Chapter 80
Listen to stories with Wanderer, Miss Irons, and Trixie: 6 Votes
After a few minutes to look around the camp and sip from her bottle of whiskey, Kestrel ultimately decided she was comfortable where she was, seated by the fire. The air only grew colder as night crept in, the dry dirt and dust of the southwest doing little to hold the day’s heat, so the flames were a welcome companion. Besides, listening to Wanderer tell stories that blurred the line between truth and fiction was always a good way to pass the time.
Kestrel leaned back in her chair, bottle of whiskey wrapped in the feathers of her wing, and tilted her chin up towards the two elderly ponies sitting across the fire from her. “So? What tale was you in the middle of ‘fore Tumbleweed dropped the unfortunate news?”
Wanderer waved a dull red wing turned vibrant by the flickering light of the campfire. “Oh, that one was just about the two years I spent as a ship’s mate. You’ve heard that story a hundred times before, I’m sure.”
“The one where the captain pressed you into the crew because he caught you sleepin’ with his daughter?” Kestrel snickered at that. “You always was the romantic kind, Wanderer.”
“Oh, ain’t that, the truth,” Miss Irons said, shooting the elderly stallion a flirty look.
Trixie made an exaggerated gagging sound as the two camp elders rubbed noses. “Trixie thinks other things might be her demise before these ‘Pinks’ ponies…”
“Hush, you.” Miss Irons shot Trixie a stern look. “Just because we’ve seen our fair share of years doesn’t mean we can’t have a special somepony.”
“Yeah,” Wanderer said, and the quirk of his eyebrows was all the warning Kestrel had for what was coming next. “Young love is nice and all, but it’s clumsy. Old love, now… let’s just say when you’re seventy-two, you know a few things about anatomy.”
Kestrel snorted, almost shooting whiskey out her nose, and Trixie’s jaw fell slack while a rosy blush built on her cheeks. “I… Trixie…” the magician stammered, at a loss for words.”
Miss Irons lightly bopped Wanderer on the nose. “Come now, you’re making the young mares uncomfortable,” she teased.
“I wouldn’t be an old coot if I didn’t,” Wanderer lightheartedly retorted. The two chuckled, a laughter that slowly faded away, only to be overcome by coughing and drunken laughter from the other side of the camp. Kestrel looked over her shoulder to see Roughshod pounding his chest while Silver Wings teetered and tottered in her seat, pointing at him and laughing with an empty shot glass balanced between her feathers. Kestrel had no idea what was so funny, but she was at least happy to see that those two hadn’t let the news about the Pinks get to them.
That was something that Trixie picked up on as well. “Why is nopony worried about the professional outlaw hunters staying in force just a few miles up the road?” she asked, frowning.
“Because this isn’t anything new for us,” Wanderer said. “We’ve been on the run more often than not these past few years. Much of that time was spent running from the Pinks. When you’re part of a gang like ours, it’s just a fact of life. But so long as you stay smart and you don’t let your guard down, you’ll live to see tomorrow.”
Trixie glanced back at the two ponies playing drinking games on the other side of the camp. “This doesn’t feel like we’re keeping our guard up…”
“Tumbleweed and Snapshot are walkin’ ‘round,” Kestrel assured her. “You can bet that they’re keepin’ an eye open for any threats. So long as we stick together and trust each other, we’ll be fine.”
The magician didn’t have anything to say about that, but Kestrel could tell by the way she hunched her shoulders forward that her concerns weren’t entirely waved away. Instead, Kestrel turned to Wanderer, hoping that a story would help get the mare’s mind off of things. “How ‘bout another one, Wanderer?” she asked him. “Give us a really good one. Somethin’ I ain’t heard before.”
“Something new?” Wanderer tapped his chin in thought, the primary feather of his wing bending with each tap. “You’ve heard most of my stories, we’ve been together for so long. Though… hmm…” He slowly grinned and raised an eyebrow at the two young mares sitting across the fire from him. “I ever tell you about the time I met Princess Celestia?”
“What?” That one caught Kestrel by surprise. “You never… you’re makin’ that one up, ain’t you? You’d have told us ‘bout that sooner if it were true.”
“Well, I mostly don’t talk about it because it’s an embarrassing one, truth be told,” Wanderer said with a shrug. “Another story dredged up from my days as a rambunctious colt.”
Trixie looked over Wanderer’s aged features, his fraying wings, the thinning patches of his coat. “Trixie finds it hard to imagine you as a colt,” she said.
“Believe it or not, I wasn’t born in my seventies,” Wanderer said with a little chuckle. “I was actually quite the troublemaker when I was small. My father was a soldier who flew off to Griffonia when I was little and never came back. My mother was a baker in Cloudsdale, though the feather flu got her before too long. Perhaps it’s no surprise I turned to a life of crime when I turned thirteen and was on my own.”
His wings picked up the guitar lying nearby and idly strummed soft notes on the strings. They didn’t play a melody, only a few lonely chords; it was the older stallion’s way of thinking when digging through his memories for his stories. “When you’re thirteen and on your own in a sky city, about the only thing you can do to get a roof over your head is work in the weather factories. Those new complexes were being built up at a blistering pace while I was a colt. The promise was there, alright. Imagine it: pegasi could manufacture the weather in one central hub and bring it all throughout Equestria, instead of having to corral clouds and shape weather patterns on the site to fit your schedule. Thing is, those factories going up so fast, needed ponies to operate them. They tried bringing in all sorts of workers on the promise of two meals and a roof over their heads. Cloudsdale was in the middle of a recession, so labor wasn’t exactly hard to find. But they preferred colts my age, because they could pay us pennies compared to adults. But I wasn’t about to settle for that.”
“Why?” Trixie asked. “You needed a job, didn’t you?”
“I needed money, not a job,” Wanderer corrected her. “And I figured there had to be a better way of collecting bits than working in a factory where I’d more likely than not get electrocuted by a thundercloud, considering there were foals as young as ten operating the machinery. So I sat down on a cloud and thought long and hard about how I was going to get the bits I needed to survive. And I came to the conclusion that only a dumb and desperate thirteen year old could possibly think up.”
Kestrel covered her muzzle with a wing to hide the growing smirk on her face. She knew exactly where Wanderer was going with this story.
Trixie, however, apparently didn’t. “What’s that?” she asked, angling her head to the side.
“Well, if you’re going to rob somepony, they might as well be worth the time, right?” The small smile on Wanderer’s lips widened. “And who has more money in Equestria other than Princess Celestia herself?”
“You tried to rob Princess Celestia?!”
“Ambitious, that’s for damn sure,” Kestrel said with a snicker.
“Yes, ‘tried’ being the operative word there,” Wanderer said. “I made it about as far as the gardens before I got caught. Or in other words, I dived in from a cloud and had guards on me before my hooves even touched the ground.”
That even earned a snort from Miss Irons. “I see not much has changed since your youth.”
Wanderer proudly shook his head. “Still the loose cannon I’ve always been. But, anyway, after the guards caught hold of me, they went to take me in for questioning, since who knows why a starving colt would be landing in the royal grounds in the middle of the day. On the way there, though, I crossed paths with the Princess herself.”
He rubbed a hoof behind his neck and shrugged his wings. “Honestly, though, there isn’t much more to say about that. She asked what was happening, and I eventually admitted to her that I was trying to rob the castle for bits, she laughed and had me released. She even let me stay for dinner in the royal halls before letting me go.”
“No way!” Trixie exclaimed. “This is made up!”
“Everything I’ve said is the truth,” Wanderer assured her. “Our nation’s princess is one of the kindest ponies I’ve ever met. She reminded me a lot of my mother, in fact. But all the despicable greed in Equestria, well it’s not her fault. She lives in a castle on a mountaintop, and that doesn’t let her see as much of her nation as she probably thinks it does. There are so many ponies who take advantage of her kindness all throughout Equestria that it’s the reason things are the way they are today.”
“Like how you took advantage of her kindness in eating dinner and then scrammin’?” Kestrel asked.
“Yes, well, what can I say? After she politely showed me the door and offered me some words of encouragement, I gave up on trying to rob her again.” The old pegasus chuckled as he added, “She offered me a job helping around the palace, but of course I was too proud and too embarrassed to realize how gold of an offer she’d presented right in front of me. Instead, I slept in an alley, robbed a pony the next morning, and took a train all the way to Manehattan just to put that whole thing behind me.”
“Imagine you, though!” Miss Irons exclaimed. “Head butler to the Princess, not some wanted outlaw!”
“I think I prefer life this way,” Wanderer said. “I’ve seen more of the world than I ever would have had I just stayed in Canterlot. And I’ve met more ponies in my many storied years than thirteen year old me could have imagined. Sure, I could have had a happy and comfortable life had I made the smart decision when I was a stupid teenager… but I wouldn’t trade any of this for the world.”
After a moment and a few last chords, Wanderer set the guitar aside and forced his tired bones into a standing position. “I think I’ll head in for the night,” he said, glancing up at the stars overhead. “Old coots like myself can’t compete with you younger ponies when it comes to staying up late.”
“We can’t compete with you when it comes to getting up early,” Kestrel assured him. “Goodnight, Wanderer.”
The old stallion touched his hat and slowly slipped into the darkness, Miss Irons not too far behind him after giving a curt nod to Kestrel and Trixie. When they were gone, Kestrel turned to Trixie and noticed the mare was deep in thought.
“Tryin’ to figure out if everything he said is true?” she asked the magician.
“Yes… no… ugh, Trixie doesn’t know.” The blue mare rocked herself out of the chair and to her hooves, her eyes looking into the darkness where the two elderly ponies had disappeared. “This is his family, isn’t it?” she finally asked.
Kestrel simply nodded. “We’re all misfits, Trixie,” she said. “All of us have lost somethin’. This world don’t want us none, so we had to find other ponies who would. The Gang is my family, much as it’s Wanderer’s, much as it’s Tumbleweed’s. We’re gonna stick together until the day we die, one way or another. Whether that’s years from now on a sunny beach on a tropical island, or in a few months at the end of a rope, we’ll always be a family. Bonds like these ain’t somethin’ you take for granted.”
Yawning, Kestrel stood up and jammed the cork back in the whiskey bottle, not feeling like finishing off the rest at the moment. “Whatever happens, we’ll look out for each other. That means everypony,” she said, making eye contact with the magician and giving her a reassuring nod. “G’night, Trixie.”
“Goodnight, Kestrel…”
Kestrel’s tired hooves took her across camp to her lean-to, where she stripped herself down naked and slid onto the sleeping mat. She could occasionally hear the hooting and hollering of Silver and Roughshod as they played their games and drank, but that didn’t bother her much at all. Closing her eyes, Kestrel counted to ten, and then she was out like a light.
[NO POLL FOR THIS CHAPTER]
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Man, either royal security was really short-staffed on pegasi back in the day or teen Wanderer's a better infiltrator than he claims to even get in proximity of the castle.
Back in the present, I'm not sure this has helped Trixie too much. It feels like she still doesn't think she fits in here and could easily panic if/when she's thrown into a situation against the Pinks. And that's before potentially finding out her illusions (and with them, her main contribution to the gang) are basically useless now...
10133663
Option 3: He did a sudden cannonball dive from above the no fly zone. Still got intercepted, tho.
Good story.
Similar, yes.
10134698 Ah, "Dine 'n Dash". The classics never go out of style.