//------------------------------// // You Have Nothing to Fear... // Story: Rainbow Dash's Awesome Nightmare Night Haunted House Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Adventure // by TheDriderPony //------------------------------// You enter a room that looks like it might have once been some kind of fancy bathroom. The walls and floors are both tiled up in a pleasant pattern of blues and whites, what you can still see beneath the grime. Off to one side is a tub big enough that you could get away calling it a small pool, wide enough to fit half a dozen ponies easily. The sinks have all been ripped out or smashed, leaving the floor littered with broken porcelain. The less said about the toilet the better. Someone has also clearly made themselves at home and it looks like they raided Twilight's basement lab to do it. Strange machines with buzzing gauges and sparking electrodes are bolted to the walls or haphazardly stacked in piles, stitched together with wires and tubes. Pipes cover the walls like jungle vines, connecting machines to one another or just disappearing into cracked holes in the wall. What little free space remains is covered in diagrams. Medical sketches of hooves, horns, wings. A Vitruvian Mare with her magic channels illuminated. The anatomy of a wing, with parts crossed out and rewritten. The whole place reeks of chemicals that sting your nose and make your eyes water. "So. This is the kind of trash I have to work with these days." A mare you hadn't noticed slips out of the shadows between the wall and a stack of blinking machines. She blends in so well with the room she's practically invisible. Her once white jacket's dulled to almost the same shade as the machines. Her coat and mane, however, almost look like they have too much color. The shades aren't just dark, they've unevenly oversaturated. But it's her face that makes your heart stop and your body freeze in place. A face that's so unfathomably familiar, yet one you almost never see. Except in one place, every day. The mirror. "What the fresh hay is this?!" you demand. "Why do you look like me?!" The other Rainbow Dash looks down on you with a scowl, a cruel and toxic thing made worse by the jagged scar running across her face and through her milky eye. "Don't kid yourself, sunshine. There's a passing resemblance, but you don't have a tenth the chroma I do. Just another washed up filly who thinks she's something special." You're taken aback, not just by the harshness of her words, but also the vitriol with which she spits them. Maybe in some small part of your mind, you expected a pony who looks like you to also act like you. Clearly, that part is wrong. "Chroma?" "Chroma," she agrees and steps out fully into the half-light. "Magic essence. The quiddity of Equestria. That vital quintessence that makes ponies who we are." She strokes the side of her machine, gazing longingly into its blinking lights. "I've spent so long studying Chroma. Learning its secrets. How to measure it, manipulate it," She turns to you with a predatory glint in her eye. "How to extract it." "Extract—" "Yes, extract it!" She lurches over to another machine and turns a valve. Sickly-looking blue and pink fluid starts to pour from a faucet on the machine's side, spilling out into a channel cut through the floor. "Look at it! The very lifeblood of magic! Purified! Distilled!" She scowls again and strikes the weak flow with her hoof, sending it splashing across the room. "And still impure! Their Chroma was weak and tainted! That's why it failed! That's why I need more. More Chroma. More experiments." She turns to you. "More research subjects." A cold sweat runs down your back. "Hold on, you don't mean me?" "And why not you? You're no different than any other. You look like you might have enough to give me a few cups' worth after it's extracted and purified. Though I'll let my machines handle that process." At her words, the wall behind the tub opens up, revealing a contraption of monstrous design. An iron cage, shaped to barely fit a pony within, their limbs spread and fixed in place. It's covered with needle-tipped wires and tubes clearly poised to be inserted into the flesh of its unwilling occupant. The lower bars are all stained with a rainbow of noxious sludge. Only now do you notice that the tub beneath it is actually full. What you thought was mere shadow is a thick brownish morass, the result of hundreds of shades of color mixed together. A faint swirl of pink and blue shows where the drainage channels lead. "Now. Enough of this useless chatter. Are you going to comply with my supremely important work, or are we going to have to do this the hard way?" Trapped by your mad scientist of a doppelganger who wants to use you for her next experiment. Time to FIGHT for survival. But if she is you, on some deep level, maybe you can TALK her around? If that fails, you can always use an ITEM.