//------------------------------//
// 2: Ghost Town 
// Story: The Best and The Worst 
// by Firesight 
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The walk out was spent in silence, with an increasingly uncomfortable Twilight feeling alone despite Celestia’s presence, keeping company with her own strangely brooding thoughts.

She had tried to come up with a more benign explanation that would fit the clues they found, but each theory that suggested itself was quickly shot down by her own logic. Increasingly, she was forced to reach the discomforting conclusion that her first guess was correct—that something very bad had indeed happened there, an uncertain amount of time in the past.

After an hour of walking south along the unmaintained and cracking road with only the rising sun to keep them company, they reached a crossroads at the end of the forest, with an old sign at one corner standing out to them and gaining their attention.

“Can you read it, my student?” Celestia asked, motioning with her head up to the odd lettering.

“It says… town of Pripyat?” Twilight recited somewhat dubiously, squinting at the sign, sounding out the exotic letters carefully in her head before speaking the name. “My Cryllibex is a bit rusty, but I think that’s right.”

“It is,” Celestia confirmed as they followed the arrow, walking towards the town, which shortly resolved into a series of buildings in the distance. And was it her imagination, or did Celestia’s mane colors appear just slightly more vibrant in the morning light? “I am pleased to see you kept up on your language lessons. Now come, my student. Let us look around. Perhaps there is some clue as to what happened here. And the origin of this strange energy you sense.”


* * * * *


Minutes later, they came upon several rows of what Twilight could only call old and nearly identical apartment buildings.





Each seemed as drab and utilitarian as the last; a far cry from the colorful structures that ponies favored both in Equestria and in Equios. 

They were disconcerting enough—they seemed barely adequate to the purpose of housing workers or families in anything approaching comfort—but they, like the road they had come in on, seemed abandoned, with broken windows in places; visible rust and water stains that spoke of lack of maintenance for a very long time. A glance inside one showed plants growing in what had once been a building foyer, while another had the remains of a rotting and waterlogged rug on the floor.

There were at least some parks and plazas to be found, including a school with, of all things, a large but empty swimming pool; slowly being stripped of its tiles.





And later, they came upon something very odd and out-of-place—an old amusement park, the centerpiece of which was an equally old and run-down Mare-is Wheel that likewise appeared to not have been used in years, if not decades, judging by the rust on it.





Here and there was a discarded bicycle, also rusting away, and there were even some wooden tables with old plates and cups set out as if for a family picnic, coated with a layer of dust or outright dirt.

Celestia said little as she led Twilight from place to place, letting her student take the lead at times, though Twilight remembered her instructions to ask permission to enter even small structures. Worse, the odd and dangerous energy was only growing stronger the deeper they got into the town, and the more she saw of it, the more ominous the picture in her head became.

“Very well, my student. You have seen the residential areas of this town now. From them, what can you conclude?”

Twilight shivered as she voiced the undeniable answer. “It’s like… they just up and left!” she exclaimed. “No, it was worse than that—they left almost everything behind! And there were crashed vehicles on the road behind us that weren’t salvaged. So it was if they had to drop everything they were doing without warning and run for their very lives, leaving all their possessions behind in their panic to just... get away!”

She swallowed hard as she sensed the truth of her own words, but also the contradiction that underlay them. “But the weird thing is, there’s no destruction here except the ravages of time. There’s no sign of an attack or war,” she further noted, having visited some human battlefields in the past and studied old pictures and videos of human conflicts. “Everything seems peaceful, just… abandoned. But why?” She again sensed the answer even as she asked the question. “Is it this corruptive energy I sense? But you said it wasn’t strong enough to hurt us!”

“I said it wasn’t strong enough to hurt us now, my student,” Celestia gently corrected, causing a chill to go through Twilight.

“Then it was once?” she immediately realized, then followed her own logic chain to a very troubling place. “But Princess… this town and those vehicles back there… they look like they’ve been abandoned for thirty years!” she guessed by the level of rust and the extent the town had been overrun by the encroaching forest. And that means…

“An excellent guess, my student,” Celestia acknowledged with a pleased expression. “Your deductive abilities serve you well, as the actual number is thirty-three.”

“Thirty-three?” Twilight reeled, taking no satisfaction from the compliment for what it also meant. “But that means that whatever this… contamination… is, it’s been here at least that long, and was once much stronger! And for it to be this detectable even now…” She suddenly had a very strong urge to leave; to teleport back to the portal and flee this sun-forsaken place forever before she was forced to learn the truth behind it. “Princess… what is this energy? And what poison could possibly last this long with such a low decay rate?”

“What indeed,” Celestia echoed grimly. “The answers you seek can yet be found elsewhere. So come, my student. Perhaps there are more clues to be found with a better vantage point. So let us get to high ground. We will go to the top of an apartment building to look over the area. And as I do not wish to disturb the crumbling interiors of these buildings, we will simply teleport up.”

Twilight blinked at that. “But Princess… I can’t accurately teleport unless I can see my destination or have already been there!” she reminded her mentor.

“I have on previous visits, so I can,” Celestia replied evenly. “I will take us both. Now touch my hoof, my student, and we will be off.”

“Y-yes, Princess.” Twilight wasn’t quite able to keep the tremor from her voice as she obeyed, desperately wanting answers but also afraid of what they might be as they disappeared in a flash of light.