Mr Stripes was busy pacing up and down Bridleway when the first eldritch ululation rose from underneath like an escapee from Hell, low and dirge-like and warbling straight through the sidewalk.
He paid it absolutely no heed and nor did anypony else, faint as it was and drowned out by the general bustle and chatter and clamour of Manehattan. Instead, Mr Stripes kept pacing, doing his best impersonation of a thundercloud with a grievance as he did so, and reading as well. He held an open book in the cleft of his forehoof, and glowered at it as if it had done him personal injury.
The book’s title was 1001 Possible Presents for Your Teenage Filly’s Birthday (And Where to Get Them All at Extremely Short Notice), and as he read it, Mr Stripe’s forehead formed a mass of worried wrinkles that could have put glaciated continents to shame.
“‘Tickets to a concert by whatever hip new band foals are listening to these days’,” he muttered under his breath, sidestepping a newscolt as his brows creased further. “Am reasonably sure ‘hip’ was unhip term even when I was colt. What else? ‘A full-size poster of Prince Blueblood in all his strapping and princely majesty’. Hah, Plaid is far too discerning. Surely this book must have better idea or two.”
Mr Stripes was a stallion who usually ambled through life with the breezy and impervious single-mindedness of a warship. He knew that he was one of the biggest and best and mostly-ethical landlords in Manehattan. If you swung a cat anywhere in the city, you’d have good odds of concussing it off one of his properties. He knew that Plaid Stripes, the darling apple of his eye, nurtured a spark of genius that would prove her to be one of Equestria’s foremost sartorial artists in due time. He knew that his collection of miniature furniture was unequalled in the world, and when the great miniature furniture collectors of history gathered in the Hereafter, he’d feel no shame in their company. Mr Stripes knew many things, and was sometimes even right about them.
But to his deep unease, and after nagging weeks of putting off the decision, he’d found he didn’t know what to get Plaid for her birthday today. He was out of his depth, and felt like half the stallion he usually was. And if he couldn’t come up with something worthy of his daughter, he’d be no sort of stallion at all.
“‘A job, so that they can buy their own present’,” he read on as he came to a sidestreet. “Ooh. Snippy, writer. And taken care of, besides. ‘A dress resplendent enough for a Princess.’ Bah, she makes her own out of kitchen utensils, and they are more than resplendent. What about… what’s this?”
A maintenance hole cover by him had started clanking and rocking, as if something was trying to open it up from underneath. From below, there came a few muffled curses and yips, and a gleaming metal edge was shoved up through a brief gap. The whole thing was levered upwards in one abrupt motion and, accompanied by a fragrant guff from the city’s sewer, there rose a long and shaggy canine head.
The Diamond Dog blinked owlishly up at the bemused Mr Stripes, glanced round at a nearby sign, and then clambered up out of the hole. “Up, dogth!” he barked with a long and badly-crooked muzzle, beckoning up with a paw, his waistcoat studded with little jewels and tools. “Itth Bridleway. Up and out and away, before ponieth get thuthpithiouth and everything goeth to thit.”
“I… What were you doing down there?” said Mr Stripes, whose thought processes floundered when trying to parse ‘thuthpithiouth’ and who sought firmer ground for whatever this unhelpful distraction was. “Were you dogs mining down there? The city does not look kindly on that.”
“Were mining,” growled the dog, waving pack member after pack member out of the hole — some shaggy, some short-coated, some in sturdy waistcoats, some clad in armour. A few hauled up crates and long poles and pickaxes, and a couple gingerly held cages holding large, sleeping canaries. Most of them sent nervous backwards glances the way of the hole. The last dog out slammed the cover back down. “Blame our Alpha, the thtupid thod. Thought he found a nithe theam of gemth. Thought ponieth wouldn’t notith a buthted tunnel or two till we were gone. Thought it’d be fine to cut a earth paththage through the old route with ‘Delved Too Deep - Do Not Dithturb’ carved all over the wallth. ‘It’ll be fine, Patcheth,’” he said, sing-song. “‘That’ll jutht be greedy old-timerth keeping otherth out of their claim. Everydog knowth everything bad wath wiped out at near-thurfathe levelth long ago.’ Falling into a lava pit wath too good for him. Brainlethth berk.”
Mr Stripes was struggling to maintain his attention in the face of a thousand ‘th’s and a thousand specks of canine slaver. The yelping pack that was accruing about him and drawing the attention of everypony in the block didn’t help much either. He had important things to worry about. “Well, you just move along,” he said. “City won’t like to hear what you’ve been doing. Undermining our buildings. Bah! How irresponsible can you get?”
“Hah, thith much,” said Patches. “Come on, dogth! The dockth are thith way. There thould be an unattended thip or two lying around. Bring the crateth and canarieth, we’re changing continentth!”
Mr Stripes shook his head and turned around. Dogs could do whatever it was dogs did, and whatever it was Patches was rambling about, it wasn’t any concern of his. But one little spark of desperation stayed his hooves, and he glanced back at the dog. “Ah… one question.”
Patches glanced around, irritation and nervousness vying for dominance in his expression. “Yeth? Make it quick.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have idea about what the world’s best daughter, the very star of my skies, would deserve as birthday present, no?”
Patches stared flatly at Mr Stripes. From underneath the street, a deepening doom-doom-doom thrummed, which Mr Stripes paid little heed to. “I thuthpect,” the dog said, “that a nithe long vacathion away from thith thity would be jutht what thhe needth. Bye-bye, now. Don’t thtay here long.”
“Vacation,” Mr Stripes murmured to himself. His face lit up. “A vacation? That… hah, that is good idea! Somewhere warm this time of year. Maybe she’d like that as a special treat. Well, I shall consider, and thank you—”
He looked back up at Patches, but the dog and his pack were already fleeing in the direction of the waterfront, weaving through a curious audience of Manehattanites. He regarded them for a moment, shrugged, and moved on. If they were in a hurry to get somewhere, he wouldn’t delay them. They’d given him a good idea.
Mr Stripes angled himself towards the nearest travel agency, sure and happy once more. The universe had righted itself. Sunny places and budgets wheeled through his mental world as the powerful gears of his thought process gratefully chugged into life along a given direction.
He ambled off around a corner, whistling as he went, and left the dogs, the maintenance hole, and whatever that business had been about out of sight and, the second after, out of mind as well.
Out of Mr Stripes’ sight and mind, a moment after he’d rounded the corner, the earth shuddered and rumbled. From beneath the streets, another low, cold, and whisper-thin alien ululation rose.
This once again had no effect on the street traffic of Bridleway, the volume level of which could normally only be measured with a silly number of decibels, and ponies continued about their business unperturbed. Peddlers peddled. Hawkers hawked. Pedestrians pedestriated.
The maintenance hole cover wobbled as if something was trying to push its way up and out. It rose an hair’s width up off the ground, and the unearthly keening of the deep became that bit more pronounced and attention-getting. The hubbub hushed, and the collected Manehattanites looked quizzically around at the maintenance hole. Some of the older ponies sunning themselves on benches acquired the steely, faraway looks of those who’d lived through the Great Alligator Infestation of several decades hence, and rose creakily to attention once more.
“If those darned dogs woke up anything, I swear to the princesses…” one of them muttered, a wizened unicorn mare with two-and-a-half peglegs and a face full of scars. She nudged a nearby newspaper-laden newscolt and tossed several bits at him. “You start passing those papers out to everypony here, sonny!”
“What? Er, okay. Why, ma’am?”
“Don’t you know your history? Or applied biology? Hard whack to the snout with a rolled-up paper and a harder cry of, “No! Bad!” did for your average ‘gator nine times out of ten.”
“Oh.” The newscolt studied the bits in his hoof. “What happened the tenth time?”
“‘Gator did for you. Now get to passing!”
“You sure it’s alligators we’re dealing with?” said a griffon sausage-inna-bun seller, who had drawn a long toasting fork out from his cart’s stove, the tip still glowing red-hot and the length sporting several seared lumps of quorn. The newscolt distributed papers left and right, and the whole of the street’s crowd shuffled and edged guardedly towards the maintenance hole cover.
The old mare snorted. “You know of any other sewer-dwellers that could make that sort of racket, sonny?”
“No,” the griffon said hesitantly, his gaze on the maintenance hole cover, which was now wobbling ever-upwards, with something dark and tendrilous half-glimpsed underneath it. “Definitely none that’ve got tentacles, that’s for sure.”
He pointed with the toasting fork, and many pairs of eyes followed it to where a black and glistening tentacle-tip had levered up the hole cover and now lay on the sunny sidewalk. It twitched this way and that, rose for a moment as if inspecting everypony present, and for a long moment, hung still.
“Could be a common-or-garden Saddle Arabian tentacled ‘gator,” the mare said dubiously. “They were always the most vicious of the breeds.”
“Don’t be daft, Moonshine,” said a similarly old and scarred stallion. “They had pale brindled tentacles. That one’s solid and darker’n the hollow bits inside your head.”
“Daft? Hollow bits? I’m not having that sort of lip from a stallion with a prosthetic where most ponies keep their haunch, Peatreek!”
“You cheeky so-and-so, you were the one not watching my back when we were making a sweep of the North Tunnel—”
“Priorities?” ventured the griffon as the concrete around the maintenance hole began to crack. The ululation resounded with new and terrible force, and the cover slid to one side. From the impenetrable blackness that stood revealed, down in the darkness beneath the city, there came the sound of something moving. Something vast. Something rising.
It was one of these rare occasions where the citizenry of Manehattan were silent, and they took a collective step back as the concrete cracked and crumbled, as something ascended with all the placid unstoppability of a glacier that had forgotten its relationship to gravity. It pushed up through the street, a hulking mass that carried and shed lumps of pavement to reveal a black, roiling, shapeless form. The whiff of the sewers rose with it, but under their reek there lay buried another musk like dusty sulphur, incubating since some bygone aeon.
Rubble pattered down around it, and before the paralysed eyes of Bridleway, there emerged…
There emerged...
No words could do it justice, but these’ll try their best. The seething, shapeless, protoplasmic, building-sized mass of it towered over the watchers, its rugose hide blackly iridescent under the light of the sun, seething with an aura of unlight. Ghastly, dripping appendages unfolded from all sides, an array of uncoiling tentacles and tendrils and polyps and spindly, segmented limbs that groped here and there in the clear Manehattan morning.
From gaping, cave-like orifices and from the ends of stalks, countless eyes stared unblinkingly outwards and fang-lined mouths hung open, ringed with sensory organs beyond reckoning, drinking in details beyond pony ken. Everything that mortal imaginations conjured in the abyss between stars and at the bottom of worlds sat there on the sundered sidewalk, in that rough beast that had arisen from those deepest pits carved out by the Fires of Creation when the world was young.
Silence hung then. The Dweller Below’s eyes blinked slowly, one by one. Several on the end of stalks swung this way and that. A tendril reached out for the nearest poster-covered wall and tentatively prodded it. From a mouth, or possibly mouths, there came a noise like “Schk-vloorp?”
And like that, the multitude released its breath. Voices rose from all quarters.
“Wow, ha ha, it’s got tentacles everywhere!”
“Look, it might have been an alligator, we couldn’t have taken the risk it wasn’t —”
“Is that a polyp it’s got there? I don’t know what a polyp is, but that’s what it looks like the way it sounds.”
“Cthlooglk?” burbled the Dweller Below which, for its own part, wasn’t sure what to make of this strange new environment with disorientating amounts of light and hardly any lava oceans to speak of. Weird colours blistered on every surface it could perceive, the dimensions and the Euclidean geometry were all wrong, and the familiar creaks and echoes and songs of the under-places were nowhere to be found. Sensory organs which had done sterling work for millennia at fathomless depths below the world peered owlishly up at the sun, which the Dweller Below tried and failed to eat when the exact distances involved eluded it. Where was the ceiling? Lots of little alien things chattered on all sides. It peered at them. “Twrp?”
“Stars above, it’s like a sea-slug and the mould in the back of my fridge had a child, and Discord was the doting godparent.”
“Does it look like a threat to Equestria and/or the world at large, you reckon? We’ve not had one of those in weeks.”
“Looks like something the Element Bearers’d wrangle. Say, doesn’t one of the Element Bearers have a boutique here? Maybe she could —”
“She’s not an Element Bearer anymore, slowpoke, she’s a Rainbow-something-er —”
“Well, whatever she is, you reckon she’ll know what to do?”
“Somepony take my picture with it!” said a uniformed pegasus constable, brandishing a camera.
Alien though the little creatures may have been, the Dweller Below couldn’t help but feel that this wasn’t how they were meant to react. It angled various sensory organs up towards the sky and tooted with bewilderment. Latent agoraphobia was dawning on it, which was a terrible thing to discover was even possible, let alone that it had. Its tentacles groped blindly upwards in search of wherever the ceiling was. There had to be one somewhere. “Yog-z-zwrgl?”
Lots of varyingly-sized structures lay around it, with oddly-regular walls rising up and stopping over what seemed like littler caverns within this great over-cavern. The walls themselves ran on, framing great open stretches, and the Dweller Below recognised those at least. It knew tunnels when it saw them. Perhaps one would lead up to a point where there was a ceiling in reach, and maybe even up to that curious glowing thing. It slithered abruptly off down Bridleway, tentacles and tendrils schlurp-schlurp-schlurp-ing off and on the concrete as it went. The crowd jumped back as its bulk bore past them, and several unfortunate parked wagons became several parked collections of kindling as it swept over them.
For a long moment, the massed Manehattanites stared after the Dweller Below as it careened off down the long street, heralded by crashes and swerves and swearing from the road traffic ahead and by a choir of shrieks from the pedestrians seeing it for the first time. Then there came an embarrassed cough from the constable, who put his camera away. “Oh, right, it’s a public hazard. I forgot.”
“What’s everypony waiting for? After it!” yelled Moonshine. “We’ve got to corral it somehow before it wrecks more and hurts somepony!”
“Corral that? How exactly?”
“With ingenuity, that’s how! Come on!”
“Pitchforks!” yelled the griffon, spotting a demand when the market presented one and whipping out spare toasting forks from a drawer in his cart. The crowd surged around him, charging after the fleeing Dweller Below. “Get your miniature pitchforks here! Freshly-made, they’re lovely!”
Several streets away from events as they unfolded, a travel agent looked up from her desk and out the window. “Er,” she said, two ship tickets to Zebrica in hoof. “Are you hearing a distant crashing and unearthly keening as well, or is it just me?”
“Is likely of no consequence,” said Mr Stripes cheerfully, taking the tickets. “And many thanks for these. My daughter will be delighted.” He paused and studied the travel agent’s features, and rifled through his memory for faces. “You don’t happen to rent one of the apartments in Lower-Upper-Left Midtown, no? I rent out many there.”
“I… yes? Apartment four in Mulberry Hei— oh. Oh, Mr Stripes!” The agent flushed. “I… I should have the rent by next —”
“No need! Have a six-month reprieve!” said Mr Stripes, who knew that he was a good landlord who made firm but fair landlording decisions, but who also knew that a good mood was a thing worth spreading. He turned to leave as the agent gaped. “Please, enjoy your rest of day! I know I will.”