//------------------------------//
// Wrong-Town 
// Story: This Town is Wrong 
// by StandInTheSun 
//------------------------------//

Crunch, crunch, crunch. The only sound audible in the forest as Sharpshooter and I trotted through the thick trees, gear weighing heavily on our backs was the leaves, grass, and occasional branch beneath our hooves. We had been camping for almost a week and not once had the forest been as quiet as it was in that moment. 

"Dead world, huh?" I said, floating my rifle close to my chest in my magic’s grip, making sure it was still there.

Sharpshooter hummed in response as he pushed a tree branch out of his way. I cast a nervous glance around, the shadows between the trees becoming more ominous as time wore on. 

It wasn’t supposed to be this quiet. We continued onward, my unease growing stronger with every step I took into the silent  forest. 

Suddenly, I was pulled out of my thoughts as I crashed into Sharpshooter’s flank. I hadn’t noticed he had stopped walking. 

“What the fuck?” I heard him whisper. 

“What is it?” I peered over Sharpshooter’s shoulder and could see that nestled in a valley that we were now overlooking was a small town, which consisted of about ten buildings arranged into two neat rows parallel to one another. The issue with our discovery, however, was that we had been dead center in a national forest. Not a single building had been constructed there outside of fire watch towers, and not a single building ever would be constructed there. 

“Maybe we should go check it out,” I had no clue why I said that. My unease was so great that I could feel sweat beginning to form on my face and I could feel the ever-present knot in my stomach grow tighter as I stared down at the town. 

Sharpshooter shrugged and began the trot down into the valley. I took a deep breath and followed, looking behind me as I went. 

We made the trip in complete silence. As we approached the opening of the single road that went straight through the center of the town, I noticed that it looked wrong. Fake. It was made to look like a small town from the Appleoosan area, but it was like a movie set. The buildings looked like plastic, not wood, and they were even labelled cliché things like “saloon” or “general store.” I shivered at the discovery, and the deep feeling of wrongness I had been feeling since the forest went quiet deepened. Eerier still, the place was empty. Not a soul in sight.

“What the Tartarus is this place?” I wondered aloud.

The more I looked around, the more I began to feel as though we shouldn’t be in the town, like we were committing some grave sin just by standing where we were. I cast my eyes down at my hooves in an effort to get the feeling out of my mind, pretending that the blades of grass or occasional weed growing through the gravel road was oh-so-interesting.

Wait, gravel? The road couldn’t have been gravel, I hadn’t heard any crunching when Sharpshooter and I had stepped onto it. I levitated my rifle onto my back and picked up a rock in my magic’s grip, floating it over to me and dropping it into my waiting hoof. It had visible sharp corners and angles, but in my hoof it felt smooth, like a pebble you’d find at the bottom of a lake. I dropped the rock back onto the floor. It didn’t click against the others like a rock should. I looked back up at the buildings, at their edges, into the alleys. They all looked wrong. Something about this place was deeply, deeply wrong. I looked back at Sharpshooter and noticed he was standing stock still, floating his rifle at a low ready, staring into a window on the building marked “General Store." He was stiff as a board and his eyes were wide open, I even thought I could see his legs shaking slightly.

“Window,” He croaked. I looked over at the window and understood why he had his gun ready. There was a pony standing in the window, staring directly at us. Like everything in this town, the pony seemed wrong. His face was obscured by shadows when it shouldn’t have been, and the room behind him seemed flat, like a photo pressed against the glass. In a sudden wave of fear and paranoia, I spun around and looked into the other windows of the town’s buildings. There were ponies in all of them. All of them wrong and all of their faces obscured by shadows. 

Suddenly, a frigid wind blew through the street, freezing me to my core. 

“We need to leave,” My voice was shaky. “Now.” I grabbed Sharpshooter’s foreleg in my magic and pulled, breaking him from his stare. I started to gallop back the way we came, Sharpshooter in tow, when I noticed more ponies at the edges of buildings and on the roofs. They seemed flat and I couldn’t see any of their faces. I kept galloping, tears welling in my eyes. Sharpshooter had pulled his foreleg away from my magic but I could hear his frenzied footsteps behind me. 

That’s when I saw it. One of the flat ponies was standing in the middle of the road, staring me down. This one was different from the others, however. I could see his face. He could barely be considered a pony. His eyes were too small and spaced too widely, his muzzle was too long and his smile, oh Celestia his smile. It stretched to the outer edges of his face, much farther than any pony’s ever could and he had too many teeth.  Without thinking, I brought my rifle up off my back and shot at him. I hit him twice in the barrel and his smile disappeared. He screamed and keeled over before dissipating into the shadows that the buildings cast in the evening light. 

It had been noon when we entered, how was the sun so low on the horizon?  It didn’t matter, I just kept galloping. That’s when they all started screaming. It was horrific. It sounded like there were hundreds of those things, screaming in agony at the top of their lungs. 

I kept galloping until I was sure I had left that cursed place behind. I collapsed after galloping at full speed for what must have been a mile or more, falling to my knees and heaving. Sharpshooter was doing the same. He was laying on his side, gasping for breath like he’d been underwater for hours. 

“What the fuck was that place?” I asked between deep, choking gasps. Sharpshooter just stared at me. I turned to look back at the town when I noticed that it was noon again. I couldn’t see the town. That’s when I heard the rustle of a breeze through the branches, and the chirping of birds high up in the trees. The town had disappeared, along with the spell it had put on the surrounding forest. 

“That place was wrong,” Sharpshooter whispered after he had regained his breath.

“I know,” I replied, still breathing deeply. 

“I’m never coming back here.” He said as he shakily stood up and started slowly trotting back the way we came, back to a civilization that was genuine, one that was real, and one that housed actual ponies.

“Me neither,” I huffed as I stood and cast a final glance behind me, swearing I could see flat ponies in the shadows of the trees.