Port Hoofcourt was an old settlement, a place where zebra traders and raiders made forays into the jungle for two centuries before eager Equestrian colonialists joined them a few decades ago. But the old town was being covered over with new structures, built with capital from investors in distant Canterlot. The old zebra trading post, now the seat of a colonial company manager, was sandwiched between a shipping office and the Orchid Hotel. It was in that hotel that Angel Gaze found herself, after a long but uneventful oceanic journey around the Horn of Maretonia, sitting in the hotel's restaurant across a table from one Elixir Lotus.

"...his brutality," continued Lotus, "got worse and worse. He's working the poor warthogs to death." The white unicorn mare said. She shifted in her seat, favoring a bandaged foreleg.

"But this Colonel Curse, you said he was a mercenary from the start --" 

"Oh, yes, but look around you, almost everyone here is some sort of mercenary. Do you think any of them really care about the indigenous peoples of this continent?"

Angel looked around at the unsavory collection of soldiers of fortune, rough-looking traders, and pitiless company mares sheltering from the pouring tropical rain. 

"I suppose not."

"Right. They only care for what they can plunder. If they desire to avoid violence, it's only because war is bad for business. That's why I wrote the Colonial Benevolent Society - just try getting any of this lot to care about any warthog who isn't pulling a cart of tribute."

Angel nodded. Such attitudes were common. The daughter of Canterlot nobility, she had found her purpose in life with the Colonial Benevolent Society, working to expose exactly this sort of corrupt foreign adventurism. But what Lotus was telling her about Colonel Curse and his wicked band was worse than anything she or the CBS had confronted before.

"I only barely got out of his compound alive," Lotus said. "Almost all of my possessions, my research notes, and most to the point, my money... stayed at the Seven-Tusks Headwaters. No chance to hire the help I needed to go back and put a stop to this... exploitation under the guise of archaeological research."

Angel nodded sympathetically. The CBS had sent her with money to procure protection for herself in investigating the situation, and perhaps if it was spent well, she might be able to return to Canterlot not with an expose, but with a report of a unjust situation already rectified. That would surely change the minds of anyone in the Society who'd written her off as a dilettante...

"... and it is essential," Lotus continued, "that his activities be curtailed. Not only for the warthogs, but for all of us."

"All of us?" Angel asked. "What do you mean?"

"The Elephant civilization that built those ruins..." 

A clash of thunder punctuated Lotus's words.

"... that civilization did not fade quietly into the memory of historians, ma'am. It had a very definite end, in a single hour of... profound misfortune. There is a power in that place, which must not come under Curse's control."

"The sooner we head upriver, the better, then?" Angel asked.

"Yes."