12 - Poison in Your Veins
“I think she’s waking up.”
The words drilled into Twilight’s brain like a spiky nail. She groaned and, with great effort, drew up her hooves and rubbed her eyes. She felt like absolute crap; she was undergoing acupuncture with railroad spikes, her stomach had been squished into a malfunctioning blender, and someone had decided it was a good idea to replace her brain with a running jackhammer.
Still, there was a plus: all the pain meant she wasn’t dead.
“Yeah, she’s getting up. Uh, hey. Princess?”
Twilight groaned again. “Ugh. Yeah?” Her throat didn’t feel all that bad, surprisingly enough. A bit scratchy, but a lot less than… everything else everywhere else.
“Open your mouth. You’re gonna want to drink this.”
Twilight couldn’t recognize the voice, but that might’ve just been because she couldn’t locate the off switch for the jackhammer. She opened her mouth. Someone placed a bowl to her lips, and she drank deeply. She almost gagged; the liquid tasted terrible and had a strange texture. But once it hit her stomach, the pain slowly started to dwindle.
“That’s it. Keep drinking.” Uvivi. Probably. “You’ll feel better.”
It sure didn’t taste like that, but whatever. Twilight drank again, got another reduction in pain, and was able to blink her eyes open.
It took a few seconds for the blurs to resolve. Stormwalker and Uvivi were standing over her, looking worried, Uvivi standing on her hind legs to compensate for her small size. Twilight herself was in… she wasn’t sure where, but from the sterility of the walls, probably some kind of hospital or medical center. If that was true, the bed beneath her was a lot comfier than it had any right to be. She ached too much to do anything resembling looking around. “Spike?” she murmured. “Livingstone?”
“They’re both… not okay okay,” said Uvivi, “but they’re not in any danger.” She looked over her shoulder at a few beds further down. Something was off about her, but Twilight couldn’t say what. “They’ll probably be waking up in a few minutes or so.” She swung back to Twilight. “How are you feeling?”
“Could be worse,” Twilight coughed. She took another deep drink from the bowl, somehow managing to not spit any of it out. More pain receded. “Am I allowed to get up?”
“If you think you can,” said Uvivi. She took a few steps away from the bed. “Just so you know, you’re still in the palace, and it’s not quite noon of the day after the dinner.”
Not quite noon. Could’ve been worse. Twilight grunted and rolled out of the bed. Somehow, she managed to land neatly on all four hooves without collapsing. Stormwalker was at her side immediately, offering assistance without forcing it. Twilight waved her off and took a few steps. Yeah. She could walk. She wouldn’t be running any marathons, but she could walk. She took a better look around the room. Definitely some kind of hospital room, very similar to ones in Equestria; big enough for four patients and some guests, although there were only three at the moment. Spike and Livingstone were in the next beds, both sleeping; their chests were slowly rising and falling in a slow, easy rhythm. Cumulus was standing between them, and a zebra doctor had her ear to Livingstone’s chest.
Uvivi cocked her head. “Doing alright?”
“Yeah,” said Twilight. “Stormwalker, did you threaten anyone?”
Stormwalker bristled. “No.”
“That’s not what what I heard before I passed out.”
Stormwalker opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything.
Twilight groaned. “Seriously. This needs to stop. If you’re going to overreact to everything that comes my way, you’re going to render all of this pointless.”
“Your Highness,” Stormwalker said, “I-”
“Keep quiet unless I tell you to speak.”
Stormwalker’s jaw snapped shut and she nodded.
Twilight took another drink from the bowl. “I heard what you were saying to Uvivi before I passed out, and… just… just really? She’s been nothing but friendly to us, the first thing she did was make things easier for us, she was offering to save my life, and you threaten her? That’s…” She smacked a hoof to her face. “No. Just… no. You said you’d dial it back. Dial it back. I know that she might have been trying to kill me-” (Uvivi looked shocked, but didn’t say anything.) “-but if you keep reacting to what might happen, we should just leave right now, because it might have been Inkosi who poisoned me.”
After a moment of hesitation, Stormwalker nodded.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” said Twilight. Her ears were folded down, and if looks could kill, Stormwalker wouldn’t be more than a smoking crater. “You will only react to definite threats, not possible ones. You keep this up, you’re staying in the embassy as long as we’re here. Understand?”
Stormwalker’s pupils shrank and she nodded stiffly.
Twilight sighed. “Look. I don’t want to keep you in there. If ever I needed a bodyguard, it’s now. But you’re driving everyone away, and that’s the exact opposite of the whole reason we’re here. I’ve still got Cumulus, and I’ve got alicornhood, so in the end, I need a good reputation more than I need you.”
Stormwalker nodded again. Her ears were back, but she wasn’t angry. Any other circumstances, and Twilight would’ve been sympathetic.
“At ease,” Twilight muttered. Stormwalker relaxed so much she lost several inches in height.
Uvivi coughed, making both of them jump. “Um, sh-should I have, um, left?” she asked, pointing at the door.
“Maybe. Too late now, though,” said Twilight. She took another drink from the bowl. Whatever was in there, it was doing wonders. “Anyway, I feel fine, bu- What happened to your horn?” She’d finally realized what was off about Uvivi: the top two-thirds of her nose horn were gone. Not cleanly, either; it looked like it’d been ground away by something.
“What, this?” Uvivi asked, tapping the nub of her horn. She tried to grin, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Pfft, it’s nothing. It’s not even the most important one, and besides, horns grow back.” Her smile vanished as she rubbed her stump and muttered, “Eventually.”
“But… but why? Why’d you… grind down your…” Twilight couldn’t even think about that without shuddering. Apparently, unlike unicorns, abadas didn’t have any feeling in their horns, because otherwise… ow.
“Well, long story short, thanks to the magic running through them, our horns can act as an antidote against poisons. Yours should, too, actually, if your magic works at all similarly to ours. And it’s, we just met, but I, I’d hate for you to die, so…” Uvivi shrugged.
“Antidote… against…” Uh-oh. Twilight looked down at the bowl she was drinking from. Looked back up at Uvivi. Looked back down at the bowl. Looked back up at Uvivi. It finally, finally clicked and Twilight’s stomach turned over. “Am I… Am I drinking your own powdered horn?!”
Uvivi cocked her head and frowned. “You say that like it’s weird.”
Once Twilight was back from washing her mouth out so she could stop screaming about what she just drank, she said, “Okay. So. Spike, Livingstone, and I have been poisoned. Now what?” Stormwalker opened her mouth, and Twilight added, “And, no, holding all the nobles and executives for questioning isn’t a viable option. We went over this literally a minute ago.”
Stormwalker reddened, slowly closed her mouth, then tentatively said, “In a perfect world, we could barricade the party in the embassy and not come out until it was time for our proper audience with Inkosi. Whenever that is.”
“In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be poisoned.”
“Right.” Stormwalker flapped her wings a few times. “And since this isn’t a perfect world, it would drive us all crazy. So… hypothetically…” She swallowed, and when she spoke again, it was like she was forcing the words out. “You could, if you wanted, go about business as usual, just with a bit more vigilance for any other attempts on your life.”
“You’re telling me it’s okay for me to be out and about?” Twilight eyed Stormwalker up and down. “Who are you and what have you done with Stormwalker?”
Stormwalker grunted. “I’m not saying it’s okay. Just that you could do that if you wanted to, so long as we paid more attention to your surroundings. Politicians acting as if nothing out of the ordinary happened after an assassination attempt is surprisingly common, assuming they weren’t injured. Not forty years ago, when Princess Celestia was visiting Sacramaneto, an assassin-”
“I know,” said Twilight. “A would-be assassin named Lyneightte dropped a bomb at her hooves, which failed to go off because Lyneightte had never armed it.”
“And do you know what Celestia’s response was?” asked Stormwalker. “Complain that the Royal Guard was crowding her, then go right back to what she was doing. If you look into the daily diary for that day, it’s mundane actions through and through, the assassination attempt is added in as almost a ‘by the way’ sort of thing, and there’s no change in Celestia’s behavior before or after it.”
“Yeah. I read that for an assignment in school once.” Twilight squinted at Stormwalker. “But why do you know that?”
Stormwalker bristled and pulled herself up a little higher. “I like to know the history of my profession. The point is, it is possible for you to do as you wish. I’d recommend against it, obviously, but the choice is yours.”
The doctor chose that moment to leave Livingstone and walk over to Twilight. She looked an awful lot like an Equestrian doctor, with a white medical coat and a head-mounted penlight, but she also had a pair of white saddlebags from which herbs were poking out. “Hello, Princess. Dr. Nganga.” She said it in a weirdly disconnected way, as if she didn’t really care about what she was saying. “Your friends are going to be fine. Abada horn is potent stuff, disgusting as it is.” She shuddered a little. “You can wake them up if you want, but it might be better to just let them sleep.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Twilight with a sigh of relief. “You wouldn’t happen to know what was in that, do you? Because Spike — the little lizard there-” She gestured. “-he can swim in lava and come out just fine.”
“For most poisons, physical durability doesn’t mean much,” said Nganga. “Tembo can take several dozen arquebus shots to the head, thanks to their tough hides, but a proper amount of poison will still do them in. And this particular poison, devil’s helmet, interferes with nerves, so…” She shrugged. “Being able to survive a mountain getting dropped on you won’t do much if your nerves don’t work.”
“Oh.” That was a creepy thought. Twilight couldn’t help but shiver.
“Like I said, you all should be fine. Just to be safe, though, open your mouth.” Nganga flicked on her penlight.
“Wait, what?”
Nganga tutted. “Open your mouth. I want to be sure your throat looks okay.”
Twilight slowly opened her mouth a little. Nganga snorted and pushed Twilight’s chin down and nose up, forcibly opening her mouth wider.
Stormwalker flapped her wings and and twitched her legs. She cleared her throat and asked in a voice that was almost polite, “Do you know who you’re handling?”
“A politician I’ve never met from a land I’ll never see,” said Nganga gruffly. She squinted down Twilight’s throat. “You hold your own king’s life in your hooves and handle their internal organs, it changes how you think of leaders. I treat Inkosi the same way. Treated her mother the same way, too. But I’m still here, so I must be doing something right.” She released Twilight’s head, clicking her penlight off, and crouched down to put an ear against her neck. “Say ‘ahh’.”
“Aaaaaaahhhhhhh…” Twilight felt embarrassed; she’d never been marehandled quite like this in years. It brought to mind visits to the doctor’s office when she was just a filly, only that doctor at least had something resembling tact and she’d been a bit hyper at that age.
“Good, good,” muttered Nganga. She stood up and placed a hoof on Twilight’s chest. “Deep breath in, deep breath out.” Twilight breathed in and out; Nganga nodded to herself and placed her hooves on Twilight’s sides. “Deep-” She stopped and leaned to one side; her hooves were on Twilight’s wings.
“Sorry,” said Twilight, rubbing her leg, “I can ju-”
“Keep them down,” said Nganga. She slid her hooves under Twilight’s wings and placed them right on her ribcage. “Deep breath in, deep breath out.” Once they went through with that, Nganga had Twilight repeat the process with her wings horizontal, then with her wings vertical.
“Everything seems to be in order,” Nganga said, withdrawing her hooves. “Good throat, stable breathing. You should be fine. But if you feel a bit lightheaded-” She twisted over to reach into her saddlebags and withdrew with a couple of herbs in her mouth. She dropped them on the table next to Twilight. “-stew one of these into tea, or chew it until it tastes bitter, then swallow. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be off.” She swept out of the room before Twilight could say anything else.
“Well,” muttered Twilight, “that was-”
Nganga poked her head back into the room. “Oh, and you’ve got two groups of visitors waiting out there, if you want to see them. There’s a nurse keeping them at bay, but he’s getting impatient.” She left the room again.
“Groups?” Twilight muttered to herself. “That’s a lot of people.” Hopefully not too much. “Let’s see them through.”
The first group wasn’t actually a group; just a single zebra stallion clad in armor. Bare steel armor, with none of the gilding of the Equestrian Royal Guard. “Your Highness,” he said, bowing, “I am Captain Mlinzi of the Zebrabwe Royal Guard. King Inkosi was shocked to hear of your poisoning, and would be visiting you herself if she didn’t have other matters to attend to. She apologizes for your trouble and is furious that such a thing could happen in her court; an investigation into the matter is already underway.”
“Good,” said Twilight. Inkosi was definitely on top things, wasn’t she? That was either a good sign or a self-serving one. Inkosi might just be doing it to look competent and caring, but Twilight decided to believe she really wanted to keep Twilight alive, which in turn meant she really wanted an alliance with Equestria. Promising.
“If you wish,” continued Mlinzi, “she is also offering guards from her own retinue to supplant yours, s-”
“Supplement,” said Twilight, almost purely on reflex. “She doesn’t really want me to replace my own guards with hers, does she?”
Mlinzi turned a bit red, but his body language didn’t change. “Right. My apologies. She just wants to provide you with additional protection, if you so desire.”
Twilight was about to accept, but glanced briefly at Stormwalker. She knew better on these sorts of things. This was the kind of situation you brought a bodyguard along for in the first place. Stormwalker didn’t say anything, just nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Yeah,” Twilight said, “that’d be great.”
“They will be sent to your embassy as soon as possible,” said Mlinzi, clapping a foreleg to his chest. “And, finally, Inkosi has set up a proper audience for you the evening of the day after tomorrow. The rest of your party should be in by then, correct?”
“Right,” Twilight said with a nod. “One way or another.”
“Then if there are no more questions-”
“There aren’t. Thank you.”
“-I take my leave. Thank you.” Mlinzi bowed again and walked out of the room.
“Do you really think they’re safe?” Twilight asked Stormwalker. “If someone was able to poison me during dinner, they might have people in-”
“Poison is easy to use, as far as assassination tools go,” said Stormwalker. “You don’t need an absurdly complicated conspiracy to use it. In fact, doing it during a political dinner implies they don’t have enough people to do it at a better time. We can most likely trust Inkosi’s guards. And Cumulus and I can keep an eye on them.”
“That we can do,” confirmed Cumulus.
“Suppose it was Inkosi herself who had me poisoned,” said Twilight. “I doubt it, but humor me. What if her guards are under orders from her to kill me?”
But Stormwalker laughed. “Oh, nooooo. She’s the king, she doesn’t need to resort to something as crude as poison. If that were the case, we probably would’ve never gotten into the dinner in the first place.”
“Okay, good.” Twilight smiled a little. “See? Do more stuff like this. Don’t scare away people.”
Stormwalker frowned slightly and she flicked her ears, but she said nothing.
The second group actually was a group, although not a very large one: Mtendaji and Mhate. Mtendaji looked distraught, while Mhate looked like she wanted to be anywhere but here. Out of embarrassment, though, not out of hatred.
“Twilight!” gasped Mtendaji. “I was so worried, I thought you weren’t go-” She coughed and looked away with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. I know we just met, but I can, um, overreact to things.”
“Heh. Believe me, I can relate,” Twilight said with a grin.
“So, you, you’re doing okay?”
“I think so. My head’s still spinning, but it’s getting slower.” Twilight arched her back and stretched her wings, drawing a stare from Mtendaji.
Mtendaji slowly reached out with a hoof, as if she wanted to touch Twilight’s wings, but quickly yanked it back. “I guess you’re still an ordinary pony beneath it all, huh?”
Twilight shrugged. “In some ways, yeah. In some ways, no. It’s complicated.”
As all this was going on, Twilight kept an ear and half an eye on Mhate. As Mtendaji was talking, Mhate walked up to Uvivi. “Do you think you’ll be long?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Uvivi replied with a shrug. “I don’t think so, but it’s hard to say.”
“Alright. Well, take your time. We’re not in any hurry anymore.” Mhate reached up and rubbed Uvivi’s horn stub. “Can’t believe you went that far. That’s a lot to do f-”
“Twilight?”
“Huh? What?”
“I was just saying I hope the rest of your time here is better,” said Mtendaji. “Kulikulu’s a great place. You thinking of going out at all?”
“I, I don’t know,” said Twilight. Images flashed through her head of assassins jumping her in the streets. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“If you’re gonna go, try the theatre,” suggested Mtendaji. “It’s great. Anyway, I gotta get going, so…”
“That’s fine. See you later and thanks for stopping by.”
“Mmhmm.” Mtendaji left the room, pausing only to say to Mhate, “I’ll be outside.”
Mhate looked at the door, then turned to Twilight with a great effort. She coughed. “Princess, I wanted to apologize for what I did yesterday. I was… This meeting was really important to Imayini, and I was at the end of my rope, and it was down to the last hour, and…” She ruffled her mane and looked down, kicking lightly at the floor. “Look, I, I’m really sorry, a-”
“Apology accepted.”
“-nd I just want to what now?”
“I’ve been in those sorts of situations, and I can, at the very least, relate,” said Twilight. “It’s not like you meant anything by it, right? You were just trying to let off steam. So, apology accepted.”
Truth be told, though, Twilight wasn’t quite as wholehearted as she was making herself out to be. Mhate might’ve been stressed, but that was still no excuse to take things out on the Equestrians when she thought they couldn’t understand her. That didn’t say anything good about her attitude. Still, “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” and all, and it didn’t do to hold grudges.
“Heh. That was easy. Thanks.” Mhate grinned. It was restrained, but genuine, and a grin was a grin. “You’re the friendly kind, aren’t you?”
“Back in Equestria, my title is the Princess of Friendship. It’s kinda my thing.” Twilight paused for a moment and flicked her tail. “So, aaaaside from the attempted poisoning, did it all go okay?”
“There aren’t enough yesses in the world to encompass that.” Mhate’s grin became a bit less restrained. “It went great. Can’t really talk about the details, but yeah. Great.”
“Good.” At least something went right for somebody.
“Anyway, um, I, I should probably get going. Mtendaji’s waiting for me. So, um, see you. Maybe.”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll stop by the abada embassy sometime. Be seeing you, maybe.”
Mhate nodded and left the room. Right before she stepped out the door, she whispered to Uvivi, “Take your time.”
Twilight did a few laps around the room, just to be sure everything felt right. She wasn’t 100% yet, but it was close. Lower 90’s, maybe. The pain was mostly gone, aside from a few tingles in her hooves and wings, and her face still felt weird. But those were the kinds of things that were easy to ignore. “Should we wake up Spike and Livingstone?” she asked Uvivi. “They’ll be fine, right?”
Uvivi nodded. “They ought to be. It might still hurt for them, but they made it this far, they’ll be fine.”
“Then let’s do that and get back to the embassy.” Twilight trotted up to Spike’s bed and nudged him lightly. “Spike?”
Spike grunted and blinked a few times. But when he saw Twilight, he was wide awake in an instant. “Twilight!” He jumped off the bed and latched himself around Twilight’s neck. “I was so scared, I thought I was gonna- Wait, we’re not both dead, are we?”
Twilight giggled. “No, Spike. We’re okay. Livingstone, too.”
“But…” Spike let go of Twilight’s neck and dropped back onto the bed. “But we were poisoned, right? So how’d we…”
“Well, um…” Twilight rustled her wings and rubbed the back of her neck. “You see, Uvivi’s, um, horns can act as an antidote to poison, s-so she, um, she cut one of them off and ground it up for us to, um…” She couldn’t bring herself to finish it.
After a moment of thought, Spike blinked at Twilight, blinked at Uvivi, blinked at his hands. His pupils shrank and he coughed. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” he said matter-of-factly. “Excuse me for a moment.” He hopped off the bed and walked over to a trash can.
“Seriously,” muttered Uvivi, “why’s everyone being so weird about this? It’s just horn powder.”
“That’s why,” said Spike, leaning over the can. “In Equestria, unicorns don’t hack parts of themselves off for medicine.”
“Well, you’re missing out on some great cures.”
“If you say so.”
Twilight was at Livingstone’s side next. “Excuse me. Livingstone?” She lightly nudged her.
Livingstone slapped Twilight’s hoof away. Or at least vaguely waved her hoof in the direction of Twilight’s. “D’y’mind?” she mumbled. “‘M waitin’ f’r th’drums in m’head t’stop.”
“Do you think you can get back to our rooms?”
“G’me fiv’min’ts.”
Twilight managed to decipher that into “give me five minutes”. “Okay, but if you’re still not up by then, I’m dragging you back to the apartments myself.”
“Fine.”
Just as Twilight was wondering what to do with her five minutes, Uvivi kicked at the floor and cleared her throat. “Why don’t I teach you the translation spell? Just in case it wears off at a bad time.”
“Let’s do that,” Twilight said with a nod. “You said you start with separating the thoughts from the words, right?”
Twilight knew she was stressing when not even the possibility of books could get her out of her funk.
After returning from the medical bay, Twilight had Spike send a letter to Celestia, telling her what had happened. Celestia’s reply was about as close to panic as Twilight had ever read. Much to Spike’s chagrin, it had taken several back-and-forths for Twilight to properly assure Celestia that she was okay, ending with a promise to stay safe and send in a letter every evening to confirm her survival. But once that was done, their plans were all variants of “stay in the embassy and don’t let anyone in”. With nothing else to do, Livingstone had decided to teach Twilight and Spike the Zebran alphabet. After Twilight’s pace had proved too fast for him, Spike had picked up a late draft of one of Livingstone’s Equestrian-Zebran dictionaries so he could hopefully teach himself a little bit of Zebran, spoken or written, at his own speed.
Learning the orthography of Zebran had been easier than Twilight had thought it would be (which wasn’t saying a lot, but it was still surprisingly easy). Livingstone told her which letters made which sounds and wrote down a simple sentence in Zebran for Twilight to translate. It’d been most of the day, and the western sky was turning orange, but she already knew more than half of the symbols, enough to make a decently accurate guess at the ones she didn’t know when she had the context of a word.
But she was sure that if her mind hadn’t been wandering, she’d’ve completely learned the Zebran alphabet by now. She kept going back to the dinner and the poison. Her life being in danger was nothing new. In fact, someone specifically trying to kill her was nothing new. But someone preemptively trying to kill her? That was something else entirely.
She’d never been an assassination target back in Equestria. She just wasn’t as big a symbol as Celestia or Luna. Or even Cadance. When you got right down to it, Ponyville was ultimately just some podunk country town, not as much of a thing as the Crystal Empire. So why was someone trying to kill her now? What would that accomplish? It’d get Celestia… angry, to say the least. And no one liked Celestia when she was angry.
Unless… that was the whole point. Frame the zebras for her death, get Celestia to bring the thunder down on them, no more zebras. But who’d want that? All the people at the dinner had been a) zebras themselves, b) closely involved in business dealings with zebras, or c) both, in the case of Okubi. No, that seemed a bit unli-
“Princess?” Livingstone asked. “Um, Twilight?”
“Hmm, sorry?” Twilight said.
Livingstone tapped a certain swoopy squiggle on the parchment in front of her. “I was saying that this letter represents the ‘ng’ sound, but you seem distracted, yes. Is something wrong?”
“Take a wild guess,” muttered Twilight.
“But… you survived. Is it that bad?”
“YES!” With a flap of her wings, Twilight pushed herself to her hooves and started pacing. “I’ve barely met anybody here, and they’re already trying to murder me! I’ve only talked with Uvivi, Inkosi, and Mtendaji, and they all seemed friendly, so…” She groaned and rubbed her face. “I could handle it if this was something I knew to expect. Like they hated us and I was trying to patch things up. But I come here with a blank slate, make what I hope is a good first impression, and then I get poisoned anyway! It’s all…” She groaned and flopped to the floor.
“Look,” she said to Livingstone, “I really, truly appreciate what you’re doing. Any other time, this would be just about the best thing ever. Seriously. But right now, it’s just not enough to distract me from everything else.”
“Ah,” Livingstone said, twirling a lock of hair around her hoof. It was easily the I know I need to say something but I don’t know what form of “ah”.
“And I can’t even look into it myself, because I don’t know where to start, and I’m here as an ambassador. Even if I have diplomatic immunity, I can’t just go around tramping all over the zebras and expect them to like me.” She stared up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I don’t know, really.”
“Ah,” Livingstone said again. Same form of “ah”. “Would you like to, maybe, try something else, yes?”
“Like what?” asked Twilight. She rolled back to her hooves. “This is a nice place, but there isn’t much else to do in here.” She looked around at the bookshelves wistfully. If only she was able to keep her focus on learning written Zebran…
“I don’t know,” muttered Livingstone. “Maybe… I don’t know…”
“Go shopping!” yelled Spike from the next room over. He walked into the room with a stack of parchment in his hands. “No, really. Come on, Twilight, there’s a whole city open to us. How’re we gonna learn about zebras if we’re cooped up in here all day and night? We’ve gotta see what their culture’s like, right?”
“Maybe, but I’m not even sure my guards will want me leaving.”
Two more zebra guards had been waiting at the door when they came back from the medical bay, Askari and Mtetezi. Together with Stormwalker and Cumulus, they’d barricaded themselves in one of the rooms with a bunch of maps of Kulikulu and some of its buildings and had stayed there for the past several hours, with one of them coming out once in a while to get a quick drink or something to eat.
“You can at least try,” Spike said as he hopped up on a chair. “You can learn in more ways than just books, you know.” He began leafing through his papers. “Besides, it sounds like fun.”
“It does, but whether or not it’s possible is something else,” said Twilight. “Have you been studying Zebran like I asked?”
“Actually, I got bored and started drawing Power Ponies pictures.”
Twilight groaned. “Spiiiiiike…”
“Come on, I’m not you. I can’t sit with a book and learn stuff for hours.” Spike pulled out one of the larger pieces of parchment. “Besides, I think I’ve got some good ideas here. Check it out.” He held up his picture, one of Filli-Second blitzing Baron von Ruthless, and grinned a grin that said, I know it’s not very good, but I like it anyway. Although for not being very good, it wasn’t that bad.
“I’m glad you’re having fun, Spike, bu-”
“Is that her Silver Age outfit?” Before Twilight could react, Livingstone had snatched Spike’s picture away from him and was studying it intently. Before long, she was grinning. “I approve. I like the details you put in, yes.”
“Well, her current costume’s boring,” Spike said with a shrug. “It’s not much more than a plain jumpsuit, and- Wait, you know the Power Ponies?”
Livingstone laughed. “Son, I was a few years younger than you when they first premiered. I was a filly, it was all I could afford at the time, and this was back when comics were fun, without the tangled mess of continuity and crossovers you have nowadays, yes. I still have piles of them back in Equestria.”
“Really?” asked Spike brightly. “You collect comics?”
“Not anymore, but I did. Back when-”
Twilight let them go at it. She still wasn’t sure about going into Kulikulu. True, it sounded nice, but there were still plenty of safety issues. And if she brought it up, what would her guards think?
As if to answer her question, Stormwalker strode into the library with an expression on her face Twilight had never seen before: a smile. When she spoke, her voice was unusually cheery. “Good news, everypony!” (Spike coughed.) “And dragon! We now have no less than three different evacuation plans for Princess Twilight in every open area of Kulikulu’s Old Quarter, as well as for most large establishments in the same area!”
“Hooray,” Twilight said flatly.
“Which means,” Stormwalker said, still in her happy voice, “if you’d like to go out tonight and see that part of the city, Princess, you’d be about as safe as you can be at the moment.” Her smile hadn’t dropped an inch. “Askari and Mtetezi were incredibly helpful, since they’ve done this before.”
“And, for the record,” added Livingstone, “the Old Quarter’s the most interesting part of the city, yes. It’s the, how to put it, the ‘historical preservation’ district. It’s where Kulikulu was founded, and it’s kept in a most accurate depiction of the city at the time, aside from a select few modern amenities: streetlights, plumbing, that kind of thing.”
“And,” Stormwalker bubbled, “it’s close to the palace, so if anything goes wrong, we can get you back here ASAP, even if you can’t teleport!” She clapped her front hooves together. “Win-win!”
Twilight paced back and forth a few times. Well, if this wasn’t a sign, nothing was. “How close to the palace is ‘close to the palace’?”
“Ten minutes’ walk,” said Stormwalker. “Twenty at most with bad traffic. That’s without flight, remember.”
As good a time as any. “And you’re positive you can keep me safe there?”
“Absolutely,” Stormwalker said with a nod. “Those two zebra guards will be a great help. I mean, I’d still recommend staying in here, but just looking at you…” She chuckled. “That might not be the best idea for your sanity.”
Oh, hay. Might as well. Twilight still had her doubts, but staying in here any longer would drive her insane. “Alrighty then,” she said, rustling her wings. “Let’s get ready for a night on the town.”
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I thought the canon name of the Zebra homeland is Zebrica? Is that official or is it widespread fanon?
If it's just the latter, then carry on.
Missing know.
a bad time.
While I approve of the joke, how would Livingstone have any frame of reference for the current state of comic books? She's been trapped in Gondwana with no outside access for years. At most, she maybe knows whatever the Equestrian equivalent of the Early Bronze Age is.
a sign.
7350814 Widespread fanon. We have been told literally nothing about literally anything about zebras that doesn't involve Zecora, and even that's just limited to basically the contents of her shelves and a few vague hints as to her magical ability.
Also, good solid chapter. Love the reprimanding of Stormcloud, and suspect the coal miners.
Good chapter! You're truly writing the characters and their exchanges well.
Yeah, I can understand why Twilight feels disturbed by this - like she said, she is a blank slate. There should be no reason for anyone to try and assassinate her, because no one knows anything about her.
Even the thought that someone might be trying to rile Celestia/Equestria up enough for them to bring the hammer down on the zebras, while typically not bad as far as plots go, doesn't really fit here - it was during the dinner itself that Twilight demonstrated for the first time why Equestria (and the alicorns) should be tread lightly around, but the assassination would have to have been set up earlier than that, during a time while Twilight didn't have a "danger, handle with care" hanging around her neck yet.
So ... yeah, I'm at a loss for now, same as Twilight. And you can tell this uncertainty is really getting to her, if she is actually asking her guards if they can keep her safe. Them, keep her safe! Out in the city where the only attempt could be a physical assault, which is the sort of thing she is best at. Poison in your food is one thing, but a straight-up brawl against would-be assailants ought to be one of Twilight's least worries normally, since that's really where she is at her strongest and with no uncertainty muddying the issue.
Yeah, Twilight's clearly bothered by this - one can hope some sort of a lead pops up that she can focus her energy on and get herself back into gear; she has never been the best at simply lazing around and doing nothing.
On a side note regarding unicorn horns - we do know from the show that horn filing is actually a thing in Equestria, so they can't be all that sensitive. Granted, unicorns certainly wouldn't cut theirs off for the purpose of medicine, but still :)
Oh hey, maybe you can join Lincoln.
Again a nice and entertaining chapter.
The only thing that bugs me is, that the first thing Twilight does after waking up is criticizing Stormwalker. I mean someone tried to kill her, so there should be some more important things for her at that moment than how mean her bodguard was to others while she was, well, dying.
Good stuff and interesting use of aconitum (Aka Devil helmet aka wolfs bane) for those who don't know. Aconite is a genus of over 250 species of flowering plants belonging to the family Ranunculaceae with most species are extremely poisonous. heck it has been understood as a poison from ancient times, and is frequently represented as such in fiction with one being that In Greek mythology, Medea attempted to poison Theseus with a cup of wine poisoned with wolfsbane.
7350977
Her bodyguard was literally threatening the person who was in the process of saving Twilight's life, though. Had Stormwalker actually succeeded in intimidating the doctor or disrupted her work, Twilight might have very well been worse off - or even dead. At that moment Stormwalker was being an active threat to Twilight's security herself.
7351477
I completely understand this point, but the weird thing for me is, that this was the first thing Twilight did after waking up from a near death experience.
Or maybe Twilight threatening someone just sounds weird for me
Good to see that eveyone is okay.
Hm, so if I had to guess, the next chapter is Applejack, Zecora and the other zebras vs the Ngoloko, then Twilight's shopping trip to take us through the evening and into the next day.
Then it's all going to go horribly wrong.
7350955
You noted something I found interesting as well: Twilight hadn't been there for very long, and then she gets poisoned in a rather haphazard manner (during a court dinner with the king, surrounded by other courtiers). Poison requires some preparation, including putting it in the food of your victim without anyone noticing.
So, I'm wondering if Twilight was really supposed to be the victim, or if it was originally intended for someone else. Maybe they felt like switching gears when she arrived at court, or it was her display of power who prodded them into giving her the poison instead.
Or maybe it wasn't important who'd actually get the poison because the poisoner didn't really care who died. In that case, Twilight and her coterie were simply unlucky (or lucky; pony magic might've helped fight off the poison, and Spike can eat rocks and garbage, even if the doctor thinks it wouldn't matter).
Also, they used monkshood. Wolfsbane. Interesting choice. I'd been trying to determine what the poison was, and Wolfsbane was on the list (along with ricin).
As an aside note, it's kinda funny how the Zebra's homeland has a Sanskrit name!
Oh right, there's also this:
Unless it refers to Twilight, Mlinzi suddenly underwent a sex change without anypony noticing.
7351629
What's interesting to note is: to the best of our knowledge, only Twilight and her companions got poisoned; none of the other dinner guests were affected. That's very specific and targeted, which speaks against it being a random act of domestic terrorism where the culprits would have been happy with any random target being poisoned. Unless Twilight and her entourage are the unluckiest band of misfits since forever, being the only ones to eat whatever was poisoned, but that would be way too much of a coincidence to consider.
What else, then? I had considered a radical or two among the isolationists, but that doesn't quite sound right either. After all, if you assassinate a foreign princess, it's all but guaranteed that you will see more of said foreigners, not less, in very short order - right along with their invasion fleet and the army that has come to avenge their monarch and a spit in the face of their offer of friendship.
Granted, radicals aren't always the smartest people around and incensed zealots might not think through the full consequences of their actions, but I'm not sure. Granted, this could be it, and is probably more likely than Twilight and her party being the only unlucky ones to partake in generally poisoned food, but I dunno.
The third option would be Twilight's own idea of someone trying to summon Equestria's hammer down on Zebras by assassinating her, but this is a very flimsy plan when you know nothing of Equestria and what they could bring to the table. Sure, with a functional airforce, magic, weaponized weather control and airships Equestria likely could flatten the zebras if they wanted to, but there is no way for would-be local assassins to know any of that at this point.
Though granted, perhaps they don't care how much of a distraction it would provide, only that it does, big or small - we know something fishy is going on at the local level, what with the false travel order restrictions going around the country. Something is moving in the shadows and undermining the government, and perhaps this something wouldn't be opposed to distracting the government further by causing a conflict with Equestria. Though this is once again risky, because if this completely unknown Equestria turns up and turns out capable of stomping your nation into the ground ... well, suddenly all your plans fall apart anyway when the country gets occupied. Unless these plans, whatever they are, don't much care for what state zebrica is left in at the end of it.
All in all - I get Twilight's frustration. At this point her attempted poisoning seems borderline random and very dumb from multiple perspectives, with very few (if any) locals being in a position to benefit from the act, unless it's done by actual zealots with no regard for consequences.
Granted, I suppose it's possible that someone from Twilight's ship is actually responsible for this - it's not impossible that someone from the other side of the pond is trying to involve Equestria into an oversea conflict, perhaps hoping to take advantage of the fact that Equestria's armed forces would be busy stomping around in zebrica, halfway across the world ... changelings, perhaps?
But who knows - needs more information.
But still better than if she didn't do that, right?
Good chapter.
It seems Twilight is safe (for now).
Let's see how Applejack and friend are doing.
May had found an error:
Here is something wrong.
Great work on this chapter.
He starts monologueing! He starts like this prepared speech about how feeble I am, how inevitable my defeat is, how the world will soon be his!
My thoughts:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Tembo_the_Badass_Elephant_cover_art.jpg
twilight does not have the power to move the sun. She only did it when she had the combined power of four different alicorns. Also celestia and luna moving the sun and moon is probably do to cutie mark super specialization.