//------------------------------//
// The Controller 
// Story: Welcome to My Nightmare 
// by Horse Voice 
//------------------------------//

"Woah!" Sonata said. "Déjà vu!"
It was the first thing Adagio heard as she emerged from the common bedroom, still shivering a little from a forgotten nightmare. Sonata and Aria, already awake, were seated on opposite sides of the small main room, and each was staring at a monitor. 
"Sonata, if you're gonna sit there and chat with your imaginary boyfriend, at least do it quietly." Aria barely moved as she said this. 
"He's not imaginary!" Sonata's tone reminded Adagio of a protesting child. "He's typing to me right now! He says, 'BRB, gotta get mah hot pockets out.'"
Until recently, Adagio might have chastised them for bickering. But there was little point. The trio's new lair was not big enough for those two. She looked forward to when she could move them into one of the houses she had recently acquired. But for now, those had to remain a secret. The Controller insisted.
She felt the Controller begin to pull her toward the door, one step at a time. They had work to do.
It had begun speaking to her the night after the sirens had lost their powers. Its voice was not of words, but of notions that passed through her mind. In her desperation, she had accepted its help, and it immediately began pulling her this way and that. It was not like the subtle manipulation of siren song, but rather a tugging sensation, as if Adagio were a marionette pulled by a thousand invisible lines attached to every muscle in her body. It didn't hurt, but was always more than a little unnerving.
Adagio knew there was far more to this arrangement than she could see, for after the agreement was made, she had begun having frequent nightmares from which she awoke in a cold sweat and could not recall.
Still, she thought, she could do a lot worse for a partner. As she passed the streets of south Canterlot at a jog, she smiled as she noted the properties they had acquired under assumed names.
First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then...
"Revenge." The word was sweet on Adagio's lips. 
She wondered about the Controller's motive for helping her. Was it doing some sort of justice that only it understood? Did it have some great cosmic objective Adagio couldn't begin to guess at?
Or did all this somehow amuse it?
The Controller steered her toward a long, narrow alleyway between two tall, decaying buildings. Today, they would take new territory. Violence would be necessary.
In the course of thousands of years, she had never needed mortal weapons. But now, she kept a small submachine gun in her belt, a long knife in her boot, and a snubnosed revolver in her padded bra. They were crude tools compared to siren song, but the Controller had an affinity for them, and Adagio for once had no better ideas.  
As she stepped into the refuse-strewn corridor, some six or seven mean-faced men and women emerged from shadowed doorways in either wall. They were dressed in shabby denim and wore red bandanas, either on their heads or around their upper left arms. Each carried one of the poor man's implements of carnage: crowbars, baseball bats, hammers, and even a chainsaw.
A rough voice shouted, "You're dead, bitch!" And as one, they charged.
On the Controller's impulse, Adagio drew the submachine gun, leveled it, and raked the alley with bullets. She barely knew how to use such weapons, but the Controller was a deadly shot, and in a matter of seconds, a mess of perforated bodies was all that remained of the enemy.
Adagio knew there would be others, for there always were. The Controller reloaded, chambered the first round, and began to direct her forward, checking in each doorway and behind each obstacle. But it didn't notice the small, dark figure that silently dropped down behind her from the fire escape where it had been hiding. The figure's hands gripped the hilt of a long, curved blade that whistled as it moved through the air.
There was a flash of sunlight on steel, and Adagio heard a horrible shlupping sound. Something warm and wet sprayed against the underside of her chin. She looked to the ground at her feet, and what she saw there made her think of raspberry jam. 


*  *  *


Button Mash grunted in annoyance and hit the option that read, "Reload from checkpoint." Again he guided Adagio from the common bedroom and set out to claim that last stubborn slice of south-side territory.
"Woah!" he heard Sonata say. "Déjà vu!"