The Darkness Walks Among Us

by DukeArbiter

Chapter 5 - Lunch with a Side of the Truth

It didn't take Lyra very long to find Ditzy, though in truth, she wasn't looking for the mailmare when Lyra found her. The musician had been walking all over Ponyville trying to catch Ditzy while she was still delivering the mail. After a bit of searching with no success, Lyra decided it was about time to take a break for lunch. After all, she had only eaten a few bonbons all day and while they were delicious, they defiantly were not filling.

By the time the unicorn arrived at the Ponyville cafe, her stomach was growling so loud that she was sure the people in Canterlot could hear it. As she walked through the scattered outdoor tables, Lyra began to hear something. At first she disregarded it, thinking she was just hearing things but sure enough, Lyra heard it again. The green mare turned in the direction of the sound and found Ditzy Doo and Octavia sitting at a table talking rather loudly over a small lunch. In reality, the pair wasn't actually talking very loudly, rather, everypony else was talking in hushed tones. Most likely they were talking about Carrot Top's recent untimely demise which her friends seemed oddly unfazed by.

Lyra walked up to her friends and caught a snippet of their conversation. "and it turned out the muffin was in my bag the whole time," Ditzy concluded. Evidently she had been recalling an interesting story involving a lost muffin of some sort which Octavia appeared quite unamused with. At Lyra's approach, the cellist seemed to brighten a bit. Perhaps she thought that a fellow musician would bring better conversation.

"Hello Lyra," Octavia said, "find anything interesting at Vinyl's house?" Lyra was ecstatic to share her strange discovery with her friends. "I sure did!" Lyra boasted to which Octavia rolled her eyes and Ditzy attempted to straighten her own. Lyra continued, "She moved all her furniture upstairs to block off her bedroom and when I teleported in there I found her journal. Guess what? It had all the pages torn out! How weird is that?" Ditzy seemed entirely confused as if this was the most mysterious thing in the world but Octavia seemed as if she had already figured it out. "You don't suppose Vinyl could have had a reason for sealing away her torn up journal. Perhaps Vinyl has something that she doesn't want anypony to know about," Octavia said flatly. "Wait a minute, your not saying that Vinyl killed Berry and Carrot, are you?" Lyra questioned. Ditzy's face was instantly filled with fear and her eyes, which she had worked so hard to focus, had reverted back to their original crossed state. "Carrot is dead?" the mail mare screamed out in horror. Octavia's head whipped towards the mint unicorn and she shot Lyra an evil look. "Lyra! Why would you say something like that! I took her out to lunch so she wouldn't find out about that! She was already terrified enough after Berry's death," the grey earth pony lectured. She turned back to the cross eyed pegasus beside her and began to hug her. Octavia rocked back and forth, humming soothing tunes all the while, and Ditzy slowly began to calm down.

Octavia released her grip on the cowering mare and turned back to Lyra. "Thanks a lot. Now she won't be able to sleep tonight," Octavia said viciously. Lyra looked at her friend quizzically. "What do you mean?" she asked. Octavia released a heavy sigh, as if explaining would be very long and difficult. "Last night at around two in the morning, Ditzy came to my house because she was too scared to be home alone. Since you just freaked her out again, you're going to take her home and let her sleep in your house tonight," the cellist explained.

Now it was Lyra's turn to let out a heavy sigh. At least she would be able to question Ditzy Doo in the comfort of her own home.

Bringing Ditzy home turned out to be more of a hassle than Lyra had expected. When the two had arrived, Bon Bon proceed to give Lyra a long winded lecture on how she shouldn't invite ponies to stay with them without clearing it with her first, the majority of which the musician had ignored. After a few minutes of arguing however, the mint unicorn succeeded in allowing the grey pegasus to stay in their home for the night. Though Ditzy wasn't particularly happy in having to sleep on the couch, the mail mare was very grateful the cream earth pony's hospitality.

After Ditzy settled in, Lyra decided she should do what she had found the grey mare for. "Hey Ditzy," Lyra asked, "Do you remember what happened at the party?" Ditzy looked at Lyra as if that was the most perplexing question in the world. "Yea," she replied, "but why do you want to know?" Lyra was stumped for a second. She couldn't tell Ditzy the truth or else she might get scared again and then the musician would never get to hear the story. She would have to think of something quick. "I was just curious. I was so drunk that I couldn't remember anything and I thought that you could tell me what happened," Lyra lied. Ditzy seemed to calm a bit at this and she cheerfully replied, "Oh okay then! It was a bad party, much worse than usual."

Ditzy Doo floated alone in a corner of the loud, crowded upper room of Sugarcube corner. She always hated parties. Ponies always got drunk and rowdy and things inevitably were broken. It just didn't seem like the right place for a mail mare like Ditzy to be hanging around, but her friends always came to these things so the pegasus had to come as well.

Vinyl's music thumped loudly as more and more ponies began to stream into the room. Most of them were ponies she didn't recognize but a few stood out: Carrot Top, Bon Bon, Lyra, and Berry Punch. Both Lyra and Berry headed straight for the tables that held the enormous amounts of cider on it. Both had their own reasons for drinking. Lyra drank because she couldn't stand being around so many ponies at once while Berry drank because she believed that she would be able to have more fun if she didn't care what she was doing. Both of them regularly drank all the cider at any given party.

As the night went on, ponies drank more and more and the party became more and more wild. It seemed that almost everypony was drunk or at least a bit tipsy and the effect was most profound on the stumbling mass of ponies that comprised the dance floor. Berry punch began to stumble over to the tables again for yet another drink. It seemed that the drunkard had drained almost half the supply of cider on her own and she was still drinking. When she arrived at the tables, Berry sloppily poured herself a new glass of the intoxicating liquid. As she was stumbling off however, Berry ran hear on into a large, brown colt. The unicorn stallion looked slightly agitated but no worse for wear. Berry however found herself on the floor laying in a pool of cider with a broken glass in her hoof.

The drunk immediately stood up and began yelling her head off. Of course because the music was so loud only the ponies who were very close to the scene could actually hear what was going on. Berry ranted for what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, about how the colt should have watched where he was going and that he she be banished for being so mean. The brown unicorn could not have been more angry at that point. He lifted the intoxicated earth pony into the air with his magic and launched her across the room just to shut her up.

Berry collided with a table filled with cupcakes with a massive crash that was so loud that it drowned out the music for a split second. Everypony turned their heads to look at the pony who had not only destroyed a table full of perfectly good cupcakes, but had stopped the party, a massive sin at Pinkie Pie's parties.

None of that mattered to Ditzy however. The moment Berry collided with that table, her mission became clear. The pegasus flew over and began to pick up the scattered treats. She floated back and forth between the floor and an intact table, dropping off the already spoiled desserts. After mere moments of this however, Lyra showed up to get another drink and suggested that she should leave the cupcakes alone. Reluctantly, the mail mare agreed and decided that for once it would be a good idea for her just to leave the party and go home. This party had become too much for Ditzy to handle.

Lyra sighed heavily, Ditzy Doo's story hadn't told the unicorn anything important. It seemed that bringing the mailmare home with her was a terrible idea. Lyra looked across the small living room to see if Bon Bon shared her thoughts but it seemed that the cream earth pony had something bothering her.

"What's wrong?" Lyra asked. Bon Bon turned to look at the mint pony, her questioning eyes staring past Lyra. "Why would Berry start a fight like that? I mean I know she was drunk and everything but why would she do that? Doesn't everypony know that its a horrible idea to start fights at Pinkie Pie's parties? Its got to be some surefire way to get thrown out and..." Bon Bon thought out loud. Before the earth pony could even finish her excessively long thought, Lyra had an idea.

"Hold on a second Bon Bon," the musician began, "Why don't you just tell your whole story and we'll see what happens from there. Since Ditzy was kind enough to talk about the party, why don't you just start with the next day?" Bon Bon seemed thrilled at this new change of pace and she immediately dove into her tale.

Bon Bon found herself in a position she never thought she would: She was staring at the mutilated corpse of her friend, Berry Punch. It seemed to Bon Bon that somepony had really hated the purple drunkard or else they wouldn't have gone to such lengths to mutilate her in the first place. Why anypony would want to kill anypony was a mystery to the candy maker however. Nothing was so bad as to kill somepony over and defiantly not bad enough to do this to them. If somepony was doing this, there had to be something wrong with them and they would not stop here.

None of these sort of thoughts were running through the mare's thoughts at the moment however, all she was concerned with was the fact that there was a dead pony right in front of her! Before she even knew what was going on, everypony was going their separate way and Carrot Top was beckoning for her to follow.

Bon Bon rushed to catch up with her orange friend. Carrot Top seemed quite on edge after the scene but defiantly not quite petrified like Ditzy or paranoid like Vinyl. No, Carrot was just scared and she had every right to be. Its not like Bon Bon wasn't scared, it was just that she had to be strong for everypony around her who couldn't. So Carrot Top and Bon Bon walked home in relative silence only talking a small bit about anything that wasn't about Berry but everything seemed to come back to her, so the pair stopped after a while.

As the two began to leave the more normal areas town, things became a bit less tense. Out in the more rural area on the town's outskirts, things seemed far calmer and it was almost as if nopony out here even knew about the murder. When the two mares reached Carrot Top's humble home, Bon Bon began to hear a faint thumping noise. It was probably just her imagination but she swore she heard something. The cream earth pony turned to her orange companion and asked, "what's over that way?" Bon Bon gestured in the direction she heard the noise coming from. "Oh its just an old factory. Before this town was what it is today, Ponyville made some great cider out of that factory but once the apple family took over the cider market the factory closed down. Its abandoned now but I still hear noises from it every once in a while. You learn to ignore it," Carrot Top explained.

Bon Bon accepted that answer and she ignored the sound the entire way home. Back home, the cream pony suddenly felt extremely tired. She didn't realize how long it had taken her to walk to Carrot Top's house or how long her day had been. Bon Bon decided that Lyra could fend for herself and she went to her bedroom for a bit of well deserved rest.

Lyra was still stumped. Things just weren't making any sense and nopony seemed to want to tell the green unicorn anything. Lyra yawned loudly. She didn't realize how late it had become. She looked over to see that Ditzy was already sound asleep on the couch and Bon Bon was begging to nod off as they sat there. Perhaps Lyra should follow Ditzy's example. Perhaps things would be clearer in the morning.