The Panel of Perdition!
The place was a madhouse.
Doctor Caballeron, Professor of Antiquities, late of the University of Maredrid (now on indefinite unpaid sabbatical (and certainly not fired, regardless of the university comptroller's opinion (said comptroller being a brainless hoof-clipping who had no business demanding he turn over his office keys (of course the fool never suspected he, Caballeron, had been clever enough to have a duplicate set of keys made up!)))) looked about him in stunned wonder at the phantasmagoric hall of the conference center. For a moment he believed he had unknowingly ingested the hallucinogenic flower of the quagga bush, for what else could explain the panorama of garishly colored booths, phony-looking jungle foliage painted on cardboard, and milling crowds of ponies dressed to mimic the reviled Daring Do?
His henchpony, Withers, sidled up to him, eyes wide. “What the hay, boss?” With a shaky hoof, he pointed into the milling ponies. “Is that supposed to look like you?”
Sure enough, a yellow stallion had painted a copy of Caballeron's cutie mark on his flank, and sported a poorly-tied neckerchief and shirt in Caballeron's style.
Caballeron felt his gorge rise. His informant had been wrong, so very wrong. “Madre de Luna, this isn't an archeological conference... it's a literary event!”
Those books... those accursed books! Daring Do's lying biographical tracts, pawned off on the ignorant ponies of Equestria who devoured them as if they were fanciful adventure novels—how he hated them. Ever since he had stumbled across a battered copy of Daring Do and the Shrine of the Silver Monkey and discovered the... utterly scurrilous and libelous depiction of himself within its pages, his animus toward Daring Do had burned hotter than the flames of the Temple of Xiuhtecuhtli.
Not to mention Daring Do and the Flame Temple of Xiuhtecuhtli was absolutely riddled with mistakes, both archeological and journalistic.
And here was an entire conference in celebration of the books. Foolish ponies dressing up as Daring Do and others from the stories. It was a fantastic waste of time. Also, there were far too many Daring Dos, and not enough Caballerons.
He had understood Daring to be presenting a paper at an archeological conference. Clearly the information had been garbled somewhere, but... given the nature of the actual event, it was possible she was making an appearance nonetheless. Perhaps a discussion session, or some signing event for the slanderous tomes.
A cursory tour of the hall revealed no trace of his nemesis, although the giant pillows with life-sized images of her printed upon them were sure to give him nightmares for quite some time. It soon became obvious to him that the event extended well beyond this hall. With a snort of irritation, he turned to his henchponies.
“Split up and search the building,” he said. “If you spot Daring Do, come find me. We must acquire the Amulet of Kuliakan.”
The two ponies stared back at him, moon-eyed.
A choking anger rose in his throat. Why must the muscle always be so stupid?!
“Yes?” he said, biting the word out of the air.
“Umm,” Rogue said, “what if you find her first?”
“Then I'll come find you!” he snarled. “Now go!”
The two of them started, bumped into one another, then took off in opposite directions. Caballeron stared after them with a sour look, then turned to explore the other side of the convention center.
He made his way through the milling ponies, their minds deadened with adoration for their self-aggrandizing heroine. Such ignorant foals! They had no respect for archeology, they only wanted their simplistic tales of adventure. They were... Daring Deluded. Yes, or maybe... Daring Dazed? He nodded to himself in satisfaction just as a stallion jumped in front of him and seized him in his hooves.
“Awesome Caballeron, dude!”
Caballeron fought down the urge to slap the pony across the jaw, as if he were one of his henchponies. He saw the pony was wearing a costume intended—yet almost completely failing—to represent Ahuizotl.
If Ahuizotl ever saw this... this travesty... He cut the thought off before it could reach its horrifying end.
“Lemme get a picture,” the stallion said.
“I have no time for this foalishness,” Caballaron growled.
“Yeah! You totally got him down, bro!” the stallion said, and flung one foreleg across Caballeron's shoulder. “Meadow, get our picture,” he called over to a unicorn mare.
Caballeron glanced her way. She seemed to have painted her body with spots, and wore a cheap set of cat ears on her head. Had she actually tried to dress as one of Ahuizotl's feline terrors?
“Say 'wheat,'” she said.
“Wheeeeeeeeat!” the stallion cried out in his ear. The flash caught Caballeron mid-grimace.
“Got it,” Meadow called.
The stallion let Caballeron loose. “That was awesome, dude. You're awesome. Keep up the evil fight,” he said with a wink, and trotted off with his marefriend.
Caballeron stared after the pony, seething. But he could not spare the trouble of teaching him a lesson—finding Daring Do and the Amulet took precedence.
Still, finding her was proving difficult. His explorations turned up plenty of ponies dressed like her, but of course few of them bore more than a passing resemblance. His wanderings eventually brought him up to the mezzanine level, where he discovered a wide corridor with a number of meeting rooms attached. Outside each room were easels with hoof-written schedules scrawled upon them.
10:00 – 12:00: Cosplay Clinic one of them said. Bring your projects and share tips with fellow enthusiasts!
Caballeron poked his nose inside and found several ponies sewing and working on their ridiculous outfits. In one corner there seemed to be a heated conversation going on about pockets. In front of him, a mare looked up from her work and stared—not so much at him as at his neckerchief and shirt—and said “Ooh, nice Caballeron!”
With a haughty snort, he turned and left.
Other rooms had other schedules. He could not begin to understand what Literary Celebration or Literary Colonialism? The ethical quandary of writing fanfiction in the setting A. K. Yearling created was on about. And Dig! Learn about REAL archeology with Professor Sandy Toe of Canterlot University coaxed a derisive guffaw from him. He'd heard of Sandy Toe of course—she was full of odd ideas about laying out grids and doing painstaking excavations with nothing but trowels and brushes while recording the exact location and orientation of every artifact found. Caballeron didn't know what that was, but it certainly wasn't archeology. Archeology was learning how to spot the arrow traps.
The muffled sound of laughter came from a meeting room across the hallway. Caballeron turned, and out of idle curiosity checked its schedule.
11:00 – 12:00: Not-So-Master Mind: The Dumbest Plans of Caballeron.
He growled. What was this?
At the very least, it should read Doctor Caballeron.
He pushed open the door of the room and entered. At the far end, a handful of ponies sat at a long table, facing the rows of ponies that filled all the available seating in the room. At the back, a few more ponies stood, and Caballeron moved to join them.
One of the ponies at the table was speaking. “...So, the Temple of Sek-Ret-Ariat is in the middle of this ravine, and he knows Daring is in the gardens at the back. So Caballeron blocks the temple entrance, sends half his guys around the left side, and takes the rest with him around the right. Like, did he forget she can fly?”
A ripple of laughter passed through the room. Caballeron had a sudden flashback to the fiasco. He'd been a little overexcited at the time, and could hardly be blamed for the oversight.
“'Forgot she could fly' is one of the more common Caballeron goofs,” another of the panelists added.
Caballeron scowled. They were talking about him. They had read all those silly books and were discussing his role in them.
Criticizing him.
As if they had any idea about the effort that went into planning an archeological expedition, or coordinating with Ahuizotl, or devising a strategy to trap the oh-so-slippery Daring Do, or finding good henchponies.
“Oh definitely,” said another of the panelists, a mare wearing a severe pair of glasses. “Along with 'forgot he can't fly,' like in Map of Mystery.
“Wait, I don't remember that one,” said the first panelist.
“Oh? So, Caballeron is down in the Lost Caves of the Coltmecs, across the underground lake and at the final chamber which Daring has opened thanks to figuring out the trick door with the map she stole from Caballeron earlier. Of course he shows up the instant she gets the chamber unsealed. So anyway, the chamber seems to be attached to the lake, because there's deep water at the bottom. There are two rows of stone columns running in parallel and at the far end is the Key of Paso Fino in a golden cage. Caballeron starts racing for it, jumping from column to column down one row, and Daring paces him on the other because she's figured out each pair of columns has to be depressed at the same time to unlock the golden cage.”
“What?” Caballeron's voice burst from him involuntarily. Had the columns really worked that way? He'd never even noticed!
“So they get to the last columns, and the cage opens. But it's still a dozen pony lengths away on the back wall of the cavern, and they're standing on columns a couple storeys above the water—there's no way for an earth pony to reach it. The book makes clear the Coltmecs were all unicorns, and they would have levitated the key over to them, and Caballeron should have been prepared for something like that.
“But Caballeron is so pumped up from jumping across the columns that he leaps for it anyway. He makes it about halfway before gravity wins out, and then he goes plunging to the water, screaming like a baby all the way down.”
Caballeron clenched his jaw. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing.
The panelist next to Glasses piped up. “See, I think that's just sloppy writing on A. K. Yearling's part.”
“No, no, it shows how Caballeron pretends to be calm and in control, but whenever he's under pressure he falls apart.”
Caballeron stomped his hoof. “That is not how it happened!”
Every pony in the room stared at him. “Whoa, nice outfit,” the first panelist said.
“Thank you,” Caballeron said automatically, then gave his head a shake. “I mean, that is a complete misrepresentation of events!”
The panelist raised an eyebrow. “Okay, 'Caballeron,' I'll bite. What's the real story?”
Caballeron cleared his throat. “First of all, Daring did not steal the map, she pilfered it as I slept unaware. Secondly, Daring did not open the trick door on her own, she had to cheat by using the hidden solution on the map. Thirdly, this was all according to plan so that I would be able to catch up to her after upturning my camp searching for the missing map. Fourthly, she was not pacing me jumping from column to column, she was hard-pressed to keep up with my athletic form. Fifthly, you civilian ponies may be unaware of this, but in archeology we have a concept we call the 'Leap of Faith.' Nearly every old ruin has a Leap of Faith built in the architecture somewhere.”
“You still ended up in the water, though.”
“Sixthly, I was not 'screaming like a baby,' I was screaming a blood-curdling oath that surely haunts Daring Do's nightmares to this day.”
For some reason the ponies in the room were laughing.
A mare on the panel raised her hoof, her brow furrowed. “Excuse me, but in my professional life I'm actually a field archeologist,” she said. “I don't believe I've ever encountered this 'Leap of Faith' thing.”
“Fields are flat,” Caballeron scoffed. “How much leaping do you do in fields? If you had studied mountain archeology, you would be quite familiar with the concept.”
Justly chastised, the mare grew silent. The manner in which she rolled her eyes was doubtless a reflection of her own exasperation over her ignorance.
“Allrighty then... moving on...” the first panelist continued, “I'd like to talk about another Caballeron flaw—his inability to ever learn from his mistakes.”
Caballeron ground his teeth. Was this just to be a vicious and unjustified roasting?
“Ooh, let me,” said the last of the panelists, a fellow with an unruly mane who badly needed the services of a good tailor. “In Daring Do and the Razor of Dreams, we have Caballeron throwing in with Ahuizotl after Daring refuses to team up with him. But when he gets his hooves on the Razor, he sneaks off and sells it in an underground auction, which angers Ahuizotl enough to give the famous 'My hand is wrapped around your fate; pray I do not squeeze' speech.”
“I know how to deal with Ahuizotl,” Caballeron said dismissively. Still, the room felt somehow colder for a moment.
The speaker continued as if he hadn't heard him. “But then, in Ring of Destiny, Caballeron goes ahead and sells one of the Rings of Scorchero to a disguised Daring Do even though he's arranged to sell it to Ahuizotl. Like, did he forget how much he pissed of Ahuizotl the last time he pulled that stunt?”
That had been Daring Do? Surely not. Caballeron remembered the incident well, the bearded fellow with the hefty sack of gold could not have been... well... it had been rather dark out.
The other ponies on the panel were nodding. The so-called “field” archeologist spoke up next.
“Why must he always make his plans so overcomplicated? A typical Caballeron plan involves stealing something or kidnapping somepony that Daring needs to come get, making Daring do a trade for what Caballeron's really after, double-crossing Daring and capturing her, putting her into some needlessly elaborate deathtrap—”
“One works with what one has,” Caballeron objected. “Sometimes it's an ancient crumbling temple full of quicksand pits, sometimes it's an ancient crumbling temple full of alligators and pressure plates to release them.”
“—and then he always wastes time gloating and explaining his schemes to her.”
“That's the most important part! How else am I to prove my superiority?”
“I don't know, maybe actually defeat her for once? Not give away the whole plan?”
“Gloat-time is important,” he sulked.
“Gloating is what always screws up the plan!”
“Maybe if Caballeron didn't obsess about gloating over Daring Do so much, he could focus on actually accomplishing something,” said the wild-maned panelist.
Caballeron felt his face heating up. “I do not obsess! Why, I barely notice her!”
“Friend, I admire your commitment to staying in character,” the first panelist stepped in, “but you're getting rather disruptive.”
Caballeron's jaw dropped. He stared at the panelist, outrage pounding in his veins. Who did they think he was?! They should be honored he had graced their obnoxious little discussion group with his presence! Especially since they were talking about him.
On the panel, Glasses turned to Wild-Mane and said, “Well, he obsesses over Daring because he has a crush on her, obviously.”
“Oh yeah,” Archeologist jumped in. “I ship it hard! Half my fanfics are CabaDo, you know.”
“That's your ship? Of all the great parings you could choose, that's what you sail?” Wild-Mane had that lemon-sucky look that Ahuizotl sometimes got when Caballeron had to report Daring Do had fouled up an otherwise flawless plan.
Someone in the audience shouted out “It's 'Darealleron'. 'CabaDo' is a horrible, disgusting shipping name, and, and, just CabaDon't!”
The room erupted into a hubbub of voices, and Archeologist stuck her tongue out at the speaker. It seemed everypony had an opinion, but Caballeron wasn't sure about what. Somehow the conversation had jumped to sea transportation?
Caballeron shrugged in irritation and checked his watch. He'd wasted too much time with this silliness. His goal must remain Daring Do, or rather, the Amulet of Kuliakan she must be carrying.
“As amusing as I have found our time together to be,” Caballeron announced, “I have an important amulet to locate—”
“Of course you do,” somepony snickered.
“—and so I must bid you farewell.” He ignored the undignified laughter that followed as he made his way out the door.
And came face-to-face with Daring Do.
Adrenaline flashed through his muscles. He was lucky he'd left the room when he had, for she might have passed by with him none the wiser. What should he do? Tackle her now and try to wrestle the Amulet away in the struggle? It was a one-on-one fight, however, and she knew all sorts of cheating kung hoof techniques. Where were his henchponies, he needed his henchponies! No, wait, perhaps it was better to let her flee, and then follow in order to locate her secret lair so that he could later infiltrate it with one of his henchponies disguised as a waiter, in order to—
“Caballeron, my old nemesis,” Daring said, “do you know where they're holding the panel on voice acting in Daring Do puppet shows?”
It wasn't her voice. For that matter, she had a sharper muzzle than Daring, and her eyes! How could he have missed she had a different eye color? It was another of these damnable costumed ponies, dressing up like it was some sort of archeological Nightmare Night. Only the fact that he had encountered her so suddenly as he came out the door had made him imagine she was the real thing.
And yet.
He had seen the panel she sought listed on one of the schedules beside each door.
His proud equine blood thundered in his veins. He grinned down on her. “Oh, Daring Do, you precious foal. Once again, I, the great Doctor Caballeron, am one step ahead of you. Once again, you are caught flat-hoofed and flailing as you race to learn the matters which I have uncovered and long since dismissed. Struggle though you may, time and time again you find yourself piecing together a puzzle I have already mastered! But go ahead, be my guest... and pit yourself—” here he pointed dramatically “—against that which awaits two doors down!”
Wide-eyed, she stared at him. “That was awesome! Thanks, Doc,” she said, and trotted happily to the room in question.
Caballeron turned away, a sudden lightness in his step. There was work to be done, and perhaps, after all, some thought to be given to what those know-nothing ponies who dared criticize his plans had said....
But nothing beat a good gloat.