Harmannoyed

by Tirimsil

Ch. 11 :: Saturday

"Saturday. Any other Saturday it would've been a comfortable weekend. But not this Saturday. This Saturday was ten hands of poopy in an eight-hand suit. And I had to be out here, cleanin' up the mess."

"Izzy," Zipp protested, "I'm glad you're feeling better but do you need to... narrate? Or whatever that is you're doing? In that weird deep voice? Out loud..." She tilted her head with furrowed brows.

"I kept pacing in the throne room, lookin' at the windows, sniffin' at the floor. Sniffin' out clues. The princess was givin' me attitude, but I couldn't get mad at her. I knew she was stressed. Real stressed. Down bad, as her sister would say. If she were here. But she wasn't here. She was got. Because she got got. She was got-ified by the bad side of town. The bad crowd she fell in with on bad Saturdays."

Zipp cleared her throat indignantly. "That's a great full circle and all, but my sister is actually a pretty big square for how much she says otherwise on Pish..."

"Her lips kept moving, but I couldn't hear the words. All I could hear was justice. I looked at the windows again. No evidence there. They broke when the Recalloids dove in. Shattered like the dreams of foals when they grow up and realize how cruel the world is. How cold. How callous. How --"

"The world sucks, we get it," Zipp facehoof'd.

"The missy wanted me to hurry it up. The first forty-eight hours were vital. I took one more lap around the room. But there wasn't anythin' to find. Just an empty throne room with nothin' in it but the ghosts of yesterday. And ghosts weren't real. Or heck, maybe they were. But they sure didn't talk, and they couldn't tell me nothin'."

"Keep looking," Zipp scowled. "There's gotta be something."

"There wasn't any sign of a struggle. That didn't line up. The vic had robots guardin' her. Maybe they were still out chasin' me when she got nabbed. But either way, there should've been damage. Cracks in the floor. Paintings knocked askew. Brains smeared all over the place like a kid learning to paint."

Zipp urped and covered her mouth.

"But it looked like she kept her brains nice and tidy, and I knew she always kept her hair real nice and tidy. Too nice and tidy. No loose furs to track her down. No bread crumbs for Hansel and Gretel to follow back home. I could only hope she wasn't about to get gobbled up by a nasty witch."

"The witch only ate big fat kids," Zipp reminded her. "Pipp's a light eater."

"The lady had a point. Princess Pipperoni had a big personality, but she was a two-bit, one-bite social butterfly in the jaws of the big city. Kept herself a fanclub that just ate her up. Maybe one of 'em was feelin' a bit more ravenous than usual."

Zipp blinked, a wing raised, her mouth open, and her eyes darting around as she considered what part of that to object to. "... 'Pipperoni'?" she decided.

"My heart sank like those foals' dreams. Whoever plucked that little bird right out of her nest took advantage of me crashin' that concert. A concert about friends, and love, and other nice things that can't exist in this sick twisted world. That gal thought I was her best friend. And I never even learned her name. Her and Zippolini."

"You know what my full name is..."

"Zipperoni."

Her Royal Highness The Princess Zephyrina Storm of Gil, Duchess by Right of Quillwich, Countess Proper of Nightingale, 56th Champion of the Look Ma No Wings Wrestling League, bristled with a phlegmy growl appropriate of some of those titles. "Oh come on! We're not twins!"

"Zipotle."

"Stop."

"I was wearin' grooves in the floor from circlin' around. I sighed. Tired and defeated. There was nothin' in the world of fact and reason that'd help me find Pipp."

"What!" Zipp cried. "You're giving up? Just like that? Pipp's in danger!"

"She told me what I already knew. But we'd already asked everyone in the castle, and the queen didn't see a thing. The guards didn't see a thing. No one noticed a kidnapping. And there wasn't any evidence. It's like she just... disappeared."

"I won't forgive you if you quit."

"She was ready to deck me, but I never said anything about quitting."

"Huh?" Zipp tilted her head.

"Reality was nothin' doin'. It never was. It always rained when you wanted a picnic. People closed doors when you wanted 'em open. It always smelled like beetle farts in Maretime Bay."

"It does stink over there."

"So it was time for imagination. I knew somebody took her. Now who could it've been. First I looked at Zipp, the good older sister."

"Uh, no you didn't --"

"She had no motive. She didn't even know the vic was a Twin Soul. And she woulda left me to sulk in that luxurious jail and unreasonably deprive myself of its massage chair and mysteriously ever-full bowl of exotic fruits. Besides, she coulda knocked the little lady off at any time if she wanted."

"Knocked her off..?!"

"Literally. They couldn't fly until the magic came back. Woulda took one little push to turn her into Pippty Dumpty."

Zipp urped again.

"But why would she? Zipp was the heir, not Pipp. If anything, Pipp woulda wanted her dead. But Pipp hated responsibility. Bitesize wasn't a threat to Zipp, so she wouldn't'a struck first. And the queen wasn't a suspect either. Worst intrigue she ever got herself into was, uh, oh yeah, it was the fake-flying thing, wasn't it?"

"You mean when you made me and Pipp homeless?"

"Most aristocracy was a real basket case, but these folks were a basket of good eggs, and they weren't missin' the don't-kidnap-your-family eggs. A real commodity in this rotten city. No, someone hated good eggs. Someone thought the only good egg was an omelette. Someone wanted to wake up on this awful Saturday and have a nice Pippty Dumpty for breakfast."

"Please stop saying that," Zipp buried her face.

"I didn't like the idea of havin' to interrogate the whole castle staff again. No time. We needed someone who was able to keep a princess ransom. Wouldn't have been any of the petty staff, like the maids or the cooks. No, it would've been higher up. A vizier, especially."

"No way," Zipp shook her head. "We treat our cabinet super nice. Tons of benefits - tons of audits. None of them would wanna risk losing their jobs. And me 'n' Pipp grew up with the vizier, he was like our uncle, he coulda kidnapped us a hundred times, he's a cool dude."

"My instincts told me to always distrust viziers and always distrust creepy uncles, but I had nothing to pin on the guy. The rest of the cabinet was a bust. A stranger to the castle would've been noticed. I was all out of leads. But where did the robots go, I wondered. They should've come back. Maybe they did - maybe they knew where Pipp was. Maybe they were zeroing in on the kidnappers. I had no idea how Pipp was able to control them. Musta had a remote. Maybe a chip embedded in her neck. But they had to have a way to know where she was."

"Wait," Zipp brightened. "Maybe there's something in Pipp's room related to the Recalloids!"

"Was worth a shot. This old throne room had nothing to tell us except that the queen could stand to lose a few pounds."

---

"Excuse me..." the gentle voice warbled.

The maids continued fussing about in the hallways, ignoring the request. "Oh our dear Princess..!" Adjusting the paintings. Knocking the vases over, catching them before they shattered, setting them back upright, bemoaning their Princess and their clumsiness. "Whatever will she do without us beside her!"

The guards double-took and furrowed their brows at the visitor, looked at one another, and approached with caution.

"Excuse me..." the gentle voice repeated.

"She'll lose her mind within an hour of no Pish..." A maid stared a thousand yards away while slowly fluttering down the hall, dusting, dusting, dusting. She began to dust the flickering yellow pegasus with the long pink hair.

"Please do not do that," Kind☆Harmonoid requested.

A guard approached, her armor clanking. "Er, ma'am," she grumbled in what was clearly a put-on low voice, "The palace is off-limits to the public following the disappearance of the Princess."

Kind☆Harmonoid looked the guard up and down. "I'm sorry to impose," she apologized, "But I need your armor, weapons, and if it's not too much a military transport one mare can operate, please."

"I beg your pardon?" the guard balked, blinking.

"You might have spares I can borrow... I'll give it all back, though I can't guarantee the condition... Did I remember to say please? Please."

The guard approached to put a hoof gently on her chest. "Now look here, lady --" and she flipped the guard onto her back, her armor popping off with springing sounds and spinning in rattles on the floor, leaving her there with polka-dot shorts and her eyes wide with surprise.

The maids gasped and leapt back as the guards rushed forward, yelping and brandishing their various armaments. "Oh dear." Kind☆ fretted, easily swatting a baton out of a guard's hooves. "This is highly suboptimal."

---

Izzy had given up the noir thing after half an hour of ransacking Pipp's room and had gone straight to whining after an hour of interrogating a cute little robot. "Nothing?!" she cried. "Nothing at all?!"

"Celestia," Zipp commanded. "Are you hiding anything from me?"

"You are recognized as an administrator," the small cylinder replied, its lights pulsing in time with each syllable. "You have accessed all files available to me."

"Thank you, Celestia," Zipp said. "That's all." She sighed and turned back to Izzy as the cylinder's lights faded. "See? I've gone through her laptop, her backup cell phone, her backup backup cell phone, her eJournal, and her Celestia," Zipp scowled, counting them off on her feathers. "I'm making a big sacrifice here, she told me she'd un-sister me for snooping. She needs to change her password, it's 'PippIsHeckaLit' for everything. And there aren't any other electronics. If she ever had a Recalloid remote, she's still got it there with her and the kidnappers."

"Then... there's no hope," Izzy flopped down on the ground. "I'm clueless. It makes no sense. You and your mom didn't do it, nobody on your staff did it, nobody else could do it..."

"There's gotta be something," Zipp sighed in frustration and worry.

"But what?!" Izzy started sobbing. "There's no other explanation! The only possible way that she could've been kidnapped is if --"

All the dots connected, so quickly that Izzy couldn't even find the words to describe it as it happened. As though the Calculous Crystalcorn had beamed all the knowledge into her brain and her head was gonna explode like the evil lady in that movie. Her heart was not doing much better.

Zipp paused and double-took as Izzy stopped making any noise. Then Izzy leapt up with a gasp as her eyes suddenly turned pure glowing white, causing Zipp to roar in alarm and leap back from her.

Izzy had never felt this feeling before and she didn't know what to call it. It wasn't like when a friend accidentally elbowed you in the chest and you got mad at them. It wasn't like when you were losing in a video game to a stupid unthinking computer that had no soul and devolved into bingbong-words and snarls. No, this was far deeper. Izzy had, for the first time, felt the bitter, righteous anger that led sons and daughters to avenge their fathers, that made saner mares than Izzy Moonbow plot the demise of bitter rivals over months, years, and eons. She had become the avatar of retribution, a nightmare to those who walked in shadow, a demon unleashed upon all those who might trespass upon the children of light.

But she was also an excited Izzy Moonbow again and that was much worse than any of that.

"Of course..!" Izzy cried. "Zipp, come on!" Her eyes returned to normal and she galloped out of the room.

"Come on where?!" Zipp objected, flying after her. "You're still under parole, you know! How do you run so fast?! What is happening in your head?!"

One of the guards whipped her head around perfectly to follow their movements, fished around in her saddlebags for a phone, glanced at it for an instant, nodded her flickering head, and began walking after them, gradually increasing her speed. Then she tripped on her spear with a meep and face-planted.

Comments

[Tirimsil]

It's Saturday and here's Saturday! It's completely a coincidence the chapter is named the day I posted it on.