Fear and Loathing in Neigh Orleans

I was in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo, and someone had been giving booze to these goddamn things!

Well, that’s not quite accurate, actually. It was more of a menagerie than a zoo, and I’m pretty sure some of the booze had actually been water before it had the nerve to change into alcohol.

At any rate, we were near the bar of the old Mariner’s Inn in downtown Neigh Orleans, sipping our drinks and watching the colourful crowd around us. It was a loud one, too, since the customers wouldn’t stop roaring and groaning and chirping like a rickety table dragging over tile. No sense of common decency, these ponies... lizard... things. I would have told them to quiet down, but I’ve never been one to intentionally draw attention to myself while I’m twisted. Makes other ponies suspect things. And that is always a bad idea.

The anchors and fishing nets nailed onto the far wall had begun to dance and ripple to the rhythm of some godawful country song that sounded like a dying yodeler strumming a guitar he hadn’t realised he’d broken ten minutes ago. I know it sounds kind of ironic for an earth pony working in a rural area to despise country music, but buck me if I doesn’t sound like the same goddamn song a hundred times over.

The other reptilian denizens of this fine establishment didn’t seem to care, though, as a number of old cooks and retired schoolmarms who looked like they’d crawled out of a cover of Senior Living had started dancing across the wooden floor like it was their tenth wedding anniversary. This would have normally kept my attention, if it wasn’t for the large group at the table across from me that was busy feasting noisily on the hearts of their victims without a care in the world. I swear, some pon... liz... ponizards? Some ponizards didn’t know how to eat with their mouths closed. And all the blood they were getting on the floor! Impossible to walk in this muck, I thought.

“Order some rain boots,” I muttered to nopony in particular. “Or else we’ll never get out of here alive. These lizards are everywhere.”

“Lizards?” my partner asked, her ears folding as she looked around warily. “Please don’t talk to me about lizards right now. You know what that kind of talk does to me.” I could see she was getting nervous, but why? There was nothing particularly frightening going on at the moment. Er, well, at least it wasn’t frightening for me, though it probably should have been. Truth be told, I was more annoyed at these goddamn animals for making such a fuss.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “We can walk through the blood on the floor no problem. Just imagine it as very red mud, and you should be fine.”

“Blood? Why the fuck is there blood on the floor?” she blurted out, earning some confused looks towards her. She twitched slightly, her breathing speeding up before she grabbed me by the shoulder, turning me to look at a table to my right. She pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us with their beady yellow reptile eyes. “You see them over there? They’ve spotted us, Silver!”

I peered a little closer, noting that they just looked like the starving remnants of an alligator family reunion that had been kicked out before dinnertime. A large placard stood in the middle of their table, which said something like, Bill Hoof’s Thirtieth Annual Staff Party. “Don’t mind them,” I said, nodding sagely. “It’s just a bunch of used car dealers from down the road.”

“B-but they’re staring,” she stage-whispered. “And they... HOLY LUNA THAT MARLIN IS COMING RIGHT AT ME!” She ducked beneath the table, only her tail visible beyond the edge of the tablecloth. “Don’t come near me. No no no, it’s not gonna come near me. I knew that evil fish would come back for revenge. This is what I get for ordering a fish fry at a Salad Station.” Oh right, I’d forgotten most pegasi had a taste for fish. Never been one for it, myself, despite living near the coast.

Looking around to see the glares directed at me by hungry, pissed-off ponizards, I gave a sheepish chuckle before shrugging. “Sorry folks, she’s just had a little too much to drink. I’ll take her home soon, I promise. Go back to your... meals.” Though there was some grumbling, the customers gradually went back to their chatting, dancing, and gorging on the hearts of virgins and the blood of newborn foals. You know, the normal diet of a growing brood of reptiles on a boring Saturday night.

I will never understand their culture, but hey, who am I to judge?

Frowning, I lifted the hem of the tablecloth to see my partner shaking. I could tell the Fear was starting to come upon her. “Amber, dear, what are you doing?”

“Hiding from that goddamn marlin! Did you see it? He wanted a taste of me, bad!”

“Amber, let’s get out of here. The marlin can’t bother you in our room.” She poked her head out from under the table.

“You sure?” I would have chuckled at the absurdity of this situation if it wasn’t so serious a moment.

“Yes, I’m sure, Amber. Now come on, let’s get home and away from that nasty fish. I’ll even give you all the tartar sauce you need to defend yourself with.”

“Tartar sauce?” She perked right back up at that. “Honey mustard too?”

“Yes dear, there will be plenty of honey mustard.”

After a moment of hesitation, she crawled out from under the table, brushing herself off before stumbling towards the door. “Come on then! I want all the honey mustard for that goddamn marlin!”

Hoping that nopony else had heard that, I just made what I hoped was a confused and deeply apologetic gesture towards the bar, before turning to follow her out the door.

By the time we got up to our room, my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. In fact, I was sober enough to order us a pizza from Pizza Shack, and actually answer the door with only a modicum of problems. The delivery colt had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge alligators and purple dragons lumbering around in viscous pools of fresh blood.

As my partner wolfed down her half of the pizza, I lay on the bed, staring vacantly through the window and up at the sky. I thought I would have a decent view of the Quarter from here, but alas, it was not to be. Instead, there was a large sign blocking my view, advertising some washed-up insurance claim attorney whose name I didn’t read, as I was too busy looking over his ugly mug. He was a big fucker, I could tell, with both mane and teeth a little too white and a smile that oozed sleaze like the bathroom of a Bourbon Street nightclub. Come to think of it, he looked like the type you’d find in that sort of place, probably getting his rocks off with a five-bit hooker while ignoring his scowling, curler-wearing housewife back home.

My eyes followed the lines of his pinstriped suit, watching them ripple and undulate like streamers caught in a breeze. Or a snake, I thought. White snakes crawling and wriggling down the navy-blue fabric, serpents slithering across the white starched shirt, the deep crimson necktie wrapping tighter around his pudgy neck...

“Hey, you haven’t eaten your half yet! What are you looking at?” I snapped my head to my left to peer down at Amber sitting in the middle of the floor, looking up at me with a little bit of tomato sauce on her muzzle.

“There’s big snakes up in the sky, on that suit jacket.”

“Shoot them,” deadpanned my partner, going back to her half-finished slice of pizza.

“Not yet. I want to study their habits.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Sure you don’t want your half of this?” She proffered the open pizza box that looked like a fondue had exploded on it. When my partner had asked for ‘extra cheese,’ boy had they gone above and beyond. Not that I was complaining, of course.

“Just put it in the mini-fridge for later. I can have it for breakfast in the morning.” I know it sounds rather vulgarian of me, but there really is nothing like reheated pizza for breakfast. It’s unhealthy, slightly greasy, and the cheese never melts right, but Sweet Celestia does it hit the spot.

My partner was looking a little green around the gills as she went to close the curtains, shaking her head. “You’ve got to quit this talk about snakes and lizards and blood. It’s making me sick. I was starting to get the Fear down there.”

Ah yes, the Fear. That creeping sense of impending doom that starts in the back of your head, before slowly spreading to the rest of you. Your heart races, your body shakes, and you feel like a trigger ready to shoot off running. It sometimes happens when on powerful drugs, generally followed by that tiny little precipice that separates a good trip from a bad one. You can usually pull yourself back from it if you get to somewhere you feel more comfortable soon, but once you go over the edge... only the mercy of the Powers-that-Be can help you at that point. Thankfully, I have never fully gone over the edge, though I’ve come close. Others have not been so lucky.

“Take some downers,” I suggested, turning over on the bed to look up at a painting of Jenny Square and the Cabildo above my head.

Amber wasn’t eating now, the pizza box closed and put away, but was pacing across the floor anxiously. “Where are they? I don’t remember.”

I sighed, glancing over to the corner of the room to see if I could make out anything by the light of dim table lamp. Sure enough, there was the little leather briefcase by the bathroom door. “In the briefcase.” I muttered. “Combination is Two-One-Seven. Check the little plastic baggie marked ‘Przlam.’ And no, I didn’t bring the pinion, so don’t bother looking for it.” Benzos was one thing, but I didn’t fancy her trying to calm her nerves with that stuff unless I wanted her practically immobile for the next several hours.

Whether or not she was looking for another one or not, she eventually found the right baggie, washing down a couple of the little blue tablets with a swig from the bottle of gin in the bag. I visibly winced. “Amber, you know you’re not supposed to take those with alcohol.”

She groaned and lazily waved a hoof at me, “I’ll be fine, Silvy. You just go get some sleep; I’ll join you in a few minutes.” I raised an eyebrow- that didn’t sound good.

“Amber, it’s nine o’clock at night. What else would you be doing?”

“Just going for a little flight around the block. Need to stretch my wings, you know? Wanna see what the city’s like from the sky like this- I’ll bet it’s gorgeous.”

My brow furrowed. She wasn’t seriously thinking of going out alone like this, was she? Tipsy, hallucinating and anxiety-free was not a good combination for being outdoors at night. Especially not by herself. “Amber, I don’t think that’s a good idea, since not even a half hour ago you were getting the Fear-”

“Silver, I just took a couple benzos, and my trip is wearing off. I’ll be fine.” She was already walking towards the door as she said it, slinging her brown saddlebag over her shoulder.

I started to climb off the bed, only managing to hit the carpet with a painful thump. Dear Celestia, I hate it when I forget I have four legs. “Amber, wait up-”

“I’ll be fine! See you in a half hour at most!” She called over her shoulder, the door slowly opening as I scrambled back up to my feet.

I ran towards the door, my heart pounding in my chest as the door swung closed behind her with an ominous click. “Wait, no, don’t leave me-”

I smacked into the door painfully, stumbling back onto the carpet. “...here.”

Shit.

Feeling the Fear rising, I swung open the door to see if I could go after her...

...only to see she was already gone. Oh no...

Swallowing, I closed the door, going back to lay on the bed. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this. She had gone off and left, and Gods only knew what could happen to her out there in her state. I didn’t think she’d have a freakout, but I did think she’d do something she would regret and just barely remember later.

As I laid there, my worries began to change from her to me. She was alone out there, but I was alone here. I’ve never really been able to cope with being alone in an altered state, you know? I mean, it was different when I was just by myself in a different room and Amber was just across the hall from me. I never felt really alone then, since I could just open my door at any time and find her. Now, I actually was, and all I wanted to do was go to sleep and forget about it.

The worst thing about acid is that you can’t sleep unless you’re on a downer. That same warm, metallic energy that makes you able to just walk around and enjoy the trip also leaves you jittery like you’ve just drank half a pot of coffee. You can stare at the ceiling or the walls or a spot on the carpet for hours, mesmerised, but you can’t sleep until the trip is over. I think I was only about halfway there at the time.

As the room started to grow larger around me, and my thoughts began to become more and more anxious, I knew it was time to find a downer. I climbed off the bed and rummaged through the briefcase, going past the benzos and the reds until I found a little vial with a yellow substance labelled ‘Kykeon.’ Now this was what I was looking for. Quickly, I uncorked the vial and downed half of it, shuddering a little at the slightly bitter taste in my mouth, as always. After a few minutes to let myself start feeling the effects, I sealed the vial again, before putting it back in the briefcase, and retiring to my bed.

Kykeon is... similar to, but not like other hallucinogens. It’s a sedative as well as a psychedelic. This means you can sleep while you’re taking it, but be prepared for very strange visions while you do. As I laid back, I began to feel a strange, almost electric sense of euphoria creeping through my veins. It isn’t a particularly intense sensation, but more of a distant, detached one, as if it were somepony else feeling it instead of you. The hallucinations shifted as well, the sharpened lines and distinct, vibrant colours beginning to blur and melt into each other. Shadows flickered across the room as I lazily waved my hoof in front of me, as if my vision was running at few frames per minute.

After a while, I tried to get up only to find my body wasn’t responding well, my limbs moving as if in slow motion. The clock on the bedside read ten o’clock, though I was sure an hour couldn’t have passed yet. Time works strangely in the world of Kykeon; or to be accurate, it often refuses to work properly at all. Realising the sedation had already set in, I simply sighed, and closed my eyes. When you buy the ticket, take the ride, I thought.

It was a strange sort of world behind my eyelids, all full of pulsing lights at the corners that disappeared as soon as I took notice. Lights twinkled across the dome of the sky, some warping and shifting out of existence to give birth to new ones every few minutes. Strange vines of green and white crept slowly across the void, blossoming and twisting around each other before dissolving into hails of green sparks that plummeted into the emptiness. As I looked down, I began to feel that creeping Fear at the back of my head again, that sinister, yet familiar voice that whispered, “You are alone.”

Instead of anxiety, though, I felt a powerful defiance well up in my chest. I controlled this world, not the Fear. If I didn’t want to be alone, I would not be. As I thought that, a figure took shape beside me, morphing and spinning like clay on a potter’s wheel. Once it had attained its final shape, I realised it was me. Well, not me exactly, but a facsimile of me. Between the pale grey coat, the unshorn fetlocks, the tinted yellow sunglasses and the off-white Panama Hat, he could be me. The eyes were off, though, a pale, watery blue instead of my dark green. This simply would not do, and I tried my hardest to focus on the right eye colour. But the stubborn eyes remained blue, to my consternation.

Oh well, I thought. No reason to be picky, right?

“Can you speak?” I asked the figure, tilting my head slightly to examine him. To my surprise, after a moment of silence, his eyes lit up, his body changing from rigidly immobile to animated. After glancing around at his surroundings, he spoke back.

“Yes, I can. My name is Doppel. Doppel Ganger. Some call me Gemellus. You may call me Gemel.”

I smiled, extending a hoof. “Pleased to meet you, Gemel. So... what are we going to do here?”

He tapped his chin for a second, before turning his head to the right. “We’re going there.”

In the distance, where there was once only the void, a bizarre structure devoid of all conventional geometry stood. It looked like a caricature of an old gothic university, rows and rows of arcades and crooked towers and vast, soaring spires that pointed straight into the sky. Stone and brick broke apart, reshaped itself, and molded itself into buildings as it wished, with little logic or order behind the placement. Rooftops sat on the ground, arches were upside down, doorways opened sideways in a weird sort of whirlwind of architectural madness. And in the midst of it was a massive archway, the length and breadth of it barred with an iron grille that glowed a pale red.

All in all, it looked thoroughly ominous. “We’re going there?” I repeated, incredulous.

“Yes. There.”

Sweet Mother of Faust. Maybe the Kykeon wasn’t such a good idea after all. Too late to turn back now, anyways.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.