A New Pony In School

I awoke to a warm furry body pressed up against my own. I let out a high pitched scream, making all other occupants of the small room wake with a start. Unfortunately, that put a certain pastel orange face in the line of fire of my flailing hooves. WHACK. Plink. Drip.

Pencil yelped as the hard appendage came into contact with his mouth, and we watched as a shard of enamel fell onto the floor with a small noise. His mouth filled with the taste of copper and there were rivulets of red running from where his lip had split. My mouth formed an "O" as I repeatedly apologised and fussed over his injury. I tried to cast a simple healing charm to hold the wound closed and almost fainted from the splitting pain that racked my entire body. I shook my head and in a second it was gone.

A glance around the room revealed that a changeling had replaced our food supply. We ate in silence, Pencil with a bit of difficulty thanks to the weak bonding enchantment CJ had cast on his lip, not to mention his chipped tooth. We took turns for a bit thinking of a way out while the rest of us tried distracting ourselves from the situation at hand with games and jokes. After about half an hour I noticed the air was getting rather thick and glanced at the window to check for a breeze. My throat constricted in horror at the sight I was greeted with. There was nothing but dirt wall all around us. If we didn't get out soon, we were going to run out of air.

It suddenly felt as if the breaths I was taking were too big. I walked backward in absolute terror, pupils constricted to pinpricks. The others in the room looked at me in confusion, and I managed to stutter out a small "The w-window...". They all simultaneously glanced at the wall. Cocoa squeaked. Cyborg gasped. Pencil just stood there, still as stone.

I got up and started pacing. We had to get out somehow, or we were going to die. The realisation hit me like a brick wall, and I paced faster, racking my brain for ideas. Cy opened a small compartment on his mechanical hoof and pulled out a few bits and pieces, beginning to fiddle and tinker something out of them. Pencil tapped his chin for a minute before beginning to hit his head against the wall repeatedly. CJ just sat there, rolling around every once in a while.

It went on like this for half an hour, but by then the heaviness in the air told us we didn't have long left. I could feel my eyelids getting heavy and struggled to keep them open as my chest moved up and down in short, shallow, uneven breaths. Pencil was sweating profusely and the others weren't in any better condition. Suddenly, CJ broke down crying quietly, repeating over and over how he didn't want to die. Cy went over to comfort him, and Pencil collapsed on the ground, mumbling something about being tired. His eyelids drooped to half-mast, and the uneven rise and fall of his chest was barely visible. In a fit of frustration, I put all of my meagre strength into bucking the wall as hard as my air-deprived body could.

Immediately, a passage opened next to where I had hit.

I took in great, heaping gulps of oxygen, and went back in to find Pencil in a small coughing fit, but otherwise fine, and CJ slowly unfurling his small body, his tear stained face breaking into a grin. Cyborg, on the other hand, remained unmoving, crumpled in the corner next to the hunched over form of Cocoa. The strained breaths he was taking were inaudible and fading, and his eyes were closed. I looked pleadingly at Pencil with blurred vision. He grabbed Cocoa and they whispered a little bit. I caught bits and pieces of their conversation.

"You really think..... pull..... correctly?"

"I think we can try....... we don't succeed..... die."

"....... worth the risk...."

"Agreed?"

"Mhm."

They positioned themselves so they were over the dying form of Cyborg and faced each other. With a small nod they did something I had only ever read about. They touched their horns together with a small tap. They began to glow, bright orange intermingling with purple in the center, and their eyes began shining white, irises fading as the intensity brightened, and a flash of colour filled the room, a bolt of orange and purple linking Cy and the two horned colts. It was over just like that, the room darkening to a normal brightness in an instant. The two magical fillies got to their hooves shakily, and I immediately noticed their horns had lengthened slightly. I was about to comment when the crumpled ball of metal and blue fur shifted a bit. Dark brown and synthetic blue eyes opened and blinked owlishly a few times. The colt was immediately smothered in a four-way hug.

Once we were sure he was OK, we set off, wings, horns, and hooves at the ready, to find the center of the chaos that had befallen everyone.

Grim Dark.