607 - Wondering, Fearing, Doubting
I have your maid, the pegasus mare with the downy brush on her flank. Bring ten thousand bits to the address below at midnight tonight, alone, or you’ll never find her body.
Lex stared at the note in cold fury, his eyes shining and thoughts whirling as he contemplated the two sentences of text and the location scrawled below them, a single word going through his mind as he looked them over again.
Silhouette.
The name had been at the forefront of his thoughts since he’d read the demand, despite its lack of a signature. Ever since Nosey’s mother had told him how the crippled stallion had not only assaulted her daughter in an effort to find out more about him – and worse, had gotten away with it – Lex had wondered what the deranged earth pony would do next. Now, it seemed, he had his answer.
After all, this was exactly Silhouette’s mode of operating: find someone weaker than himself to use as leverage. He’d done exactly that when they’d first met, taking advantage of the fact that Lex had been unable to cease performing his ritual over Aria to subdue Nosey and Sonata right in front of him, a memory that still made Lex grit his teeth in anger and shame. Silhouette had done the same thing when he’d gone after Nosey a second time, surprising her at her home in Canterlot and interrogating her for what Wordsy Windbag had made sound like tactical information. Now he was holding Feather Duster hostage in order to force a confrontation.
There’s no guarantee that he hasn’t killed her already, hissed Lex's tulpa malevolently. Her only value to him is in calling you out. He doesn’t need her alive for that.
“S-Sire!”
Coat Tail’s panicked voice pulled Lex’s attention away from the voiceless whispers in his head, belatedly taking notice of the field of black crystal spikes that had pierced the floor around him, causing the other ponies in the room to back away from him nervously. Forcing himself to rein in the worst of his rage, Lex made the stalagmites dissipate with a thought, giving the note one last glance before he turned toward the others. “When did this arrive?”
Gulping, Coat Tail took a step forward. “It was sent by courier,” he replied. “The delivery pony was waiting in the lobby when we arrived, since he was instructed to deliver it to you personally but wasn’t allowed upstairs.” The bald stallion’s horn lit up as he telekinetically tugged at his collar. “I managed to convince him to let me sign for it, since I was in your direct service. Naturally, I took the liberty of opening it first, in case it was a waste of Your Highness’s valuable time, and, well…here we are…”
“I want to know who commissioned that courier to deliver this,” hissed Lex.
But the words had barely left his mouth when Tranquila spoke up. “It was occurring to me to be making that question!” The words rushed out of her mouth all at once, as though she’d been struggling to hold them back. “Skinny delivery colt say only it was earth stallion, mane and tail blue like sky, not seeing any cutie mark and no giving of name!”
“We got the guy at the front desk of the hotel to look up that address for us. Turns out it’s an apartment building in that shabby part of town, down on the ground,” volunteered Aria. Lex’s features immediately tightened, but he didn’t have a chance to say anything before she kept speaking. “And no, before you throw a fit over word of this getting out, we didn’t tell him what was going on. I just told him the address, asked if he knew where it was, and that was all.”
“I still think you should have totes let me put the whammy on that guy,” huffed Sonata, before giving Lex an upset look. “The guy at the front desk is, like, a butler right? Everyone knows the butler’s always involved! How else could some weirdo have gotten in here and kidnapped poor Feather Duster without him seeing?”
The question made Lex frown, but not because of any insight on Sonata’s part. Rather, it struck him as incongruous that her first assumption was that Feather Duster had been kidnapped from their penthouse. After all, she’d been the one who’d sent the maid away so that the two of them could have some time to themselves. Or does she think Feather Duster was abducted before she exited the lobby? he wondered.
“However it happened, what’s important is that someone’s kidnapped that poor pony,” broke in Thermal Draft before Lex could give the matter any further thought. “Right now the most important thing is figuring out how to get her back.”
The question – or rather, the mare which uttered it – made him narrow his eyes, still suspicious of her sudden arrival. But with his magical senses crippled and his thaumaturgical spells all but depleted, there was little he could do to investigate her sudden reappearance. She’d given her report about what she’d learned in Trottingham, showing him the melted remains of what she’d said was the hilt of Long Road’s sword, and the story (complete with her coming to Las Pegasus in order to tell him what she’d learned at the earliest possible opportunity) had seemed plausible.
Even so, he’d subsequently made her recount their first meeting, when he’d healed her illness in the filthy apartment in Vanhoover where she and her friends had barricaded themselves, in order to verify her identity. After that, he’d pulled Sonata and Aria aside, asking the former if she seemed enchanted while having the latter cast her spell to detect magical emissions. Both had declared Thermal Draft clean.
With no further way to examine his misgivings, Lex was left with little alternative but to conclude that he was being overly cautious, and that Thermal Draft showing up at the same time Feather Duster had been kidnapped was exactly what it appeared to be: a coincidence.
“Perhaps we should alert the authorities?” ventured Coat Tail, blind to Lex’s foreboding.
“I am the authority here,” rumbled Lex. “And Aria’s instincts are correct; the fewer people who know about this, the better.”
“How come?” asked Sonata, ignoring her sister’s triumphant smirk. “Like, even if we don’t know where she is, telling everyone what’s happened will make it easier to find-, no, wait, oh my gosh!” Her eyes widened as she grinned, pointing at the ransom note. “We do know where she is! The kidnapper totes wrote down their address! Haha, what a dummy!”
“Says the person who not only didn’t realize that until just now,” snorted Aria, “but whose first suggestion was that we should look around for an actual trail of breadcrumbs that would lead us to the kidnapper’s hideout.”
“Oh, excuse me,” snorted Sonata. “I forgot that your big idea was to blow-dry the paper to see if anything was written on it in invisible ink.”
“At least my idea was from actual detective stories instead of fairy tales!” retorted Aria, coloring slightly. “It was worth a shot!”
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Lex, quashing the urge to castigate them further for reverting to petty bickering during a crisis, since doing so would make him guilty of the same thing. Instead, he looked at Sonata. “This address is obviously not where Feather Duster is being kept. More likely it’s some sort of drop-off point for the money they’re demanding for her return. As for why I want this kept quiet, the lower portion of Las Pegasus is the one place in this city where my presence doesn’t draw a crowd. If there’s any chance that news of this could make ponies follow me around while I’m down there, potentially putting them in danger if something goes wrong, then I want to avoid that if at all possible.”
Tranquila cocked her head. “So plan is paying ten thousand of the bits?”
Lex frowned again, glancing at the ransom letter. Despite his certitude that Silhouette was the culprit behind Feather Duster’s abduction, he couldn’t bring himself to feel completely confident in that conclusion, largely because of the demand for money in exchange for his maid’s safety.
While the tactics involved suggested the stallion’s involvement, the stated motivation made no sense. Pecuniary desires had never been Silhouette’s impetus before, being instead concerned with enacting Luna’s will, and subsequently with what sounded like a desire to avenge her being cursed…and possibly his own death, as well. Yet rather than calling him out for some sort of showdown, Lex was keenly aware of how the note instead demanded money. It was a dissonant element, alongside the curious phrasing with regards to Feather Duster’s cutie mark; calling it a “downy brush” was odd phrasing, sounding almost archaic in its vernacular.
But if it wasn’t Silhouette, who else could it be? Despite the animosity he felt toward the princesses, Lex couldn’t imagine them being involved in this; the demand for money made even less sense when it came to them, and for all their incompetence, they at least wanted to do the right thing. Despite the callowness of their morals, even the alicorns knew that kidnapping, extortion, and threatening to murder an innocent pony were wrong.
Of course, the third possibility was that this had something to do with his unknown entity that was periodically monitoring him via scrying magic. But there was no way to confirm or deny that, which made it pointless to speculate.
Ultimately, there was no way to ascertain who was behind Feather Duster’s kidnapping without directly engaging them, and that bothered Lex deeply. Bad enough that this was happening at the worst possible time; not knowing who he was dealing with made it difficult to formulate an effective response.
Difficult, but not impossible.
“No,” Lex replied at last, looking at Tranquila. “The plan is to rescue Feather Duster, and if possible capture whoever took her.”
“Not without us, you’re not!” declared Sonata sharply, shrugging at the inquisitive look Lex gave her a moment later. “What? This is usually the part where you say that you’re going to do it all by yourself and you want everyone else to just hang back and let you do your thing, so I figured we’d skip to where me and Aria tell you that you can totes forget that.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with the ditz,” snorted Aria. “I don’t care if that letter says that you’re supposed to come alone. We’re going with you, so work that into your plan.”
“The two of you accompanying me is part of my plan,” replied Lex flatly.
Two sets of eyebrows rose. “For realsies?!” gaped Sonata, before the corners of her lips turned upward. “That’s great! The three of us haven’t fought bad guys together in, like, forever!”
She wasn’t the only one grinning, with Aria flashing him a smirk. “Well well well, look who’s finally figuring out how this works.”
Lex rolled his eyes at their posturing. With his power being at its lowest ebb in quite some time – and the equinox still being a little over two weeks away – bringing the Sirens along wasn’t so much a concession as it was a necessity. Even if that hadn’t been true, his last few attempts to distance them from his plans had ended in disaster, ranging from his first meeting with the Las Pegasus delegates to his trying to develop an anti-scrying ritual. As much as he didn’t want to bring the two of them closer to danger, Feather Duster’s life was on the line; when viewed dispassionately, it was far more likely that Sonata and Aria would prove to be a help rather than a hindrance.
Hopefully.
“I’ll help too!”
Thermal Draft’s declaration turned all eyes toward her, with Aria being the first to react. “You wanna help?” she scoffed. “Stay here and plan the victory party for after we’ve taken care of things.”
Thermal Draft scowled, but kept her eyes on Lex. “I may not be able to cast spells or hypnotize ponies with my voice, but I can make a difference! I was right there in the thick of it when we all battled those sea monsters on the docks! I was part of the team that broke into that bank vault despite all the ghouls, even if we got ambushed on the way out! And when Starlight Glimmer attacked, I was the one who came up with the idea to attack her with lightning! I know I can be useful, so please…” She took a step forward, giving him a pleading look. “Let me help.”
Lex hesitated for just a moment, making the decision to put aside the last of his reservations about her, before nodding. “In that case, there’s something I want you to do.”
“Yes!” Her wings giving a single flap as she leapt upward happily, Thermal Draft grinned at him. “Name it!”
“I want you to go to the hotel where Nosey Newsy and her parents are staying and protect them.”
Thermal Draft’s smile dropped immediately. “What?”
“In fact, I want the rest of you to go there as well,” continued Lex, looking at Coat Tail and Tranquila. “Everypony should stay together until this situation is resolved in order to maximize security.”
“Wait,” interrupted Thermal Draft as the two others nodded. “I don’t…you want me to stay behind? And to protect her, of all ponies?”
Lex raised a brow. “I want you to protect her, her parents, and everyone else there with you.”
“But-”
Lex, however, gave her no chance to protest. “If you’re of the opinion that this is some sort of pointless exercise, allow me to dispel any such misconceptions. While it strikes me as unlikely that Feather Duster’s kidnapping is some sort of feint in order to force me to be at a specific place at a specific time so that some subsequent transgression can be carried out without my being there to stop it, I’m not willing to rule out that possibility entirely. Should that turn out to be the case, then it’s important to make sure that everypony known to associate with me is safe in case any of you are being targeted; since you have the most experience in crisis situations, that will be your job.”
“You think someone might be after one of us?” Coat Tail looked positively ill at the thought.
“Unlikely,” admitted Lex. “But this is too important to leave to chance. I want all of you to head to Nosey’s hotel immediately. Make sure you stay together, and don’t draw attention to yourselves.”
“Aw,” cooed Sonata. “That’s, like, super-sweet!”
“Is good plan!” agreed Tranquila. “Help keep everypony relaxed while prince give bad guy whack on noodle!” Smiling, she gave Thermal Draft a hearty pat on the back, almost knocking the smaller mare over. “Counting on you very much!”
For her part, Thermal Draft pursed her lips, pausing for a long moment before nodding, her smile still absent. “A-alright. I’ll do my best.”
“Good,” answered Lex perfunctorily. “Now, start getting ready to depart. The sooner you’re with Nosey, the better.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the other end of the suite, glancing at Sonata and Aria. “The two of you come with me. There’s still a few hours before midnight, so we’ll use this time to go over what I want you to do.”
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Poor duster.
Well, technically yes and in their eyes, you aren't innocent though Lex would feel very angry to say the least should he ever find out about who sent Dark Streak to kill him.
As for Thermal Draft, while she was given explicit orders to stay with Nosey and the others, I have to wonder if she'll leave at the first chance she gets to 'rescue' Lex. And speaking of which, I'm guessing that her status as a doppelganger can't be detected so easily so at least she's safe from getting found out though this will just open her up to other mistakes that will reveal her new form.
Putting that aside, I do wonder how Lex will approach the designated location with the sirens with him. I suppose he could use the whisper spell to direct them but as far as I could recall, Sonata couldn't do it in reverse. I mean, Aria could probably do it...which does leave the option of Sonata pestering Aria to tell Lex stuff.
p.s:Tranquila is quickly becoming one of my favorite bit character even if she only gets a couple of lines.
Wonder if the Griffon has more than one phase or teleport, given Lexs apparent ability in an enclosed space, without any magic, spells or abilities left, to turn that volume into a Very fatal Geode Maiden?
10863384
That was in reference to the threat to kill Feather Duster if Lex didn't deliver the money. As much as he despises the princesses, Lex can't bring himself to believe that they'd ever sign off on that sort of thing. They might try to kill him, but he knows they wouldn't go through someone else to do it. Of course, should he find out who's targeting him, and who sent her there, he may need to revise that appraisal.
As for what Lex has planned for the Sirens, that's iffier, but it's a good sign on his part that he's taking them along. Doubtlessly Sonata and Aria would have been very upset if he'd tried to brush them off, since they know that he's unable to use magic to augment or supplement his senses. And I suspect that by now even they're starting to notice that he hasn't used any big magic, since they wondered why he held back so much against Twilight. Plus, I wonder if Lex knows that they'd come charging in even if he told them not to (like they did when he was conducting his ritual), so it's better to just take them along from the get-go.
Clearly he's not expecting Drafty to do the same thing, which is why he's telling her to babysit Nosey. But then again, Lex clearly doesn't know as much about Drafty as he thinks he does, so she might surprise him (potentially in more ways than one).
10863143 She's in a tough spot, to be sure. Hopefully she'll come out of this okay.
10863404 Presumably Dark Streak has something in mind, since she's been very meticulous in her planning so far.