Angel, like all bunnies, is as evil as he is cute. When the dastardly plot of the largest bunny organization in the region threatens Fluttershy, he's the best-qualified critter to take them down.
Angel, like all bunnies, is as evil as he is cute. When the dastardly plot of the largest bunny organization in the region threatens Fluttershy, he's the best-qualified critter to take them down.
This story is the embodiment of multiple writing experiments, some of which were not originally intended.
Today was nearly a day just like any other at Fluttershy’s cottage. Up in the lofts, the songbird choir had just pulled out the book of Hearth’s Warming classics; Fluttershy had been helping them to plan a Hearth’s Warming holiday four months early, before many of them would migrate for the winter season. The squirrels’ Economic Independence Consortium was meeting in the executive flower garden to discuss acorn investment plans. In the living room, several mice advertised their home-improvement services, ranging from putting in doorways to hiring mole crews for den construction from scratch. Angel, however, was making plans to save Ponyville from the greatest threat it had ever seen: cute, fluffy bunnies
Earlier that week, he had noticed more bunnies around Ponyville than he’d remembered there being, to the point that it seemed there would be a some bunny or another hopping about every time he turned around. He started to wonder if they were following him, an idea which carried uncomfortable implications for his safety. He hadn’t exactly left his family on good terms.
When Fluttershy was asleep, Angel hopped his way to the bookshelf on the other side of her room, where she kept things she didn’t want to lose, like a her bunny census. He could suspect all he wanted, but he knew the other critters wouldn’t authorize action on suspicions alone. Careful not to make any noise, he pulled the scrolls out and started reviewing the numbers.
The numbers were as he had feared: over the last two years, the proportion of brown-coated bunnies in the region surrounding Fluttershy’s cottage had increased, as had the overall population by a smaller margin.
It had been a long time, but Angel tried to recall what he could from his time at the Whitetail Warren. Coat colors weren’t considered for most roles, but certain colors were required for region-specific surveillance, or the scouts wouldn’t survive often enough to gather information effectively. Angel shook the memories out of his head; he didn’t remember which colors matched which regions, but he took another glance at the bunny census he held and figured that Ponyville called for brown bunnies.
He couldn’t act on that. He’d need something that actually indicated that the bunnies were planning something dangerous to Ponyville’s residents before he could really do anything.
The next day, Fluttershy found three homeless bunnies on her front doorstep. Angel watched with heavy heart as her heart melted at the sight. He wished she could know better, but ponies always trusted cute things. They never believed that cute things could be bad for them.
He fought to keep his stomach from twisting as she set them up in the cottage. The enemy was moving in. What they wanted from the cottage, though, he wasn’t as sure of.
Angel kept an eye on the newcomers as best he could while keeping up with his duties. Acting as Fluttershy’s personal manager had two sides: one was the direct assistance he provided to Fluttershy, such as fetching things or reminding her of scheduled items; the other was as a buffer of sorts between her and the critter world. Angel tried to avoid his role as the latter as much as possible but the critters accepted his input in place of Fluttershy’s because of his close relationship with her. It didn’t translate into any real power over the critter population at large, though; their government maintained an authority completely separate from Fluttershy.
Between minor critter disputes or fetching Fluttershy a pencil to mark the calendar with, Angel patrolled the rafters and sought out the new bunnies. Throughout the day, he hadn’t observed much more than hopping, ear flopping, and nose wiggling. It only made him more certain of their malicious intent; they were probably some of the best operatives that the Whitetail Warren had to behave normally so flawlessly.
As unhappy as Angel had been with the new bunnies, they had crossed a line when he found them wandering out of Fluttershy’s room that evening. He’d just hopped up the stairs and hadn’t expected to find himself face-to-face with anycritter, let alone a bunny. He had no doubt that they were snooping around like the black-hearted fluffy little devils that they were. Angel glared and sarcastically asked them if they had gotten lost.
One of the bunnies made a slicing motion across its neck and then pointed at Angel.
Before Angel got the chance to explain how he was going to claw their eyes out and feed them to Phoebe, Fluttershy stumbled across them all and complimented him on making friends with their new bunny guests. She ruffled their ears and told them that she had carrots for them downstairs.
Angel held his glare until they were out of sight. Fluttershy was going to make it difficult to protect her. He knew he needed to get the critters on his side, and the only critter he trusted to believe anything he had to say so far was Constance.
Angel held little outright respect for any of his fellow critters, but Constance was an exception. Angel had first heard the songbird’s name when she joined the songbird choir. Shortly after, her charisma and ideals won her a seat as the songbirds’ representative and a good reputation among all the critters. Most critters didn't know what kind of strings Constance was willing to pull to accomplish her goals, though. For Angel’s purposes, this was exactly what he needed.
He climbed up to the rafters, pushed his way through a small window, and followed a small walkway to Constance’s birdhouse in the leaves of the cottage. It was late, but Constance was still awake, and agreed to hear him out.
After Angel gave her a rundown of the bunnies and his concerns, Constance said to come back when he had something tangible – something that would change the minds of other critters – before she could do anything. She said that it wasn’t enough to say the bunnies were wandering around in the wrong place at the wrong time, as most critters would attribute that to their unfamiliarity with the cottage.
Angel started to explain how serious of a problem that the bunnies were, but Constance cut him off and glanced around. She said that she wouldn’t be surprised if he was right because the only bunny she knew was a right little terror.
Angel glared at that.
Constance assured him that she’d have his back, but Angel had to produce something real, or her wings were tied.
Angel huffed before he left the birdhouse. Moments after he stepped out onto the adjoining rafter, he noticed that the trio of bunnies were all on the ground, watching him. When he returned the gaze, two of them started hopping about their business again. The biggest white one just wriggled its nose. It was enough to make Angel feel sick.
Over the next couple of days, Angel stewed on his conundrum. He needed some sort of evidence that the bunnies were up to something and he had to get it before they actually caused any trouble. Worse, he didn’t really know what their plans were, which was really the biggest obstacle. By the end of the second day, Angel’s worries started to coalesce into a course of action: He’d have to gather information preemptively. The only place he knew of that might have any answers was the Whitetail Warren, the center of operations for nearly all bunnies between the San Palomino Desert and the Galloping Gorge.
Fluttershy had a relaxed weekend planned; Angel decided to take a trip then.
The warren was too quiet. Part of that because the damp dirt walls seemed to soak up every sound, but Angel had expected to have to avoid more bunnies. It put him on edge that while he knew the layout of the warren – well enough to avoid their sleeping dens, at the very least – he had nothing to go on regarding their schedules; combined with the sound-suppressing damp, it took a lot of his concentration to have any confidence that he wouldn’t run into a bunny any time he turned a corner.
Years ago, when he left, they had been in the midst of a civil war between the four major factions. Admittedly, it was a war that he’d tried his hardest to start and through no small amount of backstabbing, he’d made it happen.
By the time he’d found the first group of awake bunnies, he had started to think that maybe the war was over.
Dozens of bunnies sat in the den, all on the receiving end of what Angel knew would be a very boring nighttime lecture. In his time at Fluttershy’s cottage, he’d all but forgotten about the limitation most bunnies had: they couldn’t read, and Fluttershy was the only pony he could communicate with because talking with animals was her special power. What little Angel could hear suggested that it was a lecture on the Whitetail Warren government structure.
Bunnies had to pass everything on orally. To the best of Angel’s memory, some of the listening bunnies would be dedicated to their single topic and would work to integrate new knowledge and pass it on to the next couple of generations before they died. The other bunnies would listen to lectures in several topics that they needed to know to perform their assigned jobs and then they would perform those jobs until they died.
Angel listened to the lecture for a couple of minutes before he resumed snooping about the tunnel network. What he’d heard hadn’t comforted him; it wasn’t much, but the concept of a tetrumvirate suggested that the four factions had united. If any of the old leaders had survived, Angel figured he would be Public Enemy Number One. He decided to take extra care to avoid making noise or running into any stray bunnies.
A lone picture of Fluttershy sat in the den. Next to it sat a small pony camera and a couple of Fluttershy’s notes that had gone missing over the last few days. Time stopped for Angel.
The warren’s possession of those items suggested that they knew that she could communicate with critters and had plans to exploit it somehow. Fluttershy could be in danger.
Angel had to get back and warn her.
No, he had to get back and warn Constance. Fluttershy would never understand. Fluttershy could never understand how any of her cute, fluffy charges might pose a threat to her. Constance could arrange for Fluttershy’s protection and Fluttershy would never need to know.
Angel hopped into the den and picked up the picture. His evidence. In it, Fluttershy had simply been looking at a calendar, apparently unaware of the camera. He turned around and—
There were two brawlers blocking his way out. Large bunnies with large muscles for the purpose of imposing order. Either they had set a trap or he had accidentally tipped them off.
Either way, he had to make it out of the warren if he was going to protect Fluttershy.
Angel swung the picture at the first brawler; he’d learned from Fluttershy that papercuts were serious. It took him a couple of attempts, but he managed to draw blood from one of their ears. Angel took what satisfaction he could from that and put on an evil grin; that cut would be stinging for hours. Both brawlers were a little more wary after that, and it only took them one step back before Angel darted through the opening as fast as he could manage.
Many of the larger tunnels hadn’t changed since he had left, so Angel stuck to those. They also offered the space to jump around the bunnies that tried to stop him. Before long, he could tell that many of the bunnies had been alerted to his presence and he could hear a lot of shouting behind him. Something he had picked up since he had left, however, was his hobby of parkour. He held the picture of Fluttershy tightly as he darted through the tunnels with almost half-again as much speed as the bunnies in pursuit and at least twice as much grace.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t outrun their shouts of alarm. When he broke out to the surface, more bunnies from the region were already converging. Before long, there wouldn’t be any openings to dart through. Angel started in the general direction of Ponyville as fast as he could. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed several bunnies running in other directions, presumably to spread the alarm.
Getting out of the Whitetail Woods was going to be tricky, if not outright dangerous, at the rate things were going.
After a few minutes of adrenaline-fueled running, he noticed a familiar brown lump ambling across a ridge before him. As he drew nearer, he waved the picture around and shouted to get the lump’s attention. As he’d expected, he had to get right on top of Harry before the bear noticed him. Angel latched on to Harry’s coat and started telling him that if he looked a little farther back he would see a lot of bunnies and every single one of them wanted to hurt them and probably Fluttershy too because he stole the picture from them and that meant they had it in the first place. Harry was a bit slow, sometimes, but he perked up when he heard that Fluttershy was in danger.
Angel closed his eyes and tried not to imagine the angry white horde of bunnies that probably wanted to kill him now. Moreso if they had figured out how much of a role he had played in their recent civil war. He felt Harry turning under him, and then Harry reared and and roared. It was an adequate roar: primal and full of malice. It gave Angel the confidence to take a peek; if he had the opportunity to see a hundred evil bunnies terrified that they would be torn asunder if they got too close, he didn’t want to miss it.
Harry dropped down to all fours, roared again, and started charging the mass of bunnies. Angel positioned himself atop Harry a little better and started yelling obscenities at the terrified bunnies who scattered like, well, terrified bunnies. Angel felt a little better after that, and he thanked Harry for his help. Then he asked Harry why he was even in the Whitetail Woods in the first place.
Harry explained that his family had just had a big family reunion and he’d gotten to see his brother for the first time in a couple of years. Angel tried not to listen to closely about Harry’s family politics, but he could tell Harry had been rambling on about who had what house and all the gossip that they had swapped for some time while he ambled through the woods.
When Angel heard a lull in the monologue, he asked Harry if he was going back to Ponyville soon. Harry replied that he had been planning to stay in the Whitetail area a little longer to enjoy the scenery, but that wasn’t as important as Fluttershy’s safety was, so he’d take Angel home.
Constance wasn’t happy to have been woken at such a late hour, but when Harry was doing the knocking it was impossible to ignore, especially since the birdhouse wouldn’t hold up to a second round. Angel showed her the picture of Fluttershy and explained where he’d gotten it shortly before a horde of a thousand bunnies had tried to disembowel him. Constance started to express her doubt but Harry nodded enthusiastically and said that it was true, and that he had to scare them off by trying to eat some of them.
Constance thought about it for a moment before she asked Harry if he would be willing to support Angel’s story publicly. Harry said that he would.
Constance said that she’d call in a few favors in the morning and that she would make sure there were a couple of hawks keeping an eye out for Fluttershy whenever she left home. She warned Angel that there wasn’t too much she could do unless a committee was formed and they all agreed to authorize further action. Even for Fluttershy, it was a bit of a long shot.
Angel thanked her and let her go back to sleep.
Fluttershy probably wouldn’t have condoned the interception and interrogation of bunnies, but Fluttershy’s safety was a lot more important than her approval. He had started to form his suspicions about how everything would play out; most of what he suspected would bring her to tears. He had decided that she didn’t need to learn about any of it.
After the birds had been surveying the Ponyville region for a week, Constance and Angel had put together a small map of what appeared to be nearby bunny messenger routes. Less than a day later, they had hawks deployed with orders to intercept and retrieve bunnies on those routes.
Angel did his best to interact with the critters of the cottage in his normal manner. It was hard to fully distract himself from waiting for a bird messenger to tell him they’d captured their first bunny. He heard that the squirrels’ Economic Independence Consortium had recently unveiled potential plans for putting a Bank of Acorn in the vicinity of Fluttershy’s cottage, promising that the construction jobs would be a big boost to the local economy and that the bank would have lasting benefits itself. Angel knew that Fluttershy wouldn’t mind the extra squirrel traffic in the slightest, but it pained him again that Fluttershy wouldn’t understand that cute critters weren’t necessarily good. Squirrels were admittedly handy when it came to gathering resources or trading around services – really, whenever their “economy” ideas could be applied – but they were definitely greedy.
Angel brought it up when he saw Constance next; both of them were trying to pass the time. Constance joked that the squirrels would probably jump at the opportunity to fund a war. Angel filed away the idea for later, and asked if she knew if the special committee had decided on anything. Constance replied that she they had barely started formally discussing anything, but she was friends with enough of them that she might be able to get new evidence to be considered even if it was obtained through questionable means.
Another day passed before the hawks caught the first bunny. Angel and Constance met them at the entrance to the cottage tunnel network as close to the Everfree Forest as the tunnels went. Far from other critters’ disapproving eyes or ears. The hawks deposited the slightly bloodied bunny on the ground in front of them and took off again.
Angel took the prisoner to a den just inside the tunnels and started to ask questions. He asked what the bunny’s message or purpose was. What the Whitetail Warren was planning to do to Fluttershy. What had happened after the civil war. Where could they find other bunny messengers or scouts. The prisoner refused to answer any of them and stuck his tongue out at Angel.
Angel said that was a mistake. He told Constance to keep an eye on the prisoner for just a second while he stepped into the tunnel. He’d asked Phoebe to follow behind in case he needed her, so he called out for her. When she slinked into view a moment later, he told her that he couldn’t promise her a meal but that things were starting to look that way.
Phoebe followed him into the den and gave the prisoner bunny an appraising look. The bunny had only a moment to wear its expression of discomfort before Phoebe pounced. Constance jumped back in surprise. Phoebe had the bunny’s neck pinned by her teeth and said it would be wise to answer Angel’s questions but she wouldn’t mind too much if it didn’t. The bunny started yelling that the Whitetail Warren had big plans and they wouldn’t learn about them until they were already doomed. In the middle of the bunny’s explanation that nobunny would ever break and tell them what they wanted to know, Angel signaled Phoebe to bite down. Constance grimaced at that; Angel just glared at the limp bunny.
Constance asked Angel what they were going to do if the bunny was right. Angel told Phoebe to enjoy her meal but to make sure there was enough left – their ears, perhaps – for the next bunny to recognize. He told Constance that they should keep intercepting runners or scouts or whatever they could find and eventually one of them would break.
Every day or so, the hawks would manage to catch a new bunny. Angel and Constance would meet them at the Everfree tunnel entrance, pick up the prisoner, and start interrogating. Angel was thankful that most critters either avoided the Everfree side of the tunnels or would happily attribute the growing pile of bunny corpses to an unpleasant creature from the forest itself. To minimize their chances of being discovered, though, Constance spread the rumor that an unknown predator had been active near the edge of the forest.
After the third bunny, Angel settled into a bit of a routine: he’d ask the bunny his questions, they would refuse to answer, then he would show them the remains of their peers and ask his questions again. The bunnies had reacted to the remains, but they didn’t break. Phoebe, for her part, appeared to be enjoying the opportunity to play with a new bunny every day. The bunnies enjoyed their playdates considerably less so.
Constance still attended all of the interrogations, though she made no attempt to hide her discomfort at the end of each meeting. Angel and Constance had gleaned enough from the bunnies’ denials and taunts to start piecing the situation together, though they were a long way off from fully understanding what was going on.
Most of the bunnies had refused to confirm anything beyond the fact that the Whitetail Warren was definitely acting on some sort of plan. Angel had gathered that the four factions had stopped warring, quite possibly through an amount of backstabbing similar to what he had employed to start it. One of the bunnies had gone so far as to threaten him with the statement that the four faction leaders had united against him, and that he was a dead bunny. Angel wasted no time in pointing out that of the two bunnies in the den, he wasn’t, in fact, the dead one.
The special committee took in what evidence Angel and Constance had scraped together. With almost a dozen interrogations completed, the committee agreed to take special action to investigate a potential threat to Fluttershy’s safety. That’s what they said publicly, at least. Privately, Constance had won over almost the whole committee, and they had started organizing a larger, still-secret operation. The committee consisted of many more species of critter, so their commitment presented new opportunities.
The bunny interception operation greatly benefited from the support of the local snake population. The squirrels, much as Constance had jested, had offered to front the expenses of paying a larger team of predators. Angel noted that Phoebe couldn’t eat as many bunnies as the snakes could catch, and the excess of their remains could be used to pay the snakes in part.
Some of the bunny corpses that Phoebe hadn’t eaten had started to decompose. Angel found that these more-intact partially-decomposed remains worked nicely with the growing pile of bones to strike fear into each new bunny’s heart. The most intact remains were a little more relatable, after all, and Angel thought that the quantity of remains was starting to show that they were pretty successful. He was certain that it wouldn’t be much longer before bunnies started to break during interrogation.
All the while, most of the critters – and especially Fluttershy – had no idea. Fluttershy even still trusted Angel to organize meetings for the Furry Friends book club.
The trio of bunny operatives were still around, but they hadn’t been up to much since Constance assigned a few songbirds on them to keep an eye on them every moment of the day. While they were under Fluttershy’s protection, or at least periodically receiving her direct attention, they weren’t worth confronting.
As the days passed by, Angel began to grow a little anxious about the actions of the Whitetail Warren. His standard interrogation methods hadn’t yielded any new results, no matter how terrified the captives were. Angel had lost track of the body count, but they didn’t have any new information.
After watching Phoebe tear the head off of a particularly smug bunny, Constance asked Angel if they were going to keep trying. Angel protested, but Constance reminded him that the last half-of-a-pile of bunnies hadn’t broken like he had been so sure they would. She suggested that a change of tactics was in order, or else the particularly gruesome side-effects of interrogating bunnies might draw somecritter’s attention.
Angel had to concede; he knew that if Fluttershy got reports of a fearsome predator too close to her cottage, she would probably want to convince it to hunt farther away. Rather than finding a predator, of course, her nose would lead her to a pile of bunny corpses in varying states of decay. Whether she suspected Phoebe or not, she would probably notice the oddly-specific nature of a dead-bunny pile.
Angel agreed to discuss other options before they made their way back to the cottage.
Constance started with the basics: They knew that Whitetail Warren was interested in Fluttershy, but how dangerous were they?
Angel said that there was something that Fluttershy couldn’t comprehend and most critters didn’t realize about bunnies: They were always evil. He explained that it wasn’t about who they were or how they were raised, because it was a feature of literally all bunnies. Even himself.
Especially him, Constance noted.
Angel continued, emphasising that bunnies were born evil and that if you imagined every one of them to be like the worst villains they had ever read about in book club, it wouldn’t be far off. He noted that they sometimes disagreed in their goals, but those were often differences such as ‘organized exploitation’ versus ‘flat-out destruction’. Those differences, he said, were actually how he incited a civil war between the four primary factions at the Whitetail Warren.
He warned Constance that because they were united now – something which he had never seen or heard of before – they were more dangerous than ever. So far as he could tell, they wanted to know how Fluttershy talked to critters to reverse-engineer it, and they might even have the resources to pull it off.
Constance agreed that this would be bad, and asked how that translated into harming Fluttershy.
Angel shuddered and said that bunnies weren’t very good at magic; if they managed to figure something out, it would probably involve a lot of brute force and sacrifice, which was evidently the primary strength of a bunny population. Fluttershy might be their only example of pony-critter communication, but if they had reason to believe that her sacrifice would help them understand, they wouldn’t hesitate because that’s usually how bunny organizations approached difficult problems.
Constance had a wing held up to her beak and asked Angel why she should trust him if all that were true.
Angel admitted that he had been enjoying himself during the interrogations, but Fluttershy gave him ample opportunity to be evil, whether she knew it or not. He said the biggest difference between him and the Whitetail Warren bunnies was that he had learned to regard his fellow critters with a modicum of respect, so he didn’t go about killing on a whim.
Constance held a wing to her head and said that she felt so much more assured now. She asked Angel if he was trying to be effective with his interrogations or if he just enjoyed playing with the captives.
Angel stayed silent for a moment.
Constance asked if bunnies were always evil and used to sacrifice, why he thought that demanding critical information and threatening them with death would yield positive results.
Angel buried his face in his paws for a moment before admitting that it didn’t sound like the smartest plan anymore.
Constance told him that she would take what he had told her and devise a new interrogation routine, and that he had better follow it.
The next morning, Constance and Angel were called out for another interrogation. On their way, Angel asked if the other critters on the special committee were ever going to take part in the interrogations, but Constance assured him that not only did they want to pretend that the interrogations weren’t happening for their own comfort, she would not allow it if any of them had the guts to consider it anyway.
In turn, she asked Angel if Fluttershy had noticed how much time he had been spending outside of the cottage or if he’d had to miss any outings with her.
Angel said that he’d been slipping in and out unnoticed by her, and he hadn’t admitted to anything yet and he hoped he wouldn’t have to. Fluttershy hadn’t gone anywhere overnight since they had started, but he had considered what he would do if she wanted to bring him anywhere for very long. He didn’t have any clear plans yet regarding that.
Constance said that the committee fully agreed that Fluttershy wouldn’t handle the truth well and for her safety they might as well avoid letting her know. Perhaps an important factor in that decision was the threat that Fluttershy would disown any or all the critters if she did comprehend the threat.
Angel said that was why they needed to settle the issue as quickly as possible; if they could dismantle the Whitetail Warren’s plans, they might never reach such a unified state again and Fluttershy would stay safe and never need to know.
Constance agreed.
They met with the delivery hawk and accepted the captive. Constance congratulated him on his success rate before they dragged the bunny into the tunnels.
After propping the captive against the wall opposite the bone pile, Angel took a deep breath. What Constance told him to do was probably one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.
He played the role of a dumb, overconfident leader.
Constance swore it’d take advantage of the bunnies’ gloating nature, a side-effect of poorly-developed evil, which was something that the book club had taught her. Some of the bunnies might not take the bait, but she’d seen enough variance to know that some of them wouldn’t be able to resist.
Angel started by claiming that they had been onto the Whitetail Warren for years and that they had no hope of completing their dastardly plans.
He made a note to bring a mustache he could twirl for next time.
He followed that up with ridiculous assumptions about what their plans were and how they would thwart them. He had a dark appreciation for the fact that Constance had insisted he overplay the death threat, seeing as the captives themselves knew that it wouldn’t work.
By the time he had gotten around to loudly ordering somecritter to bring in the beast, their captive was snickering.
As ashamed as he felt playing dumb, Angel kept up the facade and insisted that the bunny was doomed.
He raised a fluffy eyebrow when the bunny insisted that his information was hilariously far off and claimed that the Warren didn’t have bunny operatives in several of the regions that Angel’s fake-assumptions had centered on. After stating that those regions didn’t have anything of interest to the Warren, the bunny’s eyes bugged and it clamped its mouth shut.
With Phoebe behind him by then, Angel put on a most gracious and spiteful smile as he thanked the bunny for its assistance. He snapped his paws to let Phoebe know it was her turn.
As Angel listened to the bunny’s death throes while he strutted out of the room, his self-satisfied smile grew even larger.
Constance organized what they had learned and presented Angel with a longer-term interrogation plan. The bunnies proved susceptible to leaking information in their smug denials when they had been presented with absurd claims. To maximize their gains, she crafted a specific set of absurdities for each interrogation.
Less than a week later, they made a presentation to the special committee.
They reported that the bunnies appeared to have special interest in Fluttershy’s communication abilities because it would enable them to read and write – which was dangerous enough on its own – and also to influence ponies directly. It appeared that the Whitetail Warren’s long-term plans included predator control of some sort, which they suggested may be related to influencing ponies.
Angel took a moment to highlight how damning it would be if the Whitetail Warren not only could read and write but also multiply without limit. At that point, he warned, the scope of the threat went beyond Fluttershy’s safety: every critter had a stake in the outcome of their plans, and failure to act would spell doom for all of Equestria.
The committee inquired as to how they had produced this information, but their questioning didn’t last long after Angel and Constance started to explain the interrogation methods they had to use. All critters in the den agreed on the severity and reliability of the information.
Then one of them voiced the important question: What should they do to prevent the Whitetail Warren from achieving its goals?
To Angel’s surprise, Constance had a rather drastic answer.
The critters’ preparations took almost two months. The committee spent a large portion of that time carefully disseminating the information without inciting a panic. More time had to be spent manufacturing evidence to support alibis and cover stories so as not to tip Fluttershy off.
The squirrels had proven invaluable in this with their ‘booming economy’. Fluttershy had been so proud of all of her little critters that had been hired for long-term “luxury tunneling” contracts or to move close to their families.
Angel knew, for all his faults, that Fluttershy would have been destroyed if she knew that they were actually mobilizing for war. By the end of the first month, a tenth of the local critters had volunteered and moved out, with almost another quarter of them in line to follow.
Some of the first intelligence they had gathered regarded positions that were not occupied by the bunnies, and it was in the one such region closest to the Whitetail Woods that the critters were gathering their forces. With only a few hawks on patrol, no bunnies made it close enough to suspect anything.
The critters had gathered their friends and families, bolstering their forces even more. The squirrels had set up arrangements with several bee populations to supplement the critters’ food supply, though they quickly found that the honey traded for more rations than if the critters ate it directly. The squirrels were also largely responsible for running their supply network, travelling under the protection of various birds of prey.
At the end of the second month, Constance and Angel agreed that they had waited long enough. They had arranged for Fluttershy’s discreet protection while Angel encouraged her to get out of the house more often as a decoy, which Angel was surprised to find didn’t sit well with him at all. Her continued protection couldn’t be guaranteed, though, so they had to act first.
That day, Angel told Fluttershy that he was going to go on a trip to the Whitetail Woods to take part in a family reunion, which was technically true in that he would be meeting with whatever relatives he had and then some.
Fluttershy ruffled his fur and packed him a bundle of treats for the trip.
The plan was set. Constance would keep things organized from behind the lines, and Angel would be directing the charge near the front. Angel surveyed his troops. Beyond the common mouse, chipmunk, and beaver, they had a small contingent of the more predatory critters, especially ferrets and badgers. Angel and Constance planned to take full advantage of their army’s diversity and had insisted on several training exercises to establish adequate protocols in the absence of direct orders.
Negotiations with the racoons of Ponyville had come together only recently, but the mice had wasted no time fashioning armor and weapons from the cardboard and metal scraps that they had produced; they supplemented their arms with bark and sharpened sticks from the beavers.
The critters were as ready as Angel could expect.
He called to start their march to the Whitetail Warren.
The battle had started an hour ago at most. Angel felt pretty good about their chances; the first couple of minutes had been slaughter. Constance’s birds had picked off most every bunny posted on the surface before the army had come into view. They had no idea what had begun when the moles started opening up new entrances into their tunnels.
That wasn’t to say there hadn’t been losses; Angel had reports of several of the leading badgers being overwhelmed, at least one cave-in with critters still missing, and he was on his way back to the front lines – an entire team of critters was reported to be pinned down near the heart of the warren – with a division of armed mice.
Blood pooled in the tunnels and the number of bunny corpses made navigation difficult through some of the smaller ones. The tunnel-maintenance crews had been doing their best reinforcing and cleaning the tunnels, but the side-tunnels could only hold so many bunnies.
On his way through the tunnels, a small runner-mouse caught up with them and reported Constance’s estimate that a third of the critters had been lost or wounded. Angel told the mouse that they controlled nearly half of the tunnels, they were fighting their way to the Whitetail tetrumvirate, and if they apprehended the leadership, many of the remaining bunnies would surrender. The little mouse nodded and scurried back to the surface.
Angel and his team arrived at the scene of their pinned-down comrades. The lead group, given the importance of their objective, had been assigned two badgers and several hedgehogs; Angel had hoped they would fend off the bunnies with impunity, but the badgers had bloodied legs and coats from numerous vicious bunny bites; without the protective barrier that the hedgehogs had formed, Angel feared things might have been worse.
The tunnel had opened into a larger space, one which dozens of bunnies swarmed around in, with dozens more behind them. On the other end, it appeared that several of the tunnels had been collapsed, probably intentionally. Angel brandished his own weapon – a fork missing one tine – and the mice charged. With the critters tightly packed on both sides, the next minute was the bloodiest that Angel had ever seen.
Angel met with Constance after they had secured the farthest corners of the Whitetail Warren. She reported that just over half of the critters had suffered an injury and that dozens were still missing in action. They made arrangements for many of the fighting critters to help with search-and-rescue.
Angel acknowledged the losses and assured her that the Whitetail Warren was in ruins; even if they regained autonomy somehow, they had been set back years in their technological learning after so many of the knowledgeable bunnies had died in the fighting.
The next couple of days were spent picking up the pieces. Lost critters were still turning up periodically, though not all of them were survivors. Angel had spent most of his time with badgers and ferrets behind him, laying down his wishes to the remaining Whitetail bunnies. He found that, in their eyes, his demonstration of leadership and – prior to his original departure from the Whitetail Warren – his ruthless backstabbing had slightly tempered their hatred with some respect. Angel figured that the bunnies most willing to cooperate were following their survival instincts.
It occurred to Angel that this would be his best opportunity to seize control of the Whitetail Warren. With the critter army backing him, installing himself as their leader would be almost trivial, and the thought of having an endless supply of ruthless minions to execute his every whim – or enemy – was an intoxicating one.
But that would mean abandoning Fluttershy.
In the end, Angel decided his interests were best served by setting up a proxy to rule the warren in his stead. While minions would have been nice to have, all he really needed was a way to keep tabs on them and make sure they never caused problems for him and his.
To be sure, he made it clear to everybunny that there wouldn’t be any survivors if they gave him the slightest reason to think they were up to something again.
Fluttershy gave him a nuzzle as soon as he stepped through the door. She asked if the family reunion had been enjoyable. Angel nodded, and said that he had been able to catch up with a lot of his old friends too.
After that, Angel gathered several of the bunnies that he had follow him from the warren and sent one of them to fetch the three bunnies in the cottage for a little chat outside. Before long, they were before him. Angel told them that he wanted to thank them for keeping a close eye on Fluttershy for him over the last few weeks and that he had a gift for them. He reveled in their confused expressions.
Angel waved one of the other bunnies over, who was carrying a small cardboard box. He took the top off and presented its contents: a bunny’s foot, which he explained was from one of the tetrumvirate leaders. He told them that it hadn’t done its first owner much good, but he hoped that it would bring them much luck.
