The Adventures of Derpy, Lyra, and Octavia

by IsabellaAmoreSirenix

Terror at the Library! Books Make Great Jenga Towers!

"Out, out, get out!"

A wail like the screeching of a banshee sent Derpy, Octavia, Lyra, and Bon Bon running. The labyrinthine walls of bookshelves were a blur as they pushed themselves faster, faster, faster. Their hearts were fluttering birds fighting to get out of their ribcages. The pounding in their ears was incredibly loud compared to the deathly silence around them.

Well, it had been until the banshee, anyway.

A surprised cry, and Derpy collapsed to the floor.

"Girls!" she cried, lifting her head weakly from the dust bunnies nestled in the aging carpet. "Go on without me! Save yourselves!"

Lyra screeched to a halt and spun around, sending bobby pins flying at Sonic Rainboom speeds.

"No, Lyra!" Derpy screamed.

"No, the token cute one!" Lyra yelled before rushing to the back while Bon Bon and Octavia continued to run like there was no tomorrow.

"Go, Lyra, please!" Derpy said. "I... I'll be... fine..." Her constricting throat made her words shaky.

"Come on, kid, get up!" Lyra roughly grabbed Derpy in her magic aura and placed the pegasus on her back. Derpy shifted to avoid Lyra's wacky feather headband before the headband fell off entirely. They were off and running, Lyra's chest heaving dramatically. Derpy stuck her tongue out like a dog on a car ride.

Up ahead, Bon Bon and Octavia held open the heavy double doors. "Come on, come on!" Bon Bon shouted. "You can make it!"

"I'm going to leave you to die, Lyra!" Octavia yelled. "You know that, right?"

With one last cry of effort, Lyra pulled her and Derpy over the finish line and tumbled down the stairs into a tangled mess. Just as they were about to get up, the floor shook with the force of the double doors slamming shut.

Bon Bon sighed and leaned against the wall. "Well that was lovely," she said with a pout.

"I just don't know what went wrong!" Lyra complained, stomping the ground. "What happened?"

What happened indeed, Octavia wondered. Despite her persistent pessimism, even she hadn't seen this coming. It was all going so well...

---

Dust mites floating in the air. A warm, inviting smell of parchment. The faint ruffling of pages like falling leaves. All was quiet, all was peaceful, all was orderly and normal.

And there was absolutely no sunlight.

Octavia leaned back in her chair to gaze up at the ceiling of glass, showing a flock of birds flying in the sky. That afternoon had been an absolute blessing; it was almost unreal. No crazy impulses to strangle cats or hit ponies with sticks or anything above the base diagnosis for an asylum. No, everything was just as it should have been.

Looking back down, Octavia's eyes roamed around her... friends, for lack of a better word, seated around one of the library's many tables. There was Derpy, sucking on a quill tip as her eyes scanned the famous paintings in her textbook. Next to her were Bon Bon and Lyra, who were passing a sheet of paper back and forth and scribbling on it in bright red ink. Occasionally they would whisper heatedly to each other, but for the past half hour they had been perfectly respectful to the library's strict "if-you-so-much-as-sneeze-above-20-decibles-I-swear-I'm-going-to-smash-your-brain-with-a-stapler-lawsuits-be-damned" rule.

Octavia legitimately smiled. Perhaps she should start treating libraries as consecrated places of worship. Any place that could silence that insufferable unicorn mare was a miracle upon this planet.

Yes, everything was just as it should have been.

"What's up with Mira's line here?" asked Bon Bon, circling a part in red ink. "Why would she slip into a country accent all of a sudden?"

"Because," Lyra explained, "she's remembering her childhood on a farm."

"I can remember being 2 years old," Bon Bon replied, "and I don't slip into infant jargon."

"But her emotional memories are triggering a relapse."

"No, it makes no sense. Change it."

"But... B-But..." Lyra clutched her manuscript to her chest like a mother holding a newborn foal. "I loved that line! The emotion, Bon Bon, the emotion! Take out that one line, and the whole chapter is like a dry, empty husk!"

"Kill your darlings," Bon Bon said with a shrug as she crossed out the line.

Lyra placed a hoof to her chest. "Oww, Bonnie! Where's your sense of sympathy?"

"Somewhere in the gutter with my patience. You realize that I still need to look over my work too, right?"

"Of course!" Lyra said. "But Bonnie, you know I'm right. Come on, that line's perfect!"

Bon Bon sighed. "What," she began, "is the point of peer editing if you don't actually listen to your editor?"

"I am listening!" Lyra protested. "I'm just choosing to not pay attention to what I hear."

"Fine," Bon Bon said, pushing the manuscript back across the table. "If you want a dialect-disoreiented, contrived, and frankly flat person in your story, be my guest."

Lyra audibly gasped, one for each of Bon Bon's complaints, until her entire front section of her body looked horribly bloated. "Mira isn't flat at all! She's the most robust character build in my entire story! Just read about her curves!" She paused for a second to think. "And how dare you say those other things? Mira is my baby!"

"And you feel like mine," Bon Bon remarked, exasperated. "Look, remember Neighponyan? How his Summer Diamond adapted too quickly to the change of dialect when she moved to Appleoosa?"

"No, she didn't!" Lyra protested.

Bon Bon shook her head, got up, disappeared behind some bookshelves, and emerged seconds later with a thick tome in her mouth. It fell on the table with a loud thud that made the other two mares look up from their books in surprise.

"Chapter 14, paragraph 75," Bon Bon cited. "There," she pointed. "Summer goes from using dear to darling in just two lines."

"Ponies use darling in Manehattan too, you know! And besides, what about Charley Horse and A Tail of Two Princesses?" She levitated the book in question with her magic and let it settle neatly on top of Bon Bon's book. "In Chapter 9, Princess Amara distinctly transitions into the royal archaic after a flashback."

"That's because the line she said in archaic was still part of the flashback," Bon Bon corrected. "Here, the prequel, there Amara says "thee," but only in the context of..."

Soon, the two English majors had created a rickety stack of books that came awfully close to breaking through the ceiling.

"Could you please levitate this book up there for me so I can humiliate you again?" Bon Bon asked.

But Lyra wasn't paying attention as she rifled through another of her own books. "Aha!" she shouted triumphantly, shoving the book into Bon Bon's jaw. "There we go! Line 17, Rose Petal says, 'I'm right.' And then again! So that means I'm doubly right!"

"Yes!" said Octavia once she had pulled out another book from the stack. "11 to 10, I'm in the lead again!"

Derpy's eyes narrowed in concentration. She flew up and down their pseudo-Jenga tower in search of a book just loose enough to pull out. It had to be light, preferably a paperback, and already jutting out of the stack--"

"Ooh!" Derpy gasped as she flew by a book with pretty gold trimming. Eagerly, she clamped her muzzle around the book's spine and pulled hard.

Octavia looked up at the tower. "Uh oh." Leaping into action, she grabbed Lyra and pinned her legs to her sides. "Please," she appealed to the gods, "take her instead."

Crash!

All four mares were adrift in a sea of books bent, scattered, and dirtied.

Clip clop, clip clop came the sound from a nearby aisle. It was the librarian.

"Quick, what do we do, what do we do?" Bon Bon cried, looking frantically for an exit.

Octavia placed a hoof on Bon Bon's shoulder and said very slowly and solemnly, "Play freeze tag."

A little known fact: a librarian's sight is based entirely on movement. Doesn't move, doesn't exist. Unfortunately for Octavia, this particular librarian seemed to have forgotten that detail.

Octavia's heart was sent pounding uncontrollably as the librarian surveyed the wreckage equivalent to that of a small typhoon with her half-moon glasses. She saw all the books strewn out of order, and she saw one, two, three faces of absolute guilt and terror.

With a shrug, she was just about to pass their aisle by when the fourth pony finally broke through the sea of books to find air. Air that was filled with dust mites. Dust mites that just so happened to settle inside her still stuffy nose.

"A... A... Achoo!"

For a second, one could hear a pin drop.

Then the menacing click of a stapler.

Comments

[Enigma In the Jungle]

stack--"

why the "? as a joke with this chapter or just a mistake