~~~|*/\*|~~~

What button do I push again?

This one here, silly. I’m not gonna show you again!

~~~|*/\*|~~~

My name is—

Wait... shit.

~~~|*/\*|~~~

Call me Double Tap.

Yeah, that sounds better.

Call me Double Tap. At Rita’s insistence, I’m going to document some of the fucked up dreams I’ve been having in the hope of making them stop, or at least figuring out why I’m having them. They’re not all the same dream, mind you, but some of them are similar enough that they may as well be. And uh… well, as long as I’m sitting here with this tape recorder, I may as well talk about myself. Maybe that will help too.

A few years back—I don’t really remember exactly when—completely broke and with a pistol in piss poor condition, I thought I would try my hoof at bodyguarding. At best, I’d make enough for another night of room and board. At the worst, I wouldn’t be in need of food or shelter, and another unremarkable pony would join the countless bodies scattered across the wasteland. It was as much a last ditch resort as it was an attempted suicide. I hadn’t even gotten my cutie mark yet, so I thought, what do I have to lose?

I should probably back up a bit, before I get into that.

My dad was a merchant trader, and I never met my mom.

You’ve got her eyes, he used to say. He was a funny guy; real fond of bad jokes, always positive, even though he was basically just a scavenger barely scraping together a living… I—

Sorry… where was I?

I spent my early years on the trail with him, going from settlement to settlement, watching him sell supplies and junk he picked up out in the wastes. When I got older, he let me try my hoof at selling some of the things he would pick up, but I wasn’t much good at it. It wasn’t a privileged childhood and things were pretty rough sometimes, but I was happy, and we got by. For a while, anyway.

When I was nearly a stallion, my flank still bare as the day I was born, we got separated by a band of raiders while traveling from Old Appaloosa to New Appaloosa. He told me to run, so… that’s what I did.

I never saw him again.

That’s how I ended up homeless. No money, no cutie mark, no family. I used to think that I was the reason I had never met my mom. That she hated me, and didn’t want to see me. I guess a lot of the folks at New Appaloosa felt the same way as her. None of them tried to take me in.

Well, that isn’t true. There was this one lady who offered to let me to spend a night in her shop once or twice, but I have a bit of a problem taking things that aren’t mine, so… that didn’t go too well.

I was young, but I was old enough to work, and there was plenty of work around New Appleoosa. Problem was, nothing really clicked. I wasn’t good at selling things, building things, or fixing things. I wasn’t even good at getting ponies drunk and taking their caps. Doing odd jobs barely got me by, and I was in a really dark place.

One night, maybe a year after my dad and I got split up, I took a busted up pistol off of one of the raider corpses I was moving around earlier that day, and decided it was all or nothing. There was a trader moving out the next morning. I covered up my flanks, asked if he was hiring protection, and that was that.

The trip started out pretty uneventfully. Just me, a traveling merchant, and a pair of pack brahmin. It was dry, and hot, and boring. I was surprised how much I had missed that... nostalgic, almost. The first two didn’t change, but not long after we reached what I was told was the halfway point, trouble found us. I should probably mention that until that point, I had never actually fired a gun before. I sure didn’t tell that to the pony I was protecting, but you could say it was a bit of a concern in the back of my mind. Shooting is simple though, right? Just point and squeeze.

I un-holstered that beat up pistol with my magic real slow like as small group of raiders came at us. If they had been using guns, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here making this recording. Still, even with the firepower on my side, I didn’t think I had the advantage. The merchant cowered between his brahmin, and demanded to know why I wasn’t shooting. I asked myself that same question as a grey mare with a knife between her teeth came within a few paces of me.

Point and squeeze, I told myself.

When that knife wielding mare was close enough that I could feel the heat snorting out of her nostrils, I lashed at her with the pistol, swinging it from my side and pressing it to the side of her head. I think she knew she was dead before I had even pulled the trigger. The sound of gunfire wasn’t new to me, but at point blank, it was loud and visceral. I was too stunned by what I had done to really flinch as blood spattered back at me, her body crumpling against mine as her momentum carried.

The pistol fell out of my levitation as her corpse knocked me onto my haunches, but that didn’t matter. I was focusing on the knife as it tumbled from her mouth. I pulled it out of the air, turning it over as I lay beneath limp dead weight. The second raider was close enough for me to see the whites of his eyes. I saw the same crazy, shit-kicker grin in that raider that I saw in the ones that took my dad from me. I wanted to carve it right off of his fucking face. Without even realizing it, the knife followed my line of sight. It spiraled, glimmering in the sun until it sank to the hilt in the softness of his eye socket. He tumbled head over hooves into the dust.

The third raider hesitated. He was just starting to turn when I spotted my pistol on the ground. He had the same thought, diving toward it. Being a unicorn, I had much better reach. The slide kicked back, an empty casing bouncing against his foreleg as I punched a hole in his skull, chin first.

I’m not sure how long I lay there, under a rapidly cooling and lifeless body. I had never taken a life before, and then, in less than a minute, I had taken three without getting so much as a scratch. I never really thought of myself as lucky until then, but then I stopped to think about it. I had escaped certain death before, and my first time in combat, I took down three ponies with no idea what I was doing.

It felt good. I wished that the merchant cowering between his brahmin was my dad, that the raiders were the same bunch that destroyed what little semblance of a life I had… But I knew that would never be true. I never lied to myself. I knew my dad was dead. I could only assume my mom was long dead as well.

The feeling of satisfaction faded, and I wanted more. I wanted to see how far my luck could take me. I wanted to make the wasteland run red with blood. I could already see that protecting caravans wasn’t going to give me that. I didn’t care about being virtuous, or making a difference in the wastes. I wanted revenge. I wanted to kill.

I came away from my first taste of combat with more than just a feeling of purpose. Something I had stopped caring about long before that point. Later that day, I noticed that something had appeared on my flanks; a pair of dice. Snake eyes. I didn’t get it then, but it makes more sense to me now, I guess. I had made a gamble with my life, and I came out on top. Rolling a two is supposed to mean bad luck, though, so…

Yeah, it has something to do with luck. Maybe I give everyone around me bad luck?

Anyway… yeah? What’s up?

Oh! Don’t mind me. I didn’t know you were—

~~~|*/\*|~~~

Chapter One – Now Hiring

|[o8- ]|[ /_\ ]|[BAR]|

The whiskey mingled with the dash already coursing through Double Tap’s bloodstream, speeding up his perception of time enough that everything played out at close to normal speed. Without the whiskey to slow him down, words could drag on for agonizing amounts of time, and even the shortest conversations could last seemingly forever. He was in the sweet spot, though, and that meant his night was only just beginning.

“I think Red Eye is alright!” he announced to the entirety of the Crystal Ball Lounge. “I’m sure he had a perfectly good reason to put his soldiers out in front of the place!”

The other ponies at the bar had learned to ignore Tap when he got chatty, and the bar keeper refused to throw him out because his companion was a very generous tipper. Of course, he was too drunk and high to realize that he was taking advantage of his bottle-cap-currency based immunity.

“And you know what else?” The bottle floated to his lips, spilling slightly as he tipped it toward the back of his throat. “Fuck DJ Ponethree! What has he ever done for the wasteland? Red Eye has a whole fucking city! He gets shit done, while this smug asshole just sits on his ass in a recording booth all day!”

Grinning widely, Tap swung around on the bar stool, sweeping the room in search of supporters. He found none, though he did notice a unicorn with a wild blue mane getting up from the end of the bar, shooting a glare at him as she silently trotted out of the room.

“Maybe if you fuckers willingly supported him,” Tap called after her, “he wouldn’t need slaves!”

The little griffon next to the swaggering unicorn giggled as she looked up at him, putting a clawful of bottle-caps down on the counter. The bar keeper sighed and raked them in.

“Why don’t you talk about something else, hmm?” The gold of her irises sparkled through his haze of intoxication, but the glowing red LED of her bomb collar hurt to look at. She smiled around her beak, brows arched under the rims of her blast goggles. “Oh! Actually!”

She put her talons on the counter, her PipBuck swinging loosely on her wrist as she leaned closer to the troubled looking mare on the other side. “Have you heard any good gossip lately? Maaaaybe about the Ministry Mares? Any new details? Anything at all?”

The barkeeper furrowed her brow. “Please stop asking me about those damned Ministry Mares, Rita. You know I don’t buy into any of that shit.”

“But the Ministry Mares are— They’re so—” Rita paused. Tap could just imagine the gears spinning in her head as she tried to form a complete sentence. “Anyone will tell you that they’re an important part of Equestrian History! As important as the princesses! In fact—”

Double Tap had learned to ignore Paharita when she got chatty. She had barely even touched her martini, the tiny umbrella still balancing against the rim of the glass, and already she was rambling on about a bunch of ponies that had died more than two hundred years before she was even born. Completely irrelevant. He took comfort in the fact that, at the very least, she wasn’t rambling about the Ministry Mares in slow motion. That was the worst.

A bottle on the shelf began to glow as Tap reached for it with his levitation, shakily floating it toward himself. Instead of looking at him, the barkeeper looked to Rita expectantly. The little griffon smiled and set down another clawful of caps, then went right back to clicking her beak.

There was a glint of excitement in the barkeeper’s eye as Tap briefly slouched forward, dissipating immediately when he grinned up at her. “And another thing!”

She slapped a forehoof across her face. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

“I’ve listened to his speeches and that stallion has a plan! He knows what the fuck he’s doing, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for DJ Ponethree!” He propped himself up on the bar, giving the barkeeper his full attention. “Once he gets everything up and running, he won’t need slaves! He’s going to fix the wasteland! All that other asshole does is play depressing, shitty old records about how fucked up everything is! Now you tell me, who’s doing a better job rebuilding society?!”

Without so much as looking at Rita, or the counter, the barkeeper reached out to collect yet another offering of caps.

A hoof gently clapped on Tap's shoulder not long after that. Had he been in any condition other than his drug and liquor induced zen, he would have fed that hoof to its owner. As it was, he just glared back at the nervous security guard it was attached to, the pony in question looking up from under his sweat beaded brow.

"Excuse me," the earth pony coughed. "We've been getting a number of complaints about, uh... disorderly behavior." The guard laughed nervously. Tap ran his tongue over his teeth. "And some harassment. Now, I know you've done a lot of work for us in the past and you've been very discreet about dealing with," he lowered his voice to a whisper, "internal conflicts." He paused, rubbing his forehead with a fetlock. "But if you could perhaps—"

Tap's vision shifted back into focus, revealing only one guard instead of the imagined six. He looped a foreleg into the collar of the trembling pony's vest and yanked him forward.

"Fuck. Off." Tap said simply and clearly, making sure to get some saliva on the pony's face.

"Fair enough," the guard squeaked.

Tap removed his hoof, and the pony promptly dropped back onto his haunches. The scarred unicorn turned back to the bar, not even bothering to watch the guard leave.

Half way through what he counted as his third bottle of whiskey, Tap started to black out for real. This was only another step on the way to having an eventful night. Tap had even made something of a game of trying to guess what had happened between patches of lucidity. After trying to figure it out, and hopefully not before slipping into another dark spot, he would check his answer by asking Rita to fill him in. His perception was attuned enough that, even while severely inebriated, he was usually at least half right.

He came back around just in time to hear Rita wrapping up. “…posters, personal effects, autobiographies, memory orbs, rumors of possible descendants, or remains. I think that’s about it!”

The bartender wasn’t even looking at her anymore. He thought she was nodding along for a moment, until he realized she was softly banging her head against the liquor cabinet. Another customer got to their hooves and stormed out of the bar, which of course meant more caps.

While Tap had his eyes on the door, he spotted a mare in some kind of robe slowly making her way into the bar. She seated herself beside Rita just before he slipped into darkness. His vision returned seemingly moments later, getting a good view of the back of Paharita’s head, the strap of her goggles overlapped by some of her feathers. She was speaking in hushed tones to the mare in the robe.

“…come highly regarded. Judging by your record,” the robed mare added, “I think that’s entirely deserved. This won’t be easy, though. I’m letting you know that up front. That’s why we’re prepared to pay handsomely for—”

Everything went black again. They were discussing a contract. That was fairly normal. Both he and Rita were hardly discreet about their profession. If ponies should need their services, the pair of them could be found after sundown at the Crystal Ball Lounge in Manehattan's own Tenpony Tower. They had yet to let a job go unfinished, and business had been pretty good as a result.

Good enough to afford a room in Tenpony Tower, in fact. Double Tap wasn’t particularly fond of Tenpony, and most of the residents of Tenpony weren’t particularly fond of him, but it was hard to argue against staying somewhere with hot, running water that didn’t register any clicks on a geiger counter. Since it bore one of the closest resemblances to civilization in the wasteland, Tenpony was also a major trading hub. It made sense to use the place as a safe location to discuss business with the kinds of clients that had the money to make a contract worthwhile.

Light and color bled back into his vision as his hearing returned.

“…so excited!” Paharita squawked, bobbing in her seat, the stool squeaking under her. “You can count on us, we’ll make sure the job gets done! Can we keep that folder though? We’re going to need to do a lot of planning to do this properly, considering that— Wow, I can’t believe we’re really going to do this!” She spun around, her eyes all lit up with excitement. Despite that, she spoke in a near whisper as she leaned closer to the inebriated unicorn. “Hey! We just got hired to—”

Even though he slipped out of consciousness again, there was no doubt in his mind that Rita had just sealed the deal, and that there would be a lot of money coming their way when the job was done. The real question was who? Double Tap had killed everything from debtors to gang leaders to vigilantes to slavers to nut jobs holed up in an alley rigged with megaspells. There was nothing he couldn’t kill with ample planning, the right equipment, and some luck. The prospect of a challenge was actually exciting. He had to go back to doing protection jobs during a dry spell the previous winter, and if a challenge meant extra money to keep him from having to stoop that low, he was all for it.

The world slid back into focus just in time for him to watch the robed mare slowly trot out of the bar. Paharita was looking up at him, grinning as wide as she could with a beak in the middle of her face.

“Ohhh, this is going to be so great! I can’t wait to get started!” The griffon wrapped her claw around the stem of her martini glass, knocking it back in one gulp. She winced, then giggled, depositing two clawfuls of caps on the counter. “Goodnight Foam! See you later!”

“Yeah.” muttered the barkeeper, eyeing the swaying unicorn as he grabbed another bottle off the shelf without permission.

The floor rolled under Tap’s hooves as he slowly made his way to the exit, Rita practically hanging off of him as the alcohol went straight to her head. He grinned as she idly nibbled the side of his neck, her beak tickling as much as it pinched. Other residents cleared out of his path as he swaggered through the hall to the elevator, his ears buzzing, his sheath feeling fantastic every time he took a step or Paharita brushed against him.

They hadn’t even reached the elevator when she started kissing him. She really can’t hold her liquor, he thought, pressing to the corner of her mouth where her beak stopped and her lips started. Kissing a griffon had been weird to him at one point, but now it was just another staple of a good night. She buried her beak in the side of his neck again, cooing softly as she unfolded her wings into the passengers standing on the other side of the elevator.

The inconvenienced ponies stayed silent, or as close to silent as their dignity would allow. Tap’s reputation branded him as a pony not to be confronted directly. Even as Paharita’s wings repeatedly slapped and prodded the fancy residents across from them, the most he could hear was muttering under breath. He snickered when, just as the doors opened, she knocked the monocle clean off a stuffy looking stallion. Rita cleared her throat, folding up her wings as she stepped un-apologetically out of the elevator.

As Tap followed her, he heard someone grumble after him. “Yeah,” he spat, “you can all get on my dick!” He caught a glimpse of their outrage just before the elevator doors shut behind him.

Walking in a straight line was an ability Tap had left behind at the bar. He fumbled with the bottle of whiskey he had grabbed on the way out. When he tried to unscrew the cap, a spark erupted from the fracture in his horn with a sharp pop, and he cracked the neck right off the bottle. He looked down at the two pieces of whiskey bottle floating precariously in front of him, frowning. Rita started laughing.

“Not funny!” he snorted.

When he looked up, he found himself with a perfect view of prime griffon ass. Her tail waved slowly through the air as she swayed her hips, fluttering her wings and grinning back at him.

“Come on, silly; we haven’t got all night!”

That was all the convincing he needed. He tossed the remains of the bottle over his withers, the shatter of glass echoing down the hall as he drunkenly pranced toward her. He had gone from tingly to rock hard by the time he had her up against the door.

“Oh jeeze,” she groaned, squirming back against him, feathers tickling every inch of his underside. “Let me unlock the thing at least!”

He had just started to move his hips against dusting feathers and the feline haunches below them when the door swung open, Paharita giving an excited, trilling chirp as they fell forward onto the floor. Still half laughing, half chirping, she tried to crawl out from under him, tickling his sides as she fluttered her wings. There was no escaping, however. Tap could feel the heat between her hind legs. He snorted as he missed his mark, grinding against her belly and her left thigh instead of driving home.

“Now come on!” The tuft on the end of her tail made him shiver and throb as she coiled it around his middle, trying in vain to restrain him. “They said they would fine us if we leave the door open again!”

“Don’t care,” he grunted.

On Tap’s second attempt, he plunged deep inside her, shuddering as she immediately started to milk him for all he was worth. Even though she had stopped trying to crawl, she attempted to continue her campaign to close the door. Her words became little more than a series of pleasant gasps and high pitched warbling as he put his back into it, stuffing as much of his cock into her as her body would allow.

The room began to spin, everything fading to black. Right on schedule, as far as Tap was concerned.

He came to on the bed, on his back, with Rita straddling him; hunched forward with her talons digging into his forelegs, keeping them spread as she bounced against his middle. She had shed her clothing at some point, and judging by the feel of her fur and feathers against his skin, so had he. Her ass wetly slapped his inner thighs every time she came down. He couldn’t see her face, but he had a pretty good view of her neck, nuzzling into her sweaty plumage as he felt her beak on the tip of his ear.

The little griffon was just starting to lock up, trembling, letting go of his sore ears as she began to trill between gasps. He gushed like a Sparkle Cola bottle on a rattling generator as her warm, wet cunt turned into a vice. A thick white slurry slowly oozed down his cock toward his crotch as the thrusting died down. After a minute, their rigid forms slowly melted. She rolled forward, talons gently stroking the lightly bleeding claw marks in his forelegs, eyes half lidded as she nuzzled into him, cooing softly.

Everything blurred and wavered as Tap tilted his head back, spying a lone bottle of whiskey on the shelf. He noticed the door was still open as he levitated the bottle across the room. Paharita bolted up and snatched it out of his magical grasp. He watched in horror as she twisted off the cap, taking a swig and coughing after the fact.

“Oi!”

Paharita sneered, waving it around so that he couldn’t wrap it in his levitation. “Maybe now you’ll let me close the door, mister hot to trot?”

There was a moment of lingering sensation as she slowly pulled herself off of him, mutual squeezing and pulsing drawing the motion out, until at last he felt his shaft cooling in the open. His brain sloshed as he turned to watch her. Her limp was much more noticeable when she was drunk, her left hind leg taking slightly shorter strides than her right. In his opinion, it just pronounced the sway of her hips that much more.

“Did you get a good look?” she mused after the dry click of the door. He nodded, and she smiled, gazing fondly back at him from under her eyelids. “Ready for round two?”

“Come and get it,” he slurred.

His final thought for the evening, as she prowled toward him with her wings spread, was something along the lines of she’s got a lot of fuck in her for such a small griffon.

Darkness followed.

No dreams.

Perfect.

|[o8- ]|[o8- ]|[o8- ]|

The following morning, Double Tap woke to a pair of fuzzy paws in his face.

Oh, this again.

He could feel a beak against his sheath, warm, soft puffs of air blowing against it in regular intervals, accompanied by a girly snore. This would hardly be the first time the little griffon had fallen asleep on top of him, probably mid blowjob. Without waking Paharita, Tap shifted around under her. The room was a bright blur, dusty columns of sickly light reaching through the curtains. The room was also a complete mess, and it looked like there had been a small fire at one point. Business as usual.

A soft murmur rose from beside him, which he found odd considering that Paharita had her face in his crotch. Turning toward the source, he found himself face to face with a stallion. Double Tap froze, eyes wide and teeth gritted. He relaxed again just a quickly.

Whatever. It was a familiar face, belonging to a stallion that worked at Tenpony’s clinic. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the stallion’s name. Lifesprout? Vitalbloom? Ah, fuck… Rita, we talked about this shit.

Feeling much less affectionate, Tap slid out from under her, dumping her against the spunk stained sheets and their sleeping guest. He spent a moment leering at her, half expecting her to wake up, but she was still fast asleep even after a few soft bounces.

Paharita’s long, silky, peachy plumage was a mess, not that she ever did much with it besides brushing it to the left side of her face. The deep magenta she had died the tips of her plumage and the feathers around her eyes matched the color she had painted her talons and hind claws, making them stand out against her tawny fur. He shuddered and turned away as he remembered the fiasco he had gone through to get her that nail polish.

In actuality, the once lavish room in Tenpony was just a place to sleep with convenient proximity to places with food and drink. They didn’t actually keep anything of value in the tower, and treated it very poorly as a result. Empty bottles and inhalers lay scattered across the floor and over the dresser. Approaching the scorch mark occupying a corner of the room, he realized that at some point, they must have been trying to cook. That never ended well while sober, which is probably why they would attempt it while completely plastered.

A black cloud of a headache was quickly settling over Tap’s brain as he crossed to the bathroom, kicking empty bottles out of the way as he went. Rita’s flack jacket and oily, long-sleeved shirt lay in a heap just outside the door, not that they looked much different to Tap when she actually wore them. The outfit was almost comically oversized on her, as was most of her clothing. Just inside the bathroom, he spotted his ratty leather vest and equally weathered red sweater draped over the side of the bath tub. They smelled strongly of bile. He had seen mercenaries in similar getups; usually the adventurous types.

Tap perked up and glanced over his withers as a speaker kicked to life in the main room, pouring out a kick drum, an electric and bass guitar and an organ in funky, juicy harmony. Paharita had set an alarm on her PipBuck and was sleeping right through it. He shook his head, wincing as the motion set off a jolt of pain, and wrapped the cold water handle in his levitation.

Once the sink started flowing, he put his lips to the faucet and began to drink. Paharita had commented on how clean Tenpony’s water was once, and when he asked, instead of simply saying that there was no radiation, she went on a spiel about how great the purple Ministry Mare was for having the foresight to come up with a radiation purging system. Nearly everything in the tower led to a history lesson he never asked for. With his thirst quenched, he heaved a quiet sigh and spent a moment looking at himself in the mirror.

Red veins spiderwebbed across the whites of his eyes. The hazel pools of his irises dilated slowly as he traced the long, pink scars etched into his face. They stood out against his olive coat, much like the dozens more that spread out over his body, a reminder of his biggest mistake to date. A few dirty red locks of hair fell into his eyes. As Tap tossed his head to shift his mane, he realized that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had taken a comb to it. His horn jutted through the tangled mess, a chip and several radiating cracks marring the smooth, slow twist to the tip. He put on a big, fake grin, satisfied that he still had all his teeth, then turned back toward the main room.

Paharita lay alone on the bed. The clinic stallion had successfully slipped right out of the room while Tap had his back turned. He found that both admirable and worrying.

Am I getting rusty? Maybe it’s the hangover? He chewed a bit of dry skin off his lower lip. It’s been a little while since my last job, but it hasn’t been that long, has it?

Tap stopped at the dresser, putting the mouthpiece of a dash inhaler between his lips and huffing lightly. Everything slowed to a crawl for a few long moments, allowing him to clear his thoughts.

He let his eyes drift over his holstered pair of custom nine-millimeter pistols, dubbed Comedy and Comedy. The silencers were unscrewed for storage sake, since he wouldn’t be doing much shooting inside the tower, but it never hurt to anticipate the worst. He was able to smuggle knives and ammunition for those pistols in and out of Tenpony on a regular basis, after all, and they had still yet to catch him. If he could do it, that meant there were other ponies that could do the same. Grenades were a little trickier to sneak by security, but he had done that as well on occasion.

Paharita moaned softly behind him. He glanced to find her arching her back, falling limp against the mattress a moment later. She remained fast asleep, alarm still sounding. 

Tap snickered and turned back to the dresser, setting his sights on the folder next to his bandolier. Discolored manila bearing the Steel Ranger’s insignia glowed softly as he peeled it away from the contents. Inside was a series of documents and attached images that looked to have been pulled from security feeds. There were actually several different profiles inside the folder, each one focusing on a different pony or, in one particular instance, zebra.

Tap flipped back to the first page, skimming the document, pausing as his eyes drifted over the image stapled to it. It was almost like she was staring right back at him. It was fairly obvious which one was the highest priority, but looking at the picture, it just didn’t make sense.

This has to be a mistake, he mused to himself. How could such a tiny little pony be worth so much to the Steel Rangers? 

Even her name wasn’t threatening. He glanced back at the fuzzy picture, locking eyes with a still frame of the mare with a price on her head.

To no one in particular, he asked, “Who the fuck is Little Pip?”

|[(  ) ]|[  7 ]|[o8- ]|