//------------------------------// // Nov. 2014 - Our Lost Tales - 2. The Voice // Story: RoMS' Extravaganza // by RoMS //------------------------------// “Look around you and tell me what you see. Now look again and tell me once again what you were seeing. Now do it one more time and repeat what your words exactly were. Repeat them, and let me laugh… Repeat them, and make me cry… There is a lesson in all this mess, young lad. Believe no one. Don’t even trust yourself. The best of liars are your own eyes.” [ α Ω α ] “Are you sure it is safe, Scootaloo?” Sweetie Belle asked, her voice shushed by the dim of the blaring wind. “Really sure?” In the wind’s harshest gusts, unable to see farther than a hoof throw, three hooded forms were shuddering in the numbing cold. A sky as white as the ground drizzled with millions of snowdrops, sharp and cutting in all their coldness. Tartarus could have frozen that it was its icy bits that were raining on the three crusaders. “It’s this or there,” the Pegasus pointed out, swiping her hoof across the vast and invisible white no-pony’s-land that stretched beyond her sight. “Now… or never.” “I think I peed…” Sweetie Belle sniffed. “…on myself.” “It’s the cold,” Scootaloo snapped an explanation. “Compress the bladder.” “Alright…” Sweetie Belle murmured shakily. “If you say so…” Apple Bloom grunted loudly and rolled butt over head as a screech of metal wracked in the air. The massive ponyhole that had blocked the three survivors’ escape route now lay aside with its locks broken. A round and ominous black maw contrasted out of the snow. The white dust whirled and screamed through the orifice, down to a rotten place that exhaled putrefied fumes. The three looked at each other. Though Sweetie Belle pleaded them with tearful, widened eyes, her two companions crawled in and went down the hole on a rusty and unsteady ladder. “Don’t tell me I warned you,” she howled down, her head the only thing she let squeeze in the ponyhole. Sweetie Belle fidgeted, rubbed her forehooves together, felt the coldness between her legs, and heard a scream in the far distant nether. Biting her lips, she mumbled in apprehension and followed in her friends’ stead. Gulping down, she strained on her muscles and dragged the piece of metal back over her head. As it closed down in a shattering and echoing screak, she felt a bursting tingle in her chest. She felt trapped. “I’ve got a bad feeling, girls,” the Unicorn mumbled, pocking her horn repeatedly until the sparks cracking out of it became a steady whitish light. “Welp,” Apple Bloom mentioned, a hoof on her forehead. “Ah’m sure we ain’t gonna freeze down here.” Scootaloo grumbled, scrapping the thin icy stalactites that had enveloped her feathers’ tips. “Hey,” Sweetie Belle bellowed, receiving a bit in her eyes. “Careful!” Scootaloo groaned back. “What’s happening to you today,” Sweetie Belle noticed with a hiss, trudging up on her backlegs and hitting down the ground. A dirty splash answered her reckless move and Sweetie Belle froze. With shot-open eyes, she slowly hung her head down and stared at a thin, semi-stagnant stream of sludge running between her hooves. “I’m not feeling very well, girls,” she mumbled. “I don’t… want to be here.” “Pony up,” Scootaloo said, rolling her eyes. “We’re not going to stay in the sewers for long.” “Why did say you so?” Sweetie Belle challenged crossing her forehooves until she grimaced, seeing she’d spread some murk on her chest. “It’s close to a metro station,” Scootaloo said, pointing at the information plate cast into the wall next to the ladder. “We’ve entered the…” While Sweetie Belle tried to sweep the shallow water off herself with a cross-eye look, Scootaloo squinted her eyes and washed a thick piece of dust off the plate with the back of her hoof. “… Greater Manehattan Area,” she finished. Apple Bloom walked up to her left side and scrutinised the map on her own. “Damn, that seems to be a heck of a walk from here to… well…” She was lost. “Sweetie Belle?” The pale Unicorn’s ears perked up at the mention as she shook off the last bit of sludge of her left forehoof. She was not so white now. “Yes?” she smiled ruefully. “Ye’re the one who went to the Big Apple with yer sister back in the time. Where did ya say the signal must be coming from?” Sweetie Belle sniffed, frowned, and slipped in between Scootaloo and the unheeding Earth Pony. “Like I told you dozens of time,” she said, pointing at a location on the map, “the radio station was on top of the Diarchy State Building, hmmm… there!” Apple Bloom stared closer, rumbled, grabbed her friend’s horny head and shook it up to get some more light. “Hey!” Sweetie Belle whined. “It doesn’t work like that!” A whisper echoed on the disgusting walls of the tunnels, reaching the trio’s ears like the distorted whistling of a thousand centipedes scurrying legs. A gust of wind whistled above their heads and a rasping scrap of metal cackled in the air. For a mere second, the trio looked at each other in silence. “Sounds like an echo,” Apple Bloom advanced looking at Scootaloo with a forced nod. “T’is nuthin’.” “Definitely,” Sweetie Belle approved far too quickly with the same dishonest nod. “Do you agree, Scootaloo?” The Unicorn squinted her eyes at the Pegasus as her face drew closer, soon joined by Apple Bloom. “We. Don’t. Wanna. Know,” Apple Bloom whispered. “Got me?” Scootaloo smirked grimly, turned away, and showed her rump to her two companions. “There is no wind inside,” Scootaloo stated. The orange Pegasus swept her nose and reached for a fold of her hood just below her left wing. The edge of a knife gleamed in the light of Sweetie Belle’s horn. “Follow me,” she intoned as her backside slowly vanished in the darkness of the tunnel, her hoofsteps the only sound that carried backward. “Wait for us,” Sweetie Belle hissed, scurrying towards the Pegasus with Apple Bloom behind. The old sewer, smelly and swamped by the gut-wrenching sound of the shallow water dripping down its walls, whistled again. It was closer this time. “My little pony…” The trio stopped, petrified as the singing marish voice crawled over their head. “… Why aren’t you with me?” “You heard?” Sweetie Belle called slowly, getting a deadpan stares from her two friends. “I… don’t want to be here.” “My little pony…” “Sweetie Belle,” Apple Bloom urged as the Unicorn slid and rested tight next to her. “Stop talkin’, you gonna summon ghosts.” “Why are you crying…” “It’s a bit farther,” Scootaloo warned, biting harder on the handle of her long, smeared, and rusty knife. “…when you can trot freely?” Sweetie Belle’s light crawled over the walls, denuded of everything but troubled water streams, murky moss, and scrapped and unreadable old markings. “My little pony…” A crack on the right side of the tunnel was large enough to let pass a small river of dirty murk, pushing out the opening like claws in a closing door. The trio walked around it and though Scootaloo eyed it with ill-feeling pinching her heart, they still faced an unending loneliness. “Don’t you cry…” Drops of water fell off the ceiling, hitting the round-shaped tunnel’s walls and the three Ponies’ hide in a gloomy musical cycle. “Tell me you’ll be brave…” A cry erupted in the settling silence as a poorly kept light crept out of a far fork in the tunnel. The crusaders’ path slowed down as the three kept the distance tight between each other. “Tell me you’ll be strong…” The clatter of a rock falling through a tube reverberated in the tunnel, sending a chill down the trio’s bones. “When your core shines brightly…” A sheet of metal being torn up. Wet papers sploshing down a small steep. Invisible bugs buzzing over and around the ears. The ill sensation of miasma obstructing noses and throats. The psychic unease from feeling absent insects crawling beneath the skin… The three young mares’ manes crawled, and Sweetie Belle whimpered as they finally reached the fork. Scootaloo sheathed back her knife in a hiss that startle her two friends. “… over the darkness and the fury,” whispered the voice one last time before falling silent. The light came from an old but still working greenish diode, still flashing inside an exit sign. It was the maintenance tunnel of the metro they had been looking for. A yellow plaque above an unending group of pipes running across the curved wall of the alleyway told them so. The silence was, as always, deafening. The trio stopped and, upon seeing the walls of the maintenance, they scampered back away in the sewer. They were covered in writing, uncannily white. Hooves had scratched those words to life. Those were testimonies… witnesses’ last words… testaments… prayers. So many words scratched up like the memories of a long gone world. Scootaloo was the first to enter the tunnel, avoiding eye contact with the writings. She was far more interested in a plaque screwed to one of the pipes, holding a worker’s plastic map. Sweetie Belle, her horn still lit up, went in a corner and sat down, breathing hot hair on her chilled hooves. “Hmmm,” Apple Bloom rumbled, looking left and right in the darkness of the tunnel. “Ain’t no singing pony down here.” “Hush now,” Scootaloo called with a dagger-throwing glare before she looked closer at the map. Apple Bloom frowned and cast her glance away from her friend right at the writings. She neared towards the writings until her nose touched the cold concrete. She gulped as her eyes streamed past words, sentences, and paragraphs, always ended with a name. Her hooves started shaking. She sniffed loudly and her backend slid in a loud thump. “Apple Bloom?” Sweetie Belled said as she raised her head. “Are you alright?” Even Scootaloo’s focused reading session stopped. She stepped backward and caught her friend’s state of mind. Apple Bloom’s rear rested on the floor and she was crying, on the edge of collapsing. With a hoof hung on the wall just below a text, the young mare’s whimpers echoed and lost themselves in the vastness of the underground. The text itself was scribbled, probably written in a hurry, a few years old and attacked by the ambient derelictness and humidity. Scootaloo drew closer and watched over the small bit of text. As she started reading out loud, her heart fell in her chest, an anchor of repressed emotions finally called her back to memories she had buried in the depths of her mind. “For all I know, this message will probably get lost. I can’t talk to you directly at the moment. I was just going to hope that, if you find this, just know that your big sis’ love you out of her all heart. And that I’d have given all I own just to see you once again.” Scootaloo stopped, swallowed, and blinked a few times as small plundering tears formed on her cheeks. “I’m so sorry I can’t be with you… right now. But I’m watching over you while you’re out somewhere I can’t go to. I am sorry I can’t be there by your side. What a bad big sis’ I am. But I still love you. And I’m waiting. Please. I pray every night Luna’s making you’ll be back soon.” Scootaloo broke away and strolled down the left part of the tunnel until the pipes on her right resonated, bellowed, vibrated… and finally screamed out. The trio screamed, scared with hot sweat crawling down their backbone. They plundged, tried to hide, and shielded themselves from the scream. Only when the shattering, high-pitched, and heart-wrenching cry died in a gurgled that a tiny, broken, and raspy voice whispered in the echo. “I still love you, lil’ sister. Despite what you did…” Sweetie Bell had crooked into a ball under the pipes, uncaring for the drips of mud falling in her dishevelled mane. Scootaloo held her face in between her hooves and pressed on her ears to shush out the voice. She would have enjoyed the silence if her Earth Pony friend’s voice had not trudged in. “Look…” Apple Bloom voice shakily called. She got up hesitantly, stumbled across the tunnel in Scootaloo’s opposite direction. Apple Bloom nearly disappeared in the darkness for a second. When she came back, her hooves had closed on something she dearly held against her chest. She was crying, not even trying to hide it as her complaint replaced the whispering voice in the tunnel and echoed through the pipes, shafts, and ventilations. She was holding a hat, torn up, rotten, and scrapped… Applejack’s hat.