Slice of Strife

by helmet of salvation

1. These animals don't listen

The piercing, rattling shriek of the referee's whistle ground its way above the cacophony of growls, squeaks, warbles, twitters and other animal sounds filling the little sod-roofed cottage. The hubbub lowered to a marginally less disturbing level while acquiring a distinctly indignant tone.

"All right critters, stop whatever you're doing and fall in right here. Eyes and ears on me. Move, move, move, move, move." A pony with a coat of sky blue and a mane and tail streaked with the colours of the rainbow flew to every corner of the cottage interior, her rasping voice reiterating her marching orders in no uncertain terms to every creature she encountered.

Signalling their displeasure in tongues unintelligible to the pony, the animals made their desultory way towards the centre of the living room and assembled in ragged files. Rabbits, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, cats, ferrets, badgers, a lone brown bear, goats, bats, cardinals, jays, woodpeckers, owls, swallows, lizards—all had made their home in and around the cottage under the stewardship of Rainbow Dash. The cottage stood near the boundary between Ponyville—a semi-rural township within the pony-ruled principality of Equestria—and the untamable wilderness of the Everfree Forest.

Rainbow Dash cast her eyes over the assembly before scowling and focusing on the stairway leading to her bedroom. Wrapped around the wooden framework at the base of the stairway was a tree snake, paying no attention to the pony.

The pony darted into the serpent's line of sight. "Hey! You got a hearing problem? Need a written invitation? Move it."

Nicoil could indeed not hear a word Rainbow Dash said but the pony's impatient glare and pointing of her forehoof towards the gathered animals conveyed her meaning sufficiently. The reptile slid her forked tongue out and flicked it up and down, giving an expression that seemed to say "I'm just sniffing the air here and totally not making a face at you." Loosening her grip on the stairway, Nicoil eased to the floor and undulated towards the assembly.

Rainbow, too, had descended to the floor. She preferred to spend her time in the air but right now she needed to place herself on the critters' level, to show she meant business. Head held high, chest thrust out, muscular legs working like pistons, she paced back and forth in front of her motley audience, conveying the most imposing figure she could and silently wishing her hoofbeats made a thunderous thudding sound instead of an adorable little clip-clop.

"You critters have pushed your boundaries for the last time, understand? Now, I like to think my leadership style with you has been pretty chillaxed, and I don't mind falling for a good prank now and then. The job you woodpeckers did on my bedposts was pretty sick, I'll admit.

"But this time you've gone too far. Ripping up my Wonderbolts posters and using them to line your birdcages and litter boxes. You didn't just destroy my property, you know. Treating images of Equestria's most awesome flying team like that is practically sacrilege.

"Now I'm not gonna take that kind of disrespect from anyone. But the last thing I want to do is punish any innocent creatures, so I'll give the ringleader a chance to show some guts, step up and take their medicine."

A few tense seconds passed as several creatures glanced at one another. Eventually, a small white rabbit with black beady eyes shuffled forward from the front rank.

"Angel. I wish I could say I'm surp——" Rainbow whipped her head around at a glimpse of movement to her right. A ferret had stepped forward as well. So did a gerbil. Birds hopped towards the pony, mammals walked, reptiles crawled, insects crept, until the entire menagerie had rolled forwards.

Rainbow narrowed her eyes and resumed her pacing. "So, that's the way you wanna play it, huh? Well if you're gonna take advantage of my good side, then get ready to meet my bad side. The time for fun is over. What I say goes. And I'll be keeping a close eye on all of you to make sure you stay in line." The pony stopped in front of Angel Bunny and pivoted her body to face him. "A very close eye." She stretched her neck down so that she engaged the rabbit in a long, close glower of menace.

Too long, in fact, and too close. For Angel took the opportunity to blow a fat, wet raspberry straight into the pony's face.

Rainbow Dash recoiled and let out an involuntary yelp of disgust as a chorus of amusement rippled through the assembled animals. Burning with ignominy, she wiped her muzzle dry on her foreleg and lunged at the rabbit, only to jerk to a halt and fall flat on her belly. As the laughter from the surrounding creatures increased, she turned to see Nicoil's tail wound tightly around her left rear leg, the serpent having anchored her head end around the leg of a sofa.

More movement in her peripheral vision caught Rainbow's attention. The animals to her right had parted to make room for the brown bear, fearsome teeth bared in an ursine grin, lumbering towards her. The great beast had never shown any signs of seriously harming her but if her body were to end up under his enormous paws she would be at his mercy. Such an indignity would take considerable living down.

With a flash of movement, Rainbow Dash sprang to her free hooves and shot towards the ceiling. She was strong; the power and suddenness of her ascent allowed her to slip with relative ease from within the smooth, dry scales of Nicoil, who was not a constrictor and was used to much smaller prey. The pony stopped short of the ceiling in time to see Angel give an insolent wave of his forepaw before pushing open a pair of glass windows and bounding outside.

"Don't move 'til I get back." The pony was already outside before her shouted command was half-complete. She doubted whether the critters would pay any attention. She was thinking of the bigger picture. If she were to keep the animals under her care from becoming pests, she had to win back their respect. Her best chance of doing so would be to make an example of the most troublesome of their number. Which meant catching him before he disappeared into a burrow.

Few creatures in or around Equestria could attain a speed approaching Rainbow Dash's aerial velocity. More importantly, despite her considerable inertia, she could change her trajectory at a sharp angle in an instant, allowing her to mirror every dodge and weave of her quarry that her keen eyes could perceive. Keeping pace with Angel was the easy part.

Rainbow's real challenge lay in restraining the little bunny without harming him—her destiny was not merely to control Ponyville's fauna, she had to protect and care for them as well. A pegasus pony, she lacked the magical spiral horn that allowed the unicorns to hold and levitate objects remotely. Her wings were unsuited to the task: even soft, fuzzy little Angel could inflict too much damage to the feathers or light bones in a struggle. Her tail wasn't prehensile enough. And the one time she tried to fasten her teeth around the scruff of his neck sent him into a state of near-panic. Her only option was to use her hard, blunt hooves to gather him up in her forelegs, and even that procedure could damage a small obstinate creature if done too hastily or forcefully. It required great precision and delicacy, and Rainbow Dash didn't do delicate.

She didn't face this problem the day she first discovered her true calling. The creatures had literally thrown themselves at her, clinging to her hide, mane and tail as she raced back and forth to rescue them from the rising floodwaters and guide or carry them to safety. For those too big to ride on her body, she crashed through tree trunks to make floating logs and pushed them, labouring mightily against the currents, until their passengers could reach higher ground. Her outstanding exhibition of speed, power, quick thinking, courage, determination and selflessness in the teeth of natural disaster had saved the lives of dozens of animals and earned Rainbow Dash her cutie mark—the symbol of a pony's destiny, adorning each side of their hindquarters.

Those same critters didn't throw themselves at her anymore, except to torment her. She tried her best to take care of them but it wasn't good enough. They gave themselves the run of Rainbow Dash's property and disregarded all of her efforts to rein in their havoc. It was as if her heroic rescue had never happened at all.

In fairness, it had not. The true source of her triple butterfly motif was the unfinished spell of the legendary unicorn wizard, Star Swirl the Bearded.

Princess Celestia, oligarch of Equestria, had assigned the completion of Star Swirl's spell to Twilight Sparkle, her beloved magic student whom she had sent to Ponyville to undertake a practical course in the most important magic of all: the magic of friendship.

Twilight, bright and prodigiously gifted but overly eager to please her mentor and acquire knowledge, cast the spell to determine its effect and deduce what needed to be done to rectify it. Noticing nothing, the youthful unicorn decided the incomplete spell was merely ineffective. Little did she realise the incantation had switched the cutie marks of her five closest friends, who thereafter had no reason to suspect that their marks had ever been otherwise. Instead, their subconscious minds had created false memories to rationalise their apparent destinies.

Rainbow Dash was one of those friends.

"No! Not the briars."

Angel shot his pursuer a glance of pure malevolence and bolted towards a small depression barred with a tangle of bramble bushes.

"Please, not the briars." Rainbow shot through the air, aiming for the shrinking space between Angel and the thicket. "Anywhere but the briars." She was fast but Angel was too close. She landed just as Angel's long, skinny rear paw disappeared into the depression.

There was little room to move, even for a creature as small as Angel, but that was of no concern. He was in no hurry. Rainbow Dash could not wait long for him to emerge, not with a cottage full of critters to attend to. Ensconced behind his thorny barricade, Angel turned to face the pony, his expression one of insufferable triumph.

His smirk faded when he noticed that Rainbow was wearing a similar look herself.

* * *

Emitting a stream of enraged squeaks, Angel squirmed and kicked, seemingly not caring where or how far he would fall should he succeed in breaking free. Rainbow Dash flew on, the crook of her right foreleg maintaining its grip on the writhing bunny. Steering was more difficult with only one free foreleg but Rainbow was a highly skilled flier, and not one to let a little awkwardness—or pain—faze her.

Several ragged red lines decorated her face, with even more on her front pasterns and fetlocks. Yet her hard, tough hooves took most of the exposure to the wicked briars when she had barged and slashed her way with brute force to the rabbit cornered within. Rainbow Dash didn't do delicate.

The wind aggravated the pain of her wounds but she didn't care. The sting would fade, the scars would heal. The pain of letting Angel thwart her would have lasted far longer, and set an unwelcome precedent for the other creatures in her care. Swift, decisive punishment of defiance: that would show them who was boss. Filled to bursting with pride and anticipation, Rainbow kited through the open windows of her cottage, ready to flaunt her prize to the other animals.

Her legs went slack, allowing Angel to drop harmlessly to the sofa. The bunny blew another raspberry and scampered off, while Rainbow Dash darted to every possible hiding place of her cottage and repeated the word "No" with increasing frequency.

She had been prepared to let the animals do their worst to the dwelling in her absence; they would answer for it later. What she didn't consider was that they would leave en masse to wreak chaos elsewhere in Ponyville. Whether they had played her or simply taken advantage of the opportunity, she had failed, and somepony else would most likely be paying the price for her blunder right now.

Rainbow flew back out of the cottage and rocketed high into the air, scanning the town from above for any gatherings of rampaging creatures. Within seconds she spotted them.

Sweet Apple Acres.

* * *