Dynamic Canter System
“You want your fortune read, dipstains?!” Tweak shouted, firing a rapid volley of manablasts at the corner behind which a thick group of enforcers huddled. “You're all deader than a Sunday afternoon!” He blasted his rifle until the core emptied. “You doubt me?! Come look into my crystal balls, flankfaces!”
Pieces of the sewer chipped away. Chunks of rock flew from the impacted wall as hot steam floated across the sceen. However, as soon as Tweak's intimidating onslaught was finished, three enforcers poked their horns out, levitating mana guns that shot back with equal vigor.
Tweak flew himself behind a pillar of the aqueduct upon which he was perched, hissing through is teeth as the enemies' projectiles ricocheted off the partition behind him. “Darn it. I suck at motivation speeches...” Panting, he looked at his remaining clips and a pale expression washed over his face. “Shoot. Running thin.” Fidgeting, he tossed a sweaty glance at the trembling figure beside him. “Imre! Imre, I could use a hoof!”
She hugged herself, teeth chattering as she gazed—horrified—into a blank space.
“Hey!” Tweak kicked her lightly with his lower hooves while reloading his weapons with his forelimbs. “Sunshine! Snap out of it!”
Imre's eyes twitched. She flinched as a manablast streaked closely past her shaved head and she gave Tweak a nervous glance. “Huh...?”
“I need you to stay with me, girl,” Tweak muttered, sliding the pistol off his hoof brace. “In body and in spirit!” He glanced firmly at her. “You think you can do that?”
“I... I...” Imre shuddered, giving a forlorn glance towards the depths of the muck below the aqueduct. “Rainbow Dash's battling...” She gulped. “Battling that enforcer just now...”
“She can take care of herself!” Tweak shouted. “Odds are, he's some super mega death pony or something. That's not our concern!” He wheezed as a chunk of stone was blasted out of the stone beside his head. “These yuckle-chucks, however, are our concern! And I need your help in taking them out!” He handed the pistol out at her, freshly reloaded.
Imre looked at him, at the gun, and back at his face with a frown. “If you think I'm actually going to put a hole through another pony's head—”
“I don't know if you've noticed, princess, but they ain't hesitating to do the very same dayum thing to you!” Tweak shouted. More shots ricocheted around them, and he barked, “Look, I know you're all about saving ponies' lives and all, but there ain't no simple way for us to get out of this bind! If you don't want to kill anypony, fine! Leave the dirty work to me! I just need some cover!”
“Some... cover...”
“You betcha!” He finally thrusted the silver metal weapon into her grasp. “I'm gonna flank them from the far side. If I just trot out there all hunky-dory-like, I'll be reduced to cheese!”
“What kind of cheese?!”
“T'ain't important!” Tweak snarled. He cocked his rifle and motioned beyond the pillar with his head. “Just give them something to freak out about while I rush in from the side! They won't know how bad of a shot you are, or what kind of a stick in the mud, for that matter!”
“Right...” Imre shuddered, reluctantly sliding the pistol's brace around her hoof. Her horn glowed in little burst of energy. “Just give you cover...”
“And, y'know, keeping me from dyin' would be a plus, too.” Tweak managed a firm smile in spite of all the bulletholes forming around him. “I've got some kids to get back home to smacking around, ya feel me?”
“How...” Imre flinched again. “How c-can you be so calm in the middle of all this?”
“That's a darn good question. What say we stay alive so we can chew the fat about it! Huh?! Can ya do that?”
“You mean stay alive?” Imre fidgeted, glancing down at the muck again. “Yeah. Yeah, why not?”
“Thattagirl! Here's an extra clip!” He tossed her another cylinder of bright crystal and flexed his limbs, readying for a sprint. “Be sure to aim at them and not me!”
“Yeah. Okay. I think I can do that.”
“You'd darn well better. Aaaaaaaaaand...” Tweak clenched his eyes shut, seethed, then reopened them—bright and veiny and alive. “Now!”
“Nnnnnghhh!” Imre spun around the corner, firing several loud shots.
The enforcers flinched and ducked behind their shattered corner. As Imre's blasts landed around them, they shouted muffled words of frustration at one another.
“You going or—?!” Imre grunted.
Tweak was already sprinting along the slender aqueduct. “Ain'tnothinglikecountryairinthespring. Ain'tnothinglikecountryairinthespring. Ain'tnothing...”
Imre glanced at him, then back at the corner. Two enforcers exposed themselves, aiming rifles. She was firing before she thought about it. One of her blasts landed dangerously close to one of the soldiers, and he hid back behind his respective corner.
Tweak jumped onto an adjacent bridge, scaled it towards a ledge above the sewer, then hopped up to climb another.
Imre was reloading the stallion's pistol at this point. She looked up above the silver bits of metal and hissed, “What in the name of all that's holy...?!”
Tweak mounted the ledge, skittered over it, held his breath, and dropped down to the left side of the guards as they poked out again.
“Happy new year!” He fired an entire salvo into the group. The air behind the distant partition of brickwork went red with a bright wet mist. Five violent seconds into the act, Tweak rolled out of way, avoided a stream of returning manashots, and galloped his way towards a chunk of marble to hide behind. As he did so, an injured enforcer rolled out from beyond the corner and aimed a bloody rifle at his back.
Imre blinked, her ears flinching from the thunder echoing out the barrel of the pistol in her grasp. She gasped to see the enforcer's body falling slap, a huge hole in his chest. He flopped and fell down into the drink like the wet heap of meat that he was. The mare's blood went cold as her normally dull eyes grew moist.
She was vaguely aware of the panting, thankful glance of Tweak from afar. There was a splashing sound, and then the air lit up with more bullets and shrieks. She slumped down tight and crouched behind the pillar as Tweak and the enforcers exchanged more blasts from afar. All the while, she couldn't help but tremble and stare down into the depths below.
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Imre gets her first blood. Poor Imre.
Imre's a medic, you would think she would have no problem dealing
withblood. I guess she heals ponies, and doesn't like killing them...Imre seems to have a hard time going from constantly keeping ponies alive to doing the complete opposite. Can't say I blame her.
2992456
Dealing with blood, not dealing blood.
2992482 I didn't say dealing blood... But I guess I should have
Consider that comment edited!
Alas Imre.
War makes monsters of us all
2992456
Killing ain't an easy thing to do.
It's a hard thing to do what should be done, what sometimes needs to be done to protect others.
Poor Imre. She's no longer the wide-eyed innocent.
Poor Imre indeed.
Yay! All aboard the PTSD train! Yay!
Poor Imre...
Better step up the one-liners, Dash. You've got some competition on your hooves.
Good on Imre, here's hoping she'll pull through.
Don't worry Imre, only a few more times and it'll be just like waking up in the morning! Totally.... nothing......
wrong...
with
that.
"What kind of cheese?!?"
Sold me on the entire chapter.
Oh man, and now it's time to break the cutie.
I would be in exactly the same position as Imre if I ever had to kill...
Poor girl. My sympathies and all my hugs.
That happened to me the first time I killed someone...
Damn, poor Imre...
C'mon, pull yourself together, girl...I know it's hard, but ya need to have your head in the game.
guys, isn't Imre not originally a medical surgeon?
didn't she commit atrocities before? I seem to remember something along those lines...
this isn't the trauma of first blood here. this is a flashback, or something.
2993366 oh good, I'm not the only person who remembers imre calling herself a butcher or something back when Roarke's ship started its journey to pale shelf. I'm not completely sold on imre breaking down because she killed, I think remembering when she killed freely is whats killing her.
Tweak.
Is a badass.
Poor Imre. I've thankfully never been in that sort of situation, but I could see myself responding the same way. Hell, I go out of my way to put spiders outside, rather than kill them, and that's nothing next to taking the life of a sapient being. And then there's the whole Hippocratic oath thing. But then, if she hadn't done what she did, Tweak would've been the one to fertilize the daffodils. Just the absurdity of war, I reckon. It never quite leaves anyone untouched that crosses its path.
On a lighter note:
It would be worth it to be a crystal pony, just so I could say something like that.
Shouldn't Imre be used to seeing blood and gore, considering her previous work? Oh, well. Time will tell.
Everything changes when you take a life.
2993450
I was assuming that she was implying that her talents had been used for something barbaric, like gruesome experimentation or some such, and she later put her ill-gotten skills towards being a medic. I would imagine this is the first time Imre's gotten her hooves bloody in combat.
I wonder if C.M.F.S. is kicking in for Imre.
(cutie mark failure syndrome)
2994385 true, but either way she should have been used to killing, having most likely done it before. I can see how this happens if you never directly killed someone, or possibly if this was your first kill in a combat situation. I just think that Imre is having crippling memories rather than her breaking down by killing another.
2992456
There is a difference, Searo, between staunching blood and drawing it.
I still think my prediction is plausible. Josho sacrificing himself, not for EE, but for Crimson, because Crimson means so much to EE.
2992693
Imre? Innocent? When was that?
Joking aside, I see your point. She seems to be close to having a flashback to Pale Shelf or something of the like, what with all the nastiness going around her.
It's never fun to kill somepony for the first time.
2994586Has her butt tattoo been mentioned? ...Has anypony's?
Try looking at it from the bright side: at least you're not doing that kind of stuff for a living.
2992456 A medic that used to participate in sick, inhumane experiments for quite a while, too! I mean, seriously. Compared to what appears to have been going down there, shooting someone must be like babysitting.
3012289 A hacksaw. It has been mentioned.
Dang. As the story gets more gory its kinda nice to be reminded that the whole killing thing isn't easy for everyone. Comical head-splodeys aside, of course. What on earth did Imre see in that Pale Shelf place?
IIIIIt's Dashie's evaluation time!
Well, this certainly isn't Imre's proudest moment. Unfortunately, I've got to side with Tweak on this one. If Imre doesn't grow up fast, she'll never make it in Rainbow's world. But I get the feeling that she will, in time. These are my thoughts so far.
-MASH
P.S.3063423You finally passed me...kudos, good sir.
“I'm gonna flank them from the far side. If I just trot out there all hunky-dory-like, I'll be reduced to cheese!”
“What kind of cheese?!”
God I love Imre.
The whole 'you need to kill in war' lecture reminds me of GL and Lobo's to Noir on Tamaran. Unfortunately for her psyche, Imre isn't a badass samurai. Tweak's kinda screwed.
I really feel for Imre here.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for shooting folks what need shooting. But if you're not prepared for it, it'll hit you hard. Not uncommonly, hard enough that you won't pull the trigger at all. But she was told that it's just to make them duck, and she wasn't expecting to make any connections. If you're in a place that you might have to pull a trigger, you've got to deal with the consequences before you're in the gunfight.
But the thing is, it's more about your self-perception than anything else. Do you believe that you are a stone killer? A mama bear protecting her cubs? Just a soldier following orders? A normal, ethical person who would never cause harm unless necessary to protect an innocent party from unwarranted aggression? Or a healer with a moral obligation to never cause harm?
For Imre, it's different. This isn't her first time killing. She's just used to doing it in a sterile room, over anesthetic and under bright lights. She pulled herself out of the "soldier following orders" paradigm and ran away, broken. She ended up in a whole different world, full of a different type of violence; gritty, pervasive, cheap. She dealt with it by changing her self-perception again.
And now she's thrust into a new situation, but this time it's not beyond her control. She could have stayed on the ship. She could have refused to take the pistol, or refused to fire it. But she did.
And now she's dealing with the fact that she's killed. Not just one death - this one quite ethically justifiable. No, her self-perception as a mare of peace and healing has been shattered. She suddenly has to deal with all the lives she's taken in her past - every single one, unjustifiable, in the service of a fascist regime. This is her moment of truth. She will come out of this stronger, with hope of redemption... or not at all.
Imre's going to need to learn how to kill to survive with Rainbow.
-Spirit
Also, sorry Imre, but you might need to stallion up and hurt somepony.
Save one life at the cost of another sounds good in prospect, but in action . . .
poor imre....
baptism by fire?
trial by fire?
whichever fits more.
shes gonna have the thousand yard stare for a long time...
Aw, Imre. It gets easier over time...
nice
5842987 I prefer chuckle fuckers.
Oh God. Be honest: how long were you waiting to use that line?
Imre, now's not the time for an existential crisis! Back to shoosting!
Ha!
6015850
I just call them clucks. The little clucks.
Hmm, I wonder what Imre has to do with Shell... The way she's reacting to her fighting Rainbow Dash...
Imre has spilled so much blood she never wants to again. Unfortunately for her, we don't always get to make those kinds of choices
09/05/2019
00:45 UTC