Three minutes later, they hadn't found any dirt on Button Mash, but they had found an awful, awful lot of garbage.

“Ew. Ew. Ew.” Shaking her hoof, Scootaloo failed to dislodge the crusty, old Cheese Oat powder clinging to it. Wiping her hoof on the bed, the once-clean mattress was now covered in a multitude of streaks of processed food coloring dyes. Aside from the orange Cheese Oat powder, and the red Rabid Pony drink, there were purple streaks from accidentally crushed grape juice boxes, yellow streaks from some kind of spoiled rice cake dip, and blue streaks from a bag of sludgy, ant-covered, gummy hearts. Completing the rainbow, Scootaloo added some green ones after stepping on something squishy that used to be white.

Apple Bloom winced after accidentally taking a whiff of a half-empty can of Rabid Pony. “Gah! It's a floatin' mound of fuzz. Not even the pigs would want that.”

“Gross. Gross. Gross.” After touching a slimy, moldy carrot, Sweetie Belle hadn't done any more searching and just huddled in place on the floor. She used her magic to catch flies and toss them out the window, but it didn't do any good as the annoying buzzing insects flew right back in.

“How can he live like this?” Scootaloo asked. That prompted the three of them to look at Button Mash, who clearly wasn't doing any kind of living whatsoever.

“Okay, that settles it. We gotta clean his room,” Apple Bloom said.

Despite what ponies said about the Crusaders, they never intended to create any of the disasters that typically followed in their wake, and often picked up after themselves. While they weren't exactly the best, they'd spent enough time cleaning to push them past that delicate threshold where they only learned just enough to be dangerous—something they had a real knack for.

Of course, actually knowing how to clean properly didn't stop them from cutting corners. Love Tap's tenderly sown and cultivated tulip garden soon became a dumping ground for all the refuse that Button Mash had accumulated in his brief lifespan, plus a few other things that happened to not be nailed down. Scattered atop the pile of blankets, empty cans, and food wrappers were several loose posters, a toy chest shaped like a treasure chest, a few textbooks, the soiled mattress, a section of wallpaper, and the room's vintage ceiling fan.

Wiping the sweat from her brow, Apple Bloom nodded in satisfaction. The other two panted next to her, but were also pleased with the results. In a few short minutes, Button's room had been transformed from a toxic dumping ground, into an empty toxic dumping ground. The floor was still squishy and sticky in a places, but as long as they avoided the stained splotches they'd be all right. To properly finish the job, they'd have to scrub the walls, wash the carpet, condemn the house, and seal it in a concrete bunker. They had neither the time nor inclination to do that, and besides, they still had the slight problem of a dead Button Mash to worry about.

After catching her breath, Sweetie Belle gave Button Mash's corpse a flat stare, then pointed at a bunch of loose papers stacked on his bookshelf. “Okay, let's see what kind of secrets he's hiding. The more embarrassing, the better!”

Scootaloo zipped over and climbed on top of the bookshelf. Once balanced, she started rummaging through the loose papers. “This looks like school work.” Picking up a stack of papers, she scanned several pages before letting them drop to the floor. “He sure gets a lot of C's and D's.”

“Wow. He's really smart,” Sweetie Belle said.

Snatching one of the fallen pages, Apple Bloom stared in awe at the piece of paper that wasn't completely covered in red ink. “I wish we could get grades this good.”

“Tell me about it,” Scootaloo moaned. “My magic kindergarten teacher's always giving me these mean stares because I keep failing everything. It's like she doesn't even want me in her class.”

“Hmm...” Sweetie Belle put down the graded test she was reading and turned her attention back to the dead body. While fascinating, snooping through Button's academic record wasn't enough to cause him to stir. “This isn't working. I don't think he cares. We're going to have to find something more personal than just grades.”

“I saw a tub under the bed when we carried the mattress off. Let's see what's in there.” Hopping down from atop the bookshelf, Scootaloo walked over and poked a hoof beneath the box springs. Rummaging around, she grabbed a white bin and pulled it out. They gathered around it. It was sealed with a tight-fitting plastic lid, but Apple Bloom was able to force it off on the third try. Something snapped, and the release mechanism would never be usable again.

“Wow. That's a lotta comic books,” Apple Bloom said as she stared at the tub's contents.

Picking one up, Scootaloo's eyes widened. “Amazing! This is a mint condition Funny Mouse comic, one of the first ones ever made.”

“It is?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Yeah.” Setting it back down, Scootaloo picked up a different one. “And here's a mint Hound Pony one! So awesome! And Batpony, and Spiderpony and Monkeypony and Catpony and, uh, Zoopony? Wow. I forgot just how lame Zoopony was. An animal-themed superhero? Yeesh. Who reads junk like that?”

Picking up the Funny Mouse comic, Sweetie Belle sniffed it.

“Applejack never buys these things. Are they any good?” Apple Bloom asked. She picked one up at random and sat down. Flipping open the cover, she giggled at the silly antics of two ponies trying to wash a cow with different brand name products. Sadly, that comic book only had advertisements on the first page, and the rest of the stuff wasn't very good.

Likewise, Scootaloo grabbed several of the early edition Daring Do ones and sat down with a huge grin on her face. Occasionally sneaking glances at each other's book, the two of them leaned together as they read. Both failed to notice smacking and slurping noises.

Sticking her tongue out, Sweetie Belle wiped it off on her fetlocks, staining them with the powdery black hue of newspaper ink. “Yuck. Scootaloo, you were wrong. I tried them all and not a single one tasted like mint. They were all dry and really, really bland.”

Eyes wide, Scootaloo gazed up at the horror in front of her. Scattered about the tub were the torn and crumpled remains of the once-pristine comics. Each and every one was marred by a huge bite mark. “You... You... You ate them?”

“Only a little.”

Scootaloo's left eye twitched. She grabbed Sweetie Belle by her shoulders and shook her. “They were priceless! Button's going to murder you when he sees this.”

Button, however, was still flat on his back, right where they left him. Some flies buzzed around.

“Wow. I guess he doesn't care about those either,” Apple Bloom said. Sighing, she rolled up the one she'd been reading and tossed back in the bin. “We'll have ta keep lookin'.”

After her eyes stopped rattling from being shaken, Sweetie Belle stepped over and shooed off the flies. “What else is left? His room's not that big.”

Scootaloo sighed and stuffed the ruined comics in the bin. The lid didn't fit right, for some reason, but she didn't care and just kicked it back under the bed. “Well, there's always that stuff,” she said, pointing across the room at his game collection. In addition to the ponycade machine, he had his portable Joyboy, a dusty blue Yaystone and its associated metal controller wands, and an experimental chrome Mane Event Max XF. This latter device was so new that it wasn't even publicly available. How he'd gotten one was anypony's guess. It likely involved quite a lot of bits.

Before the Crusaders had any time to dive into any of the games, there was a knock on the door. “Girls, I'll be fixing lunch soon. Do you want anything?” Button's mom asked.

They froze wide-eyed, as if they'd been caught red-hoofed plucking another one of Fluttershy's chickens. Apple Bloom jumped, yelping out, “Pancakes!”

“Pancakes? For lunch? Are you sure?”

“Yep!” Scootaloo said.

“Me too,” Sweetie Belle added.

“Well... okay.” She sounded somewhat irritated but otherwise resigned. “What about you, Button?”

It felt as if a knife twisted through their rapidly-thudding hearts. Button Mash was still lying flat on his back, gazing at nothing with his vacant, dead stare. He wasn't going to respond, and she was going to open the door, and kill them all until they were deceased, defunct, and dead, dead, dead...

“Pancakes,” Scootaloo said in the deepest voice she could muster.

For a moment, there was no response. The tension in the room was so thick that they had trouble breathing.

“Button, are you impersonating another one of those arcane game characters again?”

“Uh, yeah! I'm, um...” Scootaloo glanced at the nearest poster that was still intact. It featured a hooded, cloaked figure wearing a metal mask and bladed hoof plates. The whole costume was black except for a brightly-glowing red horn that seemed to be made from pure energy. In the background, a squadron of pegasai similarly dressed in white outfits were flying in close formation. Aside from vaguely recognizing the awful Hornsaber trilogy, Scootaloo drew a blank on that particular character, so she took a wild guess. “Lord, uh, Lazy-oaf-atron, yeah.”

“What? I've never heard of—wait, nevermind. I don't want to know. Button, are you really sure that you want pancakes? You can't live off of junk food forever.”

“Moom! Lazy-oaf-atron demands pancakes! Pancakes for everypony!” Scootaloo said, still doing her best to impersonate Button, sounding nothing like him.

There was a sigh from the other side of the door. “Fine. But I'm also fixing peas and you'd better eat them this time.” The harshness in her voice softened as she spoke again. “Girls, I'm going to have to prepare the batter because I don't keep store-bought mix. It'll be about an hour before they're ready. Remember to play nice, and wash up before you come down for lunch. I'll call you when it's ready, okay?” Her otherwise pleasant tone was derailed by that interjection of pure venom.

“Okay,” they all said, and gulped.

“Okay,” Scootaloo hastily added for Button Mash.

Behind the closed door, Button's mom grumbled to herself unintelligibly. She walked off, and as her hoofsteps faded down the stairs, the three little fillies let out huge sighs of relief.

“That was close,” Sweetie Belle said.

“Thanks, Scootaloo. That was quick thinking,” Apple Bloom added.

“Don't thank me yet. We only have an hour.”

“Pah. A whole hour? That's practically forever.” Walking over to Button Mash's ponycade machine, Apple Bloom raised an eyebrow. She smacked the side and the static on the monitor blipped out. She frowned. “How do ya work this thing?”

“Let me try.” Scootaloo grabbed a Yaystone control wand and used it to pry off a panel on the side of the ponycade machine. Inside was an assortment of wires crisscrossed and connected to a green board along with a full assortment of capacitors, diodes, resistors, and many other things that she didn't recognize. “You just have to, um...” Blinking, she poked at the electronics with her metal stick.

It sparked, causing her to yelp and jump back. The machine let out a puff of black, foul-smelling smoke. The faint hiss also ceased, although they hadn't noticed it until it went away.

“Well now ya did it,” Apple bloom said. She glanced over at Button's corpse, which still didn't move. “How much of his stuff are we gonna have to destroy before he notices?”

“I wasn't trying to break it.” Scootaloo winced and massaged her throbbing hoof before popping it in her mouth to suck on.

Apple Bloom rolled her eyes.

Popping it back out, Scootaloo pointed her orange, saliva-soaked appendage at her yellow friend. “Hey! It's not my fault that somepony decided to put bottled lightning in a metal box. I mean—who does that? It's just not safe.”

“Ya mean aside from us?” Apple Bloom asked.

“Well, at least we know not to do that now.” Frowning at her hoof, Scootaloo gingerly set it back down on the carpet, then shifted her weight onto it. She didn't flinch—much. After all, getting shocked by lightning wasn't a big deal for most pegasai.

“Girls, we can't fix Button Mash just by breaking his stuff. We have to root through his deepest, most personal secrets.” Sweetie Belle held up one of the games made for the Yaystone. It was a wedge-shaped crystal whose surface was etched with magic runes. It was shaped to fit inside a slot on the larger device. Once inserted, magical energy would power it and create an interactive projection screen that could be poked and prodded by the properly-attuned Yaystone wands. The whole thing was shiny, but it didn't reveal any of Button's secrets.

Limping over, Scootaloo picked up a game tome for the Mane Event. While that device was also magical, it ran off a completely different principle, using enchanted tomes instead of crystals to store data. That made the games cheaper, but since everything was written in an open book, they were vulnerable to... tweaking. Anypony with a little know-how and a quill could give themselves infinite lives and loot, for example. Given the complete lack of any editing in the game tome Scootaloo was flipping through, Button Mash was not one such pony.

While the others were fidgeting with the arcane devices, Apple Bloom picked up Button's Joyboy. This was a simple gray box with a tiny screen and a few buttons, all of which were heavily worn. She poked them, repeatedly, but nothing happened. Frowning, she shook it, hard. Something snapped inside and it started to rattle. That made her eyes widen. Whistling nonchalantly, she drop-kicked it under the bed.

“This is hopeless! We're never going to find anything!” Rearing up quickly, Sweetie Belle threw her hooves out dramatically. Unfortunately, she was too close to the Yaystone and smacked it in the process. All three of them watched in horror as the expensive crystal tipped over and crashed on the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces.

“Okay, now it's really hopeless,” Apple Bloom said as she picked up one of the glassy shards.

“Aw, I didn't mean to break it.” Sweetie's ears drooped and she sighed. “Why does this always happen?”

“Don't worry about it,” Scootaloo said as she swished one of the metal wands through the air. “Having a super-fragile game system rely heavily on wildly flailing around a metal rod? It's just a bad formula. It was bound to happen anyway.” She sounded quite bitter as she spoke, prompting the others to raise eyebrows, but they had more important things to worry about.

“So, uh...” Apple Bloom tossed the broken piece back onto the pile. “I can't help but notice that this stuff's all magical. Do ya think that has somethin' to do with how he died?”

“Wait—you mean like he got sucked into a game and was forced to play it for real?” Scootaloo asked.

“I thought that was just a rumor,” Sweetie Belle said.

“Well, if it happened...” Apple Bloom pointed at Button's corpse.

Scratching her mane, Scootaloo said, “I don't know. I've never heard of a game that paints its victims red, ties them up with string, and leaves them foaming at the mouth.”

“I wish we knew what he was playing when he died,” Sweetie Belle said.

Smacking herself in the forehead, Apple Bloom groaned. “Like that matters now. We've already broken everything.”

“Well, no. We haven't broken this thing yet.” Scootaloo said as pointed at the sole remaining arcane game machine. If it had a soul of its own, the Mane Event would have quaked in terror.

“What's this?” Swiping a small blue book lying next to the Mane Event, Sweetie's eyes widened. “It's his diary! This is exactly what we were looking for. Eeee!” Next Chapter: Diary of the Damned Estimated time remaining: 57 Minutes