I know I opened a scone shop, but for the life of me I can’t remember where it is.

For the past hour or so, I’ve been wandering the city with no real direction in mind. It’s raining, I’m soaked to the bone, and I’m lost in the biggest city I’ve ever been in. Despite all that, I have no desire to go indoors and dry up. There’s something inside my head forcing me to keep going until I find my store.

All I know about this city is I have a store inside of it. But every time I try to think about it, all I get is fog. I don’t know where it is, or when I opened it. Did I even open it? For all I know, I was going to open it this morning before all this happened. Heck, I can’t even remember what the name of the place is. I better not have named it something stupid, like GriffonScone. The wordplay is too obvious.

What if I didn’t name the place yet? That would be bad. A store without a name is like… a baby without a name! How would you talk about a store with no name? ‘Hey Donut Joe, I’m going to the intuitive concept of a pony building a house to pick up some nails, do you need anything?’ We don’t have the telepathic infrastructure to handle talking like that!

On another note, they say if enough random things happen in a junkyard, you came make an airship, or at least that’s what I think they say. And if you wander Manehatten long enough with no idea where you’re going, say for an hour or two, you’ll end up right where you need to be.

As I was stressing about the fog in my head, the thing forcing me to walk yanked me back the other direction. Something tells me to look up, and I do, only to find a sign above my head.

Scone Quarry, it reads.

Before I have a chance to yell how stupid the name is, I’m blinded by bright lights and the rest of the world fades out.

Sunlight, warmth, the windows to a storefront…

“That’s a stupid name.”

A sign hanging above a doorframe, a sign that reads Scone Quarry…

Pink, lots of pink, so much pink my eyes hurt…

“Well, you didn’t like GriffonScone, so this is the next best thing I can come up with.”

“This isn’t what I had in mind.”

A sad face, my eyes still hurt from the pink…

“Then what did you have in mind?”

“Hmm, I don’t know, maybe ‘Gilda’s Family Scones,’ the name I told you I want.”

A white blur, an indigo streak, blue eyes…

“That won’t work. We’re in Manehatten, the ponies here demand the fresh, the contemporary, the now. And they want it now!”

“But it’s my store, I get name it whatever I want.”

A flash of paper…

“And you can, from this extensive list of pre-approved names.”

More pink…

“I helped make it! My favorites are this one, this one, and this one, don’t forget this one…”

My blood, it’s boiling…

“Don’t worry dear, everything else is up to you. We’re just here to help. If you want, we can put the name you want underneath the one you choose.”

A long, hard sigh…

“Fine.”

The world came back, and I’m still in the rain, under the store sign. Hey, I’m not dead, yet. That was a memory, I actually remember something!

Gilda’s Family Scones, I like that name. It’s friendly, straightforward, and easy to remember. How did I let someone convince me otherwise to pick something else? I take a closer look at the sign and grind my beak. They didn’t even put the name I wanted underneath! What a bunch of lying punks.

Enough of the sign. I take a look at the store… Oh son-of-a-bison! The grand opening must have been terrible!

The windows are boarded up. There are burn marks all over the outside of the building. There’s dried blood splattered at the foot of the door. It smells like a rat died outside…

Wait a minute… a blood stain?

I take a closer look, and I hate to imagine what happened here. That’s a lot of blood, and it’s all over the side walk. The rain washed most of it away, but the dry spots are still dark red. Did a pony explode or something?

I look around, and then I notice something strange. My store isn’t the only one boarded up. The entire street is closed. There’s no one else. I’m the only living creature walking through this street. There are scorch marks everywhere I look and there’s blood everywhere the rain hasn’t touched. So much blood… The whole street looks like a warzone. What in Tartarus happened here?

Blood dripping, something shiny…

“What the heck Tanya, I told you to be careful with that knife!”

Brown feathers, bronze eyes…

“It’s all greasy and dull. Did you sharpen this damn thing with butter?!”

A mop wiping up a red puddle, wrapping bandages…

“This equipment is brand new. State of the art.”

An angry face, a clenched beak…

“You still got to sharpen the knives, featherbrain!”

That memory came out of nowhere. Though I suppose all memories do that, but they hit hard when all you can think of is fog and darkness.

Tanya. I know that name. She… she…

Oh yeah, the owl-lion, she came with me to help open the scone shop! She wanted to get out of Griffonstone so bad she followed me to a strange land to go on a risky business venture. As I recall, she’s very handy with money.

“Hey you, what are you doing here?!”

I jump up and spin around to find three ponies, covered in armor, walking towards me. Their helmets and chest-plates are matte gray with black undergarments underneath. All their sleeves have Equestria military emblems nailed to them. These guys are full-on military hard types, mostly a home army for Equestria. I hope they aren’t involved with the blue-eyes.

“I’m just looking at my shop, sirs,” I say. If these are soldiers, I don’t want to pick a fight with them. The last thing I need is to have Equestria’s military on my tail.

“This area is off limits,” the middle guard says. “No civilians allowed. Can’t you read signs?”

He points out a sign behind me, and I check to read it. It’s a massive piece of work, covering the entire front side of the building. With large, red letters, it reads, ‘RED ZONE – DO NOT ENTER.’

“Sorry, I guess I didn’t notice that.”

“Clearly. As protocol states, we must detain all trespassers in the red zone. We need you to come with us.”

No, I won’t. I’m not interested in going back to… wherever the hell I was. I don’t say this out loud to the guards, instead letting my actions speak louder than the insults I could think of. Whatever force let me jump really high earlier, it’s now helping me out run the guards. Within seconds, I run five blocks away and lose them around a corner. Damn, I’m fast. Did I always have this speed?

After a little running around, I find a populated area blocked off by a chain-link fence. Sweet, now I can get out of this nightmare zone. With a little twelve foot hop, I make my way back into civilization. The few ponies out this late at night scramble back away from me when I land in the street. I think I hear one scream the word ‘infected’ or something.

Oh come on, I’m just a griffon flying over a fence. It’s not that strange of a sight.

With a bit more sprinting, I get as far away from that crowd as I can. There we go, I’ve seen my store, and the only thing I found out is somepony strong-armed me into giving it a crappy name. Also I got more questions than answers, but that’s not important. How the heck did a pony convince me to go with Scone Quarry? Gilda’s Family Scones is so much better!

Tanya, she might know what’s up. I know that girl, she’s the strong type. I got to smack her over the head for not backing me up on the naming issue.

Also I should probably ask about what happened to the neighborhood. I suppose that’s important. There’s no way scones could destroy a street, right?