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// Third Night: Diamond Heist 
// Story: Light Pollution 
// by Quillamore 
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Diamond Tiara could practically feel the alarm bells piercing her mane.  The entire room was illuminated by alternating streaks of red and green, and lasers crisscrossed through walls.  Sweat wiped down her face as she watched Babs fiddle with some sort of odd device from what seemed like oceans away.

“Get over here!” she could hear the other filly yell, the stress of the situation ebbing away at any sense of empathy the Apple might’ve felt.  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

All Diamond had to do to get her point across was to gesture to one of the many streams of light speeding through the room.  From simple observation, she’d been able to tell that they reconfigured themselves into different patterns every minute, so getting through to the other side would take speed and finesse.  Neither trait was something she could really summon at the moment.

And to think, she thought in frustration, some ponies do this for fun.

Just before the other filly could yell at her any more, Diamond finally decided to push her limits, taking it one potentially deadly laser at a time. Taking extra care not to hit her tiara against the lethal limbo line, she couldn’t help but curse whoever’s idea it’d been to go to an escape room in the first place.

Granted, Manehattan’s escape rooms were the most renowned in Equestria, and more importantly, she currently lived with the two ponies who suggested it, so perhaps things weren’t quite as bad as she made them out to be.  But, as opposed to the Cutie Mark Crusaders, Diamond Tiara most certainly did not thrive in adventure.

As if to further emphasize this point, the alarm bells started to scream at her yet again, and it took all of five seconds for her to realize that her tail had gotten caught in one of the laser lines.  Even though the more rational side of her knew it was only a light projection no more harmful than a unicorn’s aura, she could still practically feel the burn coursing through her body.  Letting fear take over any particle of subtlety she still had, she willed herself over every obstacle she faced.  It almost would’ve been an impressive sight, if she hadn’t screamed all the way over to Babs.

Sure enough, the other filly was hunched over a safe and cracked a lock with little to no expression on her face.  For a few short seconds, all the effort Diamond had taken towards befriending the Manehattan filly ebbed away into smoke, and her eyes practically reddened in rage.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she scoffed, staring straight into Babs’ mane.

For all she knew, the other filly probably didn’t even know Diamond was there, with the way she barely even turned her head to acknowledge her partner.  Judging from how Babs didn’t even try to counter with a snarky remark, she was probably completely transfixed with this weird jewel thief roleplay thing they’d been roped into.

It was really hard not to hate her at times like this.

Just when Diamond found herself at her limit, though, the lock clicked suddenly, revealing at least fifty fake diamonds inside.  They barely looked fancy enough to be rhinestones, much less any sort of cubic zirconia, yet she felt a strange feeling of satisfaction looking at them.  At the very least, at least she’d have somepony to talk to now after all that hullabaloo.

“Coulda sworn I’d tried that sequence before,” Babs muttered, staring at the safe in confusion.  As she turned to Diamond and saw the annoyed look on her friend’s face, she exclaimed, “That must be it!  Your death glare made it open all on its own!”

While Babs made a whole show out of her realization, Diamond’s glare only deepened.  She wasn’t quite sure if she was really annoyed at her friend or if she was just doing it to play along.

“Hey, it’s a gift,” continued Babs, playfully jabbing Diamond in the leg.  “Apple Bloom says there’s a mare in Ponyville who can make animals do what she wants if she stares at ‘em long enough.  But your stare even works on inanimate objects!  If you’re gonna be ashamed of it, do it when there isn’t less than a minute on the clock.”

Diamond Tiara had barely realized it in the heat of the moment—or as “heat of the moment” as a simple escape room visit could be—but had the two fillies not solved the puzzle at the exact time that they did, they would’ve lost the whole thing.  In true action-adventure fashion, the clock had stopped at thirty seconds.

In her own twisted way, it looked like Babs was congratulating her on a job well done.  And, whether she’d actually helped to solve it or not, Diamond knew she should never turn down praise.  The two fillies high-fived and embraced each other, and once again, in the heat of the moment, they barely noticed something was amiss.

However, after five minutes of celebrating her victory, Diamond came to the sudden realization that nopony else seemed to be around.  As Bambi had explained before leaving them to their adventure, normally somepony would come by to take them back to the amusement park.  Judging from the way Babs turned her head from side to side, both fillies were likely wondering the same thing.

After a few short attempts at waiting patiently, Diamond hesitantly approached the exit door, only to find that the knob didn’t budge.  Shortly afterwards, she could see her friend trying to headbutt the door with similar results.  The other filly ricocheted across the room, landing straight onto the safe she’d cracked only a few minutes before, and Diamond cringed at the sound of the impact.

She was almost about to ask Babs if she was alright, but sure enough, the brown filly managed to shake the pain off just about as soon as it had hit her.  Considering how many times she’d seen Apples ram parts of their bodies into random objects without complaining, she almost wondered if it was some weird family gene or something.

“Looks like we’re stuck here,” Babs finally said a few seconds later, rubbing her head as she spoke.

“Duh.  I could’ve told you that, and then you wouldn’t have had to ram yourself into everything.”

She quickly shut her mouth after the outburst, realizing that bickering in a locked escape room with anypony, much less somepony she was already in a tense relationship with, wasn’t an ideal situation.  Still, Babs only responded to it with a simple shrug of understanding and came closer, showing her friend her lack of visible wounds.

The strangely forgiving nature of some ponies was still something to get used to, for Diamond at least.  On the other hoof, she could get stranded in dark rooms every week for the rest of her life, and it’d never stop being as awkward as everything had been in that moment.  The two fillies stood in silence for five whole minutes before both of them gave up on trying to get the door to unlock with their minds.

“So, those alarms really freak you out, huh?”

Diamond whipped around, almost forgetting there was another filly in the room.  The area was darkening with every passing minute, and she could barely see Babs now.  That, or tell whether she was asking a simple question or mocking her.

“Yeah,” she hesitantly replied.  “They’re a bit too much like the ones at my house.”

Really, she wanted to go on and on about how the idea of being caught at anything, even without the alarm, made her think of how much her mother would end up yelling at her, but she figured Babs didn’t need to know all that, or see how embarrassing she could really be on the inside.

“Guess that makes ‘em extra accurate, if they sound that much like a Rich family alarm.”

Babs laughed harder than Diamond had ever heard her laugh, and she probably would’ve been offended any other time, now she was just relieved the other filly bought her excuse.  However, Babs’ next question hit her just as hard.

It’d come after the brown filly had rolled over in laughter for a few more minutes and the room was ignited with silence once more.  From what little concept of time Diamond had in the darkened room, at least fifteen minutes had gone by without any outside interference.  Yet, as soon as she heard the question, she knew that the intrigue behind it would be enough to stave off her fear.

“That stallion from last night,” Babs began in a surprisingly urgent tone.  “Did you get any more info from him?  Did anything else happen that I oughta know about?”

Her eyes were shrouded by darkness, as was everything else, but Diamond could tell just by hearing her voice that they were glowing.  Come to think of it, the redheaded filly had seemed far more excited than she should’ve been about the revelation, a detail that had been lost to the rush of the day, but one that had resurfaced nonetheless.  While Diamond wasn’t quite sure why this stallion interested her companion so much, she’d never been one to turn down a mystery.

Especially, of course, when the alternative was waiting in a locked room and doing nothing.

“No,” she replied.  “He didn’t mention you at all, if that’s what you’re wondering, or hurt me.  He just rambled on about his family business.  The whole thing was really weird, if you ask me.”

Silence streamed through the room again.  Disappointment, Diamond figured.  The type of disappointment that came over and over again, only for ponies to get their hopes up just as many times.  That was the feeling that came through the darkness as clear as day, and the one that would keep filling the room with its negativity unless she did something.

“So, how do you know him?” she asked, hoping more than anything that Babs would trust her with this sort of deeply personal information, the sort not even she herself would share.

With a quick sigh, the other filly responded, “I…was kinda in a bad situation a few years back.  I was too young to remember my parents, but he was the first pony who took me in after they left.”

As grave as Babs’ situation seemed to be, a single question went through Diamond’s mind as she listened in.

“Coco isn’t your mom, then?”

She could practically feel Babs staring her up with everything she had as soon as she said this, burning lasers into her turquoise eyes.

“’Course she is, and anypony who tells ya otherwise had better be prepped to deal with me.  Like I said, I don’t even remember my other mama, so she’s the closest thing I’ve ever had.  And since I know you’re gonna ask, Bambi and I are still sisters.  Other than the Apples…she’s the only blood relative I really have.”

Red hair grazed the ground, and more than anything, Diamond wanted to reach out and touch the other filly, to tell her she didn’t need to go on with this.  Even somepony who’d been as rotten as Diamond Tiara was knew nopony deserved to go through anything like this.  Yet still, somehow, Babs exploded into her story, tracing the details with even worse revelations.

“But Momo—er, Mosely—was Bambi’s dad, and after a while…it felt like he was mine too, ya know?  I don’t like talkin’ about the things that separated the two of us, even to a friend like you.  But what matters is that after those things happened, I never saw him again.”

With a nervous blush Diamond could only barely detect, Babs finished, “I shouldn’t have been so hard on ya for not gettin’ anything from him.  But a few minutes ago, all I thought was that this was my chance.  If your family really is makin’ a deal with him, and you told him you and I were friends, there’d be no way he’d ignore me anymore.  He and Coco would get together, and we’d finally be a family again…”

Two things struck Diamond more than anything else about the situation: that Mosely had to be the crew member Coco was dating and what Bambi had told her before.

Anypony who’d abandon a foal deserves to rot in the lowest depths of Tartarus, with no friends by their side but the all-consuming flame of punishment.

That’s one crime I can’t excuse.

Who had she really been talking to back then, only a few short hours before?  Diamond, or somepony else entirely?

Another mystery, another question.  For once, Diamond found herself driven not by the promise of blackmail, but by genuine concern for her friend’s situation.  These were answers she needed to know, ones that could make or break her growing relationship with her former enemy.  Ones that could help that enemy turn the corner from the jaded filly she knew into the beacon of light she deserved to be.

She’d never felt more like a Cutie Mark Crusader, doing the same thing to somepony else as they’d done to her.  Yet somehow, that revelation wasn’t quite as scary as it should’ve been.

“Can I ask you something else?  If it isn’t too hard for you to talk about?”

Babs nodded her head, realized there was no way Diamond could’ve seen it, and whispered a single ‘yes.’  She wasn’t the laughing filly from before, but Diamond got the distinct feeling that this was a start, at least.

“All that stuff with him leaving you behind…that’s why Bambi hates him so much, right?  But that couldn’t have been his fault, whatever it was.”

“That’s what I always tell her,” Babs answered, telling Diamond all she needed to hear.  “She still thinks he’s gone bad somehow.  Sometimes she thinks it was my mom breakin’ up with him, or somethin’ about his own family issues.  Either way, she thinks somethin’ about him snapped a long time ago, and every time she sees Coco worn down from work, she’s reminded of just how bad he is.”

Trying to recruit Diamond into his family business and dating his costume designer.  Neither particularly struck the pink filly as anything worthy of the hatred Bambi had for him.  Surely, the stress Coco faced as a producer’s marefriend was one anypony in the same situation would have.  And even if Mosely had abandoned her friend so long ago, as Babs herself reminded her, she could change the tide.  Getting past Bambi would be one thing, but then again, Diamond had gotten past her fair share of ponies in her short life.

“But even if he is bad, weren’t the two of us like that before?”

This time, Diamond let the silence permeate the room and let Babs reflect.  If she was really going to pull what everything around her told her she had to pull, it would take a plan greater than she’d ever had before.

Once it finally came to her, a smile of devious satisfaction crossed her face, one expression she hadn’t felt in months.  The escape room might’ve been a bust, but its puzzles and strategies might end up having some use after all.

Thirty minutes after the safe had been cracked, the door finally opened.  In the distance, Diamond could barely hear a park employee apologizing profusely, but other thoughts dominated her mind.

Who better to reform a bad guy than two other bad guys?

As the two walked out hoof-in-hoof, Diamond turned her head ever closer to Babs’ ear, trying to fit everything they needed to do into her mind before Bambi came back.

“The Cutie Mark Crusaders have their missions.  Why shouldn’t we have ours?”

The look of excited agreement on Babs’ face, yet again, told Diamond everything she needed to know.  This was the direction she would have to take if she wanted to keep the other filly by her side.

With a wink, she whispered, “Welcome to the Mosely Orange Reformation Society.”