The After-Party
“Hello, Pinkie Pie,” said Gleaming Shield through gritted teeth. “It hasn't been nearly long enough since the last time I saw you. And don’t call me that, my name is -”
“Yeah, yeah, grrr, I’m so tough, I’m going to pretend I’m my dead brother! Fine, hi there, ‘Gleaming Shield’. You manage to kill anygriff today? Boy howdy did we send you a lot of rebels, didn’t we? Which battalion were you with again?”
“Fifth Griffish Territorial, as I’m sure you already knew. You always know, somehow.” The lieutenant’s eyes fell on Major Pie’s rank tabs, and Gilda felt for her at that moment. Gleaming Shield had been so proud of her early promotion, and the prospect of an even earlier captain’s baton in another half-year or so. How did a classmate of hers from the pony military academy end up reaching the rank of major already?
“Oh, yeah, I remember now. You must be the only member of our class to have volunteered for the colonials. Not that a few others didn’t end up out here all the same, but none who wanted it, or with your grades.”
“And none with your grades, either, Pinkie. Tell me again how you passed the final exams?”
“Ha! Family secret, I can’t tell you!”
“If that’s a euphemism for nepotism…”
“You know where I came from Twilight, the ponies of Rock Valley don’t have any hooks in high command!”
“Stop CALLING ME THAT!”
The pink staff officer giggled and stuck out her tongue, making an ‘oopsie’ face. Meanwhile, the general had gotten bored of his underling’s antics, and wandered off with the dark-maned pony soldier without any rank tabs. To look closer at the piles of griffon dead, Gilda supposed.
No pony corpses anywhere to be seen.
“Did you say that this battle was your idea, major, ma’am?” asked Gilda, to derail the circular argument the two ponies were locked into.
“Oh, yeah. Maybe. Not really? I mean, I didn’t mean for this, exactly, to happen. But we always knew that taunting the rebels day in, day out with flashy military parades would eventually draw out a response. So did the rebels, though, so, you know, they avoided being drawn out, and we kept waiting for the boom. Always boom tomorrow, you know, never boom today? Six months we’ve been waiting for the boom.
“Honestly, I think we finally killed or captured the last rebel commander with the sense to not rise to our bait, and here they are. Baited! The dummies must be in charge on that side of the fence, now. I just hope we didn’t catch the dumber ones in this.
“They might try it again!” The young staffer giggled like an innocent foal, smiling sweetly in the midst of the worst stench Gilda had ever smelled.
And Gilda had known some truly ripe quarters of old Griffonstone. She looked down, and realized that although the pink pony was bouncing up and down on her naked hooves, somehow she was staying out of the pools of drying, sticky blood and worse fluids soaking the cobblestones under-hoof.
“Pinkie,” ground out Gleaming Shield, “Could you take a little less joy in the damage done to our own battalions? The Second Brigade had to have paid heavily for this success of yours.”
“I’m not celebrating today’s success. I’m rejoicing in the end of six months of failure! What you have to understand, Twilight, is that war is full of ponies who absolutely, positively, absoposolutely need cheering up in the worst way possible. So we need to blow them up in the fastest, quickest way possible, so that the survivors can enjoy the 'yay, you surrendered!' parties!
“So as far as I’m concerned, the tragedy wasn’t today. It was these long, boring months of burning down the ghettos one warehouse and shack at a time, torturing these poor birdies and killing them only a little at a time. That was the real tragedy! So we killed a whole bunch of them this time! That’s a good thing!
“Maybe the survivors will even come in and sue for peace! Wouldn’t that be nifty?”
Lights were being set up by griffons under the instructions of unicorn ponies with their horns glowing bright. The clean-up continued, as more and more uniformed ponies appeared to rubberneck, much like Gleaming Shield and Gilda had done. Gilda was stuck with the lieutenant’s gig, so she couldn’t wander around like the rest of them, and slowly lost track of both Gleaming Shield and her sort-of-not-really friend from school, as they meandered into the darkness, still squabbling.
While she waited for the lieutenant to wrap up her screaming session with Major Pie somewhere out in the half-darkness of the battle-damaged square, Gilda found herself with nothing to do but stare at the nearest pile of dead griffons, and eavesdrop on the conversations of other officers as they emerged from the darkness in their turn, and drifted past her carriage.
“Amazing that they chose Gilbert Square. It’s as if they were trying to get mouse-trapped…”
“...strike force was in exactly the right place, it’s like they just put their flanks in our faces…”
“...could you believe it? I thought it was a trick. We didn’t tuck right into them, because I was busy sending scouts into my own rear and flanks looking for the other side of the pincers or the surprise. But they didn’t find…”
“...when Major Pie told us to move the flying battery in parallel ahead of the crab-backs, all she said was that we were ‘in case of massacre-related emergencies’. I have no idea how…”
“...but how would they have known we were there? We didn’t know we’d be there until we were…”
“...things scare me in this world, but that mare terrifies me. It isn’t the glee, it’s the incomprehension when you ask her…”
“...terrible civilian losses, though. The bombs caught more onlookers than anything…”
“...sickening, really. We did our jobs. Damn well. It could have been…”
“...hospitals are overflowing, I hear…”
“...not a single casualty in my entire unit.”
“Really? I had two wing-sprains and a recruit managed to stab herself with her own spearhead.”
“Well, those hardly count. That’s your basic marching order sick-list fodder…”
“Interesting place to wait for your officer, Lance Corporal Gilda,” the dark-coated stallion said, appearing out of nowhere in Gilda’s blind spot. “Getting a good earful of intelligence, are you?”
“Gah! Hello, uh - sir? Do I know you from somewhere? Uh - where’s your rank tabs?”
“That’s need to know, and you’ve already gotten two ears full of things you did not Need To Know. I think it would be an excellent thing if ALL THE OFFICERS IN THE SOUND OF MY VOICE WOULD RETURN TO THEIR UNITS IMMEDIATELY! This is not a coffee klatch, nor is it a staff conference! This is a battlefield! If you are not scrubbing cobblestones in five minutes and you are still in this square, I will have you arrested for dereliction of duty!”
Gilda looked around for the goon squad which the nameless dark pony was using to back up his utterly unsupported threats, but there wasn’t anypony or anygriff anywhere around. But when Gilda looked back, the dark pony was gone, and the officers were scattering to the four winds.
“...the residue of a prepared mind. Oh, hello, General Grouchy-pants. Seen enough of the butchery yet?”
Gleaming Shield and Pinkie Pie emerged from the gloom in one direction, and the General and a collection of additional aides from another direction, both of them arriving in Gilda’s dim little corner of the stinking darkness at the same time.
“Pie! We still need to talk about the decisions made today! If you’re going to be part of my G-3 section, I need better accountability-”
“Oh, General, didn’t you get the memo? I won’t be joining your Operations section. I have a letter from Sky Marshal Firefly. They’re establishing a new command-level staff section for me and my ponies. J-13!”
“J what? There isn’t even a J-12!”
“No, and there isn’t a J-11 either. But there’s a J-13 now! I’m calling it the Special Section for Plotting, Planning, and Partying! I will need to talk to your Gs 1 through 5 inclusive. This experiment proved the concept, I’ll be spinning up your very own Special Section, your own G-13! We’re going to make this war so much fun, the enemy will just die from laughter!”
The lieutenant rolled her eyes, and turned her back on the livid commander and his herd of confused underlings as the pink pony continued to fill the darkness with her madness.
“Come on, Gilda. We’ve been ordered out of the way of the cleaning crews. Time to return to the battalion.”
And as night displaced evening, the griffons with mops and shovels started appearing out of the darkness around the jabbering major and her captive audience of staffers. Gilda and Gleaming Shield lifted up off the ground, spiraling lazily counter-clockwise over the indifferently-lit battlefield.
As they rose into the dark skies, Gilda saw first one, then three pegasi in the light armor the pony aerial squadrons wore. They were doing something peculiar she didn’t quite understand at first in the darkness. Without asking permission, Gilda turned the colonel’s gig aside to investigate.
Gleaming Shield helpfully lit up her horn to illuminate the mystery ponies as they flitted about in the smoky air over the darkened battlefield. Gilda could now see this pony and that grabbing bits of blackened smoke, and dragging them here and there, while others flew rapidly in and out of the globe of horn-glow like barn-sparrows through a fireplace-lit longhouse.
“What are they doing, lieutenant, ma’am?” asked Gilda, flummoxed.
“Storm-making, Gilda. They’re building a rainstorm from scratch. It’ll be a filthy rain, put together with this miasma. Stinking of gunpowder and death.”
Gilda had never understood the pony fixation with controlling the weather, but never had she not understood so intensely as that night, watching pegasi labor long into the evening, wringing a bit of foul drizzle from those dry, smokey clouds.
“But, why?”
“Tradition, Gilda, tradition. After any battle of note, the warriors of the pegasus nations have done this. They bring together whatever clouds they can, and wring them out over the battlefield. Some say it is their way of weeping for the dead. They themselves will tell you it’s to wash the blood and the hate away, so that it doesn’t attract windigos.”
“But windigos are a myth!”
“The pegasus position on that question is that if they keep to their traditions, the windigo will continue to remain a myth. Regardless, I like my posterior unfrozen, don’t you?”
As Gilda bent the aerial cart downwards, and started the search for the rest of their battalion in the half-darkened streets below, they passed between the flying ponies as they flew through the measures of their traditional cloud-cotillion. Long after they left them behind, the pegasi continued to wring bitter tears from the dry eye of the heavens into the night.
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What the-? I was right! He is a political officer!
Kind of?
This may be the most disturbing thing I read today.
From the sound of it, the -13 sections are weaponizing party ponies.
If that isn't a war crime, it will be soon. And that no-need-to-know data... Well, we'll see what comes of all of this.
Damn this Pinkie scares me
If the Pink one isn’t completely adversarial by the end of this story I will be surprised.
I'm impressed and a little jealous. This chapter does an incredible job of blending humor and... cynicism? Bitterness? It is a bit funny, even if in a dark manner, but the somberness at the end doesn't feel out of place. There's no sense of mood whiplash or anything.
Great. Pony Komissar. Exactly what Equestria needed. I feel there is something wrong here and it's not Celestia fault for once. I feel they will be problem with that later.
And Pinkie too. To insane to be let alive at some point. Disregarding civilian lives like that...
I hope Twilight and her unit can stay out of trouble.
But the bit about Twilight being the only one applying to work with Colonial is very interesting. I wonder what it was about?
9251874
"This may be the most disturbing thing I read today."
That paragraph, for me, nah, I'd already heard of that school of thought (that a short bout of fighting of high intensity does overall less damage, to both sides and to the civilians, than a longer conflict of lower intensity), and while I don't know if it's correct, it seems plausible enough that I at least don't find it disturbing to have it raised as a possibility.
This one, though, just before:
It's the way she states it, and presumably thinks about it... Imagining her saying, in her happy Pinkie voice, that there are lots of ponies (meaning people in general in addition to biological ponies, presumably) who really badly need cheering up, and then continuing, in the same voice, about how it's so good to kill them...
Oh, and then remember that this pony appears to be just rocketing up the rank ladder, too, with this sort of thinking and presentation.
Boom.
That's...one way of looking at it. I guess.
I'm starting to suspect there's something more going on behind the scenes among the Equestrian ranks...and if I'm right in my suspicions, the implications that leaves me with are...worrying.
Very much enjoying the B5 reference, along with everything else that gets stuck in.
Is pinky a reincarnated Libertarian Japanese business man who hr job got him killed ?
In a warzone, Pinkie manages to fit in with the rest of the spooks just fine. Freaking psi ops.
Another very high ranking pegasus officer name Firefly, huh? Who are you?
I love some good ol’ nods to pegasus warrior heritage!
Pinkie Pie: putting the "laugh" in slaughter"
That is a beautifull piece of writing . .
The rebels were so fantastically stupid, it sounds like they're currently being led by a double agent who wanted to get as many of them killed as possible.
So far this seems like a really one-sided fight. The only way the rebels could possibly make any progress is if they gained some kind of Mary-Sue commander who was just good at everything...
9260233
In the rebels' defense, they did resist rising to the bait for six months. And were playing against a god-modder who had fog of war turned off.
9260310 Sure, a precog is total Hax. But based on
That sounded to me like not just good fortune and strategy on Pinkie and the EUP's part, but incredible stupidity on the part of the rebels, to the point where I was wondering if Gabby has been deployed as some kind of double agent in the rebellion.
9261795
That seems to make sense to me - or, rather, to not make sense in a way which lends verisimilitude. A army organization which made complete sense would be the sign of recent total reforms or, most likely, a very recent creation.
9251874
In an sense she is right. An long war will make people suffer more then an short war. An long war will make the civilians suffer under military rule and will have surtage of everything and with the constant treat of death.
There's something wrong with this version of Pinkie.
This was the scariest version of Pinkie Pie I've seen or read, or even read of.
9364869
Far more horrifying than Cupcakes.
One of the more disturbing Pinkie Pies in the Greater Equestrian Multiverse.
Well, that's gonna haunt my dreams now.
That is a heck of a way to close a chapter. Delicious, delicious phrasing there.
If you're trying to make me root for the rebels here, you're doing a fine job.
-And just like that, this Pinkie moves firmly away from "Mad Killer Pinkemena but directed usefully" into "Pinkie, wiser than she seems"... although I am only ~98% sure her logic is correct.
-As I pause to make this post it occurs to me that her rapid promotions are entirely plausible. Somepony who does something completely against SOP, but with good results and can only refer to the "delusions" of a "madmare" for their justification might have trouble maintaining their rank. Someone who IS a "madmare" but keeps her mouth shut on the subject, and simply gets results with unusual methods is much more tolerable. Thus the appropriate way of militarizing Pinkie Sense would be to promote her as quickly as possible. This may or may not be the actual reasoning, but it is certainly a viable hypothesis to me based on what we know so far.
-Lastly, I have never watched Blackadder, but I seem to recall it being described that the Blackadder's were a cowards, and cursed to bad luck until one of them performed an act of bravery. So far "Gleaming Shield" seems to not be such, given she had Gilda fly her into a dogfight, if only to give orders from a heavily armored vehicle.
-Incidentally, either there is some aspect of magic I am missing (or simply have a differing fanon of), or the lack of heavier armor for Gilda is a horribly short-sighted decision from an engineering viewpoint. It doesn't take much brains to aim for the person keeping a hated high-value target from plummeting rather than the high-value target itself. Some brains, but not much. Then again, maybe your sky-vehicles don't rely on the magic of the puller to remain horizontally behind them and/or retain the flight magic for long enough after that demise to allow a gentle decent of one sort or another. Or a separate enchantment or commonly trained spell for the passenger. Or maybe I am just over-thinking it?
-Is it just me, or does the use of lights to continue the clean-up smell of discrete forensic analysis of tactics and such, rather than simple "lets get this cleared up before it starts to stink even WORSE".
“...when Major Pie told us to move the flying battery in parallel ahead of the crab-backs, all she said was that we were ‘in case of massacre-related emergencies’. I have no idea how…”
-More evidence of what I said about the reasons for Pinkie's promotions. Although I also wonder how much it might have been a matter of her superiors never knowing the reasons for her repeated successes. Although the lines before this imply there might have also been other things going on (perhaps our mysterious black-clad personage without rank emblems arranged something sneaky... I could see Maud going far as a Spook based on her poker faced ability to keep secrets, intelligence, and MAYBE being forgettable due to being boring).
-Incoming Fluttershy doing the sort of things that in our world developed into stuff like the Red Cross and/or "Doctor's Without Borders"???
-And here I thought the lack of Pony causalities was supposed to be a commentary on the Ponies getting the Gryphons to do all the really dangerous bits of the fighting.
-Did I miss them being referred to as a stallion before? Not Maud then...
-Dude in black confirmed for Spook. How utterly unsurprising.
-People have occasionally compared Pinkie to The Joker, perhaps a mirror universe Good one. This fits that second image... or the first if one is being very pessimistic. I'd say I pity the rebels for having to face this if it weren't for her earlier point about decisive victories resulting in fewer casualties even to the enemy.
-A viable explanation for a plot-hole I hadn't even considered. Even if there is no magical basis to it, the ritual might be a useful psychological exercise to accomplish the desired result. Regardless, it sounds better than nothing for anti-bateriological purposes... perhaps even better than a pure rain, as toxicity would kill the bacteria, rather than merely washing them into (open?) sewers. Probably not, given the lack of volume to wash it away, but volume would require too much effort... come to that leaving a cleaner soaking on a surface a few minutes before washing it away can produce superior results, and this may follow a similar theory to an extent.
-Very poetic.
9252179
Disturbing to read, yes, but at the end of the day it may be a reasonable way of coping with the reality of the first paragraph being discussed.
Let me quote from 2012 from Orthodox_Gozerite on forum.rpg.net :
(Enlarging and bolding mine.)
The real test of which of our impressions is more correct would be to see what she does after she retires or especially if the conflict ends. How she goes about interrogating prisoners might or might not also be a good indicator.
9251864
Intelligence service, not political officer.
And yet again Pinkie pie terrifies me.
Will be really surprised if Pinkie doesn't end up as a major antagonist in the end.
Horus? Is that you?
Pinkie is seriously taking a page out of Horus Lupercal's book: The best war is the quickest war. And that means the most violent and brutal. Because then the enemy surrenders, and less people die.
And again the story manages to creep right to the edges of where it starts to lose me a little in pushing a bit too far from how it feels it could be from the Equestria we know having taken a different track... and then swerves away from that line with added, really amazing and fitting details.
Here, both the bizarre, seemingly bloodthirsty and amoral stuff from Pinkie having some twisted logic behind it that you can see it's not that simple. But especially that talk about the pegasus ceremony after a battle.....