Twilight awoke to complete darkness, and an impossible silence. She could tell, somehow, that this wasn't the darkness of a closed room, or even that of a basement. She had only experienced such an overwhelming absence of light once, as a captive, deep, deep within the wealthy, gem-filled bowels of Mount Canterlot. But what was really unnerving was the silence; it was such that she could not just hear herself breathing, but hear her heart beat, her blood pulse, her joints creak, her guts work. She could hear the sound her eyes made when rolling in their sockets.
Something about the silence made her loath to panic; it seemed to somehow discourage rash action, or loud speech, or any speech at all for that matter. She repressed her horror, and thought with desperate, methodic intensity. From what little she could sense, her working hypothesis was that she was in a room, designed for sensory deprivation. Twilight started checking her surroundings. She was lying on her side - presumably, on a floor of some sort. She probed the space around her with her limbs. They met no obstacle besides the floor: no wall, no ceiling. The floor itself felt smooth, soft, bland, like a hairless, poreless, endless portion of skin. It did not even feel warm, like skins do, or cold, like floors do. Twilight warily rose to her hooves, to a concerto of creaks and sloshes and exhalations. No problem so far.
Twilight lit her horn. She tried to make as bright a light as she could manage. It changed nothing; all she could see was herself, her own body, and the shadows it cast upon itself. Everything else drank up the light in absolute darkness, without even a reflection, or texture, or grain, or nuanceof any sort. Pure, uncompromising blackness. She gave up, and reduced the light to a minimum.
Twilight jumped, as high as she could. Still nothing. Not even air currents. The air was as still as the worst summer nights in Manehattan, neither warm nor cold, and odorless save for her own natural smell. The black ground absorbed the impact of her jump, so efficiently and completely that it was unnerving—like a thick carpet. She tried tapping the ground: no sound. Pounding: nope.
She started walking. She kept walking. Then she walked on some more, for who knows how long. Twilight was beginning to get frustrated, and frightened; her mind was beginning to fill the oppressive silence with imagined, hallucinated sound, and her brain began to fill the darkness with fleeting patterns. Twilight broke into a trot. Still nothing. She'd had enough. The silence grew so loathsome she couldn’t help but panic. Twilight galloped, she galloped as fast as she could, she ran until her throat was raw and her legs couldn't carry her. A wall, an obstacle, a pothole, a slope, a feature, a damned feature for the love of…
Twilight took flight. She still wasn’t completely used to her wings, and sometimes forgot that she could fly at critical moments. Now, she poured all of her efforts into her wings, beating them in a desperate effort to find a ceiling, a roof, something. As Twilight kept flying higher, and higher, and higher still, the horror began to overwhelm her. There couldn't possibly be a room this large, anywhere. Unless...
Twilight’s flight muscles jerked and seized in pain. She plunged to the ground in a barely-controlled fall, one that felt surprisingly shorter than the endless rise. Either she had flown much lower than she thought, or space here wasn’t working as it should. More evidence for this being a magical place of some sort. She crashed inelegantly on the unbearably dull ground, and it felt like she hit it with no velocity at all, her momentum cancelled as if she had never even jumped. She tried to steady herself, her heart pounding against her chest—it wasn’t just a figure of speech, the scholar in her observed; it almost felt like an act of violence. She stumbled on her own feet, and, finally, collapsed. She cried, a crumpled mess on the ground. Quietly at first, voicelessly, but soon she started sobbing, then bawling. And not a single of those sounds made any echo in the emptiness.
"Help!" she finally screamed. "Is somebody there? Please, for the love of Celestia... I want to leave! I want to see the light again!"
Light. Light everywhere. Everything was a pristine white, without texture, without a sense of surface or distance. Even the ground was alight, so that Twilight cast no shadow at all. Still, she was glad to finally be able to see herself. Her own hooves had never seemed so interesting since that time she ate the wrong mushrooms on that field trip... She laughed, she dried her tears... even her snot was a welcome sight; she dropped it on the floor, hoping it would constitute a marker... and it faded, like it had never even been there. She saw that the same was happening to all the sweat that her running had caused; it should have formed a puddle around her, yet it disappeared as soon as it left her body.
Twilight seriously considered whether she was dead.
"Is this Tartarus?" she shouted with a raw voice. "Am I dead?"
She couldn't help but perceive a mocking, condescending quality in the silence that followed.
"What do I have to do to get out of here?" she tried.
A long, white cylinder seamlessly rose out of the hitherto utterly uniform floor. It kept rising until it was at chest level with Twilight. Then its extremity bloomed like a flower. The smooth, seamless top of the cylinder opened, showing that it was made of a number of juxtaposed, imbricated membranes, like geometric petals. The petals were retracting, sliding on each other, away from the center and disappearing into the sides, revealing a big round shiny red button in the center.
She must have been hallucinating at that point; despite the deafening silence, she was overwhelmed with a sense of being the object of gross, unrestrained, roaring laughter. It reminded her of a roomful of teenagers in their first sex ed lesson.
Waaaaait a minute... Twilight narrowed her eyes and tilted her head at the big red button.
The sensation of laughter redoubled. The teenagers' teacher had just asked them what they thought was so funny about the word "penis".
Twilight had had enough. Beet-red, she smashed the button down with every intention of breaking it. The silent laughter stopped, replaced by a giddy anticipation. She looked left and right, confused and terrified with anticipation. Nothing had changed. She waited, and then waited some more, and, as nothing happened, she slumped her shoulders, and gave a sigh.
And was instantly catapulted into the air as if from a cannon, screaming in sheer, undiluted terror, while the class of teenagers were howling and slapping their knees and holding their sides and falling to the floor.
As she spun through the air, the terror overwhelmed her, and she fainted.
Can you find your own plot without a map?
"Miss? Are you okay?"
Twilight felt she was gently being prodded.
"I'm not, I don't—wait, what?" She opened her eyes. It was noon, and the sky was an endless blue. She was sitting on the ground, her back to a wall, in the middle of a bustling street. Presumably, she had just fainted. What a dream.
What a dream indeed, she thought as she began raising herself. Awfully long and detailed and horrifying, for something she had from fainting. She considered the child, an obvious street urchin right out of a Chuck Chickens novel, newspapers under the arm and all, while reflexively adjusting her long... flowing... period... dress?!
Author's Note
Cue credits. Comments are very welcome as usual.
