When I moved to Canterlot, I took great care in hiding the suitcase where no one would ever find it. My own town home is an obvious place to look, so I didn’t hide it there. In fact, from what I can gather, Blackwatch searched the town house right after they hit the scone shop. Good thing I had the foresight not to hide under my bed, otherwise I’d be out of options. But Blackwatch invading my home does mean I’ll have to hit Blueblood with another lawsuit for wrecking my crib. Hey, more money for me.

The suitcase is nowhere in the city. Technically I don’t know exactly where it is. That’s intentional. The first thing I did when I got to Canterlot over a year ago was jump off the train outside the city gates and get lost in the forest at the base of the mountain. I made sure to walk long and far, staying away from any settlement. When I found a good spot, I buried the suitcase right there and walked out of the forest. My eyes were closed on the way back, so I have no clue where I buried it. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t say where I put it if someone forced me to talk.

I constructed the plan with my living situation in mind. If Blackwatch or anyone came for me while I was living here, I’d jump off the side of the mountain, follow my Gilda senses to the suitcase, dig it up and head to the nearest town to open it up and unleash Tartarus. I’m proud of how brilliant and simple it all it. The jump lets me evade my pursuers. The forest lets me shake anyone who’s following me. And there’s at least six nearby small towns I can set up shop at. It’s all perfect.

That was the original plan. My plan did not include a guest following me to where I buried my suitcase.

Arctic North and I are sitting on the edge of the lower Canterlot circle, looking down at the forest far below us. It’s night. It’s cold. The wind is blowing up our faces. Neither of us are happy about the situation.

“So…” Arctic says, looking down at the forest, “it’s somewhere down there.”

I really don't like having Arctic tag along with me. There's something about him that doesn't sit well in my belly. But here I am, making a deal with Discord. “Yep.”

He waves a hoof over the side of the disk. “And it’s somewhere in that general direction.”

“More or less.”

“And the only way down there is either train, which doesn’t run this late at night nor does it come down this side of the mountain, or airship, which you won’t let me take since you don’t want anyone following us.”

“You got it.”

“I see.” He mulls over this information as he scrutinizes the wide expanse of trees and nature. “You can jump down easily, I know that. But this leaves me with my hooves tied behind my back.”

I look at him with a raised eyebrow. “What, you don’t know how to teleport like your other unicorn pals?”

He gestures at himself. “Do I look like Twilight Sparkle? I’m too busy with my job to practice my spells.”

“I don’t know who that is. What about something else? Say… a feather falling spell.”

“Hmm. Feather falling?” Arctic taps his chin. “I haven’t done that since grad school. I’m a bit rusty, but I could pull it off in a pinch. Why would” – His sentence dies abruptly in his mouth. He looks me dead in the eye. “Oh no, don’t you” –

He screams when I punt him off Canterlot’s edge. “See you at the bottom!” I yell as he flails high above the forest tops. I might have given him an extra boost of monster strength, so he’s going to be falling for a while.

Somebody gasps behind me. I turn around to see a homeless pony frozen in the middle of digging through a trashcan. He’s looking at me with wide eyes and jaw wide open. I shrug at the fellow, then I jump off after Arctic, tuck my knees in, and yell, “Cannonball!”

People often underestimate how tall mountains are. As a mountain girl myself, I can say they’re pretty tall. This particular mountain is so tall that it takes me a full minute to plummet to the base of the mountain. When I do finally hit the ground, I have enough momentum to blast the biggest crater in my life. The dirt goes rolling away in a massive wave. Trees uproot and fly into the air. The resulting sound wave rolls up the mountain like thunder. I giggle as I step out of my crater. I bet the entire valley heard that.

Above me, a pale faced purple unicorn floats down on a cloud of magical sparkles. When Arctic is low enough to see the white of my eyes, he glares at me from his magical cloud. “What in blazes were you thinking?!”

I give him an innocent little smile. “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to let you ride me.”

The sparkle cloud dissipates when he touches ground. Arctic tries walking, but his legs are shaking too much for him to control. It takes a bit for him to overcome his jitters, but once he does he’s back on his feet and ready for the next thing for me to throw at him. Hopefully it’s a rock. “Where to next?”

My Gilda senses ping for the suitcase, and I point the direction they pull me towards, which is somewhere deep in the forest. “That way.” Yep, my Gilda senses work with inatimate objects. Suprised me too. There is a slight chance that I didn't bother checking if I could do that until a few months after I buried the sitcase, but who's gonna know?

Arctic North follows me as I lead the way. There’s enough moonlight for him to stay close without losing me in the dark. He grumbles about crazy griffons and how he should’ve pulled funding from my experiment or something. He's quiet enough that he thinks I can’t hear him, but I don’t think he’s aware of my monster hearing. I won’t say anything. The more he doesn’t know, the more I can surprise him later.

The lights of Canterlot poke through the trees as we descend through the forest. It’s a pretty sight. Most of this land is mandated as a protected forest and I can see why. The forest canopy hides the city in a way that you can’t always see the entire thing all the time, giving Canterlot a mysterious feeling to it. With how high it is in the mountains, it almost looks like a second moon.

Arctic North’s voice comes from behind. “How much further?”

My Gilda senses ping for the suitcase. It returns an average strength, meaning we’re still some ways away, but the direction we’re going is still the same as last time I pinged. “I’m not sure, but we’re still going the right way. Just be patient and enjoy the hike.”

“For you, all I have is patience,” Arctic says. “I’m just curious how far we’re going. From the looks of it, you buried it as deep in the forest as one can go. If Blackwatch knew you hid it somewhere in these trees, we would lose it forever. It’d be impossible to search for, even with the thousands of working bodies at my disposal.”

I push a branch out of the way. Arctic grabs it with his magic and passes after me. “That was the point,” I say. “I wanted to keep the suitcase hidden but in a place I can run to if you guys came after me. Buried in a forest was the obvious choice.”

“Very effective,” Arctic agrees. “But you didn’t run off to grab it when we came for you. Why was that?”

I stop in my tracks, and Arctic stops too when I shoot a glare at him. “I can’t fix the damage you did to my shop if I’m on the run.”

“I suppose you can’t.” Arctic starts walking when I move forward, and we continue our journey through the woods. “That brings up another question I had. Why Canterlot of all places? Your choice of residence is bold. It's right under the Princess's noses. Might as well have built a carnival in front of the den of an Ursa Major.”

This guy is talkative. Eh, I don’t mind. We have a ways to go, so might as well entertain ourselves. “Canterlot wasn’t my first choice. I originally wanted to do Las Pegasus.”

“Oh? And what made you change your mind?”

“I couldn’t walk up there,” I say. “I planned to talk to a real estate agent when I first got to the city. We were going to meet up at the balloon station when I arrived. He was there, right on time. I got off the balloon to shake his hoof, but when I stepped off, I plummeted straight through the clouds, right in front of the guy.”

This elicits a laugh from the unicorn. “The agent must have been confused to see you survive a fall from the sky.”

“He looked confused the second time I rode up a balloon. We tried it again, three or four times. The clouds never held me up. I think there was something going on with the cloud walking spell. The damn unicorns tuned it wrong.”

“No, it wasn’t the unicorns. In fact, that sounds consistent to what I’ve seen.”

I look back at him to throw him a confused look. What's consitent about me falling though clouds? He's too busy giggling to himself to catch my confusion. “And after that, you came to Canterlot.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Where, for the past year, you lived right under the Princesses’ noses.”

I shrug. “What do you think a fugitive would do, run to the Badlands, or buy a townhouse in Equestria’s capital?”

"I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to pick option B.”

I am going to take that as a compliment. “Sometimes stupidity is your greatest ally. Took Blackwatch over a year to find me, so I'd say the stupid option worked out pretty well.”

“If stupidity is your ally, then what does that make the letter you sent?”

I’m silent. Damn, he’s got me there.

Arctic grins at me. “Let that pass. We all make mistakes.”

Story of my life.

The forest has been growing thicker. I draw out a monster claw to slash away at any shrubbery standing in our way. Arctic assists by magically grabbing loose boulders and branches and tossing them aside. “I notice,” he says, “that the places you chose to live in are expensive to do so, let alone set up a bakery I the busiest part of the city.”

“Yeah, so?”

“How on earth did you get the money to set up your life? The question’s been digging in my mind ever since I saw the letter. Do you have a benefactor I’m unaware of?”

I look back at him again. He genuinely looks confused, no motive behind that face. “You could say I have a benefactor. Many benefactors, in fact.”

His confusion turns to worry. “Please don’t tell me you have a cult following you.”

“Heck no,” I say shaking my head. “I couldn’t stand the attention. No, the benefactors are your Blackwatch goons.”

Arctic switches back to confusion, only this time it’s a more violent confusion. “What?”

“You know all the goons I ate while fighting you?”

He nods, slowly. “Yes. There’s a dedicated shelf full of files of my agents whose deaths we account to you.”

“Must be a large shelf.”

“I'm hopeful it doesn’t grow.” He shoots me a glare as he says that. “What about those agents? How do they pay for you?”

He seems miffed. “Welp, turns out anyone I eat, I gain their memories.”

“And that does…?”

I smile at him. “Those memories include bank account information.”

Arctic’s eyes go wide. “You’ve been stealing money from my deceased agents?!”

I wave a claw at him. “Oh, don’t throw a fit over it. It’s not like they’re going to cash out anytime soon.”

He throws a hoof into the air. “But it’s still their money! It would go to their families! It’s unforgivably disrespectful!”

“Technically, it’s not stealing if I’m them,” I say. I shapeshift into a goon I ate back in Manehattan. I leave out the Blackwatch suit, so Arctic North sees the real face of a dead goon. I think this guy’s name was Arsenic. “It’s still Mister Goon walking into his bank, asking to withdraw all his money, and walking away with his life savings. The clerks were wondering why this was the hundredth guy that week to withdraw everything, but there was nothing illegal about it.”

Arctic is on the brink of screaming. “That’s a major felony! You committed a crime.”

I shift back to griffon form and wave a talon at him. “The real crime was how much you underpay your goons. Seriously, if they’re going up against me, they should get paid at least five times what you give them.”

He’s about to shout something else, but my Gilda sense lights up underneath me. “Oh hey, we’re here!”

Arctic North, while still looking like he’s going to strangle me in the name of the law when I have my back turned, perks up at the news. We circle around a mound of dirt, covered up by a year’s worth of grass and vegetation. Arctic uses his magic to brush it all aside, leaving the dirt exposed to the air.

“Right under our hooves,” he mutters.

I nod. “Yep. Eight feet of ground keeping it hidden from the world. No way anyone would stumble on this thing.

Arctic looks up at me. “Eight feet? We’re going to be here all night digging this up.”

“Dig? Pfft. Who said we were digging? Step back and watch.”

The unicorn takes a step back. I lean on my side, shoving a claw into the ground. The claw splits into a tentacle and shoots into the dirt. Moments later, the earth rumbles, and the dirt mound explodes into the air. The blue suitcase breaches the earth, carried by a cluster of my ground spikes.

Arctic’s eyes flicker between me and the suitcase. I wiggle the blades a little bit and smile at him. “Well, go on and take it.”

The unicorn hesitates, but his horn glows, and the suitcase floats over to him. He clicks the suitcase open and gazes inside. His horn glows slightly brighter, and he pulls something out of the suitcase. The object he pulled looks like a clown mask. It’s mostly white, with red stripes on part of it and a red nose. It’s giving Arctic a sinister grin. After a moment of examination, he puts the mask back into the suitcase without closing it. “This really is the Nexus.”

The blades shoot back down into the earth, and they whip back to my claw. “I didn’t lie to you. That’s my half of the bargain, now you have to do your half.” Finally, I can get Blackwatch off my back. Breath of relief, right there.

Arctic North looks up at me. He flips the suitcase around so the dark inside is pointing towards me. “Nah.”

His horn flashes, and a bolt sears into the suitcase. I’m hit with a roar, and a vortex flies out of the suitcase, similar to the one that sucked the bug lady inside.

Oh. Shit!

Leaves and twigs whip past my face as the vortex sucks them in. I flip around to try to run, but the vortex keeps me from going anywhere. My speed can’t overcome its pull. My monster claws shift out and I slice them into the ground. No good. The vortex is so strong that my claws only rake through the ground. I yell over the vortex’s roar. “We had a deal!”

I hear Arctic laugh over the noise. “We had nothing!”

In little time, I give out. My claws rip out from the ground, and I tumble back into the void. Every little particle of me twists and warps as I’m sucked into the suitcase. I fall back into blackness. The last I see of the world are the lights of Canterlot seeping through the forest canopy.

"Good riddence, you monster."

Everything disappears when Arctic North shuts the suitcase. All is dark.

Backstabbing bastard!

Author's Notes:

Notice: Thank you for installing the Nexus Story Mod. You now have access to thousands of mods that you can install with a single click of a button. Due to recent arrests that we feel are complete bull crap, we've recently rolled out an update to assist anyone who's facing a tyrannical, capitalist government. If you are under police seige, please feel free to go to Nexus Settings, go to the EMP tab, hit the big blue button, and RUN FOR THE HILLS! We hope you enjoy all your new mods!

- The Nexus Team