Payback: A Real Pain in the Rear

Sweetie Belle stared down into her glass. She watched the level slowly drop as she sipped her milkshake through a straw. Suddenly feeling disoriented, she looked up to see Apple Bloom and Scootaloo sitting beside her at the counter of an old fashioned diner. She had no memory of such a place, and could not remember how she had gotten there. The other two girls seemed similarly confused.

“Hold on.” She said, beginning to piece it together. “None of this is real!”

“Well of course not, darling.” A familiar voice chimed in. “Everything in that milkshake probably came from powder.” The trio looked over to a nearby booth, where a woman who looked very much like Rarity -- but somehow...not -- was touching up her lipstick with the aid of a makeup compact. Seated around her were five other eerily familiar you women.

Sweetie was about to say that wasn’t what she meant, but couldn’t find the words. Behind the counter, three tall, muscular young men were busy washing dishes, clearing trays and otherwise tending to business. They were all quite attractive, with striking features and perfectly groomed hair...almost like models, and somewhat out of place. Through the large windows at the front of the diner, a large crowd was visible just across the street. They surrounded a platform or a stage of some kind, where it looked like a ribbon cutting ceremony was about to begin.

“What ah can’t figure out” mused the one who could have been Applejack’s twin “is why in the hay the mayor is going through all this trouble.”

Hiding behind a coffee mug and long locks of soft pink hair, the timid one nodded and added “He has been acting strange lately.”

“I KNOW, right!” exclaimed a highly caffeinated girl with cotton candy hair, accidentally knocking over the half dozen empty soda bottles in front of her. “And what’s up with that weird crystal necklace thingy?”

Apple Bloom was distracted momentarily by a sudden itching sensation on the back of her left hand. She scratched it and kept listening.

“I noticed that, too.” said the girl next to her, furiously thumbing through one of several books she had brought with her. “It looks like something I’ve seen before in my studies, but I can’t quite place it.”

Dabbing whipped cream off of her lip and nodding in agreement, the country girl added “Why, it’s almost like--”

From somewhere outside, a thundering explosion shook the floor and rattled the windows. Diners scattered, and the crowd around the stage ducked for cover. A very overweight, balding man -- presumably the mayor -- was quickly ushered off of the stage by his security detail.

“Ah hate it when I’m right about this kind of thing.” The Applejack lookalike dead-panned.

“No you don’t.” Smirked a rainbow-haired young woman sitting beside her.

In a flash, the six of them leapt from the booth and ran for the door to meet the trouble head-on. The almost-Rarity was the last of the incognito super-heroes to leave. Jabbing a well-manicured finger at the three milkshake girls, she commanded “Stay!” Then she was gone.

The second they were out of sight, a lone figure seated further down the counter set her fork down with a loud clang. “Mmm...most people have never tried it, but the chocolate cream pie here is just to die for.” she announced, oddly unphased by the turmoil from the explosion and the panicking crowd outside. With a vague sense of unease, the girls turned to look at her. The figure wore a long coat and a hat, looking a little like a generic reporter or maybe a private investigator from an old crime thriller. The hat concealed most of her features.

She pushed her empty plate away, and one of the three hunks silently took it away. Lifting her head to peek under the brim of the hat, she turned to meet the girls’ gaze. Her eyes were a stunning pink and green, with a dangerous, piercing spark of insanity. The girls gasped in unison, instantly recognizing the villain. Before they could even think about fleeing, burlap sacks came down over their heads. The three undercover henchmen cast aside their roles as diner employees and prepared to make a clean getaway with their captured prizes. The girls thrashed and cried out as they were lifted bodily and carried into a back room. Shouting for help, they struggled to get free, but to no avail. Scootaloo flailed about so much that the henchman carrying her dropped her on her side. With the bag over her head, she couldn’t see to break her fall. She hit the pavement with a sickening, wet cracking sound, followed immediately by the agonized crying. She wasn’t fighting anymore...just crying.

“Shut them up.” ordered the Mane-iac, her voice tinged with disgust. Rough hands held the girls’ heads still as a door opened, letting in the nearby sound of a truck’s idling engine. Rags were pressed against their faces, muffling their protests. The chloroform acted quickly. The truck’s metal door slid upwards, and then the world went dark.

“Where in the hay did you find a comic book like that?” Apple Bloom asked, peeking out the treehouse window, suddenly nervous about somebody finding the three of them with something so lewd.

Sweetie Belle narrowed her eyes and looked side to side. She leaned forward conspiratorially, and in a low voice she explained “I found it in Rarity’s underwear drawer.”

“Hold on a sec.” Scootaloo interjected, an eyebrow raised suspiciously. “What exactly were you doing in your sister’s underwear drawer?”

Sweetie Belle blanched. “Shut up! I was trying to find nail polish remover.”

Apple Bloom snickered. “In your sister’s underwear drawer?”

“You two are impossible.” Sweetie said with a scowl. “So, are we going to take a look or what?”

The three of them sat on the rug in the middle of the Crusaders Clubhouse and opened the first page.

Episode 11: Payback. When the Mane-iac’s plans are foiled, she can be a real Pain in the Rear!

“For 1-4 players” Apple Bloom read aloud from the second page. “What’s that supposed to mean?” The others shrugged, so they continued into the main part of the story.

At first they giggled and made jokes, but before long it got very quiet. The story was difficult to follow, especially towards the end, where it seemed to branch off into multiple possible endings. After turning the final page, the girls just stared into space, unsure of what to think or say.

“Wow.” A very wide-eyed Scootaloo said, finally breaking the silence.

Looking down, Sweetie Belle realized that she had subconsciously been fanning herself. Suddenly mortified, she clasped her hands together and glanced at the other girls, fully expecting them to make fun of her for getting hot over a stupid comic book. Somewhat to her relief, they seemed to have experienced a similar reaction to the action-packed, lurid and extremely graphic story they had just read. Suddenly, she was terrified of her sister noticing that it had gone missing. Scooping it up, she muttered something about how she really needed to find that nail polish remover.

“It isn’t real” Sweetie Belle whispered, her shaky voice echoing slightly against the cement walls and floor.

She had managed to wiggle out of the blindfold that had been placed over her eyes at some point, but the room’s oppressive darkness made that a hollow victory. Sweetie Belle grunted and tried to stand up, but an elaborate set of restraints held her in a crouched posture on all fours. Her wrists, elbows, ankles and knees were secured in some kind of metal contraption. Her knees rested on padded leather, and her ankles were tied together. It wasn’t painful, but it firmly rooted her in place. A rod rested across her waist, limiting her forward movement. Her torso was bent over the rod, and her elbows and wrists were tied together and secured to the ground, similar to her knees and ankles. Her head was blessedly unrestrained, and she was able to move it around freely. Somewhere to her left, a soft groan made her tense up until she realized it was one of her friends.

“Apple Bloom?” she asked cautiously.

Another groan.

“Apple Bloom!” she hissed. Rattling chains replaced the sound of groaning for a moment, and Sweetie felt a flutter of hope that her friends were there, and they might be able to help her figure out how to get out of this mess.

Moments later, that flutter of hope turned into pang of shame.

“This is all your fault, Sweetie Belle!” Apple Bloom finally replied.

Sweetie Belle cringed, then hung her head. “I know” she said defeatedly. At first it had happened so fast, but now she was having a hard time figuring out how long they had been in this room. She darkly wondered if they have been drugged, and if it had been hours or even days since they were abducted. She took slight consolation in the fact that she at least seemed to be still wearing all of her clothes. After a moment, she pushed away those frightening thoughts and looked around the darkened room, vainly trying to see anything at all. “What happened to Scootaloo?”

“I’m here” came a familiar voice, sounding as scared and confused as Sweetie felt.

“Are you ok, Scootaloo?” Apple Bloom asked her friend.

“Ugh..ouch!” Chains rattled briefly as Scootaloo tested her restraints. “I can’t move, and -- oww! -- I think my arm’s broken.”

Sweetie Belle felt panic begin to rise again. Swallowing hard, she stammered “Listen...we got into this, and we can get out of--”

All three of them jumped, startled by the muffled sound of a very heavy door slamming shut a little ways off. The sound of heavy footsteps grew louder and louder as someone -- or something -- drew closer.

It isn’t real. It can’t be real!

“Well hold on, now.” Apple Bloom said, absent-mindedly kicking at a splinter on the floor of their clubhouse. “We should at least see where it came from. You know...in case something happened, and we needed to replace it.” she said, trying to sound casual while avoiding eye contact.

Sweetie Belle wrinkled her nose. “You just want to get more of these things, don’t you?”

Apple Bloom cringed at the accusation, but Scootaloo had no problem saying what all of them were actually thinking. Cutting through the awkwardness and denial, she blurted out “You guys, that was so fucking hot!” She grabbed the magazine from Sweetie Belle and squinted at the back cover. “Power Pornies, copyright 2014….yada yada, aha! It says it’s distributed exclusively to Minxy’s Menageries.”

“Huh.” Apple Bloom said. “Rarity must have gotten it during one of her trips to Manehattan.”

“What’s this?” asked Scootaloo, pointing at a section on the back page. It was an empty box that simply read…

IMPORTANT: BEFORE USE, WRITE YOUR SAFE WORD HERE.

Scootaloo could tell that at one point there had been something written in the space provided, but it was done in pencil and had since been neatly erased.

“What’s a...safe word?”

“No idea.” the others replied in unison.

Just below that it read CONTENT RESTRICTIONS, with a series of checkboxes. The columns were labeled “P1” through “P4” across the top, and the rows had odd titles like “allow pausing/resuming”, “skip intro”, “NPC rescue after 60 min.” or “improved Hum-Drum AI”. Of the twenty or so options, the only one that Rarity had already checked was “no v-card” under the P1 column. None of it made any sense to the girls. Even further down, a lone checkbox labeled “helpful hints” was also checked.

Sweetie Belle grabbed the comic back from Scootaloo and squinted at it herself. “There’s something else, too.” Holding the magazine very close to her face, she read haltingly “You can return to the place you started when the Mane-iac is defeated. Take a closer look to join the adventure in this...book?”

A flash of white light erupted from the comic. Uttering a surprised squeak, Sweetie dropped it. The light expanded until it had nearly filled the room.

“What’s happening?!” Scootaloo wailed as the three of them felt the light tugging them towards its source. Through the twisted portal of blinding light, the distorted image of an old fashioned diner came into focus. In a panic, they tried to scramble for the clubhouse door, but the powerful vortex swallowed them and popped out of existence as quickly as it had emerged, leaving the Crusaders Clubhouse as quiet as if nothing had happened at all.

The heavy footsteps stopped, and keys rattled impatiently. A loud click echoed harshly inside the cement-walled room, and a door opened, much louder and much closer than the last one. Light flooded into the room from a hallway, causing the girls to squint. A large, bizarrely shaped figure was silhouetted in the door frame, and it began to shamble towards them. A soft click turned on a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Once her eyes adjusted to the light, Sweetie Belle was able to get a good look at her surroundings.

Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were similarly restrained, and the three of them had been angled towards the center of the room. They could see each other clearly, being perhaps five or six steps apart. Sweetie tilted her head for a better view of the large figure as it glided towards the middle of the room, between her and her friends. Under the glow of the light bulb, the menacing figure was actually a woman -- of sorts -- and quite possibly the last person that any of them wanted to see. A dozen locks of green hair sprouted from her head, writhing and undulating like monstrous tentacles from a horror movie. She practically levitated across the room, her unnatural appendages carrying her aloft seemingly without effort.

The vile woman-creature let out a low, menacing laugh. Horrified, Sweetie Belle’s pupils narrowed to pinpricks as she met the gaze of her captor. Those pink and green eyes were mesmerizing in the comic book, but heart-stoppingly awful when they could stare right back in person.

“The name of the game is simple.” Her voice was low and calm, but edged with sinister mischief. “You are the closest family of those who ruined my plan.”

As she spoke, she slowly turned to look at each of them. One of her hair-tentacles casually slithered around Scootaloo’s injured arm. “It is not my intention to harm you...” It squeezed, eliciting an agonized yelp. “...much.”

She sneered and relaxed her grip on the girl’s arm, only to slide another pair of tentacles around the restraints on Apple Bloom’s ankles.

“When you leave here, you will take with you a message from me to...them.”

Apple Bloom kicked defiantly, but uselessly against the revolting appendages near her feet. “Ah ain’t gonna do nothin’ to help you!”

The Mane-iac narrowed her eyes and frowned, as if annoyed that she would have to explain what should have been obvious. Leaning towards the feisty farm girl until they were face to face, she put on a nasty smile.

“Silly girl.” The tentacles gingerly slid from Apple Bloom’s ankles, up her legs and then snaked in between her thighs. The girl’s jeans offered some resistance, but the surprisingly strong tentacles forced their way between her legs, along her groin and around her backside. With a swift jerk it hoisted up her pelvis, pulling her hips roughly against the metal bar in front of her hips.

“Words make for such poor messengers.” she cooed. “Scars are so much more elegant.”

Apple Bloom cringed from the painful pressure of the bar against her hips, and from the revulsion of having her pelvic area man-handled. Out of the corner of her eye, the farm girl caught a glimpse of something shiny and green. Tucked between the villain’s breasts was a curious looking green crystal. It hung from her neck on a plain silver chain, and vanished from view as its owner stood up straight again. Something about it seemed familiar, but Apple Bloom was suddenly distracted by a burning sensation on the back of her hand. It went away as abruptly as it had appeared. The Mane-iac relaxed her grip, and her tentacles slithered lewdly against the denim over the girl’s groin as she finally withdrew them altogether.

“And I know what you must be thinking: that you’re a ‘big girl’, and whatever I do to you will only strengthen your resolve and blah, blah blaaah.” As she spoke, she lolled her tongue out and crossed her eyes to further punctuate her disdain for such a ridiculous sentiment.

Free from the Mane-iac’s loathsome grip, but still very much restrained, Apple Bloom glanced quickly over and locked eyes with Sweetie Belle for the briefest of moments.

“And that’s my favorite part.” The villain added with a diabolical laugh. “I won’t be hurting you at all. You will be hurting each other. Consciously. Through your own choices.” With an ominous sense of finality, she chuckled to herself and prepared to begin her work in earnest.

Apple Bloom squeezed her eyes shut, but not in time to stop a single tear from slipping down her cheek. Scootaloo shrank back as best as her restrains and broken arm would allow. Sweetie Belle felt the panic rising again, and began to hyperventilate in terror and despair. She shut her eyes and frantically tried to believe the single thought that she had been repeating over and over since the ordeal began.

This isn’t real.