The Edge of Madness

by SaltyJustice

Chapter 3

I bid the twins farewell the next morning, as I had some important business to tend to. They grumbled at me as they went about fixing up the rest of the house and acquiring the various furnishings, such as refrigerators and desks. Neither of them knew what I was actually doing, and no amount of assurances would make them believe that it was more important than fixing the house. They thought I was shirking. I'd have to convince them later.

The flight school itself would have to wait, the first thing I had to do was deal with the patients at the mental hospital downtown. The hospital was a ways away from the “Strip” where all the big casinos and theaters are, and much of the city sprawled away from the strip on various cloud layers organized haphazardly around it. You could tell this city had one defining feature, I felt bad for the residents who were just trying to make their lives here.

The mental hospital was a squat building with a series of wide terraces that attached to the main hospital building. The terraces were all indoors, sealed off under glass in order to prevent any of the patients from getting any ideas about escape. There was enough room to fly, mostly vertically, which I was told could be very therapeutic to some ponies.

There was no receptionist in the lobby, just a list of visiting hours and notices. The place looked run-down, the interior had been built some time ago and never updated. Like most government buildings, it was built with all visitors in mind, not just fliers, so the interior had stairways and was made of earth materials like wood and that strange floatstone that doesn't fall through clouds. The paint was peeling in a lot of places, the signs had symbols on them but the letters had faded or fallen off, and I could almost smell the despair on the air. This reminded me a lot of a certain other government building I had encountered once.

I saw a couple of fillies talking to one another down a hallway. As I stood in the waiting room and got my bearings, the smaller of the two, a blue Pegasus with a mane that looked like she had dunked herself in zap-apple jam, noticed me and hushed up. I looked at them and gave a wave. She looked at me and pulled her friend, a lanky yellow Pegasus with hair that reached down to the floor, around the corner so they could speak in peace.

Celestia and I had sent a letter ahead of me informing the doctors of my visit, though it took me a while to track them down. I didn't see those two fillies again as I searched around the building. Dr. Hoverace I found first, she was just walking out of one of the patient rooms and recognized me from Celestia's descriptions. She flagged down Dr. Wheeler as he passed and introduced me.

“So, before I get started, did you organize the patients as I asked?” I said.

“The most difficult to administer ponies are in the lower numbered rooms on this hallway, starting at 201 and going up. We sorted them in reverse, most advanced symptoms to least, just as you asked,” Dr. Wheeler told me. I had told them to sort the ponies to make treatment easier to administer, my concentration would wane as time wore on and I was more likely to make mistakes, meaning the more difficult jobs would need to be done first.

“Good, what about feeding schedules? Have any of them eaten in the last few hours?” I asked.

“Nothing except water, as you specified. Not that it mattered much,” Dr. Hoverace said, readjusting her glasses.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I don't know what sort of mumbo-jumbo you do, all I know is that these patients are the first I've seen that refuse to eat,” she said simply.

I had never seen a pony last long enough to die of starvation once they were afflicted, in fact, I hadn't really paid any attention to their eating habits at all. I merely preferred them to be hungry since otherwise they were prone to throwing up on me. Most unpleasant.

“Like, they'd rather starve?” I asked.

“Not quite,” Dr. Wheeler interjected, “these patients are suffering from acute paranoia. They believe that the hospital staff are trying to poison them, I think. They're very difficult to interview. They only eat when they're so hungry it hurts. They're practically starving themselves to death.”

This made much more sense to me. Over the years, I had had the chance to speak to some of the afflicted after treatment. The story varied in specifics but not in the general sense. At first, they would get the creeping feeling something was watching them, even at times when that was impossible. One mare had locked herself in her closet and we had needed to tear the door off to get to her, though that had been many years ago, back when this was a rare event.

Over time, the subject would begin to believe that the feeling was justified, and that everypony around them was spying on them. I had heard as much from the patients themselves, some would find that their friends were speaking to them condescendingly, others would notice little lies and convince themselves it was a conspiracy. They would stop trusting and begin to fear others.

Soon after, the hallucinations would begin. They would see other ponies where there were none, in most patients, the hallucinations would always be facing away, or walking just out of sight. Everywhere they looked, somepony was just turning around and leaving. At night, the shadows would warp and twist, and combined with the fear of being watched, sleep became impossible. They feared for their lives and would sleep in fits and starts, waking up after scarcely fifteen minutes.

The few ponies who had seen the illusions close up never wanted to discuss the faces they saw. I had heard a wide range of descriptions, the only word that they all had in common was “wrong”.

Eventually they became incapable of understanding others, would retreat from any bright lights, and would mumble to themselves incoherently. Many would attack those around them, believing them to be the villains hounding them day and night. There was only one thing to do in that case, and it was part of my job.

I had not brought my sword today either, since the reports I had read in Canterlot had told me the victims were still treatable and would not need the cure. I thanked the doctors and got to work, as they went back to administering to the others under their care. The treatments were effective, the black fluid put up its usual fight and twisted or constrained them to cause pain as I cut them off. Each time, I would find that the patient had fallen asleep by the time I was done, no doubt needing the rest after weeks of nightmarish confusion. I would need to get the doctors to interview them for me and find out what was causing this problem.

Most of the ponies here were students at the school, of varying ages and disciplines. I had found some reading material on the Hummingbird Flight school, which did more than just teach fillies and colts to use their wings. It was one of those technical colleges, athletes and specialist workers would go there to get training and certification, up-and-coming prodigies hoping to be like the many great graduates who had competed in the Olympics or set records that would not be broken for decades. There were a few older ponies who I assumed were staff, teachers or custodians, all the same to me.

What I found unusual about their affliction was that it was not progressing. In fact, the tar did not react at all until I had started cutting, it was like it was dormant. This was very unusual, as the usual occurrence was the tar actively sliding over and feeding off of its host, covering them entirely in itself, taking them over and squeezing the life out of them. Only one pony had ever lasted past stage three, and I'd rather not talk about her.

It took me much of the day to clean and disinfect all eighteen of the patients, I needed to rest every now and then, emotionally if not physically. The process took its toll as I was literally slicing up their psyches and patching them back together, occasional whispers of the fear and anger would make their way into me as I did so. My mind was incapable of accepting this corruption they were covered in, I was the antibody created specifically to stop it, yet I still felt the misery. It was through parts of myself that I was able to defeat it, I had to give just a little of my happiness and love to each pony so that they could reassemble themselves and carry on. I would share an unspoken bond with all of these ponies for the rest of my days, like a blood donor, but on some more primitive level.

“There, that's all eighteen, sleeping like foals. Let me know what you get out of the patient interviews,” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead. I hadn't exerted myself physically, the air was just really hot in the building for some reason. I wanted to go outside and shove my head in a cloud bank until I felt better.

“Eighteen? Princess, there are twenty one patients total,” Dr. Hoverace told me.

“Oh that's right, isn't it. Twenty here and one at the guard station. Wait, where are the other two?” I asked.

Dr. Wheeler trotted down the hall and stuck his head into one of the rooms far away from me, too far to see its room number. He then checked the room across the hall, and came trotting back up to me.

“They're not in their rooms at the moment. Should I get somepony to find them for you?” he asked me. I briefly considered his request, the two patients had been in the far rooms and were thus barely in need of treatment.

“What symptoms were they presenting? Anything serious?” I asked.

“Just paranoia, no insomnia. They're probably hiding someplace, could take a while to find them,” he said.

“In that case, it's not a huge deal. Send me a letter when you find them and I'll be right over, I have to go deal with the twenty-first patient,” I said, turning to leave.

A curious feeling overtook me as I did.

“By the way, what were their names, the two I didn't get to?” I asked.

Dr. Hoverace quickly checked over a clipboard full of patient charts. After a few seconds, she looked back up at me and pushed her glasses up her nose again.

“Miss Rainbow Dash and Miss Fluttershy Smith,” she said.

I arched an eyebrow.

“Smith?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Wouldn't tell us her real name, so we put down Smith until we find a family member. Standard procedure,” she said.

I left the building behind me and set out towards the guard station where I had been told that patient twenty-one was waiting, in a secured, padded cell. He was too violent to be kept in the mental hospital, I had been told, and thus had to be kept restrained by armored soldier ponies.

The guard station was some distance away, though I didn't feel like flying. Something told me to stay on the cloud layer, so I took a brisk trot and took in the city sights. Mostly washed-out gray buildings around this area, the city was boring except for the Strip, probably all the budget had gone there. I wanted to just grab the nearest pony and shove a bucket of paint under his hooves, perhaps show him how to use a roller. Would it kill them to put a layer or two on one of these structures?

As I pondered the poor design choices around me, one extremely colorful detail stood out. Some distance ahead of me was a pony with a rainbow tail, standing next to a corner and talking to somepony I couldn't see. As I got closer, I got a vague sense of deja vu, the peculiar color scheme stood out. You didn't often see a pony with that many colors in her tail, perhaps she dyed it?
Miss Rainbow Dash.

Sometimes I'm such an idiot. The filly I saw up ahead of me was the same one I had seen in the hospital earlier. I would have just ignored it except that the name of one of the missing patients was Rainbow Dash. Would her parents really have named her that? Did everypony have to have stupid pun names? It was cruel to name your foal like that, imagine how many bullies she'd have to put up with every day, the constant name-calling.

As I approached the filly, it didn't occur to me to hide myself. I would just walk up to her and talk to her, right? She'd listen to me, I'm Princess Cadence!

Or not. I don't know if it was my clever disguise, or possible a result of the mild paranoia she had been suffering from, but the moment I got close enough to speak, she turned, saw me, and shot away like a bullet. I was left speechless for a second before it occurred to me to give chase.

Wings, don't fail me now.

Comments

[Sensual Endeavor]

NOOOO, NOT RAINBOW DASH AND FLUTTERSHY MISS-I'M-TOO-PARANOID-TO-GIVE-MY-LAST-NAME-TO-THE-GOOD-DOCTORS!!! YOU HAVE TO SAVE THEM, CADENCE! THEY'RE TWO OF THE SIX! Umm, right?

Anyway, amazing story here, kinda plowed through the first one overnight on Thursday. Also, interesting idea, making Cadence a sword master (I'm kinda counting past lives here...), you don't see too many ponies able to hold, much less wield, a sword.