I awoke to a darkness so absolute that, for a few seconds, I thought I was blind. That was the first sign that something was wrong. The feel of the bed was another. I got up carefully, waving my hooves because I couldn't see my way. It seemed like a silly thought - but it was the first time I could remember not having a single light source reaching my eyes and, in those couple of seconds before the lights did flicker on, I felt a very literal blind panic.
The room was roughly cube-shaped, barely four or five metres on each side. Its floor and ceiling were bare concrete, but its walls were mirrored and covered in a layer of condensation and dust. The four smeared-out beige-and-blue reflections of me were the only sources of colour I could see. I thought that if I took the time to wipe away the condensation, the room would repeat in all directions. Then it wouldn't feel so small.
No, that wasn't right. The room felt small because I couldn't see an exit.
I felt that panic again, but less this time. There had to be an exit, otherwise how had I gotten into the room in the first place?
How had I gotten into the room in the first place? I tried to think back, but the last thing I could remember was going to bed in my very normal, non-mirrored room. My joints hurt like I'd slept on every single one of them wrong, and I was getting a headache. Or maybe I'd woken up with the headache, and hadn't noticed at first. I pressed one hoof to my forehead, just next to the base of my horn. Celestia, memory magic was a thing, wasn't it?
That thought sent my mind down a rabbit hole. Had they done something to me? How long had I been asleep? Was anything I was experiencing even real? Whatever had happened, the Pinks were almost certainly involved. It was just a question of how and why.
The silence, too, was absolute. I hadn't noticed that so much, when I'd been moving around, but when I stood still in the centre of the room the sound of my breathing was all I could hear. No, that wasn't right - there was something else, if I really listened. White noise of some sort, like the hiss of a broken speaker. Perhaps it was the hiss of a broken speaker. It was too faint to work out where it was coming from, so I decided to respond with noise of my own.
"Hello? Is anypony listening?"
My throat was dry - moreover it felt wrong - and my voice came out pathetically small. It took me a couple of seconds to recover from the shock of that first attempt and try again. Who was I talking to? Pinks?
"I haven't done anything wrong! Please, there's been some sort of mistake... I'm- my name's Backlight, look me up if you've got me on file? ...Hello?"
My throat hurt after that, so I decided to wait. I wished I had a glass of water.
I turned on the spot, scanning the walls for some sort of door, and my eyes fell on a seam in one of the mirrors, in the corner opposite the bed. Rectangular, door-sized. Yep, that was the exit all right.
The panel lit up blue with the light from my horn as I tried to open it somehow. It occurred to a calmer, less-scared part of me that I should have tried using magic when I'd first woken up as opposed to flailing around like an idiot. It was strange, but I couldn't remember having to consider that application of my innate ability.
I tried every possible variation of force I could think of, but the panel didn't even rattle. I paced for a bit. When I got bored of that I grabbed the pillow from the bed and used it to wipe the mirrors clean, because I was running out of other options and hoped a closer inspection would reveal something more helpful. I didn't have any way of keeping time, but then again I'd never really made a habit of that anyway. What was the point? Still, it must've taken more than ten minutes to get rid of the vast majority of the condensation and the smears of grime made in the process. I placed the damp pillow on the floor rather than the bed (thinking it might be my only source of water in a few hours, if I failed to get out), stood in the middle of the room, and admired my handiwork.
A shallow hall, filled with endless reflections of the bed, the pillow and I. There were no walls, but the concrete planes above and below me eventually converged to a vanishing point. I realised then what a mistake I'd made. The room felt no bigger, but its ceiling and floor seemed to be closing in on me. I hadn't found any other seams in the mirrors, only hundreds of sets of eyes. Granted, they were my own, but what had been a steady paranoia had grown into an acute feeling of being watched.
There was only one option left.
I pushed the thin mattress off the metal bed frame into the corner. It took me a long time, but I eventually managed to unscrew one of the legs. It was hollow, and didn't weigh as much as I would've liked it to. I stepped into the other corner, the one directly opposite the door, and threw the piece of metal at the door with all the telekinetic strength I could muster.
My telekinesis was proving useful, but a big part of me was wishing I had some other spells. Anything that would help. My parents had paid for a few lessons when I was a colt, but I hated practising; I was never able to concentrate for long enough to achieve anything. I understood how it all worked in theory, and occasionally managed to get something working, but certainly couldn't do spells on demand. The only consistent outcome of practising magic was that it gave me a headache. After I got my cutie mark, I gave up on trying to learn new spells - with exception of the months I spent trying to learn how to teleport. What this amounted to was standing in a room for ten minutes every couple of days and very strongly wishing I was somewhere else.
Anyway, my telekinesis was fine. I could hold things very steadily, but that was about all I had going for me.
All of that's basically my way of justifying why it took me at least eight attempts to put any sort of mark in the glass. "At least", because it only occurred to me to start counting partway through. A thin spiderweb of cracks appeared, but no shards fell: the mirror was held together by a coating of something.
Less wary of flying glass, I approached the mirror and picked up the leg again. I hit the mirror a few more times until I broke through the coating and was able to pull a few pieces free, which I carefully swept into the corner. Behind the glass was, much as I'd expected, a metal door. It took me a good while to get the last of the glass off it, leaving a perfectly-rectangular hole. There wasn't any visible mechanism, nothing around the edge which I could access, and I had nothing with which to pry the whole thing open.
I tried shouting again a bit, but my throat hurt and I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't know who was listening, if anypony, and was feeling just about the most self-conscious I'd ever felt. The white noise had stopped at some point, which was a relief. Having nothing else to do, I decided to smash the rest of the mirrors. Doing so gave me little in the way of satisfaction, but every time the leg bounced off the glass there was noise and that was something. Only a few pieces fell, more as my throws got better, and I swept those into the corner with the rest. There was only sheet metal with thin vents behind - again, with no visible seams.
When I threw the leg at the wall with the door, I was pleased to see that I cracked it first time. I threw again, and this time the leg didn't bounce. It went straight through the mirror and out the other side, clattering onto the floor. I shot across the room and peered through the hole it had made, but it was too dark to make much out.
Unfortunately, I'd lost my glass-smashing implement. Seeing as I'd made it that far without cutting myself, I was intent on getting out to the room with no blood spilled.
In its tripod state, I was just about able to lift the whole bed frame and hit the whole wall with it. The mirror bent with its reflective coating (creating an interesting optical effect), but didn't break entirely. I tried again, this time putting my full body weight behind it, and the frame went through the glass, tipping down and coming to a stop at its midpoint.
It seemed like something had finally gone exactly the way I wanted it to - with the frame in its current position, I could replace the mattress and use it as a bridge of sorts over the sharp edge of the hole I'd made. I hefted the thing onto the bed frame, which rocked precariously. I used a hoof to push down the end inside the room and climbed up on top of the mattress, crawling forward and allowing it to tip back up so I could edge my way through the mirror.
I was towards the end of a hallway, with another room just like mine opposite and a fire door to my left. It seemed like the mirrors were actually made of one-way glass, with a rectangular section cut away in the wall acting as a window for each room and an alternative channel of entry/egress. Alternative, because the rest of the hallway to my right - doors included - was completely blocked by rubble. The ceiling sagged worryingly and the air was choked with dust, presumably stirred by my escape. If nothing else, the damage to this place supported the theory that I wasn't being ignored deliberately.
There were four light sources besides the one in my room: another in the room opposite, and one above each door.
The mostly-buried doors to the mirrored rooms looked to have some sort of a traffic-light system, labelled "SUSPENSION STATUS". One green light, two amber, and one red, in a horizontal line beneath the text. Only the red lights were glowing.
The light above the fire door to my left came in the form of a glowing green sign. White printing depicted a pony running through a rectangle. Such a sign universally means exit.
Before getting out as soon as possible, I thought I'd better take a look inside the room opposite. There was a bed like mine, with something beneath the sheets. Another pony.
I picked the bed leg up from where it had landed, then changed my mind and picked up a piece of rubble instead. Concrete. Heavier. The window shattered with the impact, and I was immediately hit with a wave of stench unlike anything I'd smelled before in my life.
Rot. It was what I thought rot smelled like. I almost threw up.
That wasn't a pony in there, it was a corpse. I should've gone in and checked but, to my shame, I didn't. Instead, I turned left and pushed my way through the fire door. Lights flickered on automatically, revealing a stairwell in a sorry state. The stairs going downwards had collapsed entirely, and I didn't fancy my chances of getting back up if I jumped down to the floor below. The landing was mostly gone, with barely a few hooves' worth of space clinging to the wall, and the stairs going up were little more than stubs sticking out of the walls.
As I edged my way out onto the landing and up what was left of the stairs, I leaned against the wall for support and thought about those lights. Well, the words next to them. Suspension status. I hadn't seen anything suspended from something else, which left a more abstract interpretation of the word. Preventing something, stopping something. That was what the rooms were doing. There was also the interpretation of the lights: did red mean something was stopped, or that the suspension itself had stopped? All questions I'd have to ask when I ran into somepony who knew what was going on.
I reached the top of the second - and last - flight of stairs, where I found another fire door. I didn't hesitate to open it.
This room was the biggest yet, though perhaps that wasn't saying much. On either side of me were heavy-duty lockers, containers, and filing cabinets. They were the second thing I noticed.
The first thing I noticed was the door. Again, it was bigger than any I'd seen so far. Metal, closer to a square in shape, with a complex locking mechanism clearly visible. Above it was another green sign, with the pony and the rectangle.
Exit.
I hoofed it across the room, practically colliding with the mechanism's lever. I pushed it down and other parts shifted, sliding deadbolts out from the door frame. With a squeal of old hinges, the whole thing moved outwards and a breeze of cool air took its place. This was it, I could feel it. Time for answers.
The landscape I was greeted with was endlessly brown and grey. Tarmac, a chain-link fence, then dirt. The clouds were thicker than any I'd seen in my life - not a single patch of blue sky was visible. There was barely enough light to cast shadows. I could see a collapsed electricity pylon.
Hesitantly, I lifted my hoof over the door frame. I glanced down and froze.
There was a skeleton waiting outside, half buried and scattered from where the ground had turned to mud and back but otherwise picked clean.
Slowly, I stepped back and pulled the door shut again.
Two dead ponies. One downstairs, one outside. What had happened to them? How long ago had it happened?
Hopefully long enough ago that the same thing wouldn't happen to me.
That thought was just about enough to calm me down. I took a shaky breath, sat down, and looked around the room again.
What I needed was a plan. I needed supplies. I needed to find ponies.
If there were any left.
No, it was statistically unlikely that I was truly alone. If I was alive, then it stood to reason that others were too. I thought about the room opposite mine, about going back there, but the thought of the smell alone was enough to put me off. I couldn't stay either. One way or another, I was going outside.
I jumped as the metal door locked itself again behind me. That was interesting to note: once I left, there was a good chance I wouldn't be able to get back in.
The room was laid out with a row of lockers along most of one wall (all locked) and a row of matching filing cabinets along the other (locked, which was particularly annoying because I suspected that they held information pertaining to my situation). In front of the filing cabinets was a large table (with nothing on it) and a couple of plastic chairs. Next to the lockers was a (padlocked) wooden trunk, and in front of them were several decently-sized metal containers (again, all locked). I felt my frown deepen as I stepped back into the centre of the room. Celestia, it couldn't be easy, could it?
I spotted a yellow-and-pink first aid kit hanging next to the fire door, levitated it onto the table, and opened it.
Empty. Empty.
Fine.
I closed the metal box again and took a deep breath. The padlock. I could deal with the padlock, maybe.
This time, I started counting right from the beginning. I smashed that first aid kit against the padlock twenty times, then stopped and paced a little until a very grim sort of determination came over me and I resolved to keep going until I hurt myself or succeeded in opening the trunk. After forty-three impacts, it wasn't the padlock or I that gave but rather the bit of metal the lock was looped through; the wood split apart at the lid. The first aid kit was dented completely out of shape, and I dropped it where I stood. A smile cracked across my face as I opened the trunk. Pickaxes, crowbars, fire axes, spades, rakes... tools of various kinds or, as I was thinking, weapons. Admittedly, I'd been hoping for firearms, but this was a lot better than nothing. After a couple of seconds of deliberation, I levitated a red crowbar out of the trunk. One of its ends was straight, the other was curved, and both were sharp. It seemed like the most versatile option available to me, seeing as I'd realistically only be able to carry one. Besides, there was no way I'd be able to use a sledgehammer.
I twirled the crowbar in my telekinesis and almost dropped it. Okay, I wouldn't be doing that again. It occurred to me that I could use it to break into the lockers, and I spent another couple of minutes trying to do that before giving up. Too sturdy. Better to quit while I was ahead; no point in wasting any more time.
Water was a priority, and I hadn't found any working faucets in the building. No, I suspected that I'd find water where I found ponies. Living ponies. It sure didn't seem like I'd find any if I stayed where I was.
I took a deep breath, pushed the lever down, and swung the door open.