Coming awake, Dash found herself remembering very little of the party other than the drinking, and not all that much of that. A few hazy blinks told her she was lying tangled in her own blankets and sprawled over her own bed in her own bedroom, so she'd apparently made it home in one piece. That was a good sign, at least.
With more than a few yawns, she stretched gingerly, ready for the telltale pinches and kinks that would grouchily let her know that she'd maybe gotten carried away the night before, but nothing jabbed her, nothing stabbed her, nothing made her want to curl right back up or anything. She felt a little wilted around the ears and a little dry around the mouth, but other than that...
"Weird," she said aloud, and her voice didn't even crack. She sat up, looked around—
And the angle of the sunlight drifting through her window all over the cloudy floor almost shouted that it was past noontime.
Which seemed even weirder than the whole not feeling wrecked thing. Sure, she'd been just as careful as always about letting everyone from Spitfire to Derpy know that she was taking the day after Nightmare Night off, but every year, there was somepony—Pinkie or Twilight or Applejack usually—who either didn't get the memo or thought it'd be funny to pretend they hadn't gotten the memo. So the morning after Nightmare Night tended to crack over her with a voice shouting from down on the ground or a hoof nudging from the bed beside her or even a tortoise hovering overhead. But this year?
"Huh." A few more stretches still didn't rouse any sort of aches, so Dash hopped out of bed and took a quick look in the back of her closet where she kept her Nightmare Night candy to make sure her bag had come home with her. It had, so she flapped downstairs.
Tank was asleep on his cushion, but this far into autumn, that wasn't too weird. The kitchen didn't have a grain of food in it, but again, not too weird: she'd pretty much been expecting one of the girls to have dragged her into town for breakfast by this time, after all, and she'd spent all week at Barnyard Bargains picking up the stuff for her sphinx costume, not stocking the bread box.
That she was having trouble remembering the party told her it had been a blast, and a little grin curled her snout. Maybe she oughtta go wake Pinkie up for a change...
Whisking out the window, she did a couple barrel rolls through the blue and cloudless sky at the thought of her friends tumbling off their mattresses when she yelled their names instead of the other way around, but sailing over Ponyville, she couldn't help noticing the quiet. The day after Nightmare Night wasn't an official holiday or anything. So where was everypony?
A giggle tickled her ear, and Dash looked down to see Derpy draped over Davenport's mailbox outside Quills & Sofas. Her gray wings gave a little flap, but instead of rising into the air, she just giggled again.
Dash let herself smile. That was pretty much usual at any rate. Shifting course to glide down and ask if Derpy had seen Pinkie or Twilight or anypony out yet today, Dash caught a red flash from the town square: apples stacked up on Applejack's cart, AJ herself there beside it. Another shift sent Dash skimming along the ground toward her—talking with AJ didn't get her nearly as frustrated as talking to Derpy did—and Dash could see other carts were set up, too, more ponies standing here and there under the midday sun.
No pony seemed to be talking, though...
"Hey, AJ!" Dash called out, skidding to a stop beside the cart. She almost started to complain that none of them had woken her up this morning, but, well, she kept telling them not to do that, didn't she? So instead she went with: "Some party last night, huh?"
"Hmmm?" Blinking, Applejack swung her head toward Dash, and Dash wasn't sure she'd ever seen such a cloudy look on that usually sharp face. "Oh, hey, Rainbow. How're you...doing?" She yawned, her eyes went all unfocused, and her mouth closed into a little smile.
Three or four seconds ticked by, Dash feeling her own smile fade. "AJ?" she asked, waving a hoof in front of her.
"Hmmm?" Applejack did some more blinking, her gaze seeming to come into focus again. "Oh, hey, Rainbow. How're you...doing?" With another yawn, everything about her went soft, that same little smile curling back into place.
"Uhh..." Dash stretched her neck to peer more closely into AJ's face. "How hard was that cider you were pouring last night, anyway?"
"Hmmm?" For the third time, AJ blinked, straightened a little, seemed to catch sight of Dash, and said, "Oh, hey, Rainbow. How're you...doing?" That led to her yawn, to her relaxing, to her little smile, and to a shiver icing down Dash's back.
Snapping her head around, she saw similar little smiles nestled on the lips of the other ponies in the town square, some of them kind of swaying where they stood, all of them silent and not really looking at anything.
It took some effort for Dash not to shout, "Zombies!" when she leaped straight up into the air. It couldn't be a prank, after all, a part of her whirring brain insisted, 'cause Pinkie would never repeat herself like this. So quick as an indrawn breath, she burst across town to the front steps of Twilight's castle.
Through the doors, she slammed them and started darting from room to room. "Twilight! Spike! Starlight! Trixie, even!" But only her own voice echoed back along the crystal corridors.
When she stuck her nose into the library, though, three different shades of purple grabbed her attention, and she just about threw herself over to the book-stacked table in the center of the room where Twilight, Spike, and Starlight were sitting. "Guys! Something weird's happening!"
"Hmmm?" Twilight looked up, and Dash almost jumped backwards at the fuzzy smile and half-asleep gaze. "Oh, good morning, Rainbow. I didn't hear you...come...in..." She yawned.
Dash grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "Wake up, Twilight! You gotta wake up!"
"Hmmm?" Shrugging, Twilight frowned slightly, her horn lighting up. The purple glow of her magic wrapped warm around Dash's hooves and pushed them away with a force Dash couldn't fight against. "I am awake, Rainbow." That smile came back. "I was actually planning on going over to your place this morning and...waking you up the...the way we...we..." She yawned again, and while her eyes didn't close, just like with Applejack's, they seemed to lose focus.
Her magic stayed solid, though, like two purple glowing hoof-warmers holding Dash in place. It took her a couple seconds of struggling till she could pop herself free. "C'mon, Twilight! This is no time for—"
The word "daydreaming" right on her tongue, Dash froze. A quick glance at Spike and Starlight showed it pretty clearly: the smiles; the distant gazes; the slow, gentle breathing. Spike was even humming a little, and as Dash watched, Starlight lazily turned a page in the book she wasn't quite looking at.
So, yeah. Not zombies. Just lost in—
"Hades." Leaping into a hover, Dash zipped back outside and whooshed toward Fluttershy's. As much as it was something she'd never in a million years thought she'd be telling herself, she needed Discord for this. And since she didn't know how to get in touch with him...
Zipping overhead, Dash could see all kinds of ponies out and around in Ponyville now that she knew what to look for. Roseluck and her partners had their booth open, but they were lounging around among the shelves with soft little smiles, their hooves sort of randomly moving bunches of flowers here and there. One guy she passed leaned against the side of his lawnmower in the middle of his half-mown front yard. Ponies hauling carts on the roads below would take a few steps, stop, shake themselves, take another few steps, then stop again. And nowhere did Dash hear any talking or laughing or singing or anything except a little tuneless humming now and then.
Fluttershy's cottage was quiet, too. Well, yeah, okay, Fluttershy's cottage was always quiet, but dropping down onto the path leading up from the bridge, Dash stretched her ears for the usual chitters and chirps from all the critters who hung around the place. Hearing nothing, she practically galloped up to the front door and shoved it open to see Harry the bear sprawled and breathing easy over the sofa where Discord had been last night, mice curled into little balls of snoozing fur along the walls, the birds with their heads tucked under their wings up in the rafters.
But no Fluttershy. Not in her bedroom or on her back porch or in her yard or out by the chicken coop, either. All the little food bowls had food in them, Dash noticed as she whipped around the place, and no dishes sat unwashed in the sink even after last night's party.
So maybe Eff had gone out into the woods before all this daydreaming had hit? Except Dash had seen her butterfly-embroidered saddlebags hanging on their usual peg in her bedroom, and she wouldn't've left without her pack. And memories of the night before, the way Hades had practically started drooling when he'd seen Fluttershy, made Dash grind her teeth there in the yard surrounded by sleeping weasels and rabbits and wrens and all.
"Discord!" she shouted. "If you can hear me, you big jerk, you better get over here right now!" She couldn't help wincing. "Okay, maybe I don't mean 'jerk,' but still!"
Two, maybe three seconds, Dash waited, and when nothing happened, she flashed back inside, grabbed the Discord-shaped lamp from the table, and smashed it to the floor, only a few ears on a couple of the animals even flicking. "I mean it, Discord! Right now! Or I'll—"
Dash had no idea how to finish that sentence, but fortunately, tiny shouts of, "Hey! Hey! Hey!" rang out from the carpet before she had to think of anything. All the shards of the lamp were squishing and stretching into miniature versions of Discord, hopping up and down and shaking their fists at her, but she barely had time to blink at them before they all ran into each other, bunching and bulking up until the regular-sized Discord stood there glaring at her. "You break it, you buy it, you know," he said.
"No time!" Dash flapped up so she could grab his shoulders. "Fluttershy's gone, and everypony in town's, like, nodding off into daydreams all the time!"
"Daydreams?" He blinked at her. "Fluttershy? What in the wide, wide world of Equestria are you—?"
"Your cousin Hades!" Spinning away, Dash waved her hooves at the dozing animals. "It's like this all over Ponyville, and after the way he was leering at Fluttershy last night, I'll bet he's carried her off to his evil lair or something!"
Discord's mouth went sideways. "In the first place, I doubt that wimpy little nerd even knows how to leer, and in the second place, you're more likely to have an evil lair than he is."
She folded her front legs across her chest. "We're talking about the guy who built Tartarus! And you couldn't've missed how he was ogling Fluttershy!"
All he did was blink a few more times. "Apparently, I wasn't watching as closely as some." Everything flashed, and Dash found herself lying back on a couch in the middle of the living room, Discord sitting beside her in a tweed jacket with a little notebook in his claws. "Tell me: do you often stare intently at Fluttershy?"
"Will you—?" To cover her blushes, Dash let anger flood over her, threw herself into the air, and rolled to where she could jab at that snaky tube of hair he called his chest. "We need to find where he's taken her, get her back, then figure out how he's making everypony all sleepy and make him stop!"
For the first time, Discord actually moved his head to look around the room, and for just the tiniest instant, Dash thought she saw something like worry in his eyes. But then he was shrugging, a dark brown fedora popping into place between his horns. "Well, playing detectives should liven up an otherwise dull afternoon." He aimed a claw at her, and Dash felt something settle onto her own head. "Still, it's your case, Inspector." Appearing right beside her, he nudged her in the ribs with an elbow. "So where do you wanna go to inspect her, hmmm?"
"Y'know? Forget it!" It was taking Dash a fair amount of effort not to wheel around and do her best Applejack impression against his face with her back hooves. "Our friends are in trouble, but I guess I was just being stupid when I thought you might wanna help them!"
"All right, all right." He rolled his eyes with a creaking like a rusty gate. "Like I said, though, you're the one with connections to Hayseed's little realm of polka sots and goonbeams. You'll have to daydream yourself in, and I can follow if you really think you can't handle things on your own."
And as much as she wanted to tell the big jerk to get lost and never come back, just the idea of being alone with Fluttershy in a land of daydreams made Dash's stomach turn to a solid block of ice. "Hades is a draconequus!" she hissed, pulling what sounded like an actually good reason out of the tangle of her thoughts. "And, yeah, maybe he's a midget one or whatever, but he can still do that freaky snapping and changing-the-world-around-me stuff, right?"
"Yes..." Another worried expression came and went instantly across Discord's snout. "You should know, however, that there are certain restrictions on what we draconequi can do to each other, especially when we enter a realm run by someone else." He blew a smoke ring. "Not that I'm worried, of course. Anything Hades can slap together, I can cover with chocolate syrup and eat with a spoon." Leaning back in his chair, he waggled his claws at her. "So go ahead. Shuffle off this mortal coil or slip the surly bonds of earth or whatever it is you ponies do to start daydreaming. I'll be right behind you."
Everything inside her still lumpy, Dash leaped into a hover, grabbed whatever he'd popped onto her head, and threw it to the floor—turned out it was one of those tall, blue, old-timey policemare's hats with a silver star on the front. "How?" she barely stopped herself from shouting. "My friends are maybe lost in some crazy dreamworld, Fluttershy's maybe been kidnapped, and the only help I can find is you! That's pretty much the opposite of anything I'd ever daydream about!"
His red and yellow eyes closed halfway, and he snapped his talons. White light whooshed everywhere, gravity spinning, and Dash squished into something soft and familiar: her bed back home, a quick look around told her, with Discord sitting in a fancy, high-back chair by her closet door. "Shall I sing you a lullaby?" Another flash, and a oversized wooden mallet appeared in his claws. "Or do you prefer the more direct approach?"
With a glare, Dash couldn't keep from imagining him shrinking down to something about the size of a Breezie so that the hammer, suddenly way too big, would keel over and—
The air shifted against her wings in a way she'd never felt it shift before; the colors all around got softer but somehow brighter, and Discord shrank, the hammer tumbling back, the handle catching him mid-chest to pin him against the back of the chair. "Hey!" he squeaked.
Dash stared, and another voice crowed, "Ha! Was I right, or was I right?"
Snapping her head around, Dash saw Hades peering in her bedroom window. "It never fails!" he was going on. "Cousin Discord has this uncanny knack for getting everyone he meets to eventually daydream about smashing him!" A flash brought Hades into the room, and he squatted down beside the chair, Discord struggling against the mallet. "This is a good one, too: nice and sturdy." He poked a claw into Discord's stomach, Discord freezing and his eyes going wide. "You've definitely got a gift for this, Rainbow Dash."
"What?" she finally managed to ask.
Hades spun, his mean little smirk making him look way too much like Discord back in the bad old days. "The only real limitations we draconequi have are those we've placed on ourselves, and they're all about the things we can and can't do to each other. If I tried to conjure up a stick to beat my cousin until he assumed the consistency of unbaked cookie dough, the universe itself would deform in a way that would conspire to stop me. But if I give the stick to a friend—or in this case, to a hapless stooge—they can wallop away at the jerkwad till all involved are blue in the face."
Discord, still wriggling under the hammer's shaft, waved a paw. "That's not how it works at all!" he cried, sounding like an unhappy kitten. "You can't just—!"
"Quiet, shorty." Hades gave Discord another poke, then turned back to Dash, his eyes glassy like he had a fever. "So thanks muchly, Rainbow Dash, for cutting him to the quick like this, and because I'm in a good mood, I'll give you a piece of friendly advice instead of fitting you for your very own cast-iron tuxedo."
As she stared, everything about him seemed to get sharper: his horns, his teeth, his claws, his glare, even his shadow stretching out longer and longer behind him. "It's simple," he said. "This thing I'm doing'll shake out one way or another before sunset, so have a great time while you're in Mythos, but don't get in my way. Things happen to ponies—and other semi-sapient life forms—when they get in my way. Am I right?" He reached over and flicked Discord in the side of the head with the clattering ring of an alarm clock going off. "Or am I right?" And with that, he puffed away like a vapor trail on a hot day.
Without a second thought, Dash jumped over to the chair, grabbed the hammer in her teeth, pulled it away from the struggling Discord, and dropped it to the floor with a thunk. "Are you okay?" she panted out.
He sprang, his wings buzzing like half a swarm of angry hornets. "Do I look okay?" he peeped, and as much as Dash didn't want to laugh, he just sounded too funny—like the time Pinkie had introduced her to the wonders of breathing from helium balloons.
That he was snapping and flailing without getting any bigger sobered her up pretty quickly, though. "What did he do to you?" she asked.
Pulling into a hover in front of her, he folded his arms. "The oldest trick in the book," he said, still as tiny and squeaky as before. "He got a mortal to do his dirty work for him. I'll bet you can't even daydream me back to normal, can you?"
"I—" She squeezed her eyes closed and imagined a regular old smarmy Discord sitting in the chair beside her. But when she opened her eyes, he was still floating there maybe twice as tall as her hoof. "You mean we're stuck here? And you're stuck like that?" As hard as she tried, she couldn't quite keep the panic from peering out around her words.
"Temporarily." He rubbed his forehead. "I hate having to reevaluate my opinions of my stupid relatives!" With a popping little flash, he became a small gray and brown violin with his head up by the tuning pegs. "But yes: he played me like I was a fiddle and you were the bow." He flashed back to his tiny self. "I'm not entirely powerless, so once I get the feel for this place, I'll be able to snap myself back to—"
"We don't have time!" Dash waved at the window. "Till sunset, he said! And, yeah, I don't know what he meant, but that's only, like, six hours away! We've got to find him before then and stop whatever he's doing to Fluttershy! And, y'know, everypony else, too, though they seemed pretty much okay when I saw them earlier."
Even on his postage-stamp-sized face, his smirk was infuriating, and Dash couldn't stop her teeth from gnashing when he said, "Fluttershy first, and then the others. Interesting..."
"Will you just—!" She pushed every thought from her head, gave a quarter spin, and stuck one wing out at him. "How 'bout you hop aboard, junior? Unless you think you can keep up with the Dash."
He scowled, then something more thoughtful tugged at his snout. "Hades is counting on us arguing too much to work together, so let's not do that, hmmm?" He flashed, and Dash felt something even lighter than most of Fluttershy's bird friends settle down between her wings, the pin-prick of his claws currycombing her neck. "Onward, then, my trusty steed! We shall rescue your maiden fair! And, y'know, everypony else, too."
Holding back the shout she wanted to aim at him, she instead turned toward the window, the whole thing rounder and its lines fuzzier than she thought they ought to be. "Hang on!" she called, and flaring her wings, she jumped through into whatever this daydream world might hold.