The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Castle Climb, Five

As Valey slunk through a hall in the highest levels of Stormhoof's central keep, it was as far away as she could imagine from being fun.

A squad of armored guards marched straight over her head, not pausing to brighten their corridor and potentially flush her out of the ground. Her heart squeezed with every footfall, the stress of the situation building and building and only being compounded by Gazelle, strolling along behind her in plain sight like he owned the place. It was as much his turf as the Defense Force base had been hers, every soul keeping a healthy respect of him and not getting in his way, even though he hailed from a different noble house. Meanwhile, she was outnumbered, exhausted, pursuing a goal she didn't have a plan for to see through to completion and entirely reliant on the help of a stranger she had no reason to trust. As life-threatening as it had been, she honestly preferred the fight against the mercenaries in the Flame District. There, everything rested on her and her own skill, not luck and the whims of others... and to make matters worse Gazelle had an uncanny ability to follow her even while she was shadow sneaking, like he was showing off his skill at guessing where she was going to go.

"I can't do this," she panted, getting up and leaning against a wall when the coast was clear. "Call me a chicken, but this is not my element, prince dude. If I was beating stuff up as I go, maybe, but my nerves are shot and I hate playing other ponies' games. I want out."

"If you were fighting as you went?" Gazelle shrugged, clearly not seeing the problem. "You got past those first three easily enough."

Valey raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was you."

"Whoever's found them by now won't know that, and I made sure they were distracted before you took them out just in case." Gazelle patted her on the head with a wing. "Cause some commotion, as much as you can! Enjoy yourself!"

"What part of 'I need a nap' don't you understand?" Valey growled, spreading her wings. "I do my own thing! Please let me go!"

Gazelle blinked. "I thought you wanted to find some friends? It was my impression I was helping you!" He pointed a wing behind him. "I couldn't let you give up, could I? Think of me as your cheer squad?"

Valey began to stiffly pace, the situation so far out of her control that she was completely rigid from apprehension. She needed to be proactive; that was the only thing that could possibly help. But what did she have to work with? Her wings ached. Her legs ached too, but not as badly. She didn't know enough about her area to predict what any action would do, from assaulting the Prince to calling for help. But that left her with only herself as a tool, and she was borderline exhausted... She sniffed. Starlight was still somewhere above her. Above her...

Her eyes slid up, scanning the hallway's ceiling. Embedded in the ornate, carved rock were strips of mana lighting, the same powered kind she knew from the indoors and underground of Ironridge. Turned to a dim, energy-saving setting, they were a trap waiting to be sprung, ready to force her out of the shadows and into a pincer trap at any moment. But where there were lights, there was a cable. What could she do with a powered-down manaconduit?

"What are you doing?" Gazelle asked as she coiled her legs and sprung, punching the light cover.

"Basically... nothing!" Valey grunted, jumping again and this time earning a crack for her efforts. On the third blow, the casing shattered, and at her fourth jump Valey grabbed the glowing light fixture in her forehooves, dangling midair from an apparatus that wasn't designed to support a full batpony's weight. "What are you gonna do about it?"

Crack! The fixture broke, dropping Valey to the ground and a sparking mess of crystals, reflectors and energy coils along with her. Several loose filaments connected it to the empty socket in the ceiling, and Valey frantically blew on her hooves, fanning them to cool them off. "Ow, that's really hot! Perfect. Owowow!"

After some shaking, rubbing and cooling, Valey set herself back down and turned to the still-glowing energy fixture. Off came her saddlebags, and out came a squash she had purloined from Moriarty's storeroom. She wrapped it in the heated manacoils that were still connected to the power supply, sat down, and settled in to wait.

Once again, Gazelle lifted an eyebrow, giving her several seconds' benefit of the doubt. "What are you doing?"

"Making dinner," Valey replied. "I dunno how to roast a squash, but this will have to do. If I finish that and nobody's stopped me, I'm going to go to sleep for the night, right here on the floor."

Gazelle blinked.

"You can try to stop me," Valey continued, "or you can get bored and leave. It'll probably be really boring. If any guards find me and ask what I'm doing, I'll say I snuck up here to cook and eat dinner in a hallway, just to prove I could or because someone dared me or something. If they try to fight, then I'll bust them up, or wait for you to do it. But I'm kinda hoping they'll just stand there staring stupidly at each other and have no idea what to do, and either get someone important to come check this out or politely show me where the exit is. Either way, I need a break, and I feel like doing this. Try to stop me."

"Stop you?" Gazelle chuckled, a bad idea grin widening on his face. "That's brilliant! Ha ha! Admittedly, I don't have any idea how to roast a squash either, but mind if I join you? I can't wait to see the looks on their faces!"

Valey shrugged, and Gazelle settled down on the opposite side of the cooking gourd, flopping far more casually than royalty had a right to but not quite to the point of being barbaric. And then they sat there and watched it cook.

Soon enough, another patrol came along, marching with military precision and then halting in wide-eyed bafflement at the sight of the two ponies blocking the hall just as Valey had predicted. "Prince Gazelle?" one managed, barely able to keep her voice straight. "Can I ask what in Garsheeva's name you're doing? The keep is on lockdown due to an invasion!"

"Making dinner," Valey replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"It's a funny story, actually," Gazelle added, motioning to the guards to join him around the heating squash. "This sarosian? Your fabled invader, and the height of her aspirations were to cook a gourd in your halls. And she's getting away with it, too."

"Wha...?" The guards shuffled, searching for hidden meaning in his words but finding none. "Explain!" one requested, pointing a talon.

"I said what I meant and I meant what I said," Gazelle lectured, appearing more interested in the gourd than the guards. "When she bamboozled poor Geribaldi into giving her a free ride to the upper entrance, then managed to single-hoofedly render every guard you left unconscious and slip inside right under your noses, I was horribly concerned! Did you have a masterful assassin on your talons, come for Lord Garland himself? I gave chase and was about to engage her in combat myself when she stopped and began the most fascinating ritual, the results of which can be seen here." He pointed a paw at the mess of squash and cables. "After a conversation far more civilized than any I've had with Geribaldi, I discovered your grand invader is nothing more than a street hooligan acting on a friend's dare to make a mockery of your castle's defenses. If you ask me, spooking Baldy into causing a lockdown so that the difficulty would be at its highest, successfully infiltrating your tower regardless, dismantling a light and proceeding to cook her gourd accomplishes far more than that." He gazed seriously up at the guards with slitted eyes just like Valey's own. "Stormhoof, most defended of the twelve provinces, played for fools by one single slippery mare. If you ask me, you have a serious public relations disaster in the works."

The guards all blinked at him, processing the wall of information he had just dropped. "We need to get rid of her, then," one decided, pointing at Valey. "What are you doing, High Prince!? If she spreads information that that happened-!"

"Then what?" Gazelle inspected a paw. "It's not her you should be worried about; no one in Stormhoof takes a sarosian seriously. It's the other three guard squads we saw since I joined up with her who wandered off before I could give my warnings! They're probably gossiping about it to other patrols as we speak. Do you really want to waste time staring when there's action to be taken?"

Valey pretended to focus on her squash as the guards stared among themselves, deciding what to do. At the very least, she suddenly had a good idea of what Gazelle was up to: her sneaking around was embarrassing for Stormhoof's reputation, and he wanted them to feel like they had been had. But he was also enough of an ally of theirs to be welcome in the castle in the first place, and couldn't possibly have planned her intrusion. He had to be just that opportunistic, unless...

An image of a bottle-green griffon with an absurdly dapper bow tie surfaced in her memory, and Valey swallowed. Whether he and Gazelle were working together or not, and she already knew they were acquainted, Kero was in the tower, and she had a strong feeling he would show up sooner rather than later if she kept drawing attention to herself. But she was committed to the act, and it was too late to break and run with any amount of ease. Without twitching a muscle, Valey studied her cutie mark and readied herself once again for a fight, just in case.

Comments

[Campo]

Just wanna say that I love Gazelle. Valey too. That was just awesome.

[KMCA]

As a security guard I will admit that this would work. You have what you expect, what your experience tells you is normal. When something so far around the bend as this happens there's a moment where you experience what I like to jokingly call "vapour lock" Your brain just locks up and refuses to engage. Someone who knows how to make it worse can play you like a fiddle until your brain starts up again.