Fizzy mumbles to herself in the back storage room of the Ponyville Flower Shop as she places pages, one at a time, back into her notebook. The flower ponies didn't know that this was where she hid out every night, but it was likely better this way. If any of the forces of Chaos found her friends… or worse… a Villain…
“Don’t think about that,” she whispers to herself.
She shakes her head as she places another page into the binding. Her notebook of found pages from the Book of All Stories glows with a gentle golden aura as the page is accepted into the fold, merging into the book. The jumbled words on each page rearrange themselves as if they had a life of their own, stringing together a story about a Yak growing hundreds of feet tall. Fizzy can’t help but smile at the absurdity.
“I suppose it is EVERY story,” she says to herself.
But what does that even mean? How could a book hold every story without bursting at the seams? Many stories had a single choice that could result in a different outcome. A different arc. In one, a character lived in loneliness. In another nearly identical story, they fell in love.
In this very book, Fizzy thinks, there could be a story that would tell her the secret to finding all of the pages and sending away those who want to use the book for… ill intent.
She picks up another page and presses it into the notebook. It begins to glow, as if it’s pleased to accept this humble offering. That’s when Fizzy notices two pages are bunched together, just ever so slightly out of place.
“Oh shoot,” she mutters to herself.
With a lick of her hoof, she tries to pry the two pages apart, but the makeshift book begins to glow brighter, and then brighter still. The two pages feel as if they’re bound together by gravity. Words arc back and forth between the two pages as they begin to separate, the binding trying to keep them melded firmly together.
“Come on… Come on!” Fizzy grunts, trying to force the pages apart. “I can’t pull these apart!”
With a loud pop, the two pages force themselves to the right and left side of the notebook. Words twirl up and out of the pages and grow into a large yellow circle.
For a moment, there is silence, and the air is still. Fizzy stares in awe at the golden aura in front of her.
“What in the world?” she wonders aloud.
Faintly on the other side, she can see… what seem like walls. And carpet, maybe? It’s hard to tell. Almost as if… it was a portal. Before she can fully register what she is seeing, the light slowly begins to dim.
Fizzy feels the siren call of the bad endings in her hooves. She picks them up on the floor, one by one. Each one feels like a fresh wound to her psyche, the words leaping off the page into her mind.
What if she isn’t strong enough? What if none of this really does make a difference?
Fizzy approaches the notebook and looks down at it with newfound respect.
The power of a story— The power of an ending is truly an untamable force.
She places the pages over the candle’s fire and watches them burn.
“We choose our own destiny. And our choices matter.”
Black bits of paper fly into the air, disappearing into the night.
Fizzy rises to her hooves, eyeing the portal intently. She moves closer and closer, reaching out a hoof to the book.
Then, as if trying to touch something burning-hot for as little time as possible, she slams the book shut.
The yellow energy fizzles into the air like melting snowflakes, and she sighs with relief.
Going in there would have been dangerous and possibly deadly, she reasons. If she got hurt, nopony would have even known that she’d left. Even if there was some sort of important thing the book wanted her to know, was it really worth the risk of being stuck on the other side?
She opens the notebook back to the pages that had caused all of this in the first place, and, instead of strange energy appearing, she begins to read a rather humorous tale of Queen Chrysalis being made of actual cheese instead of skin.
But, late at night, she wonders to herself… Maybe she made a grave mistake.
The light begins to fade around Fizzy as she feels a plush, but almost sticky ground beneath her hooves. Her eyes begin to adjust. all around her are almost sickly yellow walls, and a light brown, heavily trodden carpet. She turns around to see just the faintest glimmers of the ciderhouse’s store room dissolve into thin air, leaving her alone in unfamiliar territory.
No, within where the pages wanted her to go.
“Hello?” Fizzy calls out. Her voice echoes continuously back at her, reverberating from wall to wall in the impossibly long hallway.
“Strange,” she mumbles to herself. “There doesn’t seem to be anypony here…”
She begins to trot towards a doorway and pokes her head through. On the other side is a nearly identical empty room with the same brown carpet and the same decaying yellow walls.
“What is this place?” she wonders aloud. “It’s like nothing has happened here in… years.”
She trots to another room. And another. And another. Each room seems nearly identical to the last, except for a change in size. Sometimes a stack of chairs was be heaped into the corner of a room, as if prepared for guests that would never arrive.
“What’s the story here?” She asks to nopony other than herself. “Usually there’s another pony or character or… Something. I don’t think this is even Equestria.”
She pushes open a new door and falls backward in shock. The frame of a door had been expertly crafted into the drywall and finished to look just like every other door, but on the other side was only… more wall.
“Uhhh.”
She rises to her hooves and turns back to retrace her steps, but instead of the open door she walked through waiting for her, there are three other doors with a sign saying “Make your choice.”
“Well that’s not ominous.”
She moves forward and examines each of the three doors.
“Is this some sort of test? If this is a story, why is it boiled down to such… meaningless pieces?”
She blinks and steps back.
“Unless this isn’t a story. Maybe this place… is between the pages of the book. Maybe it’s the absence of stories. As if… the opposite of a book that contains every story, is a library that holds nothing.”
She blinks and examines the three doors.
“Or maybe I’m going CRAZY and just need to wake up.”
Fizzy bites her hoof. It hurts and she loses 2 HP.
“We'll cross that one off, then.”
She scrutinizes the three doors in front of her.
“Well if this is a trick, then that means I need to use… the trick door!”
She turns around and finds that the trick door behind her has vanished.
“Shoot. If there’s a spooky monster behind me now, I’m going to be very angry,” Fizzy says warningly.
Turning around once more, there are only three doors.
“Well, okay. I can open them, but that doesn’t mean I have to go through, right?”
She tosses open the first door, and a dark energy seems to pulse from the other side. A void of pitch black that beacons to her, whispering sweet nothings to her. She can hear the flutter of pages and the gentle coo of a mother’s song. A bedtime story to lull her to rest.
With three steps that seem to have stronger gravity than normal, she throws open the second door, and finds… the storage room of the Ponyville Flower Shop. This is it! She could escape right here and end these tricks. Maybe she could learn more about the Empty Library at a different time. After all, there’s many more pages to find for the Book of All Stories. She can’t spend all of her time here.
Moving seems easier after knowing there seems to be a way out. She tosses open the third door proudly, and shutters as the first thing she sees is two deep crimson eyes glaring back at her.
Fizzy gasps and tries to slam the door shut. But something that seems like a claw reaches forward and pushes, refusing to be locked away again. She pushes as hard as she can, and feels her horn beginning to flare up. This is bad. She can’t hold this thing off forever. She has to do something.
She gathers the pages together and smiles. These pages don’t have to go into the notebook. But now she knows of a place she can go to farm pages every night. She can CHOOSE which endings to keep, can’t she?. She can decide what kind of ending to experience. Maybe an ending that leaves the world with only Heroes. After all, she’s only doing this with good intentions. Yes.
Besides, the Darkness seemed to have some good points…
Fizzy smiles as she looks down at the notebook. She grabs the two fresh pages bunched together. Her eyes begin to glow a scarlet crimson.
At that moment, she knows two things. First, her notebook is showing her something important. Second, she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to open this portal again.
She heaves herself onto her hooves and shakes her head.
“This is a terrible idea.”
With a swift gallop, she leaps into the portal, quickly blinded by a great, bright light. Soon, she will have to determine if she can #SurviveThePages.
She has to get away from this monster. But she has come too far to turn back now. This Empty Library has some sort of secret that the pages in the notebook want her to know. If the notebook knew Fizzy needed…whatever this is, then it can’t fall into the wrong hooves.
Maybe it was the adrenaline, but Fizzy feels like time is slowing down. She pushes away from the third door and rushes forward with all of her might. She slams her escape shut and she feels every muscle in her legs ache as she sprints. With a loud crack, the third door bursts open, but she can’t look back now. She hears the whispering. The fluttering of pages. She sees the darkness beyond the door frame. She leaps forward, turning only for a second to see the glitching, writhing form chasing her glare with deep red fiery eyes.
Her form. Her eyes.
The darkness welcomes her, and takes her within its clutches like a mother’s embrace. She falls and watches as the light from the room she left flies up to become only a solitary star in a sky of pitch.
She falls deeper and deeper within the notebook’s pages, hoping to find a secret that can turn the tide. Some sort of wisdom that can end the danger that all Equestrias are in. But, once she gets this secret… this weapon, can she #EscapeThePages?
Fizzy’s heart feels as if it’s beating through her chest as she pushes off and ducks into the center door. She pulls the door behind her and with a simple click, the door disappears from her hoof and leaves her once more in the silent darkness of the flower shop’s storeroom.
She is safe to live another day. And she’s able to get some rest knowing tomorrow is another opportunity to get pages and save all stories!
But something eats at the back of her mind: While she was trying to save all stories, something had got loose in that Empty Library. If a monster is running loose in a realm of no stories, will anyone ever subdue the beast within the notebook? And what will happen if no one ever does?
The wind whistles past Fizzy’s ears and as she falls. She can’t help but wonder if this is it. Will she keep falling for forever? Will she simply splat on the ground like a sad ice cream on a hot day? Or…
The wind begins to die down, and soon Fizzy begins to orient herself. She feels like she’s falling downward. Toward her hooves, that is. And soon, she feels a gentle firmness greet her hooves.
“Well that’s convenient,” she says. “Now what do I do?”
She looks around, but while she can see herself as if the room is perfectly lit, there was only black in every direction. Even the ground or… whatever it is that she stands on… seems to be floating above a bottomless pit.
“Good thing I was working on that fear of heights…”
She puts one hoof in front of the other. Then she seems to hear a flutter of pages far off in the distance.
“Hello?” she calls out. “Could you please tell me what the heck is going on? This is getting a bit too abstract for me, and that’s saying something.”
With a rush of wind, a burst of pages rushes forth and assaults Fizzy from every angle. She feels them brush past her, assaulting her senses. Then they disappear as suddenly as they arrived.
She gasps for air, and freezes. She examines her legs for papercuts, but she seems to be generally fine.
“Well that was rude. I could have used a warning.”
She looks around, as if expecting a second onslaught, but nothing materializes.
“Come on! I know you’re trying to show me something. Meet me half-wa-”
The pages rush forward again, but this time Fizzy grins and reaches out to grab a piece of paper. As soon as her hoof snatches a piece, she feels it attempt to wriggle out of her grasp. The other pages disappear into the dark once more, but the one in her hoof remains. She examines the paper, which seems almost too new to be from the Book of All Stories.
“Fizzy and Caramel looked down at Barley, his leg bent in a direction that didn’t seem possible. Sickness rose in Caramel’s throat,” Fizzy reads to herself. “What is this?”
The pages rush forward again, leaving thousands of tiny invisible cuts all over her body. Fizzy jumps into the air and snags a few more pages out of the air.
“Fizzy smiled at her friends, as her last breath escaped her lips.”
She shuffles to another page.
“Caramel cried as she held her two friends in her arms. The Villains had won. And she was alone.”
“Are these… death scenes?” Fizzy whispers to herself.
The pages rush at her once more. Their messages assault and whisper about every possible way she might fail. Every possible story in which she makes a terrible mistake.
Every single page contains a way she and her friends might lose. Or worse.
Fizzy growls at the endless void around her.
“I want a different ending!”
She leaps into the air, grabbing page after page.
“I’m going to fight for my friends. I’ll choose the story I want to live!”
She clenches almost many pages close to her as they fight against her grasp. She can hear Caramel’s tears. She can hear Barley’s cries of agony. The other pages spin in the air, outraged that some of them have been taken from their legion. They circle in front of her, forming themselves into an equine shape.
The paper monster opens two crimson eyes, and its narrative skin dissolves… into her.
“Those are MY endings,” the dark Fizzy growls at her brighter self.
Fizzy looks down at the papers she clutches.
She looks up again. “And I’m going to make sure these endings never happen. Even if it’s the last thing I do!”
“FOOL!”
The Dark Fizzy rushes forward, and Fizzy turns on the spot and plunges into the darkness. She has no idea where to run, but she refuses to let this be the end. Even if she can’t be a part of a good ending, if she tears enough bad endings out of the book, maybe she can ensure that the Heroes will win the day.
She sees a light appear far off in the distance, like a new star being birthed into the world,
She runs and runs, feeling the darkness nipping at the back of her hooves like papercuts. She hears the hoofbeats the monster close behind her.
Soon, a giant golden portal comes into full focus. Her body aches but she sees her way out.
Her own voice, distorted and angry hisses in her ear.
“If you don’t collect every ending, there’s always a chance you will fail. You will be responsible for your friend’s deaths. You will be the reason that Heroes lost.”
“We’ll see about that,” Fizzy retorts, and leaps into the air.
A bright light overtakes Fizzy and soon she lands on a hard wooden floor back in Marewalkee. She looks back, but there is no golden portal to be seen. The notebook sits on the table in front of her, firmly closed and illuminated by moonlight.
She looks around at the dark storeroom and sighs.
“Well that was crazy,” she mumbles to herself.
She stands up and fumbles for her candle. She sets just the tip of her horn grow alight with fire and uses it to light the candle.
As the room is filled with warm, yellow-orange light, she sees at least a dozen new pages, scattered across the floor. She picks up a piece and feels her heart sink.
“Fizzy handed the book over to the Villains, knowing there was nothing that she or her friends could do to defeat them,” she mumbles. “They had lost.”
This… this is a tool, she realizes. These pages, if put in the book, could change the outcome of this whole battle. Not only that, by maybe deep within the Empty Library there could be pages that assure their victory. Pages that only told the stories of glorious triumph over evil. The scattered papers begin to glow at this thought, radiating with power. The idea of assuring victory feels sickly sweet on Izzy’s tongue.
A way to win, no matter the cost.
The candle burns, but the papers glow brighter. What should be done with this power? *
