//------------------------------// // Amethyst 2A: The Ward // Story: Lost Legacies // by AkibaWhite //------------------------------// [Night of Day 21] Twilight Sparkle's hooves clicked and clacked on the white linoleum as she entered the waiting area of Ponyville Memorial Hospital's Neurological Treatment Ward. She squinted a bit, her eyes making the transition from the harsh white light of the hospital proper to the warm amber glow of the atrium's ornate chandelier. The plush, expensive rug at the area's center silenced the noise of her hooves. Twilight suppressed a chuckle at the sight before her. "Detective?" Detective One Liner rested on an ottoman that matched the tan of his tousled mane, trusty fedora at his side. His head dipped low; his eyelids dipped lower. The wait and ottoman's comfortable cushion had taken their toll. Twilight cleared her throat and repeated in a louder voice, "Detective?" Liner's head snapped to attention, his blue-eyed gaze meeting hers. "Miss Sparkle." He quickly lifted himself off the cushion and proffered a hoof in greeting. "Thank you for meeting me here at this late hour." Twilight gave the hoof a polite shake. "It's not a problem." She observed the reception desk at the far end of the room. The nondescript unicorn stallion manning the station seemed to pay no heed to her arrival, or anything else for that matter. Liner motioned to the ottoman across from his own. "Please, have a seat. The director should be out to meet with us any minute now." Twilight hopped onto the cushion and folded her legs underneath her body. Not a bit had been spared in decorating this room, and the ottomans were no exception. Twilight pressed her limbs against the velvety softness and gave a little hum of satisfaction. No wonder Liner had dozed off. An orderly exited one of the two double-doors on either side of the reception desk and made his way to the oaken doors that Twilight had entered through. The lavender-hued mare watched Liner, who had remained standing, stare at the brown plaster walls behind her. She coughed nervously. "So, why are we here this late? Did you have some work that you needed to finish first?" Twilight raised an eyebrow. "For that matter, why bring me along? I can't imagine that the Sheriff's Department didn't have anypony to spare." "The director insisted that I come back after dark," Liner responded impassively, "and that I bring a unicorn with me. The P.S.D. doesn't have a unicorn under its employ." "What about those two officers from the raid on the inn?" Liner grimaced ever-so-slightly. "They returned to Canterlot the day after. Besides, neither of them were unicorns. The Canterlot P.D. won't field a unicorn agent outside the city without proof of criminal magic usage." Twilight sighed. "So the C.S.I. team that you called in didn't find anything in Room 208?" "Nothing outside of trace amounts of sulfur, which could have a lot of potential explanations this close to the frontier." Twilight shook her head. "I can't believe that you're having to deal with red tape in a case like this." "Actually," Liner replied with a hooftap on his shining badge. "The special dispensation I received from the princess has given me a lot more leeway than I usually have to work with. She even has the Royal Guard patrolling the countryside around Ponyville to keep the suspect boxed in tight, and if I were to press the issue, I'm sure that I could requisition a unicorn assistant." He bowed his head lightly. "Whose skills would be naturally inferior to your own." Twilight stared at the floor. "Not that I'm much use when there's an earth pony who can disappear and not leave behind any magic residue." It was Liner's turn to shake his head reprovingly. "Not so, Miss Sparkle. Intelligence is always an asset. After all, 'the fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise one's crime is the crime that is not found out.'" He smiled. "If Three Strike happens to be wise, I'd be in trouble without your assistance." Twilight's mouth fell open. "The Mare in Mauve?" Liner shifted his front hooves. "A personal favorite." "Mine too," Twilight gasped, unfolding one of her front cannons and letting it hang over the ottoman's edge. A winning smile crept over her face. "How about Perry Neighson?" Liner looked away, his voice reduced to an embarrassed mutter. "Childhood hero." Twilight's grin grew wider. "I'm impressed, Detective. I never would have figured you for the literary type." "It's just mystery novels," Liner remarked with a straightening of his coat. "I had a lot of time on my hooves as a kid." Twilight brought her other foreleg over the edge and leaned closer. "Say, is that why you became a-" "Detective Liner, Miss Sparkle," a stern voice interrupted. Both the addressees turned to see a white earth pony mare clad in an equally white lab coat. At first, Twilight didn't recognize who she was looking at, but the pink mane wound tightly in a bun soon gave it away. "Nurse Redheart?" she asked. The mare in question adjusted a set of black-rimmed glasses on her face and smiled. "Director Redheart now. Thank you both for coming." She sighed. "So, I assume that you're here to ask about the Ventium. Better late than never, I suppose." "Late?" Liner asked as he turned to dig something out of his coat pockets. Director Redheart nodded. "We gave notice to the Department of Health four months ago to send a team and clear out our excess inventory after the administrative shakeup." She snorted. "They sent the team straightaway, but left behind five bottles of this useless stuff. Legally, we're not even allowed to throw it away. It's just taking up space." Liner fished the bottle from Room 208 out of his coat and placed it on a nearby table. "Has it been taking up a little less space lately?" Redheart bent down and gave the labeling a studious glance. "This is one of ours all right. Hello, Number Six." Detective Liner frowned. "No patient name and no hospital logo. This is sloppy, even for in-hospital use." Redheart narrowed her eyes. "Why do you think the previous director is out of a job? I assure you, this isn't the only error resulting from his policies." "You called it 'Number Six,'" Twilight interjected. "So this isn't part of your inventory?" The director pulled a record sheet from her coat and laid it on the table. "Ten bottles in the initial shipment. One administered to patient. Five remaining in stock." She gave the table a hooftap. "Four unaccounted for. I reported this and the botched pickup to the Department of Health multiple times. I'm still waiting on a response." "I'm not surprised," Liner muttered as he scanned the record sheet. "The D.O.H. didn't handle all of Ventium's distribution." "They didn't?" Redheart responded with a quizzical stare. "The records say otherwise." Liner looked up from the paper. "Yours do. I been doing some digging ever since Miss Sparkle notified me of her difficulty in tracking down this bottle's point of origin." He turned to Twilight. "Remember how the primary test subjects for Ventium were the criminally insane?" "Yeah," said Twilight with a nod. Detective Liner gave the barest hint of a grin. "Your medical journals had it right; the shipping records didn't. The Health Department only handled the distribution for normal patient testing. The distribution to criminal patients was handled by the Department of Corrections, presumably to avoid the controversy that goes with using experimental drugs on those with no right to refuse treatment. They had agents identify themselves as representatives of the D.O.H. on delivery." "What a mess," Redheart groaned. "So that pickup team didn't even know that the Ventium was theirs to begin with, and the D.O.H. won't admit to any record of it being shipped here." She rolled her eyes. "When did politics become a part of my job description?" "Back to the question of the four missing bottles," said Liner. "The most obvious answer is theft. Why wasn't this reported to the police?" Director Redheart gave Liner a moment's stare before picking up the Ventium bottle and tossing it at the entrance to the ward. The glass cylinder bounced off of a sheet of green energy with a loud crackle, sending ripples along the surface of the magic barrier. The stallion at the reception desk looked up from his magazine with a smile. "Sweet," he mouthed before returning his bored gaze downward. Redheart flashed a cocky grin. "They check in; they don't check out. Every incoming shipment of experimental medicine is enchanted with a repulsion spell. You can't get it past the field without removing the enchantment, and even a unicorn would need a magic device that's kept locked up in my office to do that." She shrugged. "As you just saw, the enchantment wasn't removed. The police know that the field has been in place ever since the ward was constructed; you can't shut it down without turning off the entire building's magic generator, and that hasn't been done in three years. Sheriff Badge couldn't get his mustache to figure out how the bottles escaped, so he had the case dismissed and told us to double-check our records." The corners of Redheart's mouth turned down in a disgusted scowl. "Looking back, he actually had a point." Liner's expression soured considerably. "Our culprit must have a Cutie Mark in creating 'locked room' mysteries." Director Redheart raised an eyebrow. "Funny you should mention that." She turned about and began to walk toward the double-doors on the right of the reception desk, the folds of her lab coat billowing behind her. "Follow me, please." Liner grabbed his hat and motioned to Twilight, who promptly hopped down from the ottoman and trotted alongside the detective. As they passed through the doors and into a long hallway, her ears pricked up. "What about that patient who was taking Ventium? You said that one bottle had been used." Redheart continued forward, answering Twilight's question as they walked. "We received a massive influx of patients after the Discord Incident a couple of years back. Half the rooms in this place had never even been used before that; suddenly we were overwhelmed. Ponies who'd been discorded, ponies who'd been driven nuts by discorded ponies, we had all sorts of fun patients to deal with after that brouhaha." Her gait slowed. "But none of them had anything on Screw Loose." "Odd name," Liner remarked. "It was the staff's idea to call her that," said Redheart. "She was brought in as a complete Jane Doe: nonresponsive to all questions, no form of physical I.D. and no resemblance to any pony reported missing at the time. We actually reported her to the police for a different reason. She was covered in blood, and it wasn't hers." Twilight blanched. "She . . . she murdered somepony?" "It sure looked that way," Redheart responded as she began to glance up at the room numbers. "But the violent crimes that resulted from Discord's rampage were actually pretty few in number, and none of them matched the severity of what Screw Loose seemed to have been a part of. She was never officially charged with anything, but the Sheriff's Department had her labeled as Criminally Insane just so that we could keep her under lock and key if she ever became lucid." "Did she?" asked Twilight with more than a hint of trepidation. "No," Redheart answered flatly. "She worsened every single day. The doctors initially diagnosed her as a violent schizophrenic with symptoms of severe schizophrasia. They were understating the matter. Screw Loose tossed words around like salad and vacillated between moods the way most ponies change conversation topics. Most of those moods came with her kicking, biting, and generally lashing about. Even after the straightjacket became her clothing of choice, she made a regular habit of writhing about on the floor as if in severe pain." "What if she was really hurt?" said Twilight. Redheart stopped for a moment and turned to give Twilight a withering glare. "What kind of facility do you think this is? We examined every square inch of that pony's body for what could be causing that kind of suffering. The only answer that the physicians could come up with was that it had to be psychosomatic—'phantom pains', in other words." She shook her head and continued walking. "There's no way to tell how much of it was real to Screw Loose either. At times, she seemed to be aware of her own symptoms. She even had an unnervingly common habit of picking apart the doctors' analyses before going right back to making animal noises or other such nonsense." Liner coughed. "Sounds like the name fits, at least." Director Redheart stopped in front of Room 401 and turned about-face. Any and all levity had departed from her expression. "She didn't get that name from her behavior, Detective. It came from her Cutie Mark; well, one of her Cutie Marks anyhow." Twilight's eyes widened. "Cutie pox?" "Nothing that easy," said Redheart, her eyes drifting across the three types of lock on 401's door. "Her mark changed on a near-daily basis. The only commonality between all the ones we documented was the image of a metal screw. Her coat and mane colors shifted back and forth too, though that was more gradual. We tested for changeling blood and had unicorn specialists screen her for every known form of curse." She sighed heavily. "Everything came up negative." "This sounds crazy, even for an N.T. Ward," Twilight mused with a hoof to her chin. "Did you ever send word of it to Canterlot?" "We did," Redheart responded. "They sent us the Ventium; we began treatment, and after one week of no measurable improvement . . ." She waved a hoof at Room 401. "Screw Loose disappeared from this very room. The windows were barred, all the locks were in place, and wherever she went she took the straightjacket with her." Redheart gave a wry grin. "We reported it, as always, but the sheriff and her doctors were so glad to be rid of her that nopony made too much of a fuss about it. She hasn't been seen since." Liner gritted his teeth. "I'm beginning to think that my time would be better spent grilling Brass Badge for everything else he thinks isn't relevant enough to put in the case file." "One more thing before you go," said Redheart as she fished a keyring out of her lab coat. "I want you two to have a look at this room; Screw Loose did a bit of . . . creative decorating in the week before she disappeared. Good ole 'Brass 'Stache' said he'd get a research team from Canterlot to have a look, but I'm sure you can guess that we're still waiting on that." She slid a long key into the first padlock. "All right, Director," Liner acknowledged, slipping on his black shades as he did so. "I'll take what's behind door number one." Redheart paused, turned to give Liner a confused glance, and sighed as she returned to working on the locks. Detective Liner raised an eyebrow over his shades and looked to Twilight. "Too much?" Twilight's jaw hung slightly ajar. "What kind of detective stories were you into again? NEXT Episode 04: "What You Wish For"