With a sigh, Flack rolled over and got out of bed. It wasn't that he didn't like his job, he loved his job, it was that he had been having such a surreal dream. Something about talking horses...
Even as he tried to remember it, however, it was slippign through his fingers like it was fine sand. He shook his head, instead getting ready to perform his morning routine.
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"Hey, Mac, what's the latest?" asked Stella Bonasera, as the detective walked into the main room, and fell into step next to his partner. The older man had a faint look of incredulity plastered onto is weathered face, and Stella knew that it must be something miraculous to actually extract an emotion of surprise from Mac Taylor.
"You won't believe this. Apparently, a talking, sentient horse was killed and we are going to investigate," said Mac, looking through the file he was carrying as he did so.
"Wait, Mac, are you sure it was a horse? And what did it look like?" queried Bonasera, just as Danny arrived turned a corner and came to a stop in front of them. He had a surprising grin on his face, and he looked like he was about to burst from sheer joy.
"What's got you so happy, Danny?" Jokingly asked Mac, gesturing to the smile plastered on his face.
"Well, if I didn't know any better, I'd say that this is a character outta My Little Pony, god how I love that show," sighed Danny, suddenly looking more than a little melancholy. At this, Flack stuck his head out of his office and then the rest of him appeared, just as Bonasera left for her own office, likely to gather her own gun.
"Wait a minute, Danny boy, I had no idea you enjoyed that show. And I thought I was the only one!" Flack grinned, his original scowl transforming at the end of his first sentence.
"Children's shows aside, we need to be out there and investigating in about twenty minutes, you all hear that?" Mac announced to the rest of his team, gathered around him, two of them with graced with smiles.
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"This is amazing. A sentient, talking pony? Or, more accurately, a pegasus, because insofar as Greek mythology is concerned, Pegasus was Hercules' winged mount, though I doubt that's what we've got here," narrated Stella as she examined the body, and drew on her knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean culture, "it appears to have a light green coat, and a tattoo of some sort on the posterior." Mac helped Hawkes roll the body over, which revealed a box somehow attached to its chest.
"Get back!" shouted Mac, putting his arms out to escort the other two down the street, stopping only when they reached a building and hid behind it, thirty yards away.
They all peered around the corner, just in time to see the box fall off the pony's chest. It opened to reveal what could only be described as a miniature, very old-fashioned camera. They stared in shock as a white beam of light emanated from the top of the camera, scanning the entire street, including the team, still hiding around the corner.
With a frown, Mac started around the corner. This wasn't how bombs operated. This thought, more or less, had just passed through everyone's heads like a high-speed bullet when the light stopped on them. With a sickening lurch, they fell forward as the light blinded them. In the space of time it takes for a neuron to fire, they were gone.
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Sid frowned, wondering why he didn't have a body. Mac had usually gotten him a corpse by now, but today something was off. Just as that thought was crossing his mind, he received the body, which he signed off on and began his work.
The dark green horse had wings, and also had some sort of tattoo on its rear flanks. Sid noted with amusement that it seemed to be a full-grown male.
However, he received a shock when he turned the body over to begin conducting an autopsy and found a black device attached to its chest. He assumed it wasn't a bomb or dangerous, else it would've been another hour or so before he got the cooling body, but it was worth examination.
With a sense of trepidation, Sid slid on a pair of gloves and goggles and removed the box. It came off, but there was arcing electricity, and, oddly enough, there wasn't a single trace of adhesive! He frowned at the corpse.
"What were you using, my camouflage friend, to attach a rectangular object to your dark-furred chest without using straps, tape or adhesive, my little pony?" Hammerback muttered, turning the device over in his pale fingers.
Abruptly turning his attention to other matters, or bodies as it was, he placed the little box into a tray, facing the body and drawing some blood, to send to the toxicology.
As he did so, he idly ran some calculations and frowned as he finished them; these wings shouldn't be capable of holding up something- or someone, as the body may be- let alone moving at speeds to be of any use in regards to mobility.
The wings should have been far larger, and hollow, which they weren't, at least by Sid's reckoning. These bones felt solid, like a normal human bone.
They wouldn't be able to lift a pony of this size and weight, at least not without something… magical. Moreover, the muscles seemed to be well-formed, indicating that they had been used. Common sense indicated that someone with those wing muscles eventually would stop using them, or at least, the wings would atrophy, changing their shape from what Hammerback was looking at, to something that… wasn't what he was looking at.
He sighed and continued working, making a note to include it in his report when he talked to Mac.
Sid shuddered, as he finally came to the conclusion that here was something magical about it.
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Adam Ross frowned as he examined the box. It wasn't what it should've been.
The box was about the size of a child's hand, and seemingly made out of iron. However, there was no indication that it had ever been attached to anything or anyone, nor was there any indication that there was anything inside the box. There were no tool marks, and in fact the only thing that kept him from dismissin it as a random chunk of iron was the strangeness of its weight.
Iron is inherently heavy, no quite as heavy as lead or gold, but nowhere near as feather-light as aluminum or titanium. And a piece of iron such as this would have a definite weight, weight that Adam most distinctly felt was missing.
Shrugging, he decided to play some music as he worked. The song was catchy, and he sang along as he ran the box through the x-ray scanner.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin' back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
But you can't take the sky from me.
It differed rather greatly from his usual fare of rock, but it was a nice melancholy tune, and one that had rather large hidden depths of meaning.
His attention was diverted when the results came back from the scanner, and he scanned them rapidly, his jaw rapidly coming onto roughly the same height as the floor.
The little box contained energy. Not a lot, but enough to do some weird stuff. Adam turned towards the door, in order to find Mac, when a bright pink light leapt from the device, enveloping the almost deserted lab and it's sole occupant, now running at a fast pace towards the door.
He never made it, falling into the inky blackness like it was an alcohol induced torpor, and had had seven too many drinks.
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