I couldn’t help but notice that Vinyl Scratch’s radio station lair wasn’t any more impressive with the interior fully illuminated. The DJ had been generous enough to let me use her bathroom to freshen up after my little episode on the back lawn. I was grateful, though I knew it was also just an excuse for them to have a discussion about me behind my back.
The bathroom was attached to the former-home’s single bedroom, which had the distinct honor of being the messiest room in the station I’d seen yet. The disheveled bed in the corner seemed to indicate that the DJ still slept here when she did, in fact, sleep. Every other available storage space in the room was stuffed to the ceiling with records. That left the floor as the primary receptacle of all the mare’s clothes and personal effects.
I navigated my way across the bedroom minefield and flipped on the bathroom light. Thankfully it was cleaner and record-free, though not completely devoid of music. The tub was surrounded by a dull white shower curtain speckled childishly with musical notes. I doubted that the DJ could make any more sense of them than I could.
With my head resting sideways in the sink I let the cold water run over my face, flowing down through my mouth. Every so often I caught a mouthful and swirled it around, trying to get the taste of bile off of my tongue. I would have killed to have my toothbrush there.
“If it wasn’t a melted puddle of plastic in that pile of ashes you call a house.” I thought to myself bitterly.
So much had happened in the last two days that I had nearly forgotten about my house. At this point I was no longer concerned about dealing with the authorities on the matter; the only thing that ate at me was the loss of my possessions. I didn’t have many keepsakes but there had been some. Chief among them were the pictures and knickknacks I had picked up on my travels while filming Equestrian Wilderness.
The water washed away the few tears that fell from my eyes as quickly as they appeared, leaving no trace. When I faced myself in the mirror all that remained of the passing emotion was a slight redness in my eyes. I convinced myself it was merely the result of hard water irritating them.
“She used you; it is only fair that you get something in return…”
Nightmare Moon’s word echoed in my mind. I had no idea how the Everfree Forest’s power really worked. Could it change the past? Could I really make it so that Hayseed Swamp had never happened? Would I remember that it ever happened? Even if I could somehow undo it, the memory of it happening at all would still haunt me.
More importantly how would I even do it? If by some miracle we actually made it through the forest and found the colt, what would I do? Hold him hostage until Golden Prose wrote everything I demanded? She had come undoubtedly come here to use the Everfree’s power for herself, so she probably wouldn’t be inclined to just help me out of the goodness of her heart after all.
I stared at myself in the mirror, letting my forehooves rest absentmindedly under the running water. No one would get hurt, right? I wouldn’t actually hurt Bookmark and I’d get what I wanted. Whatever happened to Golden Prose after that point wasn’t my problem. The damage she had caused was already done. The Princesses would have to figure out how to clean up the loose ends.
“You alright, Mossy?”
The author’s voice snapped me out of my trance as she appeared in the bathroom doorway. How had she navigated that battlefield of a room so silently?
“Been better, but I’m still kicking I guess.” I splashed a last bit of water onto my face before turning off the faucet. “Come to make sure I wasn’t in here spewing shadows everywhere?”
Golden Prose regarded me with a look of distaste and magically tossed a hoof towel at my dripping face.
“At Ironbars insistence mostly. He’s back in the broadcast booth with Vinyl Scratch while she does her thing.”
“And she really thinks she can send out that broadcast without causing a panic? Ponies are either going to dismiss it as a hoax or completely freak the buck out and make everything infinitely worse.”
“And a shadow tornado descending on the town police station didn’t even elicit a peep from anypony? Things are beyond weird right now, I don’t think her broadcast is going to change anything. If anything it’s just to make herself feel better.”
She had a point. The event seemed to be isolated to us and the few ponies that inadvertently became involved with us. Every other Taken we had encountered seemed to have been loners from the outskirts of town. Ponies that were easily isolated and wouldn’t be missed. The townsponies were probably safer now that we were no longer among them.
I rolled my eyes and began to rummage through the medicine cabinet for painkillers.
“Well as long as she feels better. I don’t suppose you could convince her and that deputy to stay here and continue the broadcast while we go on to the forest? Last thing we need her getting inspired to write music in there or something.”
Music was undoubtedly a powerful form of creativity and therefore fair game for the forest’s power. Despite that I couldn’t imagine what exactly a song written there would do. Frankly I didn’t really want to know.
“There’s safety in numbers, Moss. They’ve been around us for too long now, do you think whatever is out there is going to leave them alone?”
My eyes lit up for a moment as I uncovered a bottle of aspirin, but the author’s words quickly put a frown on my face.
“No.” She continued on. “If anything it’ll go after them specifically now to use them against us.”
“You sure do seem to know a lot about what the Dark Presence will or won’t do.” I muttered before popping several of the pills into my mouth and gulping them down dry.
Golden Prose looked taken aback.
“I’m a writer. It takes a fair deal of understanding about how the world works in order to write about it. It only makes sense.”
I scoffed and pushed my way past her out of the bathroom. I didn’t want to let on how much I actually knew more than I already had, but at the same time playing so blissfully ignorant of everything would just drive me mad.
“Come on. Let’s go see if DJ Orson Welles has whipped the town into a panic yet.”
Not that any part of the residence-turned-radio-station struck me as a good idea, the sunroom broadcast booth struck me as particularly poor planning. Aside from the wall that attached it to the house, the entire room was plate glass window panes. There was no soundproofing to be seen. Any background sound from outside probably bled right through into every live broadcast.
I was ready to chalk it up to yet another fault in the mare’s personality, but then I actually stepped back into the room. As I passed through the doorway my ears popped and suddenly all I could hear was the DJ’s voice.
“So remember, colts and fillies, keep your doors locked and your nightlights on.” Her voice was calm and smooth, the practiced voice of a professional radio personality. “And when you see sunlight peeking under your door, maybe think about taking a little vacation up to Canterlot for the rest of the week. Tell em’ DJ Pon3 sent you.”
From her seat behind the control panel Vinyl Scratch hovered in front of her microphone, her horn glowing a dull blue. It all made sense now. When I really focused on the windows I could see the wavy distortion reminiscent of heat lines in the summer. The DJ was using magical sound dampening to isolate her studio during her broadcasts.
“Now some special friends of mine just showed up so I’m afraid that’ll be all for tonight. This is DJ Pon3, signing off.”
With that the glow from her horn dissipated and the sounds of a summer night in the forest began to creep back in. The normalcy would have been reassuring if not for the look on Vinyl Scratch’s face.
“I usually get updates from the local weather control teams so that I can broadcast them during my show.” The mare pushed the boom microphone away from her face. “We’ve been having unseasonably hot weather for the last week because they’ve been diverting our rainclouds to Phillydelphia since they’ve been dealing with a drought.”
“And?” I offered irritably as I trotted past an uneasy looking Ironbars.
“And they are supposed to continue diverting those clouds for another three days. But what do you suppose that looks like?” Vinyl Scratch rolled her chair to the nearest windowpane and tapped a hoof toward the moonlit horizon.
Clearly visible along the horizon was the leading edge of a fairly substantial looking storm front. The wall of clouds loomed ominously, threatening to block out the moon and swallow the sky. This wasn’t just a stray cloud that had escaped the weather team; this was a force to be reckoned with.
“That just means we have to get to the Everfree before it hits. We don’t want to be caught up here in the hills when the lightening starts.” Golden Prose spoke up from the studio doorway.
Ironbars, who had apparently been watching the storm front approach the entire duration of Vinyl Scratch’s broadcast shifted uncomfortably on his hooves. I hadn’t really stopped to think about the Taken pegasi we had destroyed on the chariot, but now that things were calmer I realized that the deputy may have known them. Undoubtedly they had been part of the missing search party.
“Ah know what ah said back inna station, but ah don’t think ah can go any fartha with you ponies.” His voice was still stern, not betraying any uncertainty he might have been feeling.
Vinyl Scratch rolled her chair out from behind her console and bumped into the deputy. “Not afraid of a little water, are you?”
The deputy scowled.
“You shouldn’t go eithah. We’ve done enough the safety of the town; it’s time to watch out fawr our own skin fawr a change.” He cast an eye first at me, then to Golden Prose. I knew what he really meant.
“Good riddance!” I tried and failed to hide my relief. One down, one to go.
“So what are we supposed to do? Just leave you here for whatever the thing out there in the dark is? Not gonna happen.” The playful tone was gone from Vinyl’s voice. It seemed she was determined to cling with us, for whatever reason.
“Neither of you are coming with us.” I interjected before the two could start to argue. “Ironbars is right. You have no stake in this; you just need to protect yourselves now. And that means both of you staying here and watching each other’s backs.”
The deputy seemed satisfied, but Vinyl Scratch popped out of her seat and was in my face before I could blink.
“Now I’ve stuck around with you for way too long without asking half the questions I wanted, let alone getting answers for the questions I did ask. That ends right now!”
The DJ head butted me with the side of her face, stumbling me back towards the door. The assault continued until I got the hint and followed her lead out of the room. Dismayed, Golden Prose tried to follow but was quickly intercepted by Ironbars.
I found myself back in the DJ’s black hole of a bedroom being stared down by her piercing magenta eyes.
“Level with me here, stallion. I’ve seen some chaotic magic at work around this town before, but nopony ever lost their life over it before now. Off the record, pony to pony, what are you two into?”
I gritted my teeth and prepared for another fight, but the mare anticipated this. With a dull blue glow in the dimly lit room she magically retrieved a small flask from one of the lower drawers in her dresser. She took a quick drink for herself before offering it to me. The strong brandy mercifully overpowered any remaining foul taste in my mouth.
If neither Golden Prose nor I made it back from the forest maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have somepony who really knew what happened. Princess Luna would know, but frankly I wasn’t sure how much trust to put in her anymore.
Apprehensively I gave Vinyl Scratch a rundown on the events as they had happened. I left out the vision of Nightmare Moon I’d had in the root cellar out of a fear that she might start to pick up on my ulterior motives.
The DJ took in the story in silence, nodding when appropriate to show that she was still listening. I couldn’t tell if what I was saying was making any sense to her or if she was just humoring me. When she finally spoke again I was reminded that she wasn’t the vapid radio personality I still mistook her for on occasion.
“If what you say is true, it sounds to me like she did this all to herself. I understand how easy it was to get swept up in this and just go along with whatever she wants to do because it seems like the only option, but you need to take your own advice. Look out for yourself right now. We can all hunker down here until sunrise and get in touch with Canterlot in the morning. If they don’t want to take care of the problem we can force them to. They won’t be able to keep this a secret if I put this out on the airwaves.”
I had to admit, as I sat there still sipping from the flask of brandy the things Vinyl Scratch said to me sounded good. But that little kernel of selfishness and spite still lurked in the back of my mind. I could cut my losses now like she suggested, or I could see things through to the end and maybe come out a little better off. I didn’t have a whole lot to lose at this point.
“If the princesses couldn’t do anything before, what makes you think they can do anything now? Golden Prose is the closest thing we have to a weapon to use against the Dark Presence itself, but she can only use her power in the forest itself. The Presence knows that we know too much now and there is no way it’ll let her get there by herself. She needs my help and my help alone. Involving more ponies is only going to complicate things.”
Vinyl Scratch sighed and snatched the flask away from me, draining the remaining alcohol before I could protest.
“You’re just doing your damnest to stop me from getting my interview, aren’t you?” The tip of her nose was beginning to turn a flushed pink. “Since you seem so insistent on going, I don’t suppose either of you are going to reconsider letting me tag along for this it?”
I shook my head and hoofed at a balled up pillowcase on the floor. It was amazing that I didn’t have whiplash as quickly as she had turned me from wanting her gone to feeling bad about leaving her behind. I would just try to chalk it up to the brandy.
“You and Ironbars have been a big help already. The only reason we made it out of town each time was because of you two. If we do make it out of this I owe you a drink, or an interview, or both.”
She slapped me roughly in the chest with a forehoof.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Golden Prose and I did our best to strap the flashlights Vinyl Scratch had given us into our saddlebags. They weren’t as large and powerful as the Maglites we’d started out with, but they would have to do. The author still had her revolver but I had been unable to extricate my axe from the wreck of the chariot. The only thing I could find around the DJ’s home that seemed like an adequate weapon was a garden shovel.
We stood in the glow of the security light over the studios backdoor as the DJ and the deputy watched from the doorway.
“Wait! Before you go…”
Vinyl Scratch darted back into the house and reappeared moments later with a bottle in her teeth. She dashed across the back lawn and disappeared into the root cellar. Several minutes passed before she came back up with the bottle magically levitating above her head.
I now recognized it as the glass bottle that the brandy we’d shared earlier must have come from. She had filled it with something clear and stuffed a rag into the neck. It hit me that it must have been fuel from the generator.
She’d made us a Molotov cocktail. Fire in a bottle; and more importantly, light.
“Sorry I can’t give you more, but I don’t drink enough to have an abundance of bottles lying around.” She tucked the cocktail into my saddlebag, being mindful to keep the neck poking through the cover to keep it upright.
“Thanks, but I don’t smoke…” I offered up hopefully.
The DJ rolled her eyes and disappeared into the house again. This time she reemerged with a shiny silver lighter clutched in her teeth. It was actually a very tastefully designed piece with her cutie-mark engraved on the sides. She passed it off to me and I tucked it away into the bag opposite the cocktail.
“Now I don’t care what happens, you two have to come back because I want that lighter back. It was a graduation present from a good friend of mine.”
Golden Prose and I chuckled and nodded. In the doorway Ironbars looked unmoved. He only glanced upward when the first drops of rain began to fall on our heads.
As we started off away from the tiny studio any sense of readiness I felt from having the flare gun and the cocktail began to wash out of me with each drop of rain. I’d made my choice and now I was going to have to follow through.