The day was almost over, and the sun outside was setting, creating a vibrant tapestry of oranges and purples. Minted Wrap could see the painting from a window in the hallway he was cleaning. It was much easier to see such a thing from the seventy-seventh floor of a one hundred story sky-scraper. The carpet was filled with crumbs and soil residue from the potted plants placed in the corners of the hall and the large opening leading to a room of offices at its end. Minted Wrap was exhausted. His usual deepmint fur was darkened by his sweat, his deep blue eyes were bloodshot with fatigue; and his bright green mane and tail, usually straightened out and with a vertically wavey pattern of white, was now a jumbled mess. At least his paper hat cutie mark wasn't affected by the working conditions.
This vacuuming was just the final bit of work he had needed to do before leaving for home, and he couldn't deal with it anymore. Could he talk, he would voice his frustration, but he really wanted to finish his work instead of thinking about what he couldn't say. Perhaps a raise would be in order? He could ask his boss. Solar Plant Industries was a very lucrative agricultural industry. Maybe they had a few bits they could add to his pay.
Wiping his forehead for a second time, the stallion took a drink of water from one of the bottles hanging from the brown belt around his waist. Fifteen minutes later -give-or-take-, the stallion noticed the lights above flickering and buzzing with with effort just so they wouldn't turn off. Minted frowned at the event. He had just changed the fuses to the main fuse boxes a week ago on account of similar issues with lighting. Somepony walking across the carpet attracted his attention to the offices forward. A brown and red pegasus had just left the elevator and was walking through the offices, seemingly looking for something and carefully pushing away chairs and desks with moderate difficulty.
Having no real way to talk, Minted Wrap slapped the end of his nearby broom against the wall, and it worked. The pony was coming to him. It was another stallion that the janitor had never before seen. He figured it was just someone from the lower levels since he never cleaned anything but the higher ones.
"Greetings, pony," the new stallion said. "I seem to be a bit...lost..." he sighed. "Do you know where I am?"
Minted tapped a symbol on his vacuum: A green raindrop surrounded by two white circles, the outer one being grayer than the inner.
The visitor rolled his eyes in response. "Yes. I know WHERE I am building-wise. I just don't know WHERE in the building I am. Why don't you just tell me?"
Minted turned his head slightly and looked at the pony, judging them and seeing them with suspicion.
"What's the matter? You can't say anything?" the visitor asked. He hummed as he thought of the reasons. "I would think it would be that you don't trust me, but you would've said so." He tapped the ground in his realization. "You lost your ability to speak! Would you like to recover it?"
Minted snorted aggressively at the stallion and bared his teeth.
"Don't worry. It won't hurt." The stallion's body started to flux somehow. After images of him were fluttering in and out of existence all around him. "You'll just have to wait for a while, and you'll have all the cords you want!"
His face exploded outwards in multiple sections as multiple tentacles erupted from his face and started whipping at the air. Other, smaller tentacles came out of his body and whipped around like tiny worms trying to free themselves from the ground. The largest tentacles had an assortment of eyes and single rows of teeth all along them, and their slithering created a disgusting, slimy noise. Wrap would have yelled at the sight, but all that came out was air. The stallion threw his broom at the creature and galloped as far from it as he could.
The nightmarish beast continued to fluctuate uncontrollably, even causing the light to shift through various levels of brightness. Minted almost fell over multiple times whilst rushing past desks and printers due to the building itself trembling. Perhaps it did so knowing what was within it.
"Don't leave!" the visitor pleaded. "You'll get your voice back! I just need to open you up first."
His ribcage crackled and snapped while it tore through his chest, revealing a maw filled with more tentacles, this time covered in sharp barbs, spinning like buzzsaws. The creature looked around, trying to find the stallion that had escaped it. It fluxed again, followed by yet another general earthquake. The deafening noise of shaking debris didn't find itself any improvement due to the tentacles throwing desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and other office supplies haphazardly. Finally, the creature arrived at a dead end where a janitor's closet waited almost tauntingly.
Just to amuse itself, the visitor scraped against the door with its tentacles and, with a distorted laugh, slowly opened it to see that Minted was waiting for him with a cloth over his muzzle and a bucket in hoof. The janitor threw the product all over the monster and waited for it to back away, but the many eyes it had widened slowly from their 'happy' gait. For a moment, nothing happened, then a loud hissing noise followed by smoke started emanating from the creature.
Minty tapped his hooves casually and slowly went under the immobile creature to carefully rush towards the elevators. Luckily, the one the monster took was still there, so it didn't take long for Minted to manage to leave, but one last look before the doors closed showed the visitor wasn't moving since it had bleach thrown onto it. The green pony hoped he wouldn't come to regret that action in the foreseeable future.
He panted loudly, thankful that everything was over, then another tremor, quadrice the violence of the previous ones, shook the elevator and its occupant like maracas. The breaks and emergency clamps all failed, and Minted's head slammed against the back of the machine when it slammed diagonally through a wall further down. The stallion had no idea how much time had passed since he was knocked out, but he was sure it was a long time. Any hopes of this adventure being a dream was shattered simply after realizing where he was after managing to reorient himself. With some effort, Minted forced the damaged doors open to another floor with strange...characteristics.
It was very dark, the air was humid, and some of the walls were riffle with holes like they were chocolate left too long in the sun. In fact, there was a strange, black slime oozing about everywhere, and it was extremely sticky and gross. His head still hurt, and the stallion was uncomfortable wading through this muck before him. The further he waded, the tighter the corridor seemed to become and the more the muck was tightening around him. The door to the stairs was just a few feet away, but Minted was stuck in place. He couldn't move. That's when he heard a sound and looked down. He was in the 'mouth' of some kind of tortured soul moaning silently. For lack of terror, Minted noticed that the face was almost like that of the previous stallion, but without the tentacles, obviously. The goop started climbing his legs and stretching from the walls. He could feel the abomination burning through his skin and came to the horrible realization that he was going to die.
He whimpered and cried silently as he felt the life eb away from him, but then a chance appeared. Some kind of beam of light erupted from the lower floor, hitting the glob and burning it away while it screeched in pain and did its best to slide away from the light. Limping forward, Minted jumped down the hole and landed hard on the ground below. He noticed that he appeared to be in some kind of castle corridor as attested by the stones, and decided to hide behind a cobbling of half-rotted crates punched in from the right corner by rusty halberds that fell down from an old weapon holder. There was moss and other plants growing all over the floors and walls despite there being little-to-no light coming into this place. Even the thin, tainted glass windows, such as the one behind Minted Wrap, although they were completely covered in dust and decay. If light came through them, it would be a miracle.
Taking the moment to rest peacefully, the janitor looked through one many cracks through the crates to look further on. There was an opening to a large, circular, indoor garden whose plants had long since died and rotted away. Little alcoves housed rusted suits of armor held up only by metal beams, but even these failed to what seemed like long bouts of time. Minted covered his mouth and felt his heart race a marathon when loud, slow clanks resonated against the stone walls.
It was a suit of rusted, pony armor moving with difficulty along the floor. Supposedly patrolling the halls. Its movements were immediate and 'locked' when its body ceased one action. It was almost machine-like. It looked around, its body cricking and dropping rust particles, then decided to walk towards Minted for no discernible reason other than to continue its task. There were no sounds other than the clanking of its feet getting louder and louder, closer and closer. The stallion felt himself hyperventilating with every step, and having dared to look through a thin crack could see a strange, solid red fire burning in the left eye behind the hollow, horizontal line serving as a visor.
Then another shake rattled the office building, and walls in the circular room were blasted out, throwing rubble and dust everywhere. The statue stopped moving and twitched around to see that several ponies and diamond dogs wearing black suits of full body armor were threatening it with what looked like high-tech rifles with two white sections -both at the top and bottom of the weapon- jutting forward. One of the diamond dogs fired at the armor.
While a bit of it was torn off, the armor was not properly damaged. It expanded outwards, a gross, melted amalgamation of flesh growing and pushing the bits of armor apart from each other, leaving a random assortment of armor sections all over its dark body reflecting a blueberry-colored sheen. Its extremely thin body looked like it had decayed and melted before being thrown into a freezer. As for its face, the right side had completely slumped over and was hinging onto the 'skull' by barely a thread. The left eye was now the one holding the flame, and the right eye, hanging precariously along with the rest of that facial segment, looked around. The scelera was black, and the iris and pupil were several layers of blacks and whites. This, coupled with the bubbling of the skin, made it look like the creature had not slept for a very, very long time.
"Potential possessive located," the diamond dog said to a blue crystal glowing alongside the right of his face mask. "Neutralizing and capturing. If capture is impossible, flux destabilization is the only recourse."
The ponies and dogs started shooting the creature with their weapons. Minted was almost deafened by the loud bangs coming from their weapons and the effects of bullets smashing into the walls. The stallion saw that the shot walls were temporarily returned to their original state, but Wrap couldn't concentrate on them. He was too terrified, as attested by his violent shaking. The armor made a loud, gurgling noise accompanied by a loud screeching of heavy, rusted metal.
At the end of the screech Minted heard a feint, vocal wailing, and then he saw the armor rush forward. In place of it hands were lengths of flesh unequal in size and width. They wrapped around one of the armored ponies and repeated smashed them into the ceiling and the ground, denting both deeper and deeper with every strike. It threw the pony into a group of others and followed up with a charge. Fortunately for the ponies, a wall of diamond dogs formed up to take the impact of the possessed armor, but it didn't do much for the three taking the direct hit, for they themselves appeared to melt and be inhaled by the nearby armor, turning into simulacrums of the original, rusted monstrosity. They saw no qualms in attacking their former comrades, but a pegasus with his wings covered with a blue sheen flew in and impacted into one with his hind legs, sending it into the wall. He backed away and shouted orders to the others.
"Get the purifiers and exorcists in here! We need to free our comrades!"
Minted saw an opportunity in an air vent across from him and crawled towards it. He cursed in his mind due to the grating being locked. Punching it multiple times revealed itself beneficial, especially with hooves, and the stallion kissed said parts of his body and smiled when he pulled the grate off.
"Hey! Who's that?!" one of the armored diamond dogs shouted.
A large group of twelve stopped attacking the monsters and pointed their guns at Minted, whose only instinct was to swallow nervously and remain still. His face was distorted with stress.
"Is that one of the workers here?" the same dog asked.
"I don't know," her pony companion replied. He took a few steps forward and pointed his gun at the stallion. "Who are you? What are you doing here? How are you still alive?"
Minted opened his mouth and gestured to it frantically in a bid to mime that he couldn't talk.
"It's trying to summon something from its mouth!" a mare pushed forward. "It's feigning silence in a bid to kill us. Kill it first!"
"Agreed!" the female diamond dog nodded.
They all started firing on the stallion, singing his fur and burning the skin underneath. With one last desperate buck, he managed to push himself into the ventilation shaft, but it wasn't over. The air current was violently strong, and Minted found himself swinging around corners, falling down holes, and being sucked upwards into more sections of the maze of metal and wind. When he was violently thrown through another grate, he groaned and rubbed his aching head.
He was now in a distorted, twisted area of the skyscraper, and now he got to witness the changes occur as another quake shook the building and caused everything to visibly flux uncontrollably. The blue floors bent and twisted every which way, often changing color and size, and the windows -whilst following the same morphing- depicted different parts of the day, different seasons, and even different timelines. They even did this within the same window, and it was confusing for the poor janitor. He wanted to go home and be in his bed. He never thought this was how his hard work was going to pay off.