Descent
“Hello whoever is listening to this.
Before you do anything else there is one thing you must know. Do not open this door. The thing on the inside must not get out. If you are on the wrong side then may Celestia bless your soul and Luna lead you to the afterlife.”
“If you are still listening I hope that means you took my advice. I will now tell you why you must not open that door. But to do that I must first tell you a bit about myself. And before you turn this message out of boredom, there is a job for you if you are willing. But that will have to wait for now.“
“I am Fairysong, a unicorn mare with a special talent for spreading light. And yes that means that my talent is making my horn glow. Yes it may sound like a useless talent but it has saved my life several times, especially in the last hours. I used to live in a small settlement in the Manehattan ruins called One Way. And, well, here is where my story begins.”
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I let out a groan as a loud banging sound tore me away from my wonderful dreams. To my sleepy brain the banging sounded like a steel ranger firing his grenade launcher next to my bed. Forcing my eyes open, I was greeted with a dimly lit room.
If the room hadn’t been so small it would have looked barren, but as it was, it almost looked overfull. An entire wall was made up off storage lockers, a bunk bed which I was currently occupying the lower half off, and a sofa that was all the furniture there was. The light was coming from underneath the only door in the room, which also seems to be the source of the sound that had awakened me.
The door was actually budging inwards at a bad angle for each blow, then suddenly the assault stopped, followed by a voice.
“Hey, Fairysong, get up! You're shift starts in ten, so get up before I come in and drag you out.” I recognised the voice of Scraps, One Ways mechanic, merchant and apparently filling extra duty as alarm clock. I crawled out of bed, feeling like I could sleep for another day and then started dragging myself towards the door. I magically unlocked the door and opened it, only to be greeted her grinning face.
“Good morning, Fairysong, I hope I didn’t wake you!” She said with a big grin. A grin that only grew when I glared at her with my half open eyes. Her grin faded a bit as she continued. “Barrel told me that if you missed another shift you would get reduced rations. And that means both of you.” She glanced past me to the upper bunk bed where my friend Treasure Chest was sleeping soundly despite the banging just a minute ago.
“I should probably leave you too it. You have about half an hour before your shift.” She turned around and have already taken a few steps before my sleepy brain caught what she had just said. “Didn’t you say I had ten minutes before?” This made her turn around, a huge grin on her face. “Just something to make you get up Fairy. Now I’m needed back at the shop and you should be preparing for your shift!” She turned away again and started walking away.
I just stared dumbly after her for a while, then I realised that I should probably get at it. I walked back inside, closing the door after me and headed over to the wall filled with storage lockers. I began carefully searching them for something edible, careful to not wake Treasure Chest. After a short search I found the right locker and lifted out a snack cake package. Popping it open I sat down in the sofa and started munching on the sugary cake.
At a sudden sound coming from the bunk bed I looked up at it. Treasure Chest just started snoring. Great! She may be my best friend and sister in all but blood, but her snoring was worse than the noise from the food dispenser.
Quickly finishing of the cake I went over to the lockers again, this time I pulled out a purple sweater and a pair of saddle bags. The sweater was the only piece of usable goods I ever had managed to find while scavenging. I pulled it over my head, loving the feeling of the smooth wool on my fur. Levitating my saddlebags into place on my back I headed to the door, glad to get away from the horrible snoring sound coming from the bunk bed.
As I started walking through One Way I realised how early it was. Nopony but me was outside and the town was almost completely quiet. Even the Manehattan ruins were quiet for once. It gave the morning a slightly spooky feeling, as if something ominous was hanging in the air.
I shrugged and kept on walking. One Way was a really small town located at a dead end road in what must have been the small industry district of Manehattan. It was named after the sign at the opening of the street leading down to the town. The actual town was built up of shacks made of junk and scrap, like mine and Treasure Chests house, and some buildings on the side of the road.
There was only a few good things with living in One Way. It was a bit remote from the more raider infested parts of Manehattan, which made raider attacks weak and far between. There also was the heart of the town. The food machine in the back of town produced enough food for the ponies in town and even some for trading. I’m not sure how it worked but I didn’t care that much. It was food and it didn’t taste horrible, just a bit on the dry side.
I could make out the guard post, a tower made of junk that was watching out over the road coming up to the town. Going out on either side of it was a wall made of scrap metal and sharp metal pieces. The only exception to this was the gate area just next to the tower which was made of what remained of a garage door. Scrap had even managed to power it so that the guard could open and close it from the tower.
I started climbing up the tower. It wasn’t very large, only four meters in each direction, but since we mostly had one pony at watch at the time it was more than enough room. As I entered the ‘room’ I was greeted by a scowling guard pony.
“Hi there, Bottle. Your shift is over now.” I said with a smile. Bottle was the town drunk and since he wasn’t allowed to drink while on guard duty, he was always in a bad mood when his shift was over. Unless he disregarded the rules and drank anyway.
Bottle stood up slowly muttering something under his breath and walked past me without so much as a greeting. Some ponies have no manners. “Sleep well!” I called after him. Then I sat down at the window with a sigh as I started my boring shift.
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I looked out over the gray landscape of the Manehattan ruins. I only had one hour left on my shift but it was still boring me out of my skull. Guard duty must be the most repetitive and dull job in the Equestrian wasteland, especially when you are in one of the areas with a limited view, and even if I spotted something the only thing I could do were to shoot a warning shot, since if I actually aimed I would most likely hit myself. Black Barrel, our guard captain, didn’t let me get my hooves on anything more powerful than the smallest peashooter in our arsenal, which was probably wise.
In One Way you either helped out or got kicked out, and since I was horrible with science and repairs and most of the other useful skills, I was on guard duty, which sucked since I couldn’t even read my favorite book while I worked. Barrel had already yelled at me once for reading on duty. That damn gun fanatic, no appreciation for real art! So that meant that I had one hour left of watching a gray street. Well it could have been worse, it could be raining.
*Krazoom*
A flash of light, directly followed by a deafening thunder crack sound. I almost jumped out of my skin in surprise. And then came the rain. The bucking rain. So now I had to keep lookout over the twenty meters of road that I could actually see. After what felt like an eternity I felt a hoof on my shoulder. Looking back, I could see a completely drenched pony, glaring back from under a dripping hood.
“Is that you, Treasure, or do we have a drowned ghoul living in town without me knowing?” I chuckled as Treasure Chest stroked her mane out her eyes. Her light barding was also completely soaked, and must be freezing to have on. I was suddenly very happy that I had put on my thick purple jumper on for my shift.
“Very funny, Fairy. Did anything happen during your shift?” she asked as I started walking towards the exit.
“Nothing except a thunderstorm, you should have seen it!” I grinned at her as innocently as I could.
She returned the look for a few second before I burst out laughing. Then she glared at me.
“Ha ha. Now get your flank back to town. Oh, and don’t slip, we wouldn’t want our own personal little lightbringer getting hurt.” She teased and I glared back at her. Ever since DJ pon3 had started talking about that stable dweller as the lightbringer, everypony in town had started calling me their own little lightbringer because of my cutie mark. Sometimes I wished I could have gotten a more useful talent than making my bucking horn glow.
Well I guess it was time to get back. “Have fun watching the rain flow.” I said to Treasure Chest as I prepared myself to run through the rain. “Also, you might wanna get out of your barding before you catch a cold.” I added.
“Yea, see you later.” She responded, already reading a magazine from one of her saddle bags. I felt slightly annoyed over the fact that she probably never would get caught by Black Barrel. Treasure Chest was One Ways best scout and could probably hear a cricket at a mile's distance.
Running through the rain, I kept slipping on the soft mud and the slick cobbled streets. Wondering if it wouldn't be better to simply move underground to avoid the stupid rain.
I was almost at my house, as I saw the door through the heavy blanket of rain. Suddenly it felt as if somepony had pulled the ground out from underneath me and I was falling. The last thing I heard before the blackness took me was the loudest boom I had ever heard.
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“Ow ow ow.” I woke up mumbling out the first thing that came to my mind. Looking around, the only thing around me was utter darkness. I lit my horn up with a basic light spell, revealing what looked like a maintenance tunnel for one of the subways.
I tried to stand up, but stopped when a sharp pain in my hind leg made my body spasm. Looking back I saw it being pierced through by a rusty piece of metal. I was simply looking at my pierced leg as the shock slowly faded giving way to a pulsing ache.. My body started to shake from the agony and the metal piece titled making a wet sound as it fell out of my leg, taking a piece of meat with it. Everything was dulled out by the blinding pain from my leg.
I don’t know how long I lay there screaming, but when I stopped my throat was sore and the pain had turned down to an amazingly painful throbbing. I started crawling forward, wincing each time my leg touched the ground. The soft light from my horn gave everything a shadowy look, but all I could focus on was to get away from… Actually what was I trying to get away from?
I looked back and saw that the roof had collapsed, the entire hall filled with dirt and concrete. There was however a hole in the debris leading up. I crawled back towards the debris and tried to look up. Unable to see anything, I strengthened my light spell, and was rewarded with a small glint of light on metal far in the distance. Wherever I was, it was far down.
Suddenly a water drop hit my horn. I started looking for any pipes along the torn walls and find nothing. Hopefully that meant there was a way for the rain to get in, which meant a way for me to get out! I think I just changed my opinion about rain, it’s wonderful.
I just lay there for what seems like hours, the shadows playing tricks on my mind. I tried to listen for dripping, but felt unable to focus entirely as my entire body was aching. If only I had some form of spell that could have healed my wounds. “Stupid cutie mark,” I wheezed out.
Then I heard something. It sounded like voices. I tried yelling but my throat was too sore, so all I got out was a wheezing yelp. Suddenly, there was a groaning as the walls shifted a bit, followed by yelling from the hole in the roof. Oh, rescue was coming!
Then I heard the voices distance themselves until they faded away. I just lay there, shocked. Nopony was coming for me. Nopony knew I was down here. If I was to get out, it has to be by my own four hoofs.
I look down on my hurting leg, realising why everything feels so lucid. My leg was still bleeding through the big hole in it. I rip a piece of my jumper and try to stop the blood flow with it. All I manage to do was to get an increasingly bloody piece of cloth into the open wound.
I start looking through my saddle bag for anything to stop the bleeding, and gasp in surprise at a red little bottle in the midst of my other junk, a healing potion. Pulling it open and pouring it over the wound, I hiss as the magical fluid cover the wound, slowly closing it. After a few seconds the wound isn’t bleeding anymore and it look almost a day old.
My entire body relaxed as the pain slowly withdrew from my leg. I tore another piece of my jumper and tied it around the wound in case it started bleeding again. I stood up, my legs trembling, and started slowly moving down the tunnel, still pretty woozy from the loss of blood.
After a few steps my light illuminated a wall right in front of me. The corridor was turning to the left, so I staggered over to the corner and leaned on it, panting heavily. Even after the healing potion simply moving my leg made it flare with pain. While taking a little break I looked down the new corridor. It looked almost exactly like the last one, without the collapsed roof of course. However on the left side there was a door.
I started dragging my hooves towards it, taking it slow as to not hurt my leg anymore. When I got closer my light shone on a sign above the door labeled ‘Storage’. I tried to push the button next to the door causing it to start opening but just a few centimeters of the ground the door stopped with a groan.
“Damn it!” I grumbled, sitting down just to get of my leg. “Now what?” I looked closer at the door, noticing that there was a lot of metal scrap shoved into the side of the door.
“Why would anypony do that?” I mumbled to myself as I gave some of it a tug with my magic. It came loose after a little effort. I started clearing the rest of it away from the sides.
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I finally got the door open. All I could see inside was boxes. Storage boxes, ammo boxes and a single medical box with a faded pink butterfly on it. I dragged my hurting body over to the medical box and tried to pry it open. The box let out a small clang as the lock prevented me from getting the front off. Who locks away emergency supplies? I looked around frantically after a key or something else to help me open the darn thing.
Then I saw it! At the very edge of my spells light range I saw the second best thing to a key. A rock. I levitated it over and grabbed it in my forehooves. I aimed where the lock and slammed with all of my might. The box got a nasty mark but it wasn’t enough to dispatch the lock. I brought it down again. This time it let out a satisfying crunch and an ominous klirr.
I opened the broken box to find the remains of one or two healing potions floating around in there. There was also some drenched magical bandages and a syringe of what I thought was Med-X. I carefully tilted the box and started drinking what’s left of the healing potions, holding a hoof to stop the pieces of the bottle from getting inside my mouth. Setting down the box I lifted up the syringe and inject it into my foreleg. The combination of the potions and the painkiller removed almost all of the pain and only a faint echo of it still remained.
The bandages were probably useless since they were wet, so I sat the box down and turned my gaze to the other boxes in the room. Ignoring the ammo boxes, seeing how my gun skills are lousy anyway, I opened a storage box. It was empty, and so was most likely the rest of them too. I got back up and walked out the door, feeling a lot better after the medical supplies.
I stumbled down the hall, the pain gone but my head still feeling like it was stuffed with wool.
Suddenly I spotted something glowing softly red further down the hall. As I got closer I saw the source of the light. It was the opening console for a door and since it was glowing red it was a locked door. I sighed and started moving past the door, when I saw something odd about the door.
It was the same dusty gray as the rest of this place, but there was something that looks like black paint splashed on it. I carefully reach out with my hoof and touch it. As my hoof made contact I felt something like a cold shudder flow through my body. The stain, however, felt just like normal paint, like it's a thin layer on top of the metal door.
"I guess my nerves are getting too me," I muttered as I continued to walk down the corridor. Just a small distance away from the door the corridor ended in a T-intersection. One arrow pointed in each direction, the right one read "Lab, Cells, Quarters" and the left one "Cargo elevator".
A surge of hope filled my chest as I rushed down the left corridor. A bit into the corridor I could see another red light, but also the soft glow of a terminal. The door may be locked but maybe the terminal could unlock it.
As I closed in on the terminal I noticed that it was logged in. If I was lucky I might be out of here in a few minutes. As I walked in front of the terminal I immediately started searching for a command to open the door and after only a short search I found it! I selected it and got an error flashing on the screen. Apparently the login I was on didn’t have authority to open the door.
I sighed, stepping away from the terminal, I felt my hoof hit something and a loud clirr of many small metal pieces hitting each other. I looked behind me but found no possible source of the sound, but I was pretty sure what it was. A key ring!
After searching for it for quite a while, I closed my eyes and tried a magic trick that one of the unicorns in One Way had thought me. I imagined a vague image of the keyring and channeled my magic at it. It felt like I had just tried to run straight through the Manehattan ruins with my saddle bags fully loaded. I slowly opened my eyes too find myself in a much brighter hallway than before.
Looking around for the source of the light I found that instead of making the keyring levitate, as the trick was meant to do, it had made the keyring into an improvised flashlight. The bright glow coming from the keyring had a soft feel to it and didn’t hurt my eyes, but was still bright enough to light up the close vicinity.
I stopped channeling power into the keyring, feeling drained. Too my surprise it didn’t stop glowing as I did so. I levitated it up and grinned. Heading over to the elevator door I started trying the keys on the lock.
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“Okay who put fifty keys on the same key ring and not a single one is too this elevator!” I growled tossing the keychain at the terminal. While I tried every single key on the lock I noticed that the light from the ring had faded a bit. I began stomping of until a sharp pain made me remember that I was injured. I looked back at my improvised bandages and saw that the wound was bleeding again, filling out the last clean part of the cloth with a deep red.
I groaned and started walking again, more carefully this time, when I remembered that I had past another locked door. Levitating the keys back up too me, I headed back to the door with the paint on it.
I sat down in front of it, lifting the first key into place. It didn’t even fit the hole. Second one then. It entered the hole nicely and giving it a light turn, the lock gave a soft click and the light changed from red to green. I was taken aback at first. Something was going right?
I opened the door and walked into what looked like it had been a small office that somepony had thrown a tantrum in. There was nothing in the room except the desk and the terminal on top of it, which was standing up. A few fallen bookshelves filled the floor and some of the pipes in the roof had fallen down.
In the other end of the room I could barely make out a window, the light from my keys growing dimmer and dimmer. With the light from the keyring fading, I noticed that the terminal was on and letting out a soft green light. Walking towards the terminal in the fading light, the silence was suddenly interrupted by a loud snap as I felt something give way under my hooves. Looking down the skeleton of a pony was lying crushed under one of the bookshelves. I seemed to have stepped on one of the pony’s front legs making it snap. I quickly stepped away from the skeleton, then going forward again, making sure not to not step on any more of it.
On the other side of the desk I found a toppled chair with another skeleton laying in it. This one seemed to have gotten hit in the head by a lamp falling down. I turned my attention to the terminal instead. It seemed to be a special model, being much more bulky than the ones I had seen. I gave an annoyed sigh as I noticed that the terminal was locked and I knew that there was no chance that I could unlock it. I sat down and went through my saddle bag for anything to eat, this place being as good as any for taking a break. I smiled as I found a package of sugar bombs. Tearing the package open, I immediately popped two of the sugary treats into my my mouth. So sweet!
Munching my way through the package I looked around the room. A piece of paper lying next to where I sat caught my attention. I let go of the sugar bombs package and levitated the paper up to my eye level. There was a single word on it. ‘Progress’. I stared at the word, then glanced to the terminal, then back at the word. I stood up and entered the word “progress” as the password. It let out a small ‘bip’ as the password was accepted,the screen filling up with a list of files. That was probably the most insecure way of keeping a secret password I had ever seen.
A lot of the files seemed to be research logs listed on a daily basis. I scrolled past them but that only brought up more of the logs. How many was there? I keep scrolling past what seems like thousands of logs until I reached something different. The very last file was of a different kind than the rest. I selected it and opened it, only to nearly jump out of my hide as the room was filled with extremely loud music
The earsplitting music lasted for only a few seconds before it was shut off. “Flower, you can’t have your music on that high, it’s interfering with the tests.” I looked around for the source of the voice before realising the screen of the computer was now playing a video. On it was a really tired looking mare, her gaze looking towards the windows. No wait, she was looking towards the door, stupid mirror effect. Her mouth started moving followed one second later by what must be her voice. “Lay off me, Biscuit.” She sounded as if she would collapse any second. “The boss put me up for a triple shift and I’m not getting off until 2 hours from now. I need that radio right now!” I kept eating my sugar bombs, feeling a little sorry for the mare, Flower was it? I knew how rough a double shift was and I didn’t even want to know how bad a triple one would be. Her job was probably more straining than my guard duty job.
Flower starting to speak again broke me out of my thoughts. “And since they increased the intensity of the experiments I can barely look through my window without feeling sick anymore.” Her head turned now looking towards the windows. Suddenly the room on the screen shook followed by what sounded like a really heavy earthquake. The viewpoint changed from the mare too the roof. I could hear things falling and a yelp of pain and confusion.
Then it all went silent and the screen went black. I realised that my keys had gone back to normal and with the screen going black, the last light in the room was gone. I lit up my horn with a soft glow and turn my head towards the same direction as Flower had looked at the end.
I could see through two windows into what looked like a medical facility. There was an operating table and a lot of what I think was magical medical equipment. Great! Maybe I could find something for my legs. I got out of the chair and then looked back into the other room again. Something was off about it. Then I saw it and I felt how a scream started to build in my throat. Two deep green eyes was looking back at me and under them, there was a wide, sharp-toothed grin.
Notice!
Level two attained.
New perk: Sunpony. Grants +5 to all skills while in direct light from the sun or your horn. Gain -5 to all skills when in darkness.
New trait: Dependant. You have always had a pony there for you when you needed it. -5 in non tag skills but you gain 10% extra XP.