Delinquency

by Daemon McRae


Essay One: The Biggest of Problems, the Smallest of Men

Essay One: The Biggest of Problems, the Smallest of Men

Of the many, many inconveniences afforded someone who has chosen to hunt monsters for a living, none is quite so troublesome as the sheer volume per capita of horrible nightmares waiting to chomp one’s undercarriage off. Even moreso, the rather unnecessary variety of the things. From simpler, far more straightforward threats as vampires, werewolves, and zombies; to the more biblical creatures like demons, devils, and fallen angels; to the still more esoteric beings such as wraiths, tommyknockers, and even some of the old gods, the universe is more than happy to let you know that it wants you dead in no uncertain terms, and its toy chest is unfairly large.

This has led, naturally, to the development of more blanketed approaches to monster hunting. Spells that dissolve any kind of sentience-driven organic matter, for example (In an assuredly slow and disturbing manner, no doubt). The long-standing practice of summoning something truly awful and destructive in the hopes that it happens to be better at its job than the other truly awful and destructive thing you intend to aim it at. Mother Nature’s toy chest is filled with nasty, murderous things with big locks on them, and mankind has spent an awful lot of time and resources creating the necessary keys.

Now if only someone could put forth the effort into making sure the damn things matched.

“Right, you, monster hunter boy,” Sugarcoat said, in that tone of voice bordering on annoyance for the simple fact it was trying not to sound scared, “On a scale of one to ‘Oh god, make it stop’, how screwed are we?”

Treble, who up to that point had taken a disturbingly keen interest in the paint on the walls, came back to Earth with a start. “What?” he asked, obviously having missed the question.

“She asked how fucked we are you goony,” Sunny groaned. She, too, was putting on a brave face, trying to cover the gnawing beast that was her fear with a mask of irritation and impatience.

“Oh, believe me, I wish I had an answer to that. Truth be told, I have absolutely no idea where we are. And before either of you gives me the snarky, obvious answer of ‘in a hospital, I’d ask you what kind of hospital has no patients, nurses, or medical equipment,” he growled, shaking a nearby supply cart to demonstrate his point. Besides the obvious rattle of the wheels and the shifting of the metal drawers, it sounded completely empty. He threw open a drawer to demonstrate exactly that. “It’s like… we’re in a child’s painting of a hospital. Some empty interpretation of what a hospital is supposed to look like, without any of the substance.”

Sugarcoat took a few steps forward and inspected the supply cart, opening the other drawers to sate her curiosity. Treble sat back and watched, letting her air out the no doubt nagging sense of disbelief still rolling around in her head. One thing he had learned long ago could get him killed. “Ok, so we’re not in the hospital anymore. This place is some kind of fake? Like bait in a trap or something?”

DT thought about that for a second, then shook his head. “I doubt it. Bait would imply we were led by the nose to come here. We kind of stumbled into it. More like… a work in progress, I think? Like somebody’s trying to put their own hospital together, piece by piece? I mean, it’s just a guess. We haven’t done much more than look down a hallway and shake a cart. But it’s not like we don’t have options here.”

“Really?” Sunny said, gripping onto the notion hopefully.

“Sure,” Treble assured them. “Look, we’ve been here maybe ten minutes. Trust me when I tell you that anything that wants to kill us would probably have done so by now. At least in my experience. Besides the atrocious décor, really the only threat here is isolation and starvation. Or, more likely, dying of thirst. Which would take several days by normal world standards, so who knows how long it would take us here?” When the girls gave him less-than-properly-assured glares, he continued, “What I’m saying is we have time to figure this out. Which is a huge advantage. So we can either delve deeper into Canterlot Generic Hospital; turn around and look for a way back while ignoring a perfectly good mystery-slash-possible threat to reality; or panic like tiny lemmings and all go find a shiny new cliff to heave-ho off of.”

There was a brief pause as they all considered their options. Sunny seemed to be deep in thought, Sugarcoat was stoic and considerate, and Treble had the look of one who had long ago made their decision and was simply waiting politely for everyone else to be wrong. After a moment’s silence, however, Treble’s ear twitched again. “I… hmm.”

“Oh god, what is it now?” Sugar protested.

“Possibly? Nothing. There’s just something that doesn’t… feel right,” Treble answered thoughtfully, scrunching his brow in concentration. “I mean, it might just be nerves. This entire place sets me off like fireworks.”

“I would welcome fireworks right now,” Sunny groaned, shuddering. “As much as I like the sound of my own voice, and don’t completely hate yours, I could really do with some background music or something. It’s wayyy too quiet in here.”

“Quiet...” Treble mused aloud. “I think that’s it. It’s super quiet. I mean, besides us talking, I can’t hear anything else. There’s no echo off the walls, or anything.” He clapped his hands a couple times, the sharp staccato slightly muted by the lack of reverb. “I mean, I heard that, but that’s it. It’s like the only sound here is the stuff we make ourselves. Everything else is… gone.”

“That’s not all of it,” Sugar noted. “Considering my heart is pounding like crazy, I should be able to hear a bass line in my ears. I’ve got nothing.”

Treble stood still for a moment, focusing on his internals. He felt his heartbeat, naturally, but the usual rush of blood and rhythmic pulsing in his ears was gone. Considering how quiet the rest of the space was, he should be able to map his own pulse by now. “You’re right. That’s… a new kind of weird. Which is bad.”

“...how bad?” Sunny asked, obviously not wanting an answer.

“New means I don’t have any experience in the matter. This whole place is… different,” he said, pacing back and forth nervously. “I’ve been neck-deep in strange probably longer than is healthy for any one person, let alone four, and this isn’t ringing any bells. No pun intended.”

Sugarcoat crossed her arms and looked pointedly at the floor. Or, more accurately, Treble’s feet. “I don’t think it would if it could. Your feet aren’t making any sound, either.”

Treble paused mid-step, and raised an eyebrow. Looking down at his feet, he stomped the floor, hard. There was a dull, muted thumb from his soft-sole shoes. “Sounds… well, not fine, but it sounds to me, anyway.”

“No, Sugar’s right. When you were pacing you weren’t making any noise,” Sunny argued.

“I think that’s just your paranoia showing. I literally just...” he trailed off as he looked at his feet, as movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Shifting his gave, he saw Sugarcoat tapping her foot impatiently. Saw, but didn’t hear. “Um, Sugarcoat?”

“Yeah?” she snapped, obviously stressed.

“You know you’re tapping your foot, right?” he asked, pointing down.

Sugar stopped and looked at her feet, then shook the limb in question. “It’s a nervous habit. What’s your point?”

“Do it again.”

“Wha-”

“Just humor me,” Treble insisted.

Sugarcoat rolled her eyes, then looked at her foot and tapped it furiously again. This time there was a rapid, hushed rhythm as her toes beat on the floor. “And?”

“And you weren’t making that sound when you did it the first time. I think -although this might sound absolutely insane- that the only sounds we make here are the ones we make consciously,” DT reasoned.

Sunny looked down at her foot, and stamped it a few times. Dull thuds met their ears, despite the flat linoleum and hard plastic of her heels. “Is that why we can’t hear our heartbeats?”

“I… think so? I mean, it’s not like you do that on purpose, do you?” Treble took a few deep breaths, pausing to listen with each one. “I mean, I didn’t even hear myself breath a moment ago, but I heard that.”

“You know what I think?” Sunny asked, in a slightly defeated tone. “I think there’s a shiny new cliff with our name on it, and it’s calling to me.”

--------------------

The next hour or so was a test of patience for the three, if nothing else. Treble poked his head into every room they came across, rattled every drawer, picked up every phone (whether it was connected or not), and overall brimmed with nervous, almost fearful energy. The two girls had simply deigned to follow behind, falling into step with the only person in the room who seemed to know what they were doing, or at least looked the part.

It wasn’t until their fifth or sixth identical hallway that someone spoke. Had Treble not been going out of his way to create as much noise as he could in his search, thee might have been a silence for it to break. “Um, Treble?” Sunny asked hesitantly.

Their ‘leader’ spun on his heel, halfway through the door of yet another empty room. “Sup?”

“I found.. something?” she hesitated, pointing at the top of a nurse’s station. “I mean, I think so.”

Sugar leaned over her shoulder to inspect the ‘something’. “It’s… a pen. Good job, Sunny. Found a pen.”

“Really?!” Treble asked with more enthusiasm than a pen should elicit. “That is something.”

Sugarcoat opened her mouth to speak, found no words, and simply watched, amazed, as Treble marched over and picked up the writing implement with renewed curiosity. Eventually, some words came to her. “And why, exactly, is a pen something?”

“Because we haven’t found anything smaller than a crash cart since we’ve gotten here, and even that didn’t have paddles attached,” Treble explained, not taking his eyes off the pen. Indeed, he was holding it at eye level and staring at it with a sense of what one might call reverence. “Pens and things like it are… nicknacks. Tiny things. Almost inconsequential.”

Sunny, torn between her brief moment of being useful and her sheer confusion, raised a hesitant finger and asked, “And why is that important?”

“It’s important,” Treble insisted, turning on his heel again and holding out the pen for them to see, “Because it’s a detail.” Then neither of them seemed to share the same spark of comprehension, he elaborated, “Up to now everything has been basic. Rudimentary. Even the posters for this place are just giant block letters. A pen is an afterthought. It’s not something you consider in the ‘big picture’ of putting together a hospital. Really, it’s not even something you normally think about until you actually need one, or just find it randomly.”

“Which means…?” Sugar pressed, not quite getting the gist of Treble’s rambling.

“It means that this place is… incomplete. We’ve stumbled onto a blank slate. A template, if you will. Someone or something is still filling in the details. Like pens,” he stressed, shaking the pen in his hand.

“Or… sound?” Sunny guessed. “You make it sound like we’re in some kind of… simulation that’s still being built. If that’s true, then maybe whoever is putting it together hasn’t programmed sound in yet?”

He considered this for a moment. “That… is actually a much more plausible explanation than I had rolling around.”

“Which was?” Sugar demanded.

“None at all. NOW,” he exclaimed, making the two girls jump slightly. “We have a theory. What we need is a way to TEST it!” He tossed the pen aside, and it landed soundlessly on the floor.

“What we NEED,” Sugar interjected, mocking Treble’s new found enthusiasm, “Is a way out. Or at least an idea of what could create a space like this out of nothing, piece by piece.”

Treble gave her a hurt puppy look. “Well it’s not like you’ve volunteered any useful insight. I mean, do you even have any idea how much raw power it would take to do this on purpose? Manipulate time and space in such a way as to construct an entirely new environment one piece at a time?”

“”It sounds like some kind of fancy spell, to be honest,” Sugar retorted. “Maybe you guys just pissed off a wizard.”

Treble kneaded his brow in frustration. “Ok, first off, wizards don’t work like that. Secondly, there’s the little detail of the law of Conservation of Energy. Yes, I know, physics and magic don’t really tend to walk hand-in-hand, but this one seems pat. Alchemists call it equivalent exchange. You can’t create or destroy matter or energy in it’s basest form. To create this much matter out of nothing, you’d need an exorbitant amount of energy. I mean igniting the atmosphere large. We’ve been walking around for hours and still haven’t found the point where we started. This place is HUGE!”

“Wait, how do you know we haven’t been walking in circles?” Sunny asked, taking a seat on the nurse’s counter. If she was going to listen to someone explain the laws of magic and physics, she wasn’t doing it on her feet.

“Because I scratched my initials in the paint in the corridor we first arrived in. I’ve been making marks on the wall with my nails every time we hit a new corridor, and I haven’t seen a single mark again afterward,” he explained.

“Maybe this place isn’t being created then,” Sugar argued. “Maybe it’s just being put together piece by piece from existing materials. I mean, you don’t build a house by making the bricks on-site, do you?”

Treble scratched his chin; he needed a shave. “That does sound more likely. It would certainly be a lot less difficult than putting everything together from scratch. It would also explain why everything looks exactly the fucking same.” Seeing his statement met with a pair of raised eyebrows, he explained, “Look, say you want to build a house, like you said. And you have to make the bricks yourself. Doing it by hand, the bricks would be a little different every time, right? Different shape, density, color, slight imperfections every time. Because it’s literally impossible to do it the exact same way by hand every single time. Sure, a few might come out exactly the same, against all odds, but the majority would have brief, subtle differences.”

“Okay...” Sunny asked slowly.

“But this stuff,” he continued, shaking a door in its frame, “Is all exactly the same! Every door, knob, corner, wall, poster, frame, hinge, and screw! The screws are even perfectly aligned with each other!” he insisted. Sugar took a closer look at the hinge and saw that the drive for each flathead screw was at exactly the same angle. Even for the lower hinge, and, as she found in a moment, the door on the other side of the hall. “Which actually lends more credence to your piecemeal theory. It looks like someone is just taking pieces off an assembly line and slotting them together. Machine-manufactured, so that everything is the same as the last piece. Even if there was a scratch on the door we didn’t make ourselves, I have no doubt that scratch woul dbe on every single door in exactly the same place.”

“So that could, or would do that?” Sugarcoat asked, more to herself than anything. “If I may jump back to my programming analogy for a moment, it sounds like they’re putting together an environment based on very limited assets- the uniformity might not even be on purpose. It’s possible that the sheer size of this place isn’t a result of the amount of energy being put into it, rather the uniformity is a result of having limited pieces to fill a vast blank canvas.”

Treble took a seat on the counter next to Sunny. “But that would imply that the space was already here. And I seriously doubt the third floor of the hospital is miles wide,” he reasoned.

Sunny shrugged. “Well, maybe we’re not in the hospital. Maybe we’re between the hospital and someplace… else?” she suggested.

Treble shook his head. “I doubt it. I mean, the only place I can think of big enough to house this kind of environment, let alone be empty enough to allow for someone to turn it into their own construction site is the Void. And there aren’t a lot of things that can work in the void: it’s completely devoid of any matter, energy, or life. There’s not even air or a vacuum. Someone would have had to bring this place in from the outside. But who would build a hospital in the void?”

“Maybe they’re rehearsing for the real thing?” Sugar offered snidely.

“A rehearsal? No, that’s… no. No, no, no. OH no. Fuck me that can’t be right,” Treble ranted, shaking slightly.

Sunny leaned away from him. “Um, are you going to share with the class, or just pee yourself quietly. I mean, I wouldn’t blame you, I haven’t seen a bathroom since we got here, but some warning would be nice.”

Sugarcoat elbowed Sunny, hissing in her ear. “I’d be a little more worried if I were you.”

“Why?” she hushed back, eying Treble carefully as he ranted to himself and tried to steady his body, which was doing a rather admirable impression of a maraca.

“Because the guy just came out of a haunted house that put two people in the hospital, was there when Midnight Sparkle started blasting holes in the universe, and has been walking around this empty hellhole for hours, and this is the first time I’ve seen him afraid of anything,” Sugar insisted.

Sunny’s eyes widened, and she leaned a little closer to Treble. “Treble?” she asked carefully. “What is it?”

There was a moment of quiet, and Sunny wasn’t sure he was even going to answer, until he swallowed largely and said, “It’s a rehearsal space. Something is practicing moving around in this environment.”

“What, a hospital? You get that kind of practice with the flu,” Sunny joked.

Treble shook his head, his large mane of hair jerking rapidly. “Not a hospital. Three-dimensional space. Something is practicing what’s it’s like to be in three dimensions. This… thing. These guys aren’t usually three-dimensional. They come from universes much higher, more complicated, than ours. And this one has enough power to drag matter into the void. This is a transitional space, for something trying to reach our dimension.”

“What do you mean ‘these guys’?” Sugar asked carefully. “You know what this is?”

Treble nodded. “Yeah. It’s a psychonaut.”