A turn of the key gave me access to what looked to be a storage closet. I wouldn’t have been able to tell what exactly lied within due to the fact that each of the few doors down the poorly lit hallway were paling with age and had no tags on them to make them discernable from one another, though.

“Open sesame,” I said as I pushed the door open.

As I stepped into the closet, there were boxes upon boxes of mechanical parts and various other objects that were useless to me. I turned on the weak light in the room before moving further in.

Lifting the lid of one of the more worn looking boxes, I shouted in fright at what lied within. Inside the box rested a hideous spider, about the size of a size ten shoe, and all the more terrifying for it. It looked as pissed off as a bull ready to charge as all eight of its horrifying eyes turned up to me in annoyance.

“Oh shit!” I screamed in a manner most dignified.

The spider actually hissed at me before I shut the box closed, searching around the room in panic for my possessions. I didn’t want an eight-legged eldritch monster the size of a Chihuahua jumping on me, after all.

Luckily I didn’t have to go further back into the closet where there were more cobwebs gathered around the equipment as I found my stuff lined up neatly in one of the shelves that lined the wall to my left. The shelf that held what little I owned was about waist height, so I crouched down to snatch everything up, including my phone, my water canteens, and even my bag of quarters. I decided at that moment that I’d hit up the first arcade I saw when I escaped.

I noticed I was missing something, though, as I still needed the red stone the monkeys gave to me. A quick pat down revealed that the object was actually in the pocket of my jeans. Sighing in relief, I reached into the bag out of curiosity before pulling out a…quarter? Only this quarter was unlike any coin I’d ever seen. It was golden in color, and upon making this observation I looked down into the bag to see that all of the quarters I had were golden!

Realizing that I hit a jackpot made my mouth water at the amount of money I could sell these for when I returned home. I’d never have to go hungry again!

My pleasant train of thought was derailed when another hiss emitted from the box along with a few large bumps. I hurriedly placed the coin back inside the bag and rewrapped it, tying it around one of the straps on my pants. I searched the room quickly for anything else of use when the glint of an object caught my eye in the dark room.

On the floor, I saw a dagger. I’m not too good at describing things, but I’ll say this: it was large, the tip curved backwards, and its surface shone like it was freshly polished. It appeared to be made of stainless steel of the highest quality, the teeth were serrated, and the handle was covered in some form of brown synthetic leather. The synthetic property of it made sense to me, I guess, what with ponies being herbivores last I checked. I had a hard time imagining a pony, even one from this world, eating and skinning other animals. I could have been proven wrong as I have many times before since I arrived here; this was a different world after all.

Back to the knife, though, it was beautiful. Masterful crafting, intimidating curves and ridges, and firm padding around the handle made this weapon quite appealing as I reached down to grab it before running out of the room and locking the door to ensure the dog-sized monstrosity still residing in the room wouldn’t be able to follow me out.

I held the weapon in my hand, getting a feel for it. I tossed it up in the air a few times, doing a few little flashy tricks with it until I missed it and it bounced off of the ground, leaving a nice little gash in the cement right next to my right boot. I blanched for a moment, grateful that my foot wasn’t just an inch to the left.

Reaching down to pick up the knife – which showed no sign of wear incidentally – I wondered where I should put it. Eventually I decided to place it between my belt and my pants, keeping it over my back pocket. I walked down the hall before a thought occurred to me: I never locked the door to the room I was imprisoned in.

I rushed back to the room containing Hawkeye before peeking inside. Surely enough, there lay a still-unconscious griffin resting on the cold, hard floor. I moved closer to Hawkeye as I realized she could have just jumped up and pursued me when she awoke, spotting the rope that was used to bind me. I quickly ran over and picked up the rope before attempting to tie the griffiness’s talons and paws together, doing a shoddy job. Like I said, I wasn’t no boy scout growing up, but I did double knot the bindings if that counts for anything.

I removed a golden coin from my pouch before placing it upright in front of the griffin, both sides showing, slowly backing away so as not to wake her from her uncomfortable rest.

A slight smile tugged at my lips as I slowly crept out of the room.

“Sleep tight, princess,” I whispered sweetly.

I locked the door after me to make sure the griffiness wouldn’t just waltz out when she awoke, whistling a nursery tune as I walked down the hall, twirling the keys around my index finger as I went along.

I followed Hawkeye’s directions, ending my whistling as I climbed the stairs to the first floor.

‘A’ight. That’s done, so I got two more places to pass before I’m outta here,’ I thought to myself as I mentally checked “Get to the first floor” off of my to-do list. Now all I had were “Get to the lobby” and “Home free!” on my list.

I slowly peeked around the corner of the stairs, looking for any sign of life. I cautiously stepped toward the end of the hall, approaching a door.

"What the hell kinda design is this?" I asked myself, honestly perplexed at the layout of this strange place.

When I opened the door I found it opened up to a large room filled with old assembly lines, vacant lunch tables, and hanging machinery. A few large windows allowed sunlight to pour into the room, dust particles floating throughout like algae in a shallow river. I coughed a few times, swatting at the air in front of me to clear the way for my sinuses to properly function without any of the dust there to clog them up. I looked around the abandoned room, searching for a way out as the stuffiness made me wholly uncomfortable. On the far end of the room, under a large railing, sat a door. I vaulted over a few of the assembly lines – each with various unfinished weapon parts – to reach the door, only to find it was blocked off as I pushed on it.

The place was clearly made for ponies, as it seemed to swing both ways with no handles. It made me wonder why the lower levels of this building had doors built with handles instead of being made the same way, to be honest.

I looked through the glass pane to see a massive amount of clutter lying on the other side of the door, keeping me from pushing through. I groaned as I looked around, once again taking notice of the railing. I backed away from the door to give it a once-over, quickly discovering that there was yet another door at the top. I thought there’d be an emergency exit somewhere around here, but everywhere I looked there were only concrete walls.

A ladder led up to the railing. A noticeable difference being that this ladder was simply like a steep flight of stairs. I quickly climbed this ladder before walking to the door that awaited me. This was another push-push door that read “Authorized ponies only”, and despite the slightly shorter height, I bent down only a bit to move my way through.

On the other side of the door was what I guessed was some kind of control room. The only thing that was worthy of my attention in the hot area being a flashing red light. Curious, I approached the light like a moth to a flame, the radiance coming from a red button that simply read “Start.”

Before I realized what I was doing, I unthinkingly moved my hand toward the red button.

When I finally got my bearings, I already had my finger firmly pressed on the button. A deafening beep signified the reanimation of the hibernating machinery, a veritable merry-go-round being what it looked like as the assembly line whirled back to life and slowly spun around. Loud scraping sounds emanated from the room as the buildup of rust was assaulted by the rotating wheels in the conveyor belts, and I quickly pressed the button once again in hopes of turning it off.

In hindsight, that wasn’t a good idea; it was actually quite moronic, as instead of stopping or slowing down, the machinery kicked into high gear and spun even faster. Now thoroughly panicking, I looked around the table that held all sorts of flips and switches, each flashing the same red light. Looking through the glass, I saw that all hell was beginning to break loose.

“The fuck is wrong with these ponies!?” I shouted, madly flipping each switch and making more of an ass of myself. “Why is every one of these buttons the same damn color!?”

The conveyor belt was running at an insane speed, the scraping sound nigh unbearable at this point in time, before it eventually wore down and began breaking. A few wheels shot out of the assembly line and into random directions, one even shattering the glass and nearly taking off my head with it. I started at that and decided that I liked having my head on my shoulders more than I cared about being subtle.

I sprinted to the other side of the room, hitting another door that seemed to be locked before pulling out my keys and seeing that there were probably a dozen different keys I’d have to try as the metallic screeching continued behind me. Eventually, I decided to simply punch through the glass pane and squeeze my way through, running down the hallway on the other side and abandoning the madness that persisted in my wake.

I was still making my way away from the scene as quickly as I could a few minutes later. My hand hurt like hell, but the adrenaline I was filled with after nearly getting a fatal haircut helped me ignore the pain. I powered through a few more doors before stopping to catch my breath. I found myself in another hallway, this one appearing to be an intersection.
I looked around as my panic bled away, now feeling like I had gotten far enough away from the control room of the manufacturing section of this building. My eyes rested upon a map that sat on one of the walls and I noticed that this place was huge. According to the map, the manufacturing plant I was inside was only one of four that this compound held.

“Why would anyone need a weapons manufacturing plant this large in the middle of the damn desert?” I breathed, shocked at the implications of what seemed to be a war factory.

“This place could supply World War Seven if the former owner put their mind to it. Why would anyone abandon a factory as big as this?”

I gazed at the point where I presumed I was. I say presumed because there was a giant star that read “You are here” in bold red letters. I noticed that the conference room was nearby. I just had to go down a couple of flights of stairs to make up for climbing that ladder back at the plant and take a left.

“A’ight. Gotta get through the conference area and I’ll find one the lobby. Sounds easy enough.”

I turned and began walking down one of the halls.

“But so does everything else at first…”

“One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer; take one down, pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall~,” I silently sang as I neared the so called conference room.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer; take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall~.”

What can I say? I was rather bored walking around this giant facility and simply wanted to just leave, but I didn’t want to possibly draw any unneeded attention when I did go. As much as I loved the people I had met here so far, I didn’t need tears, cake, and sharp objects pointed at me for my going away party. No siree, I just wanted to keep everything on the down low if at all possible.

As I walked to the conference room, I placed my ear against the door to make sure no one else was in the room. After a few seconds of hearing nothing, I carefully pushed the door open to peek inside.

Luckily for me, when I actually stepped into the room I had guessed was empty, no one surprised me by beating the back of my head in with a blunt object. Believing that to be a good thing, I stopped to look around the conference room. There was a large oval-shaped mahogany table that took up a large portion of the room, surrounded by legless chairs made of more of that synthetic leather. My only thought about the low seats was that they were designed specifically with ponies in mind.

The rest of the room was quite bare in comparison, with only slightly better lighting, a few filing cabinets, and one storage closet with horizontal cuts in place of a pane that allowed those inside to look out, but were angled in such a way that it would be difficult for an outsider to look in. Yeah, I had a hard time wrapping my head around how that worked as well before just blaming it on this world’s many, many nuances compared to my own.

The door also had handles on it, which I found quite odd, considering this room seemed to be made expressly for ponies. I couldn’t help but think this was way too out of place in a room that showed such signs of opulence. Why wasn’t this room out in the hall or something? Why right in the conference room? I couldn’t help but feel this was placed here for some reason other than storing janitorial and office supplies.

I jumped over the table, which wasn’t as dusty as the rest of this place all considered, to get to the door on the other side of the room. As I reached out to push the door open, I heard distant voices on the other side.

“Yessiree, Boss Man. Hawkeye’s been sent down to pick up the loud-mouthed critter. She shoulda been back by now, though. Wonderin’ what’s goin’ on down there, in all truth.”

“Ensure that she gets back this instant. We have ponies that I very much want to impress and a paycheck that I don’t want destroyed by either Hawkeye’s mischief or the brown creature’s churlishness. Also, from the central maintenance hub, I could see that for whatever reason the power’s been draining for the past thirty minutes. We need as much light as possible if we’re to make a good impression, so go and see what that crazy griffin is doing.”

“Alrighty! Be back in a sec, Boss Man!”

Oh crap! It was Tony and Barney, and from the sounds of it they were headed right to the conference room!

Backing away from the door as the hoofsteps on the other side grew louder and louder, I couldn’t help but take notice of the storage closet yet again. I leapt over the table again and ran over to the closet, twisting the handle and pulling myself inside in the nick of time. Right as I shut the door, the blue pony pushed his way through the entrance and walked around the table to leave the room, soon followed by the Fearsome Threesome’s ringleader, Barney.

I narrowed my eyes upon the entrance of the maroon pony, clenching my fists as I remembered that I still owed him a broken jaw for my broken phone. He was a businessman apparently, so he knew that in the business world everything evens out one way or another due to some equalizing force. I was going to be that equalizing force. Not at that moment, but eventually.

My breath caught in the middle of my festering anger when I saw Barney’s eyes trained directly at me. They were as cold and calculating as ever, and I could just see the cogs spinning in his head as I stared back in shock. As he advanced towards the storage closet, I involuntarily took a few steps back as quietly as I could to keep the distance between us as far as possible.

‘I could take him. I can crush him right now,’ I thought to myself, my thoughts betraying a completely different message than my body as I broke into a cold sweat the moment I once again felt the lingering pain from my fight with Hawkeye compounded by my hunger and lack of hydration.

I put a hand over my mouth to prevent any noise from escaping when I grunted in pain as the ache of my ribs returned with a vengeance. I was in no condition to fight. I nearly got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by Hawkeye, so how was I supposed to deal with Barney here if he decided to open that door?

“Christ,” I whispered, grasping at the spot that Hawkeye had earlier reduced to mince meat when another jolt of pain shot through the area.

The clippity-clop of hooves stopped just outside my door as I realized something:

This situation wouldn’t end with a happily ever after either way.