• Published 28th Oct 2021
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Rainbow Dash's Awesome Nightmare Night Haunted House Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Adventure - TheDriderPony



A branching story with interactive gameplay, multiple endings, and more secrets than Pinkie's basement!

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You Have Nothing to Fear...

The glass and iron doors struggle open with a squeal of rusted metal. The hinges have weathered poorly and look more rust than metal.

You find yourself in a garden. Or the corpse of one.

The walls of the house box in this courtyard like the sides of a coffin, rising so high as to block the sky before being sealed off entirely by a glass ceiling now so filthy it's hard to believe it ever let through enough light to grow a garden. But grow it had, once.

The space is filled with memories of greener days. Tiered flower beds divided by a cascading water feature. Trestles and trellises placed on the path to form tunnels of vines and flowers. A trio of pony-sized hedges, lovingly trimmed into artistic shapes.

Every piece of it dead and dry. The flower beds empty, the archways collapsed, the topiary little more than brittle skeletons. What few plants remain are weeds, and what few weeds there are are dead. Every step you take is a cacophony as corpses of bushes and flowers crunch underhoof like old and brittle bones.

"Wow. Cheery."

In all the garden, only one thing sustains any signs of life. At the very center, prominently displayed in its own private patio, is a tree unlike any you've seen before. The branches are wide and grow out more than up, casting near half the garden in gloom, with a strange bark of alternating light and dark stripes.

You only know it's alive at all from the fact that it's in full bloom, though completely out of season. Small flowers the color of dried blood tip every branch.

You notice a small pedestal with a brass plaque installed near the edge of its reach and move to investigate. It reads:

Loomis Elm
A rare specimen obtained from the far western continent. Blooms rarely, and only under exacting conditions. Most well-known for the potent nectar of its flowers, the quality of its wood in magic staves, and its marked aggressiveness towards ponies. Considered by many to be distantly related to the now-extinct Whomping Willow.

"Aggressive to ponies?" you repeat as a few loose leaves drift down from above. "How can a tree be aggressive?"

Your question is answered for you as a branch as thick as your foreleg slams to the ground, barely missing you. You hop back, but that branch was not the only one. The entire tree is thrashing about like an enraged octopus, wood groaning as its branches crash into the remaining landscaping and reduce it to rubble.

"Whoa!" you call as you backpedal away from another lashing strike. "I guess that answers that! Can't say I ever fought a tree before, but first time for everything!"


You've known ponies who cared for trees, ponies who lived in trees, and even ponies who wanted to be a tree, but surprisingly, you've never faced a monster that actually was a tree before. Except timberwolves, but those are pretty wildly different. Although... the same techniques might be effective. A little fire from your LANTERN could do the job. Or maybe it'd help to SUMMON some support? On the other hoof, maybe the answer to a mysterious magical tree is a EXPERIMENTAL FORMULA Or, if you don't think you have anything that can take it on, you can always RETREAT.

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