#4
When Cozy woke up, Paul was gone. This was a surprise.
He hadn’t disappeared though, he’d just slipped out for some reason, leaving a note in his wake that read ‘I will be back’. This left Cozy to her own devices. In his house. With his things.
The fool! Underestimating her. Better than him had made the same mistake!
Originally, in her old plan, she’d have taken the opportunity to slip away with her objectives achieved, but given that her efforts at snooping during the night had been curtailed she figured now was probably the best and only time she’d have to pry, so pry she did. In search of stuff!
Sadly, no such luck.
If Paul kept plans or notes she couldn’t find them. All she found instead was tools she didn’t know the function of and parts she couldn’t work out the purpose for. She did have a poke at a few of the toys themselves - there were a couple in various states of completion which she imagined could perhaps give her a few clues or ideas - but really they just raised more questions than answers.
Which just made it worse! These things were inexplicable! That made them useful to her! If she couldn’t work them out, who could? They’d be baffling when deployed! Catch everypony off-guard! Keep them on the back-step, keep her ahead. Useful! New!
She’d have to try and wheedle the secrets out of him directly. That would require a different approach entirely, and a lot more work. She didn’t relish the thought, but she wasn’t going to just write off the past few days - she had to get something out of it!
Being careful to cover her tracks and ensure nothing was where it wasn’t supposed to be she cast around for the best possible place to be once Paul returned and eventually settled on the stool he normally sat at, feeling that this could be seen as innocently precocious. She was still sitting there when Paul returned.
“Good morning, Paul!” She said brightly, waving. Paul, closing the door behind him (bell jangling), looked at her flatly.
“You look, yes? Around?” He asked.
Cozy’s smile took on something of a rictus quality. What was wrong with this human?!
“What?” She asked.
“Look around? For something? Valuables?”
“Me? No! Never!”
He didn’t really have any. This she’d also discovered.
“Hmph. Designs then, yes? Uh, plans? For toys? So you can make?”
“No! Paul, I’m shocked you’d even suggest such a thing!” She protested, even more loudly than before. Paul nodded to himself.
“I see. No plans. All here, yes?” He said, tapping a finger to his temple.
“I didn’t - I wouldn’t - “ She started, gearing up for a proper protest but Paul just waved her off.
“I do not care. You want breakfast?”
“Um...okay,” she said, all the wind and windup for her big, wounded speech about she wouldn’t ever dream of doing the things he was accusing her off just bled off and she deflated, hopping off the stool and following him as he limped his way to the kitchen.
Breakfast turned out to be exactly the same as what had been offered at dinner. Cozy had yet to acquire a taste for it, no matter what time of day it was being served at.
Being less hungry now she wasn’t making as much progress on eating as she had last night, either, a further distraction being the frankly disconcerting level of attention that the human was paying her from across the room where he was standing leaning against the wall, arms folded, watching.
Eventually it became too much for her.
“Something on my face? Is it a lump? Or one of the clumps?” She asked.
He did not immediately answer.
“They have posters up of you,” he said, eventually.
All at once the room felt just a touch chillier.
“...what?”
Paul, arms still folded, pointed off with two fingers.
“In the village hall. I do not go there often but I was curious. You are suspicious. So I went, just in case, to ask if anyone knows strange girl. And there you were, on walls. Posters, many posters. Name, picture. Wanted. They were surprised you had slipped away, I hear. The important ones. Surprised when they found out, I hear. Quite dangerous, you, Cozy Glow.”
Another pause. Then, in a scramble and tangle of hooves that sent the bowl rolling and smashing Cozy leapt from the table and flopped over to come to stand in front of Paul, the better to bawl at him:
“It’s all lies!”
“Lies? What is?”
“All of it! Anything they said! Everything they said! They’re making it up!”
He shrugged.
“I ask about you, they tell me. But I do not care, not really. It is not my concern. Even if you destroy the world it is not my world, and I am living on borrowed time anyway. What would I do? Turn you in? You are a child, it would feel wrong.”
That touched a nerve.
“Don’t underestimate me.”
She said, while coming up to about his knee.
“I am not. I heard what you did, they tell me. Very impressive, very clever, very big. Also, reminded me, not long ago my toys stop working. Well, mostly, still work a little, but very strange. Make sense now, I understand. But you are still a child. It is a foible of mine. Children. Not like to see hurt.”
Still galling, still insulting and she did not believe him in the slightest.
“So you’re what? Just going to keep it to yourself? That a dangerous villain passed through your shop? Not going to mention that to anyone?”
“Probably.”
Cozy let out a muted scream of tiny, tiny rage and hopped up to hover in front of his face, the better to yell at it.
“I don’t believe you! There’s a reward! I know there’s a reward! You’re lying to me! You already told them, didn’t you?! They’re coming here right now, aren’t they?!”
“No.”
“Liar!” She nigh-on shrieked, pointing accusingly. Paul remained unmoved.
“Fine, go look,” he said.
“I will!”
And, snatching her cloak from where she’d tucked it away and slinging it on (though keeping her wings out this time), she moved to the kitchen door, a door she rapidly discovered she could not open on account of the stiffness of the knob. So to speak.
After some fruitless efforts at getting it to work she sheepishly turned back to Paul.
“Could you - ?”
Grumbling, he limped over and opened the door for her.
“I will look!” She said, zipping off and out and into the air and out of sight.
Leaving the kitchen door open a crack, Paul shuffled off to the working part of the house, the shop part, settling onto his stool and getting started. Things always did need fixing or finishing, after all.
Cozy returned a minute or so later, walking in from the back and looking utterly baffled, in something of a daze.
“Nopony’s coming,” she said.
“That is because I do not tell anyone,” Paul said, tightening something very small and delicate. Cozy glared at him.
“But there’s a reward!”
A not-insubstantial one at that. She’d seen the posters, too.
“Reward, yes. But what of it? Money? Why do I need money? I have house, I have work, I live,” he shrugged again. “Do not need any more.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not for you, maybe. It makes perfect sense to me, Cozy.”
He took care over that last part, enunciating with great delicacy and afterwards looking like he’d chewed a wasp and following up with a burst of whatever that language he said he spoke was. It sounded angry.
“Was that rude? What you said just then?” Cozy asked.
“Yes.”
“You not swearing in front of me because I’m a foal?”
He gave her a very odd look.
“I do not know any horse swear words. They do not teach me,” he said.
She hadn’t considered that.
“Oh. Right,” she said.
After this, nothing, Paul’s concentration falling solely on the toy he was holding, moving entirely away from the wanted criminal standing, staring up at him. Cozy was unsettled, and didn’t really know what to do.
Really, sensibly, she should make the best of the opportunity presented and leave immediately, even without anything to show for it. That would be the clever thing to do. Just accept that this hadn’t worked, was a dead end, move on, keep going, pick everything up further along.
She didn’t though. Instead, she got the spare stool again.
“Well if you’re not going to turn me in what are you going to do?” She asked once she’d sat down opposite. Paul shrugged.
“Work,” he said, working.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Every day.”
Cozy looked around the shop. Still full of toys. Probably not a great sign to have so much stock, she thought. Unless they were just for show. She shook her head - not the issue at hoof!
“You know Paul, you could probably be doing a lot better for yourself in a bigger town. Or a city, even! You get stuck here or something?” She asked, digging, prodding, probing.
“Not stuck. Arrived here, stayed. Quiet here.”
“You like it here?”
Paul sighed, squeezed his eyes shut, shot her a look. She just grinned at him. At this point, why not?
“No, I do not like it here. Not anywhere here. I do not dislike it, but I do not like it. I do not belong. But I am alive, which is more than my friends. Did not arrive alone, you see? They did not last long. I was lucky.”
“Oh, that’s awful! I’m sorry!”
“No you are not. And it was an accident. So it goes.”
With an unusually satisfied grunt he pulled back from the toy he’d been fiddling with and laid his tools aside, closing up and clicking shut every open panel on the thing and then sitting it upright.
“So...suppose there’s not a whole lot of a chance that you’d feel like making some sort of cool array of magical, perfectly obedient metal soldiers and monsters for me?” Cozy asked, figuring that with the cat out of the bag she had nothing to lose from being direct.
She still had plans after all, and while these things Paul made weren’t vital she could at least find some uses for them somewhere.
Paul frowned.
“Does not seem like your style. From what I heard. Not very friendly.”
“Everything’s useful for something, and never try the same thing twice!” She said, brightly. Paul chuckled.
“Heh, honest with me. Clever, too. But no.”
“Didn’t think so. Urgh. Worth a shot. Well if you worked out I was suspicious and know I’m here it’s only a matter of time before somepony who does care works it out. I can’t stay here!”
Going a little further out might be tricky, things would start getting exceedingly remote and harsh, but it might be the only viable option at this point. Word of her misdeeds - or simple mistakes, really, depending on how you looked at it, because if it had worked properly then no-one would have known a thing! - had spread a lot faster than she had anticipated.
Mean really, had it been that bad? Really?!
“You go, Cozy Glow. Go, leave, do what you want,” Paul said, waving her off, then adding: “You should try to be happier, though.”
This sort of off-the-cuff faux-pithy wisdom got under Cozy’s skin immediately.
“I’d be a lot happier if I got my own way without everypony messing it up!”
She put a lot of hard work in, after all! The least everypony else could do was just go along according to plan. In her head it had been perfect! Every single step and part and aspect had performed exactly as it had meant to. Was it her fault that reality failed to live up to her expectations?!
No! It was everypony else’s fault!
“Maybe. I doubt. Your goals, bad goals. Should think about them,” Paul said, wagging a finger at her. She just glared, confused. What did he know, exactly? He lived in the middle of nowhere and wasn’t even from there to begin with! And he slept in the bath!
“What are you talking about?” She asked.
He spread his hands apart.
“Many years, I make many things. Things I make do many bad things. Hurt, kill many people. Not my fault, my fault, who knows? But certainly nothing I make do any good. So what do I have? Nothing, nothing. Then accident, arrive here. All friends, all die, just me. Everything I did, gone, world away, not matter anymore. What do I do? Make more things like before? More bad things? Or good things?”
“I really don’t get where you’re going with this.”
He ground his teeth and there came another - likely rude - round of incomprehensible muttering.
“Bad at speaking. This language. If English I could explain better. Hmph. You are child, yes? You are young. Clever though, big ideas, want to make impact. No experience though. Do not know what you are doing. Think you know, but do not. One day, in years, you will look back and you will see what you did, and you will think ‘I could have done things that did not make so many people miserable, I could have done things that made many people happy instead’. You have power, you can think, you could do better.”
He picked up the toy and held it so she had to look at it. A prop.
“I make things, that is what I do. Before I make bad things, now I try to make good things. See?”
The toy was then set down again, and he watched her.
She didn’t see, not really, but she couldn’t fight down the rising sense of outrage at having her goals questioned by someone who’d deliberately chosen to make toys for a living when he could have been doing a whole lot more a whole lot easily. A man who ate slop and - again! - slept in the bath!
“But it will be good! Might have involved a few things that seemed like bad things to get there, but those are just steps in the plan! It’s not like I wanted to do anything bad in the end! Sure everyone thought so but it wasn’t! It would have worked out good if they’d just let me do it! It would have been good! For everypony!”
Something they all would have understood, eventually, if they’d just done what they’d been supposed to and not messed it up!
Paul shrugged.
“Maybe. But if so, why trick everyone? Why pretend? If it was good, you could say so, would get help. Everyone be glad to help a good thing. But everyone want to stop you. Everyone join together to stop you, happy they stop you. Maybe you should ask why. And ask now, not later. Later damage done, too late. Now, can think, make better choice. Live happier.”
“You just don’t understand,” Cozy said through gritted teeth. Paul looked like he might counter this, but then clearly lost all enthusiasm. Instead he just sighed, pulled a slim case from an inside pocket and pulled from the case some small paper tube which he tucked behind his ear.
“Probably. I am not so smart. Just make things. Just seemed to me you lacked, ah, goal? End-game? Something. All means, no end. I do not know.”
He then heaved himself upright and started moving towards the shop door. As he passed Cozy he paused, turned, and reached over her (which she flinched at) to pick up the toy on the worksurface.
“Before you go, take this,” he said, handing it over to her. Baffled and confused she could naught but take it, blinking, holding it in both hooves. Thing was lighter than it looked.
“The broken one?” She asked.
“Not broken anymore. I fixed it. Yours.”
She looked at it some more. The little thing inclined its head at her, which was a touch unnerving. It really was a tiny bit alive. She also noticed that he had, at some point, etched the letters ‘CG’ into the side. A nice touch, but just made her more suspicious.
“Why are you giving me this?” She asked, wondering what it was he hoped to get out of it.
Paul, again, shrugged, taking the paper tube from behind his ear and holding it now between his lips, patting himself down in search of something he couldn’t immediately find.
“Why not? You like things doing as you tell them, yes? Maybe you enjoy it,” he said, digging through his trouser pockets before apparently, finally finding what it was he’d been trying to track down.
Taking this mysterious little silver, hinged-top cuboid in hand he stalked off outside without another word.
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Deep man, that's real deep.
10056302
I'm just so fucking clever, shit.
Is that missing a word?
10056324
Urgh, you people and your "Noticing my mistakes".
Hmmmmmmmmm
It just occurred to me: do you think that Cozy Glow has ever before been exposed to someone who hates themselves?
10056332
Hmmmmmmmmmm
10056335
That's a good question...
There's going to be some sort of incompatibility here, surely.
10056334
This person knows too much...
Cozy, you need a nap.
10056430
I keep telling you people, he isn't Russian!
...I'm just writing him in such a way that no-one, not even me, can help but picture him as such! That's different!
10056423
Should be the synopsis, really.
10056436
Thats what a secret Soviet spy would say! I'm onto you little Russian man.
10056436
That's what you WANT us to think!
10056497
Am I lookin' a little...
...Red?
10056503
Comra- friends, please! Such accusations!
10056516
Ok, we trust you. But first, why don't you join me in having a bottle of. . . vodka? And perhaps put some ushanka hats on. While were at it, lets talk about how great. . . communism is?
10056537
media.riffsy.com/images/dadc00fce6c0aa77bbd097da0e026bef/raw
Personally, I think he's German...
Just me?
10056557
I'VE LITERALLY SAID-
You know what! Fine! Death of the author!
/leaves
10056564
DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES!
10056557
I've been getting that impression to. Wonder if the author can confirm?
10056821
I can't tell if you guys are fucking with me or not at this point...
HE'S NOT SPANISH HE'S EGYPTIAN
10056829
He's Rami Malek?
10056849
i.imgur.com/TZSLWTj.png
Considering that she was about to be carted off to Tartarus it might be a bit too late... Hopefully Cozy will figure something out.
10056909
It really is, like, immediate.
...which I suppose is understandable given what happened. But still!
Anyway, what am I even saying, that's kind of the whole point of the story. Heh.
What's Paul's nationality, because I keep picturing him as Russian.
10057008
You people are going to make me cry, I'm not even joking.
10057016
So... No Russian?
10057021
GODDAMNIT
10057032
At least he's not shooting up an airport... right?
...
Right?
10057032
Russia!
10057050
I like how none of the comments on this story ABOUT COZY GLOW are comments ABOUT COZY GLOW!
And now I appear to be channelling her.
10057054
She's a kid, and kind of a prick. Not that interesting.
But Russian Rami Malek? That's something else...
10057054
I know he is American but, hear me out, lets make him Russian.
10057090
B-but...my exquisitely plotted character development!
Hah. And if you'll believe that I've got a bridge to sell you!
10057094
I'm going to bed in a minute and if I wake up to more of this I am going to be most upset.
10057096
Is it the Crimean bridge?
I like to imagine he’s saying ‘F***ing bulls*** horse names.”
He's definitely experienced enough to know better
He's Latvian, right? No... Estonian? Romanian, gotta be.
Fast forward when he and Cozy have finally taken Equestria. (I'm going to call him Ivan) Ivan has built many camps around the country, filled with those who opposed him and Cozy. He named all Gulag with number variants (Gulag 1.0, Gulag 2.0, Gulag 3.0 and so on and so forth). He changed the Equestrian flag to the the USSR flag, and each day the ponies have to sing the USSR national anthem perfectly or they will be sent to Gulag 69.0. He also changed the government to communism, and any who oppose it will become "suicidal" in the next week. Every year, the whole state shall have a feast involving vodka and solyanka. Even the foals will be involved. Ushanka hats will be sold everywhere and everypony is required to buy one. There will be more rules in the near future Ivan will intact for his great motherland but it will take time.
10057757
It's weird but even before this line I was thinking that Paul's lines reminded me of the Terminator, if only because they were all so stilted.
10057054
Are you surprised because you actually like her, or are you just surprised?