1. Nightfall
“AAAHHHHH!!!!!!”
I awoke with a jolt, rising to stare with bloodshot eyes at the padded room’s door. The only window in sight above the door was obscured by inches-thick steel. I stole glances left, right, up, downwards, straight forwards; nothing but the sickly cyst-white protective walls of the psych ward.
Why?
Why in Celestia’s name was I here?!
I couldn’t remember any reasons, explanations. I thought back, tried to search through my memories. Any visits with the shrink? Any diagnoses that weren’t normal?
Shit. Nothing. C’mon, Scan, gotta think. Why are you here?! This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, not to me, of all the ponies in Equestria, not to me…
CALM DOWN!!!
Okay….Okay, I’m calmed.
No recent memories. Last thing I remembered doing was heading off to work at the UERGMRIID (United Equestrian Royal Guard Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases). How did I end up in the Phillydelphia Asylum for the Criminally Insane?
Then I remembered. I’d been here before. Cantering down the hallways, two associates from the Asylum, each at my respective sides. Screams coming from the West Wing. Shock Therapy sound-pollution echoing through the corridors like a tinnitus-inducing virus slowly taking our hearing, and lives. Looking in a room with a window that wasn’t obstructed, seeing a patient sleeping on the concrete floor, blood on his forehead and the floor, hypodermic solutions of sedatives in glassy syringes scattered about the cement surface. Two guards rushed in, picked him up off the ground, a third injected him with a substance to keep him from fighting back.
They were taking him off to a safer more protective cell.
I felt so sorry for those ponies. Lost, mentally unable to even gain knowledge of themselves. But in a sick way, the slightest fraction of me envied them. Shuddering, I expelled the thought from my rapid streams of racing thoughts before I dwelled on it too much.
Focus, Scan.
I yelled at the top of my lungs,
“HELLO!!!! ANYPONY OUT THERE?!!! HELLOO????!!!!”
I didn’t know what else to shout. “Help me,” wouldn’t really get me any distance (this was an Asylum, after all).
Walking up to the door, I looked out the barred window. Just white hallways. Empty. Echoing the only silence-breaking audio disturbances for thousands of square feet – me. Gazing lower, I noticed the handle on the door. Using my magic, I tried moving it. My horn glowed orange, and I pushed downwards telekinetically, but all that occurred was a clicking sound, and no movement. Tumblers unrelenting held the handle in suspension. A jagged slot in the middle of the handle’s axle side stuck out like a faultline in a brushed aluminum desert.
So there’s a key, I thought.
But one thing made me stop to wonder just how much I could trust my sleep-deprived receptors; the keyhole on the inside? Manufacturing defect, or twisted illusion to give prisoners a false hope?
I turned around, and froze in place, eyes burnt by the horror before me.
Just before me, after a 180 degree turn, was a carcass (presumably of a past cell-inhabitant) hanging from the lighting grate on the ceiling; the upper portion of the rope securely tied to the thin metal rods keeping ambitious maniacs from breaking a lightbulb and ending their own lives. The lower portion forming a strong noose holding the dead pony high above the ground by his abrasion-torn neck. All over his body were morphine-needles, and ancient hieroglyphs decorated his hooves, along with numerous drawings of monoliths. Tied to the noose, on a string, was a key.
I took it down with my magic, trotted over to the door, and unlocked it. Without me having to even turn the handle, the door simply drifted open creepily, revealing white-tiled hallways. At the end of the hall, a ceiling light flickered, and around a corner was complete darkness. I took a step outside, listening to my own footsteps echo.
After going down the hallway, passing my the flickering light, a shout blasted through the hallways like a shockwave, scaring the living daylights out of me:
“HEY, HE’S ESCAPING!!!”
Immediately, hoofsteps rattled towards my direction, and two burly stallions rounded the corner. I instinctively bolted in the opposite direction, galloping as fast as I could down the whitened hallways, my ears ringing like a demonic bell. Suddenly, a door that didn’t seem to be that of a cell appeared to my left. I kicked it down, and burst in, only to find the security surveillance room. Closed Circuit Televisions, camera feeds, and dozens of perimeter warning lights blinded me in a moment.
I turned straight around, trying to exit the room and continue down the hallway, but after doubling back, my vision was filled by the two guard ponies running up to me. At that moment, a TV mounted on the ceiling collapsed, falling onto my head. The broken glass, steel, and silicone cracked bone and cartilage, which gave way to flesh and throbbing brain…
I woke up, frightened, scared, shaken, broken. I was in my bedroom up in my apartment. The lights were off. No guards, no TV’s, no padded walls or dead inmates. Still shaking so badly I thought I might simply shatter into thousands of pieces, I managed to get out of my bed and stand up. My legs were trembling with force, but I walked over to the window, levitated the curtains away, and looked outside.
Same, boring night. Same car-filled streets, same harvest moon. I cantered over to my worktable, my stomach feeling uneasy, and bile rising to the back of my throat. My laptop’s screen was on; my screensaver of a castle window overseeing miles of tile-flooring in the distance, for all to see on high visibility. I turned the brightness down so it was darker, but still visible, then turned to the other part of my desk. I picked up some of my sleeping pills and downed a small dosage to help me back to sleep (hopefully in peace). I and was about to head back to bed when I saw the other med-container.
Malaria pills, often used to give oneself a case of Retrograde Amnesia. I had bought them a week ago, in hopes of maybe forgetting my life behind me, my memories, what I was doing. But I chickened out, and they still sat on my desk, waiting for me to erase my past and wake up on the floor, not knowing where in Equestria I was. I shook off the notion, walked over to my bed, threw myself under the covers, checked the room one last time for lurkers in the shadows, and finally passed off to sleep one last time for that night.