Pinkie gestured frantically to the others. “Quick! This way!” she called, hightailing toward the nearest shop.
Ditzy and the Bouquet sisters followed suit. Spike stared out into the crowd. “Rarity,” he whispered.
“SPIKE!” Pinkie called. “IF YOU WANNA SAVE HER, RUN!”
Spike blinked. The crowd was continuing to close in. “Rut.”
He turned and ran toward the open door. There was a garbled cry, and a pair of cyan hooves wrapped around his head, effectively blinding him. The dragon shouted, yanking at the body, but to no avail. The only way to get her off would be to break her bones. So, instead, he charged straight for the door. “DUCK!” Pinkie shouted.
Spike hunkered down and felt his scales brush the top of the doorframe. He heard the door slam shut behind him. “Someone… help me?” he asked.
The Dash-thing clung on even more firmly, but she was no match for the combined efforts of Spike, Pinkie, Rose, and Daisy. Eventually, she was yanked off and fell painfully to the ground. “Ow,” Spike said, rubbing his head. He glanced around. Shelves full of jump ropes and space hoppers. Cuddly stuffed toys. A display of building blocks. He sighed. “Pinkie, did you choose this store on purpose?”
Pinkie, sitting in a basket filled with rubber ducks, grinned broadly. “Nope! Just lucky!”
“Right,” Spike said, nodding. “Just a coincidence that we ended up in the toy store.”
“Abso-doodly!”
Rainbow Dash blinked and leapt to her hooves, spinning to charge the door. Spike grabbed her by the tail and lifted her off the ground. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Anypony got any ideas about getting out of this one?”
Silence. Spike looked around the toy store again, this time looking at the ponies. Hyacinth was, for once, silent, sitting in a corner by herself. Daisy was sitting in the opposite corner. Rose was looking between the two, and Lily was looking miserable. Ditzy couldn’t meet the dragon’s eyes, and Pinkie… was still distracted by the toy ducks. Spike rolled his eyes. Okay, fine. “Let’s see,” he said aloud. “There must be some kind of… stockroom, right? Maybe there’s a backdoor in there.”
“Good plan!” Pinkie said, leaping out of the tub of duckies with a squeaking sound. “Let’s go look!”
She skipped along the floor, followed quickly by Ditzy and Spike. The Bouquet Sisters trailed along, with Hyacinth bringing up the rear. Outside, the ponies of Ponyville stared in through the large store window. Thunderlane pressed his hoof against the glass and tapped it softly. The others began to follow suit. Small cracks began to form.
Romana flipped Dash back over onto her little scuttling feet. “There! That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The robot pointed a leg toward the Ouija board. “Oh. Right.” The Time Lady carefully picked her up and carried the crab over to the table.
Dash, as grudging as a mechanical crab could be, pointed to No.
Romana smiled. “Good to hear. I’d give you a lollipop for being such a good patient, but I don’t think you could eat it.”
Dash spelt out something very rude on the board. Romana tried to look stern, but a smile crept through. “Ruby! Scootaloo!” she called. “I’ve finished.”
“Just a sec!” Scootaloo called back. “I’ve almost solved the mystery.”
Romana dropped her screwdriver. “You what?” she asked, all but galloping into the other room.
The two young mares lay on the floor, staring at a board. “Okay,” Scootaloo said slowly. “I’ve eliminated all the other possibilities. So, is it… Sapphire Blue in the kitchen with the lead pipe?”
Ruby shook her head. “No. It was Sgt. Yellow.”
“Dang it!”
Romana sighed. “If we could focus?” she asked testily.
“Right.”
“Sorry.”
The Time Lady led the two back into the other room, where Robo Dash was impatiently tapping her legs on the table. W-E-L-L she demanded. W-H-A-T D-I-D Y-O-U F-I-N-D
Romana bit her lower lip. “Well… not much,” she admitted. “I know that this tendril here is a mind-swapping device, of sorts. A consciousness transfer, I suppose.”
“A personality transplant?” Ruby asked, grinning.
Scootaloo glared. Dash probably did as well, but it was hard to tell. Romana, however, beamed, her hat falling askew as she tilted back her head. “Exactly right. Instead of overwriting your mind, which is a tricky matter at the best of times, this little device switches the consciousness it’s carrying with the victim. So, to get you back to normal, all you have to do is stab yourself!”
Everyone stopped. “That… sounds like the worst advice ever,” Scootaloo said. “And how are we going to get Dash’s body back?”
“It’s a plan in progress,” Romana protested, smile faltering as she adjusted her hat.
Ruby cut in. “What else did you find?”
“Like I said, not much. The auditory receptors are unusually small, the body is highly compressible, and in an emergency, they can retract into an airtight shell.”
“Huh,” said Scootaloo, staring at the tiny robot. “You’d think that an alien robot would be more… cool.”
“It doesn’t need to be ‘cool,’” Romana said, a slight amount of grimness entering her tone. “In fact, I think too many bells and whistles would detract from its purpose.”
A-N-D T-H-A-T I-S…
Ruby cottoned on first. “Put the ponies in the robots,” she said. “This way, once they’ve been captured, they can’t fight back.”
“Finger on the nose, Ruby,” Romana said with a grin. “Wait, that expression doesn’t work here. Hm.” She tapped the filly on the nose. “Boop.”
“So…” said Scootaloo. “How do we undo that?”
“Well, I suppose we attack the same way they did,” said Romana, scratching the back of her head. “Get a body and the appropriate crab, chuck them together, moment of confusion, profit.”
“No, not what I meant,” Scootaloo said, shaking her head. “How do we keep them from fighting back? The way I see it, it’ll just turn into a big cycle of body swapping, and nopony wants that, right?”
Romana’s face fell. “Oh. Yes. I suppose you’re right…” She noticed that Ruby was no longer paying attention. “What’s wrong?”
The young mare pointed silently at the window. Hovering outside was a pair of pegasi, tapping firmly at the window. Their expressions were blank and their eyes empty. “Oh,” said Romana. “Right. Downstairs we go, and remember to lock the door behind you…”
The stockroom was tucked away behind a door beside the stairwell, which led up to a photo studio and down to a root cellar. The back room was almost pitch-black and cluttered with shadowed bric-a-brac.
“Anypony see a light switch?” Spike asked, squinting into the darkness.
A murmured chorus to the tune of “Nope” echoed from the others’ mouths.
“...Right, hold on.” Spike grabbed a teddy bear from a shelf. “Pinkie, you might wanna look away.”
“Ooh,” the pink pony said, frowning. “That’s not bear-y nice.”
Spike shrugged. “Desperate times, Pinkie.” He exhaled onto the bear with non-teleporting flames and held the green makeshift torch aloft.
The room was a strangely oppressive sight in the discolored firelight. It was cluttered with boxes upon boxes of toys, still in their packaging. Stuffed arms and legs spilled out of cardboard containers. An armada of dolls sat against the wall, staring at nothing at all. It was, in a word, creepy. In two words, really creepy. Ditzy shuddered. It was like being locked in Daring’s attic again, except with fewer cursed idols. Hopefully with fewer cursed idols. The way today was going, she wasn’t ruling anything out. “I don’t see a door,” she said.
“I do,” Rose said, squinting through the darkness. “Over there, by the Pumpkin Patch Foals.”
Spike grimaced. “They still make those things?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” Daisy asked, irritably. “Let’s just go already.” She made for the door, pushing her way through boxes and spilled toys.
Something nagged at the back of Lily’s mind. “The mess,” she murmured. “The mess! Daisy, get back!”
“Huh?” The green-maned mare turned back from the door. A moment later, a crab landed where she would have been standing. “AH!”
Suddenly, the stock room was a swarm. Robots crawled out of boxes, turning the creepy scene into a nightmare of glittering carapaces in green and silver flashes. Daisy screamed and ran back toward the huddled ponies and dragon. One crab landed on her back, preparing to strike. Daisy scrunched up her face preparing for the end. It never came. “Come on!” Hyacinth bellowed, pulling her sister toward safety.
Daisy’s mouth sat agape in a mixture of fear and astonishment as Hyacinth pulled her bodily back into the main shop. Pinkie slammed the door shut, and Spike and Rose shoved a shelf full of board games in front of it, while Ditzy and Lily guarded the possessed Dash. “That should hold them,” Rose said, half-panting.
“Yes…” Ditzy agreed, pointing to the window. “But what about them?”
The glass was now too opaque with fractures to make out details, but the figures of the townsponies were still tapping away, gently but unceasingly as the glass began to creak. “Okay,” Spike said. “New plan. Downstairs, go, go, go…”
There was a crash as the glass shards finally gave up the ghost. “Go!” Spike repeated, waving the others up the stairs. “Let’s see how well this can hold them off…”
He inhaled sharply and blew a gout of green fire at another series of shelves, which teleported in front of the oncoming stampede. Almost immediately, the shelves began to rock back and forth under the immense pressure put on it by the crowd. Spike turned tail and pounded down the steps after the ponies, slamming and locking the door at the bottom behind him. “Everypony here? Safe?” he gasped.
“Yepperoonie!” Pinkie said, but it sounded forced. “But, uh, now what? We’re kinda… stuck.”
Ditzy shuddered and pulled her wings into her sides. “If we’d gone up, we could have run along the rooftops,” she said mournfully. “Down here, there’s no way to escape.”
Spike smirked. “Oh, I dunno about that. Spend enough time with Twilight, and you kinda turn into a history nerd, see. So you know stuff like the fact that, during Prohibition, Ponyville was a massive bootleg town, courtesy of the Apple Family’s ancestors. Cider’s gonna flow.”
Lily sighed dreamily. “Gosh, just picture it. The dresses and sharp suits, the style, the music…”
“The speakeasies,” Pinkie added, glancing sidelong at a wall.
“Bingo,” said Spike. “The cider ring was, quite literally, underground. Every cellar in town was interconnected, and most ponies have forgotten that. It’s not a perfect system anymore, some of the tunnels have fallen in and a bunch of buildings have been renovated, but there’s a chance…”
Rose started tapping at the walls, and soon the others had joined in. Hyacinth stood apart from the others, looking for all the world like a lost puppy. Pinkie nudged Daisy and nodded at the mare. Daisy looked. Daisy sighed. She trotted over to Hyacinth. “...I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what dear?” Hyacinth asked, her smile too wide and toothy to be real, her voice a poor imitation for genuine ignorance.
Daisy struggled not to roll her eyes. “I’m sorry that I shouted at you. I’m sorry that I attacked you. I’m really sorry I attracted all the zombies.”
“Revenants, dear,” Hyacinth corrected. “‘Zombies’ are very lower-middle class. I refuse to be under attack by those shambling scruffbags.
“...Sure. The point is, you’re my sister and we all love you.”
Hyacinth stopped tapping. She turned to Daisy and smiled warmly. “I assure you, dear, I too possess a great deal of enduring affection for all of you.”
“Right. You just… don’t acknowledge it to our faces.”
“Well, that would be a bit common, wouldn’t it? Nevertheless, I must apologize as well.”
Daisy waited. “...For?”
“Oh, you know, dear,” Hyacinth said, waving a hoof.
The green-maned mare really did roll her eyes now, but with a smile on her face. “You’re forgiven, Hyacinth. Now, let’s see if we can’t—”
“Engage in a historical recreation in a pleasant country vista,” Hyacinth interrupted smoothly.
“...Sure.”
“Guys! I think I found a door!” Rose called. “Spike, can you give me a light?”
The dragon grinned, nodded, and blew out a thin stream of flame over the mare’s mane. Sure enough, under layers of dirt and a few old posters, the faintest outline of a door could just be seen.