//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7 
// Story: The Animation Bureau 
// by Chaotic Dreams 
//------------------------------//

Chapter 7
Lauren, Bugs, and the ponies raced down the dusty, dark hallways of the labyrinth beneath Disney Park. There were more twists and turns than conceivably possible, where sometimes even distance, time, and gravity shifted in peculiar ways to allow for the odd special contortions of the maze. Often Lauren would hear the ponies right behind her only to turn and give them a command to find that there was nopony there. When Lauren would turn back around, the ponies would suddenly be in front of her (and running on the ceiling) with no memory of when they and Lauren had switched places.
Lauren wasn’t too perturbed by such developments—after all, such impossibilities were to be expected as the norm beneath such a concentrated amount of Animated radiation. That didn’t make it any less annoying, of course.
“Oh, we'll never get there before the Director!” Rainbow Dash exasperated after the team faced yet another dead end at the conclusion of the latest winding path. “This place goes on forever!”
“He’ll be having just as much trouble as we are,” Lauren pointed out. “Even Mickey Mouse isn’t exempt from spatial distortions.”
“Spatial what?” Rainbow echoed. 
“When time and space don’t seem to be getting along,” Lauren explained. “When the rules of reality seem more like guidelines.”
“You mean like whenever we’re around Pinkie Pie?” Applejack wondered.
“Pretty much,” Lauren agreed. “Only now it’s the environment messing with our heads instead of a friend.”
“Couldn’t Bugs just burrow us to the end?” Rainbow wondered. “I mean, he did dig through solid rock and metal to get here.”
“That’s because those rocks and metals weren’t Animated,” Bugs answered. “This labyrinth is made of some kind of Animation I’ve never seen before.”
“Then couldn’t we just thin our way through?” Applejack spoke up. 
“We don’t have nearly enough thinner for that,” Lauren sighed. “And even if we did, there’s probably some kind of security mechanism in place anyway, like something deadly and non-Animated waiting just behind the walls should someone try something like that.”
The ponies shivered at such a thought. 
“Then what do we do?” Twilight inquired, her eyebrow raised cynically. “This random running around isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“I agree,” Lauren said. “And unfortunately the Digital equipment doesn’t seem to give us an advantage in such enclosures.”
“Wait a minute!” Bugs exclaimed. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner!”
“What?” Lauren asked eagerly, seeing the eureka expression on Bugs’ smiling face.
“Wait just a sec,” Bugs smiled, pulling out his cell phone. “I have a call to make to an old friend.”
. . .
“Feast your eyes, gentleman,” the Director smiled darkly, following his own advice as he chowed down on the visual buffet before them. A vault door ten times the size of the one leading into the labyrinth stood before them. After countless dead ends, the Director’s head start had finally paid off—ex-Agent Lauren and her little freedom brigade were hopelessly lost behind them, and there was no way they could catch up in time to stop the opening of this door. “Beyond this portal lies the OBJECTIVE. Oh, I have a call…Wait, that’s odd…how can I get reception down here? Hello?” 
“What’s up, Doc?” announced Bugs as he burst out of the cell phone the Director was holding to his large round ears and planted a wet, sloppy kiss on Mickey Mouse’s nose. “Wait a minute, this isn’t the beach! I knew I should’ve taken a left turn at Albuquerque!”
“What?!” the Director raged as Bugs hopped out of the phone, pulling Lauren and the rest of the team along with him before the Director could crush the cell phone in his white gloves. 
“You just fell for the oldest trick in the book,” Bugs smirked. “And a word of advice—I WROTE THE BOOK!”
Bugs whipped out a large mallet and, before the Director could react, smacked it down on Mickey’s head. The Mouse was left flattened like a giant coin while Bugs reached forward with impossibly long arms and pulled the goggles off of the two henchmen the Director had brought with him. Bugs just as quickly let the goggles snap back and sent the goons flying into the far wall, leaving them slumped at the base of vertical craters with stars and planets swirling around their heads.
“Quick, before they have time to get back up!” Lauren shouted to her friends. “GLaDOS! Can you open this door too?”
“Of course I can!” the potato-powered computer snapped. “But when am I going to get my cake?!”
“As soon as we recover whatever this OBJECTIVE is and use it to stop the Director!” Lauren snapped back, getting tired of the supercomputer’s odd obsession with pastries. “And hurry!”
“Fine, fine,” GLaDOS grumbled before flashing brightly and causing the security control panel on the vault door to blink crazily before turning green. The vault door clicked open, Lauren and company slipped inside, and the vault closed behind them.
“Whew,” Rainbow Dash breathed excitedly. “That was close, but awesome!”
“You really are amazing, Mr. Bunny,” Twilight agreed. “I’ve never seen such a wonderful display of magic before!”
“It wasn’t magic,” Bugs replied, beaming in the adulation of a new fan. “That was basic cartoon physics! I’ll teach you sometime, if you’re interested—or better yet, just learn from your pink friend here. She’s still an amateur, but I can see she’s got great potential.”
“Who would’ve thought the day would come when Twilight would be the pupil of Pinkie Pie?” Rarity chuckled.
“I agree, you were pretty awesome, Bugs,” Lauren thanked her godfather. “But the mission isn’t over yet. We still have to find this OBJECTIVE—”
“I think we just did,” Applejack said, pointing to a small, old-fashioned television in the center of the vast room the team had entered. The sides of the room disappeared into darkness, but a single spotlight shone down on the ancient set. 
Lauren jogged over to the set, Bugs and the ponies closed behind, and turned it on. A black-and-white image of Walt Disney himself appeared on the screen.
“Hello and welcome to the Secret of Disney,” the long-dead original Animation Director announced. “This ride is not open to the general public, and as such requires a final test to validate the legitimacy of your purpose in coming here. If your intentions are deemed to be in the right, then you may leave the Secret of Disney with both the prize at the end and your lives. If not, I hope you all wrote your last will and testament before you got down here, and told your friends and relatives to prepare for a closed-casket funeral. Goodbye.”
The television clicked off, and the spotlight went dark.
Fluttershy cried out in the virtual night, but the lights came on again just as quickly as they had vanished. In fact, the whole room was now illuminated, all several football-fields worth of it. The television had also somehow disappeared.
“Ooh, this reminds me of home,” GLaDOS whispered nostalgically. “It’s so white and big and clean—it’s just like one of my test chambers!”
“That’s what worries me,” Lauren muttered. “This ‘final test’ isn’t going to be easy.”
“Indeed it won’t.”
The team spun around to see a man who wasn’t there. But he was…but he wasn’t. The team could see right through the human, who flickered in black-and-white tones just like a three-dimensional hologram of the picture they had just seen on the television. But the man before them now wasn’t Disney.
“You’re Les Clark,” Lauren breathed, recognizing the man’s image from his picture in the Animation Bureau Hall of Fame. “One of Disney’s Nine Old Men—the special task force made up of the best Animation Agents of all time!”
“I was, in life,” the holographic man agreed. “But that was a long, long time ago.”
“You mean you’re…dead?” Fluttershy squeaked. “Please don’t hurt us!”
“Yes and no,” Clark responded, smiling at the frightened pegasus kindly. “My body passed away quite some time ago, but due to some amazing feats of science, my old friend Walt was able to bring me back, in a manner of speaking. In truth, I am not Les Clark—merely a holographic projection of his reanimated nervous system’s brainwaves, kept artificially active through intense electrification.”
“Walt did it to all of us,” said another voice, and the team whirled around again to see yet more of the black-and-white holograms. Eight more, in fact, all the remains of the original Nine Old Men. 
“Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsberry, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Frank Thomas!” Lauren exclaimed, pointing to each grainy figure in turn.
“You know your Animation history well,” Clark remarked, still smiling. “Let’s hope it can save you.”
“What?” Lauren asked nervously, turning back to face Clark. 
“You see, Walt wanted a final test of character before the Secret of Disney was reached,” Clark explained. “And he wanted that test of character to come from people he could trust. Namely, us.”
“You’re going to fight us?” Rainbow inquired, looking a little nervous herself. The multihued pegasus may have been brave, but even she had a few trepidations about fighting what were effectively ghosts. 
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Clark agreed.
“But how can you fight us?” Applejack wondered, trotting forward and swiping a hoof through Clark’s holographic form. “You’re not even really here!”
“True,” Clark admitted. “But the mark of a true artist is how much his work affects people AFTER he’s gone.”
Suddenly Clark flew back, fading into the wall where each member of the team could see his projector was stationed. The other monochromatic ghosts did the same, rushing backwards into the walls just like the ghosts that they were. 
“What’s he talking about?” Pinkie Pie piped up. “If they’re all dead, they can’t be a threat, right?”
“I’m beginning to get the awful feeling that they’re even more of a threat when they’re gone,” Lauren gulped. 
“How’s that?” Applejack inquired, though she too looked nervous at this point.
“Like this,” replied Clark’s voice, through Clark and the rest of the Nine Old Men were nowhere to  be seen. In the spots where each ghost had vanished into the wall, large mechanical doors were lifting on giant hydraulics. Out of the nine doors, each marked with a number, stepped eight plus one figures that made Lauren’s heart stop cold. Like a gladiator entering an arena with a pride of lions, Lauren knew she was vastly outnumbered and overpowered.	
For the opponents were not exactly Animated, nor where they technically manmade. They weren’t even Digital. The monstrosities that stepped, stomped, rolled, slithered, flew, or swam through the air out into the battleground were a mixture of both manmade and Animated materials—giant robotic organisms, cyborgs of Animation and metal and genetically engineered super-flesh that hungered for blood.
“Walt was kind enough to give us dead friends of his some bodies to use when he brought us back to life,” Clark explained from one of the many mouths of a large deer-like thing. In fact, it kind of reminded Lauren of Bambi—which was probably exactly what it was supposed to be, albeit a monstrous perversion of the classic childhood favorite. “Do you like them?”
“To be perfectly honest, it looked like somebody rolled up all of Disney’s biggest wackjobs and threw ‘em in a blender set on liquefy,” Bugs remarked uneasily, though never losing his trademark wisecracking wit. 
“That’s just about what happened,” Clark smiled with his—its—many mouths, each bearing metal teeth that should not be sprouting from the skin of a young deer, even if the deer in question was huge and sported a pair of rabbit hind legs and a large skunk tail in addition to two dog collars. “Each of us represents what Animated worlds and Animated beings we discovered while in Walt’s service. I, for example, helped Walt explore the worlds of ‘Bambi’ and ‘Lady and the Tramp.’ I’ll let you guess what the rest of us discovered.
“Oh, and about the ‘viciously attacking you till you die’ thing,” Clark finished, licking its many teeth with serrated white tongues. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that Walt wanted only a true friend of Animation with good intentions to be able to defeat us and pass on to the Secret, which is exactly what you all will have to be in order to defeat us all. Otherwise, it was nice meeting you.”
Lauren, and the rest of the team gulped again, each raising their weapons as the post-mortem monstrosities (eat your heart out, Frankenstein) closed their circle around them. Then, with a bloodcurdling shriek, each leapt forward.
Lauren leapt up onto Clark’s back as it slammed  into the ground where, seconds ago, she would’ve been waiting to be flattened and eaten. Whipping out a can of thinner, Lauren sprayed at the tentacles that sprouted from Clark’s flesh and tried to snap at her with the heads of various dogs from ‘Lady and the Tramp.’ The dogs yelped as their Animation melted away, but robotic skeletons beneath sported sword-like blades that darted in at Lauren twice as quickly as the dogs had.
Lauren unsheathed the Sacred Blade, lent to her by her good friend Samurai Jack, and began to rapidly slice at the manmade metal spikes, cutting them off before they could wound her. Finally able to work without having to immediately defend herself, Lauren leapt into the air, preparing to bring the Sacred Blade plunging down into Bambi’s back.
Clark, however, seemed to have other ideas, and jumped backwards into a flip that sent Lauren flying underneath the monstrosity, pinned to the ground. 
The other ponies didn’t seem to be faring any better.
“Lauren!” Applejack called despairingly.
At seeing Lauren downed, Applejack immediately flew into a rage—the fact that she was wearing the weapons of the embodiment of fury itself probably helped—and launched herself at the nearest creature. That creature happened to be the reanimated remains of Marc Davis, who Applejack didn’t know was famed for contributing designs for such Disney Park rides as ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and ‘The Haunted Mansion.’ Had Applejack known, though, it would’ve made little difference, as the various sea monsters, skeleton pirates, and ghostly ghouls that the monstrosity divided itself into from its original twining mass of thorny rose vines were exactly the kind of thing Kratos himself was used to fighting.
Applejack whipped the Blades of Chaos at the skeleton army in a blind fury, shattering their bones and sending their cutlasses clattering across the floor. Leaping further into the fray, Applejack unsheathed the Blade of Olympus and shot like a torpedo through the head of a massive kraken that breached out of the floor as if it were the frothing ocean. Applejack landed covered in blood and ink on the other side, bits of the giant squid’s brain clinging to her steaming coat as the kraken sunk back into the floor. 
Applejack hardly seemed to notice, though, as the ghosts of a thousand graves rushed forward with their tombstones bared as shields while the swords of ancient slain warriors soared towards the orange earth pony’s throat. Applejack merely smiled and hastily put on her favorite weapons of the Kratos collection: the Nemean Cestus. Nothing but blunt, brutal force—just like apple-bucking, which is exactly what Applejack proceeded to do to each and every ghost until there was nothing left but ectoplasm splattered across the battlefield. 
“You want some more?!” Applejack screamed in maniacal laughter at the gooey remains of Marc Davis. 
“Actually, I do,” Marc replied, much to Applejack’s surprise. The shattered, blood-spattered pieces of Marc’s body suddenly began to slide towards each other and converge into the original form of a mass of twining, thorny rose vines. 
“But that’s impossible!” Applejack insisted as the monstrosity recombined with itself. “I bucked you from here to the ends of the earth!”
“You’ll have to go farther than that if you want to lay one of the Old Nine down to rest,” the plant chortled. “I would suggest you start with some weed killer.”
The rosy thorns lashed out to snare Applejack, who thrashed violently in their spiking embrace. But, the more Applejack struggled, the tighter the vines became and the deeper the thorns wounded her.
“Applejack!” Rarity called. “I’ll help you as soon as I’m done with this…hideous crime against fabulosity!”
“I’m one of the veterans of Animation,” Ollie Johnston roared. “You’re just some horse that I’ve never even seen! How do you possibly expect to beat me?!”
“Like this!” Rarity roared, leaping towards the hulking, living Snow White’s castle that was Ollie as her laser blaster fired rapidly at the monster. The blasts singed harmlessly off the castle’s solid rock walls, causing Rarity to gasp before furrowing her brow in determination and flinging herself at the castle as Samus’ morph ball. The castle opened its drawbridge  and swallowed her whole, laughing all the while.
The laughing stopped suddenly when the castle, if such a thing was possible, looked confused. Then it exploded—debris raining down on the battlefield while Rarity smiled triumphantly in the center of the blast, having shot the monster’s heart. 
However, the falling rocks instantly regrouped and transformed into towering trees with faces and grasping, slicing claws. Rarity looked dumbfounded and shouted “Now that’s just not fair!” before galloping through the homicidal forest, blasting at anything that moved. But, every time a branch was burned off or bark exploded into green energy, it grew back just as quickly, and soon Rarity found herself lost in a maze of teeth and claws that surged forward to devour her. The white unicorn’s scream was lost in the barking laughs of the killer trees.
“Rarity!” Twilight called out—and so it went. Twilight seemed to get the upper hand against Milt Kahl’s Shere Kahn, only to find herself stuffed inside a giant skull with a ruby by a mad woman with snaky red hair.
Rainbow Dash swooped in and out of the living Wonderland of Ward Kimball that prattled madly about her, throwing heart-tipped spears and splashing molten tea up like a stormy sea to singe at her feathers whenever she wasn’t quick enough. Rainbow was able to smash through the mad musical notes of Kimball’s musical pieces, but was helpless when the Cheshire Cat appeared around her, trapping her inside before drinking up the scalding sea of killer tea.
Eric Larson’s Peter Pan and the rest of the mutated flying kids swirled around Pinkie Pie, who suddenly found herself high above an Animated version of London by night, where in the open air her portal tricks and open defiance of physics were at a loss to help her. Pinkie was able to suck most of them out to the Moon by shooting one portal there and the other by the clock tower where each would rest before swooping in to attack her again—but the moon itself simply fell down on her as a result.
Meanwhile, Bugs was left to deal with John Lounsberry’s gators and stomping elephants, Wolfgang Reitherman’s Monstro the whale, and Frank Thomas’ Captain Hook and his pirate crew all by his lonesome as Fluttershy soared into the air to hide from the horrors below.
“Thanks a lot,” Bugs muttered as the creamy yellow pegasus zoomed away. Bugs was able to distract all three for a time with his reverse psychology, causing them to attack themselves, but eventually they wised up to the ploy and trapped Bugs in a ring of teeth and steel. 
Finally, only Fluttershy was left, far above her trapped friends and the monstrosities below. 
“No, my friends,” Fluttershy concernedly panicked to herself. “They’re all going to die—all because I’m too afraid to help!”
“Fluttershy!” Lauren called out in pain from beneath the crushing weight of giant Bambi. “Use your Digital weapons before it’s too late! You can do it!”
“I can’t!” Fluttershy disagreed. “I’m too scared!”
“If you don’t then we’re all going to die!” Lauren pleaded as Bambi slowly settled in, crushing the life out of her.
“No,” Fluttershy whispered to herself, a spark of fire suddenly glinting in her eyes. “My friends will not die because of me. They will NOT die because of me. THEY WILL NOT DIE BECAUSE OF ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Fluttershy raised Yuna’s summoning staff and a burst of light temporarily blinded all present, including the monstrosities of the Old Nine. 
“I do not recognize these strange weapons,” remarked one of the Old Men. “They are not Animated, nor are the manmade.”
“Nor are they useful,” added another Old Man, chuckling at the inevitability of the team’s fate. “All that the last of this rabble has been able to do is try and stun us with her light show.”
“That wasn’t a light show,” Fluttershy smirked, the fire still gleaming in her eyes. “I just summoned some friends.”
“Oh, really?” laughed another of the Nine. “Who?” 
“All of them,” Fluttershy continued to smirk. 
“ALL of them?” Lauren whispered, the breath barely able to escape her lips as her ribs threatened to crack under Clark’s increasing weight. “Oh, no. You guys are in for it now. I didn’t think that was even possible, but this isn’t going to end well for you.”
“I’ll inscribe those as your last words on your tombstone,” Bambi smiled maliciously. “Now, die—”	
“Pika-chu.”
“—what?” Bambi stopped, midway into snuffing the life out of Lauren. Bambi’s head turned to see a small, yellow, mouse-like creature sniffing disgustedly at his feet. “What is that? THAT’s your backup?”
“Squirtle,” said another one of the things, this time a small turtle.
“Charmander.”
“Bulbasaur.”
“What?” inquired one of the Nine. “What are these things? And where are they coming from—”
Then reality exploded.
Hundreds of Pocket Monsters burst into the arena from nowhere and everywhere all at once, overflowing the white room like a sea of brightly-colored mini-monsters—which effectively is exactly what it was. And they were just the beginning. Every Digital monster that had ever been discovered, catalogued, and observed by the Video Game Department burst into being.
A pyramid-headed executioner, stained with blood and wielding a blade as tall as he was, sliced into Bambi as Bahamut the dragon blasted the gnashing forest into oblivion. Close to a thousand Pokémon surged their elemental energy forth, electrocuting, burning, dousing, and generally smashing up the Nine Old Men like a living fireworks display. 
It was over in a matter of seconds, and none were spared. 
Fluttershy landed amid the carnage with a smug look on her face as Titans stomped out the life of the Nine while various Mortal Kombat humanoids lashed their weapons into the monstrosities and tore out their hearts, only to shove them back down their throats and repeat the process all over again.
“Are they all dead?” Fluttershy asked.
After a final stomp and blood-spattered scream, Earth Worm Jim walked over to the creamy pegasus, performed a low bow, and announced “Yes, my liege.”
“Thank you,” Fluttershy smiled genuinely. “You may all go home now.”
And with another flash of light, they did.
“Fluttershy…that …was…AWESOME!” Rainbow Dash cheered, zooming up to tackle her friend in a hug. “I mean, they were like ‘We’re going to kill you all’ and then you all were like ‘Oh no you didn’t!’ and then the monsters were all like ‘ROAR!’”
“Yup, that’s pretty much how it all went down,” Fluttershy smiled self-consciously. “I’m just glad you guys are okay.”
“Thanks to you, we are,” Lauren smiled sincerely, picking herself up from where Bambi—now splattered across the far wall—had been crushing her. “Is everybody alright?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” announced the ponies, snapping to attention. 
“My ego’s a little bruised, but I’ll recover,” Bugs grinned. 
“Good,” Lauren grinned back. “Then let’s—”
“Wait!” 
Lauren froze, and turned to see the last person she had ever expected to see—especially since she had just witnessed him be dashed across the wall.
“I—we—just wanted to say—” a bleary and even more static-ridden hologram of Clark tried to say, shimmering on the spot where his physical body died.
“You’re alive!” Lauren exclaimed, assuming a defensive stance as the rest of the team followed suit. “How’re you alive?!”
“I thought I told you already, I’m not,” Clark smiled sadly. “The real Clark died long ago. I’m just shadows and reflections of him. And on behalf of the Nine Old Men of Disney, I just wanted to say thank you.”
“Thank you?” Lauren echoed. “For what?”
“For laying us to rest,” Clark answered. “We didn’t ask Walt to come back—and he didn’t ask us if we wanted to. This was never our choice, but today you have freed us. For that we thank you.”
“You’re welcome!” Pinkie Pie announced brightly.
“Yes…you’re welcome,” Lauren agreed. She had never thought to look at things from the Nine’s perspective—what must it be liked to be dragged back from the grave after finally retreating to a well-deserved rest? Lauren actually felt sorry for them. But, she smiled, she now realized that thanks to her team they could go back to the afterlife that awaited them, could rejoin with their true selves that waited for them there.
“And one more thing,” Clark cautioned as his hologram began to fade. “The Secret is open to you now, but be careful how you interact with it. As I’m sure you already know, the fate of all worlds depends on the outcome of your next few actions.”
“What?” Lauren gasped. “How could you know about the Director’s plot?”
“I didn’t,” Clark smiled as he began to vanish completely. “The fate of all worlds has always been precariously tied up with the Secret. Fare well, my friends, and act wisely—reality itself depends on it.”
. . .