The room was, by any standard, dark and dirty. The windows—yellowed and opaque from nicotine—had spiderwebs of cracks and holes in the glass. The walls and ceiling had a yellow film as well, and it was doubtful that the floor had ever been mopped. Dim pitied Blackbird for having to dirty her talons on the floor when she walked. The stench inside was indescribable, the smell of sour beer, spoiled food, rancid tobacco, and semen encrusted sheets baked hard by the radiator.

It was the smell of depravity, and Dim knew it well, having lived in Tortoise-Tuga.

The appalling lack of housekeeping was all the reason Dim needed to kill every creature present. There was a unicorn behind a desk in the corner with reading glasses in dire need of polishing. A minotaur half-dozed in a chair leaned back against the wall, and his hooves rested upon a filthy table. There was one door, no doubt leading to a back room or two, and Dim kept a spare eye upon it.

“Massah, I hassa bad feelin’ about this, I shore ‘nuff do,” Blackbird said to Dim.

When he turned to look at her, to scowl at her, to give her the most degrading look he could muster, he noticed that her hand cannon was missing. The massive, almost comically huge revolver of hers, it was nowhere to be seen. Damn, he thought to himself, she’s good. It occurred to him that he wasn’t the only professional in the room. Having to explain the hand cannon would be difficult, but not impossible, if he even explained it at all.

“Hey, Zinc, I think I done found us a fine bit of property,” the greasy diamond dog said to the unicorn sitting behind the desk.

The unicorn, Zinc, lifted his head and peered over the top of his glasses at Blackbird. Dim studied him, watching his eyes, his face, his ears, and Dim’s breathing became shallow when the unicorn’s horn ignited. The wait was long and painful—a few seconds stretching into an eternity—and he was relieved when a drawer on the desk opened with a metallic clink. It was the sound of coin, of precious metal, a sound that Dim was familiar with.

“Zinc, she’s skilled. Domestic. Untouched. Real obedient by the looks of it.”

“Yes…” the unicorn had a soft lisp due to a somewhat deformed lip. “This is just what I’ve been looking for. We can put her to work cleaning up this place, and keep me company as well.” While the unicorn spoke, he began counting and stacking coins on the desk.

“Massah, please, I help catch those colts for you—”

“Quiet, cunt.” The words that came out were said with so much cruelty that Zinc cringed.

When the unicorn behind the desk recovered, however, he asked, “She is good at enticing foals?”

“Well…” Dim drew out the word and then after a dramatic pause, he nodded. “She is quite maternal, you see. She has this knack to make the little ones trust her. I have certain… how shall we say… proclivities for colts. Young ones. She has been quite good at looking after my needs.”

“Oh my, she is a prize.” Zinc laid out a few more mismatched coins on the desk, and there was now a good sized pile. “So you can send her out to do work and trust her to return?”

Dim nodded. “I suppose I am an ideal master. I do not find her attractive, not in the slightest.” With every word he said, he hoped that his protections held. If this Zinc fellow was skilled, he would already know that he was being lied to, and that deception was ahoof. Right now, at this very moment, Zinc could be trying to draw everything out as long as possible to give his magic time to work, and Dim was all too aware of this fact.

There was no time to discern what sort of unicorn he might be dealing with, and Dim decided to make his opening move. Each second of delay increased the risk and there didn’t seem to be any surprises waiting. With ease, he powered up his horn and fired off a telekinetic bolt while hoping for the best. As it would turn out, Dim had no cause to worry. Zinc’s head popped like an eager cyst and his brains splattered on the wall behind him, forming a pattern that almost looked like a butterfly. A very bloody butterfly.

The minotaur awoke with a snort, but it was the diamond dog that reacted first. Before he could even turn around, Dim fired another telekinetic blast, which shattered the dog’s skull on impact. Reaching out with his mind, he grabbed the bull by the horns, and with a flick of telekinesis, he twisted the minotaur’s head around a full three-hundred and sixty degrees. There was a sickening crunch, and with a startled, half-awake, pained look upon his face, the minotaur fell out of his chair. He went down with a thud, hard enough to make the chair he had been sitting on bounce, and then he lay with his head jutting off at an unnatural angle.

Heaving a sigh of relief, Dim was thankful that this had gone off without a hitch. It was almost too easy, the unicorn behind the desk should have been more cautious, more aware, more paranoid. No protections whatsoever. No wards, not a one. The dead pony wasn’t much of a unicorn, perhaps, and Dim’s lip curled back into a sneer of contempt while he thought about this. In the great wide world, Dim had learned much, but one lesson stood out more than all of the others. There was only one good: survival, and only one evil: weakness. To be weak and to come to a place like this was a great evil done to one’s own self. This unicorn, this Zinc fellow, did he depend upon hired muscle for strength, while having very little of his own? That was never enough. Never, ever enough. Zinc had committed the unforgivable sin, and that put Dim’s mind at ease about what he had done.

The door did not open, which worried Dim. Was somebody behind it waiting in ambush? Hiding? Was some dim-witted dullard back there shitting himself in terror? While Dim kept an eye on it, Blackbird moved over to the desk, and began to pick up the coins stacked up on top of it. Zinc was slumped over in his chair and most of the upper portion of his skull was missing. No eyes were left in his head to watch as Blackbird took his coins. When the desk was cleared, she moved on to take the contents of his locked drawer.

“I see that you are okay with robbery,” Dim remarked while Blackbird dug coins out of the no longer locked drawer.

“This is not a robbery,” Blackbird retorted and then she snorted to punctuate her terse response. “I have enough money to pay you now. Half of this is yours.”

“That is quite generous.” Dim appreciated Blackbird’s munificence, and he found himself liking his new companion even more. He liked her so much that he felt fine about provoking her when he asked, “So, killing is wrong, but robbery is okay?”

“This isn’t robbery!” Blackbird clucked her tongue a few times, flapped her wings against her sides once, and her long, feather-tufted tail whipped from side to side. “This is repurposing. We’re taking this money to do good. We’re going to spend this money, give it to good, honest merchants, and be charitable in our givings. My mother’s life and seeing her home safely is worth more than this lot.”

“You used me to kill Grenadine.” Coming from Dim, this was not a question. “You knew he was coming for you so you came to find help.”

“Maybe.” This response from Blackbird was neither admittance nor denial. “You were the knight that came rushing to my rescue when I batted my eyelashes. There’s always one in a crowd, usually. Usually, they live long enough to allow me to get where I need to go, and then I have to find the next one. Something tells me those days are done and I’m stuck with you.”

“Oh… you’re good.” Behind his goggles, Dim’s eyes narrowed into slits, and he allowed himself to stare at Blackbird’s glorious hindquarters while her tail darted from side to side.

“Consider it a hiring test. If he would have had to fight you and kill you, I would have had time to escape, most likely. But instead—”

“I set him on fire.”

“Yeah.” Blackbird turned to look over her shoulder and changed the subject when she said to Dim, “We’re rich. There’s a lot of coins here of different type. Mostly gold and silver. Later, we’ll sort it out together. I don’t want you thinking that I’m cheating you now that we are equal partners.” She blinked once, then a second time, and then asked, “Are you staring at my ass? I’m pretty sure that you are.”

“Yes,” Dim replied, while shaking his head no.

“I don’t mind you looking, I suppose, but no touching. No means no.” With the drawer cleaned out, Blackbird turned her body around to face Dim. “So… do we search the place for valuable stuff or do we leave now before somepony shows up? We don’t know what is behind the door. What do we do, partner?”

With his mouth contorted into a violent scowl, Dim turned to stare at the door…

Their saddlebags were quite a bit heavier now and Dim now had the confidence that only came from acquiring quite a haul. He strutted a bit, without realising it, and enjoyed the feeling of having his saddlebags slap against his sides, at least for now. The buying office wasn’t much. A front room, a back room, and a dirty, cramped loft with a few beds. Dim had found a hidden cache in the floorboards upstairs, and that had been filled with a small fortune in Equestrian gold bits.

Equestrian bits ended up in a lot of strange places.

Blackbird had a plan to find Grimy, and it was a simple one. Grimy, being some kind of overboss or forepony, would no doubt have workers, and those workers would no doubt spend their pay somewhere. That somewhere would likely be some rough and rowdy bar, perhaps one that also served as a brothel. Already, Dim was feeling dirty again, and would need a bath once he left this vile infestation posing as a patch of civilisation.

“That looks like the sort of place we’re after,” Blackbird said to Dim while she pointed with her talons.

Cringing with disgust, Dim set his eyes upon an enormous hive of disgusting primitives. The building was five stories tall, had been carelessly clapped together out of wood planks, and appeared to have a slight lean to it. Frontier architecture was an unforgivable abomination in the eyes of Dim, and he was tempted to burn it down just to make himself feel better. Just one spark would do it, or even pulling out a single plank around what could only charitably be called a foundation if he didn’t wish to set the entire surrounding forest ablaze. Plinky piano music drifted out of the batwing doors in the front, and one of the front windows had been broken, leaving behind jagged shards that nothing had been done about.

“Something tells me that there is no way I could walk into this place alone and still come out as my daddy’s little girl,” Blackbird said in a low, almost murmuring voice.

“Are you trying to smooth talk me into being more protective?” Dim asked.

“No.” Blackbird shook her head. “When I walked into that place on Tortoise-Tuga, I was scared shitless. I was running out of luck and I knew it. I kept ending up in worse and worse places and I knew that sooner or later, it was going to come out of my own ass.” Tilting her head a bit to one side, she glanced at Dim out of the corner of her eye. “My mother ended up in some bad places in her travels. I don’t know how she did it. I’m not like her.”

“Let’s get this over with,” Dim said to his companion. “Stay close to me. I know that you can take care of yourself, but if you are close to me, I can fit my shield around you.”

Drawing in a deep breath, Blackbird prepared herself for the worst…

The inside of the saloon was an introvert’s nightmare. Every stool, every chair, there was meat in every seat. So many had to stand that there was a crush of bodies. Five steps into the establishment, and Dim knew that there was no way the sheets on the beds upstairs were being changed between clients. This place was full of lice, vermin, parasites… and that was just the clientele drinking the warm, sour beer.

Using his magic, he formed a telekinetic wedge and then plowed forwards towards the bar, ignoring the cries of protest from the creatures shoved out of his way. He offered no apologies, he just didn’t care, and with each step he had to fight the urge to set this place ablaze. Fire was the great cleanser, and cleaning up this filth would be doing the world a favour.

Upon reaching the bar, with Blackbird pressed up against his backside, Dim shouted at the barkeep to make himself be heard, “Hey, I am looking for a pony named Grimy!”

“Are you now?” a pony who was not the barkeep replied. A rough looking pegasus with one milky, ruined eye began to size Dim up. The pegasus had a rather thick Equestrian accent and the thick muscles that rippled beneath his scarred pelt indicated that he was a formidable brute. “I take it that you are here about the job… union busting… we can’t have that. Damnable ungrateful workers… they just can’t get enough. Greed is destroying the world, it is. I can only pound so many heads to make it stop. Once the damnable idea sets in, every worker thinks they are entitled.”

“Yes.” Dim gave a nod. “I am here about the job. The instructions on how to reach Grimy were unclear, however.”

“Sounds about right. He likes the resourceful types.” The pegasus snorted, then belched, releasing a foul smelling eggy miasma. “North of the town, near where the river forks, you’ll find Grimy Rich’s mansion. Mind the guards. Some of them have rifles.”

“Thank you,” Dim replied, and he offered a sincere, polite nod to the pegasus that had long since seen better days. Turning to face his companion, he said, “Come, let us be going so we can inquire about this job.”

Author's Notes:

“No matter the species, the deadliest gender is always the female. Men will fight until they die. Women will take it to the grave and then find a way back.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon