With a subdued *fwump* a tiny shadow emerged into the vestibule of the bigtop tent. Pungent smoke assailed his nostrils as he surveyed the room and the edifice he had just meagerly bypassed.
Even so, the tip of his nose involuntarily scrunched closer to the folds of his hood. As he flexed his jaw he let his eyes wander around around his new surroundings.
The big wooden doors to his left loomed upwards almost higher than he could crane his neck. Well polished by many hooves the brass knuckles on each horizontal bar practically glowed in the light of the surrounding braziers. Huge letters adorned the oiled wooden slats; The Crown Raylneigh beamed down to anyone leaving the premises.
Looking upwards to the bronzed letters it was a small wonder he had missed them from the outside, if they were even on the outside to begin with. Musing on the last word he chewed his lip, but ended the thought when he was unable to parse out the meaning. Instead he turned to the rest of the room.
His already frazzled nerves stood on end as his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the chasm he now resided in. Twenty heights tall and nearly double as wide it was easily the largest room he'd ever seen. Five pegusi abreast easily could have raced one another from one end of the hall to the other with the space provided.
Twisting around he came face to face with the gaping maw of a tiger! Its fangs merely inches away from his nose.
He found the will to breath as his heart thumped in uneven strokes. Every fiber of his legs wanted to carry him back the way he had come but he willed his courage to stay and faced the giant cat with defiance.
Grouching and mumbling a curse, he looked the beast over with a curious eye, and even went so far as to walk around its side to see the chiseled features of each muscle perfectly represented to fully express the power they held.
As luck would have it, his entrance had landed him directly behind a row of old marble statues and plaques. Big brawny stallions stood in heroic poses, in defiance of whatever they were to come across. Many mares held ring and tasseled hoops as they twirled in silent repose. In one nearby relief a mare and stallion stood side by side supporting each other as they faced down whatever it was they stared at, their faces posed, determined, a smile creeping into being in the corners of their muzzles.
By the looks of them they had been dragged here a long time ago, and not from a short distance either. Deep scuff marks and old rain-rusted bolts marked the chipped bases at random. His eyes wandered over the damage as he readjusted his shovel farther back on his haunches. His gaze was led upwards by a marred back leg and suddenly stopped short.
He stared upwards at the crude grey protrusions sticking from the statue. Ponderously, he stared at the misshapen chunks of concrete before a bout of realization hit. It took only moment, but soon the tips of his ears were burning like the noonday sun.
With blushing cheeks he forced his gaze away and let it wander from the effigy to some of the others further on down the line. A raider had seen fit to, -endow, most of the mare sculptures with an extra smattering of crudely shaped bits of concrete. The off the cuff artist was terrible, but he or she had certainly gotten the generalities right.
As he stared at a particularly ginormous set of... somethings below a nearby statue he suddenly heard a loud creaking of hinges from behind. Ducking his head he barely got it behind a marbled base before a grimy looking stallion nosed his way inside.
The pegasus strode in through the small opening he'd made and yawned. With a half hearted kick he used his hind leg to close door the behind him. With steady steps he moseyed slowly down the hall, taking his time to stifle another yawn and return a revolver to its shoulder holster. He fluffed his dirt encrusted feathers and lazily reaching out with a tired wing to whap a statues backside on his way past. Chuckling to himself the pegasus wobbled a bit and nearly stumbled in his advance down the uneven dirt hall.
Following with his eyes the colt watched as he regained his balance and grumbled a bit. A pink scar lanced across his hindquarters, fully marring the fur and cutie mark he must have once had.
Raising his head above the marble base he managed to spy a sack of food dangling from the pegasi's other hip as the guard hoofed a few caps at what sounded like a tin can. The rattling hadn't even stopped before the feathered pony had moved on out of sight; his body obscured by the numerous edifices that lined the walk.
Craning his neck the colt was barely able to make out a slumped over figure bathed in shadowy gloom right next to where the pegasus had just passed. The old pony rested crookedly in a chair and snored quietly into the dim light as the caps ended their rattling inside the coffee tin at this hooves. He stayed perfectly still, ears drooped forwards, oblivious to the gathering of the toll. The hallway was completely silent again except for the light sounds of slumber.
Edging out from his hiding place the colt quietly moved on down the row of statues further inside. The depth of the shadows near the crook of the wall and the floor making it a relatively safe venture. As he progressed past the sleeping guard his attention was drawn again and again towards the wall across the hallway. Wandering from floor to the dim ceiling and back again his gaze found its way past the sculptures legs to oggle the varied colors and slogans beyond.
All of his vision was crowded with an assortment of old posters and advertisements from before the war. Bold typeface and brand slogans littered the haze of colors that crept out from each layered parchment. Even through the ravages of time most of the prints were more vibrant than anything he'd ever seen.
Red and blues mingled with each other in swirls before melding into the greens of pastures and plains. Ponies were everywhere, laughing, playing, and holding multitudes of things by their various handles and holds.
A warm feeling grew in his chest as he as his eyes wandered over the smiling faces and grinning ponies. He even saw a few of the posters that left forth from a distant memory, recognizing at first glance a partial Mint'als poster taped to the remains of a ministry flier.
A large Sparkle Cola advert directly across from him was easily the most garish of the bunch. With its cute poster-pony gleefully holding a drink in one hoof and a box of war bonds in the other, her eyes almost twinkled at the surrounding gloom. TREAT YOURSELF, AND THE TROOPS! it read in sprawling cursive over the bottom half of the image. He wished he could, just to see that smile in person he would sell even his soul.
He almost could feel a twinge of a smile creep onto his lips as he stared longingly at her. The pink coat and blond mane radiated from the wall even though the haze seemed to want to deny it. He could almost imagine her velvety voice inviting him for a cold sparkle cola. He closed he eyes and paused, letting that sweet feeling in his chest linger.
**zzzZZZZZZZ-snork**
He slowly opened his eyes and turned to glare at the distant doorman. The offenders jaw hung open letting a bevy of drool slide from his gaping muzzle to trickled down his double chin on its long journey towards the dirt floor.
Making a quick mental note to piss in the doorman's coffee can on the way back out he snorted to himself and resumed his quiet trot deeper into the hallway. The spell broken, he tried to dismiss the garish posters across the way, but ended up stealing a few more glances anyways. It wasn't long before another poster stole his full attention. This time however, it was on his side of the hall.
Half crammed into the unswept corner of the hallway it lay, covered in a thin layer of grime. He stooped down to curiously wipe away the cruddy layer covering it. With a few deft swipes of his hoof a colorful image of the ministry mares poked its bright hues into the room after a countless number of years being hidden away.
It was an advert for one of the most infamous Hoofer line of vacuums and personal care robots to date. At least that was what the poster boasted. Multiple blocks of text covered the poster in clumps quoting the mares about the "guaranteed quality" and "everlasting suction" it was famous for.
All of a sudden he remembered a sign he had glanced at outside of a tent as he had made his way inside the bigtop. Had they been selling vacuums too? He nodded to himself before smacking a hoof to his forehead.
Lowering his hoof back to the ground he quietly surveyed the colorful mares. All of them held a separate piece of a dismantled Mr. Hoofer in their grasp and smiled proudly outwards to all the passerby's that would evidently come across the showy lure.
Dead center and definitely the most eye catching was a purple mare clad in a bright white labcoat. In her magical grip she held aloft a spherical robot head and gazed at it lovingly like a mother would a prized child...
Swallowing hard his eyes slid away from her kind features to the gloom ahead. His legs carried him forward and only stopped momentarily to swipe an empty from behind the leg of a statue.
A quiet snap of his pouch and a flick of tail hares later he was well on his way down the hall before he spotted anything else that caught his attention so readily.
As his small frame pressed itself in shadow along the wall he crept towards the door he had spied just a second earlier. Almost hidden by a crumbling statue it had been only the wandering of his attention that had gotten him to catch sight of it. He slipped inside unseen to another anterior hallway.
Much smaller than the one he had just left, it seemed to him that it must have been used quite a bit less. Or more, depending. It was hard to tell from the perceivable state of disaster the hallway was in. Other than two more posters for the sparkle cola ad, everything else on the walls was either vandalized or splattered with varying degrees of red. Large wooden doors occasionally marred the otherwise flat wall here and there and only the large opening at the end of the hall invited any light into the space making it barely bright enough to see where he was going.
Spray cans had been used to draw all kinds of obscene words or images on the posters and were littered on the floor in heaps. Some of the illustrators had crossed the eyes out of some of the posters denizens. Some had merely just scratched them out making their unmarred happy smiles turn into a more sinister and unsettling visage.
His attention instead went to a batch of posters further on. Many of them had generously large stallion bits drawn on them, regardless of the subject. Somepony had even gone on a rampage with a rainbow marker inking the words 'buck ya'll' everywhere in gaudy cursive.
A bright splotch of red coated a poster directly over the entrance he was aimed towards. A stallion stared out from behind the mark with a huge grin; his mouth chomping away at a zebra cake. It was hard to tell with the streaks of red below the face but it looked like it said something to the tune of Better eat em' before they -ceed em'.
Just looking at the poster got his stomach turned into a knot. It grumbled painfully in the dark catching him off guard with how loud it was in the stillness. Wrapping a foreleg around his belly he stood wishing the grumbles away. Finally after some minutes it gave up the fight to be heard and petered off into tiny, barely audible rumbles.
With legs that felt weaker each passing minute he trotted up to one of the nearby doors, holding an ear against it before scurrying past to the next. Than the next. Other than a few small snores he hadn't heard anything from the rooms he had passed. He guessed that many of them must have been sleeping spaces. Either that or the ponies inside had passed out where they had stood.
Stopping at a door that appeared to be mute he nosed it open quietly as curiosity got the better of him.
It was barely open enough for him to have squeezed through when it stopped with a quiet thunk. Unable to swing any farther he snuck his head forwards and cautiously peeked an eye around the corner.
Laying in a puddle of sandy vomit a bedraggled stallion breathed in low sleepy breaths. His head sat at a what must have been a horribly uncomfortable angle. The neck didn't look broken from but it was still a miracle that the stallion was able to breath with such a sever tilt. Movement caught his eye and the colt watched a ball of lint rolled back and forth in time with the pony's breath.
He watched the lint roll back and forth for a bit as it grew in size with each pass over the grimy dirt floor. Before long the momentum carried it too close and it was unceremoniously sucked into the stallions open mouth.
Gawking with mouth agape the colt watched as the stallion slightly coughed and the ball of now slightly soggy lint returned to its rolling.
The colt turned to leave, but even before he got even halfway out of the frame his hoof painfully struck the door sending it once again careening towards the stallions head. With eyes watering he clutched his foreleg and watched the door swing with horror.
With a quiet thunk the door impacted the stallions forehead. Wincing at the hit the colt turned to run. With nerves on edge he was almost sprinting before he watched the stallion once again fail to move even an inch. A smile even creeped onto the bile covered lips as the cold dumbly watched on.
After a moment a smile of his own began to spread across his face. He could see a bruised bump where the door jam had hit him squarely on the temple. Loosing to temptation a devilish glint came into his eyes and his head turned to look at the door. After a second he pushed it again, this time a bit harder.
He was rewarded as a lighter thump a bit lower in octave resounded in the air. A softer push, funnily enough, brought out a higher sounding thunk.
Beaming now, he batted the door a few more times. thunk, thump-thump, thunk .
He giggled quietly and slowly closed the door on the stallion and his swelling forehead.