Prologue - Part 1: Our Last Song
Vinyl Scratch and Octavia
Vinyl Scratch, a white unicorn mare with a mane of varying blue colors and a double-note Cutie Mark, and Octavia, a grey Earth pony mare with a black, elegantly styled mane, a pink bowtie, and a Cleft-note cutie mark, were just two normal PonyVille musicians. We find our two composers in their home, waking up one morning to continue working away at a couple of instruments for an upcoming PonyVille event.
Octavia yawned as she slid out of her bed at 9:00 A.M., as she did every morning. She dropped to the floor, noticing that the opposite bed was empty. Her roommate had already gotten up, and, as always, hadn't made her bed. Octavia just grunted, squinting her eyes at the light as she threw open the curtains between the beds. She made up her roommate's bed, neatly folding the sheets up and under the pillow, while she took the time on her own bed at the left of the room to neatly fold it back, and gently tuck it forward, leaving her pink heart-shaped pillow leaning against the carved frame with a small musical note in the center. She grinned in approval, and turned for the door.
She turned the knob, only to be struck backward by a loud wave of music. She was forced back against the wall, her lips drawn back across her muzzle and eyelids spread open. The music quit with a click, and a white mare in purple goggles peeked over a speaker in the hallway.
"Mornin', Tavi!" Vinyl said. Octavia remained stuck to the wall, her lips and eyes still drawn back, and her hair badly ruffled. Vinyl chuckled. "Got a little case of bedhead there, Tavi. You should get that checked out." Vinyl trotted in, removed her goggles, and set them on the bed. She focused her red eyes on the mare, and reached her hooves up to grab her. But before Vinyl laid a hoof on her, she hit the wall with it instead, and Octavia peeled off the wall, falling face-first to the floor. "Get up, already! We've got a dub-steppin' day ahead of us!"
Octavia placed her front hooves on the floor, and pushed herself up. Her lips had replaced at the front of her muzzle, but her eyes remained pushed back. She stood up without a word, while Vinyl replaced her goggles.
"Well, while you get cleaned up, I'm gonna head downstairs and wait for ya!" Vinyl hopped on top of her speaker, pushed off the wall, and disappeared behind the door frame as she slid it down the stairs like a sled. After a long period of thumping, there was a crash, then a light bumping sound as Vinyl had rammed into something at the bottom. Octavia recomposed herself, and sighed. Living with a D.J. wasn't the easiest life.
She trotted out of the room and entered the bathroom. Looking at herself in the mirror, she picked up a small, pink brush, which had been lined up next to a blue one. She brushed out her hair, replacing it into the style of her liking, and picked up a small pink bowtie, fastening the white strap around her neck. She replaced the brush, and headed for the stairs.
She stopped halfway down to see that Vinyl had knocked over a small table and a blue vase filled with bright blue flowers by the front door. Octavia sighed again, trotted to her left into the kitchen, grabbed a small broom and dustpan, and swept up the broken vase and flowers. She held the dustpan in one hoof, and the small broom in her mouth, as she used her third hoof to readjust the table. She trotted into the kitchen, and pressed her hoof on a small pedal of a trash can, flipping open the lid, and gently depositing the glass and flowers inside. She set down the cleaning implements next to it, and opened the fridge. There was nothing much inside: A small, white cake embroidered with pink icing, a few jars of daisies, and a carton of orange juice. She took the orange juice from the fridge, closed it, and grabbed a small glass from the counter top. She poured herself a glass, put the carton back in the fridge, and trotted into the living room.
Vinyl was busying herself on a speaker, while Octavia's cello sat neatly in a corner. She smiled, trotted over to the kitchen table, and set down the glass of orange juice. She pulled over her cello, and began to strum a few of the strings. As she examined it, she noticed a loose string, the one down the middle of the instrument. Pulling it down in her hoof, she attempted to string it back through the string rack, but continually failed. She was incapable of repair with only her bare hooves. Vinyl, being a unicorn, could fix it easily, but she hated asking Vinyl for help on an instrument. She stifled her regret, and asked her roommate for help.
"Vinyl, can you help me with this? There's a loose string on my cello that's refusing to knot," Octavia grunted, still attempting to fix the string at the base of her instrument with her hooves.
"Sure thing, Tavi!" Vinyl said in her enthusiastic voice, trotting away from a loudspeaker and capturing the tip of the string in a blue aura of her magic. "What's wrong with it?"
"Vinyl, the string's detached. I need to to put it back, or I can't play that note!" Octavia responded as she took a hoofstep back, slightly annoyed that Vinyl always asked the obvious questions simply to push her buttons.
"Aw, c'mon. You couldn't play a 'G' note right, anyway!" Vinyl chuckled to herself, removing her purple goggles.
"It is not a, 'G', Vinyl, it's a-"
"It's an 'A'. Got it!"
"Just fix it, Vinyl!"
"Alright, alright..." Vinyl shifted the string through a small hole at the base of the wooden instrument, looping it through and pulling it tight. She released the string, and the blue aura faded as Vinyl placed her goggles back over her red eyes. Octavia strummed one hoof over the strings, and the notes all played perfectly.
"Are you sure you tied this tight enough?" Octavia asked.
"Yeah, I'm sure! You'd think a unicorn like me could be trusted." Vinyl flicked a hoof through her blue mane. "I am a musical genius, after all."
Octavia rolled her eyes, and said with a sigh, "Thank you, 'genius'. I need to be able to be sure. We will be using these at the upcoming Grand Galloping Gala soon, and we must be prepared." She grabbed a dirty rag off of a small, wooden table.
The musician's home consisted of a small kitchen table, a couch with a T.V., a coffee table, a kitchen, and a bedroom with two separate beds and a small bathroom on the 2nd floor. They sat by the kitchen table, busily tuning instruments for the upcoming Gala. Octavia wanted to begin with simple, elegant ballroom music, while Vinyl just wanted to "get the party started" from start to finish. As Octavia sat by to polish her beloved cello, a large, wooden, violin-type instrument that she had received her Cutie Mark from learning how to use, while Vinyl tended to her Bass Cannon, a magically amped-up loudspeaker that could generate sound in waves of musical spells. Although too dangerous for parties, it let off sounds of extreme dubstep notes. It now sat with one metal plate removed from the side, and several exposed wires.
"Well, what am I supposed to do?" Complained Vinyl, shifting through her Bass Cannon's interior. "I might be a D.J., but the Gala is supposed to be," she removed her hooves from inside her Cannon, waved them around in the air, stuck out her tongue, and began to poorly mimic Octavia's voice in saying, "Elegant and a time of harmonic music, Vinyl! We can't use your overpowering magic instruments, Vinyl! You're the coolest, Vinyl!"
Octavia spun around from her cello. "That is not what I said! And you are terrible at mimicking!"
Vinyl landed back on the ground, chuckling to herself. "Lighten up, Tavi! Learn to have a little fun! Life ain't all about music, ya know."
"And life is not all about having fun, either!" Octavia turned back to tending her instrument. "Now set your 'D.J. Table' up and get it ready to move. We need to have everything set up by tonight."
"The Gala ain't for two days!"
"Exactly. We have so much to prepare for. It is an honoring event to be able to perform at such a prestigious eve-"
"You do realize I didn't understand half of what you just said?"
"Shall I dumb it down for you?"
Vinyl nodded.
"We. Have alot to do. Because this is really. Im-por-tant."
"Thanks. That's much better!"
"Glad I could help..." Octavia murmured. She picked up her cello bow, and began to strum it across the strings, giving off a low, sophisticated sound, and Octavia began to remember back to her days of playing in an Orchestra. The crowds sitting in silence, her concentration focused on nothing but each note printed in front of her on the music paper. She began to slow her notes, pulling the last one back slowly to extend the sound. As she finished, the crowd burst into wordless applause. She stood, and took a small bow, but snapped back up when she heard a voice yelling from the front row.
"Yeah, go Tavi! Woo-hoo!"
Octavia snapped back to her senses, only to find herself in her house in PonyVille, with Vinyl not cheering, but tending to her speaker. "Did you say something, Vinyl?"
"Not a thing." Vinyl's face was buried inside her Bass Cannon, and she pulled out her head with wires in her mouth. She spit them out, and said, "Why do you look so mad all of a sudden?"
Octavia sighed, turned away to hide her expression of emotion, and tried her best to ignore her roommate, when she heard a zap.
"Ow!" Vinyl yelped.
"What is it now, Vinyl?"
"My Bass Cannon shocked me. I'm trying to fix a circuit-thingy in here. Can you help me out?"
Octavia rolled her eyes and turned to the D.J. She was sucking on her injured hoof. "Get your hoof out of your mouth, Vinyl. You don't know where it's been."
"Yeth, Mom," Vinyl murmured around her hoof, then took it from her mouth. She placed it back on the circuit, and it zapped her again. "Ow!"
"Vinyl! I said to be carefu-!" Octavia stopped as Vinyl's Bass Cannon began to turn on. "Don't play that in here! The builders just finished remodeling the other half of the house from last time!"
"It wasn't me!" Vinyl yelled over the whirr of the instrument. "I think I broke i-" The bass cannon fired, and the entire room was engulfed in a white-and-blue light, only leaving time for Octavia to scream Vinyl's name.
---
The light receded, and the Musicians began to return to consciousness, both holding their throbbing heads in their hooves.
"Ugh..." Vinyl groaned. "What happened?" She scrunched her nose. "And what's that smell?"
Octavia got up, rubbing her temple. "It was your blasted instrument! I told you that thing was dangero-" She stopped dead, after finally taking in her surroundings. She quivered, her voice shaking as she stammered out, "V-Vinyl?"
"Look, it wasn't that bad," Vinyl said as she took off her goggles, rubbing them clean with one front leg. She placed her goggles back on, and took a look around.
And froze.
They found themselves in a cold, small, dank room, with walls stained with moss and mildew. A small drain sat in the center of the floor, trails of green and dried red flowing toward it, along with an open jail bar door in front of them.
But what shocked them the most was the strange, two-legged creature covered in metal plating, and pointing some kind of object that looked like a metal instrument, only with a rectangular, curved case attached and some sort of barrel on the end pointed straight at the Musicians.
End of Prologue - Part 1
Prologue - Part 2: Spirit Brothers
"Point Man" and Fettel
It all started with the team. F.E.A.R. Their acronym stood for, "First Encounter Assault Recon". This team was a secret operations group of the U.S. Government, and specialized in dealing with paranormal threats. Codename Point Man was assigned to this team, when F.E.A.R. had taken interest in his skills and extraordinarily reactive reflexes. After constant years of torture and horror from a strange paranormal phenomenon, he met his brother, Paxton Fettel. After they met, Fettel had command of a battalion of telepathically controlled clone supersoldiers, and their first mission involved seizing control of the Armacham Technology Corporation (ATC) headquarters, and killing all of its occupants.
But soon, Point Man received a new mission: To eliminate Fettel, while operating in conjunction with the Delta Force. Fettel was located by means of a satellite tracking device and hunted by F.E.A.R. and Delta Force over several locations. While Fettel evaded capture by the special forces, Point Man witnessed unexplained, and occasionally life-threatening, paranormal phenomena, including hallucinations that frequently afflicted him, all of which revolved around a red-dressed little girl. Laptops found in the course of the mission, remotely hacked by Commissioner Betters, provided details about how Fettel was raised to become a telepathic military commander, that he was the son of the red-dressed girl, who was described as being a powerful psychic as part of something called Project Origin, and the existence of another child of the girl, who was born before Fettel.
All clues lead F.E.A.R. to believe Fettel was under control of his mother, who was locked in the Origin facility when ATC closed down the project, owing to the danger the woman posed. Fettel was searching for that same facility to free his mother. Point Man found his way to the abandoned structure, fighting back both the clone soldiers and ATC guards, who had received orders to cover up the whole affair. When Point Man came to finally face Fettel, he was drawn into a hallucination where Point Man learned he was the girl's first son and is thereafter enabled to put a bullet in Fettel's head. Point Man's nightmare did not end here, however, as the girl was nonetheless freed when her storage chamber was opened by ATC researcher and leader of Project Origin, Harlan Wade, who felt guilty over the company's treatment of the girl and who actually was her father. Point Man had then been called to sabotage the structure's reactor, forcing him to run a gauntlet against the girl's ghosts before the whole location exploded. In the aftermath of the detonation, a Delta Force Black Hawk helicopter extracted Point Man from the rubble, rescuing him. While Point Man and the survivors of the F.E.A.R team surveyed the results of the explosion from the helicopter, the girl made one last sudden appearance over the side of the helicopter, preparing to pull herself up into the cabin: the destruction of the Origin facility had not stopped her quest for revenge.
Later on, it is discovered that Point Man had listened to a phone call between a mysterious senator and ATC president Aristide, which offered some further explanation: She considered the project under control and deemed the "first prototype" a success.
The Mother's name was Alma.
One month later, a Replica by the name of Foxtrot 813 was sent to find Paxton Fettel and free his spirit from the psychic amplifier. Foxtrot was guided by Paxton Fettel to turn on his fellow Replica and tried to reach the epicentre of the nuclear blast triggered by the Point Man's failed attempt to contain Alma. It was evident that Alma did not want the rogue Replica soldier to reach his and Paxton's goal, and she proceeded to try to defeat Foxtrot with Replica still under her control, and the strange ghost-like beings she had implemented. When Foxtrot reached the original blast site, and proceeded deep under the rubble, Fettel made reference to other soldiers that would be his, and Foxtrot's army. They could be seen as ghosts, but unlike those used by Alma. When Foxtrot used the slo-mo ability, they became visible as Replica soldiers not unlike the Foxtrot himself. They were marching ceaselessly towards a large, red beam that appeared to be Fettel and Foxtrot's destination. After fighting a few more of Alma's ghosts, Foxtrot opened a door to find Fettel, kneeling in the middle of the room. Fettel welcomed Foxtrot as "brother" and reached out for him. As he touched Foxtrot, Fettel melted away. After he disappeared completely, Foxtrot removed his helmet to reveal Fettel's face, as Fettel's voice narrated that he had been reborn.
The nightmare continues when the supernatural being, Alma, whose rage against those who wronged her caused an escalating paranormal crisis that threatened to devour and replace reality with her own. This focuses down to Michael Becket, a Delta Force operator whose squad was sent in to take Genevieve Aristide into protective custody approximately thirty minutes before Alma escaped.
Becket experienced a hallucination involving a ruined city, where he saw Alma walking along. As he recovered, Becket's squad arrived at the penthouse complex where Aristide lived, only to find it under assault by a team from ATC Security's Black Ops, dispatched by Armacham Technology Corporation's Board of Directors. After saving Aristide, Becket uncovered hints of a project known as "Harbinger", which involved himself and several of his teammates. Aristide claimed that Becket and his team were the only way to stop Alma, but before she could elaborate, Point Man detonated the Origin Facility's reactor, knocking Becket unconscious in the explosion.
When he recovered, Becket found himself and the rest of his squad in a hospital deep underground, being operated on by a team of doctors under the direction of Aristide. The hospital came under attack by ATC clean-up crews led by Colonel Vanek, and Becket had no choice but to fight his way out. While escaping, Becket received communications over his radio from a man who called himself "Snake Fist". After escaping the hospital and confronting the commander of the ATC forces, Becket fought his way to the surface, where he encountered the reactivated Replica troops. As he moved to the surface, Becket was repeatedly assaulted in hand-to-hand combat by Alma, who (according to Snake Fist) was trying to "absorb" Becket, drawn by the psychic signal he had emitted after being psychically altered in an "attunement chamber" that Aristide tricked him into entering.
After reaching the surface, Becket regrouped with what was left of his team, many of whom had been systematically killed by Alma. His team then consisting only of Becket, his superior Lieutenant Stokes, Sergeant Morales, and Sergeant First Class Keegan, the squad moved to nearby Wade Elementary, a school controlled by ATC Security, where Snake Fist and Aristide were hiding. Becket discovered that the basement of the school was another ATC research facility, for a project known as "Paragon." Here, Becket discovered that Project Harbinger was an attempt to create more psychic commanders similar to Paxton Fettel, and that Michael and Keegan were the most promising subjects.
In the basement facility, Michael killed Colonel Vanek and found Snake Fist. Snake Fist revealed himself as Terry Halford, a researcher for ATC, and explained that the only way to defeat Alma was to travel to an Armacham facility inside a nuclear reactor on nearby Still Island, which housed a device that would amplify psychic power. With this device, Becket could possibly defeat Alma with his own psychic abilities. As Becket and Halford prepared to head back to the surface, Halford was decapitated by a Replica assassin.
En route to Still Island, Michael's squad was ambushed by Replica troops, and Sergeant Keegan wandered off in a daze. Becket followed and tried to recover Keegan, but was instead delayed by Replica forces. After fighting off both the enemy soldiers and more of Alma's assaults, he eventually reunited with the remainder of the squad underneath Still Island and headed for the ATC facility. Becket entered the psychic amplifier, and as Stokes prepared to power up the machine, she was killed by Genevieve Aristide. Aristide explained that instead of destroying Alma, she planed to seal Becket and Alma inside the device together, so Aristide could use Alma as leverage against ATC.
Alma attacked again, and Aristide sealed Becket and Alma together. Alma approached Becket, and he was sent into another hallucination, where he fought off apparitions of a maddened Sergeant Keegan. While trying to reactivate the amplifier, Becket saw images of Alma, who appeared to be crudely assaulting his body in the real world. Finally, after reactivating the last switch, Becket escaped the hallucination to find himself sealed inside the device. The device opened, and Becket found Alma standing in the midst of a blasted landscape. Alma was now pregnant with Michael's child, and as she walked up to Michael and placed his hand onto her stomach, the voice of a child saying "Mommy" could be distinctly heard.
Finally, Alma had given birth to Point Man and Fettel.
When Point Man and Fettel were young, and Fettel still alive, they had been locked up like rats. Set in a laboratory with no more than two small beds with pillows, no sheets. They wore white suits day in and day out, and were controlled, unknowingly, by the scientists watching and recording their every move. While Point Man was just a simple little boy, Fettel had not been for long. He would constantly be taken out of their containment room by Harlan Wade, and returned later, somehow affected. Wade would even enter from time to time to deliver some sort of injection into little Fettel. From the beginning, the corporation had been teaching them to kill. And when they became of age, kill they did. But soon Fettel began to act strange. Speaking of another worldly being, and painting the walls of their containment hold with gruesomely ominous pictures of a creature that resembled Alma.
Nine months after the pregnancy of Alma, Point Man was captured by Armacham Security Personnel, and interrogated in an asylum.
Point Man now found himself in the asylum catacombs under a large city, with two ACT guards cornering him in a room with Point Man on his knees and wrists banded together. As they mercilessly beat him, spitting names at him, the man behind him flinched suddenly. As the first bent down with a knife to taunt Point Man with the blade, the second soldier walked up behind him. His eyes were glowing red, and the first soldier tried to retaliate as the other reached down, and broke his neck with one twist. Point Man's reflexes started up, and he grabbed the knife, slitting the remaining soldier's throat and splattering the cell in blood. At the man's body fell, a red aural being faded from the body.
Fettel.
Now, as the two brothers were reunited, they set out to escape the sewers, awaiting the soldiers and the nightmares their Mother had waiting for her two sons.
End of Prologue - Part 2
