When we woke up again, there was another dish with bread near the door, but there weren’t any water. The dish was still inside the room. Rarity guessed that we didn’t get water because we didn’t put the little dish outside.

“Such a terrible pony!” Rarity said with anger. She rose up the dish high up in the air with her magic, but she quickly calm down and didn’t smash it. If the dish broke, maybe they won’t get water ever again.

“We have to get out of here, Sweetie Bell.”

“But… how?” I answered, not sure what she wanted.

Rarity looked at me, and her vision turned to the ditch. The ditch comes out from one end of the wall into the other.

“It’s too small for me to fit in.” Rarity said, “But I think you should be able to fit through.”

Judging by the hoof watch, it should be noon outside. If I could make it outside the building, we should be able to find help. But I really didn’t want to go in that dirty hole. The smell was too strong and weird.

Rarity could understand my feelings completely. After all she was the one with the OCD.

“Please, Sweetie Bell, this could be our only chance. I promise I will make it up to you once we get out of here.”

Rarity’s got a good point. I trotted up to the ditch and held out my hoof with hesitation. The water was not deep, barely over my knees. The bottom was slippery. It felt like I was stepping on a giant frog.

The end of the ditch looked like a dark square. The hole was quite small, but I should be able to fit through. But the surface of the dirty water was right below the top of the square, meaning if I want to get through, I have to completely submerge underwater and swim through it.

Rarity had her favorite shirt and hats on, and I had some cloth on as well since we were going to a quite fancy mall. Luckily whoever kept us here didn’t take off our cloths, so we were able to make a long rope by ripping the cloth apart. Rarity was also crying when she watched her creation turned into traps of cloths, but she didn’t hesitate much. She tied one end of the rope around my waist and held the other end tightly in her hooves. That way if I got stuck in the tunnel or if I accidently drown, she would be able to pull me back into safety.

“Which way should I go?” I turned back and asked Rarity. I have two choices, upstream or downstream.

“I would choose upstream, since it might lead to a manhole downstream.”

I slowly moved to the end of the ditch and slowly bent down. I felt the dirty water rising up to my tummy, then my chest, and then my neck. It felt like there were a lot of bugs climbing up onto my body and eating my coat and skin. I shrugged at the thought.

I held my breath, shut my eyes tight and dive in. The hole was tiny. I was barely able to fit thought. The back of my head was right against the walls.

I half climbed, half swam through the dark tunnel. I have no idea where I am going. Luckily the water was not fast, so I was able to swim upstream rather easily.

I started getting worried how long this tunnel is going to be. I could hold my breath underwater for two minutes at most, and it had been fifteen seconds. If it passes a minute, I would have to go back or I would drown in here. Luckily after just another second or two, the wall pressing against my back had disappeared. The ditch seems to be leading somewhere open.

I stood up with excitement, but then I heard some pony scream right next to me.

Even though I would hate to get dirty water in my eyes, I still managed to open them and looked around. At first I thought I went back to the room I was in, the ditch was like a portal and I just got teleported to the other end.

But it was just a room that looked the same. Rarity wasn’t there, instead there was another pony. She looked a lot older than Rarity, and I have never seen her before.

“Who are you?”

She screamed as she moved backwards from me. Her coat was messy, and it looked like she had been in a lot of fright.

I explained to her that we were locked up in the room just downstream of her. I untied the rope from myself and drag it three times, a signal that says “I am safe”. Rarity pulled the rope three times as well, telling me to keep exploring. I moved upstream again and ran into two other identical rooms. That means there were three rooms upstream of us, each room with a pony inside. The first room had a young mare, the second room had a mare with long hair, and the third room had a mare with its mane dyed red.

No pony knew how they got here. All the other ponies looked older than Rarity. Maybe whoever locked us up thought that we were both too young so he put us together to count for one big grown up pony.

There were iron bars in the ditch upstream from the first room and I was not able to proceed any further. I returned to our room and told Rarity everything.

Even after my coat dried, it still smells funny. There was no water to take a shower either, so our room stinks. But Rarity didn’t seem to care.

“So we are the fourth room from the top, right?”

Rarity said, thinking about something.

There were a lot of rooms connected together by a dirty ditch, and each room had a pony inside it, or two. I found this surprising, but somewhat comforting. Knowing that there were other ponies that were in the same situation as you are making everything less frightening.

At first people were scared and puzzled by my existence, but soon they were happy about it. Looked like they had been locked up for days, and they were alone all this time. No one opened the door for them, and they had no idea what kind of situation they were in.

Every time when I was about to enter the ditch and leave, they would beg me to go back and tell them what I found out. They all wanted to know why they got locked up, or what was going to happen to them.

I started moving again, this time downstream. There was another identical room just as I expected. There was a light yellow Pegasus who looked like Rarity’s age. She was surprised when she saw me at first, but soon she got excited after I explained everything to her.

I moved further downstream. However, I was surprised at what I saw.

It was another square room, but it was a little different. The room itself was the same, but there were no pony inside that room. After being to a bunch of rooms with ponies locked up inside, it felt strange to suddenly encounter a completely empty room.

I moved further down from the empty room. There were no ropes tied around my waist, but I didn’t mind much. There must be another bunch of small rooms downstream, so I left the rope in our room and just swam here. Each tunnel was only a few feet deep, so it’s quite impossible to drown either.

I moved into the room and saw a mare who was as old as mom. She saw me standing up from the ditch, but surprisingly she didn’t seem surprised. I felt like she was kind of weird.

She looked like she had been in a lot of fright. She curled up in the corner of the room, her either body shaking. At first I thought she was about as old as mom, but when I take a closer look I realized that she was much younger than I expected. She just looked really frightened and tired.

I moved down the ditch. There were iron bars and I couldn’t go any further. Looked like I have came to the end of the downstream.

“Are you all right?”  I was a little worried about her so I asked.

“Who are you?” She asked weakly. It looked like she had lost all of her energy.

She was different from every other pony. Her hair and coat were extremely messy, there were strands of hair scattered around the ground. Her face and her hooves were soaked with sweat. Her eyes were empty and dark, and she looked like a skeleton.

I told her who I was and what I was doing. I could see her eyes light up.

“You mean, there are ALIVE ponies upstream from me?”

Alive ponies? I didn’t quite understand what she meant.

“You’ve seen it too, right? Every day at some point, there would be dead body of ponies flowing down this stream…”

I was a bit frightened so I quickly said goodbye and went back to my room. I told Rarity about everything.

“So there are seven rooms in total, right?”

Rarity said, and then she said something that I couldn’t understand. So she numbered the rooms. Starting from the one at the where the water comes from. Our room is the fourth one, and the crazy mare’s room is the seventh one.

At first I was hesitating if I should tell what the mare in the 7th room said. If I told Rarity, that means I believed her and Rarity must think of me as an idiot. Just when I was hesitating, Rarity noticed.

“What’s wrong, Sweetie Bell.”

So I carefully told her word to word what the 7th mare told me. According to her, every day there would be bodies of ponies flowing down stream, from one room to another. I was confused. How could a mare’s body fit in this little ditch? And how would it fit through the small iron bars at the end of the stream?

I brought the questions to her, and the 7th mare told me that the bodies were cut into tiny pieces, small enough to fit through the iron bars. She could see bodies flowing by since she was locked there.

“Including last night?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I went back to Rarity. Could there been stuff flowing down the ditch while we were asleep? No, it can’t be. The 7th mare had a hoof watch as well, and she said every day around 6 pm there would be bodies. We checked her watch with ours and they matched. But last night we were fully awake at 6 pm. Al though we didn’t stare into the stinky water all day, I’m sure we would have noticed if anything had passed by.

“Had any other ponies saw the same thing?”

I shook my head. No other ponies had mentioned seeing small pieces of dead body. The 7th mare was the only pony. Could she be hallucinating?

I don’t think it was the case. I could never forget her face. Her face was thin and dented. She had huge dark circles around her eyes. It almost looked like she was dead. She must have experienced something unusually cruel.

“Do you believe what she said?”

I asked Rarity, but she just shook her head. She didn’t know either.

“We’ll just have to wait.”

So we wait and waited until Rarity’s watch pointed towards 6pm. We held our breath and looked at the ditch.

We heard hoof steps outside, which was quite frightening. Does the hoof steps appear every day at 6 pm? But Rarity didn’t yell at him this time. Maybe she had realized her efforts were in vain as well.

We could hear the sound of engine running from far away. But we didn’t see any body pieces flowing down stream, just a bunch of dead bugs on the surface of the dirty water.