Stroll

by re- Yamsmos

Barter

Tall Tale was a cesspit of bad faces and bad people, a place you couldn't trust enough to let it take your daughter to the winter ball. Its buildings varied from small to large, dotting the bumpy landscape that was a downpour of quiet scrutiny and cloaked figures sprinting down the street like there was no better time. The sky was clear as day, a few leftover clouds hanging above like sunny-side-up eggs facing the Celestial object nestled in the depths of the black, black space. Everywhere she stepped, the jagged cracks in the road and the green weeds attempting to wriggle their way out of the pits of hell hissed at her, tangling her and stumping her with as much inner hatred as an angst-filled teenager locked in her bedroom. The plagued air she strugglingly breathed in stank of cigarette ash and old bourbon. Every other sidewalk she and her companions had the graces of stepping upon was filled in with a rusted old grate that led deep into the sewers, where the rancid drug addicts and crime lords played their games of Blackjack and Go Fish, sharp knives and loaded crossbows holstered at their armored sides in case of a loss on their side.

"Hey, move it, mud pony!"

The perpetrator was a... light blue canine, with the face of a shovel and the brains of one. His wild yellow eyes begged for conflict, for bloody claws and yipping at a full moon. She flicked her dark gray tail at him, preparing herself for such an event that she was surer to win than any bass playing contest she'd ever been in. Instead, with a heavy glare on his ugly brow and a drunk-looking sway in his bulky step, he sauntered off without another word and only a simple glance behind his clothed shoulder. A Diamond Dog. She'd surely have to wipe her face full of ashes just to scare one off, a kind of tribal war paint from the old war hundreds of years before her time. She didn't know where to get ashes in a way she'd feel comfortable doing, but she could deduce one thing and one thing only: the big dog sure smelled bad. She may not have been incredibly religious, and church wasn't something that she ventured to, but she looked to the bright white heavens above and spoke a quick prayer that she wouldn't have to be in proximity to another Diamond Dog all the same. Any little bit helped, as the saying went.

"I'm walkin' here, you crazy mare!"

A... a dragon, now. Ahem. A small, short one. A teenager, if she would have the pleasure of being more specific. She could place his putrid pimples and peach fuzz as easily as a rosined bow against string. He scratched at the back of his purple spikes with a sharp pair of black claws, bringing the arm back out again to try threatening her. She felt a smile grow across her lips, knowing full well what a mistake the young dragón was making. She had been taking the caboose in the train formation of her lovely group, and only needed to step just an inch to her left to allow her heavily-armored, heavily-armed bird friends to bare their white teeth and reach for their deadly weapons. She was just a few minutes ago sure that a dragon had never piddled himself and ran like the wind in the entirety of Equestria's history, but she was quickly corrected on that assumption with the drop of a black bowler hat and a sinus-clamping cloud of dust. She quietly hoped that the stingy street cleaners—if this beautiful town had one in its deep pockets—brought their industrial eye bleach with them. The smell was enough to kill a mare and a half.

Intimidation. A lovely tool, if you knew how to use it and weren't afraid to experiment on it like an elementary school science fair project. Valkyrie was the main tool, both of intimidation and just in general, with a flurry of long white feathers that reached her sage green eyes, usually plugged with anger and the salt of fifteen sea ponies. With a pair of dark brown wings that reminded her of fecal matter and dark bronze claws all too reminiscent of Band Geek Pride, Val was something of a childish nuisance, but maintained a very friendly reminder that crossing a griffon usually landed you in intensive care and tubes in places you didn't want tubes. The dame had a wide boundary in the sand, but she liked to cross it frequently like an off-minded toddler high on bonbons.

T was what you'd receive if you crossed the nigh-unused mute button on your TV remote with a highly trained Royal Guard, all silence and brutality packed into one scary black package. He wore his griffon equivalent of a pony mane in a slightly grown-out buzz cut, one that swept back with the memories of fast flights and head butts. T didn't talk very much, only really needing to when the need arose, or when he was addressed by a helmeted higher-up who'd surely knock him on his rear as fast as he they. Golden eyes were perfect for spying, and his were no exception in the slighest. If she was to tap a hoof to her chin and guess, he'd ranked top of his school class in science for observation and P.E. for picking out the weak, the vulnerable, the ones who'd grow up to be taxpayers and penpushers while he was out there shooting at people and covering them in tar to throw them down canyons.

L was something else, like a friend you couldn't place a hoof on or an idea that never quite came to fruition. If she'd known she'd meet a griffon like L, she'd have journeyed to griffon country just to be there for her birth. L had the appearance of a bald eagle, right down to the golden beak and white head, but the behavior of an older sister who was tired of letting her clothes be stolen from the hamper in her closet. L was the kind of dame you'd share a drink with, and later regret helping back to her house with its shattered windows and torn up couch. The griffon hated being wrong and sitting still, but she had a passion for completion, and that was something she could take to the bank. While Valkyrie was the more angry and bitter one of the group, L was the more level-headed and approachable one.

"Excuse me! Could you–"

"How about you shut your damn trap and step aside, Sitting Bull!"

Valkyrie was also possibly a vile racist. She didn't really have much else to say about that. Needless to say, the rather hurt-looking bison now walking past definitely didn't deserve getting his ear talked and torn off.

W. The leader of the Furious Four, the Dysfunctional Dos Duo. He bore the wrinkles of a crippled grandfather around his eyes, but held the highest amount of legitimate command of his people she'd ever witnessed in all twenty-five years of her living. He packed two guns; one was a highly illegal Magicarm, with a cylinder that spun and bullets that flew, and the other was a bottle, with a label long faded and a mouth almost too touched. W never seemed like the kind of stallion to get drunk on the job, but then again, he wasn't a stallion in the first place. All she knew was that he hated the color of his blue eyes and spoke so many tall tales he might as well have named the city. She inwardly wished she knew what the griffon's name was. It felt a little demeaning to address him by a nickname, even if that was exactly what he wanted.

She herself was a classy mare, with a tight pink bowtie collared around her neck and a load of bad ideas chained around her brain. She carried herself prettily, making sure that her chin was held high and her lips were turned into an unimpressed frown. She had a reputation to maintain as the Lead Bassist of the Canterlot Symphony—even if she was currently in a city that seemed disconnected from anything Equestrian—and she would be damned beyond all belief if she were to just give it all up now. The citizens toiling about around her may not have shown any signs of perturbance at her coldness, but she deep down knew that they were soiling themselves and glaring at her and her companions simply out of a mixture of jealousy and fear. The messenger bag strapped across her chest bobbed and bounced with each cautionary step she took, agreeing with her every second of the way, as it—and everypony—should. Yes, Octavia... hm, Octavia... "Badass" Philharmonica was a force to be reckoned with, with a group that paid no mind but broke hundreds, neigh, thousands of them.

...

Octavia looked to the top of her forehead, blowing at a few loose locks of dark gray hair that had fallen over her eyes where they most certainly didn't belong. She rolled her eyes with a sigh. Gods, she wished it were that exciting. If it weren't for the incredibly rude rounds of gawking and staring she was fired at with upon every street corner and the seagulls flying overhead, she'd easily be able to cast her tired purple eyes downward as she'd done so many times before and imagine she was just in a more coastal Manehattan, or maybe a Manehattan with ridiculous amounts of sea traffic. Tilting her head as she stared straight forward, Octavia's neutral frown downturned, provoked by a small group of minotaurs who were standing outside a particularly shady looking store, if the blinking neon lights above it reading Shady & Mr. Pocket's was any great indication of what may have lay inside.

She didn't realize that they were teenagers—like the earlier dragon too dumb to be walking the streets in broad daylight—until she saw the small size of the curved horns atop their skulls and the baggy clothing wrapped around their average-looking figures like wet towels after an hour-long shower. With cigarettes in their mouths, they spoke amongst one another with sporadic gestures and the most annoyingly stereotypical bully chortles Octavia had ever heard. They turned their heads and narrowed their eyes as she and the griffons drew closer along the sidewalk, the clips and clops of her four hooves continuing onward undeterred even as they raised their hands by their mouths and called to her.

"Hey there, mud-slinger!"

"Oh great, another pony!"

Oh how she wished she had a bass and a bow at that moment. She was entirely positive the boorish minotaurs hadn't heard the hellishly demonized sound of playing below the bridge, if their stained shirts and droopy cigarettes were any indication of a life poorly lived without a single wink of music or sounds beyond mothers yelling at their dealers and gunfire down the street at night. She wondered why exactly seeing a pony was anything to raise a fuss about. If anything, seeing another member of their horrible kind would be the only thing worth stirring for. Tall Tale was in Equestria, for Gods' sake! The land ruled by ponies!

...

...

The minotaurs bore the kind of look you'd give your mother after realizing she was buying drugs from the neighbor down the raggedy old street corner, where the loud cracks of rising conflict roused you from your deep and wondrous slumber and worked to rid the sickening crust from your droopy eyelids. With their smirks chomping down on their nicotine and puffing it out like a locomotive on the move, they crossed their arms and leaned against whatever was behind or near them, like typical bullies she'd seen in her movies, or in her middle school. Such were dark times, plagued by name-calling scandals and mechanical pencil-pushing elitists who believed they were high above the rest because they could carry around writing ammunition.

The conversation being held by her griffon companions was quick to change when the minotaurs staked their claim and shouted her name, starting out regarding where they and she would next head—the hospital, Octavia presumed—then shifting to something a little different as they drew closer and closer to the upright bulls with more zeal than a lion on dry-erase marker fluid.

"So what are we eating tonight, L?" W asked, turning toward the griffon standing next to him. L smirked instantly, raising a brow that told a lot more stories than Octavia would have liked. Nodding lightly, her head feathers jostling with the movement, she replied in the simplest way she possibly could.

"Oh, I was thinking something along the lines of..." she began, slowly turning her head to the minotaurs, "...beef."

Needless to say, Octavia had also never witnessed minotaurs piddling themselves. In fact, she'd never really witnessed minotaurs in the first place. It wasn't to say that they were generally unkempt and held such interests as attending Orchestral concerts, with their fake smiles and their dumb bassists, but they just simply... they just weren't there. She wasn't being racist, Gods no. Racist... or was it species-ist? Ponies and minotaurs weren't of a similar race, so she couldn't say racist. Then that meant that Valkyrie wasn't one as well, as much as Octavia wished she could have something more to hate her for. Was species-ist a word, even? Could she just add ist to the end of a general topic and claim someone as being such nonsense? Was this what the world could eventually lead to?

Once she arrived back home, she'd have to stomp over to her conductor Dan and tell him that he was a bass-ist.

...

No that wasn't right–

"Hospital, right Octavia?"

"Hwuh?"

Octavia was pulling the caboose of the five-member group, and looked up at that moment to find three scrunched up faces trying hard not to laugh at her bewildered exclamation. T, as always, was excluded. By Gods there was something seriously wrong or seriously right about that griffon, she swore he was completely invulnerable to any form of amusement. She hoped that the others would run into something; turning your head while walking forward certainly wasn't a smart thing to do in a crowded street. Or sidewalk.

Once he had overcome his short burst of air-snorting and dumb looks, W repeated, "We're going to the hospital, right? First stop?"

She cleared her throat, taking a second to adjust both the train pony's messenger bag and her bowtie. Both were just fine.

"Of course! We can't dawdle out here while those train ponies could very well be injured. We've come all this way, haven't we?" She tilted her head at the question, smiling to herself at the nods and presumed shrugs of agreement. "I believe I'm with all of you when I say that I'm in desperate need for food, but we must find those ponies as soon as we can." She really needed to learn when to stop talking.

"Can't argue with that," W replied, nodding his head toward a group of large buildings further down the street. "If that red cross on the side of that big building over there means anything, and these people here haven't mixed up their national symbols, then it looks like the hospital's only a few blocks down from here." Adjusting Candidate, he added, "Shouldn't be more than twenty minutes we'll be busting down that door and screaming at nurses."

"Well, maybe not all of us..." L proclaimed, rolling her eyes and staring at Valkyrie, who was walking next to her.

"Screw you, Lavi."

Octavia stopped dead in her tracks. Did she mean her? Did she accidentally... oh... oh no.

L was glaring intently at Valkyrie, who was looking the opposite way with an innocent smirk and skyward eyebrows, whistling two high notes that Octavia was too stunned to pinpoint.

T as well was looking back at the rising conflict, eyes wide and beak scrunched.

W simply rubbed his eye with a claw and groaned, "Goddammit..."

"You're a rotten bitch, you know that, Valkyrie?"

Comments

[the other sans]

A... a dragon, now. Ahem. A small, short one. A teenager, if she would have the pleasure of being more specific. She could place his putrid pimples and peach fuzz as easily as a rosined bow against string.

Wait... when did dragons have peach fuzz? The world is ending! Quick, give Octavia a Magicarm and let her go buck wild!