A Nightmare On Canterlot High.

Twilight Sparkle clicked the light on over her desk and sat down in the badly repainted chalk white chair. She took a little purple journal from her school bag and opened it to her latest entry, call it her log of the things going on in Canterlot.

"I'ts been only a few weeks since school started up again and so far at least ten children and young adults have been killed. Only a handful of the deaths are being reported as murders. The rest are incidents where the victims are being found dead in the mornings, often by parents."

Twilight stopped writing for a second to a take a scrap of The Canterlot Quarterly, the city's premiere newspaper and tapped it over the mirror over her desk. The headline screamed the deaths of a so many kids it made one wonder why anyone would even buy it, then you realize, that's EXACTLY why someone would buy it. In its own twisted way, reading about so much death and devastation of another, as long as it didn't directly involve you, it was almost...pornographic. It was like reading pornographic material only with gore and tragedy. A strange and in so many ways taboo attraction and fascination that we all have, and try to deny we have, but can't. For some we do so to hide the emotions of sympathy, or empathy for the words and images we see. For others...not so much. Twilight returned to her writing.

"I want to keep telling myself that there's a logical and rational reasoning behind all this. That Canterlot has just hit a bad time and a criminal psychopath is on the loose. It happens to even the smallest of towns and cities, hell it more often happens in places like Canterlot and gets more attention then when it happens in the likes of New York or San Francisco. That Twilight, the one who would very much like to accept that what's happening here is just a shift in the normal rate of things like that happening in cities like this...Has been replaced by a Twilight who knows there can be something else at work now. Time seems forever stuck only moving when some greater force allows it too, Portals to world's where I have a doppelganger that's a talking winged unicorn princess. Magic running amok as it grows stronger and stronger here...I think it's time to get everyone together...

Twilight closed the journal and picked up her phone, there was going to be a lot of calls and texts to make tonight.

The five other girls and Sunset Shimmer looked up at the still unfinished storefront that Twilight had been planning to convert into a Small library. She had called them and several others to her house, they believed it to be nothing more than a sleepover. Akin to the ones they held with the pony Twilight what felt like a lifetime ago. "Come on," Sunset said making the first few steps to the front door. "The other's are inside already by the sounds of things, we should join them." Sunset began to open the door, already hear the sounds of laughter and games inside, a solemn reminder that with all this death and attacks on everyone with a hint of youth in them, they where all teenagers. teens just trying to live their lives as best as they could. Yet so much had happened to them in what felt like both so much and so little time.

"It sound's like fun in there!" Pinkie said with her usual bouncy attitude. Twilight had pushed all the book shelves aside against the walls for the occasion, at one of the tables, Twilight herself along with Fluer De lis, Indigo Zap and Sunny flare from Crystal prep had a game of Life set up, Indigo threw her arms up in double fist pumps as she was the first player to "retire." Which she made a point to vocally inform her opponents.

"Oh Yeah! Who's bad?!" She said doing a little victory dance, prompting Fleur to scoff and tell her to sit down. The other girls looked to see what else there was to do, knowing Twilight she had the best chairs set up with lamps and plenty of books. Although, true to himself, Peter Page turner sat in one of those chairs,Flash Sentry beside him. A suitcase packed not with clothes, but countless comic books sat open at his feet. He closed the one he currently was reading, and timid little Fluttershy put a hand to her moth in horror at what she was seeing. The cover showed some woman helpless awaiting the hooded and robed faces of Klansmen, something you could never see on the covers of anything today, the comic's title more than spoke for the image and why it was being used, EC comic's Shock SuspenStories...issue sixteen, a Gladstone reprint.

"I tell you Flash, these comics are like nothing you'd ever see today! And they came from the 1950's! I mean...where else can you see the Klu Klux Klan on the cover? And before anyone says anything." He said to the few heads who turned to him at the mention of such a group. "They are portrayed in the book as horrible people, this book showed the side most people at that time didn't see. The clean robes and political rallies that was showing them as "good old Americans?" Not the case here." He went on for a small crowd of the party goers, spinning a macabre but in some ways...enticing tale, occasionally turning to his Gladstone EC reprints and flipping through them. Sure they where dark and often violent, but Shock was a book that told like it was, and in some cases still kinda is. Behind the gruesome beheading, hangings,lynchings, and even drug abuse, where cautionary tales of society exposed for what it can truly be. His praise for the past was cut short by Twilight clanking a spoon to a glass to call the ensemble to her attention.

"Everyone...I have to be honest with you all...I asked you all here because...She looked at all the faces of her friends...from Pixel Resolution at the pinball table (Tales From The Crypt pinball,cost her a bundle but money well spent) to her friends from Crystal Prep breaking form their games to look up at her, To Turner and Flash reading comics, Pinkie and Party Favor who ented from the kitchen carrying bowls of ice cream topped with all the trimmings. Deep down inside, could she bring herself to take away all her friend's fun and happiness by brining up her theories surrunding the wave of death and loss sweeping though town? No, why should she bring her friends into something that could very well be a bad season? Deaths and accidents, if you could call missing and dead young people those, can rise in places when you least expect them, why shouldn't this be no different then those times? Poor Twilight, a deluted logistics beliver to the end...of her ignorance that is.

"Yeah Twi? What's up?" Flash asked her as he set a book down to join AppleJack and Big Mac for a round of Texas hold 'em.

"Nothing...Just wanted to say how I'm so happy to have everyone here tonight." Was the girl could say before helping herself to the sundae Pinkie make for her. Vinyl didn't mention the dream she had of being trapped like a fly and shredded by Freddy Kruger if he was even MORE nightmare educing, nor did her friend Octavia mention a dream she had where she could hear the shrieks and squeals of badly played strings of her signature cello, surrounded by darkness until it broke, and she found herself looking at a younger version of herself. Seated on a stool, stringing her instrument badly, all while the ugly rotted faces of her friends and family, looking no different than the ones in the comics Turner had brought, laughed and laughed at her ineptitude. Until only that hideous monster was left to use those horrible claws to slice each and every string of her cello before running the blades through her charcoal slate hair. He chuckled softly as she sat frozen with fear.

"No standing ovation for you." His cold as ice voice said as those claws began to sink into Octavia's skull, but the ringing of her alarm clock and Vinyl's arrival with french toast and orange juice save her from having her head crushed like a mouse's skull in the talons of an owl in the dead of the witching hour. Starlight Glimmer had one of her long dead father, back from his dead by blow fish toxin, his body bloated from gases, his skin moldy brown, his cracked and broken glasses askew as a fat grub worm crawled from the empty socked of his left eye, tongue falling to the floor as his slmiy gnarled hands reached out to her. Just before they could wrap around her neck, they became those bone and steel blades and the sickly yellow eyes, and that cackle. Like wind blowing through dry dead branches of a long forgotten forest.

These teens where puppets on strings and nooses, With his fleshy hand the anchor points. Those claws where just a quick swipe from severing some of those strings, but leaving the nooses intact, so he could watch them dangle then swing.