//------------------------------// // One Omen Too Many // Story: Let's Play A Game! // by DagaYemar //------------------------------// “Well, that room sure was messy!” Pinkie said happily, bouncing back out into the creaky hallway she’d discovered, “Wasn’t it, Monkey?” She arched her back sharply and the little toy monkey on her back bounced into the air. Its insides gave a groan as it landed and its arms jerkily pulled back, as if the gears inside it were defying the laws of death to live again. It suddenly found the power to clap its tiny cymbals once and its head lolled back, one eye rolling in its socket. Pinkie, of course, pressed on completely oblivious to how creepy that was. “Now where should we go next, Monkey? Back to the others? Or further into… mystery!” She pointed dramatically to the unopened door directly opposite the way back to the foyer and blithely hopped over to it, opening and entering without even a moment’s hesitation. If there was one word that could describe the next room, Pinkie would have a hard time choosing it because she could think of lots of words that could describe it. Cozy came to mind, especially those two plush-looking sofa seats. Three, if you counted the one on its side with its back torn open. Another word was cramped, what with the piles of books all over the floor and one of the bookcases leaning partway off the wall. Or trashed, that’s a good word, because of stuff like the torn open sofa seat and the books all over the floor and the leaning bookcase. But if Twilight were here, she’d probably use the word library, because that’s what this room was. “Maybe I should go find Twilight,” Pinkie thought aloud, trying to look everywhere as she wandered further into the room. “I just bet she’d find something in here that would tell us more about this place. Also, she’d like all the books! You’ll like Twilight, Monkey, she’s very smart! And very… um, that’s weird… the floor’s a little… sticky…” The pink pony pulled up her hoof and the wooden floor lifted a bit with it, sliding off her hoof with a strange “plorp” sound. The wood rippled like some kind of thick liquid as it settled back into a flat surface. Pinkie blinked at it but slipped backwards before she could react further. She twisted her head back and saw that her hind legs were slipping into the suddenly gel-like floor. “Monkey! Go get help!” Pinkie cried as she struggled not to get sucked down, rolling her back and launching the toy with a flick of her hips. The toy bounced off the edge of the overturned seat, ricocheted against a stack of books, and landed into the liquefying floor by her hooves, where it sank from view. “Monkey, no!” Pinkie shouted, making one last attempt to pull herself up from the muck. It stretched up like taffy, but in the end it was just too sticky. After several seconds of straining, she shot back like a rubber band and vanished into the floor with a “vloip”. The floor wobbled like jello for a little bit and then settled as if nothing had happened. The last bit of movement in the floor had barely ceased when the door was hesitantly pushed open and Twilight wandered in. “Hello, is anypony here? I thought I heard voices… oh!” Twilight all but pranced into the library, her hooves clopping sharply on the solid wooden floors, and spun around to take in all of the room. “Finally, something I can work with! Let’s see if there’s anything about this strange house in here somewhere…” She wandered over to the bookcase across from the door she entered from and scanned the shelves. Spotting a book that seemed interesting, she pulled it out with her magic and opened it to a random page. There was a moment of absolute stillness in the air, as if the entire house were holding its breath in anticipation, but the moment passed. Twilight, deeply engrossed in her new book, didn’t even notice. “I can’t believe that there was no water!” Rarity complained for the seventh time, stomping back out of the vault in her admittedly stylish new armor, “All that work, and for nothing! I just want a wa-ah-ah-ash!” Her head twitched and she seemed to notice that she was back where she’d landed in the basement. She flipped up the visor on her helmet and peered at the other doors. “There simply must be a washroom somewhere in this drab house. I will find it, and no phantom dripping is going to make a fool of me a second time!” She boldly marched over to the nearest door and threw it open. There was a cheerful “ping” and the grate on the other side of the door slid back, allowing her to see what appeared to be a perfectly normal metal elevator. Rarity sniffed and marched in, letting the grate slide closed behind her. “Well, at least I can get out of that filthy basement.” Instead of a row of buttons, the elevator only had a single lever attached to the wall. Rarity gave it a tug and sat down in the middle of the elevator as it groaned into motion and took stock of her situation. She wasn’t sure why she’d immediately put on the armor she’d found inside the vault when she’d finally opened it, but she had to admit is was surprisingly comfortable. It was of a pleasing robin’s-egg blue color and clung snugly to her barrel, but soft inserts sewn to the inside kept it from chaffing. It had also come with a set of hoof covers and a plumed helmet, which of course she had to put on to complete the ensemble. All in all, she felt much safer in it, if still itchy from where the black powder was being pressing into her precious coat. She briefly pressed her hoof to a saddlebag set on the side of the armor, where she’d placed the other item she’s found in the vault. She considered, but then shook her head and moved her hoof away. No, not yet. But if I don’t find some water soon… It had just occurred to her that the elevator was taking an awfully long time when it rattled to a halt. That mysterious bell dinged once more as the door opened on its own. Rarity hopped up and rushed out of the room and looked around. She was on a balcony overlooking the top of the grand staircase they’d seen from the entrance. Three other doors led to other rooms on the second floor, only one of which was hanging partly open. “If I’m upstairs, then that means bedrooms,” Rarity said with a note of hope creeping into her voice, “And that means restrooms! Sinks! A bath!” She rushed over to the nearest door and ripped it open with her magic, eagerly moving in and looking around for the expected toiletries. There was no floor. Rarity screamed as she plummeted straight down not just one, but two floors, as the room beneath also had its floor ripped out. She just barely had time to grasp that the place she was falling into was much larger than it should have been when she landed… with a splash into a massive amount of still water. Rarity floundered, struggling against the pull of her heavy armor, but managed to get her head above the surface. Since she couldn’t feel the bottom, she started treading water desperately and looked about wildly. The cave or whatever it was turned out to be even larger than she’d first thought, stretching farther than she could see under the house. It appeared to be an entire underground lake of some kind, barely lit by the light shining down from the ruined floors above. “Wha-why?!” Rarity sputtered, barely able to keep afloat and spitting water with each word. “Why is this even here?! Urk, it’s slimy! It’s getting in my mane!!!!” She suddenly clamped up so fast she nearly bit off the end of her tongue, her whole body going ridged. Something large and slimy had just brushed against her back hoof. Her mind offered up dozens of possibilities of what it had been, each one more horrible than the last. A fish? A big bug? A tentacle? Some dead thing, floating for years down here in the dark… In her horror she’d forgotten to keep swimming and her head slipped under the waves. She fought her way back up with pure panic-driven energy and cast about for safety. “Over here!” somepony shouted and Rarity blindly set off in that direction, swimming faster than she’d ever swam before. There was a square block of light on what appeared to be an old dock of some kind. Rarity homed in on it and shot through the water like a fear powered missile. At the last second she thought she felt the slimy thing on her back leg again, trying to wrap around it… The fashionista slammed her forelegs onto the dock and pulled herself bodily up onto it. She collapsed onto the old wood and panted in a completely undignified manner. She was soaked and miserable and for a few seconds she simply wallowed in it, ignoring anything else around her. After a while her curiosity got the better of her and she wearily pulled her head up. The light was pouring out from a doorway that led to what looked like a very well stocked larder. Applejack stood leaning in the doorway looking down at her. She was also wet, as if she’d recently taken a dip herself. Applejack took a bite out of an apple and grinned at her. “Look on the bright side; at least you washed off all that itchy coal powder.” “This is boring!” Rainbow Dash shouted, spinning in place and aiming a kick at the drawer she’d been rooting through. She slammed it closed and glared at the rest of the dull room. At some point it had been a fancy bedroom of some kind, but it had been left to the dust and the cobwebs for too long. She’d already rooted through the one dresser and turned over the blankets on the bed, but had come up emptyhooved. “I mean, that scream was a little startling,” Dash admitted, stomping to the center of the room and giving it one last look-over. “But it’s not like anything happened after that. And I haven’t found a single weapon or anything! Something had better happen soon, or I’m going to…” Her vague threat died on her lips as the old mirror in the corner of the room caught her eye. There was some kind of movement in it, even though she was alone in the room and not moving. Psyched that something was finally happening, she hurried over and gasped at what she saw. The room on the other side of the mirror was not the room she was in! Instead of one master bed, it had a pair of twin beds. If anything, it was even drabber and sparsely furnished than this one. And right in the middle of the room, staring back at her, was a very different looking Rainbow Dash. The Rainbow Dash in the mirror looked horrified. Her pupils were tiny pinpricks in her wide eyes and her face glistened under a sheen of sweat. She appeared to be so shaky she could barely stand. Clutched in one hoof was a wicked looking axe, which she clung to like a life preserver. “Whoa, I wonder what happened to her… er, me?” Rainbow exclaimed, leaning closer to get a better look. She almost leaped back when her mirror doppelganger shot forward and breathed heavily on the mirror. The frightened mare lifted one hoof and shakily wrote something in the fogged-over glass. “PLEH… LLIW… SIHT?” Rainbow read, tilting her head as she tried to understand the message. Before she could make heads or tails of it, her reflection shoved her hoof forward and the axe slipped through the glass without any resistance. Rainbow grabbed the weapon out of reflex and then her sense of reality crashing in on her and she leapt back, making room for her doppelganger to come through the obviously magic mirror. But the other Rainbow suddenly zoomed to the left of where the mirror reflected and disappeared from view. Dash blinked a few times, and then whooped and gave the axe a few satisfying practice swings. “All right, this is more like it! Now I’ve got something to use against any monsters I might come across!” Eager to put her new tool to use, Rainbow decided to leave out the way she’d come. She passed through the door into the weird lab, completely devoid of anything interesting as she’d already discovered, and then back onto the upstairs landing. Surprisingly, one of the other doors was wide open and appeared to be some kind of old-timey elevator. “Somepony else must be up here somewhere…” she wondered aloud, glancing back and forth between the other two doorways. She picked the door on her left at random and burst through it determined to do some violence. What she saw caused her to grin in unexpected pleasure. “Hey, it’s that room I saw in the mirror!” she exclaimed, striding into the middle of the room. “It looks exactly the same! Here are the two beds and that ancient dresser. So that means there must be another mirror in this room too! And it should be right… over…” She turned and the words died in her mouth, every muscle in her body tightening in sudden tension. Her eyes widened as her pupils shrank to the size of pinpricks as she realized what she was seeing. All the moisture seemed to dry out of her mouth in an instant. It was all she could do not to start hyperventilating. Sweat began popping up all over her face, threatening to drip into her eyes, but she couldn’t move her hoof to wipe it away. The mirror stood against the wall right where she expected it would be. Through it she could see the other bedroom and right in the middle of it was another Rainbow Dash, just as she remembered. The other Rainbow was rooting through a set of drawers just barely in view of what she could see, looking very annoyed about something, and THERE WAS SOMETHING RIGHT BEHIND HER!!!!! The… thing, because her mind refused to grasp what she was seeing, was right behind her! She must have made some kind of movement, because the other Rainbow suddenly looked up and right at her, which was the completely wrong direction to see the thing. Her doppelganger rushed closer to the mirror, just barely missing brushing against the thing, and the thing followed after her. Rainbow realized she was trembling like a newborn. How?, she thought, her mind a whirlwind. How can she not know it’s there? Oh Celestia, it’s reaching out! It’s going to get her… I mean, me! That’s me! It’s going to get me! It’s just inches away from grabbing me… I mean, her! And then… and then… What happens to me if it gets her first? All at once her paralysis broke and she rushed forward, desperate to help her past self in some way. Her first thought was to leap through the mirror and fight off the thing, but one terrified glance up at it and the fear ran the thought clear out of her mind. But she knew that her past self needed to defend herself somehow, so she did the only thing she could think of. She breathed heavily on the glass and fogged it over. She quickly wrote THIS WILL HELP into the condensation and then lifted the axe. “Come on, this worked once.” she whispered, partially horrified at how weak her voice sounded, and pushed the axe through the mirror. The weapon passed through the glass as if dipping into a standing pool of slightly thick soup. She felt her doppelganger grab it from her side and pull it the rest of the way through. She peered forward, eager to see if her past self would use the weapon against it, when it occurred to her that the events in the mirror had only happened a few minutes ago. Which means… She spun in place and shot out of the room with all the speed she could muster. “That thing must still be there!” she shouted. She shot through the landing, blew through the lab fast enough to raise the dust from the countertops, and froze in the door to the bedroom. The thing wasn’t in the room. “Where did it go?!?” Rainbow screeched in a near panic, zipping all around the room. She checked under the bed. She tore open the dresser again. She scanned the ceiling, the floor, and all four corners of the room. She even peered into the mirror again, but it only showed her reflection like a normal mirror, so she ripped it off the wall to see if there was anything behind it. There was not. She eventually stopped in the center of the room, her wings extended in agitation. “Where did it go? It had to go somewhere. Is it… somewhere else in the house? It could be behind any door I open…” Dash gulped and hesitantly left the room, carefully closing the door between it and the lab as if she expected it to bite her. For a few moments after she left the room was calm, but then the wallpaper along one of the walls bulged out. The wallpaper expanded to the size of an adult pony and suddenly burst, sending Pinkie Pie sprawling onto the floor in a heap. Almost as an afterthought, her toy monkey bounced out of the hole and landed in front of her face with a clang. The hole immediately repaired itself and within moments looked the same as always. “Whoa, that was so freaky!” Pinkie exclaimed from her prone position, rolling over to look at her toy, “I totally don’t recommend traveling like that in the future. Right, Monkey?” Her toy monkey made a clang sound somewhere in its guts and the little head turned slightly, so that it seemed to be looking directly into the party pony’s eyes. “…Monkey?” Pinkie asked, a note of uncertainty entering her voice. Gears whirled inside the toy monkey and its mouth split into a wide grin, revealing pointed teeth. It sprang into sudden motion and launched itself onto the pony’s back before she could blink. Pinkie reared back and tried to buck it off, but one of its legs somehow got tangled in her hair and it clung on. A sharp pain in her shoulder caused her to cry out and she threw caution to the wind, spinning in place like a dervish. The toy was thrown clear from her to crash heavily into the far wall. “”What did you do that for, Monkey?” Pinkie shouted. She started forward to the toy, but she buckled after the first step and clutched her shoulder. There was a deep cut there, inflicted by the monkey’s cymbals. Doing her best to ignore the pain of the wound, she ran over to the toy and picked it up, savagely shaking it back and forth. “That was mean! You could have seriously hurt me! Do you have anything to say for yourself?” The toy clanged its cymbals together once and then went still. Pinkie glared at it for a few seconds and then nodded, deciding the matter settled. “Good. As long as you understand what you did was wrong and won’t do it again. Now let’s see where we are!” Happily putting the recent events from her mind, she hopped over to one of the rooms two doors (not the one Rainbow had passed through, although there was no way for her to know that) and pushed it open. “Huh, that’s weird,” Fluttershy said, looking down at the spear between her two hooves, “For some reason, I’m feeling a little stronger.” Winona barked her encouragement. Fluttershy smiled and applied more pressure on the spear, pushing with all her might. This time she managed to successfully tilt the overturned cabinet out of the way of the door, sending it crashing on its side far enough away so that she could now open the door. “I-I did it!” Fluttershy said happily, fluttering up into the air in excitement. Winona barked joyfully, and the two of them celebrated for a moment, dancing around the junk and debris that was all over this room. Fluttershy finally calmed down and considered the spear, which she’d picked up from the clutter in this very room. “You know, girl, I think I’m going to be OK. I was a little frightened of this house at first, but I’m feeling much braver now. With this spear, and with you at my side, I just know that there’s nothing this spooky old house can do to scare me! We are going to find the others, and everything is going to be just fine!” Confident in herself, she bravely grasped the door handle and pulled the door open. Directly on the other side of the door, inches away from her, was a pony that was on fire. The pony screamed right in her face and started running wildly around what appeared to be a ballroom, which was also on fire. The burning pony ran around the ballroom, stumbled, flailed around for a little bit, regained its footing, and charged forward again, screaming at bloodcurdling levels the whole time. The fire ate away from it until it was just a skeleton, somehow still screaming and running about. Then the bones crumbled and all that was left was the flaming skull, which bounced to a halt in front of the pegasus. The skull burned away to nothing and the moment the last piece vanished, every bit of fire in the room died out all at once, leaving a ringing silence. Fluttershy stood shock still in the doorway, her determined smile frozen on her face. “Well, alright then,” she said in an even tone. A part of her was very proud of how calm she was. The next instant she was at the front door. She didn’t know how she’d gotten here, she had no memory of passing through the other rooms, but she didn’t care one wit. There was only one thought racing through her head like a leaf caught in a whirlwind. “Let me out!” she screamed, battering helplessly against the stout wood with the haft of her spear. “Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me out, LET ME OUT!!!!” Winona sat on her haunches behind the yellow pony and whined as Fluttershy poured every last bit of strength into destroying the door and escaping into the night. But despite her every effort, the portal remained closed. “I hate this grubby mansion!” Rarity complained for the umpteenth time, trying unsuccessfully to wring the water out of her mane without removing her helmet. “Who would even build a place like this? I have had just about enough of underground lakes, giant holes in the floors, and the rest of this ungrateful house! It just doesn’t make any logical sense!” “Yeah,” Applejack said, rubbing the part of her neck where she’d been bitten, “And you didn’t even see the worst of it.” “I think I’ve had plenty of horrible experiences for one night, thank you very much!” Rarity sniffed. “Ew, I’m still dripping… drip…drip…” Applejack rolled her eyes and shifted her attention to the coal chute in the ceiling. “You know, ah think ah can hook this rope ah found in the larder around that scoop and pull it down. Then it’s just a quick climb and we’re out of here!” “Absolutely not!” Rarity exclaimed, “I only just got that dust off of me. There is no way I’m going to set hoof in that filthy slide again! Besides, we can just take the elevator up.” She marched over to the door she’d used earlier and pulled it open, and then stopped in her tracks when she saw what was on the other side. One of her eyes started twitching. Applejack peered over Rarity’s shoulder and whistled. “Well, look at that. Say, Rarity…” “I know!” “This isn’t an elevator.” “I KNOW! This horrible, gloomy, drip-drip house is driving me insane!” AJ stepped past her armored friend and into the stone-walled room. It had no other exits besides the one they were standing at and the only light was coming from about five large, black candlesticks set around the floor. Each candlestick stood at the point of a pentagram drawn in something that was hopefully chalk on the ground. Heavy spider webs coated the room’s four corners, making the room seem round. “Well, this is right weird,” Applejack said mostly to herself, as Rarity had slumped against the door and was muttering the word “drip” over and over again. She decided to let her friend have her little moment. “Ah wonder who set this all up? It doesn’t look all that old… hey! There’s somethin’ shiny here in the middle.” A bright metal coin about two and a half times bigger than a bit, and about as thick as one, lay in the exact center of the pentagram. Its surface was blank save for a squiggle that looked vaguely like a long curving quill coming out of a pot of ink. The symbol emitted a feeling of calm in the farmer that was at odds with the unsettling house around her. “This seems like it’s important,” Applejack said, bending down to pick it up off the floor. As soon as her hoof touched its metal surface, the very air seemed to still. The flickering of the candles slowed, the various creaks and groans of the house quieted, and it felt like the whole house was holding its breath. And then… the stillness deepened, going farther than it should have been possible. All sound stopped, time seemed to freeze, and for one agonizing moment the utter stillness held supreme. And then, with a popping of ears as if the pressure had changed, the moment ended. The absolute quiet passed through the entire house like an anti-sonic wave, sweeping through discovered and undiscovered rooms alike. Every pony in the house dropped to their knees and pressed their hooves to their ears to keep out the quiet. When it passed the house felt strange, like it was waiting for something important to happen. Everypony waiting in apprehension, unsure of what it was they were waiting for. The first to happen, which caused them all to nearly jump out of their skin, was the sound of every clock in the house striking midnight at the same time. There weren’t all that many clocks, but after the oppressive silence they were almost deafening. After the last chime there was another moment of quiet, although this was more out of shock than anything mystical. In the quiet, everypony could hear the sound of a fiddle warming up to a haunting melody. There was something about the song, something that made you just want to… dance. The Dance of Death has begun.