my—adrenaline was still pumping, which helped.
After we left the shop, I jittered through most of my debriefing; finally, they let us go for an hour of personal leave to go eat, rest, clean up, or whatever. There’d be extra paperwork for all of us after our patrols, but our lieutenant knew better than to put the ten of us right back onto the streets without a little bit of a break.
The ten of us split up as we walked farther away from the post-raid meeting. Six went to the team’s usual bar, Scales and Aria drifted somewhere to go celebrate his recent divorce, and Starfall and I walked together to the south. He had a habit of keeping his armor and equipment at the Guard’s Citadel, since he had three kids at home.
My usual post-raid ritual involved going to Iron’s house during his lunch break. When Starfall and I reached the intersection where I turned to head that way, he gave me a knowing grin. “Well, uh… see you in an hour?”
I nodded. “At the Citadel.”
As we parted ways, I found myself smiling. In that city, even changes of pace like today held their own sense of familiarity.
In a serene way, I was glad to be home there.
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I see you're fond of the Breach & Clear segments.
Interesting to see Gilda being part of what is essentially Farrington's SWAT team.
It's amazing how much sad you packed into this one line.
Man, never be ashamed of the first cod mw, that was an epic game. The second was great for non pc guys, too.
I am somewhat of a fan of the first two Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games.
Because the other ones weren't good.
(Ghosts is basically MW4)
Once the action starts up, this gets really cool. :D Those breaching gems and the parachute flares were also neat ideas.
3951162
Not even two whole paragraphs in and Right in the damn feels. That's cold man.