City of Guilds
Chapter 9: Welcome to the Show
Shining Armor paced back and forth across the small balcony in the Rakdos Theater. The foul-smelling, cramped, and very hot room would be bad enough if it was just him, and not also filled with ten Boros and a very unhappy Orzhov. Trixie radiated steaming discontent, the sweat on her brow dripped malevolence. The group was stuffed into the disused balcony, as it was the perfect vantage point from which to spring their surprise attack. But that didn’t mean that it was going to be pleasant while they waited. “One day, Sparkle,” the blue unicorn muttered. “One day I will have my revenge.”
“I thought that you weren’t going to hate my sister anymore,” Shining retorted. “Something about positive thinking.”
“That was for past grievances. The book doesn’t say anything about new ones.” Trixie began magically fanning herself with a self-help book entitled “Forgiving All Your enemies: Making Peace with Yourself.”
“I understand that this isn’t the best experience, but how is it my sister’s fault?” Shining asked.
“She made Trixie take the Shackles and refused to come here and help us. It was as if she foresaw this horrid fate and made steps to avoid it.” Trixie used her magic to fan herself harder with the book as the show started up.
Shining attempted to continue the conversation in an attempt to distract himself from how hot he was and how disgusting the room smelled. “So you told me that you and Twily used to be rivals, how did that come about?”
“Disgusting,” Trixie muttered. Shining followed her gaze to the stage where the first act was starting up. The two human females were dressed in a thin satin fabric draped across their breasts. A small skirt clung to their hips as the only other layer of protection to the elements and the gawking stares from the audience. “To think that they are called ‘performers.’ Titillation is not a difficult art to learn; investment is the true key of a performance.”
“Little envious are we?” Shining asked.
“What do you mean?” Trixie inquired, steam practically coming out of her ears now.
“You just know that if you were the one up there then the crowd wouldn’t be cheering as loud, or at all.”
“For your information,” Trixie nearly screamed, “I would have them begging for more, and do you know why that is?”
“Ponies in the audience?”
“No! Because I have flair, I have dramatics, any true performer knows that trumps any meager amount of attractiveness!” Trixie exclaimed with her face just inches away from Shining’s. Trixie chuckled a little under her breath and turned away from Shining. “Damn, you were just pushing my buttons weren’t you?”
Shining started to laugh a little himself. “Yeah, but it got us to forget the heat for a little while, right?”
“I suppose, but still I am hotter than them,” Trixie finished, deadpan.
“Actually,” Shining quickly interjected, changing the subject, “I have heard that there is some kind of feud between the your guild and the Rakdos. Why?”
“Simple,” Trixie responded. “Lotus Nectar.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Lotus Nectar is a powerful black market drug, almost completely annihilates the user’s nervous system.” Trixie moved closer to the edge of the balcony, motioning for Shining to do the same. Probably not something that she enjoyed talking about in the face of Boros legionnaires, at least not ones that she mildly trust. “Needless to say, it is a junkie’s dream drug. It makes you silly and stupid and no negative side effects. But the Rakdos somehow managed to corner the market on it. So they only give it to high level Rakdos members or mixed with other drugs to people who volunteer to be part of their show.”
“Get people doped up and ask if they want to be tortured. Almost too smart for the Rakdos.” Shining watched as the two dancers finished their performance, and two large men dressed in just as few clothes came out with swords in their hands. The men faced each other and began to spar. Once one was hit, they stepped back and, the one who was hit would cut into his own arm. This earning cheers from the audience.
“Yes, Teysa has suggested to me that is a possibility. The idea that somehow they are being corralled by someone smarter; the question is who?” Trixie asked. “Who would help the Rakdos corner the market for a drug? From all accounts the funds appear to all be going to the guild, not to an outside investor.”
“Maybe whoever it is took a job with the guild in order to get the money from their scheme without leaving a trace. If they just work as a performer and get paid like anyone else, then we couldn’t easily trace it.” Shining pondered this further as the two muscled men onstage continued to battle, one managing to shatter the other’s blade.
“So we would then be forced to investigate every member of the group who earns higher than the average.” Trixie watched on as the man whose blade was broken bit off a part of his shoulder. His opponent threw his blade to the side and the two began to fight bare fisted. “Except that there are many of those kinds of people in the Rakdos; in fact Pinkie Pie is one of them if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yeah,” Shining replied. “But Lotus Nectar was around before we came here, the market was only cornered shortly after we arrived. Not enough time to consider Pinkie a suspect.”
“Unless she is somehow far smarter than we give her credit for.”
“She’s smart, in her own way. But no way did she manage to do something like that.”
The fight continued on until finally a winner was reached. The man whose sword was broken managed to snap his competitor’s neck and stood victorious. A couple of medics came out and pulled him offstage to treat his wounds. Pinkie Pie came out and introduced the next act. The curtain pulled back to reveal a large chain crisscrossed across the lighting rig which hung thirty feet in the air. A man held a pig’s head in his hand and began to walk across the chains, while blindfolded people below him walked along the stage, trying to avoid the dripping pig’s blood.
“What could Sparkle be doing right now that is more important than capturing Borborygmos?”
Twilight Sparkle was knee-deep in wires. Offering to Niv-Mizzet to fix the damaged mana coils was something that she probably should have considered first, but… “Any way that I can get a look at those mechanisms feeding power into Nivix again.” She scanned the Blistercoil for any points of mana leakage, which she was to immediately rewire to be fed into Nivix.
“Madam Sparkle, do you need any help?” Twilight’s Vedalken assistant stood off to the side holding a bunch of tools. Niv-Mizzet had also briefed him on the situation, which he accepted without question.
“Answer me this,” Twilight remarked. “Why don’t you care about what Niv-Mizzet needs with all of this mana?”
“Because he is the guildmaster. What he says is law,” the Vedalken replied without a trace of emotion.
“But seriously, he’s been gathering all of this mana for however long for whatever reason. This doesn’t bother you? At all?” Twilight asked.
“To attempt to comprehend Niv-Mizzet is a dangerous affair,” the Vedalken robotically intoned. “He has given us a mission. We will fix these coils, then we will be rewarded. That is the way that we work. Now I ask again, do you require any assistance?”
“So we can’t even try and comprehend what he does? That is crap, and any creature as intelligent as you claim to be would understand that.”
“Your attempts to get me to question Niv-Mizzet’s orders through petty insults against my brainpower fall on deaf ears, as the saying goes.” The Vedalken stopped briefly before continuing. “As a retort, I would reference the fact that you needed my help creating the restraint mechanism on the Shackles that are currently being used on Borborygmos.”
“We’ll see if that works. I’m not so sure that routing the mana through a single focal point is more effective than my original method.”
“Routing the mana through two separate conduits would double the amount of mana needed for restraint.”
“It would also mean that the magic is folded on top of the other. It would be easier to seal him that way. If one of the shackles, if we were using my original design, were to be clamped on his wrists, then it would restrain him enough to get the other on the other arm, no problem.”
“But it would mean that there would be a far smaller room for error. And the possibility that he would break free is doubled.”
“In theory. In your theory all he would have to do is break one of them to shatter the conduit, but that is just a theory; we were never able to prove it…”
“Because we don’t have a test subject as strong as Borborygmos. But your theory that the mana interfering with his natural mana flow and suppress him is also based solely on conjecture.”
“Borborygmos, master of the Gruul, could not possibly have a sense of awareness to be able to resist the mana flooding. The blue mana would interfere with his normal mana balance. In the same way that introducing a lack or overabundance of gravity would change an internal sense of direction or movement.”
“All conjecture.”
“I’m aware. I did go with your version for a reason, and it wasn’t compromise.”
“It was because you wouldn’t be there to use the Shackles yourself. They have to be used by someone else, someone who doesn’t use blue mana. Thereby it needs to be able to hold a larger charge.”
Twilight grudgingly mumbled a yes and went back to her work, the rhythmic clicking and hissing of pipes and gears calming her, giving her a sense of tranquility. Science was just like magic, at least to Twilight. With magic you used mana combined with a specific understanding of how to apply that mana to achieve an end. With science and machines you built a machine that ran on a power source, usually mana, that is set up to accomplish a task based on the input of its user and the mechanisms involved in its creation. It was because of this that Twilight had easily been able to adapt to life on Ravnica as an Izzet engineer.
The Vedalken Mex had been her partner for a while now, and while he was useful there was one thing that really ticked the lavender unicorn off. The Vedalken had no ambition, nothing to strive towards. This made them incredibly useful when testing but not so much for brainstorming. It upset Twilight because she had grown to a realization that it was vision and intelligence that shaped a plane. She took strides to be that way herself, inventing the things that people wouldn’t have thought to invent. So it annoyed her to see a creature with all the intelligence that she had, but no ambition, no vision…
“Ms. Sparkle, you’ve stopped working. What is the matter?” Mex asked.
“It’s nothing, just get back to work. Maybe we can finish this relatively quickly, maybe even get to see the tail end of the performance,” Twilight responded.
Vex smiled. “You really do care for her, even though she is a murderer, you still care for her as you would have on your world.”
“Firstly, her killings are technically legal so they aren’t murder, which is illegal. You’re a smart guy; use proper terminology. Second, yes, Pinkie is still my friend, no matter how much changes. She would still, somewhere, somehow, still be that eccentric mare who greeted me with a welcome party before she even knew my name. I’ll never forget that, no matter what happens.” Twilight hurriedly went back to work, sealing wires together to fix the broken generator.
“How odd,” Mex stated. “It appears that Borborygmos may not have been the only one with a vested interest in this place.”
“What is it?”
“A strange pendant, no guild insignia, but I am detecting blue mana in large quantities,” Mex handed the pendant over to Twilight who eagerly examined the strange object. “Any purpose?”
“I think…” Twilight began, “that this is a listening device, meant for long distances. It appears to be transferring some kind of information from here to somewhere close by, and I can’t really imagine another function that they could do with something this small.”
Mex suddenly looked concerned and hastily grabbed the pendant. “How far away do you think it is?”
“Can’t be that far, I mean there is no way that this small pendant can go that far; maybe if we journeyed down the pipeline we could find exactly where it originates…”
“Then I’ll take it and go looking for the source. You put the finishing touches on the device,” Mex demanded.
“Well, I would think that this sounds like a demand, but I’ll go along with it, just be back soon, okay?” Twilight let the Vedalken walk off and continued to pore over the wiring in front of her.
Shining Armor and Trixie had managed to survive the sweltering heat of the small projection booth, and now the performance was nearing its end. The previous act, a woman who swallowed a whole yard of barbed wire, left the stage and Pinkie Pie, dressed as Surprise, came onstage. “How have you guys enjoyed this so far?” The crowd cheered and loudly applauded, halted only by Pinkie raising a hoof.
“I’m glad that all of you have enjoyed yourselves, and I know that many of you want to see me eviscerate someone while cracking puns like a baker cracks eggs, but I have something to say first.” The crowd grew quiet, and their attention was drawn to the area directly beneath the projection booth that Shining and Trixie were in. Shining watched as from below them stepped Borborygmos, the Cyclops. He was huge, so huge that Shining could reach out and hit his head without having to leave the balcony.
“Many of you probably already knew about this, but in case you didn’t, Borborygmos recently lost someone, someone that was important to the both of us: his daughter, Scognor, but I always knew her by Scootaloo.” Pinkie loudly gulped, swallowing her tears. “When I was in Equestria, I never talked to Scootaloo all that much; she was a kid and had her own little circle of friends. I talked to her occasionally, but it wasn’t all the time. But once we came to Ravnica, this world, our respective guilds changed us. Some think that these changes are negative; I never have.”
“Scootaloo never thought that way either. She cherished coming here, and even if she wasn’t always direct about it, she was in her rebellious years, she loved her dad.” Borborygmos nodded solemnly as Pinkie continued. “Back on Equestria, Scootaloo was an orphan. No one knows how or why; she just showed up at Ponyville orphanage one day, and no one could figure out where she came from. Worse yet, she was bullied in school a lot, because she couldn’t fly.”
“But then she met Borborygmos and joined the Gruul and through a ‘grueling’ training regimen.” Pinkie sniffled and shook her head, “Sorry, trying to lighten the mood, but the point is that eventually she did learn to fly. Doctors back on Equestria told her that she wouldn’t gain sustained flight until her teens, and yet there she was, flying to this very theater every Saturday, so that she could train with me.”
“The reason she trained was to fight Rainbow Dash, another old friend of mine, because she was told by the Simic to destroy a Gruul encampment. Now Borborygmos knows that I think that he’s a big ol’ sweetie, but I can’t condemn Dashie, she is a friend, not was, is.” Borborygmos nodded, which Pinkie reciprocated.
“But Scootaloo, back on Equestria, she idolized Rainbow Dash, thought that she was the most radical, coolest, most gnarly thing since scooters. But she still chose the Gruul over her idol; she was prepared to get revenge for her new home. But it wasn’t Rainbow Dash who murdered Scootaloo, that almost would have been laudable, like at least she lost to her rival, a worthy fate for a warrior, and one that her dad would have been proud of if it had been a good fight where she fought valiantly to the last second.”
“But it wasn’t a fair fight, it wasn’t even a fight as far as the Boros can tell. She was murdered by someone, just stabbed and left in the Promenade. I cannot believe that, and I kill for all of you to laugh at. But I don’t leave bodies in a public place to make some kind of twisted statement. I do this to make everyone laugh, not to instill terror in the people of this world. So I have a message for whoever did this, the perp who thinks that they’ve gotten away…”
Twilight stood up from her work. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. All of the wires were magically sewn back together, and it was producing magic exactly the way that it was supposed to. “Mex, we’re finished here,” she called. No response. “Mex?” She started walking down the hallway when, as she was nearing the exit, she heard the familiar sound of two metallic objects colliding. She quickly turned the corner and saw Mex.
Mex was lying on the ground dead, a small knife wound seeping blood on his chest. And standing over him was a pony. The mare was about Twilight’s height and had short silvery locks, which complimented her dark blue fur. And in her mouth was a small dagger dripping with blood…
Pinkie looked up at the balcony, tears in her eyes. Everything after that seemed to happen in slow motion. Trixie began to summon ghosts of some kind, and Shining powered up a spell while attaching the Shackles to his armor. The various guards began rushing downstairs to flank Borborygmos, who stood across the way from her. He saw nothing wrong with his current situation; he was just looking at her, clearly trying not to cry. He was a friend. A friend that Pinkie had just betrayed. “Get ready for a Surprise.” And the trap was sprung.