Steady Hoof the Murderous Mare

by BronyWriter

Poker Night

Steady knocked on the door of the unassuming single story house in the middle of an unassuming suburb on the edge of Baltimare. She waited for a few moments before she heard the sound of hoofsteps from the other side of the door. She straightened up and put a smile on her face as the door opened.

"Steady! You're here!" Pressure Point cried, stepping inside to let Steady in. "About time you showed up."

Steady shrugged and stepped inside. "Got a bit of a late start. Everypony else already here?"

Pressure Point nodded. "Yeah, Cleaner actually only got here about fifteen minutes before you did, so we haven't been waiting too long." Pressure grinned and threw her hooves around Steady, pulling her in for a hug. "Ooh, it's so good to see you!"

"Yeah, you too," Steady wheezed. She tried to shift so Pressure's hug wasn't quite as tight, but if anything Pressure's hug only became tighter. "Uh.. you're kinda..."

"Oh!" Pressure let go of Steady with such speed that she nearly fell to the floor as she took in deep breaths of air. "Sorry about that. I wouldn't want to actually hurt you." Pressure chuckled and lightly punched Steady's shoulder. "That's more your thing."

Steady rolled her eyes. "Uh, no. I just kill them. Hurting them is your thing. I tend to make it quick."

Pressure stuck her tongue out as she locked the front door. "You didn't make it quick for that mobster bastard, though." Pressure bumped against Steady. "Good work, by the way. Almost as good as some of my work."

Steady blushed and flattened her ears. "I mean... I dunno. I should be better than that, don't you think?"

Pressure shrugged. "I dunno. I've had years of training and it's my cutie mark so..." Pressure paused for a brief second. "Oh. Oh, you mean, like, you should be a little more moral than that, or something."

"Yeah," Steady muttered.

Pressure shrugged again and led Steady through her house. "In any case, you at least made him as scared as those mares he was gonna do whatever with. That should count--"

"Let's talk about something else," Steady interrupted. A confident smile spread across her face as she entered a room where two stallions were sitting at a table, conversing with each other. "Like how I'm gonna whip your flanks at poker tonight!"

"We were worried that you wouldn't show up," Cleaner replied. "I thought you were too scared after I won all of your money last week."

"I have never been scared of you and I never will be," Steady said smugly as she took her usual place at the table. "If anything, you should be scared of me."

Cleaner rolled his eyes and opened a can of soda sitting next to him. "You don't scare me with decapitations anymore, Steady. They're a little... boring."

"Fine then," Steady grumbled as she took a soda from Pressure. "I'll have to do something that'll make you beg to have Clear wipe your memories!"

Clear Mind rolled his eyes and began shuffling the cards.

"I've seen the same horror stories and, well, horror that you have, Steady," Cleaner retorted. "Only way you're going to shock me is if you do something that'll make you worse than the ponies we go after."

Steady's smile grew brittle and she didn't respond. She slid the cards that Clear had dealt to her closer and fanned them out. Pressure took a seat next to her and waved her hoof at Cleaner.

"Oh come on, Cleaner. She's not that bad. I'm sure Steady wouldn't do anything too awful, right?"

"Like what she did to that mobster? That took a little cleaning."

Pressure shrugged. "We all gotta--"

"Let's not talk about that," Steady grumbled, sliding three cards back to Clear. "It's just... it's fine. I got it. It happened. Probably won't happen again."

"Hey, it's okay," Pressure said, scooting her chair over so she could nuzzle Steady's shoulder. "We understand, right guys?"

"Uh-huh." Cleaner smirked and took two cards from Clear. "So I take it that your nuzzle was just a comforting measure and not, say, a good excuse to look at Steady's cards?"

"You did not!" Steady growled, glaring at Pressure.

Pressure Point giggled and waved her hoof. "No, no, you know I'm a touchy-feely kind of pony. Plus, looking at my cards, I'm prrrreeeety sure that I have better ones than you do. Just saying."

"I wouldn't be completely sure about that," Steady retorted, pushing a few bits into the pot.

"I fold," Clear grumbled. "You're all idiots."

"Oh come on, Cleary. We're just having fun, right?" Cleaner tossed a few more bits onto the table. "It's just that I'm going to have more fun taking all of your bits."

"I told you to stop calling me that."

Cleaner snorted. "Yeah? Or what?"

Clear paused for a moment to take a small sip of his soda. He carefully put it down on the coaster, then stared at Cleaner with harsh, unblinking eyes. "Or I'll inform the next bystanders that your mother used to call you Pookie Snoosums when you were a little colt." Clean allowed himself the barest of smirks. "And that's the thing I won't erase."

Cleaner frowned and tilted his head. "But my mom didn't call me Pookie Snoosums."

Clear's smirk widened ever so slightly. "But they won't know that. All they'll remember about you is that your mother called you Pookie Snoosums."

"Damn, dude." Pressure shook her head and leaned back in her chair. "I'm only that sadistic when I'm interrogating somepony. That's just, wow, kind of impressive, really."

"Yeah. I only kill them," Steady replied.

"That’s just mean, Cleeeee--" Clear glanced at Cleaner out of the corner of his eye. "...eeeaarrrr. Fine. I'll find something better to call you."

"Not sure why my name doesn't cut it," Clear grumbled.

"Hey, cutting is Steady's thing and sometimes Pressure's thing. Me, I just kind of let life take me wherever." Cleaner pushed a few more bits to the center of the table. "Like victory."

"Oh, is that so?" Pressure said with a smirk. "So you have really good cards, then?"

Cleaner's eyes narrowed as he put his cards down. "No. No, we talked about this. You don't get to use your freaky mind game, body language and facial expression reading powers!"

"I can't?" Pressure tapped her jaw and called Cleaner's bet. "I don't remember that. Maybe Clear got to me. In any case, if you don't want me to do that, you shouldn't be so easy to read. Gosh, I'd have you screaming like a little filly in two seconds, then we would find out if your mother really did call you Pookie Snookums."

"Pookie Snoosums," Clear corrected.

"I honestly wouldn't be surprised by either," Steady admitted.

"Screw you, Pressure," Cleaner growled, tossing in more bits. "You ready to go down?"

"Not on you," Pressure said with a grin as she put her cards on the table. "Two pair, nines and fives."

Cleaner's mouth twitched and his eyes narrowed. "It's not fair. You're using your stupid powers." Cleaner groaned and tossed his cards down. Pair of nines.

"Not a unicorn, but thanks for that," Pressure said, reaching out to scoop up the small pile of bits. Steady poked her shoulder with a frown.

"What are you doing with that?"

Pressure raised an eyebrow. "Um... two pair beats a pair, Steady. We've had enough of these that you should know that."

"Yeah, they do." Steady put her cards on the table. "But they don't beat a full house, tens and sixes."

Pressure groaned and thunked her head on the table. "Dammit."

"There are benefits to blending in a little bit," Steady said as she pulled the bits over to her. "You and Cleaner kept flapping your gums at each other. Wasn't that hard."

"Bite me, Steady," Cleaner groaned, flicking a bit at Steady's forehead.

"How juvenile," Pressure said with a roll of her eyes.

Steady glowered at Cleaner and picked up her soda. "I told you to stop doing that. You want me to kill you with this? I totally can."

"Oh, and who would clean me up?" Cleaner said smugly. "Do you know how to get blood out of carpet? Didn't think so, filly."

"I could get a new carpet and we could call it a business expense," Pressure said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, and I need to keep practicing if I'm not going to get rusty," Steady pointed out.

"Yeah, yeah, just deal, Pressure."

Pressure collected the cards and began shuffling them as Steady put her newly-won bits into a neat stack. The table was quiet for a few moments with the only sounds being the shuffling cards and Clear Mind flipping a few of his bits. After a few moments, Pressure began dealing the cards while Steady and Cleaner put in the blinds. Pressure finished dealing and everypony grabbed their cards to check them.

"Hey, speaking of getting blood out of carpets, good job with that wacko shrink the other day," Cleaner said. "I barely had anything to do with him at all."

"Oh, um..." Another forced smile crossed Steady's face. "Yeah, for sure. Easy. He didn't put up quite as much of a fight as I thought he was going to."

"Probably lulled him into a false sense of security, what with doing a whole session with him and all," Pressure said. "Still surprised you did that, by the way. A psychological analysis from a monster like him probably wouldn't really be the healthiest thing, I'd bet. I dunno, did you get anything out of it?"

Steady shrugged and folded her cards. "I dunno. Gave him my whole story, if you can believe it. Not like he was making it out of that room alive to tell anypony, right? Freaked him out for sure."

"High bar," Clear said.

"I dunno. I don't think he saw himself as that evil. You know how they can be," Steady said. "Nopony is the villain of their own story, right?"

"I totally agree with that," Pressure said as she took two cards. "The way I've always seen it is that the baddies we go after think that other ponies are either the villains of their story or background no-name ponies so does it really matter in the end what they do to them? You should fight villains, and the no-name ponies don't matter anyway." She shrugged. "I dunno. I always figured that that was how they saw it, anyway."

"Isn't that, I mean, kind of the way we see it a little bit, too?" Steady muttered. "They're the bad guys, so it's fine if we torture and kill them."

"Interrogate," Pressure growled, glaring at Steady.

"Call it what you like."

"Holey shamoley, Steady." Cleaner shook his head and took three cards. "That shrink really did get into your head, didn't he? I mean, wow, do you ever think that he was saying that kind of stuff because he knew you were about to break his neck? Ponies will say all kinds of nasty stuff to make you feel bad when they know you're about to beat them to death."

"Yeah, but was he... wrong? I was the bad guy at the end of his story, for sure. Think about it: if you weren't a part of the story and you just heard it from, like, a narrator, you think you'd look at me, at us, as good guys or bad guys?"

Cleaner slammed his cards down on the table and shot up. "Why does it matter?!" he snarled. "Who cares? They probably wouldn't know the whole story anyway. Just forget it and do your job, alright?"

"Yeah, but--"

"You wanna go back to trying not to kill rude ponies at fast food jobs, is that it?" Cleaner's eyes narrowed and he flicked another bit at her. "Earning nothing and doing nothing of consequence? Well guess what: I don't want to go back to working in sewers. For the first time in my life I have a... a point, and if you want to have an existential crisis then that's your business, but I'm not going to get sucked into your moping, alright." He plopped back down in his chair and grabbed his cards again. "You're ruining poker night."

"Hey, I get it: I've had stuff like this too," Pressure said, putting her hoof on Steady's shoulder with a kind smile. "It's better than the alternative though, right? I can get how getting really violent might turn you off to doing this job and taking a toll on you. I know what it's like to hurt ponies. Maybe you could try to not be so violent? Sneak around and use poisons or something. Slip something into a few drinks, then head out and leave the rest to Cleaner."

"You make it sound so easy." Steady took a deep breath and forced a confident smile onto her face. "But I mean, that might not work because Cleaner would mess it up or something." She flicked the bit back to him. "Sounds like something he'd do."

Cleaner glared at Steady for another few moments before scoffing and shaking his head. "Bet you ten bits that you mess up before I do."

"You're on. You'd better hope that I don't take all of your bits tonight, then."

Pressure patted Steady's shoulder. "Let's not be too mean to him. If we are, he'll start suspecting that we went easy on him last week and that's why he won."

Cleaner's eyes narrowed. "Oh really?" He put his cards on the table. "Three sixes."

"Three sevens," Clear Mind replied, putting his cards on the table.

"Son of a--"

* * * *

Steady walked down the dark Baltimare streets on the way back to her house. The night had gone well enough. They didn't talk about anything negative for the rest of the night, unless one counted Cleaner's growing frustration at losing all of his bits. She chuckled at the memory of Pressure putting down the cards that completely sealed his fate and left him broke. Complaints of cheating and threats of graphic violence had followed.

Steady fluttered her wings to get a little warmth against the chilly night air. Her ears twitched when she heard the sound of hoofsteps behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow when she saw Clear Mind walking behind her. She stopped to let him catch up.

"Surprised to see you out here," she said. "Thought you were going to the train station."

"In a bit." He looked around the empty streets and peered down a dark alleyway that they passed. "Most young, attractive mares would be nervous walking the streets at night."

Steady scoffed. "Yeah, if anypony tried that with me, they'd be in for a bit of a surprise. Probably mean that we'd have to get Cleaner over here and he'd make a bunch of dumb, inappropriate jokes about the situation."

Clear waved a hoof. "Eh. He's barely a stallion and he has a hard job. Wouldn't worry too much."

"I know. He'll get it, right? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time, right?"

"First one Princess Luna hired."

"Yeah, so when he has time to mature then he'll get it and be a little less of a dummy."

"Hm."

The two walked in silence for a few blocks. Steady kept taking glances at Clear, but he didn't say anything to her, nor even look in her direction. She quietly sighed to herself, but figured that he would talk when he was ready. He didn't seem overly concerned about anything at the moment.

"You losing your nerve?"

Steady's eyes widened and she whirled around to face him. "No, no that's not it! I'm just a little stressed lately because it was pretty scary what happened to those mares we saved and I don't like what I did to that stallion."

"You've seen much worse than that in this job. Can't see why you'd be frustrated." Clear's mouth went thin for a moment. "Been doing this long enough to read ponies. Almost as good as Pressure."

"I'm not losing my nerve, Clear!" Steady insisted. "I've just been doing a little thinking, is all. I know I probably shouldn't because you shouldn't think too much about this job, but yeah, that therapist did kind of make me think about some stuff. I guess."

"Such as?"

"Such as if this is a good idea but what else can I do because it's my cutie mark and I really actually kind of like you guys even Cleaner but I don't know if we'd be friends if we didn't work together like this and I really want friends I don't have any outside of you three because why would I?" Steady groaned and bowed her head. "I can see the good in what we do. We're protecting Equestria and have protected it from a lot of awful stuff. It's not like Princess Luna sends us out against every mugger and scammer, right?"

"No."

Steady glared at him. "Loquacious as always. Anyway, then there's the question of if I did want to quit. Would Princess Luna see me as a liability and have to kill me to keep Equestria safe? I'm too dangerous to just be left alone at that point, right?"

"Princess Luna wouldn't kill you."

"But--"

Clear put his hoof on Steady's shoulder and looked her straight in the eye. "Princess Luna wouldn't kill you. Been doing this long enough to know that."

"Right, I'm sure." Steady pushed his hoof off and continued walking. "I guess what you and Cleaner do isn't that bad, all things considered, but Pressure and I... Pressure is such a chipper, huggy, fun pony. When I first met her and she told me what her job was, I thought that there was no way that she could be any good at it. She ran up to me, hugged me, nuzzled my shoulder and instantly declared that we'd be 'the bestest of friends'. Then I saw her at work and couldn't believe it. She was given two ponies, knew exactly which one had the info she wanted, then had that pony screaming and giving her everything in about thirty seconds. I mean, I'll bet that even you would tell her everything as quickly as you could after a few minutes."

"Probably."

"'Course it's not like Cleaner isn't weird, too. He's nineteen and his job is to clean up the bodies of ponies I kill. I think that most ponies would look at that and get a little uncomfortable, you know?"

Clear tilted his head. "Yeah."

"For goodness sake," Steady grumbled under her breath. "But anyway, yeah. I guess I've just been thinking about how wrong this all probably is. So I'm using my special talent for good, or so I'm told. But I'm afraid of not keeping it together, you know? What I did to that mob pony wasn't okay. Not at all. I should have just given him to Princess Luna so that he could have spent the rest of his life in prison. My cutie mark is murder, not sadistic torture. I guess when I saw what he had done to those mares, to those fillies, I couldn't just let him rot."

"Hm. Could make you forget."

Steady's jaw dropped and she took a few steps back from him. "Wh-what?"

"Could make you forget. You don't want to live with all of that. Makes sense. Could make you forget all of it."

Steady's eyes narrowed and she took another step back. "All of it like what I did to that mobster, or all of it period? Everything from the last few years."

"Technically both, but I was referring to the mobster."

"Right. No, I just..." Steady made a noise of disgust and waved her hoof at him. "No. That's just creepy, Clear. What, do you do that a lot? Was that your job before Princess Luna found you? Black market memory erasing of bad memories?"

Clear shrugged. "Not important."

"Uh-huh. I'm sure it's not. In any case, I don't want you to do that. If you did, then I might do it again, and I don't want that. I wanna learn from my mistakes, you know?"

"Guess."

"Yeah." Steady picked up a little speed and walked past Clear. A thought crossed her mind and she turned around to face him. "So out of curiosity, if I did quit, would you just erase my memories of all of this? Erase it and then, I dunno, make me start from square one or take enough to leave me as a blank, happy pony who believes her cutie mark is something different?"

Clear stared at Steady with his unblinking, unnerving eyes. Steady lifted a hoof as she considered running from him as fast as she could. She suddenly didn't feel as safe as she had before. They stared at each other for a few moments before Clear finally spoke.

"Up to you, I guess."

With that, he turned around and began walking to the train station, leaving Steady shivering in the chilly Baltimare night.

Comments

[AzureShade]

OK Clear is scarier than Steady Jesus Christ.

[unfortunately yiff]

jentucky fried chicken that took a turn

[Starlight Nova]

If the main OCs in this story were voiced, what would they sound like?

[TheClassyLeviathan]

"Up to you, I guess."

"I guess." Clear strikes me as a pony who never says anything without reason, I seriously doubt he tacked that onto his sentence and meant nothing by it.

[Goodluckfox]

“Have I ever asked you to wipe my memory before? Or have you ever done it without my consent?”

[Atom Smash]

Oooh, another chapter! I thought this was just going to be a oneshot.

[NexusDragon]

Clear Mind definitely just became my favorite out of the four of these ponies just from that little exchange. The quiet, reserved types always are the most interesting to me. And he's the first Luna hired so he's been around for a while too. I understand (sorta) where Steady is coming from but that little outburst Cleaner had definitely made me feel for him a bit. From sewers to dead bodies though, poor guy. All in all very interesting cast you got for this.

[-Brutus]

I love the dynamics between the members of that group.

[Chillean]

Great OCs, they play off of each other very well. Most main characters have someone dumb to provide balance, but this was a very even playing field most of the time.
The last scene was tense as fuc!

[CommanderBigMac]

M-m-m-morality!

[Geminii]

Assuming Clear is telling the truth about being Luna's first, he's also coming across here as it also being his job to monitor his co-workers and take appropriate action if they are, in fact, losing their nerve.

We know of Steady, Cleaner, and Pressure. But how many former team members do the three of them simply not remember the existence of, despite possibly working with them for months or years?

As for what Clear did before being recruited... there's a lot that's possible when no-one remembers seeing you, talking to you, or anything you did. He's basically a pony Silent - he could be standing in the same room as you, right in front of you, and you'd have no memory of him being there.

[The Spy of the Tiger]

Huh almost a year. Didn't realize I missed it till now.

[BronyWriter]

9927083
Huh... That long...

[pneu]

I just have to say that I honestly really love this and keep finding myself coming back to it every so often.

Steady Hoof is just a gem of a character.