Question Sted 5 - Aftermath

All rights reserved, except for those ceded to the Whateley Academy Author’s Group.

This is fan fiction for the Whateley Academy series. It may or may not match the timeline, characters, and continuity, but since it's fan fiction, who cares?

This is the fifth story about Sted "Ponygirl" Lancaster. The entire series, at least at the present time, is:

*Pegasus (v4)
* * * Deleted scenes
*Welcome to Whitman
*Fragment from It's A Bird!
*To Train a Ponygirl
*Aftermath <<<=====
*Ponygirl's Combat Final (game to come)
*What I did on my Christmas Vacation (second edition)
*Lizards (in preparation)
*Fashion Note
*Aspidistra (Version 2)
*Wine Dark Sea

Out of continuity:

*Roommates

October 31, 2006

Quiet. Sudden, blissful quiet after the eternity of rolling waves of nausea and disorientation. Sted "Ponygirl" Lancaster heard someone shout something over the din, but what it was didn't quite register.

She lifted her head from the foul stench of everything she'd thrown up, and tried to relax her cramped muscles. She tried to take a deep breath and almost gagged from the stench. Just then, one of the checkerboard mercs that had invaded the party walked by, and her vision filled with red. She pivoted, almost unconsciously, on her hands, shoved her inertial mass as high as it would go and executed a kick that Sensi would have been proud of.

The cyborg flew across the room, its chest caved in and with the indelible image of a pair of adamentium horseshoes in the center of what was left of its armor. It began to smoke as the Chessman hit the wall.

That felt good! She rose into the air to take a quick look around. Pure, unadulterated chaos met her eyes. It looked like the rest of the students might be getting organized, which was good. Shield wall around the non-fighters, check. She looked around and couldn't spot the rest of her team. They weren't that useful for fighting anyway, and, for all her various powers, she wasn't particularly durable. Besides, it looked like Fey was getting wound up.

Crap! She went invisible and decided to get outside to see if there was anything that a singleton could do.

Outside was hardly less chaotic. There seemed to be several fights in progress, and teams of mercenaries prowling the grounds. Her mouth formed a feral grin as she drew a long, slim rod out of her purse and aimed at one of the nearby mercenaries.

The line of eye-searing blue seemed to form in the same instant that the mercenary blew up in a satisfying cloud of gore and body parts flying in all directions.

She fell upwards at her maximum acceleration of 2 gravities. It was, she thought with shocked amazement, the right thing: the merc's companions had spotted the line back to her position and filled it with rifle fire in under a second! Rule 1: Remember to duck!. She gave an almost demented giggle. Quack, quack!

A barely felt presence in the back of Sted's mind didn't recoil in shock, only because it couldn't either recoil or be shocked. Neither was part of its nature. It did, however, note that the being it was bound to wasn't reacting as expected: it should be cowering in fright, waiting to be rescued! Instead it was taking the fight to the enemy. This wasn't the first time, but it had thought that might have been a fluke. Apparently not.

It considered the multi-dimensional skein of possibilities, probabilities, could be's, might be's, might not be's, likelihoods, unlikelihoods and can't possibly happens and decided to ... do nothing. The child it was bound to would survive, and with four probability warpers, two seers and at least three class X entities playing with the nexus points, additional chaos wasn't really needed. The attack on the school was bound to fail, and the chaos would let it sort out its pawn.

Ponygirl looked around again, and saw several more groups of mercs. She dropped to ground level between two groups and picked a target. The positron beam lashed out, and she fell into the sky. This time the return fire tore through her position into the second group of mercs, who returned fire. She almost cackled insanely as she watched the carnage from a hundred feet up.

She took two more shots, taking out a Tiger Guard each time and causing them to shoot each other while trying to get her. Then she tried a fifth shot. Her weapon didn't work. She looked at it. Damn! Out of power! It would recharge itself - in about ten hours.

The killing fury suddenly ebbed away, leaving her weak and shaken. She found a tree to shelter under as her stomach tried to empty itself - again. She managed to cough up a little bile, which left a foul taste in her mouth but also left her feeling a bit more together.

She floated up into the treetops to consider the situation. It looked, well, chaotic. Groups of the three kinds of mercenary were wandering around. There seemed to be a battle royale going on in the direction of Kane Hall, at least from the sound of the weapons. A pair of fighting supers roared overhead, crashed into a building and then roared off in another direction. Rule 2: Don't get caught near major property damage. She giggled and then collapsed into a crying jag.

She'd killed four people. Living, breathing people. Her mind tended to freeze. People. Dead people. By her hand.

She stayed up in her tree, watching the rest of the fight. Eventually it wound down, and she noticed that the security people were herding everyone toward the Crystal Hall.

November 1, 2006

"You're looking more than a little green around the gills," Mrs. Savage told Sted as she prepared to head for the Crystal Hall for breakfast the next morning. "Nightmares?"

"Nah," Sted answered. "It's just that ... I killed four of the bastards."

"Post-action trauma," the house mother said. "Perfectly understandable. You need to talk to someone about it."

"There's lots of kids worse off than I am..." she said.

Mrs. Savage looked at her. "I can understand being self-sacrificial, but the first time you deliberately take someone else's life, no matter how much it was in the heat of battle or how much they deserved it, needs to be talked out with someone. You are going on the priority list."

She looked at Sted a moment. "You're Catholic, right?"

"Um, yes."

"Let's see if we can get you to Confession. That ought to take some of the pressure off."

"That sounds good," Sted said, relief in her voice.

"Good. Scat to breakfast," she said as she made a note and headed for another of the kids that looked a bit wobbly.


Sted, as usual, found a secluded spot where nobody was looking and switched from her cabbit form to her ponygirl form. She checked that her off-campus illusion was firmly in place, and then stepped out into the street. She was well aware that most of the townspeople who worked on the main street knew she was a Whateley student who appeared and vanished unaccountably, but there was not only no point in rubbing people's noses in the fact, there were lots of real good reasons to keep it hidden from tourists.


St. George's was where she'd left it, not that she expected it to have moved. Even though she'd been a member for less than a month, the neat church, with the graveyard on one side and the small houses where the priest and the three nuns lived on the other side had begun to seem like an anchor in the shifting storms.

Especially with the triple shocks of her week being "trained" at Lady Morigan's place, Circe showing her the ponygirl goddess and now this.

Sted dropped her illusion when she walked into the little parish office.

"Sted," Sister Jean said. "You're right on time, but Father Rico is running late. He suggested that you go into the chapel and recite a rosary while you're waiting. He mentioned that the Sorrowful Mysteries would be appropriate."

"Thank you, Sister," she answered. "That sounds like a very good idea." She fished the box where she carried the blessed rosary from her purse and took it out as she walked toward the hand-carved wood fence in front of the altar.


"Come with me," the voice said from behind her as she finished the Hail Holy Queen after the last of the five decades and crossed herself. She noticed another three of her fellow students kneeling at the alter as she got up and followed Father Rico into his office.

"You may be wondering why we didn't go to the confession booth," he started.

"Um, yes."

"Well, there's a reason for the ritual, and you'll figure it out in time if you don't just look it up, but the truth is that, in a parish this small, you know who your confessor is, and he knows who's at confession for anyone who comes at all regularly."

"Then the ritual is to settle the mind."

"And provide focus. And a couple more things of theological import. Right now I need background. It sounded like there was a little war last night out your way, and the message that you needed to come to confession because you'd killed four syndicate mercenaries didn't do anything to disabuse me of the idea. So tell me what happened from your viewpoint."

Over the next half hour, Fr. Rico led her though the entire incident from the time the sonic weapon had disabled most of the people in the auditorium to when they'd reassembled in the Crystal Hall. Finally he sat back.

"That's very interesting. I think I'm going to have to put together a report for the Vatican: Whateley Academy is simply too important to have this kind of thing happening while we ignore it. Now there's one thing I noticed. Just stay still while I look at something."

He got up, took the crucifix from around his neck and held it up as he walked around her. She noticed that his left sleeve had fallen back a little, showing a pattern of roses apparently tattooed around his wrist. For some reason her eyes were drawn to an ornately inscribed ring on his left hand.

"Now," he said as he took his seat, "do you know that you've got some kind of an entity attached to you?"

"Circe mentioned it; she called it the Ponygirl Goddess. Before that, my mentor said that there was something, but she wasn't able to isolate it enough to say what it was."

"I'm going to have to report this and ask for guidance. From what I saw, it isn't demonic. If it was, you wouldn't have been able to enter the church."

"I see."

"Good. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other." He shrugged. "One piece of background you may not know, and I'd just as soon you not repeat it."

"Uh, right."

"I'm a member of a martial order that deals with this kind of thing. That's the reason I'm here: I've gotten a bit too old for the rigors of running around all over the globe, chasing vampires and whatnot, and this region needs someone to keep an eye on it."

"That I can understand!"

"Good. So let's get to the meat of the matter. The entity seems to have four roles or aspects, and it's a bit ambivalent about which one you fit into. Well, which of two. Those two are opposites in a lot of ways. You called it the Ponygirl Goddess; since you look like a classical ponygirl, it wants to slot you into that aspect. However, you keep acting like you want to be in control. Does that make sense?"

"Yes."

"So, from what I got it's willing to let you put yourself into the dominant mistress role, but it isn't really happy about it. You're going to have to take charge and make it happen, and you're going to have to keep at it."

"I've been getting that impression."

"Good. Now let's get back to what happened last night. You understand that, to keep in charge, you're going to have to be in a martial role. If the opportunity comes up to wield the sword against the ungodly, you're going to have to step up and start swinging."

"Uh, right. I guess."

"You guess?"

"I see what you're saying, but….”

"Well, it's your cross to bear. You either carry it, or you buckle under the weight."

"Um. Right."

"Now for the crux of the problem. You're feeling guilty about killing those mercenaries while they were in the act of invading your school, right?"

"Yes, but….”

"But. It's something that good people just don't do. Hold onto that thought.

"The fact that it's hit you hard means you're human. The people I worry about are the ones that kill without worrying about it. The conscienceless killers.

"There's no way of avoiding having to kill sometimes. With the best will in the world, sometimes it's necessary to protect yourself or other people. What's hard is keeping your humanity when you have to.

"Now, I want you to do two things. First is study the Life of St. George. St. George is one of the Church's martial saints; while most of what you'll read is myth that's built up over the centuries he's still very useful to study.

"The second thing is to pray for the souls of the four mercenaries you killed."

"Huh?" Her eyes flew wide.

"Think, girl! Why would you do that when you know as well as I do that they're probably in Hell right now, and deserve every minute of it?"

"I'm not sure?"

"OK. It's for you. One of the many, many roads to Hell is to hate the things you have to kill. The Way is straight and narrow: you cannot afford to let your emotions and attachments get in the way of being guided by the Divine Will.

"Whether or not you become a soldier of the Right, or whether you do something else and are only called to fight when necessary, you will be called to make a stand on occasion. Remember what we talked about with the, um, Ponygirl Goddess."

"I see. I guess I don't have a choice there."

"True. You may have been called rather than have freely chosen the position, but it's still your cross to bear. Free Will lets us make choices. It does not let us then chose the consequences of those choices.”

"In other words, if I'm going to have to fight, I'd better get serious about preparing for it."

"Precisely. You're at one of the best places in the world for that."

"I guess so," she said a bit tremulously.

"Now take out your crucifix and bow your head," he said as he came around the desk to perform the absolution.