The Red Room

Twilight shuffles off the bed and lands on her hooves with a soft thump. She feels the fuzziness of the carpeting cling to her hooves like hazy afterthoughts as she walks to the foot of the mattress. In front of the bed is a wide dresser that took up half of the wallspace. Sitting on top are a box television, a radio, various memorabilia, and photographs trapped within tabletop frames. She lifts one of them have a better look but it was took dark to see. She walks over to the nearest light source, the red wall lamp hanging over the pillows of the bed, to see a family of four ponies captured on the photo. She softly gasps as she recognizes them.

“Why are they here?” she whispers to herself as she looks at her younger, foalself sitting in between her parents and brother with a wide smile.

She looks over her shoulder at the other photographs sitting on the dresser, wondering if they too pictured her family. She then looks back at the one in her hoof and notices that her family were sitting in front of a boxy building with many windows and balconies. She hasn’t seen many, but she recognizes it as an apartment complex. Or is it a hotel? She doesn’t remember ever sitting in front of one to have a photo taken when she was young.

“This is really odd. I don’t understand,” Twilight says softly, hoping an answer would come to her.

Just as she set the photo frame down on the nightstand beside the bed, a sudden, shrill ringing knocks her senses to the ceiling, her wings outstretched. She then notices that there was a dial telephone next to the photograph, crying to be picked up. She answers it.

“H-hello?” In response, Twilight hears a dry, hoarse voice wheezing crawl through the receiver. It was difficult to tell if it was a stallion or a mare attempting to talk to her. The back of her neck chills at the sound. “Um, are you alright?”

The wheezing continued to fill her ears for a couple seconds before words were uttered. “Don’t… aaah… use… aaah… the pillow.”

A click and dead tone then follows after. Twilight sets the phone down on the cradle and looks at the pillow. It was a pillow wide enough to fit touch either sides of the queen-sized mattress, its casing red as the room it’s in with a mottled pattern of darker red. Twilight doesn’t know why the mysterious caller told her to not use the pillow, but she decides to heed their words for the time being. Twilight walks around the bed to its other side, her attention affixed on the curtains. She pulls them apart with her magic, only to find a bare red wall behind them.

“Fake windows. Alright then, what else does this room have?”

Twilight turns around to face the sliding doors next to the nightstand on the wall opposite to her. She pushes the left panel to the right. Under the dim lighting, she could make out a closet filled with clothes hanging and a shoe rack sitting below them. Nothing out of the ordinary. She then walks over to the other photographs on the dresser and gives them quick glances. All of them are the same photo she saw earlier. Her eyes then sets on the television. There are no wires running behind it and it has a stringy bent wire for an antenna. Twilight doubts it can capture a wave, much less than a channel. Despite its less than impressive state, Twilight pushes the power button.

New color enters the room to her surprise as black and white static fills the screen and static sound filling the room. Aside from the monochromic mess, there is something in particular flickering at the top right corner of the screen. Twilight moves in closer for a better look. In blue lettering, Twilight slowly reads out the numbers.

“Three… zero, two? What does that mean? Is this channel 302?”

Twilight waits a few more minutes, watching the television screen turn into nothing. She grunts and turns it off, returning the room to its dark and red colors. Twilight has had enough of the bedroom and walks towards the door next to the closet.

She pushes forward to find herself standing in a small hallway. In front of her is another door. She tries it, only to find it be locked. Her right seems to lead to the rest of the place. She could see what looks like a kitchen area enclosed only by a wall barrier that goes only as high as a pony’s chest. To the right of the barrier was a door. Turning to her left, she sees a painting framed on the wall, depicting a bundle of roses sitting inside a vase. She can’t tell what color the vase was as it was like the bedroom. Dark and red, dark and red.

Twilight walks out of the hallway to find herself in a room that seems to combine three aspects of a living space. To her left was a ovular wooden dining table with six wooden chairs all around it. A pair are at each side and a single chair at each end. On the table’s design reminds her much of a tree’s inner rings. Situating next to the dining area is the kitchen area with narrow walking space fit for only two ponies to stand next to each other side by side, the wall barrier separating it from the rest of the living space, leaving the kitchen only open towards the dining table. Unlike the bedroom, orange electric lighting are embedded at the ceiling above it. At the kitchen barrier, Twilight can see an elongated faucet crane over what she assumes is a sink, and beside the sink is a large, egg-shaped object with dark, scar-like stripes all over it.

She walks into the kitchen to see it is a watermelon sitting on a carving board. As Twilight’s eyes wanders to the left, a breath is swiftly snagged in her throat. Next to the watermelon is a massive cleaver, its wedge shaped like a wood axe with its blunt side much wider than its blade. The flat of the metal gleams in the lighting, the shine slightly curved like a orange grin. Twilight blinks and the curved aspect vanishes, replaced by a more circular shine. Twilight looks up to see the lights were in the same shapes. She shakes her head.

“I’m probably just imagining things,” she assures herself.

In front of her, beyond the kitchen barrier, is what appears to be a living room with two couches facing each other and a loveseat at the end of the room. In between the three cushiony seatings was a bare, rectangular coffee table. As Twilight approaches the table, she determined that it appears to be made of mahogany. Twilight looks around at the walls to see just like the bedroom, there were no windows to behold. Her muzzle twists in a frown. She feels trapped.

She turns to face the last door, its appearance much more sturdier looking than the others. She walks over and tries the knob with magic. Locked. Twilight growls as she leans her head closer to the knob, noticing instead of a keyhole it had three metallic disks embedded.with number engraved on it. All three are set at zero. Below the numbered dials was a pressable button.

“A number combination lock? Oh please, I don’t have time for this,” she says, executing a spell on the lock to solve it immediately. However despite the glow, the number dials refuse to rotate. “What the heck? Magic proof enchantment?”

At this revelation, Twilight realizes the situation she’s in. She isn’t just locked in here. With a magic proof lock, it seems clear that somebody had imprisoned her inside this apartment. But for what reason? Twilight paces back and forth from the door, her mind streaming question after question. She then looks back at the door knob. Why a number combination of all things? Surely if her mysterious warden wanted her to stay trapped, they would have used a more secure lock that couldn’t be solved.

“Maybe… maybe I’m not truly trapped. Obviously I can solve this with patience. There are only a thousand possible combinations with just three slots. Eventually I’ll make it out.” Twilight then walks over to the knob. “Although… I don’t really want to sit here for hours trying to brute force this lock… wait a minute. The television. What if… ”

Twilight spins the dials to three, zero, and two in that respective order and pushes the button. A loud click was uttered and the door slowly opens inward with white light flooding from beyond the doorway. Twilight takes a deep breath with a smile and steps forward.