All good things turn to ash, especially when you're carrying lighter fluid. Look at that fucker burn! But because I'm a bit of a pyromaniac, please ignore the sounds of fire in the background. I have everything under control. What better way to start an intro than-
Oh shit... I didn't think cockroaches could fly! Fuck!
Ahem...
All things turn to ash, something something witty. Now then, allow me to introduce everyone who will be listening to these tapes. Mom and dearly departed Dad, I've gone to Ponyville despite all common sense, good sense, bad sense and car sense demanding I should turn back. By now, you've probably reported a missing person file and if by some luck you come across this tape or any of the others, it's your baby Scootaloo. Dumbass extraordinaire. If it helps when identifying my body should it be littered by holes by the military, mutated from close contact by the freaky spores coming from the freaky trees or I've been forced to use a cyanide tablet...
Mom... Mom...
Let me remind you that this is a pre-recorded message and though I can imagine the long line of swears running free about your irresponsible daughter, be cool. This probably doesn't mean much but I've really thought ahead, you know... About being dead or dying or being murdered or getting sick or getting mauled by a wild bear or...
Did I learn a lesson for Dad being put six feet under because of his belief of winging it? In your words, 'A divine smug son of a bitch,' until a pair of men took him on a ride and returned his body three months later. I learned that I shouldn't be caught. Yes, your lectures and your drives to the juvenile centers and your statistics on the scum who resort to criminal activity to feed their greed had no effect. Terrible, I know. I hope you don't find my body. I rather you read my letter I left on at the apartment and respond accordingly. As in upgrade the insurance policy for all the moola. Damn, I wish I was with you.
But to be honest, I'd rather be hit by the military and buried into some ditch somewhere before there's a TV show made in the future about crimes of the military complex. At least with this tape, I won't be Jane Doe. But you know, there's something grand in dying for the cause, I think.
Anyhoo, I'm wearing a pair of brown cargo pants and a black wife-beater under my signature orange vest. And yes, I drunk the last of the orange juice. I deserved the pick me up and I didn't see your name or that stupid note on the other side. Whoops.
To the cops and other military personnel, you can't blame a girl about being curious about her old home. Ponyville. The Ponyville Flats might have been nothing but another neighborhood in a city obsessed with horses and horse puns but it was my neighborhood. The people, the places, the sights... I can't accept that it's all gone. I can't accept any of your excuses. Really now, wiped out by a earthquake and meteor event? Predicted by all those scientists and officials but nobody could really act until it was too late! That's crazy talk. That's sci-fi crazy talk.
You can put it on all the news channels and print all the lies you want but I was there. There wasn't a meteor attack. It wasn't a fucking earthquake. Oh my bad, you redacted your earlier statements of the first few months to it being a catalytic industrial accident caused by a meteor hitting the factories as an earthquake made its way through the fault line. Ponyville isn't even on a fault line. The whole area is mostly flat outside of hills! Is that the best you could come up with? And why did it work! Why didn't anyone care!
Fuck you guys, it was a damned fog. There I said it. Call me crazy or psycho or whatever but it was a fog. A clear and sparkly mist taking things. And here's the crucial part, eating people and flinging their body parts everywhere. Arms and limbs and hands rotting and mutating into bizarre colors. Sheets of skin peeling off muscle and bone and the screams. I... Their screams... The shrieking of everyone who wasn't fast enough. I shouldn't have been fast enough but she...
She said that it was...
I can't accept that it's all gone. I want to see it with my own eyes even if I might catch my death. That's what's going to happen anyway. The reports of the PN-3 have been sky-rocketing with people filling the hospitals. Trying to explain to their doctors why a pinkie rotted or why they had a foot one day and lost it the next.
Not to mention the rising cases of people just dropping dead.
Don't say that this new super-virus specifically attacking bone structure and destroying skin cells has nothing to do with what I saw that day! Or with Ponyville! It's not a coincidence. Don't you think you should tell people what really happened? What experiment or testing or whatever went wrong? You've had plenty of time to investigate! And if you're not going to do it, I will.
I'm not going to spin a long tale on how I got passed the checkpoints and made it over the several barricades and forts you have surrounding the outskirts. I'd like my death to be the only death today. But I will make the observation that your military patrols are spotty. Your soldiers manning the line are sparse and I can't help but think that has more to do with you government stooges than anything I had a hand in.
So far into the wilderness, there's only so far a off-road jeep can go with all these freaky trees but I figured you guys would have had the place locked down. Roads galore, search lights, alarm traps this far in. I was prepared for more stealth than hiking which is all I'm predicting for the foreseeable future. But if I didn't already know that phone towers around here were down, I'd make a call for the hell of it. That's how terrible this is.
Makes me feel like I could have done this a while ago. Shit.
And finally to you, dear listeners. This is a snuff tape of a set of snuff tapes. I'm not going to pretend that this will be a happy story. That I will go to Ponyville, find the truth and get to go home as if nothing happened. It didn't have a happy beginning, it certainly didn't have a happy middle and though this is the beginning for you... It's the end of me. I have to make peace with that. I'm a fool. An idiot. A true and blue dumbass walking into her death. There is no if. Only when. And where and likely not even a why from whatever does me in. Ponyville is still ten miles in front of me and I can only imagine what will happen which each passing step forward.
Onward, we go and onward, we'll die. At least like this, I'm not lonely. It feels like I've been living on borrowed time since Ponyville and it's time to put things in order.