[I have been told by my hostess that it was not originally her idea to agree to the interview. She knew who I was and what I was doing, and wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. It was only thanks to her peers convincing her otherwise that I am even here to begin with. For some reason, she does not trust me to be truthful in my writings, despite my assurances to the contrary. She has also "requested" that I refrain from mentioning her name.]

You've heard about me, haven't you?

[I open my mouth to answer but she cuts me off mid-sentence.]

Of course you have. Everypony's heard of me in some form or another, along with every single Celestia forsaken Displaced that ever decided to come here. They all know who I am, and believe you me, there's nothing that they would like more than to see me rot in some jail cell.

Do you think that you could elaborate on that a little?

[The mare gives me a strange look]

Without context of course.

. . . Alright then. I think that I can give you some idea of what I did. Let me start from the beginning though first. You see, when the event that is now known today as "the Arrival" occurred, of course I'm referring to when the supposed first Displaced came to Equestria, everypony that had heard about it was of course curios about it, or her rather. They were all wondering what she was going to do next. It was like everypony in Equestria was watching her, waiting for her to do something noteworthy. I hear that even the ruling Princesses had taken a mild interest. Everywhere you went the papers, the tabloids, even those conspiracy articles that nopony takes seriously, they were all focused on her and what she would do next. Pony's everywhere were eating up everything that got released. Unfortunately, there was just one problem with that.

Which was. . . ?

She wasn't doing anything. Now, that's not to say that she was not idle, but it just seemed that for the most part, she was just not interested in making a scene. After a little while, everypony just sort of forgot about her, and went about their normal lives like it was nothing. Just another celebrity to keep an eye on, that's all. Of course that all changed when more began to show up.

You mean more Displaced?

Yep. I can't even imagine what was going through those ponies heads when they saw a giant metal golem stomping up the streets of Manehatten, asking where the nearest gas station was at, whatever the buck that is. It took the Royal Guard a whole day to put a stop to all of the panic, and another two with the help of one of the Princesses to get it out of there before he accidentally stepped on somepony. You should've seen some of the headlines back then. Can you believe that some ponies actually thought that the whole thing was some sort of weapons experiment commissioned by Celestia that somehow went rogue? Of course, back then nopony was familiar with the concept of an artificial intelligence. Before long rumors began to circulate that the Equestrian government was actively making golems, a practice that Celestia herself banned, for certain reasons.

How far did these rumors spread before the truth was found out?

Oh, it must have been about three weeks before Celestia was able to speak against the the crying out of ponies demanding to know the truth, and by then it had already spread beyond Equestrian borders and reached places like the Griffon kingdom and Minotauria. Of course you can imagine that they were not happy at all to hear that Equestria was supposedly creating weapons of war in secret. Celestia was able to get them to stand down from their accusations thankfully, but that still left the issue of what should be done about our other problem.

So what was eventually decided?

Nothing at first. A few ideas were pitched.

Such as?

Well, I don't want to go into too much detail about the specifics of some of them. If you really wanted to you could just look it up in any newspaper ad from the last couple of years. Might have to do a little digging though.

Why is that?

Let's just say that some of the ideas that were presented were. . . less than ethically moral. You see, back then everypony in the higher rungs of society, the nobles, the politicians, the elites, they were all afraid of the possible effects that these entities were going to have on Equestria. At least that's what they were saying. Anyway, most of them were at a loss as to what to do. They weren't Equestrian citizens, but they did not belong to any other nation either. Technically they were not subject to any of our laws. Unfortunately it was not long before a few of them realized that and decided that was reason enough to throw their weight around under the pretense of "diplomatic immunity".
I can't even begin to tell you how many millions of bits in damage they caused, all because they thought they could get away with it. I'm sure you've heard some of these incidents.

I have, yes.

In light of all of the recent events, we needed something or somepony to help keep the peace, or at least make sure that they were on a tight leash. Unfortunately the conclusion we came to was what led to even more trouble.

I assume that you are you referring to the Jack of Blades incident?

[The mare's gaze turns harsh as she thrusts a hoof at me.]

Don't ever say that bastards' name to me again. It's because of him that me and dozens of other ponies lives were ruined. A few even ended up in a jail cell from. I'm one of the lucky few to have at least a few bits to my name, and even now there are still ponies who think I should rot in Tartarus.

[The mare seems to calm down slightly.]

We knew about him you know, at least a little bit. When you have a reputation like he has, you tend to be noticed pretty quickly. But we had no idea what he really was, what he was capable of.

[Can you elaborate?]

. . . Fine. I guess at least somepony should know. It's not like it's going to change my situation all that much anyway. It was about a year into the whole Displaced event, and at the time there were around fifty or so documented Displaced spread out across Equestria. Those are just the ones we knew about though, the ones we were able to account for at any given moment. There are some estimations that suggest there may have been as many as several dozen Displaced that had yet to show themselves. For example, you know that one that has a gig in Manehatten? According to her she was around for at least two whole months, living in an alley before she was found by a script writer and given a job. Two months. That's how long it was before we finally found out about just her, and who knows how many others might have been out there. We needed somepony to go out for us and make sure that they weren't causing trouble, and if they were, to put a stop to them.

What do you mean by that?

You know exactly what I mean.

Could you still give some insight?

Alright fine. We needed an individual who was willing to get hooves dirty to keep the peace. You know, nip the problem in the bud, so to to speak. Some of the Displaced were just too powerful to be left alone, but then ponies aren't exactly the best option in dealing with certain matters, are they? We didn't want it to be traced back to us, so we started looking around for somepony or someone that could do it for us.

Were the Princesses aware of what you were doing?

They were aware of what we were supposed to do.

But did they know that you had, for all intents and purposes, resorted to recruiting an assassin to either kill off or imprison any Displaced that were not compliant without due process?

. . . We may have kept certain things aspects of our plan hidden from them so that we could work more freely. Anyway, that was when we discovered Jack, and had the brilliant idea to use him to round up other Displaced. Can you really blame us though? I mean, over half of the ones we knew about were capable of causing massive amounts damage if they felt inclined. Some of them did, and a lot of ponies got hurt in the process. I suppose we should've known right from the start that Jack was no different than them. Did you know he actually killed the pony we sent out to find him? We didn't even suspect it was him that did it at the time.

You mentioned using Jack. How exactly did you plan to employ him?

We didn't put as much thought into that as we should have. We just assumed he would accept bits, but that obviously was not the case as you can probably guess. We finally met him a little while later, but only because he showed up right at our front door, demanding to know why we were looking for him. When we told him what we needed him for he just laughed in our faces and left. We assumed he had just blown us off right then and there, and we started looking into other ways to deal with the Displaced. It was not another week before the reports began to roll in that the bodies of Displaced were being found across Equestria. We also got a message from Jack himself that he would, quote unquote, "play along". We didn't what he meant by that, but we didn't care as long he was doing what we wanted.

When did you start to notice something was wrong?

Less than two weeks later, when more Displaced began to show up dead than we thought would happen. These were ones we already knew about too, ones that had already shown themselves to either be incapable or unwilling to do harm, and we started wondering just what Jack was up to. We only wanted him to take out the ones that would've been harmful to general population. But by the time we figured out that he was manipulating us, it was too late to do anything about it, and we were left holding the bag when he was done. For every Displaced he killed, the evidence against us grew, until two weeks and twelve dead Displaced later he dumped it all on us and disappeared, and we were left holding the bag when Princess Celestia found out what was going on. And let me tell you, she was very unhappy with us, and for good reason. It turned out that in our efforts to keep the peace by eliminating certain Displaced, all we were doing was making the situation even worse.

How so?

When other Displaced heard about what we were doing, they were furious. I don't blame them for it either. They started to band together to protect themselves, and that made a lot of ponies nervous. I bet anypony would be if they knew that a group of individuals with powers that could render an area unlivable were gathering together. Eventually, tensions just grew so much to the point where just about anything would trigger a full blown, nationwide riot. . . . We screwed up big time with what we did. We initially set out to keep the peace. Lot of good that did us.

[A few days after my interview with the mare, whom I will continue not to name out of respect to her wishes, I learn that she had been killed in her sleep by an intruder that broke into her house. The culprit has been caught, but has gone unnamed by the Royal Guard. As of right now, this is the only existing record of her words, as everything else that was in her possession has been confiscated.]

Author's Notes:

Special thanks to rikusorasephiroth for suggesting his story, The Masked Face of Fear for this entry. Sorry this took a little longer than I thought, had to take care of a few other things first at home. You know how it is.
Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this installment.
As always, suggestions for new entries are encouraged.
Dilos1