Tales from the Everfree RestStop

In between the quiet burg of Ponyville, and the wondrous capital that is Canterlot, lies the Everfree forest. Easily the weirdest and most bizarre place in Equestria, if not the enitre planet of Terra. Most Ponies avoid it now-a-days but it wasn't always like that. You see before the invention of trains, Ponies had to use a road that ran straight threw the Everfree, and one day somepony had the dumbass idea to set up a RestStop at the halfway point in between the two cities. This puts it smack dub in the middle of the largest section of the Everfree, or as some of my coworkers call it, Discord's Dartboard. We call it that because the further you get into the forest the more weird things get.

Granted I am aware that some ponies live near the edge of the Everfree, myself being one of them due to my line of work, and I've even heard there's a Zebra named Zecora who actually lives in the forest a little ways out from Ponyville. However those places are around the smaller and less dense areas of the forest. The area Discord's Dartboard is located in is the major section of the wilderness, and as I stated earlier, the deeper into the forest you go, the weirder things get.

From what I can tell the Everfree RestStop, named for obvious reasons, lies somewhere around the Inner ring of the DartBoard, where weird stuff happens on a regular basis, while the really freaky stuff only happens once or twice a month. If your wondering what I mean by "Inner ring" allow me to explain. You see Discord's Dartboard is set up like, well a dartboard.

There's the Outer ring, the Outer area, the Inner ring, the Inner area, the Bull's eye, and in the center of it all there's the Bull's pupil, ground Zero for strange. Ponies that travel there either never come back or go completely Batshit insane, I'm talking full straight jacket, hundred different medications just to hold a conversation insane. As for the Bull's pupil itself, some Ponies have speculated to what it actually is. Some say it's where Discord himself was born. Others say it's a portal to another dimension, and the reason Ponies go insane is because they're unable to comprehend it, and it completely warps their world view. A certain few believe it's an Alien Spacecraft which sends out some kind of brain scrambler to keep itself hidden and after centuries of being here its warped nature itself. What do I think? I don't really care what it is, just as long as it doesn't come near me while I'm working.

Onto the store itself. It's open 24 hours a day, 7 a week. If your where to go inside you'd see a number of things. The first thing you'd notice is that there are row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats for the Griffin customers, and several other snack foods, some of the expiration dates for the canned goods are suspiciously missing, like they where filed off years ago in some misguided attempt to control inventory turnover. There's also a faded "Wet floor" sign in the way back covering what "was" a crack in the foundation by the cooler, which had long since turned into a small pot-hole, and has now metamorphosed into a collection of points from sticky spill-offs over the years, forming a mixture tar pit, collecting countless insect corpses, and the occasional small mouse.

Oddly, nopony's ever complains about the aesthetic, and by some providence bordering on the supernatural or criminal, the heath inspector has repeatedly signed off on the business, always kinda ignoring faint smell of what I can only assume is some kind of mysterious chemical cocktail that has since become the defining characteristic of the establishment. Somehow more noticeable than the family of mutated Raccoons that lives in the crawl space below the grease trap. At least, we think they're mutated anyway, at the very least they have to be inbred to the point of mental retardation, while Alpha of the group, a 3 foot tall son-of-a-bitch named Rocco has been spotted multiple times, chewing on people's wagon wheels, and has gotten the absolute crap beaten out of him by a Manticore who we call Scar due to his missing eye at least 17 times or more, and keeps coming back to his hidey-hole when we were sure that he was dead this time. Apparently Rocco and Scar have some kind of long standing rivalry that started some time after I started working here three years ago. Like the Bull's Pupil, nopony's really sure why the two hate each other so much, some think Rocco clawed out Scar's eye over some food, others say that Scar ate one of Rocco's brood, as for me, don't know don't care.

The lingering smell I mentioned earlier, a sweet combination of honeysuckle, ammonia, vomit, and who knows what else, has never been positively identified. But the prevalent theory is that it's coming from the cracks in the foundation, wafting up from the underground, it's strongest right after a rain, which happens randomly here, and is pugnet to the point of tear inducing if you get too close to the storm drains that where build along with the road to prevent flooding, and yes that does happen in the Everfree. Even Scar and Rocco refuse to go within even a few meters of it, choosing to have their brawls on the other side of the road in a little clearing that Scar made by knocking down several trees, presumably while trying to get Rocco off his back.

Back to the inside for a minute, if you needed to use the bathroom when coming in here, you might have the pleasure of meeting the Bathroom Cowpony. He exists as part urban legend, part urban fact, because even though he's never been officially confirmed to exist, we have several security camera recordings of a stallion fitting his description entering the building, heading into the bathroom and leaving. But what makes him a legend is what ponies claim to see him doing in the bathroom, nothing disgusting or criminal, just weird. I remember one story of a Pony going to pee, only to see a stallion dressed as a cowpony handing out balloon animals, and some are even more bizarre, like the pony who says he walked into the bathroom only to see a stallion wearing a cowpony hat sitting at an old-fashioned grindstone like they have at blacksmith shops, grinding an axe. When he walked in the Bathroom Cowpony stopped what he was doing, looked up with a smile and a tip of the hat and said "Come on man, come on with it." The Pony, understandably uncomfortable with the situation went to find an employee, but by the time anypony came back to the bathroom, the Cowpony had vanished grindstone and all. Now the Cowpony that may or may not haunt the RestStop bathroom, appears to follow a code of rules.
1st is he never appears unless there's only one other pony in the room with him, that being you.
2nd is that he never hurts anypony, whether it be intentional or by accident.
And 3rd is that he's always polite, always says hello, never gives any back-sass, and always smiles.
Honestly, he doesn't seem that bad, especially compared to the other weird stuff that happens in that place. If you go inside you might instantly get a toothache, a strangely common phenomenon that nopony really understands, it should go away on it's own after a couple of hours.

Now for the last thing you'll see if you enter the RestStop. Me, sitting behind the counter, because out of everypony, I am the only full-time employee aside from my manager, the great-great-grandcolt of the pony who first built this place, and unlike him I'm almost always here. You may catch me reading a book, or play one of those hoof-held video games. Why? Because for some reason the internet doesn't work out here, and cell phone service is dicey on good days and nonexistent on most. If you need to make a call you can leave and go towards either Ponyville or Canterlot, preferably Canterlot since it's higher up, and the only other big hill is of deeper into the woods, and you don't even want me to go into all the reasons that's not a good Idea. Or alternatively you can pay 5 bits per minute and use the store's landline, that little arrangement was cooked up by my manager, and as much as I don't want to I have to actually enforce it, because he checks the phone records on a weekly basis and if I don't enforce it, that money comes out of my pay check.

While you're here don't be offended if I don't strike up a conversation, because if I'm being completely honest, I don't always know for sure if everypony that comes in though these doors is real or not, and if I had to acknowledge everypony in that place the could actually be real I'd lose my mind. They don't need anymore of that going on around here, I guess the point I'm trying to make is this. Weird things happen to me working at this crappy RestStop in the middle of the Everfree, I honestly wish I could decide which was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, but I can't, there's just so many.

Since I've started working here I've seen a total of four coffins inside the store on three different occasions, not dead bodies, coffins empty ones. I've met dozens of ponies wandering in towards either town from the woods, claiming they'd escaped aliens or changeling hives back when the changelings where a problem, or cultists, and they had no money but needed to make a call, and "Can I please just let them use our phone before "they" find them." But rules are rules, I'm not going to lose my pay or even my job just because you didn't escape captivity with a little bit of pocket change. I know greedy of me, but my philosophy is that I don't have to get involved without involvement being force upon me. That being said, I do give them a stealth potion my cousin makes for me incase I need to escape the RestStop myself, and tell the pony to drink it if they want to get back to town safely.

Then there's Farmer Brown, and yes that is his real name, he is, or I should say "was" a farmer on the Canterlot side of the Everfree, he's primarily the reason we sell meat products. Once in a while one of his animals dies, and he sells it to us.

Anyway this one time he got mad at us, and complained about the bulk feeder that we've been ordering for him. He insisted something was wrong with the product because all of his animals suddenly had the faces of some kind of ape creature that a Unicorn named Lyra Heartstrings insisted was called a Human. I'm sure nopony but her knew what a Human even was so after getting back to the matter at hoof, we settled with him by charging a significantly discount on his next couple of purchases. He stopped coming in one day, and I hear they found him, well, what was left of his body inside a bedroom at his farmhouse, one that had been locked from the inside. As far as I know they still haven't figured out what happened.

But now that I've gone on and on about where I work and the strange goings on there, you're probably asking yourself, "Who am I" "Who is the pony writing this." Well, allow me to tell you.

My name is Bright Eyes. I'm a stallion, average height and weight, light grey coat, and black mane. I'm a Unicorn, and my Cutie Mark is a bloodshot eye that's more or less identical to my normal eyes. You see, most little fillies get their Cutie Marks when they discover their special talent, I got mine when I was diagnosed with Chronic Insomnia, in short I'm unable to fall asleep, like at all. Nothing the doctors gave me could put me under, sleeping pills, anesthesia, sleeping spells, hypnosis, forced coma, about five years ago I tried to have Princess Luna put me to sleep, used all her power on me, couldn't even make my eyes heavy. I was about to stop there, but Luna asked Celestia along with Princess Cadence and Princess Twilight to help her the following night. Even with the combined magical energy of four Alicorns I couldn't so much as get drowsy. Honestly I don't have a problem with not being able to sleep, I was just happy for the chance to meet the Princess. The doctors said that aside from needing to consume more food than other ponies my condition was totally harmless, it even helped me out sometimes I could study for tests all night, improve on my puzzle solving skills, and do other things that most ponies don't have enough time to do. I took this job because I felt like it would be more beneficial to the owners to just have one full-time employee, instead of having to hire three different ones for the daytime, dusk, and dawn. That being said I do have a 1 hour break, which I'm going to be using to write these entries, so the manager has me train part timers in my spare time when nopony else is around.

I decided I should make this after somepony nearly got in the middle of one of Rocco's and Scar's rumbles. I asked the manager about it, and he said it was okay just as long as I didn't mention his name. For situations where I need to use his name I'll just call him the Boss, since that's what he is. I'll be glad to tell you all some stories later, but right now I got to get ready for work.