Crystal And Catacomb
"It can’t be morning!”
"Take it up with the Duchess, captain ma’am.” Gilda bent to her task, pulling greaves and pauldrons from the captain’s armor-tree, standing crowded in a corner of their very, very little room. She was forced to lay them out on the oil-cloth stretched out on their bed, despite the oil and the polish. There wasn’t room for anything else.
"I haven’t finished the engagement plan! I haven’t even worked out a theory of a plan! I have no idea what we’re going to do!” Gleaming Shield did that little dance she did when there wasn’t enough room to pace.
"Yes you do, captain ma’am, and please stand still.” Gilda smoothed out the captain’s gambeson, and began hanging the armor-harness around her pony’s barrel.
"We’re out of time!” The armor plate and accoutrements buckled to the harness, hiding it from view.
"We have exactly the right amount of time. Captain Bell will meet us in the yard, with Major... Major... Major?” Gilda tapped her beak with one talon, trying to remember the name of the Twenty-First Territorial Battalion’s executive officer.
"Major Night Twinkle. She’s a third cousin, twice removed. Or was it fourth cousin, thrice removed?” Gleaming Shield shimmied back and forth, letting Gilda slip the pauldrons over her withers.
"Right, her. We can’t get anygriff from the Fifth. The Twenty-First will have to do.” Gilda gave a tug to her officer’s armor, settling it on its hidden harness.
"We’ve never worked with the ponies of the Twenty-First Territorials!”
"Yes we have,” Gilda said, taking Gleaming Shield’s half-helm from the now-naked armor-tree. "We’ve been brigaded with them for months.”
"Looking at them across the parade ground isn’t working with them. It’s working in proximity! They never even asked me about the anti-gonne spell.”
"They’ve been in garrison roster, you know that.” Gilda took the captain’s cloth hat, a peaked cap designed to fit over the half-helm. "Only reason they’re here and available, and not out somewhere out beyond Bridlederry with our own griffons.”
"They’re a marching society, not a fighting battalion!”
"All we could get out of the brigadier. In fact…” Gilda held up the helmet and hat.
"Yes! Facts! She didn’t give them to us, she just told me to take what I needed. Said she couldn’t keep me from doing what I wanted.”
"Brigadier Falling Water has her reasons, you know that, captain ma’am.”
"I don’t want her job! I can’t even handle my job right now!” The unicorn’s head was darting around, leaving Gilda to chase her around the small room with both helm and hat in talon.
"And yet, that’s exactly what everygriff thinks you’re on the verge of doing, isn’t it? Taking her post as brigadier. Could you stand still for a second, captain ma’am?” Gilda took her shot, and shoved the helm over her captain’s mane and horn.
Gleaming Shield tossed her head in irritation. "Do I need both the hat and the helm today?”
"Yes, captain ma’am. We talked about this. We need both the armor and the uniform. That’s what the hat is designed for, to hide the steel under the velvet.” Gilda was already wearing her brocade lined with ensorceled chainmail under her panniers and her cockade.
"We need the show, and the steel, both.” Gilda shoved the hat over top of the unicorn’s helmet, and stood as far back as she could - which put her into the hall outside their room. "Do you have your flying spell handy?” Gilda asked through the open door.
"Ugh, it takes so much out of me. And the wings are cold!”
"Well, we don’t have any chariots handy today, and no place to park them when we get there. They’d get stolen. Anyway, today’s supposed to be unseasonably warm and sunny. Captain Bell said so last night.”
"She can’t know! Nopony runs the weather in this benighted province! There’s no posted schedule. It’s unnatural!”
Gilda ignored her pony’s pony-centric perplexities. Only Equestrian ponies felt the need to constantly fiddle with the weather, only Equestrian ponies got quite that neurotic about free-range nature. Only Equestrians mistook their wilful overbearing refusal to allow anything to manage their own affairs as the natural state of affairs.
They rattled down out of the royal wing to find the troops gathering in a marshalling yard just inside the Copper Gate. The assembled companies of the entire Twenty-First Griffish Territorial Battalion, and one company of the Marezonian Provincial Regiment. This collection of griffons and ponies made no sort of organizational sense - they weren’t brigaded together, had no common unit affiliations, and had never worked together in garrison, let alone in the field.
But they were what Gilda and Gleaming Shield had been able to scrape together. Obviously, it would have been preferable if they’d been able to work with their own Fifth Territorials, but the perverse demonology of the service had dictated that their home battalion were leagues away from where they needed them.
They found Captain Big Bell looking at a fresh copy of the Beak and Bone, waiting on Gleaming Shield’s arrival. The banner headline read, Villainous Hive Of Scum And Unionism!.
"Hey, there, Gleamin’ ma’am! Congrats on the promotion, mare. The colonel says she knew you were goin’ places. You seen this business? How’d they find out about us? Corporal Gilda, you moonlighting as a stringer fer the local libel-sheets?”
"While I wouldn’t put it past Gilda to take a side-job the way she goes on about bits, she’s hardly been out of my sight this last week. What are you talking about, captain?” asked Gleaming Shield. The big pegasus hoofed over said libel-sheet.
"Huh. Well, they got some of it right. And even our darker suspicions about the pink menace,” Gleaming said with a frown, speed-reading the paper’s thin Sunday extra. "But I’d think that someone listening in on our last-minute planning wouldn’t get it wrong exactly that way. It’s someone at Government House. Gilda, is this paper always like that?”
"Ehh, captain ma’am. Hard to say. Thing reads like one hen writing, but maybe there’s more’n one of them, and they’re just getting someone to-”
"Rewrite, yes. No, nothing show-stopping here. It’s better if the general public knows enough to be on the lookout. This helps. It did get distributed in the blue zone, Captain Bell?”
"You think I hang out on a street corner in the Pennies? Yesterday’s patrols said they were being sold everywhere. One copy came back with my ponies.”
"OK, fine. the rest of your regiment will be out there on patrol again?”
"Right where they can collapse on us if there’s an attack, and screen any big motion to engage outside of the planned perimeter, yes ma’am. Colonel Jubilee is on board.”
"Excellent,” Gilda’s captain said, looking like a cat whiskers-deep in the cream bowl.
That sufficed for the inspection of the pony part of their composite force. The Marezonians weren’t polished, but they’d worked with them before.
Well, Gilda had worked with the Marezonians before. And Big Bell was right there, where she’d promised she’d be. Which was more than could be said of the missing Major Night Twinkle. Or the pony officers missing from almost three fifths of the Twenty-First’s assembled companies.
"Food poisoning,” said the great big tom with sergeant’s stripes whom they’d met last night along with the missing Major Twinkle. "Some ‘alf-daft cook kicked a bad batch of peat mash out of the kitchens last night. ‘alf the offercers are greetin’ the sun in the latrine this morning.”
"How am I going to command two separate task forces of a battalion I’ve never even set eyes on, without officers?” whined Captain Gleaming Shield of the Crystal Guard.
"The same way you would with officers, captain ma’am,” Gilda said soothingly. "Ignore the existence of the rankers, give the orders to those officers we have, and the corporals for those we don’t, and let Sergeant-Major Gary here take care of matters. You can do that, can’t you, Sergeant-Major?”
The greying tom looked down on Gilda with the faintest hint of a smile tugging at his beak. Not many toms looked down on Gilda these days. It was a nice change of pace.
"Sergeant-Major?”
"What? Oh, yeh. We’ll foller your lead, Captain Shield. You don’t look much different from a regular captain. Shouldn’t you be wearin’ something glittery and fancy-like?”
"We didn’t have time! Rarity was too busy, there wasn’t enough advance notice… Gilda, am I out of uniform?”
Gilda rolled her eyes, and rooted through one of her panniers. She found an expended spellstone, and pulled it out of her bag and gave it a quick spit-shine. "Here, captain ma’am, gimme your hat.”
Gilda pinned the cheaply faceted sapphire onto the peak of the cap, next to the badge of the Duchy of Trottingham. She shoved the hat with its bit of shiny bling back on her captain’s head, who gazed up at her bat-hen with a baffled look.
"See? Crystal Guard field undress!” Gilda said to the sergeant-major of the Twenty-First Territorials.
"Izzat so? Well, at least it’s shiny,” the big tom agreed.
"We don’t have the Stinging Needle here to drape the captain ma’am in yards of gold braid. It’ll have to do,” Gilda said, exasperated.
"No, he’s right, Gilda. Sapphires, is it? Hold on, let me try something…” The captain frowned, her horn sparkling with a bit of effort.
The sapphire in her hat flowed, and poured over the unicorn like rain across a plastic-screened window. Wherever the glittering blue trickled, the captain’s blue-and-yellow-chased armor and great-coat turned crystalline and sparkling. When she was done, Gleaming Shield glistened in the morning sun like forty thousand bits of jewelry alight.
"Cor, miss, that’s the stuff!” said Sergeant-Major Gary. "If we’d had you back in the day, hain’t nopony would ‘ave ever outshone us on the pillar-pitch! That’s a right pretty trick, it is. I think the birds will foller you just to see what you do next, if that’s a sample!”
"Captain ma’am,” Gilda said, softly, looking at the gleam of her officer’s glory reflected in the eyes of the troopers standing in their files. "That’s a cue if ever I heard one. Give them their orders, ma’am.”
And so Gleaming Shield did.
The reaction force made the quick-march to Ironmonger’s Square in record time. The advance company of Territorials cleared the morning streets ahead of the pony company, who galloped across mercifully clean, ice-free cobblestones the whole length of the march-route from the Copper Gate across the western side of the Pennies. The trailing company of griffons hung lazily over the flank of the Marezonian column, looking suitably bored. The Twenty-First was more of a marching battalion than a fighting one, and Gilda could tell they missed their new finery, which she’d seen them peacocking around in garrison, now and again. She and the sergeant-major and Gleaming Shield fluttered over the pony column along with Captain Big Bell, whose tiny little feathered wings somehow managed to look less functional than Gleaming Shield’s wispy butterfly wings.
The scratch force enveloped the Cathedral of Labour, griffish corporals leading platoons to seize the entrances of each transept, and Bell’s company advancing to enter via the main nave. Goats and earth ponies were still working feverishly on some of the buttresses, and two of the transepts, despite the big inaugural meeting of the griffish tribal council scheduled for that afternoon. Additional corporals led a string of picket guards up onto the roofs of the neighboring apartment complexes and the Cathedral itself, to sit and stare at the laboring engineers of the Rock Valley Pioneers.
Nogriff knew what exactly the engineers were planning, or what their real orders were. The griffish troopers had orders to watch them like hawks.
For all the good that would probably do. If Gilda and Gleaming Shield didn’t know what to expect of Colonel Pie’s ponies, how could these under-prepared, inexperienced griffons make anything of whatever it was the ponies ended up doing?
Gilda and Gleaming Shield held one last rapid-fire huddle with Captain Bell and Sergeant-Major Gary.
"Way I see it, we’re playing ‘ome,” Gary opined. "The old cathedral’s our pillar-pitch, and we just got to keep the ‘eathen rebel from tossin’ any bombs into our perimeter. Simple matter of dividing up sectors, and letting each set of partners catch their own clouds. Er, rebel attacks.”
Captain Bell rolled her eyes at the old tom. "Buckball was always my game, old timer. And that’s a team sort of business. It won’t be anythin’ as simple as clangriffons in tartan cloaks runnin’ up to toss smokin’ bombs in through the church doors. We gotta work out lines of approach, vectors, that sort of thing. We don’t have enough ponies to go deep, though, do we?”
"Have you seen anything of the rest of your regiment yet, Captain Bell?” asked Gleaming Shield, looking formal and a bit strained in her shining armor. She clearly hadn’t thought through just how much attention she’d be getting from passers-by when she cast that spell upon herself, and there was a steady stream of looky-loos staring at her and the rest of the command huddle beside the patchy facade of the laborers’ portal.
"Nothin’ yet, but their patrol patterns are… hrm, we should be seeing First Company coming down Steeldriver in about thirty minutes. I expect to see the Colonel with them, we can talk with her about special patrols in the vicinity - she knows she was assigned this sector for a reason, but we need to make arrangements, y’know? Signals. What I’m really worried about is where are the Rangers? We’re supposed to have a team of them assigned to us, I talked to the Master Chief last night after you sent us back to barracks. The entire squadron they’ve got in city, is supposed to be all over the west end today. Including a full team that is supposed to be on the premises. I don’t see them, do you?”
"We never see the Beefeaters,” groused Gilda. "It’s their specialty, isn’t it? Not being around.”
"Gilda, shut-”
"I think I might be offended,” somegriffon interrupted Gleaming Shield’s admonition of her mouthy bat-hen. The whole huddle looked around in bafflement, trying to see who had snuck up on them. "‘ere we went to all of this trouble to get ‘ere ‘ours before dawn, and what do I get? Insults. Snide remarks. Accusations of laxity.”
"Are you using invisibility cantrips already?” Gleaming Shield asked, looking around to see if she could spot the tell-tale shimmer in the air.
"What? Do I sound like a unicorn to you? We don’t get your fancy pony spellwork. Just good ‘onest griffish grit and cleverness. ‘ave you fledgelings spotted me yet?”
Gilda looked down, belatedly realizing that the Ranger was projecting his voice away from where he actually was. There was a beak, sticking out of a storm sewer at their paws.
Ew.
"You were hiding in the sewers?” Gilda asked in disgust. "Don’t come out here, I don’t want to smell you.”
"It’s a storm sewer, not a real one, you dozy bint. Clean enough to eat a steak off of down ‘ere, it is. But nah, this stormwell connects with the catacombs.”
"The… what?” Gleaming Shield asked, boggled.
"Catacombs. It’s a cathedral, you didn’t think it ‘ad ‘idden tombs and cellars and witchy weird stuff under it? The bloody unionists used these tunnels for generations to run around the city council and the bosses. We wouldn’t be doin’ our damn jobs if we didn’t know these tunnels like the backs of me claws. The catacombs under the old cathedral’s always been our favorite junction. ‘ades, ‘alf the time we have a listenin’ post down here twenty-four seven. You got any idea ‘ow disruptin’ it’s been with the bloody Pioneers upstairs makin’ that windless racket?”
"Who am I addressing?” demanded Gleaming Shield, trying to regain control of her command.
"Petty Chief Gorham, at yer service, Captain Shield. Cor, ain’t you dolled up. I think yer gonna ruin my darksight, I can’t look at you too long. Don’t stand around too long ‘ere, somegriff’s gonna try and steal you and take you to the fences, they is. Break you up for your stones.”
"It’s a spell, Petty Chief.”
"I’d bloody well ‘ope so, you’re a queen’s ransom standing in the gutter, you is.”
"Can’t you come up out of that gutter? I feel like an idiot talking at my hooves.”
"No can do, yer captainship. This ‘ere is one of our favorite watching posts, it is. There ain’t no exit ‘ere, keeps ‘em from comin’ down after us if they get the idea we’re down ‘ere watchin’. There’s sally ports elsewheres, but it’s a bit of a jog and do we got the time for me to be duckin’ down into the catacombs just so’s you can yell at me at eye-levels?”
"These catacombs, how secure are they?” Gleaming Shield demanded, ignoring the half-hidden subterranean griffon’s borderline insubordination.
"As secure as they can get with me team of Rangers in their bowels. We’re all right and tight down ‘ere. Hain’t seen feather nor tail of a clangriffon in a goat’s age. Just dust comin’ down from all the thumpin’ about upstairs.”
"So nopony down there with black powder or explosives or matrixes or explosive spell circles?”
"Nawt I’ve seen nor ‘eard tell of, no. And explosive spell whats? What kind of ‘istorical romances ‘ave you been readin’? Griffons don’t go for none of that pony black arts stuff. We’re birds for ‘igh explosives and bright steel, Captain Shield. Tell me when the clans start ‘iring warlocks, and I’ll start worrying about the bloody black arts.”
"Damn it,” Gleaming Shield cursed. "I had been planning on going through the basements to see if Pinkie Pie had filled them with explosives and a rebel corpse or two for verisimilitude.”
"No corpses we didn’t make, no piles of barrels of black powder and wires and suchlike, yer captainship. Nobody but us Beefeaters and leetle piles of dust knocked loose by all the construction work.”
"Thank you, Petty Chief. Captain Bell, is that your Colonel approaching?”
And with the appearance of the head of the Marezonian provincials, Gilda and Gleaming Shield’s attention turned outwards, towards the most likely threats to the tribal council’s first, vulnerable meeting.
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This story is great. :D
Guessing their plan is, despite whatever Pinkie might have planned, to make sure this council meeting goes smoothly and is not sabotaged or marred by any deaths of the participating members, and actually goes well and as it was originally proposed.
Best of luck to them if so. But knowing Pinkie, I'm worrying to death that she's already a step ahead of them.
Or we've all presumed wrong on what her plans were from the start, a thought that doesn't necessarily soothe me any better.
9375915
Plot twist: Pinkie planned for them to interfere with the meeting, which goes off without a hitch. When they confront her, she tells them this.
Calling it now.
9376174
I'll double that--I was totally thinking the same thing when I made that comment.
I'm wondering if miss pie isn't a nightmare cultist here. And their interaction in matters is really a matter of sacrifice to bring back them for revenge.
Its, strange, but the more I wonder, it seems a thing.
With the fanatic nature of the troops she fielded. I just, yeah.
The one thing thats never really explained in this, and I would like to hear what can be said, either publicly or in message.
Are lineages something of a used thing and they react to empower someone of that bloodline? As gilda has to be pretty darn big by this point, given you've subtly been poking at her height throughout.
She's sorta been the impetus of change in matters. Taking charge overtly and subversively. Leading in the quiet of matters, and the point of breaking cadence's fugue state.
Griffons are obviously like orks. The more authority you have, or might have, the bigger you get.
That's why every fic with a griffon king or emperor is inevitably the biggest griffon in the story.
I can't help but wonder what Pinkie would do if Gleaming sat in during that first meeting. Collapsing the building when somepony so close to Cadence, who has shared her concerns with her, is in attendance seems ill-advised to say the least.
Of course, I'm trying to plan around a precognitive, which rarely ever ends well.
9381390
Of course they're planning around the unplannable. It could turn out that Pinkie Pie's Worker's Union Labor Party is completely on the level.
This pinkie pie case is getting crazy.
Ah yes. The route everyone would've missed. Nice.
If they're so familiar with it, though, there's no way Pinkie would use that
I've got friends on the other side!
So... not the obvious. But it is Pinkie Pie. Still, she had her engineers all over the place, who knows what they might have hidden in all the new masonry they renovated.
Or, if the plan was ever to screw with the first meeting.. too obvious... rather then wait a week or two till everyone starts letting their guard down.
It stuff like thus that makes The Joker such a problem for Batman, crazy is all but impossible to plan for.
What exactly does EUP stand for?
11052688
Equestrian Unified Principalities.
No, just kidding. It's explained in "Testing Testing 123":
given how cousins work, that's
wild
her 3rd cousin twice removed would be the same age-range (typically, mind) as her grandchildren or grandparents, and 4th thrice would be greats (again, typically, though I suppose if one branch of the tree really liked getting pregnant as early/late as possible you could get some weird mix ups; you don't see too great a mix up though until like 6th+ cousin)