My Little Saw, Friendship is Torture

Rainbow Dash felt a piercing chill slowly drag her from her dreams. She tried to open her eyes, but some kind of crust kept them shut.

"Huh, whaa," she slurred.

Her wings stayed pinned to her side, despite her attempts to flex them. She shook her head, trying to wake herself up. She muttered something, still dazed. She now noticed that she was sleeping in an upright, standing position, with only a cold, wet, and hard floor under her hooves and some sort of strange, warm feeling in her wings and the side of her legs.
"Wait, why can't I feel my eyes….or my legs…" she muttered sluggishly with her mind still frozen from being dragged into consciousness.

"Or my body!" She started to panic, trying to hold back fear.

She tried to step forward, but something attached to her legs kept her from extending them. She tried to push through, but a ripping sound followed, and the same sharp pain kept her from moving. She tried to stretch her wings, but the same ripping noise, followed by the same pressure on her wings kept them pinned. She tried to force her eyes open, but it made them sting even more. She started to feel a numb pinch in the sides of her legs. Her right leg started to throb as something warm slowly trickled down it. Rainbow was severely confused. She tried to muster her usual bravery to push through, but an unfamiliar fear kept her petrified, like a child, frozen in a trance of terror. She started to become more conscious. Something clicked, and the sound of a tape recorder rolling came from beside her, somewhere undetected.

"Hello Rainbow. I want to play a game"

Rainbow gasped in cold, sharp air. "Game?"

She remembered how Pinkie and the other ponies in Ponyville started to disappear, and it was said that somepony was going around and kidnapping the others, setting up "games." But what happened after that? Rainbow didn't know. Nopony really knew. But this only piqued her curiosity, and her fear. Rainbow's mind started to rush "Maybe it's something so horrible that nopony would say."

"By now, you're probably still defrosting, so I'll be your eyes for the moment."
"You're in a cryogenic holding cell with hooks buried in the sides of each of each of your legs. All you have to do is rip the hooks out and walk away."

"Or, crawl, in your case. Your only hope is to trust me, Rainbow. This trap is meant so that you can prove your true metal, sure you can fly around and do your little tricks in the sky but are you really as tough as you say you are?"

He chuckled, an ominous, low sound that made the room feel even more chilled than in actually was.

Rainbow's fear started to turn into boiling anger.
"But, if you don't trust me, you can always just wait for somepony to come and help. That always happens, right?" The voice said with a melancholy and yet friendly tone, one which broke the monotony of his recording.

Rainbow wiggled her right leg, making the chain rattle. The massive intruder pinched deep in her flesh. It was a strange feeling, being hurt in this fashion, though the thought of how it should be hurting, the mere thought of pain, kept her still. "Maybe I do need to trust him." She tried to give herself some sort of hope. She tugged against the chain, and a jolt went through her leg, traveling up her spine.

With her voice buried in fear and pain, she spoke brokenly. "Celestia help me, if I find you-"
She was suddenly cut off.

"Now, on with the trap. Soon a clock will count down from five minutes; every 30 seconds, the room temperature will lower by 10 degrees for four minutes. After that point you'll only have one minute until the room gets..."

The voice paused again, letting the severity of the situation sink in.
"...let's just say, 20% cooler." With a click, the tape went silent and the clock started.

Rainbow heard a hissing noise, and icy, needle like water spraying her chest. As the voice said, the room was getting colder. She felt the cold spray, making her shiver, and a rattling noise coming from somewhere in front of her only adding to her curious fright. The shock helped rouse her sleep-addled mind. What she saw seemed to have been ripped from a nightmare. The whole room was frozen over, all but the clock on the right corner of a wall, that was glowing red. Her vision was still blurry and she was barely able to make out what looked like some sort of tube spraying nitrogen into the room. The needle on a thermostat attached to the tube was slowly shaking and making its way to the end of the chart. The realization that her life was truly on the line sunk in quickly as her body temperature dropped. She started convulsing violently. She stood there for a moment, reflecting on her life, frozen in a stupor.

She wondered what she had done with her life. "True, I did my best, and most of the time I was the best. But how does that really help anypony? What have I ever done to really help someone?" The questions came rushing into Rainbow's head, and her legs started to shake even more. Her cyan coat began to lose its luster, and her expression bore a pain that hadn't been felt since a time in her life she still couldn't force herself to remember.

Rainbow's eyes lost their rose red gleam, and her eyelids hung half shut. As if she had just awoken from a 10 year nap, she slowly placed her shaky right hoof in front of the other. As the chain started to tighten, Rainbow gave it a blank glance and shot her leg forward, tearing the skin and spraying blood across the ice coated floor. She repeated the cycle, left front hoof, right back hoof, and finally her left hind hoof. Rainbow now realized that this was the same fate that had befallen Pinkie Pie, and exactly why her sisters said nothing about it. Every time somepony would bring up the question "Where is Pinkie Pie?" for the first few days, they would just run away, sometimes even crying. After a while, they calmed down, but they still shied away from any conversation involving Pinkie.

The question was never answered, not even by the guard. This realization just added to Rainbows dismal mood. Never had she gone through something like this, and even so much as a week ago she would have still been kicking and screaming.

She felt like a new pony, with a strange warm smile, as she walked a few steps and gave way to her seemingly double weight.

She dropped to the ground and started crawling on the piercing cold floor. Within a few seconds, Rainbow was dazedly re-examining her life, all her choices. She knew she was a new pony, and she was happy, even though she wore an expression of complete and total apathy. The room no longer had an effect on her. A pony opened the door in front of her, only a few inches away.

He stood over her, strong and tall, and looked her over approvingly, almost proud. Old Rainbow would have thought he was a creep, but his dull, blood red eyes, his faded grey coat, and his inky black mane, striped in a piercing crimson, made her feel oddly safe, accepted, and understood, even though she had never met the stallion.

In tone and voice, he resembled recording that had given her given the instructions to find a new life. "Congratulations."

Their lackluster eyes met.

"You are still alive. Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore"

"Th-thank you…"

Rainbow kept staring into his eyes, and he gave a welcoming smile.

"Come with me. It's time you saw the world as it was meant to be seen."

Rainbow simply nodded.

He helped her up and they walked away from her old life.

He grinned wickedly. "It has only just begun."