Mancala

by Schismatism

Adenine

It's impossible for me to say -- okay, truthfully say -- that I wasn't at least a little bit afraid of what might happen when I walked into that tree. The last time I'd done so, I'd passed out and needed to be dragged to the hospital... although, knowing what I do now, I'm certain I would have recovered in the fullness of time. Even so, that's not the sort of thing one wants to repeat, even knowing that there are good people watching out for you.

Nonetheless, the Wild Guard had done me more than a few favours, and even if some of them were a given considering their job, there were all that many more cases where they could have just stepped aside. I wasn't going to throw that away, not for a simple thing like walking into a library which... well, I'll spare you my thought processes. Just imagine a hamster running in a wheel for a while.

Somewhere around two subjective years later, despite what certain people will tell you, I finally managed to get my shaking under control. About a month later, I turned towards Cobalt, giving him a gaze like a wide-eyed ingenue, terrified that she might be thrown into a meat grinder and fed to rampaging timberwolves.

The pegasus' eyebrow did not approve.

After a similarly failed attempt at garnering the support, or at least concern, of Shamrock, I once more turned towards the gaping maw of the library itself. For all my subconscious efforts to imagine a monstrous beast, it... looked fairly normal, to be honest. Shelves were placed in neat little rows, the walls were festooned with their own niches, crannies, and the like, and some soul had placed beanbags here and there, a splash of colour in the aisles. It looked homely, and even the glowing crystals interspersed around the windows lent a sense of a candlelit air.

The aroma of old, worn paper wove through the air towards me, and for a moment, again, I felt drawn to the innards of an actual library, a place comprised of knowledge driven into page after page by quill and ink. My forehoof stepped over the boundary--

And nothing happened, other than my mouth filling with salt water, a wrench to the side, and my twist to throw up on something other than my companions or the polished hardwood floor.

---

"What... the hell? You have to be actually playing some sort of weird and twisted game with us. How did a library, of all places, get you to have a reaction like that?"

Shamrock and Crimson were standing well away from me as I took numerous deep breaths, the taste of brine at the back of my throat still lingering. I hadn't actually vomited, per se, but I'd spat up a globule of substance which looked like a cross between honey treacle and Nickelodeon slime, and had turned all the plant matter in a half-foot circle ash brown. Whoever was responsible for this plot of land would undoubtedly have words to share with me, but I frankly couldn't summon up enough effort to care right now, especially as the taint of licorice fused with seven-day-old coffee still refused to leave my tongue.

"Buh," I replied with all the charisma I could muster. "Gluh," I continued, with my characteristic flair and remarkable sense of style. This continued for a few moments before I finally spat out actual saliva onto the lawn - a lawn which did not, thankfully, wither at the very idea - and managed to croak out, "Wauhh."

Cobalt, for all that he was the quietest of the Wild Guard, sprung into action first, and returned post haste with a very angry black cloud which, to my addled mind, read 'thunder'. Nonetheless, a few squeezes later, he had managed to reform the taser-willing-to-happen into a very placid bucket of water, with only a few sparks between his primaries to show how much energy he'd taken on. To this day I'll never understand how he does that, theories aside - and I've promised never to tell what I've already worked out.

While Cobalt was focused on me, though, Shamrock had her own ideas. She took the opportunity, over the course of a half hour, to snaffle a few jam jars from a couple willing ponies in town - including the Apple family, who just so happened to have a few of those double-layered glass jars free and ready for her to take. She wanted me to throw up in them, instead of at random patches of grass that had done nopony any harm. All in all, her response might have been the best of all of them... but, then, so might have been Crimson's.

Crimson watched very, very carefully as my stomach twisted itself into non-Euclidean knots.

---

A few minutes, and quite a lot of hyperventilation, later, I was once again confronted by the dime-store Spanish Inquisition.

"Okay. Okay, I think I'm fine now," I managed to pant, groaning quietly as I eyed the library with sheer trepidation. At least this time I'd managed to figure out exactly what was going on, and how I might deal therewith. It wasn't pleasant, it was probably unhealthy, and it would be a terrible betrayal if I just left it alone.

"Then explain," ordered Crimson with a look that told me that she was quite fed up with these continued antics, and that she would probably turn me over to her higher-ups if this went on for too much longer. I couldn't blame her: I'd do much the same thing were the situation reversed. Frankly, I took it as a positive sign: she probably wouldn't be so upset if she didn't, on at least some level, care about what was going on.

With a deep breath and a light cough, I cleared out the last vestiges of the scent pervading my throat - a scent which was almost like half-rotted liquorice, and which practically rolled off those jam jars which were set aside for now - and started my explanation. "Okay. This... probably won't make much sense at first. It's one of those things, that... well. Okay, maybe I can explain it." I was repeating myself, but I didn't care too much, I was just trying to parse things. "So, okay," I reiterated. "Cobalt, you're a pegasus."

"Yes, and?" Despite his usually demure characteristics, it was quite clear that he was pretty fed up as well.

"Just imagine. You're going about clearing the skies, right? Or putting clouds together, or setting up the weather for the next day. Sometimes it calls for a rainstorm, sometimes sunny skies, sometimes you need to help fix nitrogen, but it's familiar, it's part of what you do. The rest of the team has set up a really great day for you, an oiled machine which doesn't have any concerns whatsoever."

Here he looked a little surprised, but nodded. "We celebrate those days, when everything runs smoothly. It's pretty rare, but most of the pegasi in the weather business do their best to make them happen."

I chuckled to the other two as my mind came to a better metaphor. "And pretty much everyone in the guard yearns for those days when there aren't any entanglements, when everything is exactly as it should be and nobody has to stress about a change, right?"

Collective nods all around. That wasn't exactly a hard metaphor to pull, not when the Wild Guard was all about reducing those odd instances of chaos and madness, and their jobs were much easier when they didn't have to deal with any of it. The irony that I was, in no small part, a great deal of the stress with which they'd had to recently deal did not escape my mind.

To Cobalt, I pointed out, "Now imagine that, halfway through weather detail, you wind up stumbling into a pocket of Everfree weather."

The metaphor might have been lost on the other two, but it nearly dropped the pegasus out of the sky, his face turning ashen. I realized, then, what a pain it must have been for Cobalt to actually volunteer to make those regular expeditions into the Everfree forest, and how much pain it must cause him. Pegasi don't just control the weather: they actively feel it, and a wild zone like the forest must be like being dropped into a tide pool. In a moment, he'd landed and nodded firmly, understanding just where I was going.

The other two still looked at me as though I was more than slightly insane, and so I figured I'd need to adjust the metaphor more than a bit. "And you two... imagine that you're surveying a long-abandoned building in a city. Someplace that nobody goes to. You're doing your job, making sure that it's not being used as a drug facility or something of the like. So you, with the blessings of the establishment, make a forcible entry."

Again, that collective nod, though Cobalt's was a little more hesitant. Perhaps he saw what I was getting at, maybe not, but either way he didn't let out more than a brief squeak of dismay.

"The moment you walk in, you get a huge snoutful of a weeks-dead corpse."

---

It was mean. It was unfair, perhaps especially unfair to Cobalt, who had already had a whammy levied at him just a few moments earlier. It was visceral, and visceral by design: I intended for it to shock the three awake, and my words did that admirably. In but a few moments, I was the absolute center of attention, and everyone was staring at me with a combination of nausea and unbridled curiosity.

"It's... I don't want to say worse for me, but even then," I started, looking down at the plush grass beneath my hooves. "A library is meant to be a place for learning, for curiosity, for people to grow and thrive. It should be, to me, like a kitchen in a three-star restaurant: the sort of place where I could... be, while inspiring people to learn. Instead..." Here I shuddered again, waving a hoof at the doorway, from which I could still sense the waves of disease, of boredom, of exhaustion and hatred, emanating. It was much less potent even a few meters away from the doorframe, the lingering feelings diffused by the general emotions of contentment in Ponyville. But it was there, nonetheless.

A grin cracked upon my face, slightly broken and more than a bit fragile. "I know you can't quite feel it yourselves, and I don't want to share that with you. But... even more than finding a dead body, it's like walking into that self-styled fine restaurant and having a skunk shoved in your face. You can't help but find it nauseating, and the sudden shift from zenith to nadir is... well, it tends to leave your stomach in a lurch."

"Like learning that you've acquired a huge sum of bits, but it's because a relative has died?" That came from Crimson, surprisingly, whose eyes were a bit downcast now. That wasn't the most emotion she'd displayed in my presence, but the admitted weakness was a bit more of a shock than anything else. I had to make a resolution to myself at that point: to learn more about the ponies who'd put themselves in harm's way for me.

"Something like that," I concurred, taking a deep breath of the fresh summer air, and letting out a small sigh. "I think I can probably go in there, now, but..." Here I paused. There were better ways to deal with a situation like this than to simply beat one's head against a wall until the obstruction breaks.

"There are things I want to do before I willingly put my health on the line again. And one of those things is to head to the bank and open an actual account, then pay the good doctor and his staff for their time and collective effort in putting up with me." I paused again as a thought struck me, a wry certainty. "And maybe open a tab, because I doubt it'll be the last time they're going to have to put up with me."

---

Thankfully, the three of my compatriots hadn't taken any offense to my insistence that we go somewhere else for now, though they did insist on taking a detour before we actually headed to the bank in question. A part of that was undoubtedly fueled by hunger; a rather larger part was fueled by the need for something to wake themselves up, particularly Cobalt, who was still looking as though someone had kicked him in a sensitive place and he hadn't quite registered it yet. Having skipped breakfast and emptied my own stomach over the past few minutes, I was more than a mite peckish myself -- especially after having cleansed my mouth with fresh water which still somehow tasted faintly of distilled lightning -- and so by collective agreement, we decided upon a visit to the local patisserie.

The virtues of the shoppe known as Sugarcube Corner were already well-known to me, of course, but I nonetheless paid rapt attention as the trifecta escorting me spoke of their finest muffins, their cupcakes, their full-sized pastries and their beverages - and, of course, of their ever-flowing coffeepots which kept the Guard in general in a continual state of alertness, funded by the mayor's own coffers in a mutually-beneficial arrangement. All told, even if an excess of sugar wouldn't be the world's greatest meal, I was certain that the beverages would more than make up for it.

At this time of day, the shoppe was thankfully comparatively bereft of customers, making it all the easier for me to take in the atmosphere of the building itself - which was, as one might imagine, utterly eclectic. It seemed that the makeup of the shoppe had been decided long before a certain pink menace would ever have come to town: indeed, the hardwood decor in the form and appearance of frosted gingerbread was ever so slightly warped from age and weather, bespeaking that it was more a fixture of the town than a spur of the moment decision.

As I entered the store alongside the Wild Guard, I felt myself relaxing more than a bit: the patisserie, too, had its own sense of emotions embedded within the shoppe, and they were far, far more enjoyable than those which had pervaded the library we'd just fled. There was of course the sensation of hunger, of desire -- and, more palpably, a feeling of joy, a rarity in such a place of business. I still couldn't tell exactly how I felt each of these in turn, but the effect was nonetheless there, and suffused me with a sense of hunger, to partake of what was served there. The aroma of baked goods and fresh coffee simply accentuated that emotion, that I nearly found myself salivating at the thought.

There was, admittedly, one sour note, unfortunately: from the moment that Mrs. - or possibly Ms. - Cake saw us, her usual expression of forbearance and geniality became somewhat more harsh, her eyes narrowing in particular as she took in my admittedly disheveled appearance. I'll admit, I didn't make the most appreciative figure, my hair mussed and my figure more than usually thin - but this felt more like an expression of absolute distrust, even hatred. It was enough to put me off for more than a few moments, even despite the pleasant nature of the surroundings...

For the life of me, it took me more than a few seconds to recognize that the cerulean-and-pink mare was expressing her emotional distaste not for my appearance, per se, as much as a xenophobic backlash -- and that hit me like a brick upside the head. I'd known that ponies in the town were comparatively wary of anything new and different, but up until that point I'd never quite fully recognized this flavour of dislike. Certain forms of phobia for one thing or another are reasonable; I'm not immune to them myself, after all. Ask me about spiders sometime, but mind that I don't have a flamethrower at hand. Even so, being judged on sight for simply being different...

Ever the consummate professional, though, and unwilling to ostracize some of what must be her finest customers, she quickly slipped back into the role she'd chosen for herself: her expression relaxed towards Customer Service Representative #3, the Happy Medium, and she casually asked what we'd like to order. Composing myself in turn, I let the other three make their own orders - orders which, as one might expect, included a few cups of coffee - and requested simply a few cake donuts, along with the same brew. For all that I was mildly famished, I knew that I could always get seconds, and loading upon simple carbohydrates didn't seem like the finest of plans at the moment.

As things are wont to do, as we awaited our orders, conversation sprung up.

"So, what do you think actually caused that reaction?" Shamrock was, as always, as blunt as a warhammer, and just about as subtle. I didn't mind, though: it helped to distract me from a few of the concerns impinging on my brain.

"I don't know what it's called in the literature around these parts," I hedged, toying with a napkin under my hoof as I perched on my seat. "I want to call it something like emotional suffusion. You know how you sometimes feel like a place you walk into has a certain... vibe? Like when you walk into a theater, you can kind of hear echoes of the plays that have gone on before?"

This was greeted with a look of general uncertainty by Cobalt and Crimson, but Shamrock looked like she was actually considering it. "That's not really that out there. One of my far-off cousins does card tricks, plays and stage magic for a living. It's kind of funny, he can pull off tricks that most unicorns wouldn't even dream of. He says that sometimes you can feel how a town's going to react to what you do, even before you have any real proof of it. Like there's, well, like you put it, a vibe."

I nodded firmly, and turned my attention to the napkin, deciding that a visual explanation was in order. "And sometimes if you walk into a room where something awful's happened, you can kinda feel it in the air..." Here I folded the napkin in half, pressed firmly down, then passed it along to Crimson with a flick of my hoof. "Unfold that as best as you can. See if you can undo that fold."

The unicorn looked at me like I'd lost my mind, then shook her head. "That's not how things work. You can't just get rid of a crease like that..." Then the penny dropped. "Ah. So you can still feel that."

"Pretty much," I agreed. "I think it's more complicated than that, though. Instead of just one crease, the whole place... it felt wrong. Like for the longest time, everyone who hit up the library did so just because they were going through the motions, like instead of going there to read books out of joy and the desire to learn, they were bored the whole time. And over time, those emotions kind of got embedded in the woodwork, so..."

Here Cobalt and Shamrock got the idea, and nodded in unison. "Like a pocket of air that'll never feel quite right," the pegasus paraphrased, then turned to the emerald Earth pony. "Or a patch of dirt that'll never really grow anything but weeds."

I waved a hoof idly, shaking my head. "This is all just hypothetical, though. I don't know for sure. It kind of makes sense, but..." Here I took a look at my left foreleg, glaring at the glimmering jewels in the band. "Way too many things haven't been making sense. This whole thing is insane, and I'm... I don't want to say that everything should be perfectly logical, because life doesn't work like that, but there are so many inconsistencies that I feel like I'm off the map without a paddle, a compass, or even a raft."

"You shouldn't be so dismissive of yourself." With a jerk, I looked over at Crimson, who was glaring at me as though she was going to physically assault me again. "I don't know what in Tartarus is going on with you," she continued, "but for all that you're probably completely insane in a thousand different ways, there's way too much weirdness for me to say that you're totally wrong. Ponyville's not the sanest place at the best of times, and enough manticore crap crops up on a regular basis that we can practically use it as fertilizer. Plus, when you're on, you seem to be really on. You might be halfway unhinged, but don't unhook yourself from the cart completely."

I had to grin just a bit, taking the metaphor in the sense it was intended. "Even when the cart's rolling off the edge of Canterlot?"

"Best time to learn to fly," she deadpanned, passing my napkin back with a second crease in it. I hadn't even seen her put it in there -- though I'll admit I wasn't paying attention. With a random hum, I creased an edge, then another, my grey aura flickering over the paper.

"Alright, alright!" I had to laugh, then, and shook my head as the others at the table erupted into a combination of giggles, chuckles, and wry chortles. "But you guys know that this is probably just the start of this weirdness, right? There's no way that the world's fed up with making me its chew-toy."

"S'what we signed up for," replied Shamrock with a cocky grin, and that pretty much set the mood from there. Or at least it would have, if not for the fact that our food had finally greeted us.

---

Say what you will about the health of the various meals served at Sugarcube Corner, but there was no doubting the fact that it was made fresh, with the very finest ingredients - Carrot and Cup Cake were exceptional bakers, and they kept on the tradition of the founders, whomever they may have been. Cobalt's slice of raspberry pie a la mode was oven-warm, the vanilla ice cream melting alongside in the bowl; Shamrock's cloverleaf and cherry danish practically had a haze of heat over it, and Crimson's dish of espresso coffee cake looked like it belonged in a magazine. Compared to the three, my regular cake donuts looked like an offering that would be best served to prisoners. Nonetheless, they were just as fresh and warm as the others, and a simple foodstuff was just what I needed at that time.

The others weren't quite so sublime about my own choice. "That's all you're eating?" started Shamrock, whose mouth was half-full already of her own offering; I casually ignored the breach in manners, and happily took a slice of the pastry.

"Yeee-up," I murmured, nomming down on my bite with a wave of my fork. Ah, just enough cinnamon and vanilla to truly render it delicious, without overwhelming the taste of the bread and oils. "Even ignoring the fact that, well, there was that whole emetic situation earlier, I've never really been a big eater. Though I certainly won't say no to honeyed bread as good as this." And indeed it was - the texture was just firm enough to make a couple of the pastries a full meal for me, and the flavours mixed excellently.

"Weird way to describe a donut," grinned Cobalt, who was taking the time to dig into his own carbohydrate overload. "But then..."

"Yup, I'm weird," I agreed merrily, rolling my neck to get out a light kink, before reaching for my coffee mug. Which...

'Hmm.'

"Ah, excuse me," I carefully asked, waving a hoof cautiously towards Mrs. Cake, who was currently involved in cleaning a few things behind the counter. Very definitely involved, if one would: she apparently had no attention to spare for the rowdy foursome who had invaded her shoppe, even if each and every other customer had her full and absolute focus. I figured that was simply the cost of being - well - very active, not to mention in the Guard, who undoubtedly emptied her coffeepots on a regular basis. Hardly a concern, really, but...

"Something the matter?" asked Shamrock, peering over the table to take a look at my place setting. She'd already emptied most of her second coffee, black with six sugars, and was likely going to ask for more in a few moments. Pony metabolisms...

"It's probably nothing," I replied quietly, not wishing to make a scene... but I casually pushed my own coffee mug over to the Earth pony, showing her my own preference: two creams, no sugar. That was not much of a concern, but what was a bit of a problem was the thin veneer of film coating the top of the beverage.

It took her a few moments to parse, but when she did, she went more than a bit ashen - and, I must admit, ponies don't have a great poker face. Ears flicked back, nose wrinkled, and she shot me a glare filled with concern. The expression of shock resonated around the table as the other two understood exactly was going on, and registered their own disgust. To grant them due credit, though, none of them reacted with anything more visceral, and instead turned to Mrs. Cake expectantly.

Even with her supposed stoicism, it's impossible for someone in charge of a shoppe like this to ignore a set of customers looking at her like that, not least when -- for various reasons -- we were something of an attention-grabber in the first place. With a quiet sniff, she approached our table as though looking as though she'd rather do anything else today, and asked, "How may I help you?"

Being the ostensible target, I took the lead, and smiled as genuinely as I could manage. Perhaps she had had a hard day; perhaps there was more than one reason for this. "I'm really sorry, but I don't think this cup came out of the sink quite right: it's kind of, well..." I gestured helplessly at the cup, trying my very best to project that it wasn't really anyone's fault, but that it wasn't exactly sanitary. Call it habit from working entirely too long in customer service, and from growing up in a nation where forced civility is a social norm.

With another sniff, Mrs. Cake gave the mug a perfunctory glance, and snipped, "Seems perfectly fine to me."

'Ah.'

My smile turned as brittle as a pressed leaf, my companions' expressions registering shock and disbelief as they caught the true tone of the interaction. I'd known that this was a given - that at some point this would happen, but at the moment I was having a difficult time actually grokking what was going on. To think that Mrs. Cake, of all people, would be... well. This...

For upwards of a half an hour, my mood had steadily inclined, surrounded by people who were honestly curious and did have my best interests in mind, with good food, good conversation, good laughs. But to every zenith, there is a nadir.

I don't think I consciously registered my horn lighting and pulling out a five-bit coin from my bag, but it nonetheless occurred on automatic - something which should not have been possible, but happened anyway. The coin clinked lightly against the wooden tabletop as I stood, and in a voice devoid of any real emotion, stated, "Thank you for your candor." I left the donuts I hadn't eaten -- three of four -- on their plate, where they would undoubtedly go to waste, and I stepped outside, leaving the restaurant buzzing with a thunderous silence.

---

Amongst the Guard, there are very few words which can rightly be called verboten: prohibited, that is, by anything more than simple habit or social more. Curses, ranging from the ordinary to the sublime, are considered to be much like a punctuation mark, and as frequent as your ordinary comma. (This, of course, remains primarily limited to internal chatter: in the general populace, more normative language is the order of the century.) Very few words will elicit a gasp or even a flick of an ear from anyone but the greenest recruit... though there are, as always, exceptions to the rule.

One of those very few terms which is precluded by collective, if unconscious, agreement, is 'panic.' This is what the Wild Guard were doing at this time, and had they been caught doing so, they may well have been sectioned for the offense... until their superiors found out why.

"Cobalt! Stop it! You're hyperventilating, I do not want to have to drag you to the hospital!"

"I can't help it, we've got a potential Princess-level anomaly who's halfway to the nuthouse already and that just happened!"

"The two of you, shut up already. We're going to find her, and we're going to fix this."

The three ponies... well, it's hard to say that the Wild Guard were rampaging through the streets, but they were driven in a way that they hadn't been for at least a year. It had taken them no less than two minutes for Mrs. Cup Cake (nee Chiffon Swirl)'s actions to fully parse, and that was one minute and forty-five seconds longer than it had taken their charge to vanish into the aether. For the wayward baker, it would take rather longer to understand the full consequences of her actions, but she was currently nowhere on their minds.

Only one thing was at the forefront of the train of thought the three shared, and it was this: somewhere in Ponyville, there was an emotionally-damaged changeling who knew things that she shouldn't and had just been delivered a hammer blow straight to the superego.

At the moment, they were rushing towards the hostel where Divided Gem had purchased a few days of respite, whose owner was more than passingly familiar with everyone. Few folks would accuse either Ivory Hearth or her husband of being on the ball in such a fashion, but they both knew the value of attentiveness, and one or the other would surely have seen if Divided Gem had walked in - or checked out.

Attentiveness does not count for much when you're being screamed at by a guard, though.

"CHANGELING!"

"What?!" Ivory had just come downstairs for a spot of tea, and now she was being accosted by three ponies who looked as though they, themselves, were about to spark a revolution. This was not the way she had intended her day go, and the sudden change of pace left her disoriented, confused, and just a little nauseated by the droplets of sweat and spittle.

"Th," started Shamrock, before Crimson took her by the tail via telekinesis and dragged her a few feet from the shell-shocked mare. "A changeling checked in here yesterday. Have you seen her in the last while?" Nearby, a slightly greenish-blue pegasus hovered, looking as though he was deeply regretting the last few bites of his meal.

"N--no, not in the past few hours. She said she had a lot of business to take care of in town; is something the matter?" Despite her oddities, Ivory Hearth felt as though the curious mare had at least been polite, if reticent: she certainly didn't twig that sense of concern which had, now and again, occurred when a more criminally-minded individual came by.

Crimson gave her a look which was just on the reasonable side of disgusted, the only sign of her unease being an irregularly-flicking ear. "Nothing she did. Maybe something she'll do. We'll keep in touch; if you see her, keep her here, alright?"

The three had departed in a flutter of wings and fur before she could respond with more than a shaky nod.

---

"I'm going to kill her. I'm going to take her and roll her up into a hoofball and give her to the Silver Strikers to kick around for at least a few games." Shamrock had at least calmed down slightly, to the point where she wasn't lathering at the mouth anymore. This was, however, not an enormous improvement.

"It's not her fault," started Cobalt, before the other two gave him a look. "Not entirely her fault. Mrs. Cake didn't know that she was on the verge of snapping." The comparatively laid-back pegasus, usually the voice of reason amongst the Wild Guard, was of no avail here, though.

"Right now? I don't fucking care. Until we, and especially she, receive a written apology notarized in triplicate, it is now my mission in life to render Sugarcube Corner's business a hopeless wasteland."

"That shouldn't take much from here. Did you see the looks everypony was giving her?" Cup Cake's speciesism might have been a fine mental block, but even she would find it difficult to ignore the sudden loss of business. But that was neither here nor there. "So, what's next? We've checked the bank, we've checked the inn, we've checked the hospital... actually, that should've been the first place we checked. Nobody's seen her in their place of business." Crimson closed her eyes, taking a deep breath as her left ear flopped to the side a few more times, and her tail twitched leftwards.

Shamrock groaned, "If she's made for the Everfree, I'm going to kill both of them." She'd had more than enough weirdness over the past two days, and that would simply make the whole week a wash.

"I... don't think that's going to be a concern," Cobalt pointed out, one wing tilting towards the Golden Oaks library and the black form sitting a few feet before it - a form which was taut as a drumskin.

---

Annoyance, concern... a bit of curiosity. Those were the emotions I felt from the three ponies who were approaching me from behind. And, well... admittedly, some hope too. Everyone else had given me a wide berth, despite the fact that it was the middle of the day and a pretty good time for everybody to be out on the streets. When you're radiating what I was, though, it's no surprise.

I hadn't quite stomped my way through the streets of Ponyville, but I must have been projecting a huge dose of 'absolutely no fucks to give'. What a capper, right? It's not like it's the worst thing that's ever happened to me, but having that... person give me a mucous-laced mug of something I'd genuinely been looking forward to was that proverbial straw. Well, no. That's not quite what really broke my camel's back.

When it transpired that the event was public, what I felt - far more than the bubbling loathing coming off Mrs. Cake - was a collective wave of disbelief, contempt... and pity.

"You bring a straitjacket?" I spat out, not turning towards the Wild Guard, not really willing to look at them. It was childish, it was immature, it was downright absurd, but... I didn't want to see their eyes right then.

"Think you need one?" Shamrock's voice was more than a bit cutting, but it was hard to blame her for that. Even through my nearly blind rage, I knew that I'd likely caused them to worry needlessly. I wasn't emotionally reckless enough to seek out a manticore or a cockatrice and try to commit suicide-by-monster, but they didn't know that. And...

"Probably not. I'm not that hopeless yet." My own voice sounded alien to my ears, even more than usual. I hadn't gone into a screaming rage, but... even there, I sounded like I was just going through the motions instead of actually talking. "Sorry for making you folks worry."

A bright red hoof landed on my head, though gently. "We were tromping all over the place looking for you. Should've known you'd be here."

I looked up at the tree before me, almost wishing that it would burn. It was a pretty definite example of a failure... and not one of my own, but rather a failure of the world in which I'd landed. "Seems about right, huh? A broken place for a broken person."

That hoof pressed down - not too hard, but enough that it was just a bit uncomfortable. "Seems to me there are a lot of broken people no matter where you look." Crimson sounded faintly amused as she described... well, herself, and the other two, and probably everyone I'd met here so far.

I slowly ducked down and out of her grip, then straightened up once again, my muscles burning slightly as they unlocked. "Yeah, you're probably right. And I know for a fact that one of the most broken people in the entire country is at the very top of the ladder." I started to chuckle, even if it had no real mirth in it. "Look at me, griping and moaning about my life when she's got it a hell of a lot worse."

The three went very still, and Shamrock deadpanned, "One of these days, we really must discuss our sources of information."

I turned, and now gave a genuine grin, wiping away a vestigal tear. "Yeah, and one of these days you might actually believe me. So, now that we've gotten this touching moment out of the way, I think I've a few debts to repay..."

Author's Note:

This one was a bit tricky to write. I'm trying not to create drama for drama's sake: Ponyville is to at least a point quite xenophobic, especially before the Zecora incident. But it's hard to express how it affects a character like Divide.