Day 56: [REDACTED], with a life support unit and a can of paint
Rainbow Dash opened her eyes and found herself strapped to a table.
That happened with annoying regularity as of late. This time she’d come to in an apparently windowless room, well lit and not as cavernous as some of them come, an empty wall in front of her and some pastel-colored cabinets off to one side. A sharp chemical smell hung in the air, as of paint thinner, though that might just be an effect of whatever she’d been drugged with as she . . . what had she just been doing, actually? And with whom?
Somepony was puttering about behind her head. She tried to turn it around to look but couldn’t; her mane was tied down somehow. Who would it be this time? She vaguely thought Applejack was overdue to appear, not that she was keeping a precise count of course. Then again, AJ wasn’t exactly creative about these things. Her kid sister could be a nasty piece of work, though – any day now, she’d be getting a cutie mark in red-hot pincers.
Oh well, time to get this show on the road. She cleared her throat.
“Um, what just happened? Why am I tied up?”
“Silence.”
An unfamiliar voice, strangely affectless, as if it was bored with the whole thing. Dash couldn’t really blame it, but didn’t the situation at least call for an exclamation mark here?
“Where am I? Who are you?”
Her captor came into view, mane and tail neatly tucked away inside an off-white one-piece garment. She wore a gaudy mask and a top hat that might or might not hide a unicorn horn.
“I said. Be quiet.”
The mask had a speaker grille for a mouth, with some device inside distorting the voice of the pony behind it. Something was definitely wrong here.
“Beg pardon, ma’am, but you seem to be going about this in the wrong way, what with the disguise and all. I mean, clearly you’re one of my true and dear friends who have all of a sudden gone psycho and are going to brutally torture and kill and/or mindrape me. Happens all the time. But it sort of ruins the point if I don’t know which of them you are, doesn’t it?”
Truth be told, it wasn’t always friends. Dash didn’t consider Mrs. Cake more than an acquaintance, but sweet stratocumulus, what that mare could do to someone. She had suspected that Pinkie Pie was somehow behind it, until it dawned upon her that the incoherently blabbering waif in the cage beside her own was Pinkie, who’d been shorn of her mane and tail and thrown into a tub of raw rainbow base. That one had been gruesome.
And once it had been Princess Luna, who had been more freaked out by the whole situation than Dash herself, and immediately released her, apologizing profusely. She had woken up drenched in nothing for a change, but still had been unable to go back to sleep and stayed up that whole night. Luna’s beautiful night, the sly bastard.
The mysterious mare (call her Mare-Do-Ill, she could be any of them after all) hadn’t deigned to answer her and seemed to be rummaging through one of the cabinets, the mint green one. Better try again; there’s a certain obscene logic to these scenes, and she knew this one wouldn’t be over until she could get her to monologue.
“Um, I cannot help but notice the assortment of tubes emanating from various orifices in my hindquarters. You’ve gotten a bit ahead of yourself there; it’s traditional to wait until I’m awake so I can suffer through the indignity of insertion fully conscious.”
Now that she did notice, there was an awful lot of intubation going on down there. Was this a medical-type scenario? Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so flippant; those tended to be the worst ones. There’d been the one with a doctor she couldn’t see (eyes gone? blindfolded?) blathering on and on about how he was about to kill her or turn her into some kind of abomination in order to save her life or something. Not cool at all.
“I apologize for disappointing you,” and the mask almost completely hid the sarcasm that was surely dripping behind it, “but I don’t have all day and you should just have woken earlier. If it makes you feel better, though, I’m not quite done with hooking you up.”
The sound of an electric shaver, and a sudden cold sensation in the bend of her left hock.
“There will be just a little prick now.”
Oh great, now the pain begins. She clenched her teeth. But it was only a little prick, and then nothing. She cautiously peeked downwards. An IV drip? Definitely medical. This would be bad. Ohshitohshitohshit.
What would Daring do? Something amazing no doubt, but first of all she would get free. Dash started discreetly tugging on various limbs to test her restraints. They were solid work, with multiple straps on each leg. Wings too, every feather individually stapled to the plywood from the feel of it. Whoever this was, she was nothing if not thorough. Not like Derpy, bless her clumsy little heart, who had tried to tie up Rainbow Dash with rope and granny knots all over. It had been easy for Dash to wiggle out of that and get the peculiar experience of turning the tables. But being the tormentor proved to be no more fun than being the tormentee, so fairly soon she’d just slit her throat to get done with the mess. For some reason that one had taken place in the basement of her own cloudhouse, and the memory had been so vivid she couldn’t bring herself to venture down there ever since. Thankfully she hadn’t met Derpy even when awake since then. That would just have been weird.
“. . . You see, Rainbow Dash, I have been studying you . . .”
Mare-Do-Ill was pacing back and forth in front of her now, lecturing. Dash didn’t bother to listen; it was just an inconsequential prologue to the inevitable dismemberment, or induced septic shock, or whatever it was going to be – thunderheads, what was in that IV? And then it would all be over. So get on with it, please.
But the lecture was shaping out to be an elaborate one. Flippancy aside, it was rather unnerving not to know whose hooves she was about to die by. Well, yes, unnerving, but not nearly as desperately soul-crushing as knowing for sure which wonderful trusted and loyal friendship had turned out to be a sham this time. Gotta have a sense of perspective, otherwise you’d go crazy. It was probably best not to try to figure it out.
It would probably be best not to pick at a scab, too.
So . . . an adult mare, of unremarkable body shape, unknown coloration and might be anything from earth to alicorn. Who did she even know that didn’t fit that description? Um, Spike. Big Macintosh. Granny Smith. The princesses. The foals . . .
Oddly enough, Scootaloo’s number hadn’t come up yet, natural though that would have been, but Sweetie Belle’s had, once. The sweet little kid’s idea of torture turned out to be a hooficure. That could have turned ugly quickly enough, seeing how hooficures involve knives and whatnot, but she’d done it by the book and not even drawn blood. Dash hadn’t really minded – actually it was kind of nice, not worse than a farrier’s appointment in any case, and she could hardly be accused of being a willing participant given the circumstances – but she had taken pity on the poor filly and pulled out her best terrified damsel-in-distress moves. Which weren’t, in all honesty, very good moves, despite lots of recent opportunity to practice. Perhaps she should get Rarity to coach her?
Right. She could imagine how that would work out. “Hey, Rarity, I’m having these recurring nightmares where you girls take turns cruelly torturing and killing me, and I’d like to learn to sound cooler while I croak. Shall we say about twenty percent cooler?”
Eeyup, and she should get somepony to help her practice her mad escape-artist skills too.
Her masked assailant was reaching the climax of her spiel. “. . . concluded that one and only one thing has ever been known to break you utterly. That thing is boredom.
“These little things,” she nodded towards the IV apparatus, “ought to keep you alive indefinitely. I will be along from time to time to change the bags and apply a fresh coat of paint to the wall in front of you.”
She turned to leave, but stumbled, going down in a blur of legs, hats . . . and that mask, flying clear across the room. Its wearer tried to scramble out of sight, but not before Dash had seen –
“. . . Derpy?!!”
She got on her feet, smiling sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she said, now in her own voice. “I thought it would be kinder if you didn’t see it was me.”
Kinder? Her head spun. “How are you suddenly so –” she fought for words “– competent?”
Derpy giggled. “Oh, you see, this time I’m a fragment of your imagination, so I can be as competent as you need me to be.”
“Figment.” At least this one was honest. She chanced the question she never got a straight answer to. “Why?”
“You did want me to help you practice escaping,” she answered, as if that explained anything. And somehow she looked directly at Dash for a long moment. “Oh, you’ll figure it out.”
Derpy disappeared out of view, and Rainbow Dash heard a door close.
Time began to pass.
Author's Note
This was written about a year ago, after I'd merely heard about Cupcakes and it disturbed me enough that I had to do something to get it out of my system. To my amazement, when I came across the draft recently I was able to read it again without cringing. I suppose that means it's good enough to show to the world ...
