Chapter Two
Less Easy
Dinky’s breath was coming too quickly. The edges of her vision were turning a very dark shade of red. She suddenly realized how wide her eyes had stretched and shut them tightly. The enormous dog’s claws were not digging into her hide, but she should feel their cold smoothness against her ribcage. “Mommy…” she whimpered.
Nopony heard her, not even the dog or Apple Bloom, on account of how loudly Sweetie Belle was screaming.
“SOMEPONY HELP US!” she shrieked, thrashing her head about wildly. “PLEASE! SOMEPONY! SCOOTALOO!”
“Can it, Sweetie Belle!” Apple Bloom yelled at her. “There’s nopony out here. You’ll shred your voice at that rate.
Sweetie stared incredulously at Apple Bloom. “You are hanging from the jaws of a giant dog by your frilly pink bow, and you want me to stop calling for help!? What’s wrong with you, filly?”
Apple Bloom crossed her forelegs over her chest. “I just don’t think screamin’s gonna help none.”
Deflated, Sweetie Belle stopped yelling. “Sorry I called your bow frilly,” she said.
“S’fine.” Apple Bloom tapped the bow above her head, careful not to bump the sprinting dog’s chin. “I’m actually pretty surprised it’s holdin’ on so tight.”
“Yeah, seriously!” Sweetie was suddenly smiling. “What knot do you use to tie that thing?”
“I dunno. Granny Smith does it for me every morning.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah! Ain’t that sweet of her?”
“So sweet! Gosh, your family is the best.”
The dog suddenly skidded to a halt and let all three ponies go at the same time. They flew through the air over a little cliff and screamed as they plummeted down a narrow pit. The Sun gave way to night just as they started to fall, so their descent into the earth was a dark one.
Dinky and Apple Bloom stopped screaming well before Sweetie Belle did.
“Holy Hearth’s Warmin’, how deep is this thing?” Apple Bloom asked aloud.
Dinky shook in freefall. “I-I wanna go home!” she cried.
Sweetie immediately stopped screaming at that. She summoned a faint light from her horn and swam through the air to Dinky’s side. She grabbed the tiny pony in a tight hug. “Oh, Dinky! I’m so sorry this happened! But we’ll be okay. I’m sure Scootaloo is right behind us.”
“We’re still fallin’, y’all!” Apple Bloom’s voice was strained. “If there ain’t a big pile o’ straw at the bottom of this hole, there won’t be much left of us to ―”
They landed simultaneously with a loud crash, accompanied by their various “Eep!”s and “Oof!”s. After a moment of silence, however, they realized with joy that they were still alive.
“We’re okay!” Dinky yelled, tossing up her stubby hooves. “You were right, Sweetie Belle!”
Sweetie beamed. “I told you!”
“What is this stuff?” Apple Bloom asked, feeling the smelly pile around them.
“Aaaaahhh!” came from above. Dinky and two-third of the Cutie Mark Crusaders looked up to see their missing third descending with flailing hooves, accompanied by her airborne scooter some feet above her.
“And there’s Scootaloo!” Dinky laughed. “Wow, Sweetie, you were right again!”
“Uhhh… yeah!” Sweetie said unsurely while she watched Scootaloo fall.
The orange filly plopped into the same moldy pile as the rest of them, only she landed head first directly behind Sweetie Belle. Her helmeted head disappeared into the stinking fabric, and she struggled fruitlessly to escape for several seconds until Apple Bloom moved to help her.
“Whooa!” Apple Bloom nearly lost her balance, scaling the wobbly hill until she reached Scootaloo. They worked together to yank Scootaloo’s head out of the refuse, but the helmet was lost in its folds.
“Yuck!” Scootaloo ran her hooves through her mane, pushing away rotten bits of food and cloth. “What is all this?”
“I dunno, but I reckon we oughtta get off it.”
Sweetie Belle and Dinky nodded, hurrying together down the slope of the pile. Sweetie’s horn lit the way with a soft green light. They had to stop short at the bottom of the mound, blocked by a tall pile of rusty metal objects.
“Now what?” Apple Bloom asked as she and Scootaloo caught up.
“I think we’re in some sorta junk yard,” said Sweetie Belle, peering through a forest of rusty pipes stuck into the ground at haphazard angles. “An underground junk yard.”
They heard the cackle of the big blue dog and glanced all around warily.
“Where is he? Behind us?” Sweetie Belle asked, spinning around.
Suddenly, a series of electric bulbs, strung together with bare wire and hanging from hooks burrowed into the stone walls of the cavern, flickered to life. The narrow hole they had fallen through opened up into an egg-shaped cavern. Littered all over the floor of the place were heaps and heaps of junk.
Dinky gasped and pointed upward to the opposite end of the cavern. The Cutie Mark Crusaders followed her direction and spotted the blue dog on a natural ledge of stone leading into an even better lit hallway beyond him.
“Hey!” Scootaloo shouted at the leering silhouette. “Let us out of here!”
“Hee hee hee hee! Poneez are my priznerz!” the dog exclaimed. His voice echoed eerily above their heads and died in the rubble around them. “Bactum finds customer, yes! No customer? Poneez stay here ―” He swept his eyes and one large paw over the junkyard beneath him. “― where all prizes stay without a customer! Ha ha ha hooo!”
“So our lives in the paws of a salesman who’s never seen a dentist?” Scootaloo groaned. “We’re doomed.”
“Goodbye, poneez!” the dog howled, backing out of sight. “Pleez don’t die before Bactum finds customer!”
Sweetie Belle smiled. “Well, at least he said please.”
Dinky’s knees trembled below her. “Oh no! H-how do we get out of here?”
“Easy!” Scootaloo pointed. “We just have to climb up to that ledge he was on.”
The dog slammed a door in the hallway, and four foot long spikes shot out from where the only conceivable escape tunnel had been.
Scootaloo gulped. “Okay. Less easy.”
“Oohhh, what do we do?” Sweetie Belle squeaked, throwing her eyes all over the cavern. “What do we do? What do we do?”
“This is lookin’ bad, Scootaloo,” Apple Bloom said. “Even by our standards.”
Staring at the ground, Scootaloo’s eyes flitted and darted. She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, this looks bad.” Her gaze slowly raised to find Sweetie Belle’s wandering pair. “And it’s all your fault.”
Sweetie gasped. “My fault? How is this my fault? You’re the one who wanted to dig up gems for a train ride!”
“You’re the one who wanted to rescue the poor little puppy!” Scootaloo growled.
Dinky started to cry. Sweetie wrapped her in another hug, though her face betrayed her lingering terror and disgust. “Nice going, Scootaloo.”
“I… I didn’t mean to…” Scootaloo covered her own wide eyes with the flats of her hooves. “Ugh!”
“It don’t matter how we got down here, girls,” Apple Bloom said. “What matters is who’s gonna figure out how to get us back up?”
Scootaloo rubbed her forehead and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, look… let’s not freak out just yet. We just have to think. What would Rainbow Dash do?”
Sweetie Belle suddenly smiled. “What would Daring Do do?”
“Heh…” Apple Bloom chuckled. “Do do.”
Dinky sniffled, but managed a small smile of her own. “What would Mommy do?”
“Yeah! Yeah, Dinky, exactly!” Scootaloo hopped closer to the tiny filly. “You’ve got explorer’s blood in you! Your mom was one of the greatest adventurers who ever lived, apparently! I bet you’ll get us out of here in no time!”
Dinky’s smile faltered immediately. “Huh? But I… I’ve never gone on an adventure before.”
“There’s a first for everything!” Scootaloo smiled wide and scooped Dinky onto her shoulders before standing on her hind hooves. “So what do you see? Anything useful?”
“Scootaloo, you’re scaring her!” Sweetie Belle scolded.
“She’ll be fine.” Scootaloo bounced up and down a few times. “Come on, Dinky! What do you see?”
Trembling, Dinky swallowed hard and looked out over the yellow-lit cavern. “Ummm… oh!” Something glittered on the farthest wall from them. “I think I see something over there!”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” said Dinky, “but it’s shimmering so it must be important!”
“Good eye!”
Dinky frowned. “But… it looks like there’s a lot of stuff in our way.”
Scootaloo set her down and shook her head. “Nothing gets in the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ way. It’s just that adventures occasionally have more steps to them that was initially anticipated.”
“Those are some big words, Scoot,” Apple Bloom mocked.
Scootaloo shrugged. “Eh. It’s something Sweetie Belle said once. If I have anything, it’s a decent memory.”
“Did I say that?” Sweetie asked, putting a hoof to her chin. “I like it!”
“Come on, girls!” Scootaloo crouched in preparation. “Let’s climb, crawl, and wiggle our way through this jungle of junk until we find whatever was glittering over there!”
“But what if it’s nothin’?” asked Apple Bloom.
Scootaloo shrugged. “Better to try, eh?”
The others nodded, and they began their short but arduous journey across piles of unwanted scrap.
{-DD-}
For its relatively short distance, it took Dinky and the Cutie Mark Crusaders an unreasonable number of minutes ― maybe even hours ― to traverse the messy and complex tangle of mismatched, misshapen metal and debris. After a lot of climbing, tossing, crawling, squeezing, and wiggling, however, all four of them stood victorious in front of their goal.
“It’s a mirror,” droned Apple Bloom.
“Well… it’s definitely shiny!” Sweetie Belle said. “Good job, Dinky!”
“Thanks!” she chirped.
Scootaloo sighed. “Well… not exactly what I had in mind.” She turned from the mirror and kept her head close to the ground. “Maybe there’s something else over here… like a decrepit ladder or some kinda pogo stick…”
“I’ll help,” said Apple Bloom, snooping the vicinity as well.
Dinky stared at the mirror. It was tall ― taller than a pony ― and oval. It was very dirty, and Dinky could hardly see her reflection. The thing leaned against the rock wall of the cavern, covered in dust and clearly untouched for longer than any of the fillies had been alive.
“Come on, Dinky, let’s look around!” said Sweetie Belle, spinning around. “I’m sure you led us to a great spot.”
“Yeah…” Dinky blinked. Something seemed… odd about the mirror. She approached it slowly. In her lower peripherals, she noticed the electric light from above glitter off of something else. She scurried forward and dropped her head to the ground, checking the small space between the leaning mirror and the rock wall.
Sure enough, a very old, very worn flute poked out from other scraps of garbage. Dinky gasped, grabbed the flute in her hooves, and wiped off its lip plate. Then she tucked it just below her mouth and blew forth a series of beautiful notes. Despite its age, the instrument played perfectly.
The Crusaders spun around where they stood and gawked at the sound.
“Whoa! Did you just find that, or have you had it in your mane the whole time?” asked Scootaloo.
“It was behind the mirror!” Dinky said, beaming. “It’s not as nice as the golden flute Mommy got me, but I’m glad I found it, anyway!”
“Wow, Dinky! That’s incredible!” Sweetie squeaked, bounding back her. “You really did see something over here!”
“Huh… well, that’s pretty nifty, I guess,” said Apple Bloom. “Doesn’t help us much in the way of gettin’ out, though.”
“Well, if there’s a perfectly intact flute laying around,” said Scootaloo, “there’s bound to be other randomly useful things. Come on, let’s keep looking!” She began to dig with increased vigor in the piles all around her.
Dinky sighed and hugged the flute to her chest. Even in the face of peril, the likes of which she had never experienced, something so simple gave her a great sense of peace and comfort. She glanced at the surface of the mirror, wondering at the odds of such a delightful discovery.
Her reflection smiled calmly back at her. Again, Dinky couldn’t help but feel as though something about the image was wrong. She tucked the flute behind her ear and drew closer to the glass, studying her own hazy reflection.
She gasped, for suddenly she realized what was different: her reflection didn’t have a horn.
Dinky reached up and felt her own horn. Her reflection did the same, only there was nothing on the forehead to touch. Instead, to Dinky’s amazement, her reflection spread a pair of periwinkle wings.
Dinky gaped, and her jaw only dropped further when the reflection winked at her.
“Uhhh… girls?” Dinky said.
The others couldn’t hear her, clanging about noisily in their own corners of the area. She leaned closer to the mirror, enchanted. “What are you?” she asked.
Her reflection turned around, looked at Dinky over her shoulder with an inviting smile, and galloped away into nothingness.
Watching her fade, Dinky couldn’t help but chase after her. “Wait!” she cried. “Come back!”
Sweetie Belle heard it and spun around, just in time to see the little filly pass through the looking-glass and vanish away.
“Holy buh-WHAT!?” Sweetie screamed.
Her friends jumped at the sound and gave her their full attention.
“What? What is it?”
“What did you find?” asked Scootaloo excitedly.
Sweetie Belle raised a trembling hoof toward the mirror. “D-D-D-Dinky!” she stammered.
“What about her?” Apple Bloom looked at the mirror. “Where is she?”
“The mirror!” Sweetie blinked and shook her head vigorously. “Sh-sh-she went through the mirror!”
“What are you talking about?” Scootaloo trotted to the mirror and tapped on the glass. “It’s just a-AAHH!”
Scootaloo stumbled back and fell on her haunches when her foggy reflection was replaced by a wide-eyed Dinky Doo.
“Wow!” Dinky’s eyes moved from Crusader to Crusader. “What just happened?”
“I-I don’t know!” Sweetie Belle hurried closer. “I have no idea! I just watched you run through the mirror like it wasn’t there!”
Dinky looked over her shoulder. “I was trying to…” She shook her head and smiled back at the others. “Well, hurry up and come in! You girls have got to see this!”
“See what?” asked Apple Bloom, but Dinky was already gone.
“See what!?” Sweetie Belle repeated. “Dinky? Dinky! What do we need to ―”
She rushed forward, sliding through the mirror’s surface like it was made of water.
“Well, I’ll be!” Apple Bloom smiled and walked forward slowly. “Some kinda trick mirror, huh? Must be magic!”
Scootaloo gulped. “I freaking hate magic.”
The glanced at each other, took a deep breath, and jumped through the mirror in tandem.
The electric lights in the underground junkyard flickered out.