Urban Wilds

by Rambling Writer

1 - A Rare Bird in the Lands

Bitterroot didn’t look like much as she ambled down the street. She was a pegasus, a touch on the large side for one, but otherwise had the usual lean sleekness of her tribe. Her coat was a soft orange, the sky of the golden hour, and her mane (shorter than normal, but still long enough to tie into a ponytail) was a deep purple, occasionally run through with stripes of a lighter hue. Her clothes were baggy, like hand-me-downs a size too large. Her pace was loose and a little bouncy. In short, she looked nothing like a bounty hunter.

Which may have played a role in why she was an effective bounty hunter.

One of Bitterroot’s friends had once joked that bounty hunting was like being a private eye, only crappier. That wasn’t totally wrong; dramatic chases across the nation and the like were certainly part of her repertoire, but a lot of her work amounted to just hunting down ponies who’d skipped out on bail. For that, she needed to go snooping around Canterlot and ask the right ponies the right things in the right ways without the target twigging onto you. It helped when you weren’t the kind of pony to stand out.

As long as she didn’t act out, Bitterroot could blend into almost any crowd that had enough pegasi. She didn’t have any distinguishing characteristics like scars (barring a non-obvious one on her throat just below her jawline that she could further hide by keeping her head down). Her manestyle was the practical sort of bland. She wasn’t small enough to look like an easy target, but not big enough to look like someone you took down to prove your badness. She was just sort of there, a background extra in a play. Perfect.

Of course, being socially invisible didn’t help much if you still couldn’t find hide nor hair of your quarry. Bitterroot hung her head slightly as she walked and her ears were loose with disappointment. Her current selected target was proving a tougher needle to find than she’d expected. And that was saying something, since she’d expected her to be pretty tough to begin with. Over a week, and barely any leads. That was to be expected, if she was honest with herself. You didn’t really expect criminals to be easy to find if the Royal Guard was having trouble finding them, gratuitously huge bounty notwithstanding. It didn’t make her days of fruitless work any better, nor did it alleviate the hangovers from when she’d spent those days hanging around bars (she’d quickly learned which drinks were nonalcoholic).

Arriving at her mailbox, Bitterroot flipped it open and absently pulled out its contents. She didn’t look through them, tucking them under a wing for later. She was about to lope up the steps to her townhouse when a raven landed on her railing and stared inquisitively at her. “Bread?” it croaked in that peculiarly raven-y voice.

“Sorry, Lenore, not today.”

Lenore eyed Bitterroot maybe-suspiciously. Bitterroot knew ravens were bright birds — bright enough that this one knew to hang around the neighborhood for food — but it was hard to tell if she was projecting her own preconceptions onto Lenore or not. “Bread?” Lenore croaked, wiggling her tail feathers.

“Nope. Not in the mood.” Bitterroot marched up her steps, ignoring Lenore altogether, and stepped inside. In her frustration, she slammed the door hard enough that Lenore squawked indignantly, rustling her feathers, and took off. Bitterroot paid her no mind.

She dropped the letters on the coffee table in her small (but not tiny!) living room and collapsed into an easy chair, sighing deeply. Had she been spoiled? A good number of her recent hunts had been on the dramatic side. Sneaking a criminal from the holding where their noble family had been protecting them. Trainhopping after a bunch of thieves out west. Abducting the head of a smuggling ring. And, of course, there was the necromancer she’d captured two years ago. With willing help from the necromancer herself. It was complicated. (And crazy lucrative. Bitterroot hadn’t needed a job since, even after fully paying off her mortgage.)

After all that, she was sort of expecting every job to be… momentous. Even though she herself knew better; one of her first jobs had involved nothing more than going to the right bar and not looking like a royal guard while she chatted up the locals. The money buffer provided by the necromancer had let her get picky, so she’d only been going after the more interesting scores. Maybe this sort of slap in the face was the wake-up call she needed: not every score would be interesting and she couldn’t afford to think otherwise. (Well, technically, she could, for the moment. But that might change.)

Interesting life or not, it went on and it needed living, starting with the letters on the table. Bitterroot scooped them up with a wing and began leafing through them. Bill… Junk… Spam claiming to be a bill… Junk… Bill… Personal letter… Junk… Bill. Bitterroot pushed most of the letters aside and examined the return address of the personal one: Crystal Empire Penitentiary. Amanita, then. Bitterroot quickly ripped it open.

Bitterroot,

My release date’s been scheduled. If you want to meet me when I get out, I’ll be out on Grain Moon 28 at 8:00 AM. I know what your job’s like, so I understand if you don’t have the time.

—Amanita

Short and not obviously happy at the fact that she was getting out of prison. That was Amanita, alright. And it was still better than what she’d been like two years ago. Her letters had always been a bit terse: informative and not much more.

But they were informative and they always kept coming. Compared to what Bitterroot had expected when Amanita first went away, that was good. Not perfect, but eh. Baby steps.

She frowned at the release date. Grain Moon 28, two days before Harvest Moon 1 and the first day of autumn. That was in just a few days. She was still neck-deep in her work and she’d need to travel to the Crystal Empire, but Amanita needed her to be there, right? Maybe not, based on the last sentence. But it’d still be the right thing to do. But she’d need to disrupt her work groove. But she wasn’t in much of a groove right now. But-

Bitterroot stopped herself and shook her head. She was too tired at the moment to think straight and she needed to write down what little bits of information she’d learned. Maybe her head would be cleared once she was done with that or had a little nap. She pulled herself off the chair and over to a small back room, where she rattled the light gems to life.

Her “office”, such as it was, was crammed with her notes, findings, and occasionally police reports when it was legal to get copies. None of it was really sorted, mainly because she usually found her target before accumulating this many notes. One wall was dominated by a desk and a large cork board, riddled with pushpins and pictures and labels and string. Green meant definite links, yellow meant possible, red meant investigated and nothing. During a good hunt, there would be a few strands of green in the right places. This one had lots and lots of red and some yellow. Based on what she’d found out, the yellow was going to turn to red soon.

Bitterroot halfheartedly scribbled a few notes out, mostly how this or that specific bartender didn’t know anything. When you had no information, you started at bars with bartenders. Unfortunately, she was also ending at bars with bartenders at the moment. She pinned those notes on her board and exchanged a few yellow strings for red ones. The board was getting very cramped; she probably should’ve taken some of the notes down, but she’d gone to so many places, she might forget which ones.

Maybe it was time to throw in the towel, or at least take a break. She was a bounty hunter, not a detective. She tracked down runners, not solved mysteries. She didn’t even know who she was looking for. Just a ghost in the night who committed devious deeds, slipped away, and made the paper the next morning. She was bumbling blindly through unfamiliar territory without so much as a few helpful tips to guide her. Oh, sure, she’d be doing good if she caught them, but doing good didn’t mean she could do it.

Bitterroot stared at her cork board for a long, long time, where she was potentially catching a dangerous criminal and making the city safer. All the leads that’d gone nowhere, all the lines of questioning that had led to nothing, all the contacts that weren’t. She looked over her shoulder, back to her living room, where she had nothing more important than a lonely pen pal getting out of prison. Yet the second one was vastly more appealing.

Yeah. She needed a break.

---

Amanita didn’t look like much as she stood at the desk. She was a unicorn, on the big side of small and maybe in need of some exercise to add muscle. Her coat was an unassuming, cold green, a bit dull. Her eyes were a frosty blue, her mane ashen. She was young, mid-to-late-twenties at the absolute most. Even her cutie mark was a plain red cross.

Amanita was arguably one of the most dangerous ponies in Equestria.

Amanita was a necromancer. This was well-known. From the second she was dumped into the Crystal Empire Penitentiary, the other prisoners gave her a wide berth. Stories were passed around of the gruesome things she’d done, the ponies she’d maimed, the sacrifices she’d killed, the rituals she’d enacted. Very few of which were true; she’d never been interested in zombie armies or meatbag servants. (Never been that interested, anyway, she was ashamed to admit.) Oh, she’d done some heinous things, to be sure, but they were more on the lines of slitting the local thug’s throat, not kidnapping the governor’s husband and eating his still-beating heart straight out of his chest with fava beans and a nice Chianti. She’d just wanted to talk to her dead marefriend, and if a few “bad” ponies went missing, got sacrificed, were tortured to death, well, what of it?

Amanita was repentant. Eventually, she couldn’t justify the things she was doing anymore and took off. Following a series of events that included a bounty hunt, necromantic bears, a wildfire, and a shootout in a ghost town, she’d dragged herself and her former master to the Crystal Empire and turned them both in. Her master was beyond dead, thanks to her phylactery being destroyed. Amanita herself had pleaded guilty of necromancy and gone to jail. She needed to be punished, she needed some time away from polite society to get her thoughts in order. Not the healthiest of therapies, but it’d worked (partly thanks to the help of actual therapy).

Amanita was being released. She’d been a model prisoner during her incarceration, well-behaved and quiet. She’d never raised any fuss. She’d never wanted to; what was the point? She’d done her best to think about ways she could do good outside these concrete walls. Luckily, Equestria’s prisons had councillors to help with that. Thanks to her turning in her master and a bounty hunter vouching for her good character, Amanita had been up for early release after merely two years. She’d gotten it. Now, she was going to step out in the wide world again, ready to rejoin civilization.

Amanita was lost.

“…your clothes,” the clerk was saying, “and a bank account number with your bounty. From…” She squinted at the name on the envelope. “Bitterroot.”

“Thank you,” Amanita heard herself say as she took the bag. Prison had been her life for two years. More disturbingly, it’d been the healthiest two years she’d had in a long time. No self-denial. No convincing yourself that the sacrifices were bad ponies, they wouldn’t be missed. No desecrating the dead and puppeting bodies when you were bored. No listening to your mentor speechify a simplistic Darwhinnyian model to justify her own atrocities while you smiled and did nothing but tell yourself you weren’t doing those things, so you weren’t a bad pony. But Amanita had learned. She wouldn’t do anything like that again.

But what would she do?

She was escorted down the sterile hall to the exit. She hadn’t had much of a family and had shed no tears when she left them behind to become a necromancer. She had no support structure, nothing waiting for her on the outside. Limitless freedom, if she was being optimistic, but that also meant the freedom to bumble cluelessly about for the rest of her life.

She stepped out of the prison grounds and onto a road of the Crystal Empire, blinking away the light of the rising sun, without anything resembling a plan. Like most of her current problems, it could be traced back to necromancy. She’d been suckered in at around the time she should’ve been thinking about college or picking up a trade. And while Circe, her old master, would go on and on about the wonderful, terrible powers she would learn, she’d been mum on what would happen if Amanita ever had second thoughts and left with no other possible skills and a complete lack of occupational references.

So now, here she was, alone on the streets of a city she didn’t know, the door to her old life locked behind her, with nothing but the clothes on her back and in her bag and a cheap locket from her pre-necromancy days. And a- Hold up…

Amanita dug through her bag and found an envelope labelled From Bitterroot. Inside was a receipt for a deposit at a nearby bank and a note, both incredibly wrinkled. She read the note first.

Amanita,

A million bits is more money than I know what to do with. I split the bounty and you’re getting half. The Guard helped me put it under your name in the account on the receipt. Just something to help you land on your hooves.

—Bitterroot

Amanita blinked. Half? But that meant… She looked at the receipt and the deposited amount.

Almost five hundred thousand bits. She rubbed her eyes and stared again. Still the same.

Well. At least she wouldn’t be wanting for money.

“Hey!”

She looked up and didn’t recognize anypony. She looked even more up and saw a pegasus dropping from the sky. Bitterroot landed next to her. “Hey. I got your letter, thought I’d stop by to greet you. Sorry I’m late, I slept in a little.”

“It’s fine.” Really, it was more than fine. Amanita’s heart was swelling and she felt just about ready to hug Bitterroot. Late or not, at least somepony cared for her. Hay, for far too long, the only ponies she’d had any long-term meaningful interaction with had been Circe, an egocentric sociopath, and a therapist who, although kind and very good at her work, was ultimately just doing her job. No actual friends. Not until now.

But Amanita didn’t want to drive Bitterroot away by getting so affectionate so quickly, so she instead waved the receipt in her face. “Seriously, five hundred thousand bits? You didn’t-”

“I know I didn’t need to,” said Bitterroot, “but I couldn’t just let you go with nothing. You needed it more than me.”

Part of Amanita wanted to object, but less than a minute ago, she’d been concerned about what she would do for… anything. Five hundred thousand bits was one hay of a safety net. Only an absolute idiot would turn it down. She stuffed the receipt back in her bag and slung it across her back. “Well, thanks,” she said as she stood up. “Um.” Swallow. “Now what?”

Bitterroot shrugged. “Don’t know. What do you want to do?”

Amanita had no idea. She didn’t even know what she could do. Authority figures of various stripes had dictated her life for so long, the simple idea of not having anyone tell her what to do was… intoxicating and paralyzing, all in one. And, unless it was especially extravagant, she could afford it. Just about anything she wanted.

And she didn’t know what that was. She’d spent years hiding out as a necromancer, years having her day-to-day routine controlled as a prisoner. She barely knew what she wanted anymore. Granted, since leaving necromancy behind, she wanted to rebuild herself from the ground up, but it didn’t give her anything more to do right now. Was she going to have to bumble around, trying things over again until she found out what she liked?

Bitterroot coughed, apparently having noticed Amanita’s struggle. “You, uh, just wanna get a coffee or something? I’ll pay.”

“You know what?” For the first time in a long time, Amanita smiled. “I think I’d like that.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Yo, a sequel to one of my favorite stories of yours?

*adds to tracking instantly*

[FanOfMostEverything]

Wonderful to see more of these two. Looking forward to seeing what nonsense they manage to get themselves into.

[Bloody_Tofu]

Ohhh! Thank you. Always wondered what she would do once out of jail.

[Makani]

A very pleasant surprise to wake up to. I loved the first story so I'm very excited to see what you do with a sequel.

[N4rwh41]

WOOOOOOOOOOOO! Sequel!

[hehelover]

YES! Ever since you name dropped Amanita in Great Minds Think Alike, I’ve been hoping for this to come out! Can’t wait to see where this goes, though judging from the description this story won’t have another necromancer in it… right?

By the way, I wonder how old was Bitterroot. Don’t think that has been mentioned yet.

[Rambling Writer]

11068047
I picture Bitterroot as being somewhere between 35 and 45: old enough to have seen some stuff in the world, but not actually aging just yet.

[Level Dasher]

And so it begins! Definitely looking forward to seeing what happens with these two.

[Shachza]

She had no support structure, nothing waiting for her on the outside. Limitless freedom, if she was being optimistic, but that also meant the freedom to bumble cluelessly about for the rest of her life.

Wat.

No "you know an awful lot about necromancy, so despite your sentence served there are a few key ponies you need to be in touch with for reason X, reason Y, and reason Z?" Like, in the eyes of the authorities... her main practical skills are in weapons of terror and mass destruction. Even beyond that, the last story hinted that even defense against necromancy may be under-researched due to needing some necromancy to study in the process. Amanita is a research gold- platinum- palladium mine!

Even if her life has little direction, how is she not loaded with important contacts?

[Phoen1x]

Weren't the bounties set at 600k each? Why does Amanita have under 500k if she got half?

[Rambling Writer]

11190447
Taxes took a chunk of it.

[Phoen1x]

11190461
Hmm. Guess that saying about only two things being certain was still right about one of them.

[Cozy Mark IV]

I hadn't realized this was the same necromancer from the last story: this is going to be great!