Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 16 Knicknik

Knicknik

Naudia was trying to figure out how to get into town unnoticed. She could just pose as a pony but she could feel the tension in the town right now. The plan died the next moment as she saw a pony walking around with a shotgun. There was also the problem that she didn’t know anything about the town other than the basics. There was never a reason to look into a backwater place like this.

Knicknik was like if somebody had moved an old west town up north, and then farther north along the coast. Wooden buildings that would have fit in Apploosa just fine, shutters, glass storefronts, a distinct and pointed lack of those “batwing doors” you’d see in a saloon.

That was before you started to see the changes the town had undergone recently, wooden log walls had gone up, the windows had bars on them, there was a shaky looking tower made of scaffolding next to another tower that was under construction and looked more permanent. This was clearly a town that looked like it was fortifying for an attack. The important thing was that there wasn’t a gate yet, just some basic fortifications.

All you could see from here in terms of townspeople were Equestrian guards, not royal guards their barding wasn’t as fancy, but clearly Equestria had a presence here.

That was a big difference between Twilight and Naudia here. Twilight would have just assumed things were fine, go to the guard, work with the guard. Naudia didn’t trust the Equestrian government so much. This was about as backwater as you could get she wasn’t sure how fast they would get news out here and how many mouths that news would have had to go through to get here. She wasn’t about to trust some random guards not to pick a fight with a hole riddled bug horse on sight.

It was in the middle of trying to come up with a persona to infiltrate the town when a wild rabbit came up beside her and nuzzled her. She discovered in the trek across the forest that animals tended to trust her more for whatever reason now and she didn’t understand why.

Suddenly Naudia jerked upright, she had the perfect infiltration plan.

Act as a herd of cute friendly critters that just kinda wander into town. Granted they were black kangaroo rat things with an extra set of arms on their backs and a worrying looking red stripe. Not to mention the venomous sting in the tail, but the ponies didn’t need to know about that.

It required more setup than she expected. First she had to get used to being in 50 places at once, which took a distressingly short period of time, she supposed that her body was designed for that. The problem was that Naudia was still Naudia even split up into 50 rodents, she, all of her because it was still just her alone, still acted like she did.

So, she lost more time having to create an “animal” persona by playing with the rabbit, at least an hour. She got it down though, she couldn’t call herself a changeling if she couldn’t do something as simple as mimic something else.

The final step which she almost forgot was hiding her stuff out in the woods where nobody would find it. Her bagrat would just come with her as just “another rat”.

Naudia finally began her mosey into town.

-------------------

To keep things simple in Naudia’s head, she viewed the entire operation like a command table. Even though it was just her multitasking at an astonishing efficiency, not 50 of her, or something like that. Her mother had trained her to have an extremely good sense of direction and accurate mental maps by using everything from life size mazes levitated out of a fog of sand to tactical games where she only got to see the board once and had to give orders with only reports from changelings as to what was going on.

Naudia had heard the phrase “if I could be in three places at once.” Naudia smirked to herself at that.

The first squad of 10 moseyed into town, Naudia was a master of acting casual, when she was acting as somebody else. It was important if a changeling needed to try and pick up a date. She was gratified to see that there was some interest from the guards but little, they were looking for werewolves not redback rats, which did not even exist on Equestria.

As the first squad closed in, casually, Naudia brought out squads 2 and 3. The important thing she needed to keep in mind is not to panic and use her full strength unless as a last resort. Gwynn had informed her that one of these redbacks could easily exert multiple tons of force into a single kick. Considering their tiny legs and how they would be anchored with zoetic shields, it could get nasty. The mechanism inside her mind for controlling her strength was best thought of as a kind of dial, and she kept it emphatically on the low side.

Naudia noticed a pony guard starting a patrol past the almost unguarded gate and acted.

The plan was to act like she was a herd of the most friendly rodents ponies had ever seen, get close to ponies, want to be close to ponies, and act as extremely well behaved domesticated and above all cute animals.

Squad 1 chirped at the pony guard and all hopped over, where they gathered in front of the pony, looking up at her with rodent eyes and all trying to get her attention. Naudia was extremely careful to make sure that it did not look like she was trying to surround the guard. Meanwhile Squads 4 and 5 of 10 redback rats each plus one bagrat made their way out of the forest.

Naudia was disturbed at how easy this was. She could see through every pair of her eyes at the same time, understand what she was seeing, think about what she was seeing. Move, without it being obvious it was only her in there. It was almost impossible to describe being 50 rodents at the same time outside of the useless phrase “almost as natural as walking.” Naudia was not sure if she should be disturbed by this or not.

The guard for her part was confused to suddenly be surrounded by a bunch of black rodent things with weird wing looking extra arms and a red stripe down their backs.

“Uhh, hey there little guys?” The guard said.

At that Naudia decided to really pour on the charm, she started bouncing into the air as if this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. Like a crowd of little dogs that could not contain their excitement now that their owner had gotten home.

That was when the guard started to notice out of the corner of their eye that there were a lot of these giant rodents just wandering into town. The guard pulled out a whistle with a pea inside from a couple around her neck and blew it in a specific rhythm.

Naudia was worried it was an emergency whistle but she stayed on her bluff and amped up the cuteness, the squads tilted their head at the guard all in different directions, their beady eyes open wide with curiosity.

Then she made one of them do a bouncy backflip, and then acting as if that was the consensus all the squads started doing that.

By the time another guard came around Naudia had convinced this guard she wasn’t a threat, even though there were now 30 rodents right up around her.

The second guard was the most worrying pony Naudia had ever seen, and that included Sombra. She couldn’t tell what it was but he was wrong, like he had fallen into some kind of dark valley.

“Meadow Dispatch, why have you called me here?” Even his tone of voice.

His voice was so disquieting for Naudia that she had moved all the nearby squads behind Meadow Dispatch unconsciously.

Naudia realized what it was about him that she didn’t like. He was unalive.

Not undead, no hatred for the living, nor striving towards life, unalive. Her ability to sense emotions failed at the surface of his skin, to push any farther was to push into a consuming maw that would never understand the concept of hunger.

Abandoning all pretense Naudia bounced away from the two guards. She decided to work with what she had, the squads outside would have to find another way in, possibly digging. The squads inside would vanish around a corner under buildings and in bushes. She didn’t even feel safe with her shields up, there shouldn’t be anything on Equestria that could make her feel unsafe with her shields up, she knew. She realized this unfortunately left the bagrat outside of the city.

Change of plans. Use the bagrat to learn spells outside the city while the infiltrator squads laid low. This was supposed to be a stealth mission but things had changed. She would have to practice on her own shields, but her pool of magic was split up.

Listening in on Meadow Dispatch’s conversation she failed to get the guard to understand anything was wrong. They were looking out for werewolves and the guard pointed out that the rats had ran off almost the moment he showed up. Meadow didn’t have any response to that. Or perhaps she didn’t think any response would phase this guard.

“All right then, you take over for me here, I’m going to find those rats and see what’s up with them.”

Naudia still thinking within the bounds of ponies who were alive, expected the guard to object to that in some way. The unalive did not, it simply started pacing back and forth without another word.

It took Meadow a moment to realize that was a yes.

As Meadow came around the corner, Naudia decided to try and make contact with her.

“Psst.”

Meadow looked around confused, the voice seemed to come from down low. Naudia poked her head out from under the shed she was hiding under and looked directly at Meadow. Meadow leaned down to the little rat creature with a hoof out.

“Hey there little guy.” She said in a soft voice.

“Do you have somewhere we can talk?”

Meadow blinked. That rat certainly hadn’t just talked to her, that would be weird. The problem was that her weirdness meter had been thrown out of whack for a few weeks now, and she wasn’t used to this specific kind of weird. She gave up, the world didn’t make sense so why would a rat?

“Yeah, over here behind the general store.” Meadow pointed towards the loading area for the general store. It was interesting to note that the general store’s back looked like a much more modern construction than its front did.

30 of the rats followed her back there silently, the only way she knew they were there was because she checked for them when she couldn’t hear them at all.

“What do all of you want?” Meadow was suspicious

“Uhh hold on a second, I’m going to try something that should work.” Naudia’s voice was too high pitched for prolonged conversation being so small.

Meadow stepped back in surprise as the rats merged together like clay into one big rat.

“Much better.”

“What in Celestia’s name was THAT?!” Meadow exclaimed.

“I put myself back together so my voice isn’t so high pitched.” Naudia’s voice was more normal than her size would permit.

“What the hay are you?”

“I’m a shapeshifter who was sent down here because somebody in this area has been doing evil magic.”

Meadow sucked in her breath at that.

“Yeah. I could see that. Things have been going to horseapples around here lately.”

“Oh great, do you know who has been doing this then?”

“I wish I could tell you. I mean those ‘equestrian guards’ are obviously part this whole mess but we can’t figure out where they came from and they aren’t… hostile, at least not to us.”

“Do you think the werewolves are doing the evil magic?”

“That’s what Doctor Willow thinks. There have been a lot more of them showing up in the past two years. Then of course Pete goes along with it because he doesn’t like the werewolves.”

“Hol up a sec, I haven’t gotten your name.” Meadow said suddenly changing the subject.

“Naudia.”

“That… that sounds familiar, wasn’t that the name of some changeling princess or something down in Lower Equestria?”

“Things have gotten more complicated since then, but yeah that’s me.”

“That changeling magic of yours, it’s different than I imagined it from reading about it in the papers.”

Naudia thought for a moment. She had already decided that Meadow was going to be her in for the town. The question now was how honest she was going to be with her.

“This isn’t technically changeling magic, this is something I got as a bonus alongside shedding our dependence on love.”

“Ooooh, mad scientist stuff you’re doing with your wife?”

“Yeah.” Naudia said without hesitation. “Okay, back to the question at hand, how do you know it’s the werewolves?”

“Oh that’s easy, we’ve got some ponies out in the woods with creepy black hoods that go around casting magic.”

“And they summoned in these guards then?”

“I don’t think so. What I think is happening is that we’ve got a couple backwoods cults having a fight with our town as the battlegrounds. Because I think it’s not always the same pony with the cloak.”

“And one of the cults is obviously the werewolf one.”

“Got it in one!”

“Thank you Meadow you’ve been extremely helpful!” Naudia said cheerfully. “I need to start checking around town.”

“Be careful, ponies are on edge right now, especially the ones that haven’t been up here as long as I have. They aren’t going to take kindly to things that go bump in the night.” Meadow warned Naudia.

Naudia was about to hop away but then she thought better of it.

“Things around here are going to get… complicated Meadow.” Naudia began scratching a crude map into the dirt. “Do you know where this is?”

“Yeah, That’s the creek into town.”

“Good, if things start to get really hairy you can gather ponies over here,” Naudia poked at a clearing she had noted on the way into town. “And light up a flare or smoke or something and somebody will come to help you, got that?”

Naudia hopped off and then faded into invisibility.

“Well if she could do that, then why did she spend that much effort to sneak into town as a whole pile of rat things?” Meadow said aloud.

-------------------

Things were going well for Nuadia, not only had she found an informant, she had also found out her plan of listening to almost every part of town was a bust, which was a great thing to find out before you even try it. Not directly in the middle.

She was confident Meadow wasn’t lying about anything as well. She struck Naudia as a public minded public servant who put herself into a guard job because she wanted to help.

Naudia noticed that she was leaving behind some footprints in the dirt road here, even though she was invisible. She sat and frowned at them for a while thinking about what she could do. Then she realized that there were still tens of her that she was managing outside the town practicing this new type of magic.

The first thing she did was test out a couple things, do this with the shield, buzz her wings. Then she remembered something, she still did have wings as a redback rat but buzzing them did nothing because they didn’t have a wing membrane. She clearly needed to figure out how to use them, however they were used.

Looking in on the 20 rats outside the city one would have seen a strange sight. They were all trying to fly with empty wings like little baby birds, they could jump very high but their “wings” were just arms, like a bat wing without any membrane and a couple extra pinching fingers.

It took a while but Naudia discovered that those wings each had a silk gland on them, and a kind of instinct took over for her in a way she could only call a tutorial. As one the rats in the clearing spun a set of gossamer thin wings made literally of gossamer. Naudia tried looking at her own wings when she realized she could look at another one of her wings on another of her bodies, and now six rats were doing that in a circle.

Naudia had to sit down for a moment, it’s not that this was hard, or that it was taxing her brain, it was strange to her sense of self. She was looking at herself, moving in perfect unison with herself, like a right and left hand knowing what the other is doing but with dozens of bodies that were all her. She couldn’t have done this a week ago and it scared her to be doing it so naturally now.

Naudia looked at herself and asked: “Was it worth it?”

She didn’t have an answer, yet. The only way to find out would be to keep moving forwards.

Naudia spread her wings and focused her magic without even flapping them she took off into the sky. A pack of redback rats took to the skies all coordinated perfectly with one another, ghosting through the air without a sound. She could see herself up there in an intricate dance, coordinated, the vectors of her flight perfectly calculated, extending and twisting her wings to dive through the air in a perfect dance.

She experienced the wonder of first flight twenty times, all at once, in this serene, silent clearing.

There could be no doubt about her transformation.

But it did leave her with a question, how was she this good, this fast, this perfect, at figuring out trajectories?

Unfortunately that question needed to be shelved so that she could find a place to hide in town and build a set of wings. Hovering invisible without even a ghost of a breeze coming off the wings was clearly the best way to go for stealth.

Now with her new spiderweb, no-flap, wings on a springhare’s body, Naudia was invisibly floating through town. It was a fortunate thing that she could do that because Knicknik was in a bad state.

It wasn’t that the town was abandoned, there were quite a few ponies there, more than there should have been by the emotions Naudia could feel emanating from the houses.

If you were looking at the town exclusively in terms of population you would call it lively, peak of tourist season. If you looked at the huddled ponies walking around town it painted a very different picture. These didn’t look like tourists to Naudia, these looked like dock-workers, sailors, that sort of thing, out of their element and scared.

Knicknik was a small town situated across a river that lead out to an inlet, it was how most of the goods moved inland. Naudia expected it to be busy but the number was suspicious like these boatworkers were just loitering around, waiting, anxious and grouped up.

Moving over to the other end of town where the buildings were less touristy and more “log cabin I built myself” she spotted the other groups of ponies, the pack ponies who were also loitering around. Naudia drew closer to them to listen in and see if she could hear anything significant.

“Those damn sailors.”

Naudia’s ears perked up at that, this sounded interesting. She pulled closer to some grizzled ponies in a huddle with an even more grizzled pony who had a shotgun on his back.

“Won’t sail in, won’t sail out, now they’re eatin up our supplies durin a siege.”

“We aren’t going to make it through the winter like this.”

“Now.” The pony with the shotgun on his back said, and everypony listened. “We can’t be turning against each other. Once this siege breaks we’ll be needing those sailors to either get us outta here or get help, unless you want to WALK back down to Equestria, in which case you should get started now.”

Everypony in the group balked at that notion.

“I didn’t think so. Here is what we’re going to do, I’m going to be supplying a foraging team or three with weapons, now these are very limited I would appreciate if you used them as threats rather than weapons. That should shore things up a bit, then we’re going to start cuttin up potatoes that’re a bit too old and making a garden of em just outside the walls, wherever we can.”

“And also we should put down a patch of cabbage.” One of the ponies said.

“Tartarus damn it I’m sick to death of cabbage, it’s always cabbage this, coleslaw that, if I never smell boiled cabbage again it’ll be too soon.” Another pony in the crowd said.

“We gotta put down at least one field of cabbage.” The shotgun pony said, clearly he had a lot of sway here. “We’re going for bulk food that stores well and grows well, now I know you all are tired of cabbage.”

There was a unanimous affirmation to that.

“But, this is a siege we’re dealing with, we can’t just nip down to Equestria for a bag of oats.”

The ponies grumbled still, but Pete seemed to have clamped down on them enough for them to agree to plant cabbage.

“Thank you Pete for talking sense.” An out of place pony in the group said to the shotgun pony.

“Calva.” Pete said to the out of place pony frankly. “We both know this is going to go badly sooner or later. Those wolves out there are just waiting for it. Our best chance is to fortify up to make sure we come out on top when things do go bad.”

“I just hoped that-” Calva was cut off.

“The guard ain't comin. If they were comin they would have been here when boats stopped going out.”

“But the guards said they’ll be here soon.”

“Those aren’t guards, we can only hope that when things go south those things are on the front lines. I don’t know what they are but even after helping with those walls I don’t think they’re completely on our side in this.”

The ponies around Pete seemed to agree on this point and the meeting broke up. Naudia noted that the ponies all traveled in groups. That seemed to be how all the ponies traveled in town, anypony left alone hurried along as fast as they thought wouldn’t draw attention.

Naudia smiled, it was always nice to have a lever like this, especially if you were on the hunt. She was already coming up with plans that she was more than eager to discuss with Twilight. Silently she flew over the walls and back to the rest of herself.

The best part of all this though was that Naudia got practice in with her new magic while spying at the same time. She couldn’t wait to show Twilight.