The first thing Setton saw after he regained most of his wits was a marbling sky of ever shifting, melding, and drifting colors, a majority of which were not conventionally nameable. Briefly wondering if the combined symptoms of a grinding headache and all the muscle response of a lukewarm Klondike bar were signs of a concussion or some kind of hangover, Setton did his best to rise from his prone position on a bed of grass. It took him a few tries, but he finally managed to right himself enough to look around.
Underneath the marbling sky lay a sprawling field, sprouting an array of wild grasses and flora that upon swaying in a westward breeze made Setton grateful that he wasn’t epileptic. Planted in this field was also an incredibly conspicuous cabal of stainless steel filing cabinets, each of their drawers labeled in what looked like his handwriting.
Setton squinted and promptly winced when his head throbbed in response. When the hell did I get here? he wondered. Where even IS here?
There was a movement out of the corner of his vision, and Setton turned around for a better look. Three surprises met his eyes once he did so, the first of which involved the sight of Twilight amongst the filing cabinets. She was reading through one of the nearby cabinets’ contents while speaking to two much less corporeal versions of Lee and The Beast, her back turned to Setton as she did so. The other two surprises were a bit of a package deal, partly because they were a good deal closer to him than Twilight, and also due to how the two ponies standing in front of him were supposed to be dead.
The Beast put a slender hand to his chin. “I would hate to come off as rude, but perhaps I could check on your other guest before taking a seat.”
“Go right ahead,” Pinkie said, “It’s over there, and the door’s unlocked. Watch your head on the steps!”
The Beast tipped his hat to the mare, briefly placed a hand on both Lee’s and Rainbow’s shoulder, and began going down into the basement as casually as an eldritch abomination of his stature could–
“Wait!”
The Beast stuck his head out from behind the basement doorway “What is it?” he asked.
“Dinner will be ready soon.”
There was a pregnant pause in the room, so pregnant that Missus Pause was trying to becalm the fetal quadruplets thrashing in her womb while praying to God that they would be much less rowdy after their delivery.
“…are you telling me this because you would like me to stay down here for the interlude, or simply to inform me of the upper limit of how long I can stay down here?”
Pinkie put a hoof to her chin. “Yes! No! I mean both!” she exclaimed, thrusting a hoof out each time before pausing in confusion. “No, wait, just the first one.”
“Very well then. If you insist.”
As he finished descending, he took a moment to look around the room. Something about the decorating style seemed familiar to him, but that could wait after the more pressing matters, such as the state of the pegasus strapped to the bloodstained table. Electrical burns had spider-webbed across her body, looking for all the world as a shuddering diorama of the nervous system. Vicious stab wounds and lacerations had broken the angry flesh periodically, and evidence of bruising formed at the slow but gradual rate of a storm front.
The pegasus was still breathing, highlighting just how practiced her torturer had become. Upon closer inspection, each push of the blade had deliberately missed severing any veins, major arteries, or the linings of vital organs. The Beast suddenly found himself envisioning a spectre of himself, targeting specific sections that would maximize the agony from each tool while keeping the damage to a minimum, ensuring a long and enjoyable session, fueled by thoughts of revenge and the sadistic euphoria of hearing the screams and pleadings as the Cockroach who had caused so much suffering and had destroyed so many SPASM AND WRITHE IN AGON–
The Beast got a hold of himself. While he chased away those specifically unrelated fantasies, there was one point that stuck with him. The conclusion that this was clearly done in a lukewarm rage – cold enough to retain the reason necessary to keep the victim alive in spite of the extensiveness of the injuries, but hot enough to feel vindicated by the suffering inflicted.
He then glanced over at the skeletal framework of the furniture to his left, pondering the craftsmanship. Kneeling down, he inspected the way the bones had been arranged and aligned, running an eldritch finger along the ivory and knotted sinew. He paused. Those particular knots where the stripped and segmented remnants of joints connected the foreign members. It seemed like an eternity had passed since he had last seen this style from astride The Anathema, powerless as a marionette under the reddened skies of Xanadu, and yet in reality it had been far too recent for his liking.
“Could it be…?”
He heard a soft, muffled moan from behind him. Stepping over to the now waking pegasus, The Beast tore the makeshift gag of streamers from her muzzle. Manager Dash coughed several times, focusing through the lingering fog of anesthetics – administered in just the right dosage to reduce the risk of shock but not enough to fully numb her. Her eyes widened when she saw the faceless visage hovering inches from her face. “Wait a second,” she croaked, before hacking her throat clear. “I remember you. You were in that library.”
“I was. But now you are going to tell me what happened since we last met.”
Manager Dash twisted her head round, grimacing in pain as she indicated her restraints and the state of her body. “Take three guesses, you faceless dipshit.”
The Beast calmly stood back. “If you insist on that attitude, I could always leave this room without freeing you.” As if to emphasize this possibility, he turned on his heel and slowly stalked towards the stairway out.
Manager Dash froze, but not as literally as she had in the Peisistratos. “Don’t you fucking leave me here,” she spat, trying to mask her mortal terror with foulmouthed fury and rapidly failing with each deliberate step The Beast took. “No! Wait! I’ll tell you! Just get back here!”
The Beast paused and, after a pregnant moment barrel rolling between hope, despair, and the stomach churning vertigo in between, finally turned around. Manager Dash let out a deep sigh of relief, sagging in her restraints as much as she was able to, as The Beast came back.
“So…are you going to free me or what?”
“Not just yet.” At Manager Dash’s expression, The Beast elaborated, “The downward angles of the stabs prevent the blood from flowing out through them. If you took the standard quadruped stance, the blood would drain out of you like a sieve. You’ll have to be carried out in that orientation.”
“…well, shit.”
“The best way to go about it would be to ‘put you under,’ as the saying goes, to prevent you from thrashing around accidentally.”
“So you’re telling me I should talk first before you spring me,” Manager Dash summed up.
The Beast nodded. “Precisely.”
Manager Dash closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them, she locked eyes on the location other creatures would have eyes. “Alright. What do you want to know?”
Setton pointed to the brown colt incredulously. “I saw you get thrown into the Spectra harvester. I heard your screams as it took you apart.” His finger shifted to the filly. “And you – actually, I didn’t watch you die, but I kind of knew it was going to happen. How are you here?”
The filly thrust a yellow hoof right back at him. “Well, I watched you get thrown in, and you’re here,” she pointed out. “Why can’t we be here too?”
“But I wasn’t fed through the machine – I punched through the piping just below it,” he countered. “And last time I checked, I was still alive.”
The filly looked as if she was about to argue, but the colt cut her off. “Aurora, please.” The colt turned to him apologetically. “Setton. I get it. Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t even be here to begin with–”
Setton gawped at him, utterly dumbstruck. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. First off, how the hell do you know my name? Second, where even is this place? And the million dollar – er, bit – question of why you wouldn’t ‘normally’ be here, barring the fact that you are dead, Orion.”
“Oh. Um. I thought you’d recognize this place,” the colt said looking at him for a moment. “Okay, I’ll let you know the answer to those questions. You remember what happened with the Spectra when you punched through the machine?”
“Kind of hard to forget a spider made of bone and sinew stitching my insides back inside me,” Setton said. “Wait, how would you know? You died just before that happened.”
“I’m getting to that. Do you remember what happened when you got out of it?”
Setton stopped. He remembered what he had become when Biblio was sunk into his chest, being covered in a viscous armor of pure emotion, the intense rage and thirst for retribution virtually possessing him as Spectra flowed over him.
Wait a minute…
“Are you saying that…your ghosts were possessing me when that happened?”
Aurora and Orion looked uncomfortable. “We were the freshest,” Aurora explained, “So we kept our minds together. But the others…”
Setton glanced out at the horizon, specifically at all the vaguely foal-shaped figures shuffling about. “Oh,” he said in a very small voice. “Let me, um…let me take a wild guess here. This place is either my Center of the Mind or my soul, and I’ve got a lot of other peoples’ souls rattling around inside of me.”
“As far as we can tell,” Orion said. “Or something like that.”
Aurora glanced at her friend. “It’s the best we could come up with, anyway.”
Setton tried to wrap his head around this all. “So I was fixed up with what was left of you guys…and you’ve been poking around my mind this whole time?”
Orion and Aurora nodded. Setton looked at them blankly, wondering exactly what they had seen. His face promptly fell when he remembered that Twilight had just been sifting through the filing cabinets, the ones he was now reasonably sure contained his memories.
“We saw your stash, by the way. You have some really odd tastes.” Orion paused, raising a hoof. “Granted, it wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the memory of being flayed alive, but...”
Oh noooooooooooo, Setton thought, absolutely mortified.
Those words echoed mightily across the ‘heavens’, much to Setton’s chagrin. Orion looked at him funny. “You do realize we’re in your mind, right?” he deadpanned.
Setton slumped forwards, hanging his head. “Yeah, that kind of sold it for me.” He then realized something was odd. “Wait. Where did Twilight go off to?
“…and that’s how we accidentally dropped a skyscraper on the Harlequin,” Silias concluded. He was laying on his back, periodically shifting his gaze from the nearby Doors, the high bookshelves of the Peisistratos, the unconscious forms of Twilight and Setton, and his similarly positioned listener.
Scootaloo pounded her fore-hooves together, grinning in the wake of Silias’ story. “That’s it,” she decided. “The next chance I get, I’m getting fifty of those ‘Pot Noodles,’ a copy of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and a wristwatch.”
Silias gestured vaguely at the eldritch library around them. “Well, I can certainly help with the second part. Paperback or hardcover?”
“Hardcover.”
A nod. “Good choice.”
“Hey, Silias?”
“Yeah?”
“Lee said this place is your domain, right?”
“Right.”
“What are you?” Scootaloo rolled her head over to the side facing Silias, who had paused. He turned his head to face Scootaloo. “I mean, why would you be ‘virtually untouchable’ here?”
Silias tilted his head to the side and back again in acknowledgement. “Fair question. Well, that’s because I’m the–”
It was at this moment Twilight woke up, practically flinging herself from the floor as she hyperventilated.
“You done with the catapult impression, or should we start aiming you at castles when you fall asleep?” Silias deadpanned.
Scootaloo rolled herself upright, and went over to Twilight. “What’s wrong?”
Twilight tried to control her breathing. “Someone just banished me from Setton’s mind.”
“That’s weird.” Silias frowned. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it, and I wouldn’t expect him to know how to do that himself. Did you get a glimpse of what they looked like, or at least what their presence felt like?”
Twilight shook her head. “No, but for some reason the sky was going red.”
Lee Richards wasn't sure what to think anymore. There were too many questions, and nowhere near enough answers for what was happening.
For a start, when The Beast had patted Lee on the shoulder he had slipped a piece of paper into the Silvertongue's shirt collar. While Lee had been able to palm the paper without being noticed...
I hope. Then again, if anyone did notice, they could have just decided to keep quiet. In any case I can't just open it without raising questions, or worse, escalating things. He was reasonably sure that Pinkie could at least guess at what he was capable of, especially since he'd literally demonstrated it to her not too long ago, but Lee couldn't help but wonder why the paper had been given to him in the first place. The Silvertongue figured that it had to be something important, and there was a pretty good chance he was expected to read it aloud at some point, but was driving himself paranoid with the implications.
"I've really been looking forwards to this day," Pinkie giggled to herself, as if she was a schoolgirl on her first date.
Ah, and there was the second thing weighing so heavily on his mind: his hostess. Despite the fact that her invitation clearly implied that Manager Dash had been slated for baking, a process Lee hoped was still very early in the development stages, there hadn't been any objections when The Beast went down to investigate the basement.
His inner ramblings were once again derailed when he registered more giggles coming from the mare. Either he had missed something in his reveries, or she was just giggling for some internal reason. Lee shivered unconsciously. Nothing to worry about, Lee told himself. I mean, isn't her shtick Laughter? The giggling makes total sense. She...she does giggle normally, right? He thought back to when he was fleeing Sugarcube Corner. He was reasonably sure she was giggling then...but, then again, that wasn't going to tell him much about whether or not she was actively preparing to kill him or not.
"Hi there!" Lee flinched. "You look a little tired," Pinkie noted, contemplating his face mere inches from hers. "How about we get seated?"
"Yeah, sure," Rainbow said, shooting Lee a Look.
"Great!" Pinkie beamed, and grabbed ahold of them in what in normal circumstances would be considered a jovial and certainly not terrifying manner. Following the insistent tuggings of Pinkie, Lee was shepherded into the room beyond the doorway.
It was then that he saw the decorations in the kitchen, and felt his stomach fall out like a little boy out of a plane.
Metaphorically speaking, of course, though a part of Lee figured getting disemboweled at that moment instead would have been less traumatizing.
Oh crap, this is going to turn out like that time, isn't it? With considerable effort, Lee fought to keep his face neutral as possible as he pushed his fears down, particularly those involving painted smiles and a discordant hell-noise filtered from behind a face of wood...
Oh sodomize me with an X-plorer, I had forgotten that was her idea of giggling.
"Hey. Hey!" Lee's focus came back to him rapidly with every shake, to the point where he finally took notice of Rainbow Dash raising a hoof to the side. "Snap out of it," she demanded, swinging it towards him in a familiar motion.
Oh crap, she's going to-
Lee recovered his wits a moment too late, as the hoof had came far too close to his cheek to stop her slap. "...ow." Nursing his aching jaw with a hand, he noted he was alone with Rainbow Dash in Sugarcube Corner's bathroom. "Oh. Um. Thanks," he said, grateful that she hadn't broken anything. "I needed that."
Rainbow stared at him with concern in her narrowed eyes. "Seriously, what's up with you? First you start spacing off in the middle of a conversation, then you look like you've seen the horrors of Tartarus when you walk into a room." Rainbow put her fore-hooves on her hips. "What, so a room full of blood and guts doesn't bother you, but you're terrified of smooth jazz and candlelight?"
"Look..." Lee sighed. "Seeing the room set up like that...set off some memories. Traumatizing ones." At Rainbow's incredulous stare, he added, "Really traumatizing ones."
Rainbow raised a brow. "What kind of memories would make those things traumatizing?"
"It's not that those things terrify me on their own, but..." Lee shivered. "It's more like who they reminded me of, specifically. It's a long story."
Rainbow shook her head, placing a hoof on Lee's shoulder. "Look, I don't know who you're so afraid of," she admitted. "But I'm pretty sure they're not going to be anywhere near here. That said, you need to stop losing it. I mean, has anything in here really justified flipping out like that?"
There was an awkward silence as they processed this question.
"...great, now I'm the one acting like an idiot," Rainbow grumbled, her hoof firmly connected to her face.
Lee opened his mouth to speak, but a knock at the door caused him to pause. "Everything okay in there?" Pinkie asked through the wood.
The pegasus and the Silvertongue shared a glance.
"Yeah, everything's fine," Rainbow said, trying not to cringe. "We're just going to wash our...uh." She paused, as if just remembering that Lee had hands. After an awkward beat of trying to figure out how to phrase it, she just went with "...selves before coming out."
"That's fine!" came Pinkie's unexpectedly chipper response. "Come out whenever you're ready." The sound of bouncing followed Pinkie's retreat towards what was presumably the kitchen.
Rainbow turned her head back to Lee. "So are you good now?"
Lee considered it for a moment, then nodded. "I think so." He went over to the sink, fiddling with the soap for a moment before turning on the faucet. "Are you, though?"
Rainbow blinked. "You're forgetting which one of us just spaced out like he was having a Vietneighum flashback."
Lee stared at her for a moment. "...wait, how do you know about Vietnam flashbacks...or Vietnam for that matter?"
Rainbow's brow wrinkled. "Well, I paid attention in history class. But why do you know about that, and what's with that pronunciation?"
Lee tried to parse this information as he washed his hands. "...you know what, while that's going to be an interesting discussion, maybe we can come back to that one later." He reached for a nearby towel, and began drying his hands off. "But I'm talking about..." Lee trailed off, opting to nod in the general direction of the door.
Rainbow caught his drift. "I'm totally fine," she asserted. She hovered over to the sink, firmly grasping the soap in her hooves and working up a solid lather.
"Considering what you nearly experienced, and what your double is probably a good way through, you're acting really calm about this situation," Lee pointed out.
Rainbow paused, letting the water flow over her for a moment. "I...look, Pinkie's been my friend for years. I don't know what's happened to her, but you can bet your tail that I'm going to find out what did this to her."
Lee considered where he would have his tail, if he had one, but decided not to point out this anatomical difference to the mare.
"And besides," she continued. "There's a reason I'm the Element of Loyalty. I don't just give up on my friends."
She dried herself off with an expression so serious that it would have been borderline comical in another context.
The Beast watched the limp pegasus as her chest slowly rose and fell. It had been child’s play to obfuscate a series of hypnotic colors and shapes to lull her to sleep. It was the least he could do for the information he had received. Unfortunately, now that he had exhausted the only other physical companion in the room, he still had time to pass and no one to pass it with. Unless…
Perhaps if I make an innuendo, she will chime in once more…The Beast racked his head for any and all phrases that could be considered ‘dirty.’
The plumbing in this place has seen better days. I would really like someone to help me lay some pipe down here! he called mentally.
No response.
Hmm. I hope Lee is sticking to his schedule – I would not want him to fall behind with his assets.
Still nothing.
…maybe it only works when Lee initiates the connection. After all, he DID call her out from her ‘story’ – perhaps there is some sort of eldritch bond connecting the two.
“Dinner’s ready!” came the voice from upstairs. It was time.
He spared a moment to look at the pegasus. Prior to learning the true nature of this place, there had been a microscopic temptation to leave her here, but given what she had told him that temptation wasn’t even of Planck length. After all, he’d known that there were those whose sentences had been commuted despite committing far worse sins.
Like himself, for instance.
No, not even had the pegasus outperformed his sins twofold would he ever leave her in this prison. And so, as promised, he opened the dozing mare’s restraints, placing her in his branches carefully so as not to disturb her stitches. He wove them into a wicker basket around her, gently cocooning her in an arboreal embrace and slowly slinging the resulting bundle across his back. As he turned to leave the room, he passed by the lyrics written on the wall, his new knowledge leaving him unsurprised by their content.
A thousand years have come and gone, but time has passed me by
Stars stopped in the sky
Frozen in an everlasting dew
Waiting for the world to end, weary of the night
Praying for the light
Prisoner of the lost Xanadu
Turning her face to one side, Pinkie leaned her head over the table farther than her neck should have allowed. “Dinner,” she said. Then she audibly winked.
“What is this?”
“It’s not made of ponies, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Pinkie assured.
“That’s not what I meant,” Lee said as he sawed into the meat with his knife, ignoring the look on Rainbow’s face. “Actually, I meant what the occasion was for...” Here he gestured vaguely around the room by spinning the chunk of meat impaled on his fork around before pointing it at Pinkie. “Unless you are in the habit of throwing this type of party every night, that is.”
“I don’t throw these kinds of parties very often. Actually, this is my first.”
Lee was too busy chewing on the meat to respond, but Rainbow was a little too preoccupied to eat. “What, a dinner party? You’re Pinkie Pie! You know, party planner extraordinaire?”
“I’ve never done a corpse party before.”
While The Beast didn’t so much as flinch, her mortal guests couldn’t have frozen faster if they had been dipped in liquid nitrogen.
“Please tell me that was just a Homestuck reference,” Lee murmured. "I wouldn't even care how she'd made it."
“No, that came out a little more ominous than I wanted it to. I don’t own any black clothes, and I didn’t want to break into Carousel Boutique after the last time, so I couldn’t do a funeral,” Pinkie explained. “I mean, I’d have the fun part down, but I’m terrible with fitting in the ‘eral’ part…” She fell silent for a moment, while the anomalous sound of gears turning came from her head. “Oh, I’ve got it! Calling it a wake would work!”
The Beast lamented the fact that he had no brows to raise, as now would have been the perfect opportunity to raise one. “A wake?”
“It’s because…” For the first time that night, Pinkie’s smile truly cracked. “…the nightmare’s finally over,” she said, managing a weak laugh. “Get it?”