Mare Do Well: Rebirth

by MagnetBolt

Foal's Play, Part 2

Mountain Laurel Boarding School was one of the most depressing places Loopy had been in her entire life, and she’d spent her actual childhood growing up with literal love-sucking monsters. She’d found plenty of ways to get into a little trouble, largely by accident, but getting into enough trouble to be disappeared was proving difficult. It didn’t help that the punishments she was given tended to be about throwing her in isolation and keeping her from getting into more trouble.

She’d just been released from solitary confinement (and having to write an essay about the First Griffonstone War) and was in math class again, her seat all the way at the front of the room. The teachers had apparently decided that maybe since she didn’t know anything, she’d somehow osmose information by proximity to the teacher.

“Pay attention!” the teacher snapped, slapping the ruler down on Loopy’s desk.

Loopy flinched and glared up at her. She smugly walked off, not bothering to look back. Loopy had seen the type too many times. She just enjoyed throwing her weight around with ponies who couldn’t fight back. It brought back bad memories.

“What’s this?!” the teacher snapped. “Are you doodling in my class when you should be working?!”

Pastel Palette yelped when the ruler came down on her fetlock, knocking the pencil out of her grip. The teacher grabbed the paper she’d been drawing on and crumpled it up, dropping it on the floor.

“Pick up that garbage!” she ordered, motioning with the ruler like a conductor’s baton. Pastel got out of her seat and knelt down to get the fallen pencil and crumpled paper. The ruler came up, and a grin worked its way onto the teacher’s face.

Loopy didn’t remember getting out of her seat but she was suddenly there, standing over Pastel and holding back the teacher with one hoof.

“What are--” the teacher blinked in surprise, her expression betraying the fact that she had absolutely no idea how to even process a student defying her openly and physically. It was like a daisy sandwich biting back. It couldn’t happen.

“Don’t you dare,” Loopy growled.

The teacher yanked her hoof back. Loopy didn’t just stand her ground. She pressed forward, forcing the teacher to step back out of the aisle of desks and back up almost to the blackboard.

“How dare you--” the teacher started. She raised her ruler again like a sword and swung at Loopy in blind rage.

Loopy grabbed her elbow, kicked at her back legs, and twisted. She’d never had a lot of actual combat training, but compared to a schoolteacher who’d never had to think about her victims fighting back? Even in the body of a filly earth pony, she was unbeatable. The teacher made a sound of dull surprise as she flipped over Loopy’s shoulder and into the door, crashing through it hard enough to snap the hinges and leave her in the hallway.

The class gasped collectively.

Loopy turned to the foals and shrugged. “So anyway, anypony have the answer to question four? I can’t figure out those exponent things.”

---

“She’s a menace!” one of the teachers said. They’d had to get a few of them together to decide what to do with Loopy. The bulky history teacher, who’d probably been a professional at some sport before he turned too old to run around on a field and catch a ball, was sitting right behind her as if he could keep her from escaping.

Loopy was content, for the moment, to let him think he could do that.

“Miss Meter has a broken leg and snout and won’t be able to teach for a week,” the speaking teacher continued. They had a close-cropped mane and tight clothing and were so thin that it was like everything unneeded had been stripped away from them and left only a skeleton, skin, and a cheap suit.

Loopy didn’t have any classes with them, but apparently, they knew all about her by reputation. Miss Coal sat behind her desk and glared at Loopy with what she probably thought was an impressively intimidating gaze.

“Funny how she tripped like that,” Loopy said. “Maybe she’ll learn a valuable lesson about trying to hit foals.”

“She did not trip!” the pacing teacher turned to glare down at Loopy. “Do you know who I am?”

Loopy narrowed her eyes. “I’m having problems even telling if you’re a mare or stallion. I’ll guess stallion since you’ve got that cheap tie. Have you thought about telling your teachers not to assault foals?”

“Corporal punishment is good for foals, it teaches them not to make the same mistake twice,” the thin pony hissed. “And you’ve more than earned some for yourself.”

Loopy tilted her head, glancing back at the big teacher right behind her. “And you think it’s going to take three of you to spank a filly?”

“Her mother is nopony important,” Miss Coal noted. “We can’t have this one going around and fostering rebellion. She needs to be tamed. Broken.”

“We’ve got just the place for that,” the thin pony said. “I want her taken down to the special punishment area. Fifty demerits.”

“Yes, Principal Withers,” the big stallion behind Loopy grumbled.

“Special punishment, huh?” Loopy asked. “What, am I going to have to write two essays this time?”

“It will be a way for you to work off some of that rebellious energy of yours and contribute to society,” Principal Withers said. “Soon you’ll be begging to come back to school and thanking Miss Meter for correcting you.”

---

Loopy looked at the shackles they’d put on her. Hoofcuffs wasn’t quite the right word for the heavy cast-iron antiques they were using. She’d been thrown in them and then shoved into a freight elevator in the school’s basement. As she rode it down with the teacher they’d assigned to ‘keep her in line’, she heard the sound of massive motors.

“This is below the subway,” she realized, when her ears popped.

“I didn’t say you could talk!” the stallion snapped. Loopy gave him a look. He was feeling brave because she was in cuffs.

The elevator entered a massive open space. It took Loopy a moment to get the scale right in her head with no landmarks. It was a circular cavern the size of a city block, ramps leading down from an outer ring into a crater of broken rock and ponies working with manual tools to break rock and carve out tunnels leading deeper inside. The center of the crater was flooded, with massive pumps keeping the mine from flooding and filling the echoing chamber with a dull thrum.

“That must be why the subway is dry,” Loopy whispered, her voice inaudible over the constant white noise. “The water all leaks down here and gets pumped out…”

“End of the line!” The big stallion shoved her from behind, pushing her into the doors a moment before they opened and making her bump her snout into them. She glared back at him.

“What’s your name?” She asked.

“Pitch Lateral, but you call me Sir, you understand?” he growled. “You’re in more trouble than you know. Fifty demerits. That’s gonna take longer to work off than you can imagine. Principal Withers doesn’t like you much.”

“I’m terrified,” Loopy said flatly. She looked around the cavern while Pitch lead her towards some of the ponies standing along the rim. They were the only ones that didn’t look busy, and it became obvious why - they were guards, not miners. She could see at a glance that somepony had put millions, maybe tens of millions, into this mine.

“New one for you,” Pitch declared. “Fifty.”

“Fifty?” the guards whistled. “Hope she didn’t like seeing the sun.”

“Get her working,” Pitch said. “I’m checking in with the foremare and getting her signed over.” Pitch shoved her into the guards and walked away towards a shack set up near the elevator.

“Come on, kid,” one of the guards said. “Look, I don’t know what you did to make ponies angry, but you keep your bucking snout clean here or you’ll regret it.”

“Hey, I’m not the one trying to run a mine with child labor,” Loopy countered. “It seems pointlessly mean and inefficient. Why wouldn’t you have adults do it? It’s got to be easier than abducting foals, and they can work harder--”

“It’s cause you kids ain’t got cutie marks yet,” the guard said. Loopy looked up at him in surprise. “What? You thought because I’m a professional thug I didn’t ask that kind of stuff too? The stuff that gets pulled out of this mine is some kinda magic ore. They don’t want ponies with cutie marks touching it so you kids get to do the fun work.”

“I wasn’t expecting a straight answer,” Loopy admitted. The guard shoved her towards a group of other kids and grabbed a link of the chain, connecting it to her shackles as part of a line of mining foals.

“Welcome to your new class,” the guard said. “Good bucking luck, kid.” He trotted away, laughing.

“I don’t think I like him much,” Loopy muttered. She turned to the filly chained up next in line to her. “So, this is my first day, I’ve already seen the chains, so you can just show me the ropes.”

She paused. The filly looked ragged, like she hadn’t seen the inside of a shower in a month, and the joke had gone right over her head. Or, more likely, the humor had just been beaten out of her.

“We have to dig up the right kind of rocks,” the filly said. She couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven. “If we get enough, they take away a demerit. If we don’t find enough, we get more demerits. When you don’t have any demerits left you get to go home.”

“What kind of rocks do they want?” Loopy asked.

“I found one!” One of the other foals said. The filly looked up and pointed. A colt was holding up a stone the size of his hoof. It was one of the strangest things Loopy had ever seen, like if bismuth and amethyst had a glowing rock baby. He put the segmented, violet stone in a bucket and took it to one of the guards.

“We’re lucky,” the filly said. “That was a big one. We might get enough of them to meet the quota today.”

Loopy frowned. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” the filly whispered. “I just want to get out of here and see my mom again…”

“I promise you will,” Loopy said. “Do you know a pony named Sweet Potato?”

The filly nodded and pointed to one of the older colts on the line. Instead of working like the others, he was sitting down, looking thin and exhausted. “He’s really sick. You shouldn’t get too close to him.”

“Thanks,” Loopy said. She walked over, careful not to trip on the chains or tangle the other foals. “Sweet Potato?”

The colt raised his head. He had bags under his eyes and seemed like he was barely conscious.

“W-who are you?” he whispered.

“I’m the pony that’s here to get you and all these other foals out of this dungeon,” Loopy said. “Your mom sent me here to find you.”

“My mom? But she’s the one who left me here! She doesn’t even care what happens to me!” He tried to yell, but just ended up coughing and gasping for breath.

“She’s been trying to find you, but the school says you don’t exist and the police refuse to investigate.”

“How do you know all that?” Sweet Potato asked.

“I’m a friend of a friend,” Loopy said. “Normally I’d try and come up with some kind of clever way to get all of you out of here. Maybe break one of the pumps and sneak you out of the pipes. That’d be a pretty dramatic prison break.”

She shifted her ankles to be smaller, green fire flickering around her hooves. She stepped out of the shackles.

“But you know what? I’m really getting angry about all these ponies hurting you kids. Instead of being clever, I think I’m just going to find a healthy way to work out my emotions and beat them until they can’t walk.”

Loopy stretched and walked up to the nearest guard. He was looking the other way, so she tapped him on the flank.

“Huh?” he turned, confused. “How did you get--”

Loopy grabbed the baton out of his hooves and cracked it into his face. He fell to the ground, a few of his teeth beating the rest of him to the stone floor. She pulled the keys off the belt he was wearing and tossed it back to the filly she’d been next to.

“Get everypony free,” Loopy ordered. “Pass the keys to the next line of ponies once you’re done. If a pony can’t walk, get somepony else to help them.”

The filly froze, holding the keys and not moving.

Loopy sensed the guard behind her and grabbed a rock from the ground, spinning it and throwing with one smooth motion, catching him between the eyes and dropping him instantly.

“It’s going to be okay,” Loopy promised. Her body flashed with lime fire and she grew wings. The filly’s eyes went wide, like she was looking at a Princess. “You’ll see your mom soon. Just help everypony else while I clear the way, okay?”

The filly nodded quickly and got to work, unlocking shackles and getting ponies moving.

Loopy nodded and spread her wings, flying out of the crater and swooping down on one of the guards, slamming into the unicorn from above when she saw his horn start to spark. A second guard came after her, and she ducked and swept his leg, throwing him over the edge to fall about two stories straight down onto the uneven stone.

“Hey!” a pony yelled. Loopy turned to see Pitch stalking out of the small shed, followed by a pony in a hard hat. “How did you get loose?!”

He got close enough to see Loopy’s wings and paused in total confusion.

“Is that the foremare?” Loopy asked, pointing behind him. “I really want to have a word with her about safety. I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to have clearly marked railings and warning signs near a drop like this.”

“What the buck kind of troublemaker did you bring down here?” the foremare yelled. She grabbed a sledgehammer and tossed it to Pitch, picking up a wrench. “Go break her legs! She can dig with her bucking fat mouth!”

Pitch hefted the sledge and stormed towards Loopy.

“This is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me,” he said.

“Oh, I really doubt that,” Loopy said. She charged and jumped over his clumsy swing. He turned at the same time the foremare tried to hit Loopy. She ducked low and Pitch took a wrench to the chin. “Wow, maybe you should wear a hard hat like your friend here?”

Pitch growled and lifted the hammer high, bringing it straight down. Loopy braced herself and caught it.

“Sorry. I’m just full of energy today,” she said, yanking the sledge out of his hooves and tossing it straight back into the Foremare’s chest, knocking her to the ground.

“I’m going to--” Pitch groused through his broken jaw. Before he could even come up with a decent threat, Loopy had him, getting onto his back and wrapping her hooves around his neck and squeezing hard enough to make his eyes bulge.

“Let’s talk about who you work for,” she whispered into his ear.

---

Loopy stayed back, watching Sweetclover hug her son from a distance. The mare couldn’t stop crying at the state of her son, and Loopy couldn’t blame her. A lot of the foals who had been working in the mine would need a long time to recover.

Police had surrounded the building once Loopy had gotten word to Bon-Bon and Lyra. A few of the teachers had fled and were at large, but the important thing was that the foals were free. Or at least as free as they could be. Bon-Bon was filling out what was turning into a huge stack of papers, trying to get names.

The police were mostly trying to keep the press back. It was turning into a mess, not least because they were being forced to answer questions about how all this could happen under their noses. Loopy was sure she’d made some enemies.

“Why wasn’t this uncovered sooner?” Loopy asked. “Some of those foals were down there for months. Months! And even the ones topside knew something was wrong.”

“A lot of their parents just didn’t care where they went,” Star Thistle sighed. “They’re not all good mothers like Sweetclover.” She put a hoof on Loopy’s back and rubbed slowly. “Thank you so much for helping her.”

Loopy shrugged. “I had to. I could feel how much she was hurting.” She looked at the other fillies and colts, lined up and waiting to be interviewed. There were a few other parents, but far fewer than there were foals.

“Some of the parents probably aren’t coming,” Star Thistle said quietly, not wanting any of the foals to overhear. “More than a few were just abandoned here. Some ponies couldn’t afford to raise their kids and tried to put them somewhere they thought was safe, but others…”

“Others just wanted them gone and didn’t care,” Loopy said. “Yeah. I know what it’s like to be thrown to the wolves and left to raise yourself.”

“You turned out okay,” Star Thistle said. “They might, too.”

“I hope so,” Loopy said. “I know how they feel. Growing up, all I ever wanted was to be loved. Just because they don’t get hungry for it doesn’t mean they don’t need it.”

Comments

[Reese]

And as usual, some questions answered, some more raised, and a fun time (though not for the villains :D) in the process. :)
I think you're pulling off the serial/series aspect well, and thanks for writing!

[Ri2]

Well, damn.

What will happen to the other kids?