Lavender Ponyville

by Quadraginta

Chapter 11: Shaken Awake

The elevator door opened when the arrow hit the '1.' The doors slid open slowly and silently open, revealing the Rainbow Dash Denizen standing before them. Her head was bowed, and red droplets seemed to be dripping from her face and onto the floor, where they promptly vanished.

Pinkie stifled back a gasp of surprise and fear, and quickly placed a hoof over he mouth to cover up the sound. Luckily, the Rainbow Dash Denizen didn't seem to hear them, and it's head remained bowed. Twilight, instinctively knowing not to make a sound, remained silent. Luckily for them, the elevator doors remained silent the whole time, not even a 'ding!' to let them know that the doors wore opened, and no rusty creaking metal to alert the Denizen of their presence, so they remained completely unnoticed.

Twilight quickly pressed the button for Floor 2, and the doors began closing again. They were almost in the clear, until the Denizen suddenly lifted it's head. Upon seeing Twilight and Pinkie standing the elevator, the Rainbow Dash Denizen thrust a hoof between the doors of the elevator. The Denizen's hoof came between the doors at just the right moment, stopping the doors from closing all the way. The doors struggled to keep closing, however, and the Denizen's hoof cracked like glass and blood started dripping from it.

Pinkie backed up against the wall in fear, while Twilight aimed her glowing horn at the Denizen. A bullet of magic shot forth from her horn and hit the hoof, releasing it from the door, and allowing the doors to shut all the way.

"That was too close," Pinkie said.

"Way too close," said Twilight.

"There might be more of them on the second floor," said Pinkie.

"I know, and that's what worries me," said Twilight. But then a thought came to her, a thought she hadn't tried earlier. "Pinkie, this is currently a dream right now. A very vivid, and extremely dangerous dream, but still a dream. Why not try creating a weapon for yourself to use? After all, I can control my dreams just fine, so there shouldn't be any reason that you can't."

Pinkie didn't reply, which was strange for her, but Twilight couldn't blame her, after what had just happened. Twilight knew Pinkie would take the idea into consideration, though.

When they reached the second floor, the door opened, again opening slowly, almost as if it were deliberately taking it's time.

When it opened, they stepped through, into a long, descending spiral staircase. They could lean over the railing to see into the lower levels. Or at least, they would have been able to, had the lower levels not been shrouded in what seemed like solid darkness.

Twilight formed a magic sphere of light on her horn, which she dropped over the railing and down into the lower levels. After a few feet, the darkness seemed to swallow the sphere.

"Well, that's disconcerting," said Twilight. "No point in staying put, though. Come on, Pinkie. We better get moving." She began to descend the staircase, with Pinkie following close behind. Their hooves banged upon the metal staircase, the sound reverberating all around them, as if many hammers were banging metal plates all around them. The sound honestly was a concern to both of them. It might attract unneccesssary attention. Then again, unneccessary attention was pretty much all they were getting.

The perception of the staircase was quite unusual. They could see the immediate space around them, and several feet above and below them, as if they were being illuminated by bright spotlights, but beyond their little patches of visibility was the aforementioned darkness, which, again, seemed solid.

After a while, they decided to sit down and rest, after what seemed like an eternity of descending an endless staircase.

"So, I've been thinking about what you told me earlier," said Pinkie, breaking the silence. "About forming something solid in this dream land? Well, I was wondering what I should form, but now it came to me..." she closed her eyes and concentrated hard for a moment, before a cannon suddenly formed before them, on a slightly lower part of the staircase.

"Look! I made a party cannon! See? Told you I never leave home without it," she grinned.

Twilight couldn't help but laugh at what just happened. Even in a dark, broken environment such as this, Pinkie still found a way to do unreasonable things, like making her party cannon.

"Speaking of your party cannon, does it fire anything besides parties?" Twilight asked.

"Oh, yeah, it fires cannonballs, too. But since we're dreaming, I thought I might add a different kind of ammunition into it." Pinkie said slyly.

"Oh?" Twilight's eyebrow raised playfully. "Like what?"

A sudden bangin sound from above them was heard.

"Well, I guess we're about to find out," said Pinkie as she got up and readied her cannon. She pointed the business end of it upwards, waiting for a potential target to walk into it's theoretical crosshairs.

Several tense seconds later, a target did appear. It was the Rainbow Dash Denizen, her hoof still leaking blood, which stuck to the staircase and dripped off of her hoof with each step.

As soon as the Denizen got close enough, Pinkie slapped the behind of the cannon, causing a large square slab of concrete with a rounded off top to be shot out, and it impacted the Denizen, causing it to fly back and into the wall, where it comedically bounced off and fell into the darkness below.

Upon closer inspection, Twilight saw that Pinkie fired what looked like a-

"A tombstone? Wow, Pinkie....uh....didn't expect that," Twilight muttered.

"Well, I thought it would be a nice touch to our friends," Pinkie said in a tight voice, obviously resisting the urge to cry again. Now wasn't the time to cry again, though. She pulled herself together quickly, and disintegrated her party cannon back into nothing.

They continued descending the staircase, constantly prepared for another attack, or perhaps for the Rainbow Dash Denizen to make it's way back up the staircase and try to attack them again. At this point, they both were smart enough to know that the Denizen wasn't dead. Anything but.

They walked as silently and slowly as possible, so if the sounds of quick hoofsteps drowned out the sounds of their own slow hoofsteps, they would know it was a Denizen approaching.

Just as they expected, the hoofsteps of a Denizen was eventually heard. Several sounds of Denizens, actually. The sound was coming from both above and below. Twilight and Pinkie went back-to-back, Twilight preparing her horn, and Pinkie with her party cannon. Twilight took watched of the ascending part of the staircase, and Pinkie the descending part.

The hoofsteps slowed down, slightly at first, but then slowed down so much, they knew that the Denizens were walking.

The Rainbow Dash Denizen approached Pinkie, while Twilight was tasked with confronting her look-alike, with the Applejack and Fluttershy Denizens trailing behind her.

"Applejack?" Twilight asked tentatively, even though she knew that she would not get an answer. The Applejack Denizen was now silent, just like the rest of them.

"Thought so," said Twilight as she pooled her magic into her horn. She was about to throw a ball of sticky magic at the Denizens in front of her, until she suddenly felt herself growing lighter.

"What the-?" she gasped as she felt her being lifted off the staircase. The last thing she heard was the sound of a cannon firing, before she realized that she was being shaken awake.

Comments

[Xarsor]

Aww this is the final chapter for me so far. I'm sad now. :(

[Quadraginta]

3262270

Me? Reference Discord? No. I mean. Nah. No. I totally didn't just reference Discord. Really, I didn't. Really