Mr Stripes is a stallion with a problem. It's Plaid's birthday, and he's nearly out of time and ideas for a gift. That, and an eldritch horror from the depths of the earth has wandered into Manehattan.
Mr Stripes is a stallion with a problem. It's Plaid's birthday, and he's nearly out of time and ideas for a gift.
That, and an eldritch horror from the depths of the earth has wandered into Manehattan.
Mr Stripes was busy pacing up and down Bridleway when the first eldritch ululation rose from underneath like an escapee from Hell, low and dirge-like and warbling straight through the sidewalk.
He paid it absolutely no heed and nor did anypony else, faint as it was and drowned out by the general bustle and chatter and clamour of Manehattan. Instead, Mr Stripes kept pacing, doing his best impersonation of a thundercloud with a grievance as he did so, and reading as well. He held an open book in the cleft of his forehoof, and glowered at it as if it had done him personal injury.
The book’s title was 1001 Possible Presents for Your Teenage Filly’s Birthday (And Where to Get Them All at Extremely Short Notice), and as he read it, Mr Stripe’s forehead formed a mass of worried wrinkles that could have put glaciated continents to shame.
“‘Tickets to a concert by whatever hip new band foals are listening to these days’,” he muttered under his breath, sidestepping a newscolt as his brows creased further. “Am reasonably sure ‘hip’ was unhip term even when I was colt. What else? ‘A full-size poster of Prince Blueblood in all his strapping and princely majesty’. Hah, Plaid is far too discerning. Surely this book must have better idea or two.”
Mr Stripes was a stallion who usually ambled through life with the breezy and impervious single-mindedness of a warship. He knew that he was one of the biggest and best and mostly-ethical landlords in Manehattan. If you swung a cat anywhere in the city, you’d have good odds of concussing it off one of his properties. He knew that Plaid Stripes, the darling apple of his eye, nurtured a spark of genius that would prove her to be one of Equestria’s foremost sartorial artists in due time. He knew that his collection of miniature furniture was unequalled in the world, and when the great miniature furniture collectors of history gathered in the Hereafter, he’d feel no shame in their company. Mr Stripes knew many things, and was sometimes even right about them.
But to his deep unease, and after nagging weeks of putting off the decision, he’d found he didn’t know what to get Plaid for her birthday today. He was out of his depth, and felt like half the stallion he usually was. And if he couldn’t come up with something worthy of his daughter, he’d be no sort of stallion at all.
“‘A job, so that they can buy their own present’,” he read on as he came to a sidestreet. “Ooh. Snippy, writer. And taken care of, besides. ‘A dress resplendent enough for a Princess.’ Bah, she makes her own out of kitchen utensils, and they are more than resplendent. What about… what’s this?”
A maintenance hole cover by him had started clanking and rocking, as if something was trying to open it up from underneath. From below, there came a few muffled curses and yips, and a gleaming metal edge was shoved up through a brief gap. The whole thing was levered upwards in one abrupt motion and, accompanied by a fragrant guff from the city’s sewer, there rose a long and shaggy canine head.
The Diamond Dog blinked owlishly up at the bemused Mr Stripes, glanced round at a nearby sign, and then clambered up out of the hole. “Up, dogth!” he barked with a long and badly-crooked muzzle, beckoning up with a paw, his waistcoat studded with little jewels and tools. “Itth Bridleway. Up and out and away, before ponieth get thuthpithiouth and everything goeth to thit.”
“I… What were you doing down there?” said Mr Stripes, whose thought processes floundered when trying to parse ‘thuthpithiouth’ and who sought firmer ground for whatever this unhelpful distraction was. “Were you dogs mining down there? The city does not look kindly on that.”
“Were mining,” growled the dog, waving pack member after pack member out of the hole — some shaggy, some short-coated, some in sturdy waistcoats, some clad in armour. A few hauled up crates and long poles and pickaxes, and a couple gingerly held cages holding large, sleeping canaries. Most of them sent nervous backwards glances the way of the hole. The last dog out slammed the cover back down. “Blame our Alpha, the thtupid thod. Thought he found a nithe theam of gemth. Thought ponieth wouldn’t notith a buthted tunnel or two till we were gone. Thought it’d be fine to cut a earth paththage through the old route with ‘Delved Too Deep - Do Not Dithturb’ carved all over the wallth. ‘It’ll be fine, Patcheth,’” he said, sing-song. “‘That’ll jutht be greedy old-timerth keeping otherth out of their claim. Everydog knowth everything bad wath wiped out at near-thurfathe levelth long ago.’ Falling into a lava pit wath too good for him. Brainlethth berk.”
Mr Stripes was struggling to maintain his attention in the face of a thousand ‘th’s and a thousand specks of canine slaver. The yelping pack that was accruing about him and drawing the attention of everypony in the block didn’t help much either. He had important things to worry about. “Well, you just move along,” he said. “City won’t like to hear what you’ve been doing. Undermining our buildings. Bah! How irresponsible can you get?”
“Hah, thith much,” said Patches. “Come on, dogth! The dockth are thith way. There thould be an unattended thip or two lying around. Bring the crateth and canarieth, we’re changing continentth!”
Mr Stripes shook his head and turned around. Dogs could do whatever it was dogs did, and whatever it was Patches was rambling about, it wasn’t any concern of his. But one little spark of desperation stayed his hooves, and he glanced back at the dog. “Ah… one question.”
Patches glanced around, irritation and nervousness vying for dominance in his expression. “Yeth? Make it quick.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have idea about what the world’s best daughter, the very star of my skies, would deserve as birthday present, no?”
Patches stared flatly at Mr Stripes. From underneath the street, a deepening doom-doom-doom thrummed, which Mr Stripes paid little heed to. “I thuthpect,” the dog said, “that a nithe long vacathion away from thith thity would be jutht what thhe needth. Bye-bye, now. Don’t thtay here long.”
“Vacation,” Mr Stripes murmured to himself. His face lit up. “A vacation? That… hah, that is good idea! Somewhere warm this time of year. Maybe she’d like that as a special treat. Well, I shall consider, and thank you—”
He looked back up at Patches, but the dog and his pack were already fleeing in the direction of the waterfront, weaving through a curious audience of Manehattanites. He regarded them for a moment, shrugged, and moved on. If they were in a hurry to get somewhere, he wouldn’t delay them. They’d given him a good idea.
Mr Stripes angled himself towards the nearest travel agency, sure and happy once more. The universe had righted itself. Sunny places and budgets wheeled through his mental world as the powerful gears of his thought process gratefully chugged into life along a given direction.
He ambled off around a corner, whistling as he went, and left the dogs, the maintenance hole, and whatever that business had been about out of sight and, the second after, out of mind as well.
Out of Mr Stripes’ sight and mind, a moment after he’d rounded the corner, the earth shuddered and rumbled. From beneath the streets, another low, cold, and whisper-thin alien ululation rose.
This once again had no effect on the street traffic of Bridleway, the volume level of which could normally only be measured with a silly number of decibels, and ponies continued about their business unperturbed. Peddlers peddled. Hawkers hawked. Pedestrians pedestriated.
The maintenance hole cover wobbled as if something was trying to push its way up and out. It rose an hair’s width up off the ground, and the unearthly keening of the deep became that bit more pronounced and attention-getting. The hubbub hushed, and the collected Manehattanites looked quizzically around at the maintenance hole. Some of the older ponies sunning themselves on benches acquired the steely, faraway looks of those who’d lived through the Great Alligator Infestation of several decades hence, and rose creakily to attention once more.
“If those darned dogs woke up anything, I swear to the princesses…” one of them muttered, a wizened unicorn mare with two-and-a-half peglegs and a face full of scars. She nudged a nearby newspaper-laden newscolt and tossed several bits at him. “You start passing those papers out to everypony here, sonny!”
“What? Er, okay. Why, ma’am?”
“Don’t you know your history? Or applied biology? Hard whack to the snout with a rolled-up paper and a harder cry of, “No! Bad!” did for your average ‘gator nine times out of ten.”
“Oh.” The newscolt studied the bits in his hoof. “What happened the tenth time?”
“‘Gator did for you. Now get to passing!”
“You sure it’s alligators we’re dealing with?” said a griffon sausage-inna-bun seller, who had drawn a long toasting fork out from his cart’s stove, the tip still glowing red-hot and the length sporting several seared lumps of quorn. The newscolt distributed papers left and right, and the whole of the street’s crowd shuffled and edged guardedly towards the maintenance hole cover.
The old mare snorted. “You know of any other sewer-dwellers that could make that sort of racket, sonny?”
“No,” the griffon said hesitantly, his gaze on the maintenance hole cover, which was now wobbling ever-upwards, with something dark and tendrilous half-glimpsed underneath it. “Definitely none that’ve got tentacles, that’s for sure.”
He pointed with the toasting fork, and many pairs of eyes followed it to where a black and glistening tentacle-tip had levered up the hole cover and now lay on the sunny sidewalk. It twitched this way and that, rose for a moment as if inspecting everypony present, and for a long moment, hung still.
“Could be a common-or-garden Saddle Arabian tentacled ‘gator,” the mare said dubiously. “They were always the most vicious of the breeds.”
“Don’t be daft, Moonshine,” said a similarly old and scarred stallion. “They had pale brindled tentacles. That one’s solid and darker’n the hollow bits inside your head.”
“Daft? Hollow bits? I’m not having that sort of lip from a stallion with a prosthetic where most ponies keep their haunch, Peatreek!”
“You cheeky so-and-so, you were the one not watching my back when we were making a sweep of the North Tunnel—”
“Priorities?” ventured the griffon as the concrete around the maintenance hole began to crack. The ululation resounded with new and terrible force, and the cover slid to one side. From the impenetrable blackness that stood revealed, down in the darkness beneath the city, there came the sound of something moving. Something vast. Something rising.
It was one of these rare occasions where the citizenry of Manehattan were silent, and they took a collective step back as the concrete cracked and crumbled, as something ascended with all the placid unstoppability of a glacier that had forgotten its relationship to gravity. It pushed up through the street, a hulking mass that carried and shed lumps of pavement to reveal a black, roiling, shapeless form. The whiff of the sewers rose with it, but under their reek there lay buried another musk like dusty sulphur, incubating since some bygone aeon.
Rubble pattered down around it, and before the paralysed eyes of Bridleway, there emerged…
There emerged...
No words could do it justice, but these’ll try their best. The seething, shapeless, protoplasmic, building-sized mass of it towered over the watchers, its rugose hide blackly iridescent under the light of the sun, seething with an aura of unlight. Ghastly, dripping appendages unfolded from all sides, an array of uncoiling tentacles and tendrils and polyps and spindly, segmented limbs that groped here and there in the clear Manehattan morning.
From gaping, cave-like orifices and from the ends of stalks, countless eyes stared unblinkingly outwards and fang-lined mouths hung open, ringed with sensory organs beyond reckoning, drinking in details beyond pony ken. Everything that mortal imaginations conjured in the abyss between stars and at the bottom of worlds sat there on the sundered sidewalk, in that rough beast that had arisen from those deepest pits carved out by the Fires of Creation when the world was young.
Silence hung then. The Dweller Below’s eyes blinked slowly, one by one. Several on the end of stalks swung this way and that. A tendril reached out for the nearest poster-covered wall and tentatively prodded it. From a mouth, or possibly mouths, there came a noise like “Schk-vloorp?”
And like that, the multitude released its breath. Voices rose from all quarters.
“Wow, ha ha, it’s got tentacles everywhere!”
“Look, it might have been an alligator, we couldn’t have taken the risk it wasn’t —”
“Is that a polyp it’s got there? I don’t know what a polyp is, but that’s what it looks like the way it sounds.”
“Cthlooglk?” burbled the Dweller Below which, for its own part, wasn’t sure what to make of this strange new environment with disorientating amounts of light and hardly any lava oceans to speak of. Weird colours blistered on every surface it could perceive, the dimensions and the Euclidean geometry were all wrong, and the familiar creaks and echoes and songs of the under-places were nowhere to be found. Sensory organs which had done sterling work for millennia at fathomless depths below the world peered owlishly up at the sun, which the Dweller Below tried and failed to eat when the exact distances involved eluded it. Where was the ceiling? Lots of little alien things chattered on all sides. It peered at them. “Twrp?”
“Stars above, it’s like a sea-slug and the mould in the back of my fridge had a child, and Discord was the doting godparent.”
“Does it look like a threat to Equestria and/or the world at large, you reckon? We’ve not had one of those in weeks.”
“Looks like something the Element Bearers’d wrangle. Say, doesn’t one of the Element Bearers have a boutique here? Maybe she could —”
“She’s not an Element Bearer anymore, slowpoke, she’s a Rainbow-something-er —”
“Well, whatever she is, you reckon she’ll know what to do?”
“Somepony take my picture with it!” said a uniformed pegasus constable, brandishing a camera.
Alien though the little creatures may have been, the Dweller Below couldn’t help but feel that this wasn’t how they were meant to react. It angled various sensory organs up towards the sky and tooted with bewilderment. Latent agoraphobia was dawning on it, which was a terrible thing to discover was even possible, let alone that it had. Its tentacles groped blindly upwards in search of wherever the ceiling was. There had to be one somewhere. “Yog-z-zwrgl?”
Lots of varyingly-sized structures lay around it, with oddly-regular walls rising up and stopping over what seemed like littler caverns within this great over-cavern. The walls themselves ran on, framing great open stretches, and the Dweller Below recognised those at least. It knew tunnels when it saw them. Perhaps one would lead up to a point where there was a ceiling in reach, and maybe even up to that curious glowing thing. It slithered abruptly off down Bridleway, tentacles and tendrils schlurp-schlurp-schlurp-ing off and on the concrete as it went. The crowd jumped back as its bulk bore past them, and several unfortunate parked wagons became several parked collections of kindling as it swept over them.
For a long moment, the massed Manehattanites stared after the Dweller Below as it careened off down the long street, heralded by crashes and swerves and swearing from the road traffic ahead and by a choir of shrieks from the pedestrians seeing it for the first time. Then there came an embarrassed cough from the constable, who put his camera away. “Oh, right, it’s a public hazard. I forgot.”
“What’s everypony waiting for? After it!” yelled Moonshine. “We’ve got to corral it somehow before it wrecks more and hurts somepony!”
“Corral that? How exactly?”
“With ingenuity, that’s how! Come on!”
“Pitchforks!” yelled the griffon, spotting a demand when the market presented one and whipping out spare toasting forks from a drawer in his cart. The crowd surged around him, charging after the fleeing Dweller Below. “Get your miniature pitchforks here! Freshly-made, they’re lovely!”
Several streets away from events as they unfolded, a travel agent looked up from her desk and out the window. “Er,” she said, two ship tickets to Zebrica in hoof. “Are you hearing a distant crashing and unearthly keening as well, or is it just me?”
“Is likely of no consequence,” said Mr Stripes cheerfully, taking the tickets. “And many thanks for these. My daughter will be delighted.” He paused and studied the travel agent’s features, and rifled through his memory for faces. “You don’t happen to rent one of the apartments in Lower-Upper-Left Midtown, no? I rent out many there.”
“I… yes? Apartment four in Mulberry Hei— oh. Oh, Mr Stripes!” The agent flushed. “I… I should have the rent by next —”
“No need! Have a six-month reprieve!” said Mr Stripes, who knew that he was a good landlord who made firm but fair landlording decisions, but who also knew that a good mood was a thing worth spreading. He turned to leave as the agent gaped. “Please, enjoy your rest of day! I know I will.”
It was Plaid Stripes’ lunch break, and she whistled cheerfully and tunelessly as she dressed a ponequin at the back of Rarity’s boutique. It was a day for whistling. Any birthday was. The sunny streets of Manehattan matched her mood, and the background chatter and bustle of the city lulled her as she worked. The amount of screaming and crashing in said bustle seemed to be fractionally higher, admittedly, but not enough to distract her.
She was in the zone. Pony figures cut white-hot lines through Plaid’s mind, figures adorned with gleaming metal, clad in clothes nopony had ever thought possible. Nopony apart from her. Her muse sang, and while it might not have been a song that shared a universe with notions of intelligibility and good taste as understood by most sentient beings, it poured regardless out from her mind’s eye and onto the ponequin like liquid fire. A extra rivet here, a trim of moulded skewers there, a fondue pot perched just so—
The door jangled, breaking Plaid’s flow of thought, and she hurriedly turned away from the ponequin, drew a sheet over it, and bobbed her head out to see who’d entered. “Ah, um, hello! Welcome to — oh! Hello, Miss Rarity!”
“Good day, Plaid!” Rarity said, obscured by several large packages that orbited in her magical grasp like planets around an especially stylish sun. She puffed as she set the packages down, and smiled up at Plaid. “Gracious, it was quite a bumpy train journey from Ponyville to here. The walk here from the train station via the waterfront was quite divine, though, in this weather. Is there some sort of event on in the city, darling?”
“An event?” Plaid frowned as she thought, still trying to pick bits of her brain out of the haze of creation. “Not that I’ve heard. Why?”
“Oh, there seemed to be some sort of fracas going in the streets, nearer to Bridleway and the city centre. Perhaps more of a rumpus than a fracas. I even saw a group of Diamond Dogs loping towards the harbour with some alacrity.” Rarity thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Quite peculiar, but no matter, I suppose. Could you be a dear and help me unpack these? They’re for the ponequins.”
“Of course!” Plaid trotted up and nosed into one of the bags, uncovering a neatly-folded expanse of fine forest-green fabric, studded with tiny agate buttons. “Is this the new Autumn Range you said you’d bring round? Oh, it’s pretty.”
“Why, thank you, darling, and it’s the promised range indeed,” replied Rarity, extracting a green-and-gold dress from another bag with her magic. “Hours upon days upon weeks of effort and tears and remonstrations with my sewing machine whenever it proved recalcitrant, but if I do say so myself, it’s all paid off marvellously. Voila!” She lifted several other dresses clear of their bags and flourished one like a banner. “Russet velvet for the overdress, with cream-coloured broderie anglaiseand a studding of little pearls for the cuffs and underfrock. Here’s a darker number, charcoal-spun silk in the main and for the hat, offset by the peacock feather arrangement, of course. And here’s another. See how it catches the light? Silk charmeuse, offset by the jet on the front, and I couldn’t resist giving it just a hint of Rococo with the ribbon on the wither and the way it winds around the torso. And here’s ...”
Plaid listened, spellbound, as Rarity detailed each dress and Fancé words began to fill the air like excited doves. Dad getting her a job under this sort of expertise was the luckiest thing that could have happened to her. She couldn’t wait to get Rarity’s feedback on her own creations.
Eventually, however, the onslaught of Fancé slowed, and Plaid’s spellboundness wobbled. She felt almost grubby bringing the conversation back to more prosaic concerns. “Is it all for the boutique here, Miss Rarity? I’m not sure if we’ve got enough ponequins.”
“Not all of it’s for here, Plaid. I’m on a whistle-stop tour today, dropping off stock where needed. Canterlot’ll be my next port of call after here. I trust nothing here’s gone awry since my last visit?”
“Everything’s been fine, Miss Rarity!” Plaid replied, picking up one dress in her mouth and maneuvering it onto a ponequin in the store’s window display. “Business has been booming, Sassy Saddles’ been sending advice my way, Daddy’s been making sure the building’s fine, and...” Plaid’s eyebrows waggled in a conspiratorial way. “I’ve even had the time to do some more designs myself.”
Years of cultivating proper comportment meant that Rarity’s voice only trembled a little, and the hitch in her movements when dressing a ponequin was all but imperceptible. “Oh, that’s lovely, Plaid.”
“Would you like to see them?”
“Oh, assuredly. But, ah, before that...” Rarity’s magic delved down into a saddlebag, and she withdrew a small package, wrapped up with a bow on top. “Happy birthday, Plaid!”
Plaid gasped. “You remembered? You didn’t have to! Thank you!”
“It was no trouble, darling. And I’ll confess Pinkie reminded me — do you remember her from the boutique’s opening? A pink blur of enthusiasm? She might have interacted with you for a brief instant and winkled out your whole life story and salient details in that instant. She tends to, by some magic.” Rarity motioned to the package. “I suspect it’ll be just your thing.”
Plaid undid the ribbon with one tug of her teeth, and as it and the wrapping fell free, she ogled the contents. It was an old cutlery box, and when she nosed it open, a delicate little antique cutlery set sat revealed in its velvet lining, thin tines and surfaces and decorated handles glittering in the sunlight.
“I was browsing Ponyville’s antiques shop one day,” Rarity said idly as Plaid regarded the set mutely. “And there that was on one shelf, at quite a steal of a price. And I thought, well, why not? I hope they’re —”
“West Coast Baroque!” Plaid exclaimed suddenly and delightedly. “I thought I recognised the handle style! They’re so classic … and so well-preserved! Thank you so much, Miss Rarity. I know exactly what I can do with these. I’ve a pot in need of some side-plumes.”
Rarity opened her mouth, closed it again, and then after a moment’s silence, dared enquire. “Oh. Er, do you?”
“Oh yes.” Plaid leaned closer, her voice hushed and trembling with excitement. ”I’ve been planning an Archaic range.”
“An Archia—? Ah!” Rarity donned a smile. “That sounds wonderful, Plaid. A solid starting ethos for your first set of designs! And, ah, dare I enquire—?”
Plaid grinned, held up one hoof, bidding Rarity shush. She pointed towards to the sheet-covered ponequin she’d been working on at the back of the boutique, and the unicorn cautiously trotted towards it. Her magical aura alighted on the sheet, and she turned to Plaid with one raised brow. Plaid eagerly nodded, all but jumping up and down with excitement. “Behold!” she urged.
Rarity swept the sheet off the ponequin. She beheld.
“See, I’ve been thinking about diversifying,” Plaid gabbled delightedly, as Rarity stared at the dressed ponequin. “Cutlery’s good, but there’s plenty of other practical utensils, aren’t there? A pony should be able to wear them anywhere they go just in case they need them, and look good at the same time. And then one day I was out with Dad at the Royal Museum, and on the second floor, they had the old pony-armour of General Bucephalus himself, and just like that, I had the perfect inspiration!”
Rarity’s gaze was mirrored in most every surface the ponequin’s garb had to offer. Pots, pans, serving dishes, skillets, and ramekins made up its bulk, a great dimpled suit of pony-armour. Rivets and hooks and coiled loops held the lot together, and in the gaps there twinkled smaller utensils: forks and knives and spatulas and skewers. A pair of ladles were slung over the withers, a set of kettles served as shoes, and on the head, a upside-down fondue pot sat with weighty gravitas.
“Bucephalus’s helmet had three plumes. The cutlery box you got me’ll be perfect for those,” Plaid continued cheerfully. “I’m thinking the knives fanned out on one side, the forks on another, and the spoons up the centre. What do you think, Miss Rarity?” She paused then. “Do you … do you like it?”
“It’s a mark of rare distinction, Plaid.” Rarity flashed a smile at Plaid, and then looked back at the ponequin with the expression of a pony doing her valiant best to comprehend and failing. “And diversifying’s always a good step for a budding artiste.”
“I know, right? I mean, cutlery on its own was good, but there was only so much I could do with it, you know? Kitchenware as a whole is such a good medium.” Plaid regarded her work once more with satisfaction, before smiling back at Rarity. “Is there any part of it you like in particular?”
And as Rarity dithered there under the glow of Plaid’s expectant smile, her mind host to a three-way battle between her shoulder-Applejack, the wish to help a budding artiste without breaking her spirit, and the knowledge that said young artiste’s father would likely have words on the subject of any spirit breaking, mercy came in the form of the door jangling as it flew open and a panicked-looking pegasus stallion came lurching inside. “Behind the counter!” he blurted. “Take shelter! It’s coming this way!”
“What?” Rarity blinked and trotted towards him, Plaid at her heels. “Sir, you’re in quite a state. What’s happening? What do you mean by ‘it’?”
“I’ve no idea, but it’s horrible!” gabbled the stallion. “It’s been blundering around central Manehattan causing havoc! Is this building sturdy? It’s ploughed through a few walls, but it mainly sticks to the streets, so you might be—”
“Sir, please, comport yourself. Deep breaths. Tell me what’s going on, and what’s responsible—”
“And while you’re calming down, sir,” ventured Plaid, who had no idea what was happening but felt that a salespony approach was a safe fallback, “could I interest you in any of Miss Rarity’s designs? This hat here would go very well with your—”
“Plaid.”
The stallion’s gaze had focused at the mention of Rarity’s name, and he regarded her with some hope. “You’re … you’re Rarity? The Rarity? National hero, saviour of Equestria on multiple occasions, Chic magazine’s Most Promising Designer, etc?”
Rarity preened slightly. “Well, one doesn’t like to boast.”
The stallion looked from her to the outside, from which a distant clamour was growing, and then back to her. “Er,” he said. “Er. Help? Do the saviour thing? Please?”
“Well, I’d be perfectly willing to pitch in, sir, but I’m still not quite clear on what’s happening. What needs to have ‘the saviour thing’ done to it?”
The stallion opened and closed his mouth, brain working in silence as he fumbled for powers of description that he did not in fact have. “Right, er,” he stammered. “You know how you get alleyways in some of the grottier bits of the city? With piled-up garbage bags and rat tribes and glowing magical waste and puddles of who-dares-guess-what and smells that could knock you out at fifty paces, yeah?”
“I’m … aware of the existence of such locales, yes.”
“Right. Well, we’ve got what looks like one of those in living form, grown tentacles and lumbering every which way. It just came up underground after a pack of Diamond Dogs—”
“Diamond Dogs? Really?”
“Yeah. And once it was up, it just started blundering around the streets, wrecking wagons and knocking its way through buildings. It’s flattened nigh-on every cab in the carriage depot, flattened the carriage depot as well, crashed right through one wing of the Royal Museum, and went into the Stock Exchange!”
“Gracious! That must have caused no end of a stir.”
“Well, no. Nopony thought it looked out of place there. Until it went out through the other wall.” The stallion took a breath. “And now it’s heading this way, and nopony’s called in the Wonderbolts or Guard or princesses, ‘cause everypony’s been too busy fleeing or getting their pitchforks out! Do you know what to do?”
“I … well, I confess I’m still somewhat unclear as to what exactly’s going on, but if you’d care to lead me to wherever this creature is, I’ll give it my best appraisal—”
But any appraisal would have to wait, because it was at that moment the door jangled once again, and Mr Stripes entered proceedings.
‘Entered’ is too mild a term. He billowed in like a galleon under full sail, his face aglow like a particularly cheerful lighthouse. “Mr Stripes!” declared Rarity in some surprise, “Daddy!” exclaimed Plaid delightedly, and the pegasus stallion let out a brief shriek until Mr Stripes turned out to not be a underworld monstrosity.
“Plaid!” boomed Mr Stripes, filling the gentile interior of the boutique in the same way tsunamis fill eggcups. “How has birthday been, gnome of my garden?”
“Oh, it’s been wonderful, Daddy!” Plaid chirped, trotting forwards to be taken into an enveloping bear-hug. “I got some designing done, and everything’s been alright here, and when Miss Rarity came, she gave me these!” She fumbled with a spare foreleg for the wooden cutlery box at one side, and flipped it open and presented it for approval. “West Coast Baroque! Aren’t they lovely?”
“Ah!” Despite proximity to Plaid’s enthusiasms, Mr Stripes had a decidedly average level of appreciation for historical kitchen utensils, but he was as susceptible to the spread of toothy grins as the next pony, and he mirrored his daughter’s expression. “They are very shiny, yes! And they have all the expected prongs!” He flashed his smile Rarity’s way. “Most kind of you, Rarity. Business booms, yes?”
“Oh,” said Rarity, with a laugh that concealed a certain amount of wary confusion at the zigzagging nature of the last while’s interactions. “It does, Mr Stripes, thank you for asking. And it was no trouble, really.”
“Er,” said the pegasus, throwing his own initial two letters nervously into the ring, as he tapped Mr Stripes’s wither. “You just came from outside? You… did you see it?”
The lighthouse-beam that was Mr Stripes’s expression flickered momentarily at this interruption. “See what?”
“The… you know what I’m talking about! You have to! It’s been rampaging through the streets!”
“Streets? I have been taking shortcuts. I have not seen whatever this is … a parade, or whatever.” The tone of Mr Stripes had grown slightly chillier, but warmed again as he discovered a way to tie the conversation back into his main theme. “Shortcuts from a locale, where I have bou— collected, rather, owing to my getting it in advance as a responsible and clever father would, a gift for my little bee of my blossom.”
“...what?”
“Yes indeed!” Mr Stripes reached into the front pocket of his jacket and turned back to Plaid. “For you, my darling. Much joy may it bring!”
He produced two tickets with a flourish and pressed them into Plaid’s hoof. She squinted down at them, and then squeaked with excitement high enough that the windows groaned. “Two first-class tickets to Zebrica?”
“Seemed suitable,” said Mr Stripes, as Rarity oo’ed in appreciation and the pegasus regarded proceedings in frank befuddlement. “They have sunshine, the zebras, or so I am informed. And many pyramids. You like pyramids, yes?”
“Pyramids are nice,” Plaid said. “But they’ve also got museums and things that’re even older than Equestria, and they’ve been making clothes and making utensils for millennia! They made the first cooking forks, you know, out of bronze! Oh, if I could spend even just one day wandering their museums, I’d get so much inspiration for the Archaic range!” Her eyes all but glowed. “And their modern stuff deserves appreciation and use as well — they’ve got all sorts of different spoons and measurers for all the alchemy they do, see. Oh, I should try and see one of their own fashion shows, and get inside a zebra kitchen at one point as well. I bet there’ll be plenty of scope for—”
“Excuse me?” the pegasus said, cutting into Plaid’s extemporising. “Could this maybe be talked about later? There’s some unearthly horror roaming the streets and—”
Mr Stripes turned on him, cutting him off mid-sentence with the faintest of faint diaphragmal rumbles, like a mountain alluding to long-dormant volcanic tendencies. The pegasus stared up into Stripes’ gimlet eyes, which had narrowed thoughtfully to give the impression of some vast internal list being consulted. Despite them, the pegasus swallowed and tried again. “It’s just … priorities ...”
Whatever mental list Mr Stripes had consulted seemed to draw a blank, and the crags and furrows of his frown deepened. “Not a tenant. Odd. Sir, you are interrupting birthday celebration for the jewel of my tiara. Are you here to buy from Miss Rarity? Finish your business and go.”
“As I understood the gentlecolt,” Rarity said hesitantly, “there’s some manner of creature at large in the city and causing havoc. He thought I might be able to assist in the matter.”
“Is creature relevant?” said Mr Stripes dismissively. “Is likely to be far away or to have wandered off in time this stallion has spent interrupting.”
“It’s very relevant!” said the pegasus. “I thought I heard this crashing from outside coming closer a few minutes ago, and I’m sure it’s still—”
“Bah, hysterics. Look at pretty clothes on display. Will make you feel better.” Mr Stripes turned back to Plaid the moment after, all suggestion of volcanicity gone. “Clipper shall leave harbour on the first of next month, glitter of my sequin, and make for Marephis. Should give us ample time to pack and look up guidebooks and plan whatever excursions you’d like, yes?”
“I… um, yes, Daddy!” Plaid’s gaze initially flickered uncertainly from Mr Stripes to Rarity to the pegasus, before brightening. “We could get a boat up the Neighle for a couple of days. I bet the zebras upriver have lots of their own cool kitchenware as well.”
“Dears, I don’t mean to impose, but—” Rarity started.
“Miss Rarity, please, I think your customer needs dealing with,” replied Mr Stripes, flashing her a smile tinged with irritation. “He is being most disruptive. Perhaps a pretty dress fitting is called for. Or even hoofcuff fitting, if you have those. Do you? I do not judge.”
“Underworld horrors!” wailed the pegasus. “Rampaging through the city! Am I speaking into a vacuum here? Am I hallucinating all the words I’m saying? Hello?”
“Sir,” said Rarity, pulling the pegasus aside, “perhaps if you explain matters in more detail to just myself, matters stand a slightly better chance of being resolved. Now let’s do this calmly and with all due decoru—”
And it was at that moment that there came an unearthly screeching from the street, and what sounded like the lamppost outside the door being slammed into with some force. And on closer inspection from everypony present, that was exactly what had happened.
The inspection took some doing. Rarity boggled. Plaid dropped the ship tickets. The pegasus balked. Mr Stripes tilted his head. Over the tops of the dressed ponequins, past the boutique’s windows, there wobbled a writhing, building-sized mass of what seemed like all the appendages the Creator had had going spare after finishing Creating, blotting out all else with its bulk. Black things glistened and colours unseeable by the pony eye flickered amidst yonic folds and depths. Past a coating of debris, wooden splinters and pulped fruit and building fragments, arrays of inset and stalked eyes blinked in at the boutique’s occupants.
“Glrr-gl-thwoog?” ventured the Dweller Below.
“Aaagh!” Rarity was first to decide on a suitable outburst, shedding her ladylike comportment for a second. “What is it? It’s hideous! What is it?”
“It’s like a — it looks like — I don’t know!” Plaid shrunk close to her father’s side, her eyes wide and betraying terrible fascination. “There’s octopus in there, and slug, and a hint of lobster, and one of these deep-sea things with all the tendrils, whatever the name is, and, and—”
“I tried,” moaned the pegasus.
As they all spoke at once, Mr Stripes stared up at it in considered silence.
To a pony with sufficient imagination, there was enclosed within the creature’s coils and unutterable shape all the nightmares of an age long past. All these dark old days when monsters beyond pony ken had the world as their own, and when ponykind was dust, would have it once again. The promise of these days roiled and gibbered and ‘Cthoogl?’-ed before their eyes, had twisted its way up from the earth and capered on Manehattan’s sunlit streets, and had shredded away the cocoon of lies beings wrought to swaddle themselves in makeshift sanity and keep chaos at bay. To such a pony, a dark age was promised in that beast, an abyss without fathom and without end.
Mr Stripes was not such a pony.
“Bah, do not recoil from it,” Mr Stripes said, not entirely sure of the advice he was about to give, but certain it ought to be given regardless. “Just look big and imposing, and it shall be more scared of us than us of it.”
“No, that’s bears!” wailed the pegasus stallion. “You’re thinking of bears!”
“Ach, bears, underworld horrors,” Mr Stripes said irritably, waggling a foreleg. “What is difference, fundamentally? Look, I show you.”
With that, he tottered up onto his hindlegs and waggled his forelegs at the confused Dweller Below. “Raargh!” he boomed. “Shoo, pest! Raargh! You are interrupting—!”
He got no further. The Dweller Below’s many eyes had fixated on him, and after what seemed like a moment’s fluttery indecision on its part, dozens of tentacles unfolded from its form and smashed into the boutique’s front all at once.
Chaos reigned for an instant that packed in as much incidence as possible. The windows and doors were knocked in, and wooden splinters and glass flew across the floor. Rarity yelped and reflexively rose a blue-tinted shield between the boutique’s occupants and the incoming shrapnel. It withstood the first flurry of glass and wood bits, but did less well against the incoming door, which punched right through and knocked Rarity and the pegasus off their hooves. Mr Stripes, for his part, had seized Plaid with a foreleg and leapt for the counter, and was aided in this by a ponequin slamming into him from behind. The other ponequins tumbled and fell this way and that, clothes and shreds thereof filled the air, and tentacles entered shortly after, sticky ichor glistening on their ropey lengths,
Groans and yelps came from the back of the boutique, which held a pile of ponies and assorted wreckage, and countless eyes and tentacles peered and/or flailed around the front of the boutique’s space, as if the Dweller Below was keen to be sure that the large scary creature was gone. It ceased shortly, emitted a relieved burble, and withdrew all its tentacles the second after, taking whatever debris lay upon the floor with it. Plenty of glass and wood fragments. Several sundered ponequins. The tatters of the Autumn Range. And two fallen tickets.
The Dweller Below rolled back into the street, and scooted off one way. From the distance, there came the sound of a crowd in pursuit of it. This took some time to register with everypony in the boutique, who had a great deal of groaning and ache-nursing to get through in those first few moments. But get through them they did.
“Oh no! The boutique!” wailed Plaid, first to raise her head and survey the damage.
“My nothe!” mewled the luckless pegasus stallion, who’d had the misfortune of being before the door when the Dweller Below smashed against the front, and who now had the better part of the handle wedged up one nostril.
“My Autumn Range!” screeched Rarity, the words erupting like steam from an enraged kettle as her gaze flitted across the battered ponequins and the few ichor-stained shreds hanging from them.
“THE TICKETS!” Mr Stripes outdid them all for volume and fury. He’d slammed forcefully back into the boutique’s counter, and now rose from its wreckage, shedding wooden fragments and tasteful items of underapparel like a wrathful god with a highly select domain. “PLAID’S TICKETS!”
He rose fully, and would have plunged immediately into pursuit of the Dweller Below had one of said tasteful items not become entangled around his forelegs and guided him smoothly towards a forehead-first meeting with the floor. As Mr Stripes cursed concussedly at ground level, Rarity was next to rise. She rose, dishevelled and scratched and trembling and white — or whiter, rather — with rage. “Hours upon days upon weeks,” she hissed. Her diamond-hard gaze bored into a shredded piece of lace on the ground, damp with cthonic mulch. “That was broderie anglaise! Do you know much sweat and how many tears go into broderie anglaise? Do you?”
She shook her head, teeth clenched, and forced herself to turn towards Plaid, Mr Stripes, and the pegasus stallion. Her magic uncorked the doorhandle from the latter’s nose with a sound like ‘plunk’ and a yelp, and brought a first-aid kit bobbing out from her sundered counter. An ice pack slid out from the kit and was pressed against his nose. “Keep that there,” Rarity said. “If anypony has any cuts, there are plasters and bandages in there as well. Plaid, kindly stay here and mind your father and this gentlecolt while I attend to things.”
“Where are you going?” Plaid ventured, looking from Rarity to Mr Stripes to the groaning pegasus to Rarity again.
“Matters have been made entirely clear. I,” said Rarity, in a voice that could have come from an oncoming iceberg, “am going to find those particular beings in town who are best equipped for the situation. And I shall have them deal with this.”
And with that, she picked her way over the smashed front of the boutique and vanished in the direction of the waterfront, the air colder in her wake.
“Glk,” moaned the pegasus, curled up on the ground with the ice-pack firmly applied. “Urk. Oh stars. I think it scraped my brain.”
“Tickets,” mumbled Mr Stripes, pushing himself up with no little effort. His gaze slid blearily from side to side. “Creature stole tickets. Plaid’s tickets. Must ... urrgh. Retrieve—”
“Daddy!” cried Plaid, scrambling over towards him. “Stay still. Please. I’ll get you a plaster or two.”
“No … no time, pineapple of my fruitbowl,” Mr Stripes managed. He pushed himself up a little further. “Have to head … head after it. Take them back. If I don’t, what sort of stallion am I, eh?”
“Daddy, no, the tickets don’t matter! Look, you’re all scratched! I don’t want you to get hurt more!”
“Is but a scratch! Literally!” Mr Stripes pushed himself fully upright, and some fire was rekindled in the depths of his eyes for all he swayed. “Do not worry about my hurts, darling, Daddy is very tough. Shall be back shortly.”
He kissed her on the cheek and scrambled towards the wide-open front, his movements initially unsteady but becoming surer as he went on, till something of his customary unstoppability had returned to him. A crowd was moving past them in pursuit of the Dweller Below, pitchforks bobbing in their midst, and Mr Stripes made to join them.
“Daddy, wait!”
Only almost unstoppable. Mr Stripes turned. “Plaid, please —”
“If you have to go after it, Daddy, at least let me make you even tougher,” Plaid pleaded. Past her worried expression, a gleam had entered her eye, that of a great idea dawning. “You’re sort of built like Bucephalus anyway, so it should fit you.”
“You, ah … might have to clarify, daisy of my garden.”
“I’ll show you! It’s at the back of the boutique!” Plaid excitedly gestured, and Mr Stripes reluctantly trotted after her, side-stepping the hors-de-combat pegasus as he went. “You’ll like it! Miss Rarity said it was avant-garde. Exceptionally, even!”
The Bonny Jenny, a sturdy and old-fashioned sailing brig docked at the quieter end of the waterfront, would have been perfect for Patches and his pack as a getaway boat. Perfect, that is, if not for the full crew of surprised donkey sailors who suddenly found themselves sharing the deck with a pack of Diamond Dogs.
“An emergenthy, I thaid!” snarled Patches, leaning down to try and outstare the brig’s captain, Desperada, a weathered-looking jenny with notched ears and a countenance like a stormcloud. A younger mirror of Desperada looked down from the lookout point, a crossbow cradled in her forelimbs. “Do you know that word? It meanth thomething you thail far, far away from right now!”
“Look, pal, this is my ship,” hissed Desperada. “And I sailed it into Manehattan with particular purposes in mind, alright? We’re going to offload some perfectly legitimate and legal cargo, yeah? We’re going to pick up some equally legitimate and legal new cargo. We’re going, by prior arrangement, to ferry some messages back to Asinia that the message-senders don’t trust to the telegrams. Those’re the purposes. Picking up passengers wasn’t one of them! Especially not ones who ain’t offering payment! And especially not a slavering pack of dogs with crates and … and bloody canaries in cages and whatever, who ain’t offering payment, and who say the city’s not safe for business! That last one didn’t feature as a purpose in the slightest, would you believe!”
“Ma?” ventured the younger jenny from up in the lookout point, waggling her crossbow. “Does anyone need perforating?”
“No, Conquista, nobody needs perforating. Yet. If I were you, dog, I’d think about the implications of that word and that emphasis.”
“The longer you thpend threatening me and being thtubborn, the clother we all come to our imminent and horrible demitheth!”
“Our… what? What in the Depths was that last word —?”
“Ahem.”
The sound of a throat being pointedly cleared came from behind Patches, on the gangplank bridging the brig and wharf. Desperada’s glower darkened as she craned round Patches to see who it was. “Oh, fantastic, someone new! That’s right, just come aboard! Apparently, all Manehattan’s been invited on the Bonny Jenny today!”
“Apologies, captain,” said the newcomer, her tone cold and foreboding. “I shouldn’t be long here.”
Patches turned around and looked down to see her, a white-coated and purple-maned unicorn. She was breathing heavily, as if she’d come here at a swift gallop, but her expression was grim and composed. And her eyes…
The big, scarred Diamond Dog had delved down into the deep places of the world, where nameless things gnawed ceaselessly at the roots of Creation, and he had been unlucky enough to see some of these things. And even their fathomless gazes had been less scary than this unicorn’s.
“Ma?” came a distant and unheeded voice from above, “should I perforate her, or …?”
“Conquista, put the damned crossbow away!”
Reports and dispatches from across the mines and underholds bubbled to the top of Patches’s mind, and the bell of realisation tolled once before falling silent in horror. His face twisted with confusion, before collapsing into the haunted look worn by every being who’s just found the universe interpreting the thought ‘Well, at least today can’t get any worse’ as a challenge. “Oh, thod,” he mewled. “It’th you.”
“It is I,” said Rarity, her tone as frigid and arch as a winter sky. The pack collectively shrank back, and any dog on the deck that was lucky enough to not be in her direct line of sight tried to hide behind whatever was available, up to and including the mast, crates, off the side of the ship, and surprised donkey sailors. “I see I have a reputation.”
“We’ve no quarrel,” Patches said desperately. “Our Lady Alpha put the word out, any other dogth caught trying to enthlave thurfathe-dwellerth would be nailed to a thtalactite by their earth. We were jutht paththing through.”
“Passing through, were you?” said Rarity. “On your way up from underground, I presume? And no little problems you might have brought with you in need of being resolved? Are you quite sure of that?”
“I, er, that, that ith to thay, I, er.” Patches, who was finding today eminently loathable, fought for a suitable line of thought. “Look, okay, maybe we’re connected in thome way to that thing in the thity. But not deliberately! We were jutht fleeing, nothing more!”
“Pray tell, did the notion of fixing the problem once cross your minds?”
“Yeth,” Patches cautiously allowed, “but it was thoon thidelined by the notion of thurviving the problem.”
“Look, whatever this problem is, shall the discussion about how to solve it not happen aboard my ship?” snapped Desperada. “Cargo doesn’t offload itself!”
“What about those wandering pine saplings on the last run to Al-Antalus, Ma?” ventured Conquista. “We had to tether them to the mast, the way they kept trundling around the deck all the ti—”
“Alright, most of the time, cargo doesn’t offload itself! But that’s distracting from the overall thrust of my point, which is that —”
“You have prior acquaintance with such creatures as the one in the city,” Rarity said icily to Patches as Desperada and Conquista quibbled in the background. “So I’ll thank you to come back into the city and help us deal with it, using whatever knowledge and tools you have your disposal. And kindly don’t argue. I have lost my Autumn Range this day, and I am not a safe mare to press.”
Patches’s mind roiled in terrified revolt, as he found found himself caught between a rock and a hard place, the prospect of a fire after a frying pan, and all manner of similarly unhappy metaphors. And in the midst of that broiling broth of panic, a tiny mad spark of defiance spat up, and he found himself, to his own instant horror, saying the worst thing possible. “W-why? What’th the wortht you can do?”
Silence descended, vast and crushing and pitiless. The pack stared at him, aghast. The donkeys looked mixed parts perplexed and intrigued.
Patches barely had time to contemplate the magnitude of his mistake before Rarity closed her eyes, drew a breath, and slashed forth with the first high-pitched whine.
Through the heart of Manehattan, there ran the stately Fifth Avenue, built atop the smouldering ruins of Fourth Avenue several centuries ago, which in turn had been built after Third Avenue had been carried off by a flock of rocs, and so on into the negatives.
Along the rapidly-emptying length of Fifth Avenue, there careened a hapless and increasingly out-of-sorts Dweller Below, which had been having the rottenest day of its life. It still hadn’t found a nice, natural ceiling to cover up all that awful emptiness above, all the little sub-caverns it had tried to burrow into had collapsed whenever they were so much as leaned on, and untold numbers of the little alien creatures loomed out or incomprehensibly gibbered or poked at it wherever it went. And it still hadn’t been able to get a proper handle on whatever that entrancing, glowing thing high up was. The eldritch rules of this epiterranean realm eluded it, and all it could do was blunder onwards in bewilderment and horror.
It had picked up a coating of miscellany. This included, but wasn’t limited to, the fragments of three fruitcarts and a lot of pulped fruit; two ship tickets; bits of glass; the mulched shreds of Rarity’s Autumn Range; most of the contents and bricks of the eastern wing of the Manehattan Royal Museum; an excited pegasus filly who’d alighted on its back and who’d found herself the best steed ever; parts from a dozen wagons; four trapped and wailing constables of the Manehattan City Watch who’d charged right in and had had the misfortune to make contact with an especially sticky polyp; and a set of parking clamps left by a terrified traffic warden who had screwed up his courage to the sticking point and dived in to be a hero in the way he knew best.
It had also picked up an entourage, comprising a terrified pair of pegasus parents imploring their little poppet to stop riding the subterranean abomination; a traffic warden desperately trying to get his clamps back; several dozen other city constables brandishing truncheons and wishing for equipment with more of an ordnance quality to it; and a thousand-strong mob of assorted Manehattanites who knew the role expected of them at this juncture and bore pitchforks and torches. Due to being borne by city-dwellers, the former were few and far between and often held the wrong way round, but it was the thought that counted.
“Keep at it! Keep after it!”
“Where’s it even going?”
“Who knows? Just keep at it!”
“Jet Stream, sweetie, please flap off the stygian horror and come to Mommy this instant!”
“‘Don’t be silly, constables,’ he said. ‘What would you even do with a ballista,’ he said. What indeed, chief.”
“Aagh! My hoof! The prongs went in my hoof!”
The Dweller Below flolloped onwards, high-rise buildings rising ever-higher about it as it went, while the crowd poured after it like a river discovering a downwards slope. Shouts and burbles and the occasional crash from a carriage encountering a Dweller Below going the opposite way to it rose up into the sky.
Out from a side-alley, all but unnoticed at first, a large figure trotted out, as bulky and shiny as any battle-ready pony knight of old. He stopped briefly to adjust his fondue pot, and then looked right. Under the pot’s rim, his gimlet eyes glinted, and the second after, Mr Stripes lurched into the fray, clattering like Hell’s own cutlery drawer.
The kitchenware had proven tricky in the donning, and even now a spatula was riding up into places a spatula had no business being. But with assistance from Plaid and the dragooned pegasus, he’d managed at last. Once he’d stepped outside and listened for the sound of the Dweller Below making its way through the city, which was a fairly unmistakable sound, pursuing it through every known short-cut had been foal’s play. And now he was on the same street as it, he could all but smell the tickets, and he had a clear run at the creature, give or take the odd crowd.
“OUT OF WAY!” boomed Mr Stripes as he gathered speed like an angry locomotive, nearing the crowd’s back. “TICKETS!” And then, as higher sentiments fell by the wayside altogether, “RRAAARGH!”
Those rear elements of the crowd who hadn’t heeded the warning in time found themselves ploughed to one side and left yelping insensibly on the road as Mr Stripes blew through them like an avalanche. He hardly noticed the weight of ironmongery with his blood up, and his onwards momentum threatened to only be checked by an oncoming continent or another Mr Stripes. Ponies in his way did their best impersonation of pins in the wake of a bowling ball, and Mr Stripes kept going.
“GANGWAY!” he thundered, barging forwards to the front of the crowd, sending a couple of constables flying. The lumbering back of the beast filled his vision, framed by the high and saw-toothed skyline on either side. The Dweller Below trumpeted, unheeding. Ahead of it, at the end of Fifth Avenue before it turned off to the left, Mr Stripes saw the vast shape of the Principality Building, the tallest building in a city already brimming over with compensating architects. A hundred floors of glass and limestone rose up and up, and at its peak, several tethered airships bobbed around a cloud-menacing spire.
Past the roiling thunderstorm that filled his mind, Mr Stripes’ brain clawed out some room for forethought. If the Dweller kept going that way, then it could only turn left down 34th Street, the history of which had been even longer and filled with excitement than the Avenue’s. That would give him a good, clear run at the beast, and give him plenty of time to catch up, and when he did, he’d…
...he’d do something, that was for sure. For now, he kept galloping. Ahead, the Dweller Below swerved left and right, drawing a delighted whoop from the filly on its back. Mr Stripes’ gaze shot upwards at the sound, and practised paternal instincts briefly seized control of his brain. “Wha— what are you doing up there, little one!?”
“I’m riding him! He’s Destructotron!” chirped the filly. “He makes all the things go squish!”
“Eh?”
“Go, Destructotron! Squish the world! Whee!”
“Shwrrzl-floog?” burbled Destructotron bewilderedly as it laminated a abandoned carriage across the street. Splinters flew, and Mr Stripes threw himself into an ungainly leap to avoid a wheel that came spinning out at him. Yelps from behind marked the wheel’s plunge into the crowd’s front ranks, and Mr Stripes kept galloping. His eyes combed over the inchoate hulk for any sign of the tickets, any scraps of paper, anything useful…
The creature jackknifed then, lurching over to the left side of the street and accidentally shaking free the four stuck constables. They tumbled aside with several sticky wails. The filly atop it whooped, and Mr Stripes cursed as he jumped over a constable and adjusted his heading to keep it dead within his sights. Let it lead a merry chase, he reckoned. There was only one way for it to go in the end, and he would catch it.
Behind him, the crowd was in an uproar as they galloped, and vaguely-intelligible snippets drifted out here and there.
“Wait, is that my landlord up ahead? What’s he even wearing? It’s fabulous.”
“Please, somepony help me get my clamps off it! That pile of kindling back there looked improperly parked!”
“Aagh! My other hoof!”
The leading constables had struck up an argument as well.
“Look, we’re not equipped for this. Just get out the messenger-paper, raise the alarm with the princesses or the Wonderbolts or the Guard or whoever! Get out your codebook!”
“Right-ho!” There was the sound of a small, heavy tome being whipped out and rifled through. “Er, one problem.”
“What?”
“What sort of code goes with all this? I mean there’s a section for ‘Eldritch Incursions’, but there’s all these subtypes—”
Mr Stripes ignored them all, as his gaze triumphantly alighted on two slips of paper nestled in a bifurcated polyp. “TICKETS!” he thundered. A mass at the ever-nearing mouth of 34th Street caught his attention briefly, a press of bodies and gleaming metal. But they were probably unimportant. The creature was slowing down as it came to the bottom of the Principality Building and the end of the avenue. He had it.
“Fzlbl-mleerk?” the Dweller Below tooted as countless eye-stalks angled upwards, to where the sun hung high over the building. A tentacle flailed up into mid-air momentarily, and then its various gazes turned upon the mouth of 34th Street. It wibbled and wobbled in place there for a few moments, as if pondering its next move.
“Get ready, dogth! Thpearth thtraight! Thtantheth firm!” someone called from that direction. “Canary-bearerth, hold until my thignal!”
Distracted though he may be, Mr Stripes glanced that way as well as he implacably advanced on the Dweller Below. The flurry of ‘th’s jangled memory’s bell, and he recognised that voice.
What he saw there maybe wasn’t the oddest thing in Manehattan that day, but only due to an abundance of competition. The mass of bodies and metal he’d seen earlier resolved itself into a whole pack of Diamond Dogs, drawn up into a phalanx. Many of them held short spears, though others held scavenged boathooks, the pointier sorts of street-signs, and garden gnomes lashed to the ends of sticks. He recognised Patches at their centre, gesticulating with his own spear and barking orders wildly. A couple of other dogs nervously hefted big cages holding large canaries, their red eyes blazing as they flapped at their cage bars and cheeped with bloodlust.
The array of points jangled, the gems on their waistcoats trembled, and despite the Dweller Below before them, the ranks of dogs kept glancing to their back with undisguised fear. The subject of their glances revealed itself as the phalanx shuffled, and there stood Rarity at their back. She coldly looked over their heads at the looming Dweller Below, her narrow gaze alighting on the pegasus filly and widening briefly. “Wait, hold on,” she said. “Darling! Please get down from there at once! It’s not safe!”
“Shan’t! He’s Destructotron, and he’s going to… to...” The filly trailed off as she squinted thoughtfully down at Rarity. “Hey, you’re one of those Eleme… Rainbo… famous ponies! You save Equestria a lot!”
No matter what icy lagoon of wrath Rarity may have been afloat in, the opportunity to preen would never be declined. She smiled. “Well, one doesn’t like to brag—”
“Could you get me Rainbow Dash’s autograph? She’s the coolest!”
Rarity’s smile flickered momentarily. “… get down from there, darling, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Neat!” The filly flapped clear of Destructotron, and a frantic parent came flapping in the moment after to seize her mid-air.
That jolt of sensation was what it took to kick the Dweller Below into motion. For the last few moments, it had merely burbled and held stock-still, eye-stalks flitting between the dog phalanx and the oncoming crowd, and sending the occasional plaintive glance skywards at the sun, up past the Principality Building. Unhappy, uncertain “Bloop?” and “K’drth?” noises had escaped it all the while. But now it threw itself right at the phalanx in a blur of motion, tentacles hammering at the street to propel it onwards. Mr Stripes jumped aside just in time to avoid getting concussed by a whip-fast protuberance. “Brathe!” he heard Patches shout. “Hold fast!” came the cry from Rarity.
The crash of impact rang out as the black, blubbery mass of tentacles slammed into the wall of spears, and yelps and groans resounded as every dog was forced bodily back several inches. Their line held, though, and spears and hooks and signs and repurposed gnomes pricked into the horror’s hide and held it fast. As it writhed and gibbered and wrenched itself backwards, Mr Stripes heard Patches roar, “Canarieth!”
The crowd ooh’ed. Dogs yelped and metal cage doors clanged open, and there was then the flapping of wings and a rising and maddened cheeping. And at that point, the symphony on all sides beggared all description.
Mr Stripes saw the towering form of the eldritch thing reel away from the phalanx and now very much on the back-hoof … or back-tentacle, or whatever appendage applied. If a given section of its hide wasn’t being jabbed by a terrified dog wielding a gnome on a stick, it was being mauled by a huge and enraged canary, and if it was a section of hide that must have perpetrated the most exquisite of sins in some past life, it was experiencing both at once. A medley of high-pitched and distinctly blasphemous hoots and burbles escaped the Dweller Below.
Whatever else you could conjecture about the creature’s current outlook on life and state of mind, you could at least reasonably presume this: it was distracted. Mr Stripes crouched, clawed the ground, and prepared to charge in.
“Daddy, wait!”
He turned back towards the call, and saw that Plaid had inveigled her way to the forefront of the agog, heaving crowd. She looked right at him, her shining eyes full of concern, and then at the Dweller Below with mixed parts bewilderment and pity, and then back to Mr Stripes. “Please, be careful!”
He smiled his most reassuring smile and adjusted his pot. “Fret not, furniture of my dollhouse. Daddy shall.” And with that, he turned around and plunged face-first into the storm of spearheads and canaries and tentacles, leaping at its inchoate mass with steel-shod hooves outstretched.
He belly-flopped onto its side, armour jangling as he scrabbled for a hoof-hold, and peered up in search of the tickets. There—a flash of white, nestled in the same polyp he’d seen them last. “Vleep-shwr-vwm?” the Dweller Below squealed indignantly as Mr Stripes added himself to its list of complaints. A flailing tentacle clouted the stallion as he clung on, and constellations wheeled across his vision as he struggled to keep his position.
Angry cheeping rang out at his back, and Mr Stripes’ position was made even more precarious as an berserk canary tried to dismember its own reflection in one of his saucepans. “Gah!” he spat, as a beak slammed repeatedly into his withers. “Scat! Shoo! Cursed thing!” The great wobbling mass of the Dweller Below swayed and wriggled before him, and even as he twisted to try and shoo off the canary with one forehoof, his other three hooves clawed a way upwards through its slimy tendrils and folds.
“Mr Stripes, what on earth—get down from there, I implore you!” he heard Rarity cry out.
“Get off it, you thtupid berk!” screeched Patches, somewhat less diplomatically. Mr Stripes ignored them both. The roar of the crowd filled the world at his back, the assembled citizens of Manehattan having forgone their role as an angry mob in favour of not disturbing a decent piece of street theatre. Shouts and queries flew at him like hail.
“Hey, that really is my landlord! What the hay’s he doing on it?”
“Go for it, Mr Stripes! Kick it in the vulnerables!”
“Does it even have vulnerables?”
“Good point! Kick everything!”
“—so here’s the list of codes for Incursions (Eldritch Types: A through M) but which one should we classify it as? I’m leaning towards a 37-L. That’s the one for ‘Like The Creator Started Making An Octopus And Forgot To Stop’.”
“Just put it down as 99-X for ‘Miscellaneous’, blast it! We’ll classify it after!”
“Look, if you want to look vague and incompetent in front of anypony who shows up, that’s your prerogative, but I’ve got the codebook, and I’d sooner be specific—”
Their chatter faded into the background as Mr Stripes gritted his teeth and redoubled his efforts, scrabbling up the side of the Dweller Below. His hooves skidded and dug into whatever folds and appendages presented themselves, a mix of undefinable musks choked up his snout, and the only parts of him that weren’t getting plastered with cthonic mulch were those parts inside him. He gagged, cursed, and grappled his way ever upwards. The tickets wobbled above him, five hoofspans away, four, three, all but within biting distance, if he could just scrabble and stretch that little bit further…
At that point, the Dweller Below came to a decision. At its back, a baying mass of the alien little things, jabbering and brandishing pokey things. Before it, an even pokier mass of baying things. Winged creatures screeched and flapped all around, and on all sides, irregular cavern walls ran up into chasmic, yawning nothingness. No good options…
...but one ray of hope, at least. One vast wall, running up to a point, and at the end of that point, the strange high glow, that beautiful and distant shine. It could be the way to a nice enclosed cavern. It might be food. It might just have some answers to all this madness, if it could just be grasped.
The Dweller Below dithered in place. Its eyes angled upwards. And then a broadside of tentacles stabbed out into the stone of the Principality Building, dug in, and the Dweller Below heaved itself up onto the building’s side and started slithering up.
The agog crowd watched it rise, cameras flashing. Constables bent and arguing over their codebook boggled, and then started arguing anew. Canaries, deprived of their most immediate soft target, turned upon other random targets, and scattered screams rang out in their wake. Above them all, the Dweller Below steady slithered onwards and upwards, an array of tentacles and claws and organic hooks constantly uncoiling, digging into the limestone, and pulling it up. Chips of stone scattered down in its wake, and there floated up the shrieks of office workers who’d had their day become that little bit more exciting just by looking out their window.
And as the Dweller Below rose, there rose also an armoured stallion.
The sensation of rising didn’t occur to Mr Stripes for a moment, at least not until the world past the tickets started falling rather than just rocking like a storm-caught ship, and the air on his back grew a little colder. He glanced around, and saw that the crowd had been replaced with pointed roofs and confused pigeons. And then he looked down. Horrible, horrible realisation dawned, seasoned well with vertigo.
“Gah!” he spluttered, which didn’t seem too unreasonable a reaction to finding oneself at an unhealthy height above street level. An answering cry of “Daddy!” drifted up amidst the general hubbub as the upwards motion of the Dweller Below bore him ever higher.
“Good heavens, he’s caught on it!” came the voice of Rarity on Plaid’s heels. “Bring it down, somehow, anyhow!”
“Oh, for thod’s thake.” A pause, and then the sound that might be produced by a gnome-on-a-stick flying up like a javelin and smashing through a window a few storeys below Mr Stripes and the Dweller Below, followed in turn by a concussed ‘Unk!’ from an unlucky office worker.
“...Bring it down better!”
“Lithen, pony, there’th not much I can exactly do from thith pothithion! Do you have a ballithta on your perthon? I don’t have a ballithta on my...”
And at that point, the voices faded into indistinctiveness, as Mr Stripes rose higher and yet higher. His hooves dug into the Dweller Below for dear life, skittered and slipped free, and only a panicked champ forwards onto a sturdy-looking tentacle saved him from splattering over the pavement. The taste of the tentacle and its coating of ooze filled his mouth, defying all adjectives. He bit down regardless, and maintained his hold even when the tentacle swung round and clouted him against the side of the building. “Gnk!” he gasped as air escaped him, for all that Plaid’s armour may have taken the brunt. His pot fell loose, and he tried to not watch it descend all the way down to the ground.
For the first time, the tickets found themselves dislodged from being Mr Stripes’ foremost concern in life. A strange and unfamiliar emotion sparked to life in his mind, that of regret over the decisions that had led him to this point. “Might not have been optimal to plunge right in,” he wheezed to himself, past the tentacle and ooze. “Oh, might not have been exactly optimal.”
“Ploothoon-kh-drrhg?” crooned the Dweller Below absently, still training all of its eyestalks on the distant sun.
The ghastly rise continued for a few minutes yet, and all Mr Stripes could do was cling on like grim death. The noises of the city diminished, became one great and muted roar from far below, and in the chilly almost-hush afforded at this height, Mtr Stripes usual single-track line of thought splintered apart. His heart would have been in his mouth if there hadn’t already been a piece of eldritch monstrosity there, and however he dared twist his head around, there was no sign of the tickets.
But eventually, the motion of the creature ceased, and Mr Stripes became aware of it clambering up over the topmost ledge of the Principality Building. Only the thin, high spire remained above them still, and in the cold, high breeze, tethered airships bobbed and made the spire creak. Above them, an expanse of blue. And in the middle of that expanse, beginning its long and gentle descent to the western horizon, there shone the sun, minding its own business.
Mr Stripes released his bite and flopped gratefully onto the stone of the roof, coughing and gasping and spitting out the taste of the Dweller Below, and otherwise trying to coax enthusiasm back into his bruised and jangled frame. The creature itself wobbled past him, slithering over to the westernmost corner of the building, eyes still fixed on the sun. It came to a rest right on the edge, hung still for a moment, and then groped futiley out into the sky with its tentacles once more. There rose from it a deep, confused, doleful sound, like a bassoon discovering its spouse in bed with a flute.
“Tickets,” muttered Mr Stripes, rising to his hooves, and trying to spark his inner fire once more with what he came for. Vertigo still assailed him, and the skyline had no business being so low-down as it was. “Tickets.” He stood straight and eyed the Dweller up and down. And there, after all this, the tickets still nestled against its frame, up near the top. His one-track mind knitted itself back together, and great internal engines roared. “Shine of my jewel will have sunshine and old cutlery for special day!”
He lunged once again at the Dweller Below, determined to climb it once again—and this time, it couldn’t go wrong, what was left for it to climb up in turn?—but just as he drew near, several eyestalks snapped round in his direction. One small tentacle uncoiled and whirled out at him, and before he entirely apprehended what was happening, Mr Stripes found himself coiled up in the tentacle’s clutches, pots and pans creaking and pressing painfully into him from all sides. The tentacle pulled back in, pinning Mr Stripes harmlessly against the creature with unnatural strength, leaving him unable to do much more than cast aspersions on the creature’s moral character and flail with his rear legs against the roof.
“Thrck-ython?” came the plaintive toot from far above, apparently unheeding of Mr Stripes. The stallion was aware of the Dweller Below stretching up and out one more time, leaning out into the sky as its tentacles tried to clasp around the sun’s outline.
Mr Stripes struggled, ceased, and drew in as deep a breath as he could. “Come on,” he hissed to himself. “Is surely not impossible situation. Has to be way to get free, to get to tickets, has to —”
He stopped. He looked around with a critical eye, and checked his vast internal list. Engines growled to life once again.
He drew another breath. “Creature! Whatever name is! Attend!”
Though most of the Dweller Below’s attention remained fixed on the impossible sun, one or two eye-stalks turned in his direction. “Floop?”
“Attend. I am Mr Stripes, and am best landlord in this city! And if you release me and relinquish Plaid’s tickets now, then I shall exercise a trait landlords don’t exercise for just anypony. I shall be merciful. Agreed?”
One eyestalk tilted, in the way that only eyestalks belonging to a creature with no experience of property and landlording and the quality of mercy having all of said domains explained to it in a language it didn’t understand could. “Yg-drth-wlg?”
“Ah. Have it your way, then.” Mr Stripes closed his eyes, mentally ran through each item on the finest plan he’d ever had once more, and then stared right at the eyestalk. “Am landlord. And as best landlord, I have investigated possibility of shareholding in this very building. With me so far, yes?”
“...Blorp?”
“And as past of investigating,” growled Mr Stripes, struggling within the tentacle’s grasp, tapping tentatively at the roof edge with his hooves, “I looked up the building’s paperwork. Its history! What systems and plumbing and suchlike were like, what materials were used, conditions of most things. What needs checking, and who does checking. Am responsible landlord! Did research.”
He paused, panting, double-checking his position once more. “Learned what went right, what went wrong, and … what corners were cut.” He bent up his rear legs. “Most specifically, this one!”
And with that, he slammed down his rear hooves with all the might afforded a strapping earth pony stallion with the weight of Bucephalus on his legs—or a kitchen-themed variant thereof—and cracked right through the rough limestone at the very edge of the roof. The cracks rippled out. The ledge creaked. And the second later, the whole edge collapsed free, pitching the Dweller Below right off the building. It flailed in mid-air for an instant, groping out for a hold too late, and then fell like a comet sent by a god who wanted to leave no illusions about the quality of the omen.
Mr Stripes exulted, right up until he realised that in the excitement of the plan, he’d not entirely budgeted for the Dweller Below maintaining a grip on him. “HurraaaAAAAAGH!” escaped him, kicking himself free of the flapping tentacle just in time for the crumbling ledge to recede up into the sky and for gravity to claim him as its own.
The world flew past him in one prolonged, terrifying blur—sky, buildings, Dweller Below, Principality Building, sky, &c. He careened off one hardened window of the skyscraper, resulting in a poor office worker undergoing her second nervous breakdown in as many minutes, and sprackled and whirled atop the burbling Dweller Below. Plaid’s much-abused armour rattled and shed implements with every stray knock against the building and every flailing wallop from a tentacle, and all Mr Stripes could do in whatever remained of his sensate world was feverishly wish for the ride to stop, he’d had quite enough—
Then the ride stopped with an almighty crash, and Mr Stripe’s sensate world decided to take a few minutes out to recover.
When it recovered, Mr Stripes was dimly aware of a great hubbub of voices on all sides, and of lying atop something soft and blubbery. He was in the grips of a full-body ache, as if he’d been bundled into a sack full of bricks and then rolled down a hill, and as memories of the last few minutes unspooled, he groaned faintly. It didn’t help much, so he groaned harder. That helped, and he groggily tried to raise his head. A second into the effort, he decided otherwise, and slumped.
Then a familiar voice cried out, “Oh, Daddy, you’re alright!” and that cleared out more cobwebs than a hundred heartfelt groans. He groaned anyway, just to be on the safe side, and flopped over onto his side to meet Plaid’s concerned gaze.
“Plaid?” he managed. She stood at the front of Manehattan’s amassed multitude, with Rarity and Patches just to her rear. Most of the crowd looked awed, and more than a few were nodding in appreciation for a decent few minute’s entertainment. Here and there, unhappy dogs tried to push canaries back into cages, a process which the canaries had no intention of making easy or without bloodshed. Quite a few amongst the crowd still sported pitchforks and torches, though, and were guardedly watching Mr Stripes—or watching something in his general direction, at any rate.
The blubbery mass under Mr Stripes wobbled slightly and emitted a somewhat bleary and unenthusiastic, “Cthun-thg-blb?” The Dweller Below sat in a substantial crater in the street, surrounded by scattered bits of whatever miscellany had previously coated it, and seemed to have no great interest in rising. Eyestalks vaguely wobbled this way and that as if drunk. “Glllrg?”
“Come on, get off it, you thtupid and impoththibly lucky twerp,” said Patches, ambling up and rolling Mr Stripes off the Dweller Below, who fell to the ground with all the grace of a brick. “You’ve thurely had your fun by now.”
“Fun?” replied Mr Stripes, struggling up into a sitting position as more memories jostled back into his mental world. “Ach, no, was not for fun. Was for, was for ...” His eyes scanned across the Dweller Below’s frame. Then across the ground. Panic mounted. “Tickets?”
Then he saw them. Or rather, what was left of them. Little off-white scraps, torn and smeared to the point of indecipherability, lying to one side in a small puddle of unspecified cthonic matter. The fall had been even less kind to them than to Mr Stripes, and everything about the stallion slumped at the sight. “Ach.”
“What is it, Daddy? Daddy?” Plaid looked in the same direction as Mr Stripes, and when she caught sight of them, she only hugged him closer. “Oh, that’s alright, Daddy. You’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”
“Bah,” he said wearily. “Were your birthday gift. What sort of stallion am I, that had to get them last-minute and lost them and couldn’t even keep them safe in the end? None at all, is what.”
Plaid didn’t show even the slightest sign of agreeing with any of that line of self-recrimination. “I don’t care about the tickets, Daddy. So long as you’re okay.”
“Am mediocre at best,” he moaned. He looked down at himself. “Ach, and your project! Your barding of Bucephalus, done with all your utensils, now dented and shaken apart! I’ve ruined it!”
Plaid looked the barding up and down, clocking it for the first time, and offered up a reassuring smile. “It’s okay! It’s okay! I’ll just … restyle it a bit. Say it’s his barding after the Battle of Gorgonmela.”
“Ruined your birthday gift, and your special project.” Mr Stripes’ gaze fell to between his hooves. “If your mother was not long-absent and busy pirating ships and terrorising foreign shores and plundering and such things, is likely she would skin me.”
“Daddy—”
“I mean, is likely she would skin me anyway, just on general principle, but —”
As Mr Stripes subsided into gloom, all his illusions of being the best stallion and best father and best landlord as shredded as the tickets, the crowd saw that his entertainment value was likely to be at a low ebb for the next while and turned its attention towards another discussion central to proceedings, involving Rarity, the Diamond Dogs, and assorted leading citizenry.
“It does look rather … pacified,” came Rarity’s voice. The Dweller Below burbled something faint to itself. “What now, though?”
“Now?” replied Patches. “Fire’th generally good for dealing with them for good. If only we had thome fire-lanthes. We’ll have to make do. Do any of you ponieth have any oil, or naptha, or …?”
“I’ve got a newspaper! That could make for good kindling!” said an enthusiastic onlooker.
“Wait, hang on, fire?” said Rarity. “You’re not proposing to kill the poor thing, are you? I thought you could just … take it back below ground. Corral it. However this sort of thing works.”
“Pony, there’th no way we’re jutht going to let that thing loothe below ground again. They’re utter menathes! We want to deal with it now, while it’th vulnerable!”
“That’s barbaric!”
“Pragmatic is the proper pronunthiation. Anyway, why do you care? It’th dethtroyed your property, your … Autumn Range, or whatever it wath!”
“Well, yes!” Rarity blinked. “But now that it’s been mobbed through the streets, run into your phalanx, had your war-canaries set on it, and fallen from a great height, I think proportionate justice has been meted out!”
“It’s alright, Ms Rarity, we quite understand,” another bystander interjected, soothingly. “You’re a national heroine, we get it, that comes with obligations, as it were. You’ve got to resolve problems in an ethical manner. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be a national heroine. Stands to reason.”
“It … does?” Rarity hesitantly replied, while other members of the crowd voiced their agreement.
“Yep! But it’s alright. You’ve done more than enough in your national heroine capacity. So what you can do, see, is clock out for the day, and we can handle things from here without reference to ethics at all. See? Agreeable to everypony, and you don’t have to compromise your national heroining at all.”
“That .. that’s not even slightly how ‘national heroining’ works!” Rarity started, and while some members of the crowd voiced agreement with the bystander, others broke into confused murmurs trying to follow the logic, and a couple of hoof-fights broke out to try and get ahead of the coming fashion. Voices and tempers rose on all sides.
“Daddy?” whispered Plaid.
“Yes, flash of my firework?” Mr Stripes replied, weary with himself and the day in general. As if from a distance, he heard Patches calling for anything flammable or inthendiary, and Rarity threatening to whine at him, and the ruckus building towards a fever-pitch. Not a ruckus that concerned him, though.
“Daddy, I can’t watch.”
“Watch what?”
“What’s about to happen to the creature, whatever it is! I, I mean … it’s just a confused creature that’s come up from underground, isn’t it? It doesn’t know it’s done anything wrong. I can’t watch it get hurt, or … or ...”
Mr Stripes regarded his daughter. He’d be lying if he claimed to totally understand where she was coming from, his emotions somewhat fogged by the enduring fact of the Dweller Below having ruined the tickets. But her distress seemed entirely real, and for Mr Stripes, his daughter’s emotions were catching. And liable to spark productive new ones in his head.
“Don’t want to see it hurt?” he said slowly, thoughtfully.
“I don’t want it hurt at all!” She looked desperately from Mr Stripes to the slumped Dweller Below to the madding crowd, held at bay by Rarity and other dissenters for now. “I … can you … anything?”
The words may not have been all there, but the sentiment was. And something else to achieve for his daughter’s sake in the day had neatly presented itself. Slowly, but with a force no weight could have ever flattened, Mr Stripes rose to his hooves, a delighted fire in his eyes.
“Anything?” he said to himself. “Oh yes. A definite something, even.”
He looked down at the Dweller Below. It seemed numb to the world and the clamour around it, though one eyestalk swivelled towards Mr Stripes. As he watched, the eyestalk blinked, and a sound too low and forlorn for typical vowels and consonants mewled out from the creature.
“Feeling like scared and battered failure, eh?” Mr Stripes said softly. “I understand, I think.” His expression hardened. “But not for much longer. Is only enough room for one of us in this city, and will not be me any longer! ATTENTION, PONIES!”
The bellow ripped out at the top of his lungs, loud enough to seize the whole gathering’s attention, and Mr Stripes leapt up on top of the Dweller Below for a better vantage point, his aches no object. “Attention, all! Is no need to debate about horrible creature’s fate, for I shall attend to said fate! Disperse to your homes or work or families! I have matter well in hoof!”
“What?” said the bystander who’d spoken to Rarity. “What do you mean? What are you going to do to it?”
Mr Stripes shrugged, having not planned to that point, but seeing that as no reason to stop. “Take to my abode. Maybe put on leash. See is tended to. Consult on matter of release into wild. But not kill. No, I think not.”
“Blow that! It’s a utter public hazard! Did you not see the trail of devasta—”
“See, bah. Shall not be hazard while held by me!”
“But … you’re not qualified to keep that sort of creature. I … I assume you’re not—”
“And neither are you qualified to kill creature! But my non-qualifications are better than your non-qualifications, eh?”
The bystander looked around for help, and appealed to the group of constables, who had long since whipped out paper and jotted out diagrams detailing various codes, angles, crude sketches of octopi reproduction, and had more recently discarded said diagrams in favour of arguing and trying to hit each other with the codebook. “Um, officers?”
They turned with guilty starts, and one cleared his throat as he assumed authority. “Now, Mr Stripes, you must see the sense in...”
Mr Stripes narrowed his eyes. His mental list blurred as the pages flickered. “Officer Mulberry, your station is between two buildings of mine, yes? Terrible if I felt the need to call in a fumigation for stoneworms ahead of schedule for both of them. The fumes for them are awful, so am told.”
There was a vast and echoing silence. Some other pony in the crowd broke it first with an indignant exclamation of “Did you just—”
“Ah, Summer Solstice!” Mr Stripes rounded on this latest interlocutor. “How is rent on flat? Not high enough, I presume?”
“I … you son of a—!”
“And you, Navy Blue,” Mr Stripes turned on the first, the bystander who’d called upon the officers. The big stallion’s eyes narrowed. “How is shop premises?”
Navy Blue’s eyes narrowed as well, though there were none who could narrow quite so well as Mr Stripes. “Doing quite well, enough to accommodate a rise in rent, let me tell you.”
“Oh? Well enough to accommodate a hundredfold rise? Am in the mood for yet more revenue. Miniature furniture collection could always grow larger.”
Navy Blue seethed, the agitated crowd murmured, and yet another bystander rose up. “Here, no, this is absolutely blatant abuse of your landlordliness!” she said. “You can’t just—”
“Can and do!” thundered Mr Stripes. “I have had rough day, and shall abuse position of landlord all day more if need be! Leave this creature in my hooves, and shoo!”
The bystander spluttered, and turned back to the constables. “Officers, are you seeing this?”
The officers, however, were preoccupied with looking at the ground and awkwardly shuffling their hooves. “I,” the leader among them started. “Well, um. I … the fumes suck.”
“Thcrew it,” declared Patches, throwing his paws in the air and marching off. “On your own headth be it. Come on, dogth. We’re going back underground and thtaying there.”
“Very good!” growled Mr Stripes. “And same to you all. No flames, no killing monstrosities, no nothing, just nice and civilised home-going! I will handle this creature! It is under my protection! And whatever pony should think to defy that ...” His voice pitched to a growl a crocodile would have respected. “On your rents be it.”
And ponies thought to defy it. The collective indignation of Manehattan broke upon Mr Stripes like a storm, tossing down bolts of bickering, more indignant interjections, aspersions on the big stallion’s moral character and parentage and personal hygiene. But Hell had no staying power like a Mr Stripes with his daughter’s happiness on the line, and his wolfish smile sharpened as he turned on every complaint and shot back a cheerful threat concerning the residence or workplace of the complainer or complainer’s loved ones. Many dispersed when he fended them off, grinding their teeth and intending to double-check Manehattan’s arcane property laws. Others ambled off to find the next piece of entertainment. The embarrassed constables slunk off to report a completely quiet patrol without any incident whatsoever to their chief, and Patches and the pack excused themselves from proceedings altogether.
When hush of a sort finally returned to the streets outside the Principality Building, it found Mr Stripes, Plaid, Rarity, and the Dweller Below with—at long last—ample room to breath.
The pages of Mr Stripes mental catalogue ceased flapping as if caught in a whirlwind. His tired, bruised legs wobbled. He panted with a throat roughened by more prolonged shouting and threatening he’d ever done in his life, and his mind was aglow with victory.
“Cthllrglk?” ventured the Dweller Below, which had understood nothing and continued to do so.
Rarity breathed out. “Well.”
“Oh, Daddy, thank you!” Plaid gushed, throwing her forelegs around Mr Stripes’ neck and planting a kiss on his cheek. “That was wonderful!”
“I’m not sure whether this is a victory to boast about,” Rarity said to herself, kneading her brow. “I mean … an innocent albeit destructive creature saved in the name of nepotism via threats and exploitation? How does the moral calculus work here? Oh, this is going to be a woeful evening spent contemplating ends and the means by which they’re achieved, I can tell.”
“You really think so, Plaid?” said Mr Stripes, ears only for his daughter. His voice was hoarse, but a tired smile flickered around his features.
“You stared them all down! Like, all of Manehattan! And you saved the creature’s life!”
“—I’d talk about the ethics of all this with dear Twilight, but oh heavens, suppose she was obliged by her position to step in and do something. Would that risk merely negating—”
“Creature’s life,” Mr Stripes mumbled to himself. “Hmm, yes. May have to actually consider penning arrangements now.”
“Flloobrk-i-kdath?”
“—I’m going to have to not talk about this at all, aren’t I?”
“I’ll help, Daddy! It’ll be my responsibility.” Plaid looked Mr Stripes right in the eye. “And you know what doing all this was?”
“What was it, quills of my hedgehog?”
“Way better than any ship ticket.” Plaid Stripes grinned fiercely. “I’d even say, best birthday present ever.”
And it didn’t take anything more than his daughter trying to crush him with a hug to remind Mr Stripes that yes, he was the best landlord in Manehattan, the best father, and, in general, the best.
Bah. As if he’d ever let it be in doubt.
Some weeks later, in a park that had been bustling before Mr Stripes showed up, yet was now curiously deserted:
“Do not know why Plaid insists you get walked here, rather than in park nearer to home.”
“Kthlg,” the Dweller Below absently replied, as Mr Stripes pulled it on through the park with a lead attached to one tendril. A collar ran around that tendril. It sported the legend Fluffles.
“She thinks this is more open. Less trees, more sunshine, thinks you prefer that. Curious conclusion. Maybe is right, though.”
“Mthirgn-zthchk,” concurred Fluffles.
“Hmmph. Is mystery.” Mr Stripes looked around. “Parks should all be of equal niceness, though, yes? City council should see to it they are. Why else do I … mostly … pay taxes?”
“Cthoogl?”
“Exactly so!” Mr Stripes shook his head at the state of modern civilisation, and then perked up as they came to another bend in the trail. “Come, one more circuit! I shall expound upon proper use of city taxes, in humble opinion.”
It was, he would confess to himself, not entirely clear how this had become his job rather than Plaid’s. But for getting thoughts in order, it was much better than just pacing up and down Bridleway. And goodness knows the best stallion had plenty of thoughts to assemble.
