//------------------------------//
// 3 - Amber Rose 
// Story: Velvet Underground 
// by MagnetBolt 
//------------------------------//

Amber Rose hummed a tune to herself as she polished the fittings on the door they’d been given by the Veneighs museum. It was the one thing the Director had been willing to bow and scrape and beg to get for the Canterlot museum, owing to the perfect replica of Celestia’s cutie mark in the stone.
“It really is beautiful,” Amber sighed, as she finished what she’d been doing and stepped back to admire it. The door had been placed near the entrance in its own place of honor, ponies having to walk around it and finding displays of steel spikes on one side and poison darts on the other, like they were confronting the traps themselves.
The clock chimed the late hour, and she sighed. There was so much more to do and so little time. Unlike Mr. Moonlight, she wasn’t planning on spending the rest of the night there, but there was still time for one last thing before she clocked off and headed home to get a few hours of sleep in her own bed.
The hideous statue made for a striking centerpiece to the exhibition, but even the finest art would look terrible in the wrong context. She flipped on the overhead lights and started adjusting them, her magic just barely reaching them on the vaulted ceiling of the museum hall.
Spotlight shifted, shadows crawled across the seamless stone, and something glittered as the angle changed.
“What was that?” Amber blinked, rubbing her blurry, tired eyes.
The glimmer came from the dark again. Amber couldn’t ignore it this time, moving closer to look. Embedded in the smooth stone was something brighter, a pale nodule somewhere between a pearl and an opal, set into the stone seamlessly. Something about the color and shape gave an impression less like a jewel and more like a boil, like the stone itself had an impossible blemish.
“I hope that’s not some kind of damage from transporting it,” Amber whispered, trying to decide if she should hide it in shadow or position one of the lights to catch that bubble of unlikely color.
She moved one of the smaller lamps to shine directly on it, and something in the swirling colors seemed to call out to her. Amber reached out to touch it, and that was the last mistake she ever made.





Velvet stared at the newspaper. She’d been staring since it came in that morning, and the headline hadn’t gotten any better.
“Murder at Canterlot History Museum,” she read aloud. The whole thing felt like a dream. Just yesterday Amber Rose had been alive. One of the few mares she considered a friend, if a little distant. And just like that, she was gone.
“I have to go in and… arrange things,” her father said, quietly. “The Guards came around this morning already to talk to me.”
“Did they say what happened?” Velvet whispered.
“They’re not sure yet. It was… they wouldn’t tell me the details, but from what I understand, what happened wasn’t… it wasn’t pleasant,” her father said. “I’m going to see if there’s damage to the exhibition and clean out her desk.”
“If you’d been there late last night…”
“It’s best not to think about it,” he advised. “I’m not going to be there long. I’m going to be back tonight, alright honey?”
Velvet nodded, and her father kissed her forehead.
“Be safe, honey,” he whispered. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all this. The last thing I need is for you to get hurt on top of everything else.”





Hours went by, and Velvet’s anxiety turned to boredom and nervous energy. She started pacing, her hooves taking her from one room to another until she found herself staring at the bookcase in her father’s study.
It was the kind of bookcase that held tomes instead of paperbacks, first editions, rare works, and books measured using inches and centuries. Velvet rarely had cause to even glance at them, but something had drawn her here.
“Alright, what is it I need to see?” Velvet whispered. She closed her eyes and let magic flow gently towards the future. She could feel the frustration of a thousand possible selves as they picked books off the shelf at random, most of them finding nothing as they flipped through dusty pages.
In one future, she picked the right book.
Velvet opened her eyes and grabbed it from the shelf. She wasn’t sure what she’d find but whatever it was had excited that version of her enough to pick it out from all the background noise like one bright note in a symphony of sour ones.
“Let’s see what we have here..”
The pages were yellowed with age, the kind of thick stock that wasn’t used for books anymore. Something almost immediately caught her eye. A crescent moon, framed by wings, just like the pin she’d seen the strange pony at the museum wearing.
“The Children of the Night…” she read, skimming the page. “They’re some kind of Nightmare cult. I thought those cults were just made up to scare ponies away from rock music and children’s card games!”
She flipped through the pages, stopping at a woodcut picture showing dozens of ponies bowing down before a terrifying, black pony.
“It can’t be a coincidence that my dad has an argument with a freaking cult member and then his assistant winds up dead,” Velvet decided. “I bet the cult wants something from the museum. And it’s got to be with the new exhibit.”
She started pacing and grabbed a bit from the desk.
“Dad always said, if you don’t know what you want to do, flip a coin. It doesn’t matter what the result is, because once the choice is out of your hooves you’ll know what you were hoping for in the first place. So, heads I go after him, tails I stay here.”
She flipped the coin, and was running out the door before it even hit the floor.





Ponies tend to be very law-abiding creatures. There were crimes, certainly, but murder was rare enough that even in Canterlot, law enforcement wasn’t truly prepared to handle it. The museum had been closed but unlike in a society more accustomed to such terrible tragedy, the lingering Guard presence was there to reassure ponies that things would return to normal rather than truly establish a perimeter or keep determined ponies away from the museum.
Consequently, Velvet found it rather easy to slip inside.
Empty of ponies, the Canterlot History Museum had the same echoing gravitas that all sacred ground held. Velvet felt like she didn’t belong, and crept along the wall, feeling too exposed in the middle of the wide corridors and vast rooms. Even if she didn’t remember where the new exhibition was, the museum had signs helpfully showing the way. And pointing out the nearest bathroom, if the tension really started to get to her.
A pony walked out into the hallway ahead of her, and she froze.
It was the blue pony she’d seen before. The one that had been arguing with her father. He was sneaking along, careful to make as little noise as possible. It was only luck that she’d spotted him first.
Velvet surrounded herself in her own aura, nearly able to support her own weight with telekinesis. It wouldn’t get her into the air, but it was enough to make her steps feather-light, gaining on him with quick bounds.
He turned, hearing her hoot tap against the floor, just before she barreled into him, knocking him head over hooves into the wall.
“Hah! I got you now!” Velvet said.
“What are you doing?!” He got up, shaking his head, dazed. “What are you doing here?”
“That should be obvious. I’m here to make sure you don’t attack my dad, cultist.”
“Cultist?” He looked confused, which either meant he had a concussion or he was a great actor.
“I know you’re part of a Nightmare cult.” She pointed to the pin on his lapel. “So don’t pretend you came here because you were just aching to get a look at the exhibits while there wasn’t a crowd.”
“I think there’s some kind of misunderstanding,” the stallion said. “My name’s Night Light. I’m a friend of your father’s. I came here to check up on him because I was worried!”
“That’s a likely story. You came here to get rid of him!”
Night Light backed up a step. “What?! I’d never hurt another pony!”
“Then you better have a better explanation than ‘you were worried.’”
“I’ve done research on the Temple of the Sun’s Heart,” Night Light said. “I have reason to believe that it’s extremely dangerous to have those artifacts here. It shouldn’t have been disturbed!”
“See, that sounds like crazy cultist talk to me,” Velvet said. “And since I already know you’re a cultist you’re not making a great case.”
“I just want to check on your dad, then I’ll leave,” Night Light said. “If it makes you feel better, we can go and get one of the Guards to come with us, and I’ll turn myself in for trespassing.”
“I, um…” Technically speaking Velvet was also trespassing. And by technically speaking it was actually more like she’d evaded the authorities to prowl around an active crime scene. She had a sneaking suspicion that was frowned upon even if the pony in question had the best of intentions.
“...You’re not supposed to be here either,” Night Light said.
“That’s besides the point!” Velvet blushed and looked away. She couldn’t believe a cultist could see right through her poker face! “Fine, we’ll go see my father, and he can decide what to do with you.”
Night Light nodded. Velvet pushed him ahead of her, not wanting to take her eyes off the stallion, and not because he had a nice butt.
“I really didn’t have anything to do with what happened,” Night Light said, quietly, as they walked past the police tape and museum rope blocking off the exhibition hall. “I was trying to stop it.”
“Then you should have gone to the Royal Guard if you knew something,” Velvet retorted.
“They wouldn’t have believed me,” Night Light muttered.
“Dad?” Velvet called out, her voice echoing on the stone. “Are you in here?” She couldn’t see him among the charcoal rubbings, the empty plinth in the center of the exhibit leaving nowhere to hide.
There was a struggling sound, and her father pushed through the curtains at the side of the hall. “Honey?” He asked, confused, looking like he’d just gotten out of bed, that same half-sleeping slowness to his expression.
“Thank Celestia,” Velvet whispered. She’d almost expected to find something terrible had happened to him. “I was worried about you, Dad.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “Everything’s fine honey. Just fine.”
“Mr. Moonlight, we need to talk,” Night Light said, stepping between him and Velvet. “You have to see that the artifacts are dangerous now. We need to turn them over to the Night Guard along with my research.”
“The Night Guard?” Velvet asked.
“My research suggests all this is too dangerous to have out in public,” Night Light explained. “I was trying to tell your father yesterday but he didn’t listen. I think the… the…”
“Murder,” Velvet’s father supplied, his voice oddly low.
“I think it was because of the exhibition,” Night Light said.
“But nothing here is dangerous,” Velvet said. “Well, I guess the poison darts and stuff are dangerous, but they’re in locked cases. The only other things here are the door and the statue.” She motioned to the empty plinth.
It took her a moment to realize why the empty plinth was significant.
“Dad, where’s the statue?” she asked.
“Everything’s just fine,” Mr. Moonlight said. The skin on one side of his face slumped like it was disconnected from the rest of his body. There was a huge sense of motion from the curtains around him.
Velvet’s horn lit up. Almost every path towards the future led to an abrupt dead end, with an emphasis on dead. She seized on the slim chance she saw through the dark, shining like a sunbeam through a stormcloud.
She grabbed Night Light and pulled him behind the empty plinth where the statue had been just as tendrils launched from the curtains like harpoons, slapping down on the stone floor and leaving hissing, smoking trails as they retracted.
“Good instinct,” her father said, his voice burbling. He sounded like his lungs were full of liquid. “You always were a smart pony, Velvet.”
“What’s going on?” Velvet demanded. “What was that?”
“Unfortunately, I think it’s proof I was right,” Night Light said, his voice on the edge of breaking.
The curtains turned black as they started to burn and melt, falling to the floor in a heap as something stepped out of the cover they’d offered.
“You two look delicious,” the pooka said, the statue come to life and even more unpleasant in motion. “Just the kind of snack I need after a long nap.”