“My eye…”

Despite your innocent intentions, it’s clear that your question has struck a painful nerve.

“No I… don’t think I can show you that. It’s not something to be ogled”.

You move to comfort her, but she waves you off with a wing. After a few moments she sighs and regains her composure, wiping the sparse tears from her good eye. You don’t recall ever seeing her cry before.

“Sorry about that, dear” the old mare says, “I suppose I can tell you about my legs at least – the story of one of them also happens to be the story of my cutie mark”.

You glance to the symbol that marks her flank. A pair of dice. Snake eyes. Judging by the scars this weathered mare carries, it seems to indicate a life of poor rolls. And yet, here she is, still carrying on. She lights up a cigarette before she begins. Carrying on and tempting fate. Some things never change.

“I was always a rather daring young filly” she starts off, “Never shied away from danger or a dare. There was no trick I wouldn’t try. One day, after going to see a Wonderbolts show, my friends and I decided to try our wings at a few of their moves. I believe it was a… particularly tight loop-the-loop…”

She pauses to take a slow drag on her cigarette, her eye squinting a bit in thought.

“My memory of the crash is pretty hazy. It’s not particularly important how it happened, I suppose. All I remember was waking up in the hospital with my left foreleg shattered and a brand new cutie mark on my flank.”

She chuckles, “Hell of a way to discover my destiny, huh?” You nod slowly, focused on her words. Stories of her past have always been a rarity.

“Spent a year in and out of the hospital. The doctors did all they could to try and get me a working leg again. Kept telling me how lucky I was that I didn’t break a wing. Or my neck.”

She looks down wistfully over where her limbs once were. She’s long adapted to their absence, but sometimes you see her moving as if the feeling of them is still there.

“Young me hated every minute of it, but they were right, I was quite lucky. Not lucky enough though… after numerous operations, medications, healing spells – the works – my leg never did heal. It was decided that the best solution would be to simply remove it”.

With another quick drag of her cigarette and barely a moment’s pause, she rolls right into the next tale, “I suppose you could say the other three were a package deal. The whole situation is a very long story that I won’t get into, but, ah, suffice to say that when you do the type of work I did… you make enemies. And sometimes those enemies have the means and resolve to… demolish warehouses on top of you”.

The old mare seems to be frowning in thought, choosing her words carefully. It would seem that this is another subject she’d rather not delve too far into.

“One leg got taken out in the initial blast. The other two…” a pained looks flashes across her face, as if she’s there again, before she continues, “They succumbed to necrosis while buried under debris for three days…”

She sighs and shakes her head, as if to clear it of some untold details. “That’s enough of that for today. I could use a good, strong drink.“

You’re leaning in a bit at this point, and tell her that she can’t just leave you hanging with more questions like that.

She grins back, “I’m no A.K. Yearling, kid”.

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I don’t know if I’ll do this too often, but I feel like this quick snippet would be an interesting way to build character without just doing a big info dump. Please excuse my sloppy writing.