My Little Amnesia: Ignorance Is Bliss

Twilight and Pinkie...

Gyaaah!

It has hard for Twilight to look her friend in the eye. Whatever black film that was covering her eyes made it look like they'd been gouged out, but the little red pinpricks said otherwise. The wheel on her neck was a cart wheel.

But anyways, where was she? Oh, yes. Pinkie was actually disconcertingly enthusiastic about feeding her doppleganger to the thing in the water. The water-thing. Twilight was against the idea out of principle. It was mean to feed somepony, even a Changeling somepony, to a Pit-Spawn.

After much back and forth, they eventually compromised and set her doppleganger's corpse up against the walls of the basement staircase. The agreement was that if the water-thing was willing to climb out of the water for it's prize, it could eat the corpse.

Twilight felt so wrong lifting and moving a corpse like that. She was a librarian, not a gravekeeper! It wasn't her job to lift bodies! Eeeeuck.

After splaying the body up against the wall, Twilight felt the need to reiterate her unease.

"I still don't like this idea, Pinkie!"

Pinkie pfffted.

The two of them sat at the bottom of the stairs, trying to think of their next move. Pinkie Pie pulled the cart wheel off her neck- the way Pinkie typically did spatially-impossible things. She put the wheel in the water, goading the thing inside.

"Hey, Pinkie Pie? What happened to you, exactly?"

PInkie stopped waving her wheel. "I don't want to talk about with you."

Twilight latched onto Pinkie's word choice. With you. So perhaps somepony else could pry the secret from her?

Twilight took another look at the fake Pinkie's corpse. Twilight wasn't normally vindictive, but she held a bitter grudge against the Changelings for their role in her brother's wedding. They had nearly ruined her life, her brother's life, her friendships, and quite nearly the city.

So, in a pang of anger, she slapped the corpse across the cheek.

She regretted it instantly. It felt very different from slapping a live pony. The warmth had drained from the Changeling's face, it felt cold to the touch. It was like slapping a piece of frozen meant, which was far from the most pleasant thing in the world.

"We should find Fluttershy." Pinkie suggested, pulling the cart wheel out of the water and and pulling it back down on her head.

"And the others." Twilight added. Though Fluttershy should probably be their first priority. Followed by Rarity. Then Rainbow Dash and Applejack. The latter two didn't get stress breakdowns quite as easily as the first two.

Pinkie adjusted the cart wheel on her neck.

"Pinkie, could you get rid of that knife?"

Pinkie whined. "But it feels sooo good!"

"Okay, okay."

Twilight wasn't okay with it AT ALL, actually. What had happened to Pinkie that she ENJOYED having a KNIFE in her chest?

"Let's find Fluttershy." Twilight said, more to remind herself than anything.

Twilight and Pinkie climbed up out the basement staircase and set out to find their shy, meek friend. The library was large enough, but in the unnatural, ever-creeping darkness outside, it seemed even larger.

"Where should we start? Where CAN we start?"

"Well, how did I find you?" Pinkie posed the question.

Twilight reflected. "By... you wandering into the wine cellar just as the Changeling was about to stab me...so what, we just find a Changeling who's pretending to be Fluttershy and have her try to stab me just in time for the real one to show up and save me?"

"I like the way you think, Twilight! But I don't think that will actually work. How about we split up and check back into the basement every half-hour?"

That was reasonable enough. As long as they both went in every half-hour, they could know when something was wrong if they didn't come in. Eventually, they would find Fluttershy, and, it would be a good strategy for them to do when it came time to find the rest of their friends.

"I'll go that way." Pinkie pointed over to a hallway and clopped towards it.

Twilight looked around and saw a spiral staircase. She whimpered, not wanting to go up after that staircase to her bedroom collapsed. But what choice did she have, really?

To go up another staircase? That didn't solve the problem, it just traded one with another.

Twilight sighed, hung her head, and trudged up them.

"Don't make too much noise, now, darling." Rarity's voice warned her from afar.

"Rarity?" Twilight questioned. "Are you there? Can you hear me?"

"I'm sorry, Twilight, dear, I can hear your voice and hoofsteps ...but I can't make out what you're saying exactly. Just mind my warning and you should be fine! See you soon!"

Twilight nodded, though it escaped there was no point in it. She continued up the stairs and stopped when she heard a menacing, hideous roar that caused red to creep around the edges of her vision. The interior of her vision that wasn't getting red creep set into was getting blacked out, making it so she could barely see, and the roar seemed to reach through her ears and into her brain, drilling the fake safe harbor of insanity directly into her skull.

"AAAAAH! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!? WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU!? Just-just tell me what you want, please!"

Once the roaring had stopped and her vision could go back to normal, Twilight realized she was crouching down and wondered just what it was that had made her freak out like that. Granted, the roaring was - let's stop pretending, here- the roaring was hellish. But it didn't...warrant whatever THAT had been about.

Twilight whimpered. There was a throbbing pang in her head. It was like her sanity was being drained down an unplugged sink, and ever so slowly, she had to watch it fall and slip away, able to realize that was her very sanity being drained, but unable to do anything about it..

Twilight rushed up the stairs, and when she made it to the top, she stopped dead. She was expecting the stairs to collapse behind her...they didn't, but that roar...

"F-Fluttershy?" Twilight called out. "Applejack? Somepony?"

Don't make too much noise now, darling... echoed in Twilight's head.

Twilight gulped at Rarity's ominous warning echoing in her head. She quieted her voice to a whisper.

"Fluttershy, Applejack...somepony..."

"Twilight, come here!"

Twilight darted her eyes around the room. There was a pale yellow hoof gesturing at from what Twilight could only hope was a closet.

"Flu-" Twilight hushed herself. She rushed over to the closet and crept inside. Fluttershy was there, wearing an Oriental green white flower-pattern dress with matching sandals and straps along her legs.

"Fluttershy, are you okay?" Twilight whispered, looking over Fluttershy's clothing.

"Why are you whispering?" Fluttershy questioned.

"Rarity said to be quiet!" Twilight's second whisper was strained, as she was worried that Fluttershy not being quiet would alert...something to their presence. She had no real what, just... something big and scary and nasty.

"Okay." Fluttershy nodded her head. "What's going on?"

"I was, uh, hoping you'd know."

"Oh, I'm sorry..." Fluttershy turned her head away.

Twilight looked around in the empty closet. "Why are you hiding in here?"

Fluttershy seemed saddened by the question. "Didn't you see Rainbow Dash? She's gone completely nuts."

Well, far as Twilight was concerned, the very library itself had gone nuts. Anypony inside would have to suck it up and just deal with the stressing insanity. If she had to deal with bloodcurdling, soul-freezing roars from thin air, then so did everypony else.

Twilight 'hmm'ed and put her knee on the wall of the closet, causing a mechanical panel to reveal itself, and retract. A chute dropped out, and a shiny light-blue ceramic orb rolled out. Twilight looked at it and gasped.

"I don't understand." Fluttershy murmured. "What's the big deal?"

"This is a Memorb! It records a pony's memories and allows you to experience them the way they did." Twilight explained. There was a small design flaw: say a pony deliberately mis-remembered something...but Twilight was confident. "I bet we can find out just what happened to the library with this thing! I'll just use my horn here..."

Twilight touched her horn to the orb. The effects were near-instantaneous. Twilight felt like she was being sucked into it.

Slightly disoriented, Twilight felt herself being put in another pony's point of view. She was in an enclosed room with a shivering Canterlot guard, with his white fur and gold armor.

"G-get away from me!" the guard exclaimed. He backed away.

Twilight wanted to tell the guard she wasn't going to hurt him, but she knew she was in somepony's memory. Anything she said, only she would be able to hear.

"Don't be like that..." A soft, sincere voice asked of the guard in a coo.

Wait, was that Fluttershy's voice?

The pony whose memory she was experiencing started getting closer to the guard.

"No!" The guard stammered. "Get away from me! I-I have a wife!"

"Oh! I'm sorry." Fluttershy -if that's who was- apologized. "Here, I'll go get somepony else whose torture is less... prone to contact. I'm sure- "

"He's lying." Somepony with a deep, dark, yet still very much feminine voice boomed at Fluttershy. "Continue, Fluttershy."

It was Fluttershy!

"No, no, please..." the guard stammered.

"Oh, quit your whining." Fluttershy scolded the guard in a very un-Fluttershy manner. "Buck up, and pucker up."

Fluttershy closed her eyes, which made it impossible for Twilight discern whatever happened afterwards.

But based on the sounds of the guard's muffled screaming and something sizzling, Twilight was perfectly all right with that.

Feeling like she had just been ejected from the orb in a most nausating fashion, as though the finished orb had spat her out after swallowing her on accident,, Twilight wobbled around slightly.

"What did you see?" Fluttershy asked.

Twilight held up the orb in her hoof. "Well, um...this is your memory, Fluttershy."

"Mine!?"

"Yeah. I think you did something to a guard."

"How could I do something to a guard? They're so big and tough and I'm so weak and fragile."

Twilight raised an eyebrow at Fluttershy's putting-herself-down. Granted, Fluttershy was weak, but she wasn't usually so...open about it. Come to think of it, Fluttershy wasn't very open at all.

"You know what, Fluttershy? I think you should see the memory yourself...see if you can explain it to me."

Twilight gave Fluttershy the orb and blasted it with her magic. Fluttershy's eyes became dazed and glossy, as if entranced.

Is that what Twilight looked like when she was using it?

After a minute. Fluttershy shuddered and blinked. Her eyes now clear, she drew away from the orb. Twilight reflected that didn't take long. Of course, there wasn't much memory to experience in the first place...

"I'm sorry, Twilight. I don't remember that." Fluttershy apologized.

"Ah, it's okay. We'll find out what happened somehow." Twilight looked at the closet door. "And...we'll need to come out of here eventually."

Twilight and Fluttershy exchanged glances. The latter gulped. Twilight slowly creaked open the door, and the two of them stepped out. Both ponies darted around the room, searching for signs of danger.

"All clear on my end." Fluttershy said.

"Same here." Twilight said. "Where's Rainbow Dash?"

"Didn't you hear me!? I said she went crazy!"

Twilight stepped back, taken aback by Flutttershy's irritability. What had changed all her friends so much? Twilight looked around, then stomped her hoof, having made up her mind. "Take me to Rainbow. Maybe I can talk some sense into her."

Fluttershy scoffed. "You can try. Come on. This way."

Fluttershy led Twilight into another room on the floor they were in. Until now, it had escaped Twilight that she needed to go back to Pinkie and let her know Fluttershy was okay, but finding Rainbow Dash needed to be taken care of as well.

Fluttershy eventually brought her to yet another part of the library Twilight didn't know was there. The pegasus pointed at the door. "She's in there...somewhere."

Twilight nodded, pulled open the door, and stepped inside. The room was a very long hallway with a couple of round doors, and dimly lit, as well.

"Gee, maybe we should go back for Pi-"

THHHuuunk. The door shut behind Twilight.

"Flutttershy?" Twilight exclaimed, rushing up to the door. "Did you close the door?"

"Nope!"

"Then can you open it?"

Twilight saw and heard the doorknob rattling on her end, but...

"I can't get it to turn!" Fluttershy said from the other said.

Twilight pounded her hoof on the door in frustration and signed. "Okay. I'm going to find Rainbow Dash. You go to the basement and wait for Pinkie Pie."

"Will do!"

Twilight separated from the door and started making her way down the hall. One door was slightly ajar, where the others weren't. Twilight logically presumed if she were to find something, it'd be in there.

She cautiously creaked the ajar door open the rest of the way. "Rainbow Dash? Anypony?" once inside, Twilight saw a table, a large wooden cabinet, and some beaker full of pink fluid resting on the table.

"Hmm..." Twilight approached it closer, curious as to the purpose of what was clearly a potion. "Hmm."

Twilight levitated the beaker up with her magic.

Twilight's attention was distracted when she heard the cabinet creak. Twilight whipped around at the noise. The cabinet wobbled and creaked and then fell over on her, breaking her mental concentration over the beaker. Pinned down under the heavy furniture, Twilight was helpless, unable to use her magic to keep the beaker from falling and shattering onto her snout. She was yelping for help, so the pink liquid inside had no trouble splashing down into her throat like a solid lump. Once she realized what happened, Twilight tried to spit it out, but it had already got too far down for her to do much.

Once she accepted her faith and swallowed the liquid, Twilight calmed down, and could focus enough to magic the cabinet off herself.

Twilight decided it would best to leave the room, before any more surprises happened.

When she creaked the door open and took a step out, she heard a most unwelcome noise.

'Splash'.

Twilight's eyes widened as she saw the hallway had been flooded with water.

She looked to her side, with the futile hope what she saw wouldn't be what she was expecting.

Something splashing in the water, coming straight for her. That carnivorous thing in the water, if not, a second one of them.

Twilight did what any pony would do in her position:

She ran.

She ran as fast she could, the splashing beast in the water never too far- or rather, not far enough for comfort- behind her.

Twilight started breathing heavily, thinking she would run out of space to run before escaping it.

She was seemingly proven right when she found the end of the hallway.

Backed up into an corner, Twilight backed against the wall. The water-thing was splashing closer and closer. It was going to knock her down and eat her alive, she knew it.

Then something miraculous happened.

A huge dark blade with a awkward corner came swinging down from nowhere and smacked straight into the thing. A horrible shrieked emitted from it as it drew its last.

Twilight took in a deep breath. "Thank you so much!"

The blade drew back into the corridor it had appeared from. Then metal hoofsteps began to thunk near her. A hoof clad in studded metal appeared before anything else.

Twilight started breathing heavier.

Her rescuer wasn't quite whom she was hoping to see. It was Rainbow Dash- or a Changeling, but mutated, which made Twilight pray it was the ladder. Tiny bone-like structures were stuck to her legs and torso by pins. Metal plating was covering her hooves, chest, and one of her eyes. Her left front hoof had been replaced by the blade that had struck down the water-creature. Twilight didn't think she could cope if this monstrictoy of metal was the actual Rainbow Dash.

"You're welcome." She drawled in a raspy, scratchy dry voice that made it clear she was about to do Twilight what she had done to the water-thing.

The chase was on again. Only this time, Rainbow was the pursuer.

Rainbow Dash charged straight at Twilight, who ducked, causing the nightmarish blade to lodge into the wall. Rainbow Dash now held up by having to pry her sword out, Twilight got a head start to gallop to the other end of the hall.

"I will find you!" Rainbow Dash promised. "I will KILL YOU!"

"I don't doubt that." Twilight muttered as she ran.

"DAAAaH! GET AWAY!" Somepony screamed. Somepony quiet...somepony whose name was Fluttershy!

"Fluttershy!?" Twilight cried out.

"I fooooound yoooou!"

Right. Twilight couldn't worry about Fluttershy right now. Had to worry about herself first. Run first. Perhaps it was selfish to worry about herself when Fluttershy needed help.

But she wasn't much good to Fluttershy if she was dead, now was she?

Twilight ran back into the room with the cabinet and closed the door behind her. She opened cabinet and hid herself inside. Twilight tried to calm her breathing. If she breathed too heavily, then Rainbow Dash would hear, open the cabinet door and...well, it was obvious what happened from there, right?

"She really has gone insane..." Twilight muttered herself. "...No. No. Don't rule out that she's a Changeling just yet." She reminded herself.

Twilight heard the sounds of clinking and clanking. Rainbow Dash hadn't come into the room yet, so... Twilight stepped out of the cabinet and back into the hallway. She heard something clinking still, like wind chimes.

"HAA-CCCK!"

Looking up, Twilight saw Rainbow Dash suspended to the ceiling by chains that had dropped out of it from a trap door. The chains were wrapped around her neck and wings, restricting. She lifted her blade and struck it against them, but all that did was produce a few sparks that nearly singed Twilight's eyebrows.

"..You know what?" Twilight asked herself. "If those chains weren't there, she'd have probably killed me by now, so I'm not even going to question where they came from."

Happy with that and slightly in denial, Twilight trotted her way back towards the entrance to the hallway.

She didn't see as the struggling Rainbow Dash...went limp behind her.

Getting back to the door, Twilight saw the doorknob had somehow been burned clean off. Some sort of sizzling green ichor was all around it, burning through all it contacted.

Twilight was fairly sure she didn't want to touch it.

A vibrant green eye poked through the hole where the doorknob used to be. "Twilight? Is that you?"

"Fluttershy? You're okay!"

"Yes. I'm fine. There was a Changeling who took my form and locked you in here so a Changeling that was pretending to be Rainbow Dash could kill you. But don't worry. My doppleganger can't hurt you now, Mis-." Fluttershy cut herself off.

Ah! That was a Changeling as well! No wonder why she was acting so un-Fluttershy like. Twilight was much too relived the at possilbity of Rainbow Dash having still been sane to notice Fluttershy's slip of her tongue.

"Here, let me open the door for you." Fluttershy offered.

The door opened from the other side, and Twilight stepped through to see Fluttershy. She was still wearing an Oriental dress, but it looked much more expensive and had less straps. She was also wearing sandals. Her hair was done up to look like a Lotus blossom.

"I gotta admit, after seeing Pinkie and Rainbow Dash..." Twilight shuddered. "I was expecting you to be mutilated too."

"Oh, I AM mutilated!" Flutttershy assured Twilight, as much of an 'assurance' as it could reasonably be called. "It's just internal. Look." Fluttershy pointed to the corner of the room.

Over in the corner, the Changeling that taken Flutttershy's shape and locked up Twilight in the hallway while lying about not being able to open the door, was on her side, down on the floor. The same green ichor that was on the doorknob was eating away her neck, bubbling and boiling away the flesh.

Twilight grimaced and looked to Fluttershy, who looked back with a down expression.

"I did that with a kiss."

Twilight was flabbergasted, though also a little impressed. However Fluttershy had gotten this...ability, for lack of a better word, it must have taken a lot of research!

"Come on." Twilight gestured for Fluttershy to follow her. "Let's go find Pinkie Pie."

Back in the room's corner, the ichor finished tearing through the false Flutttershy's head, causing it to separate from her body and roll away.

"Ugggggh!"

Twilight and Fluttershy went back to the basement, where the Changeling Pinkie's front leg had been dipped into the water and consumed by the beast residing within.

Pinkie eventually found them. Fluttershy reacted rather well the the knife, blood, and cart wheel on the Earth pony, consider how senstive she was usually was. Twilight chalked up to a delayed reaction from all the stress that was bound to come, or perhaps Fluttershy had seen worse after her animals got into a particular rough fight with each other.

"You found Fluttershy!" Pinkie exclaimed. "Rock on!"

"Yeah. Now we just need to find everypony else." Twilight said confidently. Then she turned her head and said, a little less confidently, "Including Spike..."

"Ah, cheer up!" Pinkie said, resting a hoof on Twilight's neck. "I'm sure he's fine."

Twilight wasn't so easily convinced. "I sure hope so...Aaah!"

Twilight spasmed and tucked her back leg in, her tail beginning to rise in the air.

"Twilight? Are you okay?" Fluttershy asked.

"Yeah, I'm..." Twilight spasmed again, her tail becoming stiff. Her eyes widened as she made a deduction.

"Oh...no, you know what? I swallowed a pink potion while I was in the hallway." Twilight grimaced as her body began tucking in further on itself. "I'm starting to think...it may have been aphrodisiac!"

A ludicrous notion, as not even a land of magical talking ponies was aphrodisiac a common thing. It was a myth. A pony tail. A story to scare little foals into behaving. But given how Fluttershy's apparently had some of...acid-producing kiss now, Twilight wasn't willing to rule anything out at this point.

"Oh my!" Fluttershy exclaimed. "What can we do?"

"Well, I have one of three options." Twilight started to explain, having read the theoretical effects of the surprisingly real aphrodisiac. "Either one of you can mount me, somepony can make a neutralizer agent...OORR I can be cooked to death by the heat of my own arousal."

Fluttershy and Pinkie stared at her with dumbfounded expressions.

"Correction." Twilight realized with an exasperated sigh. "I have one of two options."