Derpy carefully placed her fork on top of her empty plate. She had never been one to rush meals, especially when Carrot Top prepared them, but tonight she had made an exception to that rule.

To say the meal had been merely tense would be like saying that muffins were only tasty. Lyra and Carrot Top had tried their best to start conversations, but to no avail. Bonbon had tried early on to break the ice with Colgate, but the latter had simply ignored her, preoccupied with her food. Bonbon had apparently taken that badly and refused to try again.

And so the dinner had continued until Derpy could not stand it any longer. She had bowed her head and concentrated on finishing her meal as quickly as possible. She had worried that Carrot Top would give her one of her infamous ‘you’re doing something wrong, Derpy’ looks, but for once her friend seemed far too preoccupied with the drama between Bonbon and Lyra's friend than in monitoring Derpy's behavior.

Making her way over to the sink, she lowered the plates into the bottom of the basin.

Help us.

Derpy froze, head still in the sink. She slowly raised her head and peered back at the table, almost certain that she would see Carrot Top staring at her, with a disappointed expression. Nopony was looking at her, nor did any of them look like they were overly concerned with Derpy joining them back at the table, so why had...?

Help us.

Derpy snapped her head sharply as she heard the creak of wood. On the far side of the main room, a square patch of floor had risen slightly. The trap door. She had noticed it before, during her cleaning, but had ignored it, reasoning that it was nothing worth worrying about.
She could also have sworn that it had been locked and she was definitely sure that it had been closed.

Creeping around the table, she made her way over to the strange trap door. As she got closer to it, she felt an unexplainable chill run through the air, as if the trap door was some sort of open freezer. She had just about reached it when she heard a cry from the table.

“Derpy, what in Equestria are you doing?” Carrot Top had ‘the look’.

“I saw something,” Derpy explained, embarrassed. “Or, I thought I saw the trap door open… so I wanted to see if I was right, I guess.”

“Dear, you don't need to investigate why something is open if you opened it.” Carrot Top's voice was not unkind, but she still had ‘the look’.

Derpy looked back at the trap door and felt a shiver run down her spine as she realized that it was wide open, revealing a rickety wooden stair case leading down into the darkness.
“But I didn’t...” Derpy mumbled, too low for Carrot Top to hear.

“Can you please close that door now, Derpy?” The look had changed. If Derpy had not known better she would have almost thought that her friend looked afraid. Derpy tried to push that thought away; Carrot Top was the bravest, or second bravest, she guessed, pony she knew. She reached out to close the trap door when she paused.

Help us.

She thought she saw something down at the bottom of the stairs. She knew she should just do as Carrot Top had asked, but curiosity nagged at her. What exactly did a university teacher keep in his root cellar anyway?

Help us.

“Derpy?”

It was not like it would really hurt to check after all. Ignoring Carrot Top, she trotted down the steps into the darkness of the cellar.

As she came to the bottom of the stairs, Derpy paused in the musty air. Soon she could make out the dim outlines of her surroundings. Large shelves, lined with jars, leaned against the walls, which ended far more abruptly than the mare had expected. She had thought that the cellar would be one large room. What she had not expected was to find herself confronted with another door.

Curiosity spurring her on, Derpy pushed though the cellar's door, only to be disappointed when she was confronted with nothing but a pitch black room.

She was just about to give up on her exploration and return upstairs, at least until she could grab a candle, when a creak on the steps behind her made Derpy start. She spun around, suddenly terrified of what she would see between her and the only way back up to the light and her friends.

Lyra lifted a candle with her magic as she offered Derpy an apologetic smile. “Sorry, didn't mean to startle you.”

Derpy smiled back, though her heart was still pounding in her throat.

As Derpy pointed Lyra toward the cellar door, unwilling to trust her own voice at the moment, she wondered why she was suddenly so on edge. She was not a very brave pony, she knew that, but somehow having her friend there had made it far worse.

Help us.

And yet, even as she thought this she felt her heart slow to its regular pace. She had been startled by Lyra, but that was all. In fact, she reasoned as the unicorn moved past her, lifting the candle higher to illuminate the open door way, she really should have far less to be nervous about now that her friend was down here with her. Satisfied with her own reasoning, Derpy turned and followed Lyra into the second room of the cellar.

The second room was also lined with shelves, however, where the first had been clearly a food storage, this new room seemed to be more of a junk room. Rows of assorted miscellaneous stuff, from old scrolls, to colts’ toys, to things that Derpy could not for the life of her recognize, were piled high across the shelves. In the center of the room there was a large and solid looking table.
Sitting on top of that was a projector and a record player, needle resting in its cradle, its tray empty.

Lyra ignored the table and moved straight to bustling about the room, pulling down scrolls and checking their contents before quickly re-rolling them and placing them back on the shelves. Derpy shook her head. Other ponies sometimes did things she could not understand, but while her friends would explain what they were doing and why, Lyra would not. Lyra never would. Derpy had long ago learned from Bonbon and Carrot Top that Lyra often did things that nopony understood, and that it was best to just try not to worry about it.

As she began to search the shelves on the other side of the room, the mare wondered how she had met such a strange pony as Lyra.
Oh right! She remembered! She had known Carrot Top for as long as she had lived in Ponyville, back when she was just getting out of flight school and looking for a place to start her own life, away from her well-meaning, but smothering parents. Carrot Top had also been her first non-pegasus friend, a fact that she was very thankful for, since she doubted a pony like Bonbon would have stayed friendly with her for very long, back when she had first been struggling to understand the differences between pegasus and earth pony culture.

She had met Bonbon and, subsequently, Lyra through Carrot Top. Bonbon and Carrot Top had been close friends since they were fillies and it had been Carrot Top, back when she and Lyra had been roommates, who had introduced the inseparable pair in the first place.

Derpy liked Bonbon well enough, the earth pony mare could be prickly, but her heart was always in the right place. Even so, Derpy had always liked Lyra just a little bit more. While she would never say so out loud, she had always felt a certain empathy for the other pony and the way that others tended to dismiss her for her odd ideas or grow annoyed with her eccentricities. That was something Derpy knew all about.

Help us.

Lost in thought, she was hardly aware she had picked up the record before she was trotting across the room with it. She tapped Lyra on the flank, distracting her from her current scroll.
“What is it Derpy?” The unicorn asked, peeved. When she saw the record in the other mare’s mouth, though, Lyra's eyes widened. “Derpy, where did you find that?” she asked, an incredulous smile spreading across her face.

Derpy shrugged, releasing the record as she felt it being tugged by Lyra's magic. “I just found it over there.” She pointed back toward the shelf where she had taken it from. “I just thought you would like to see it… I guess?”

“Were there any other records like this, Derpy?” Lyra asked, but before Derpy could answer she rushed across the room to look for herself.

“I don't think so,” Derpy offered as Lyra scanned along the shelf rows where the record had been.

“No... I guess not,” Lyra said, sighing. “Still!” She pepped up and gave Derpy a huge grin. “We have this! I could kiss you right now, Derpy!” The mare looked shocked and Lyra laughed. “Figuratively speaking, silly! Now come on, I need you to carry this record upstairs for me. I’ve got the record player!” And with that, she gave the record back to Derpy and magically lifted up the record player from its place on the table.

As Derpy stepped back out into the first room, she felt terror grip her. Something in the contrast between the warm, steady light that beamed down through the still open trap door and the flickering shadows thrown off by the candle which Lyra held clenched in her teeth seemed far more terrifying than the darkness of before.

Without warning, a thousand nighttime terrors suddenly sprang to life in her head. All around her, just beyond her view and lurking just behind her, ready to spring, were all the ghouls and monsters she had ever imagined living under her bed as a filly. The urge to turn around and face the nothingness that her rational mind knew she would find, and the animalistic need to flee and not look back, lest the things take that opportunity to grab her, battled for control over her frozen legs.

Then, the instant ended and Derpy took off like a shot, wings furiously beating to speed her legs in their effort to close the distance between herself and the light as quickly as possible. She hurtled up the steps, barely touching them and nearly colliding with Bonbon, who had been peering into the cellar. She turned her head to look after Bonbon, as the earth pony threw herself backwards, a reflexive apology already on her lips, when she suddenly collided with something solid. Derpy yelped as her field of view exploded into stars. The record that she had been holding fell to the floor, as Derpy and whatever she had hit slammed to a stop.
As the sudden flood of adrenaline that had propelled her on her wild flight drained out of her body, Derpy realized that whatever she had hit was moaning. She opened her eyes to see the familiar blue coat of Lyra's friend Colgate. To the pegasus’s chagrin, Colgate had been smashed into the back wall. If the unicorn hadn’t been there, she would have hit the wall herself. Headfirst. At top speed.

“Derpy!” The mare felt a pair of hooves grab her and pull her off of the dazed Colgate. Carrot Top's face loomed over her friend. The look was back, and angrier than ever. Derpy suddenly wished she was back in the basement, as no childhood monstrosity was a match for Carrot Top when she was in a foul mood. “What in Celestia's name do you think you’re doing?”

“Um...” Derpy tried to smile winningly, but could not quite manage it. “I was just coming up from the basement.” She felt her face redden as she added. “And I… accidentally ran over Colgate.”

“Derpy Hooves! Do you have ANY idea how reckless that was?” Carrot Top scolded, eyes blazing with the intensity of a disapproving mother. “You could have seriously hurt Colgate or yourself with that little stunt, not to mention that, if you had hit her head on with that record in your mouth you might have broken it and cut yourself quite badly! And what then? If somepony gets seriously hurt out here there’s no way to get help quickly, ESPECIALLY if you are in no shape to fly!”

Derpy looked away from Carrot Top’s angry stare, tears welling up in her eyes. She wanted to explain that she knew that it was dangerous to do what she had done and that she would not have done it if she had not been so scared, but that she also knew exactly how silly what she had been scared of was and how it was not an excuse for her actions. Instead, she mumbled something that even she could not understand and began to sniffle.

Carrot Top did not seem placated by Derpy's tears, but before she could say anything more she was distracted by the voice of Bonbon as the other earth pony asked. “And where did you get this?”

Lyra had just finished climbing the stairs, and with a little help from Bonbon, had successfully brought up the record player with her. “This, my dear Bonbon,” Lyra said with a theatrical wave of a hoof. “Is Professor Orange’s old record player! He used to bring it into class with him and would play recordings from other historians and researchers instead of just having us read the text books.” She patted the old device fondly. “He replaced the one he had at the college back when Colgate and I were still taking his course, but he said he brought this one back home. I guess he must have brought it out here sometime between then and now.”

Bonbon shook her head. “Your low standards in professors never ceases to amaze me.”

Derpy took advantage of Carrot Top's distraction to get back to all fours and check on the still dazed unicorn. Between her fall down the stairs and her collision with the wall, Colgate was hardly in the best shape, but she seemed to have avoided anything worse than a few bruises and scrapes.

“Derpy found a record and I wanted to give it a spin on this old beast, you know? See if it’s a lecture recording or something,” Lyra continued, ignoring Bonbon’s remark as Derpy waved a hoof in front of Colgate's face.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“No, not really,” Colgate replied, rubbing the back of her head. “I haven’t exactly been having a great day.”

Carrot Top picked up the record and read its hoof written label aloud. “Translation of Necronomicon Ex-Mortis: Human Book of the Dead. Lyra, this just sounds vile!”

“I know how much you love this kind of thing, but this does sound pretty morbid,” Bonbon added, giving the record a disapproving look.

Lyra waved a hoof. “OK, it sounds a bit grim, but it’s a scholarly translation of an ancient text, it’s hardly going to be that graphic. Dashing Orange is the head of the history department at Celestia's own school, so if this is his personal work then it’s got to be something really good!”

Derpy ignored the conversation as she wrapped Colgate in a hug. “I am so sorry for all of this. I didn't mean to smack you into a wall!”

The unicorn laughed weakly. “Apology accepted. I guess I’m just getting all my bad luck for this trip out of the way up front.”

Derpy heard a sigh from behind her as a hoof pulled her away from Colgate. Carrot Top’s exasperation hadn’t gone away much and Derpy knew that she was still in for an earful later, but for the time being her attention had shifted from lecturing her roommate to seeing to the injured mare. She stepped aside and allowed Carrot Top to move in and tend to the unicorn as Derpy's own attention was drawn back to the other group of ponies by the record player.

“So why would the history head of Celestia's own school leave this translation all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, in a lightless cellar? Why not leave it back in Canterlot?” Bonbon asked as Lyra set up the machine.

“Well,” Lyra began levitating the record. “First of all, this is not just any old cabin. Every year Professor Orange comes out here for two months to just get away from the world and devote himself fully to his studies, so it’s not all that strange that if he was working on a personal project that he would be doing it out here.” She placed the record on its tray and watched with anticipation as the black disk began to spin. “Secondly, anthropology is something of a... controversial subject. Dashing Orange naturally sees it as a field of study just as worthy as any other, even if the board won’t fund it as a proper program, but it’s still not exactly the most respectable field. Apparently, the last head of the history department thought that the whole thing was just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories and threatened to fire anypony who tried to teach it as part of a serious curriculum! Can you imagine that?”

Bonbon rolled her eyes. “Oh no, that’s far too crazy of an idea for me to imagine.”

Derpy didn’t say anything. She knew that Lyra’s 'Anthropology' hobby was a large part of her perceived weirdness. She knew that most ponies thought that humans were about as real as zombies and that included Bonbon and Carrot Top. Carrot Top especially had always seen Lyra's “little obsession” as something of an embarrassment when it was brought up in public or with company and had asked Bonbon on more than one occasion to talk to her marefriend about giving it up.

When she did, Bonbon would nod her head gravely and promise to have a word with Lyra about it. When asked about it later she would simply give Carrot Top a look and roll her eyes as if to say, “you know.” Still, Derpy had always suspected that if she really wanted to, Bonbon was perfectly capable of forcing Lyra to give up on her hobby. And that she never actually would.

Now though, looking at the way Bonbon peered with genuine interest at the record, Derpy wondered why Bonbon had suddenly grown so curious about the recording. She did not know why, but the rapt attention the mare was giving to the record unnerved her.

Derpy's wandering train of thought was interrupted by a faint crackle as Lyra used her magic to place the needle on the record. The room quieted as everypony’s attention was drawn to the slightly muffled voice of an older stallion with a slight, upper-Canterlot accent.

“I believe,” the voice of the stallion began, “I have made a significant find in the Midnight Castle archeological dig site, a largely intact volume of ancient Human burial practices and funerary incantations.” A shiver ran down Derpy's spine and she looked behind herself at the trap door. The voice, obviously feeling no such nervousness, continued. “It is entitled "Necronomicon Ex-Mortis" or, roughly translated, Book of the Dead.” Here the stallion did pause as if trying to find the right words to use next. When he resumed the description, his voice had a noticeable quaver in it. “The book is bound in some form of..." another pause and then, “If later passages are to be believed then the book is bound in human leather and inked with a compound containing human blood.”

Derpy gasped, staring in horror at Lyra, whose whole face had blanched. The rest of the ponies around them looked just as distraught by the revelation. Derpy suddenly felt very glad that if humans had existed that they had died out ages ago.

Meanwhile, the record kept playing, “The book deals with creatures that these humans referred to as demons, methods of resurrecting these creatures, and of the supernatural forces which they believed roamed the forests and dark bowers of their world.” The voice took on a slightly drier tone. “The first few pages are mostly taken up by warnings about the dangers inherent with these mythical creatures and how they may lie dormant but are never truly dead. It posits that they may be recalled to active life through the incantations presented throughout this book. It is through the recitation of these passages that the writers of this book believed that the creatures could be given license to possess the living.”

Derpy thought she saw a flicker of movement. She jerked her head to the side, but saw nothing but the darkness beyond the window. Her heart began to beat faster and fear clawed at her belly.

“The following passage I could not find an appropriate Equestrian translation for, so I have decided to instead recite here in its entirety for future examination.” The voice on the recording continued. “It is from the third page of the book, and to the best of my knowledge, appears to have been some form of funeral prayer or dedication.”

Derpy felt the fear turn in her gut as she stared at her friends, who were all watching the record player intently. “We should turn this off,” she said, trying to stay calm as her mind screamed at her to demand why they were all so calm about this.

“Res ipsa loquitur, resurgam.” The stallion’s voice dropped into a rhythmic chant and Derpy felt her mane stand on end.

“Please shut it off?” Derpy implored, but the others where utterly transfixed.

“Respice finem, resurgam!” The voice grew in volume as the speaker gained confidence.

“Shut it off!” Derpy's own voice rose as she felt the fear give way to panic.

“Kaannda! RESURGAM!” The stallion’s voice filled the room as he spoke the words of the ancient incantation. “KAANNDA! KAANNDA, RESUMGAM!”

“SHUT IT OFF!” Derpy screamed, screwing her eyes shut and lashing out at the record player. Her hoof connected with the side of the box and the needle was sent skittering across the record’s surface with a harsh scratching sound.

At the same moment there was a terrible crash! Broken glass rained down on the terrified pegasus as she raced for the door, all thoughts driven from her mind except the need to escape.

Her friends were shouting something as she burst through the front door, but she barely registered them as she beat her wings, fragments of glass flying off of her in a shower of crystal fragments and droplets of blood as she took to the air. Ahead of her, between herself and the open sky, the tangled branches of the thick trees seemed to reach out for her, blocking her path, but she paid them no heed. She had only one thing on her mind: escape from that terrible cabin and that terrible voice! If she had to fly straight through a thicket of trees and scrape and bruise herself raw to do it, then so be it. It could not be any worse than being trapped down there.

Author's Note

I had allot of fun writing for Derpy in this chapter. I tried to avoid having her come off as mentally handicapped and more as being vaguely child like in the way she sees the world. At any rate, writing her gave me a new found appreciation for this fandom's favorite cross eyed mare!

On a related note, no fans of the movie, I am NOT going to write "that seen." Sam Raimi has said that he wishes that he could remake the first film, just so he could take that seen out of it, and frankly I don't blame him. I am 100% down for breaking out the silly, over the top violence and gore of the films, but there is still a line and for me that seen is where I draw it. If you disagree with me on that statement, then that's fine, but I just don't feel comfortable writing something like that.

Sorry for the little depressing tangent, but hey! Next chapter we finally start getting some pay off to all this build up! Are you hyped? Because I am hyped!