Disclaimer: I am not Lauren Faust nor Hasbro. I do not own My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, nor Equestria Girls.
Opening Note:
See the opening note of the 'preludes.'
This chapter concerns what the minotaur 'Iron Will' has been getting up to, back in Equestria, whilst ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle is in hospital in the human world. Quite a lot of what Iron Will has been up to has in fact been investigating the disappearance of said ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle and the circumstances around it.
Much of the chapter takes place in the Golden Oak Library in Ponyville in Equestria, which for those not familiar with the early seasons of Friendship is Magic was a very broad trunked (presumably magical species of) tree, much of the interior of which had been hollowed out to make an at least partially open-plan library area with various sections adapted as accommodation. As of the initial time of posting of this chapter, my attempts to find an official floor-plan of Golden Oak Library have failed, and I have had to make guesses (and to stay vague on some counts) as to the internal layout.
As to how this chapter's events slot into place, relative to what is going on in the human world, please refer to the calendar posted towards the end of the 'Author Notes' in the previous chapter.
Warning: As noted in the preludes, this story is rated 'M'.
Chapter 6:
Even before Iron Will squeezed his minotaur frame in through the front doorway it was obvious that there had been a fire here or something which made smoke – the minotaur's nose told him that much.
Inside the onetime Golden Oak Library, the chaos which now pervaded Ponyville took the form of empty bookshelves and a huge mess of ash and the remains of pages and torn book-covers spread across the floor of the main library space. There seemed to have been a whirlwind of fire, from the patterns of the debris on the floor.
There were also the hoofprints of small ponies in the ash, but Iron Will would worry about and deal with that later. The important thing was that they hadn't disturbed the central area much, and Iron Will needed to study it, and interpret what clues he could from it.
It was several days since the Lord of Chaos, Discord, had headed across Equestria to descend upon Canterlot, and Iron Will had first become aware that something had gone wrong beyond the usual parasprite infestations or dragon fallen asleep somewhere inconvenient. Iron Will had been in Canterlot at the time, resting up in between seminar tours, and having enjoyed the festivities taking place in Equestria's capital around the edge of the Grand Galloping Gala (not that Iron Will had been invited to the Gala itself.) The sun and moon had started to play up, there had been a shower of chocolate rain from candy floss clouds, and there had been something happening which involved a lot of coming-and-going taking place at the castle in Canterlot – it was obvious that something was taking place. And then Discord had arrived and taken the three alicorn princesses – Celestia, the recently restored Luna, and Cadence – all captive and stowed them somewhere underneath Canterlot. And Discord had then made it clear to the citizens and residents of Canterlot that Equestria was now his, by very loud city-wide announcement by singing pineapples, and general panic had set in.
Except Iron Will was a minotaur, not a pony, and was prone to level-headed thinking, even in a crisis. General panic was something which happened around Iron Will, but which Iron Will declined to participate personally in.
First Iron Will had dug some asocial 'bookworm' unicorn pony called Moon Dancer out of her residence and cajoled her into heading out to hit what libraries and archives were available to find out what she could about Discord for him. Then, Iron Will had determined what had happened to the unicorn pony called Fancy Pants, who had often been something close to a major domo for Princess Celestia. It took a day – or at least what probably would have approximated to a day, had the sun and moon been moving on their regular schedule – to do so, but Iron Will in the end had the information that Fancy Pants and his belle, Fleur de Lis, had departed for parts remote and unknown in great haste shortly before Discord had arrived. They had taken a good deal of luggage with them, as if they were expecting a long trip, which Iron Will had found both instructive and suggestive. After that, Iron Will had gotten a report out of Moon Dancer on everything that she'd been able to find out so far about Discord, not much of which had been good news, but all of which (even the supposition and likely myth) had been useful to know.
By that point Iron Will had also discovered that there had been some attempt to fight Discord (this time around) in Ponyville before Discord had arrived in the capital, so Iron Will had left his goat assistants to keep an eye on Moon Dancer (who looked a useful acquisition worth hanging onto and investing in the protection of, and who could carry on researching in his absence) and set off for Ponyville himself to investigate what had gone on there.
The journey to Ponyville had taken much longer than it should have done to complete, due to the increasing chaos effects as one neared Ponyville, and in the end Iron Will had had to get creative and follow the railroad tracks (walking backwards along them) to cover the last few miles.
Ponyville attained – and following on from attempts successful or otherwise to communicate with the locals, some of whom had gone insane with what Discord was doing to their home town – Iron Will's investigations had brought Iron Will to the Golden Oak Library.
According to the various witnesses that he'd been able to get anything at least halfway coherent out of, six ponies each with some sort of magical gem ('The Elements of Harmony') had tried to fight Discord in Ponyville. Moon Dancer's initial findings back in Canterlot had included that a set of mystical rocks had been used to petrify Discord a thousand years ago, so it was possible that these six ponies had been attempting to repeat the feat – maybe even with the same rocks. So far, so good, but five of the ponies making the modern attempt had been grey in colour before the battle, so that sounded to Iron Will as if there may have been something wrong with those ponies, and the last had gone grey after being defeated along with the five already-grey ponies in the battle. It was this last pony ('Twilight Sparkle' seemed to be her name, and she had reportedly been a special student of Princess Celestia herself) who interested Iron Will. The other five ponies were now known to be working for Discord, but this last one had run off back to where she had lived in the Golden Oak Library – and Discord, after having departed Ponyville to attend to matters such as the capture of the alicorn princesses, had subsequently returned to Ponyville and made enquiries about the last pony's whereabouts.
She had by then apparently completely disappeared.
And now Iron Will was in the library, looking for clues – and it looked to Iron Will that Discord had done so too before him.
In the middle of the central space of the main floor area of the library was a seemingly discarded sagging effigy of a purple unicorn-pony – with a crude cutie mark and fake tail and mane which matched those of the description Iron Will had had of pre-grey state Twilight Sparkle, the pony who had run off.
Discord had carried out some sort of magical spell or ritual here, to try and find Twilight Sparkle, all of Iron Will's instincts were telling him, and since by all accounts Discord was still looking for Twilight Sparkle, it must have been at least partially unsuccessful.
Iron Will paced carefully to the middle of the room, placing his feet with as much diligence as he could, to where he could imagine Discord floating in mid-air (there were no traces in the debris on the floor of his passage) conducting a whirlwind which sucked books off the shelves to catch fire, as he searched for information… and…
Nothing. Failure. Or at least apparent lack of success. Iron Will could imagine Discord staring ahead in frustration, as whatever he wanted to happen didn't, or maybe laughing and shrugging off the failure since it made life more interesting.
Iron Will knew little of magecraft or magic, but he did know that divinations and predictions were tortuous things, sly and deceitful like a maze or labyrinth if you were groping for something blindly without sufficient foreknowledge of your own already.
And Iron Will was a minotaur. An affinity with the paths and ways of mazes and labyrinths was in his very blood.
He half-closed his eyes for a moment, trying to see what was all around him, as a maze, and where – if it was not directly in front – the truth should be, disrupted though the patterns had been.
And then he turned around, almost completely and looked across and down, to where his instincts were telling him to look, and he fully opened his eyes.
There, amidst the chaos, were several papers, pinned by a paper knife to a bookshelf just above floor level as if entirely at random.
Iron Will made his way across to examine them, and crouched down.
He could see three papers pinned by the knife.
The first paper, on the left, was a page showing a unicorn pony stallion – an evil unicorn pony stallion, at least in the view of the artist, by the look of how he had been drawn. The edges of the paper were slightly charred, and the page had ended up pinned to the bookcase upside down, but the caption could be read by Iron Will as 'KING SOMBRA'.
The second paper, in the middle, was the right way up, and was some kind of modern builder's advert from a catalogue or magazine. It had a full-page illustration of a very solid door, closed, with a bar and several bolts in place and with said illustration no doubt being intended to depict just how very safe and secure your castle or home would be with such a door as a feature of an entryway.
The third paper, on the right, was also the right way up and seemed to be from an account of the staging of some drama or other, and had an illustration of various theatrical props used by the company in putting on the drama. Fire had burnt out holes from the images of each of the props save one – 'The Staff of the Archwizard'.
'King Sombra' inverted, a 'securely shut door', and an 'archwizard's staff' in response to an attempt to find Twilight Sparkle by magic.
Iron Will had no idea how a wizard would read this riddle, but to him it looked like the message was at least partially that the attempt was blocked by magic – powerful magic.
He pulled the paper knife out, so as to be able to inspect the papers more carefully, and another sheet fell to the floor from where it had been hidden behind the other papers. He picked it up and studied it. It was a photograph from some kind of pony educational establishment document, complete with names of those ponies featured, and showed a class with Twilight Sparkle in the middle of the picture standing next to Princess Celestia and, interestingly, with Moon Dancer in the grouping too. Perhaps Moon Dancer had been a contemporary of Twilight Sparkle, which might be useful when Iron Will wanted to know more about Twilight Sparkle. The knife had pierced right through the Twilight Sparkle in the photograph, and the small dragon that she had sitting on her back.
The possibility of this being a coincidence were vanishingly small. One way or another what Discord had been doing here was responsible for these papers being pinned here like this. (That covered the outside possibility that this 'find' could be a game or bizarre trap of Discord's.)
Iron Will straightened up, and opened the leather satchel on a strap which he wore today and dropped the papers and knife into it for later examination.
Time to check out the rest of the library.
Upstairs on one of the broad platforms overlooking the main area, hiding under a bed in what had apparently been some kind of sleeping zone and trying not to breathe too loudly, Iron Will found three fillies – one an earth pony, one a pegasus pony, and one a unicorn pony.
He flexed his muscles, lifted the bed up and placed it aside, exposing them, and they just lay there, front hooves over their heads and looking terrified.
"Please… please don't hurt us, Mr. Minotaur." the pegasus pony quavered.
"Do you live in this building?" Iron Will asked.
A mixture of scared 'yes' and 'no' answers and a brief argument answered him then:
"We didn't used to." the pegasus pony said.
"But my big sister turned greedy and mean and I don't know where the rest of my family went." the unicorn pony added.
"And my big sister turned into a huge liar and mean and my big brother and granny went loco." the earth pony added.
"And they" the pegasus pony added, clearly meaning to indicate his companions, "moved in here to wait for Twilight to come back and fix things, and because I'm their friend, I moved in here with them."
"Cutie Mark Crusaders!" they chorused together in a mixture of defiance and patheticness, taking their hooves off their heads to bump them together.
"You're the 'Cutie Mark Crusaders'?" Iron Will tried not to laugh and to sound impressed instead.
"Forever!" the unicorn pony said. "We even got matching cutie marks after we moved in here together!"
Iron Will peered at their flanks, since he was apparently expected to do this. Although there were variations in the internal details, each of them did indeed have a matching shield cutie mark.
"Has anyone else been in here since you moved in, before I got here just now?" Iron Will asked.
"The chief meanie." the unicorn pony said. "We daren't say his name now in case it causes him to appear. We were talking about him just before he arrived. We heard him moving around down below, and he didn't come up personally, but he sent something which looked like an eye which floated in the air instead, and when it saw us here hiding under the bed, we heard him laugh downstairs. And then it floated off, and he did things, and then we heard what sounded like him go out, and we checked from the window, and there he was, flying away."
"And we had to open several windows because it was all smoky and when we looked downstairs it was all a mess and practically every book had been pulled off the shelves and burned." the earth pony added.
"And we're waiting for Twilight to come back and make everything alright." the pegasus pony added. "Only we're starting to run out of things to eat apart from the chocolate milkshake rain outside."
"You would not believe how boring chocolate milkshake gets when there's as much of it as you want, but that's all that there is." the unicorn pony added.
"Do you have maybe any apples that we can eat, Mr. Minotaur?" the earth pony asked, hopefully.
Apparently they had concluded that he was non-hostile – or were sufficiently desperate – to risk confiding in him so.
"No." Iron Will told them. Time to be assertive. "The pony you're waiting for isn't going to be back any time soon, so after I've finished checking things out here, you can come with me for a few hours and have a meal with the folk that I'm staying with here in Ponyville."
The three fillies insisted on following Iron Will as he inspected the rest of the library.
Although out of some sense of etiquette or manners they seemed reluctant to enter 'personal space' areas of the library other than the one they had been hiding in (which they seemed to believe had been a bedroom area for visitors, so they were okay going in there.)
Iron Will left one particular 'personal space' area, which his minotaur senses were screaming out to him was significant, until he'd inspected everywhere else. And then he climbed the stairs to it and surveyed the scene.
It was a bedroom area. Drawers and cupboards were standing open, and the bed was rumpled not in a 'having been slept in' way, but in a 'objects placed on it' way. Something which had maybe been rectangular shaped had left the most prominent indentation on the bed – a box or case of some kind, perhaps?
And there were the charred and burnt remains of dozens of scrolls strewn across the floor, laid out in the shape of an eight-pointed star. If that wasn't the aftereffect of some kind of magic, then Iron Will was going senile.
After taking a few moments longer to study the scene, Iron Will went in and placing his hooves as carefully as possible headed for the centre of the eight-pointed star.
His minotaur sense for mazes and labyrinths were almost in overload at the aftereffects of what had happened here.
Iron Will was standing at a crossroads of disaster, where all obvious roads forward led to conflict and ruin of one sort or another, sooner or later. And the one who had stood here, before him, in the midst of this maze of choices had simply fled in blind haste down one, leaving this mark behind.
Iron Will tried to peer, psychically speaking, along the way that she – he was sure that it had been a female pony – had gone, but it was a roadway that disappeared soon into shadow. All he could see was that as with any other path of choice that had been available, it led to conflicts.
There had been no good and obvious ways forth from this crossroads.
Princess Celestia had spent centuries building an elaborate castle of cards in Equestrian society, in ways which – as long as the universe continued to work that she expected it to do – were perfectly stable and probably even a reasonable way to proceed; but the moment that Discord had changed the rules, the whole castle had started to come down and collapse, and Iron Will was standing in the place where one of the first major structural cards had gone down hard. How much of the castle of cards collapsed and what could come after it would have been to some extent determined by the direction that the card here went in, but Discord had pushed things far enough that collapse was unavoidable.
This was what Iron Will saw and understood standing at this crossroads of decision and choice.
He turned around, slowly, looking down all the ways which he could see, understanding perhaps more and maybe seeing less than the pony who had been here before him had done.
Iron Will could walk away of course, and not go down any obvious route away from this place.
Iron Will chose, and deliberately kicked through the scrolls, wrecking and shifting and disrupting their pattern, then bending down to pick out a few particularly intact ones. They seemed to be private correspondence from 'Twilight Sparkle' to 'Princess Celestia'. Ordinarily, Iron Will would have considered it unethical and unacceptable to go nosing through someone else's personal letters, but these were extraordinary times and he had made his own choices now.
The writer was naïve – almost to a pathetic extent, in Iron Will's own view – but tried to be upbeat and bubblingly optimistic, and each letter was about something she claimed to have learned about friendship. Iron Will read each of the letters he had retrieved through several times, then tucked them away in his satchel. Then he sifted through the scrolls for anything else that was mostly intact, rescuing, reading it over, and then tucking it away.
Some of the writing was actually interesting and worth thinking about later with regards to his own personal philosophies but the sum total of everything that he could read… well: Princess Celestia had sent this pony out against The Lord of Chaos? Why? Had it been a distraction for some other plan which had failed? Or had Princess Celestia bet one last time on the universe functioning in her favour as it almost always had done, and this time Nemesis had caught up with and overtaken her?
Iron Will shook his head in disbelief.
And what had all these letters been doing here anyway, spread across the floor? Iron Will doubted that they had been part of Discord's own divinations and spells which had taken place downstairs. Were they letter drafts which had been sucked from their places by the magic which had sped a female pony on her way? Or had they been letters actually sent but recently returned for some reason?
Some of the answers possibly lay now in the dungeons underneath Canterlot, if Iron Will felt like breaking into them and interviewing the alicorn princesses whom Discord was holding captive now there. Discord might even be amused by a minotaur breaking into his dungeons, and let the matter stand, if Iron Will approached the matter in the right fashion. A dungeon-trip would require time and thought to plan however.
"Mr. Minotaur?" one of the Cutie Mark Crusaders was saying.
"What?" he turned back to the edge of this ledge, where they were watching him from.
"Can we go now? We're getting hungry?"
They'd actually been mentioned in one of the letters Iron Will had read, and he felt less inclined to be brusque with them than he might have been a quarter of an hour earlier.
"I'm nearly finished here." he gruffly told them. "One last check of these cupboards, and then we can go."
"Do you know when she'll be coming back? Twilight?"
Iron Will thought of the accounts of the grey unicorn pony fleeing through the streets that he'd had from a couple of witnesses, sobbing uncontrollably, and of what he'd glimpsed in these letters.
"I think it's going to be some time that she's away, wherever she is." Iron Will said carefully. "I think that she's probably going to need a long rest."
Author Notes:
I figure that the Grand Galloping Gala in (Equestrian) Canterlot is a big enough annual event that there'd be stuff going on on the periphery for those in town but not fortunate enough to be ponies with invites to the actual ball.
After it became clear to Princess Celestia in this story that ERAFOSS Twilight and company had failed to stop Discord in Ponyville – and that the situation there was impossible to salvage – Princess Celestia was stuck with trying to formulate responses on the fly more desperate than 'send back the friendship reports to Twilight to try to inspire her', and Princess Celestia's issue of Fancy Pants with marching orders was part of a scheme she was trying to implement just before Discord arrived back in Canterlot. (The Friendship is Magic episode 'Between Dark and Dawn' leaves me with an impression that Fancy Pants is a pony that at times Princess Celestia relies on to handle some stuff for her.) Fancy Pants and what he knows about the errand which he was assigned may turn up in a somewhat later chapter.
The episode 'Best Night Ever' seems to me to indicate that Canterlot in Equestria is normally under a day's travel by pony-drawn carriage from Ponyville. Since for narrative reasons I wanted Iron Will in Ponyville after Discord had been back to look for ERAFOSS Twilight, I have handwaved in some intense and confusing chaos-effects (awkward even for a minotaur encountering them for the first time to navigate) as having slowed Iron Will down in his journey to Ponyville.
Yes, I've given Iron Will a sort of psychic ability on a loosely mazes and labyrinth theme. I note that in the canon setting (pony) Pinkie Pie has her 'Pinkie Sense' and (pony) Cheese Sandwich has his 'Cheese Sense', so what I'm doing with Iron Will doesn't seem entirely out of place to me. Said sense is by no means infallible.
On a narrative level, it bothered me slightly that Discord's divination ritual (which Iron Will encountered the aftermath of in this chapter) produced an almost card-reading like result, whilst Nurse Snowheart in the human world had been messing with a literal deck of divination cards. I needed something narratively, however, which produced clues Iron Will could look at and make guesses based on, and although I've tried to figure out if Discord's ritual could be connected to Nurse Snowheart's reading, I can't see that one would link into the other (other than in terms of (human) Nurse Snowheart's cards symbolically showing her Discord having set the fire in the library.) So this one's down (in-universe) to coincidence.
There is a reference to a costume of 'black leather and metal studs' in the Friendship is Magic episode 'Fake It 'Til You Make It', thus the ponies not only have a material called 'leather' but it's not a material they have a problem with having common uses.
Shortly after ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle fled Ponyville in this story the Cutie Mark Crusaders (that's Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom at this point, since this is taking place before Babs Seed joined them in the show) arrived at the Golden Oak Library, hoping that ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle could fix everything (including in the cases of Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom, some of their immediate relatives having gone crazy.) They decided, upon discovering her absence, to sit tight and wait for her to show up and fix everything. When Discord turned up at the library he noticed them, but they amused him sufficiently that he simply left them where they were. The Cutie Mark Crusaders remained in the library after Discord's divination attempt, still certain (at least at first) that the star student of Princess Celestia who had helped defeat Nightmare Moon was going to show up and beat this meanie, regardless of what had happened. By the point that Iron Will turned up at the library, it was starting to slowly dawn on them that maybe she wasn't going to turn up after all, hence their attaching themselves to Iron Will, once it seemed he was non-threatening in behaviour. And yes they have acquired their cutie marks earlier than in canon, and for reasons different from canon.
Canterlot High School, in the human world, has an eight-pointed star emblem above the main front entrance. This is why (although it's not a clue Iron Will is in any position to follow up on) the discarded and forgotten remains of the friendship report scrolls left behind in the library in the wake of ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle's departure are piled up in an eight-pointed star shape. (It didn't mean anything to Discord either, when he was checking out the library.)
In the line '…where all obvious roads forward led to conflict and ruin of one sort or another, sooner or later…' conflict and ruin are used in the sense of being general, rather than specific.
At the initial time of the writing of these notes, I am 95% certain that for what it matters Iron Will has been staying with the Rich family, whilst he has been in Ponyville investigating ERAFOSS Twilight's disappearance and the circumstances around it. Iron Will may have run into (pony) Filthy Rich before on the basis of some connection related to Iron Will's motivational seminar tours.
For the record, ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle's owl, Owlowiscious, is assumed to have been captured and caged by Discord (and possibly kept in close company in some aviary or other to Princess Celestia's phoenix, Philomena.) I considered having Owlowiscious turn up during Iron Will's exploration of the library, but have gone instead with just the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
Discord is assumed to be absent from Ponyville, searching Equestria for ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle and engaging in other mischief whilst Iron Will is in Ponyville during this chapter.
The next chapter should be taking place back in the human world.
Omake:
The former Grandmaster of the Society of the Golden Oak was not having a good week.
For years, ever since some lunatic had turned up claiming that the supernatural was real and wanting the Grandmaster to sign up to some kind of regulation framework – in response to which the Grandmaster had rapidly disbanded the Society, to get rid of said lunatic – everything had been relatively quiet for the former Grandmaster on the occult front. But now things were happening; things which it was getting increasingly difficult to dismiss as 'just weird coincidence'. And that frightful creep, who called himself 'Regulus' had been around, wanting to browse some of the former Grandmaster's library for some information or other. 'Regulus' had only been part of the Society in the first place on account of his kind of dark charisma and ability to organise a good impromptu very wild party and the former Grandmaster had been of more than half a mind to refuse his recent request, until he'd offered a very large wodge of cash in exchange for being able to spend an hour or two alone with The Tome of Star Swirl the Thrice-Damned, The Beasts of Darkest Equestria, and The Ramblings of Clover the Exiled (and Regulus had brought his own much-annotated copy of The Book of Yellow Pages along with him to reference too.) The former Grandmaster wasn't so well-off as to be able to turn down that much cash and so had permitted library access, although goodness knew where Regulus might get that sort of money, and the former Grandmaster had had to insist on receipts for tax purposes which had amused Regulus no end.
And the lunatic who had wanted the Society registered all those years ago had shown up again, wanting to know if the former Grandmaster had had recent contact with any 'entities from Equestria or other extra-dimensional planes or realities?'
And then there'd been the matter of the very strangely dressed young woman – probably some kind of costumed role-player – who'd introduced herself as Peachy, and had affected to have apparently mistaken (at least at first) the former Grandmaster for some ancestor or other and who had had a whole pile of questions very few of which had made sense to the former Grandmaster. The final couple of questions had concerned what year this was (which Peachy, upon hearing the reply, had apologised for not asking sooner) and whether the ruler who had gone down to history as 'Louis, the Sun Tyrant' was still known to be active? At which last question the former Grandmaster had lost her temper, thrown in a rant on basic history and what the former Grandmaster considered a joke by whatever persons had hired 'Peachy' which was being taken much too far, and sent Peachy on her way with a flea in her ear.
No: it had distinctly not been a good week. And that had been without the stresses that the former Grandmaster's current job was inflicting on account of the 'pony hysteria' currently afflicting some of the mentally more fragile members of the population…
NB
A sketch for a scene set in the human world, possibly taking place whilst ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle is in Canterlot General Hospital. Yes, The Book of Yellow Pages is an out-of-universe joke based on there being an old UK telephone directory which was called 'Yellow Pages', and others (such as the late Sir Terry Pratchett) have made variations of the joke before me…
The former Grandmaster in this sketch basically started a secret society a few years back based around reading really old books about the occult (of which the former Grandmaster had inherited a whole library) as an excuse for really clever people to hang out with one another – the former Grandmaster wasn't expecting to get people turning up some of whom actually wanted to try and carry out rituals or to cast spells, and when someone turned up expecting them to register to be monitored and to follow a set of rules… well that was too much and the secret society had to go.
There was a 'generation 1' pony called 'Peachy', who had a real-world toy that came with a pony beauty salon toy. The Peachy in this sketch is not that Peachy, but a human world origin character of a considerably more mercenary than heroic bent. If this Peachy does a good deed it's because someone hired (or otherwise retained) her to do it, or because something bad (but within her capacity to handle) made the mistake of attacking her.