Ragdoll's sagging, doll-like eyes looked up at me.

"Are you sure you want Missus Legwarmers to come along?" I asked.

She nodded with all the autonomy of a doll.

"Alright, but if she gets muddy, I'm not the one who's going to clean her." I really would get the mud stains out of my apprentice's beloved doll, but I wanted to try to drill some good habits into her. I opened the front door of Coffins 'N Stuff with my magic. Ragdoll's hoofsteps echoed behind me, along with the door shutting behind us. Boner floated up beside me, his hooves trailing limply underneath him.

"Do you know how Firefly died?" He asked. I rock my head from side to side in beat with my hoofsteps.

"Nope."

He scoffed. I started to hum a song to drown out the creaking and groaning noises of our hooves on the pier. My body fell into the rhythm, my steps synchronizing to the beat of the beautiful melody erupting from my vocal chords. I swung my head from side to side.

"For Celestia's sake," Boner said. "BB, this isn't even a song!"

I may have been humming the same five notes in a slightly different sequence. Music, though, is pretty relative. I was making a song. Ragdoll thought I was making a song – I made sure! Her steps had fallen into sync with my own, which meant that my song had a beat, that it had notes, and it had pizzazz. That made it a song.

"You penises don't know nothing," I said. Boner sighed and started grumbling, falling out of my peripheral as we neared the Mother Tree. The tree homes grew progressively nicer the closer we got to the center of town, and soon we were all standing outside of the mayor's office. The blinds were drawn and no other ponies were around. Mine and Ragdoll's shadows danced on the pier from the irregular lights of the lanterns. The musty, sticky smell of the swamp stuck to the insides of my nostrils.

We stood outside the door for what felt like a small eternity; the only noises were the echoing chirrups of birds high up in the canopy which were distorted by distance. The faint noise of drills and hammers could also be picked up in the silence of Not-Sunny, Not-a-Valley.

Come on, Spelling Bee, I thought. I glanced over at Ragdoll. Her doll was slung across her back, her great, brown eyes seeming to frown up at me. Not a glimmer of emotion showed on her face; she was completely blank.

My skin started to twitch. I tapped my front hoof against the dock for a minute. Spelling Bee said to wait for her, but she was taking way too long. I trotted up to the door and opened it with my magic.

The inside of the town hall was bright. Everything was built from a blonde wood that almost seemed luminescent on its own. Spelling Bee sat behind a desk, stamping scrolls with her magic. Her golden eyes rolled up, then widened when they settled on me. Her eyebrows furrowed and she sat down her stamp.

"You're over an hour late!" She said. She stood up from her desk and trotted over to me. She stopped a few inches in front of me and took in a breath; the action seemed to make her puff up slightly like a bird. "When I give you a deadline, I mean it, BB. We have other options for an undertaker. We don't need to have an outsider like you to take care of the town's business."

"Spelling Bee," I said, taking a step back and leveling my head with hers. I looked into her eyes over my glasses and grinned. "I'm the best undertaker in all of Equestria. You couldn't do better than me even if you tried."

"You? The best undertaker in Equestria?" She laughed, but it sounded nervous, like she didn't believe she was asking such a question about me. "Pond Frog could easily do your job just as well as you can."

"That penis!? Absolutely not. He can only catch half-dead fish." I rolled my eyes and straightened up. "Stop joking around, Spelling Bee. Now show BB and Ragdoll here to this dead body of yours."

I stepped out of her way. She hesitated for a moment, glaring up at me, grinding her teeth, then she shrugged past me and started walking away without looking back. I trotted behind her, then called for Ragdoll to follow me. She caught up and walked beside me, taking two steps for every one of mine.

Spelling Bee led us down Blue Pier which was largely commercial. We walked past the local dress shop, the bar and the grocer, then we took another turn down Green Pier. The green part of town was the smallest part, and I only rarely visited. There was a small factory that cranked out bullets for the war effort that had overran all the other businesses and left Green Pier largely abandoned. The pier seemed to sag under our weight, and the canopy almost seemed to be thicker over the industrial part of town. Shuffling hoofsteps could be heard coming from the insides of the various trees that the bullet factory used and there were the soft pings of metal hitting metal that sounded all around us. A heavy wind picked up and my mane pulled against the stitches holding it in place. It itched. Spelling Bee kept moving forward, unfazed by the wind.

We passed the factory and our hooves met the soft ground of the far shore. A narrow trail wound into the dense foliage and Spelling Bee began following it.

"Where are we even going?" I asked.

"Have you not heard about the stable that is being built?" Spelling Bee asked. She slowed down the darkness grew thicker. I closed my eyes and imagined a big, green light, then imagined pushing the light orb out through my horn. I peeked open one eye. My spell – a small, luminescent green orb – hung in the air above us, lighting up the forest around us. Spelling Bee stopped and turned around, looking at me as if she were taken aback by my fantastic magical abilities.

"What the heck is a stable?" I asked. Spelling Bee cocked her head to the side, then turned away from me again to continue leading the way.

"Did no one from Stable-Tec come by your shop asking if you wanted to sign up for residency?"

"Uh, no, Spelling Bee."

"That's strange." She trailed off. A twig snapped from deep in the forest and she quickened her pace. I sped up but made sure that Ragdoll was still able to keep stride with me. With every step, the drilling and hammering sounds that could be faintly heard from the town became more and more pronounced.

"Well," she continued, "it's just in case something would happen. The zebras might have some kind of weapon that could destroy the entirety of Equestria. The stables are being built just in case something terrible might happen."

"If the zebras wanted to kill us all, they probably would have already tried."

"If they get their hooves on megaspells, they'll probably find a way to weaponize them."

The trees thinned ahead of us. The hammering was much more clear – metal on metal.

"I was in Stalliongrad when the megaspell was cast. It was just to heal everypony on the battlefield. It was a good thing, even though it ruined business."

"Yes, well, the stripes have a habit of ruining everything they touch."

We emerged from the forest onto a shore where the majority of the trees had been cut down. Beams of metal were the bones of a vaguely rectangular shape that sat in a wooden frame on the shore. Some ponies were working on attaching metal plates to the bottom of the massive structure. Scaffolding wrapped around the entirety of the thing. Pegasi were adding onto the metal and wooden structures at the top of the stable's skeleton.

Spelling Bee led us up to the foot of the structure, then started walking up the haphazard wooden stairs that wrapped around the structure. I let Ragdoll in front of me, then followed behind. The stairs seemed to sag under each of my hooves. There was no railing on either side, just an ever-increasing drop to the muddy ground below.

"How have more ponies not died here?" I mumbled.

We stopped about halfway up the structure. Spelling Bee walked over to a large, dark red stallion and introduced Ragdoll and I, explaining who we were and what we were there to do. Then, she excused herself and left.

"I'm Brick," he said. "So you're here for Firefly?"

"Yeah, Spelling Bee already said that," I said. Penises. He huffed.

"Well, follow me."

He lumbered past us and back down the stairs, flicking his gray-ish tail in my face as he passed. Brick was a fitting name for him – he was much larger than me, tough-looking and he also looked as dumb as his namesake. Regardless of how stupid he was in most matters, I was going to assume that he knew what the hay a stable was since he was getting paid to build one. Spelling Bee's explanation hadn't been good enough for me.

"So what exactly is a stable?" I asked him. He grunted, then looked back at me.

"It's a place to live if the stripes manage to ruin the world," he said. "This one will go under the water here."

"Why not underground?"

"The swamp water is just like ground."

That was the single stupidest thing I had ever heard. If the ponies above Brick seriously thought swamp water was as good as dirt, I knew that I wouldn't be trusting them with my life if the apocalypse would come raining from the sky. We stepped off the stairs and Brick led us into the labyrinth of wood and metal. Pieces of corridors had been finished, along with some rooms and cabinets. He pushed open one door with his head and motioned with his hoof for us to enter.

The body was positioned underneath a massive slab of steel that had fallen from the ceiling. Firefly had once been a dark red pegasus like Brick, but now he was flatter than a pancake. His skin burst from his center and peeled off of his legs. His skull was left uncrushed, but pieces of ribs and organs poked through his hide. His mouth was open in a scream; his teeth were bloody and a puddle of thick, old blood was gathered around his head.

Ragdoll walked from beside me and stood over Firefly's head, then put her hoof in his black mane. She didn't seem bothered from the amount of gore around her, which only solidified the fact that she was the perfect apprentice.

"Could nopony lift the metal slab?" I asked as I walked over to Ragdoll. I was careful to avoid the blood as I examined the scene closer. Blood had oozed out of his nose and eye sockets and now it had dried on his hair, which was slightly lighter than dried blood.

"Not since we finished the floor above it," Brick said. "There isn't enough room for the pegasi to lift it and we don't have enough unicorns."

I look up through the hole that the slab had left. Above, there was another corridor. If the floor and ceiling of the damn stable was falling in, I certainly wouldn't be signing in to live in one. Stable-Tec was clearly selling very ramshackle places to live.

"It's a good thing you've got me!" I said with a grin.

"Nopony can move this alone," he said.

"Brick, Brick, Brick," I said, chuckling. "You have one of the best magic users in Equestria here on your side. Besides, I'm not going to [i]move[/i] it."

He huffed. Maybe he didn't believe me (which was unlikely), but I was about to show him what Brokenbones' magical finesse was like. I enveloped the slab in my magic, lighting up the entire room with a bright green glow. I imagined that I could feel my magic encasing the slab, then I pretended to apply pressure to the metal. In my mind's eye, I could see the metal warping and twisting until it was small, and, with enough focus, the slab began to obey my imagination. It groaned and cracked as it was bent and twisted into a smaller and smaller shape until it was shrunk and crumpled into a ball of metal about the size of my hoof. I tossed it aside, and it hit the ground with a thud.

Firefly's entire body was now exposed. His hind legs and back half had been completely crushed. Little pieces of bone were stuck in the coagulated blood that settled around his flattened body. His organs were like a paste that stuck to his ripped fur and floated in the pool of thick blood. His tail was covered in blood and whatever had been in his bowels at the time he was smashed.

"Looks like we have our work cut out for us, Ragdoll," I said.

"Sewing?" She asked.

"Yes, lots of sewing. Are you good at that?"

"Yes."

I enveloped the corpse in my magic and used a teleportation spell to send it to the morgue. It disappeared with a fizzle and a pop, leaving the pool of blood, bone fragments and organ paste behind. I turned around. Brick had his wings limp at his sides and his mouth slightly open. My shrinking spell must have truly moved him.

"You guys get the rest," I said to him. "Come on, Ragdoll, we need to start putting Pony Pancake back together for his big day. You're going to learn so much!"