Flash and Base stepped out of a small wooden cottage that sat a short walk away from the harbor, wearing baggy, dark brown overcoats, gray knit hats, and sturdy boots. Cranky Doodle was out on the porch waiting for them, and Twilight followed them from behind.
“Step lively now, boys. We’re going to be in for a good time,” Cranky said cheerfully as he led the group up a poorly maintained cobblestone road towards the town. Despite—or perhaps, because of—Cranky's good spirits, the brothers were reluctant to follow him, but their curiosity got the better of them, so they followed.
The four of them passed in front of two buildings just on the outskirts of the town. Both buildings were made of wood and, unlike the family’s cottage, had glass windows. The glass from the windows were cracked and dirty, and a few windows seemed broken. The buildings had also been painted at some point, but whenever that might have been was long past as indicated by the way the paint peeled and cracked. What ended up catching the boys’ eyes, however, were the signs prominently displayed on the roofs and the objects strewn around the buildings.
The smaller building had a sign that read “POST OFFICE” in faded gold letters and had crates upon crates of firewood stacked around the porch and woodchips and sawdust strewn about. The larger one’s sign read “SCHOOL,” and empty crates filled with fish bones and fishing equipment littered the building’s surroundings. Most notably, both buildings seemed completely devoid of people.
“Whoa, what happened here?” Flash asked, looking over the buildings.
“Oh, it’s just early that’s all. Postman Night Light and Ms. Cadance will open them up soon enough,” Cranky replied.
“Postman Night Light?” Flash turned to Twilight in confusion. “Your father’s the postman?”
“Supposed to be,” she replied with a growl. “A lot like how Cadance is supposed to be the teacher.”
“Supposed to be?”
“My father took a postman job in a place where people don’t write letters, and Cadance took a teaching job where parents don’t send their children to school. No letters and no children means no job, and no job means no income, meaning we had to find other jobs to support ourselves with. Are you starting to connect the dots?”
Completely taken aback by Twilight’s sudden rant, the brothers shared a disturbed look before First Base squeaked out, “Gee, someone seems a little bitter about their current living situation.”
“And why wouldn’t I be?!” Twilight snapped at him. “Wouldn’t you be too if THIS,” she gestured dramatically around her, “was your life?”
First Base frowned and thought about Twilight’s question. He looked at his brother, who shook his head frantically in warning. Flash’s warning went unheeded, and Base opened his mouth anyway.
“Gee, I don’t know. Flash and I have been in some pretty bad spots before, and we never got bitter. Discouraged, disappointed, and left wanting? Yes. But bitter? Not really,” Base replied.
“Well, try living here for a few months or a few years, and you won’t be much different from me by then,” Twilight muttered before marching away with a huff. Cranky and the boys took this as a sign for the tour to continue, and the group entered the town proper.
Flash and First Base’s mouths fell open as they gaped at the state of the town. All the houses they could see were in various stages of disrepair, from slightly run down to “Oh my gosh! How is this even still standing?!” The houses on one side of the road where all made of stone while all the ones on the other side were all made of wood.
“So, do kids here not go to school because everyone here is so poor that everyone needs to work for a living?” Base asked Twilight, still staring at the dilapidated buildings.
“Oh, if only,” Twilight retorted.
Just then, a loud, thundering explosion was heard a short distance away followed by a much wetter-sounding one. Flash and Base turned towards the sound and saw smoke coming out of one of the stone buildings. A girl with wavy, red and yellow hair and a short, stocky boy with greyish green skin and orange, spiky hair burst out of the building coughing and followed by a plume of smoke. The girl wore a turquoise dress, and both she and the boy were dressed in dark green jackets. Across the street stood a wooden building from which a girl with white and light blue hair stormed out with an angry scowl on her face while a tall, lanky boy with orange skin and green hair peeked from the doorway.
“Sunset Shimmer!” the angry girl screamed. She seemed to be wearing vermilion dress and a red jacket. The boy at the doorway also seemed to be wearing a red jacket, but the slime green paint covering them made distinguishing their clothing color difficult.
The redheaded girl stopped coughing and looked up, scowling as she locked eyes with paint-covered girl.
“Trixie, you blowhard!” Sunset Shimmer screamed back, pointing towards the inside of the stone building. “As if the smoke wasn’t bad enough, your smoke bombs got ash and soot all over Mr. Rich’s merchandise. Are you trying to get me fired?”
“Me?!” Trixie yelled back. “If anyone’s trying to get anyone fired, it’s YOU trying to get ME fired! Your paint bombs covered paint all of Mr. Davenport’s furniture!”
“Oh, please! If you do get fired, it’s because you deserve it!”
Trixie scowled deeply at that assertion, her face turning redder than her dress. Instead of yelling more as Flash and Base expected, Trixie pulled out a string of firecrackers from her coat pocket, lit it, and wordlessly tossed it into the stone building.
“Snips!” Sunset yelled at the stocky boy, pulling him back into the building with her. “Help me put these out! They’re going to set the merch on fire!”
Several loud pops were heard combining with the sound of stomping boots and frantic yelling, and bright flashes could be seen from the windows. Trixie walked away with a satisfied smirk and went back inside the building she had walked out of. Seconds later, Snips was shoved out of the stone building with a bucket of paint in his arms.
“Just dump that all over Quills and Sofas while I deal with this,” Sunset ordered from inside, “and make sure you get some on the windows.”
Snips simply shrugged before walking across the street. Then, he carelessly sloshed slime green paint all over the wooden building, getting just a smattering of paint on a single window. Not even half a second later, Trixie’s enraged screams could be heard coming from inside the building.
All the while, the two brothers watched the whole exchange with a mixture of shock, disgust, and morbid fascination. Their guides simply stood next to them, blinking indifferently.
“Uh, is that a regular thing here?” First Base managed to ask.
“Oh, sonny, you haven’t seen the worst of it,” Cranky replied, chuckling that same ominous laughter from earlier that Flash and Base were honestly starting to hate. “We better keep going, or you’re going to miss out on the real fun.”
“If what just went down is his idea of fun, I’d hate to see what his idea of a bad time is,” Flash thought to himself dismally as he and his brother followed Cranky and Twilight further into the town.
It was the same story everywhere Flash and First Base looked, broken wooden buildings on one side of the road and broken stone buildings on the other side. Aside from the stray animals roaming the streets and a few individuals either vandalizing property, yelling at each other, or both, the town seemed deader than a cemetery.
“I’m starting to think we might have been better off dying at sea,” Base remarked dryly as he and Flash observed their surroundings. Flash would have never said so out loud, but he was strongly inclined to agree with his brother.
Eventually, the group reached the center of town where a lone bell hung from a wooden post.
“You see that bell over there?” Cranky said to the boys. “Why don’t you go over there and give it a ring or two?”
The two brothers eyed Cranky suspiciously before turning to Twilight who simply and sternly shook her head no.
“Come on. You know you want to,” Cranky persuaded. “Would I ever let you kids do anything that would hurt ya?”
The brothers shared a look with each other.
“Yes, yes, he would,” their eyes seemed to say before turning back towards the bell and staring at it. Even though the boys knew better than to walk up to the bell and ring it, their curiosities had been piqued, and against their better judgment, they were sorely tempted to do just that.
Flash looked down at the broken cobblestone and searched the ground for a loose rock. When he found one, he picked it up and held it out to First Base.
“Think you can hit it from here?” the older teen asked his brother.
“Ha! You know it!” Base affirmed confidently, taking the rock and pitching at the bell with astounding accuracy.
The rock struck the bell with a clang and sent the bell swinging. The clapper inside the bell swung wildly, striking the sides and sending more clangs echoing through the town. Not even a tenth of a second later, a thunderous roar was heard rising through the town as if in response to the bell’s rings.
Before the boys even had time to wonder where that sound was coming from, hordes upon hordes of people rushed out from the buildings, let loose a war cry, and poured into the square. The pounding of their running feet combined with their cries, creating the roar Flash and First Base were hearing. The people coming out of the wooden buildings were all dressed in reds while those from the stone buildings were dressed in greens, and each side was attacking the other with whatever they could get their hands on, including but not limited to sticks, stones, frying pans, rolling pins, and their own bare fists.
Flash grabbed First Base’s arm with one hand and Twilight’s with the other and pulled them away from the path of the people running into the square from behind them. In the process of pulling his brother and his acquaintance away from the savage townspeople, he ended up pulling the two of them closer to himself. Shortly after, all the townspeople had reached the square and were going at one another like a pack of starving wolves fighting over a bone. While the brothers continued to gawk at the hulking mass of violence in the square, Twilight noticed how Flash had taken her arm and pulled her close to him.
“Do you mind giving me my space?” she snapped, yanking her arm out of Flash’s hand.
“Oh, sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to get fresh,” Flash apologized, just barely realizing what he had done.
“Ringing the bell makes the townspeople fight each other?!” Base exclaimed disbelievingly.
“No, it makes them come out for tea and cakes,” Twilight replied sarcastically. “What do you think?!”
“Well, how do we turn it off?” Flash cried.
“Oh, you could try ringing the bell again, but I doubt you’d be able to make a shot like that again with all those people in the way,” Cranky insinuated. “Better walk through and ring it by hand.”
“Are you trying to get us killed?!” Base screamed.
“Base, try making that shot again,” Flash said, picking up another rock and handing it to his brother. “Just try.”
“With all those people in the way, I could end up hitting someone if I miss.”
“Really?” Twilight scoffed. “These people are whaling at each other with everything short of weapons, and you’re worried that a measly, little rock is going to hurt them?”
Grudgingly, First Base took the rock from his brother and took a deep breath. Taking careful aim, Base pulled his hand back and sent the rock flying. The rock whizzed past someone’s ear, ricocheted off someone else’s pitchfork, and struck the bell with a clang. Immediately after the bell rang, all the fighting stopped. In fact, everyone seemed to stop moving as if time had frozen.
“Well, I see someone is quitting early today,” a tall, broad-shouldered, muscular man with reddish skin and a thick, gray beard came forward from the side with the wooden buildings. Unlike everyone else from that side of town, his clothing color of choice seemed to be almost exclusively black and maybe a very dark gray. “Looks like you Stones just can’t put up a fight as much as you used to, can you? Huh, Lady Chrysalis?”
“Us?!” shouted a woman with dark gray skin and long, stringy green hair from the side with the stone buildings. Like her opponent, she also seemed quite fond of the color black. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lord Tirek. You Woods were the ones who rang the bell!”
“We did no such thing. You did! You’re just saying we did to spare yourselves the embarrassment!”
“As if we would ever do that!”
“It was us!” Flash interrupted stepping forward, causing everyone to turn their attention towards him. “My brother and I rang that bell, and we’re so sorry. We never meant to cause any trouble.”
“And just who do you think you are, boy?” Lord Tirek demanded.
“Oh, great, another outsider,” Lady Chrysalis groaned.
“Well, my brother and I used to work for a merchant ship, but we were shipwrecked and brought here,” Flash explained. “We need to head back to the mainland and see if any of our shipmates survived, and we were wondering if maybe...”
As Flash talked, Lady Chrysalis rolled her eyes while Lord Tirek just stared at the teenager with a thoroughly bored expression. Then, to show how little she cared about Flash’s tale, Lady Chrysalis grabbed the bell’s rope in her hand and pulled it, ringing the bell. Just like that, everyone began fighting all over again, not even letting Flash finish his request. After maybe a whole second of dumbfounded staring, Flash returned to the group.
“Would this,” Flash asked Twilight, gesturing towards the battle raging behind him, “have anything to do with why no one here writes letters or sends their children to school?”
“Catch on fast, don’t you?” Twilight quipped bitingly.
“But how did all that start in the first place?” First Base asked.
“Heh, no one knows,” Cranky replied nonchalantly. “That’s just the way things are around here.”
“And everyone is okay with that?” Base asked disbelievingly before sharing a skeptical look with his brother.
Twilight let out a long sigh and interrupted, “Maybe you’d get a better perspective of what life here is like straight out of a local.”
“I guess we would, but is anyone here even going talk to us?” Flash asked her, tilting his head towards the fighting townspeople.
“I think I can take things from here, Cranky,” Twilight said to the ferryman. “You can head back to the docks.”
“Heh, suit yourself,” the salty boatman replied as he left the group.