Trixie's Adventures Under Ground

The golden afternoon light had vanished, and the waves lapping gently at the river’s edge were replaced by walls of packed soil rushing upward. Trixie awoke to find herself falling down a hole in the earth. When she’d tumbled in, who knew? She’d been having a lovely picnic on the riverbank with her best friend Starlight Glimmer, and just managed to open a jar of orange marmalade, when Starlight suddenly vanished from Trixie’s side.

It was a shame, since Starlight had been describing some spell or other to Trixie for some time, and Trixie had meant to start listening as soon as her toast was jammed. As it stood, or fell rather, she’d never have the opportunity to correct whatever rudimentary mistake Starlight was sure to make. Trixie was a master magician, you see, and had even attended a lesson once, before realising it was too elementary for her talents.

All she remembered (the only material that really got up to her level, really) was something about storybooks, and maybe something about enslaving the souls of different authors into a single tormented abomination. It was all similar enough, she supposed, to that difficult book about the caterpillar that couldn’t get enough to eat.

The wind blew past Trixie’s face, and she started to wonder whether or not she was actually going somewhere. Above her lay only a dark tunnel, racing up into the earth. Below her, well, she could actually see it coming up quite fast. And a good thing, too, since updrafts weren’t offering Trixie much in the way of lumbar support. There was a great mass of something liquid at the bottom of the hole, dark red and shiny.

“Trixie wonders what that stuff is,” Trixie spoke aloud, as she was known to do, “and if it will stain Trixie’s cloak. How could Trixie appear in front of an audience with a dirty cloak?” At this, she imagined standing on stage, dripping red liquid in front of a crowd of spectators. Trixie flourished her cape, and a few flecks of the stuff sailed into the first row of the audience. They began to scream, running from the stage in fear, repulsed by Trixie’s utter lack of panache. A few vomited; one mare fainted where she stood.

It would be unbecoming of a showmare, to be sure. Much to Trixie’s chagrin, it was at that moment she splashed into a vast crimson lake.

She flailed her limbs wildly, hooves churning through viscous fluid. It was dark above her; it was dark below her; all around her was thick with something cloyingly sweet. The red seeped through her cloak and stained her coat. It worked its way into her ears and down her nose. Trixie tried to open her eyes, but found them coated in scarlet film.

Eventually, she worked her way up to the surface of the lake, and her head broke water. She gasped for air as her hooves kept her afloat, pumping furiously below the surface. Trixie shook her eyes clear of the red liquid and flicked it out of her ears. All around her was a vast expanse of roiling crimson waves, with no shore in sight and nothing around.

Nothing, that is, except for a small pegasus filly passing by Trixie on the surface of the lake. Her orange wings buzzed behind her, propelling her like a parasprite. Her short-cut purple mane bobbed up and down with the waves as she floated. She wore nothing but a set of striped socks on her hooves. The filly hardly seemed to notice Trixie, motoring steadily along. Trixie was still rather shocked at having been submerged in some mysterious fluid, and didn’t find her voice until the filly was already nearly past her.

“Hey! You there! The gre-”

She coughed up some red liquid.

“The great and powerful Trixie demands y-”

More coughing.

“Demands you come he-”

The orange filly had turned around to observe Trixie coughing and fitfully managing to stay afloat. She didn’t smile, but simply stared at Trixie’s struggling form in the lake. Whether she was interested in helping, or just amused, Trixie couldn’t quite tell. On a normal day, Trixie wouldn’t have stood for the kind of disrespect this filly was showing her. Today, however, Trixie was feeling generous enough to allow herself to be helped by a passer-by. She couldn’t get any coherent words out, but managed to gesture towards herself with a hoof, and the orange filly slowly swam to her.

“What’s that you’re doing, there?”

Trixie gurgled as her muzzle slipped beneath the surface.

“Come on, I can’t hear you like that. Speak up!”

Trixie broke above the waves with a gasp.

“Shore!”

“‘Sure’? Yeah right. I still can’t hear a word out of you. You know, if I were twice as ‘sure’ as you, I’d still be hardly serious.”

Trixie got out another few words, imploring the little orange filly:

“Take me-!”

The filly responded, “Woah, woah, woah. I just saw you come crashing down and now you’re asking me to take you? Isn’t that a bit forward?”

“Forward! Yes!”

The pegasus filly rolled her eyes.

“Fine, I guess. Just so you know, I was going this way anyway. Here, grab on.”

Trixie clung to the filly’s hind leg as they started to cruise along the lake. The last time she’d held a filly like this, during a show, had resulted in a very stern talking-to by a disgruntled parent. She’d only meant to dramatically withdraw a rooster from under the filly’s barrel. Let that be a lesson to anypony who could appreciate the untouched innocence of a young maiden’s heart, and also upper thigh. Trixie could only be grateful that there were currently no responsible adults anywhere in the area.

Eventually, the two reached the bank of the pool, where two more fillies waited, surrounded by a variety of plush animals. They wore matching hospital gowns which were stained towards the hind legs. One was a unicorn, the other an earth pony; they immediately set upon the pegasus the moment she touched shore.

“Took ya long enough! Tweedlebelle and ah got all these here animals rounded up forever ago!”

“Yeah! What were you doing out on the pond, anyway, Chicken?”

The orange filly wiped her hooves on the grass and glared at the unicorn.

“I told you, my name is Dodo! Not Chicken!”

“Seems similar enough ta me. Ain’t they both just flightless birds? ‘Thout any brains, either.”

“Shut it, Tweedlebloom! It was hard enough to get you both out of the mental ward without flight, let alone keeping my head screwed on straight. Anyway, look what I found on the lake!”

“Wow! A new creature for the race! The cocking race!” the little unicorn exclaimed.

“It’s cocktail race, ya dummy. And ah still don’t get why we need to have a race in the first place. Will it really help get our cutie marks?”

“Don’t you remember? It was in the book she showed us before. We just have to do it exactly like in the book!” the pegasus responded.

“I don’t really know if we’re doing it right, though.” The unicorn filly poked a plush rabbit with her hoof, which promptly fell over. “They don’t seem to be in a racing kind of mood.”

“Well, this one I got can breathe, at least.”

“It don’t seem like she’s doing that, either. She ain’t doing a lot of anything, right now.”

Trixie was laying face down in the grass, shivering slightly. Her nostrils were clogged with more of the same viscous red fluid. Her cloak and hat were saturated with the stuff. She looked all the world like the victim of a buffalo stampede.

“She’ll be fine. It’s just jam.”

A stampede of buffalo who were very fond of fruit preserves, in fact.

Trixie’s ears perked up at this, and she lifted her head to face the trio of fillies.

“Jam? So Trixie wasn’t drowning in a nightmarish lake of b-”

“Booze? No, this stuff isn’t fermented yet. That’ll come later. Right now, it’s just the pond.”

“The Pond of Jammy Tears!” the unicorn filly interjected.

Trixie thought this a little absurd, as nopony had any reason to cry yet. Not like that filly with the deliciously smooth flank had. And certainly not like Trixie hadn’t cried when the filly’s father broke down her carriage door after the show.

The fillies soon got to discussing the optimal path for a race-course around the lake. Tweedlebelle started taking bets on which of the stuffed animals would complete it first, and promised to pay them back entirely in pebbles and little bits of straw.

The Dodo objected, on the basis that straw wasn’t nearly durable enough to survive extended circulation in the economy, and that pebbles were the far superior choice of currency. Tweedlebloom responded that, being a renewable resource, straw would serve far better as a fiat medium of exchange. Large quantities of straw, she proposed, could be harvested in order to increase the money supply, and thereby encourage a manufacturing-focused export economy. The Dodo responded that she had something to ‘export’ onto Tweedlebloom right then, and the civil discussion devolved into a series of baseless quibbling.

It was all very circular, and served well to mask Tweedlebelle hoofing bits of straw into a torn seam of a plush cat. Trixie could hardly keep up with the rapid pace at which the fillies seemed to change topic. No wonder they couldn’t agree on anything, Trixie thought. They hardly left enough time to speak the words themselves, much less pay them any mind.

Something the fillies had mentioned earlier, however, had piqued Trixie’s interest. A tiny flicker of light poked at her imagination, like a thorn caught in the supple flesh of her brain.

“You said something about a book ‘she’ showed you? Who’s ‘she’? The great and powerful Trixie wishes to know.”

At the word ‘she’, all three of the fillies had gone pale. Although they had just been raucously debating the merits of government consisting of soviets of stuffed animals, organised into some kind of united republic, they quickly fell silent.

“Uhhh, we ain’t really s’posed to talk about her…”

The pegasus turned sharply towards Tweedlebloom, but her eyes betrayed a deep unease. They seemed to sink into blackness; the fire in them was paper-thin.

“Bloom! Keep it down! Don’t you know she’s always watching…”

Tweedlebelle started to froth at the mouth.

“The book! The book! The filly’s love, unrequited! Fated friends, disunited! Chasing her in a cycle, always seeking, never finding! The pages turn around again! The stage resets, the play begins!”

Trixie was startled at the sudden change of emotion, and stepped back quickly from the little unicorn. She’d begun to expect abrupt mood swings out of the fillies, but there was something distinctly off about this unicorn. Tweedlebelle, for her part, began to shake and collapsed to the ground.

“Aw, now look what you’ve done! Belle’s SEN dropped way too low!”

“It wasn’t me!” Tweedlebloom protested, “It was yer yapping about-”

The Dodo shoved a hoof into the earth pony’s mouth.

“Whatever. Let’s just forget about that and take care of her, now.”

Tweedlebloom spat out the hoof, and nodded. Without a word, both fillies peeled off their clothes and leapt upon Tweedlebelle, who was in the midst of a seizure on the grass. They soon had her soiled gown off, too, and began to kiss her body sensually.

Though the two mad ponies began to moan in pleasure, the sane one hardly seemed to notice. Dodo thrust her tongue deep into Tweedlebelle’s mouth, who continued to dribble foamy saliva down her friend’s chest. Her eyes were rolled back into her head, showing only the bloodshot sclera; her writhing limbs beat against Tweedlebloom’s head, who was straining her muzzle towards Belle’s nether regions.

Trixie quickly turned away from the lewd sight and tried to block the ‘unf’s of young passion from her ears. Trixie was no stranger to a strange sight, being a well-travelled mare in her own right, but this was clearly a little beyond the realm of plausibility.

Just what had come over the unicorn? And the other two, for that matter. The mere mention of ‘her’ had some powerful effect on the fillies’ demeanour, sufficient to drive one of them to sanity. And what a response the other two had! Not even Trixie could derive any voyeuristic pleasure from the sight of it. They were all of them madmares, in some way or another.

It was obvious to Trixie that no more information was to be gleaned from the trio of fillies, and she set off to find answers elsewhere. Answers to what question, she wondered. Surely she’d come here looking for something. Somepony?

Where was Starlight?

Trixie spied a door up ahead, seemingly standing alone in the field. It was the only thing around that she could see. She trotted up to the door, and cracked it open with a hoof. Only darkness lay beyond the threshold.

She was eager to move onwards from the little scene, though. She had the soul of a nomad, and the open road would always call upon her eventually. Was it naturally instilled in her, or was it the product of a lifetime of ostracism?

Before passing through the door, she took a final look behind her, at the fillies convulsing on the shore of the blood-red lake. Their forms were beastly, inequine, and stared after her even in their throes of ecstasy. The heap shuddered; Trixie could hear voiceless words drifting through the aether towards her.

It was nonsensical. Trixie passed through the door, and slammed it shut behind her.