Nightshift 62: Main Hallway, 1-West

[ninelivesonce]

[from here]

Taura took up station midway between the two halls leading back into the dormitories. Alone with her thoughts; the hall was quiet. Too quiet. Dead quiet, a little voice hissed in the back of her mind.

This was no time to be getting superstitious. It was unavoidable, really, in a profession with so much risk involved in daily operations, that those who survived found things to credit. Beyond their own skill, because they'd all seen better men/women/herms when their luck ran out, and skill only improved your odds.

Her luck was holding, tonight. Was Rita and Goku's?

[Rita and Goku]

Comments

[teabastard]

"I've always managed quite well with two," England replied giving the girl an incredulous look, his hand resting on the hilt of his rapier. He smiled slowly. "It leaves your hands free to use a weapon. There is a reason that they became the dominant species of the planet." His eyes did narrow though when she mentioned humans. "You speak as though you aren't one, so please, enlighten me."

He glanced up at the dismal damp ceiling sceptically. "That at least makes a kind of sense."

[rainboompow]

"If humans are the 'dominant species', that's news to me," Rainbow answered with a roll of her eyes. She would have bet a hundred bits that humans had free run of some undiscovered continent and figured that made up the whole world. At least ponies knew that there was stuff outside Equestria's borders, even if they didn't know what all of it was. "Where I'm from, ponies are on top, from the princesses to the pegasi!"

Rainbow grinned as she backed up to an earlier point: "And duh, if you want to use stuff, you use your mouth, or magic! Or better yet, just make sure you are a weapon!" Rainbow said, pumping a fist in the air. "You do not wanna get on the wrong end of a sonic rainboom. Trust me."

She nodded up in that direction along with Stuffy. "I know, right? Big bads always hang out at the top of things — mountains, castles, cliffs, tall buildings, whatever. Never fails."

[teabastard]

Ponies? That made him raise an eyebrow. She honestly thought that she was a pony? Perhaps some people did belong here. "Where I'm from, and I have seen almost every country in the world, ponies are beasts of burden and have been for countless centuries. Property to be sold and traded." The way she was talking though, perhaps she should meet Poland should he ever arrive. He had always been obsessed by them.

He regarded her flatly. "Mouths lack the dexterity of opposable thumbs I think. Although magic certainly has its place." If he wanted to summon a demon of darkness he was sure that Russia would provide.

That seemed to him to be a somewhat simplistic way of looking at things. "I'm very fond of castles actually. And you forgot snowy wastelands."

Sorry for the delay! Essay is done, so I should be back up to speed now.

[rainboompow]

"What?!" Rainbow blurted, not thinking for a moment about where she was or whether she might attract any monsters (she hadn't even seen monsters so far anyway). "Property? Why would you do that?! What do they have to say about it?! Equal rights for equal ponies!" she went on, shaking her fist in Stuffy's general direction.

A human mouth was a little harder to use than her own pony mouth, being smushed flat against the face, but Rainbow wasn't about to give anything to the guy who was talking about pony slavery at this point. Instead she answered with: "Darn right magic has its place. Wings too. If I had my wings right now, we'd be up to that third floor in ten seconds flat! Not exactly feelin' that from the whole hands and feet thing right now."

Rainbow made a jump, half expecting to flap her way up to the ceiling, but of course, she came right back down the way any earth pony (who wasn't Pinkie Pie) would. She reached a hand up to touch the wall before hitting the ground, then pointed up to the spot she had touched. "See? This is the kind of high-flying daring do I've gotta to work with now," she said, crossing her arms in grumbly frustration.

Re: Sorry for the delay! Essay is done, so I should be back up to speed now.

[teabastard]

Her vehemence took him aback a little. She really was taking this whole thing rather far in his opinion. Well, what had he expected really, in an asylum? Some people had to be genuinely insane and he'd just had the misfortune to run into one of them. "They don't generally say anything," he replied dryly, "on account of them being entirely unable to speak and not possessing rational thought. They're like any other animal."

He arched an eyebrow at her. Wings. She thought she was a horse with wings. This just kept getting better and better. He felt like he'd just walked into a Disney movie, except the man who wrote the storyboard had taken too many hard drugs in the 60s and the animators were enacting some kind of figurative revenge for all of the April Fool's jokes.

"So normal human limitations," England said. "I admit I sympathise. I do detest healing so slowly."

[rainboompow]

"They don't talk or you all just don't listen..." Rainbow Dash grumbled to herself in annoyance. Otherwise, she let the issue go. There wasn't much she could do about it from here. Defeating Landelcord came first; freeing the slaves would come next. Not much could do about the second problem if the first one kept the world too messed up to save in the first place.

"See? You get it," Rainbow answered with a sigh, lightly punching the same wall she had just touched as she started moving a few steps forward again. Before she could get far on her way, however, she stopped, turning back over her shoulder. "So wait... You healed faster the way you were before. What were you back in... Humania or wherever?" she asked, raising an eyebrow back in Stuffy's direction.

[teabastard]

England caught the muttered words and shrugged. "I think you misunderstand me. It isn't that they don't talk, it's that they cannot talk. Horses and ponies are incapable of speech. They always have been." She probably wasn't listening. Children these days. Perhaps he was just getting old. What a horrible thought.

He snorted softly at her apparently simplistic view of Earth. "Earth, it's a planet called Earth, divided into many many countries, all inhabited by humans. I'm from a country called England. As for what I was... that's rather more difficult. Do you have countries where you are from?"