He woke up. Worse yet with no idea where he was, turning and fluttering his eyelids ever so slowly as life switched back on from an amnesia-like state. He got no aid in his situation- (although he didn’t fully comprehend what that situation was), from the growing flames, or the breeze that was much colder in altitude- expect to wake him up. His headache, and his instant lack of memory were the first things he noticed, half-unconsciously.
Vision blurred, he found his nerves again, and they confirmed to him what he already knew must be true. Passed out on the floor, his eyes recognized fully what they were looking at, only getting the first glimpse of color from its dark brown, which added a sense of misery to a miserable state.
Suddenly something new was detected in his motion, a sinking feeling- but not the kind you’d get from a hangover or overdose type effect. He was at least somewhere around mid-20’s to early 30’s, he felt, and although he didn’t remember the specifics of it, he remembered being on the sea- once, somehow, somewhere. It didn’t feel like the floor, now that he thought about it, the swaying, the sinking, the feeling of something other than soil beneath him overtook his body.
The Wind bite at him fiercely, yet somehow he felt a twinge of heat his spectrum of temperature, like standing next to a campfire on a cold night. It caught his attention, both warming and chilling his skin, which he soon realized was bare save for the suit-piece he couldn’t remember putting on, brown jacket and button-on shirt beneath combined odly with a singular pair of jeans. Besides that he wore a pair of horribly tight and uncomfortable dull black business shoes. He didn’t see them, he just felt them.
After being woken up from this miniature coma, he felt like he was brought about by the rain, except there was no rain. It would have been more fitting, and it would have been very helpful to put out the fire.
This “fire”, he didn’t know about quite yet was left unattended on purpose, even though at it’s first flicker in it’s metal engine was the survival he relied on while unconscious keeping him elevated without plummeting to the ground violently.
He got up Slowly, realizing he must, grimacing in pain as he reacted, his head feeling ten-times worse trying to stand up then it did laying down.
“Where am I?” His first dialogue of real thought, not panicking, not casually, just his first.
He was only half-up when he thought that, staggering, finally throwing himself up to use the wooden edges of something he caught hold of overcoming a lack of balance and his own body’s reaction screaming for him not to after two previous attempts.
Looking drunk and feeling like such, he looked down upon his hike upward taking in more of the world he woke in, noticing wooden material encased in stitching. His ears began tuning in, and they confirmed what his body felt- the sound of wind passed him by, and a gentle unidentified crispy noise. When his eyes finally left the floor, he straightened himself out against the barrier of sorts, and looked across to find a lot of distance between himself and a mountain. Between him and that mountain must have been about 800 yards, but beneath his feet and the ground must have been about 200 yards. He looked down upon the remains of buildings, a grey ground grassless and seeming burnt.
It was so gray all around, it was like his eyes were closed, but instead of seeing black, he saw gray.
It was both dark gray to bright gray, but only gray. To add to confirmation of his location, he craned his neck upward painfully and noticed the entire newborn sky was filled with clouds, but they were just another dominating grey, and too thick to see the blues above, if there was anything other than grey beyond such clouds. Looking out of both corners of his eyes, he faintly noticed ropes leading upward. He followed them with his eyes to the mass above. It was dark-colored, but not like the others within his vision. Before seeing it he had the thought that he might have gone colorblind somehow, but the mass above him disproved the idea.
However bright, instead of brightening up everything else by contrast the colors around it seemed to dampen it down, and it became almost like the others. It was a purple mass, huge, floating above him.
He made a connection similar to the connection the rope made to the basket, and painfully again he too fast shot his neck down to confirm it, once again viewing his height in shock of newly founded fear.
He woke in a hot-air balloon, and not just any hot-air balloon of just any conspiracy to give him anesmia and murder him somewhat amusingly,it was the hot-air balloon. He saw it in the ironically playful designs and shapes in the balloon above, which did not clarify memory through it, just became more confused.
He took his valuable and rushed time to spirally look around. Above and below each side of the circular basket, up again at the sky of Doom and once more at the ground, at the Town, at the fall and the ground that would be, all easily could be be his demise, unless he knew where he was, what was happening.
Deep breathing, He wasn’t falling, it was too slow.
“How?” Remained a top thought as compared to the millions of other racing through his head.
From one extreme to the next, it all changed when he looked upward and noticed the inside of the balloon had caught fire, and it was spreading- fast.
The fire itself was a red interchanging beast of horror, a blaze that shouldn’t be there, but somehow sustained itself just below the balloon's engine burning through the purple tarp just above his head before the balloon curved back upward into it’s ginormous shape he had seen before. The engine now noticed was off apparently, noiseless, but it started screaming when he noticed the greasy, black mechanical thing sitting just above him dreadfully, shaking already shaken nerves when it went *PffomPh!* almost in sync to his final realizations as it took it’s automatic routine and let another flame into the flash-light looking lighten core of the balloon. It had been doing that for the past hour, with he was passed out.
His eyes dilated, and then he really began to panic.
Amnesia was fine, Amnesia in the hot-air balloon Twilight Sparkle originally descended in while on fire in a place that’s very air shouted and whispered gloom and death even it its color choice was a different thing altogether.
The breeze helped only miniscule as began to suddenly consumed about double the amount of oxygen before. That same breezed only helped the flames rise higher up in the balloon tarp, spreading, creaking. The material should have gone up instantly, but instead it maintained itself, and as it infected more and more of the purple design he exponentially started losing altitude.
“The rig of it, for the conditions of it, must have been all Rigged.” He later thought.
He was right.
He measured visually the distance from him to the ground and he bore his palms into the sides of the basket like a termite.
“O.K!” He shouted his first word, a lie.
“So that’s maybe abo-o-ooww!” He sucked it in as he stepped bent forward to see and realized he hurt everywhere there was to be hurt from that.
He switched to thinking “There must be about a Five-Hundred feet down from here, ah well that’s great.” His sarcasm probably kept him alive, and he discovered personality. The entire time-frame his mind raced with questions, the one that most needing answering was “Who am I?” Then after that was, “Why am I here?”
In his mad grab to capture every angle around him he noticed one more color, bolted to the side of the arm-rest of the balloon’s basket grip was a black. This Black was of a patch, unnoticeable at first until he saw the significance beneath it, a familiar site to him somehow, not incredibly but very helpfully.
Latched to the side of the balloon was a M1911 pistol, with a single sticky- tac note in a three handwritten letter which he ripped the strand of tape off instantly and read the inscription. In all capital letters the offensive message read, “USE.” in cursive that must have cost diamonds.
He didn’t have time to comprehend before he unlatched it and found the trigger guard wrapped around one finger, the barrel pointing nowhere as the gun became an extension of his hand. He didn’t have time to admire his newly acquired black beauty with a sliver magazine before he he heard a terrible fiery *CRACK!*
Whatever was in his throat prior to that disappeared, and as he turned around to view the undeniable damage, he saw that the fire had consumed- all, with the only thing keeping him up was…
Nothing.
In one effect-feeling last gulp, the flame lashed out at him, singeing his skin, sending him flying backwards, with the gun still in one hand, and the balloon popped, like a firecracker.
He fell headfirst, and as he fell, the remains of the burning balloon following him. The only thing left was a burnt scrap of tarp, half a design still intact, and the Metal-rafters.
If he screamed, he couldn't have been heard over the sound of wind he created falling, passing-out again halfway, weak, and about to be a splotch on the ground.
He had a nice fall before his ears fianaly succubed to the ringing of not just the injury, but of the gun as it went off when he hit the ground, and round less in the chamber- the bullet nearly missing his practically-dead brain as it should’ve cracked wide open on impact. The tarp of the balloon covered him, still burning only barely now, like a parachute that didn’t go off, not so strongly as before as the wind from the fall put it almost completely out on the way down. It didn’t glide downward like a parachute, the motor of the machine now completely burnt on all edges made sure of that. It nearly missed him, landing with a “THUNK!”, making a nice little crater in the ground that was 3 inches deep.
When he hit the ground, the ground hit black, like a dream in reverse where at that moment you don’t wake up. Falling asleep to fall unconscious quite literally into a living nightmare. He should have died, split on impact, but a spell made sure he wouldn’t. He sustained just as much injury as they wanted, because they wanted him alive.
The last flame went out, and from the aerial view of it, the wreckage lay in a circle, just rafters both broken and some lying completely in dirty greasy chunks of burnt brown metal, the engine useless and dying with a final *pop*! as everything died of function but the man lying at the center of it, gun still in hand, nearly dead.
It was as the gunshot rang around the dark mountains that bowled down to the dystopian town below that it, along with every other noise- scream, landing, and gunshot alike, that the attention of everything living, dead, and dying in this mysterious new town hear. The creatures in this town would want him dead- messily.
When he fell to the “Earth”, as he hit the ground and nearly rpterng his gut landing on his side, and he hit the ground with his new title. From that moment on, from that singular moment, from that very second his skin touched and bled on that soil he became the Mayor.
Welcome to Towndown.
***
He awoke, again, in the same hellhole he found himself in the first time he woke up, but with a great multiple number of things different from the first time though. To begin with, he wasn’t up in the air- pistol latched to the wooden side of the post and machine of flight burning of purpose to allow him to fall. He also didn’t know just how much of a hellhole he was in quite yet, and he wasn’t bleeding from his nose and legs, one leg punctured by the collision with the ground. He also didn’t remember what had happened to him before he ended up falling through the sky, which was ironic to know that after he was more physically damaged then before, that he started to remember everything: about teaching, about Celestia, about being a drifter for 6 months before being shanghaied into whatever this was, even about little details like “Darin Stars” and the bar-fight.
The basket lay in pieces but the ropes still burnt but alive on the loops of the blimp now completely tarnished and devastated. There was a time difference of about 4 minutes between waking up, sent into a Coma and waking in shock, his first honest though was, “Did I die and go to hell?” through each word working it's way through causing the gruesome pain to hit him, realizing his situation again, which he grasped in partials, as the greys in his eyes hoping they wouldn’t be there. Lots of things were assured then, in these slow blinks of the eyes as his nerves came back to haunt him as violent poltergeists who in life- had been tortured in the basements of Towndown.
Speaking of which, the gunshot that rang throughout was sniffed out to one location, and any eyes not bloodshot or skewed around hanging out of their sockets- saw the fiery comet as it raced down.
In the beginning, there were only a few “Entities.” and almost automatically two of them died upon exportation of from only hitting the ground after being thrown out in the typical fashion of every other Exporation ship.
Being stolen from their home-worlds, they were taken in two strong hoofs of faceless, nameless guards, thrashing about and protesting in ungodly wails that didn’t even remotely sound like a language. Just hours before, hovering in little blue circles that kept them afloat burning fuel and creating black fumes that would have ignited and suffocated anything underneath the hoover-jets, a craft of grey about the size of a house, one piloted by dark-helmeted griffins, both of creature and of name of their operational rank, “GRIFFONS”, who spoke never save for the mandatories. Military and asylum carrier No-131, all by the books.
Descending earlier were the same ships carrying different prisoners of existence labeled under entity names and numbers’ “#171- #201.” While on the trip over, somewhere already dead rotting in their cells before they were able to be left.
These ones, one in particular was Entity #182- Traditional Rainbow Dash, Red-eyer/Classical, Main concern: Intestines spilt. Condition- Nearly dead. Little notes on the board said in the bottom of the margin that, “Number complained of both slight stomach pain, and eventually used smaller intestines to choke and suffocate self to death. Died- 5:23 PM.
These ones were just left as remains, no funeral service, just thrown on, “1,2,3!” and hit the flow in a bountiful splash of guts, and left. Some talked or tried to bargain their way out of it, or convince. Most, just laughed, screamed, cried, moaned or twitched.
“Beats the living shit out of the PPI foundation, eh?” One member joked sarcastically. Both laughed as a gagged bloody, brutally before-tortured and cut Pinkie Pie hit the floor wailing. The door closed, and so did her eyes before any cries were given out to scream not to leave her under the grey sky of death with these… things.
One of which she was one of, so much death came out of those doors, and so many ships left the sky as they did before.
“Please, I don’t want to- Ahh!”A very disbelieving, very girlish scream as an Entity who was nothing more than Diamond- Tiara with an eye patch, with the socket full of maggots and worms burrowing into her skin which she personally didn’t seem to mind. They did.
“Grimdarks.” Was the solitaire term that escaped one’s lies in the whole of the action.
All were thrown at different prints in time but very side-by died in a national effort. Supposedly this would make history. It did! The planes left, and suddenly Towndown had residents, along with its number 1 resident currently, the newfound Mayor.
Some entities killed themselves or killed each other. What started out a cleanup effort as 30 different entities was brought down to 21 of them. Most that were still once, “living people” as the term was were in much more shock than the mayor.
One nearby, termed a “Zalgo” Pinkie Pie, heard the crash first, as it happened only 50ft. away from where she was. He was lucky to land on the outskirts of the dead town. Just as the bridge over the creek with no water in it greeted him to the inner workings of the dystopian looking Ponyville copy, so did she.
He was bleeding, and so was she, but in every portion of her body, seeming out the pink curls of the razor-straight hair, through the eyes that saw nothing but text and the world in red. He was just stumbling, barely making sense of the greys in the ground and the soft soil, devoid of, but perfect for fresh grown grass. He had to lift the balloon of as the repeat the same instance as before, the questions, the pain and confusion. From her point of view, it might have been the answers to all her sentences that needed answering. She repeated it, but these words ceased through grimed, menacing lips. “He comes... He comes.” She wheezed it. It sounded more like grunts, “Zgthacht.” It came out. She turned to face him as he went down trying to sand up on a broken leg.
“Ahh!” he shouted out.
Frankly, she shouted back.
“ShoudoAzx!”
He stared, in disbelief, given still in hand.
He had the viewpoint switched back to him again. There was the staredown, and the entry to Towndown, the sick first ritual.
She shouted again, and it rattled his already bone-dry emotional core. He was sure this was hell, by the look of the creatures standing before him.
She was obviously, somehow although impossible it seemed, Pinkie pie once. She was drawn-up into existence most likely as a picture, with a very real scary amount of attention to detail, slender and long ear-puffed up but in pus-filled bubbled and rips that infected the edge of them. She had blaring red eyes, purely glowing red, like headlights but though which apparently she could see him. Which was not good. Also not good were the fangs she bore wide-open with a tongue full of soft passed- bloody holes. It caught briefly on the sharp fangs as he licked it from side to side with a hungry passion, a predator in its natural environment. The tough tore a little, disgustingly rupturing a pus-bubble and forming another hole, which hungrily and almost gratefully she stared down at him as the very bringer of death itself, and swallowed the pus in her mouth. Her cuitemark wasn’t identifiable, until his eyes widen further to the hues of the city to realize there was no cutie-mark at all, just open fleshed, shaved-off and exposed muscle; somehow miraculously not exploding in a blood-fountain that very moment he first saw it.
He felt it creep up in his throat, the urge to vomit overtook him, but he resisted and manage to throw-up words instead, “What the fuck are you?” he asked softly, making sure she hopefully couldn’t hear through her ears that were missing section to them.
Unfortunately, he already knew. He had seen it before, in his teaching days, so far behind him and seeming non-existence now, staring down at the one thing everyone was told to fear of, at first jokingly but then dead, dead seriously as a child.
His parents didn’t stick around long in his life, but they did tell him of the legends known as “Grimdarks”, which he thought of the memory clearly in that moment in which every single molecule in his body was riddled with fear, surrealism and denial.
He uttered the name softly in his head. “Grimdarks.”
He sympathized with, and yet he hated and feared what the creature he saw before him. He didn’t realize how far him arms were down in shock of how further down his jaw was till he closed to pen them as he realize how little pain he felt in comparison to this crime against existence before him.
While he sweated buckets, she bled buckets, and he wanted desperately then his defensive position to put her out of her misery.
The gun trembled like an Equestiran-quake as it raised up He didn’t scream surprisingly, but she did as she suddenly charged justifiably. He took a step backward and tumbled down stupidly landing painfully on his ass. She ran the gleaming samurai-sharp teeth and the Red headlights come at him like a pissed of truck determined to run him over. He clicked and escaped as the *click!* produced nothing.
She was nearly upon him, wailing. “ZEIHG!”
He panicked tenfold as he rushed the hammer, pulling it back with one sprained finger. She lunged upon and versus slowing down, the action speed up as he had no time to aim whatsoever through the widest eyes he’d ever had in his life. The next clicked didn’t fail to result in a bullet, and the ring in his ears combined with the screen of her in the mid-air produced a retching sound he’d never forget.
He called it his very first merry memory into Towndown; despite it was fuzzy-, as he liked it. The bullet went right through the square of her eyes, and the screaming stopped in one last haunting moan of life as the practically un-dead, the sound echoing once again. Without time to react, the body lifelessly landed with a *thunk!* right atop his chest, the legs coming off happily.
The pain of being hit by the body upon him flung over him like a blanket was something he hardly felt to through his adrenaline wrestled rustled body. He nearly blacked out those last moments, traumatized more than he would recall ever before in his life. He had no words for it, he placed no words to it, he just breathed intensely and rolled over, blood spilt all over his, “new” jacket and shoes so painlessly tight. He rolled over, letting the body hit the floor with the red-dyed one form the eyes, the hole perfectly round in her forehead. He spent what felt like countless hours on the ground before he even had the very thought of getting up. The body next to him almost looked the same as a lover in bed, on the ground. He got up, using every muscle in his core, and fell though he first thought was, well nothing he thought in enough time and shock before he threw up all over himself, relied afterwards. He felt so alone.
He was left alone, knowing that his road wouldn’t come to be tracked from this encounter. He didn’t believed that there would be any comfort in the end of this encounter. Any life remaining in the days to come, he should be dead, obviously. No racing questions about the future, no analyzations of the direct past, just all his focus on the moment in he was living in right now. There was just heavy breathing with a blood and vomit soaked jacket he now recognized was the same type he had the day he was first from teaching, in fact he would later find the letter-open same recovered letter opener from late one before, which he thought he lost forever selling at the bizarre. Eventually, he stood up, and ignored everything as an estimated portion of survival- he thought only of the now. He stared what was always waiting for him. Ignoring the liquids, he walked forward and saw the rotten-wooden flesh of a sign, just one post and a rectangle board written in red-paint.
Just as offensively as the sticky notes that said, “USE” on his gun, this sign read, “FOLLOW” and so he did. Across the bridge, into the square facing the Town hall as the nearly known, fully adapted, “Mayor Towndown.” He added to his memory for simple entertainment that in the moment as he left the not extinguished blimp and shot Pinkie-Zalgo-Pie behind, that he counted his first kill. “One.”
Somehow, the square was desolate and empty as he strolled into the main complex of Towndown. A swinging sign told him that info written the same red paint as before. At this point, he was confident it was blood.
