"Gah—ow! What the fuck?!"

My eyes snapped open and I shot up in alarm. My right hand immediately went to massage my left forearm out of reflex as I tried to rub the itching, stinging pain of being... poked with a needle?

Jolted from being dead asleep to full wakefulness was not pleasant, and waking up to find that an unhinged lavender pony had casually injected you with some unknown substance was even less so.

"Twilight, what the hell?!"

I gave the mare in question a bewildered, questioning look, to which she responded by stoically removing the syringe from my arm.

A syringe full of a thick dark red substance.

A syringe I started to suspect wasn't for injection.

"Did you just... draw my blood?" I asked incredulously, "did you seriously just decide to stick me and draw blood while I was sleeping?"

"If I said no, would it make you feel better?" Twilight easily replied as she examined the syringe full of my blood, "then no, Salvatore, I did not draw your blood while you were sleeping, now be a good whatever-you-are and go back to sleep."

Twilight Snarkle, huh? You know what? I'm strangely okay with this.

"Funny," I said flatly, "seriously though, you could've just asked, y'know. After you explained why... among explaining a few other things."

"Ah, but I wanted to know more about you first, remember?" Twilight replied, trotting away and into another room, "and this will tell me all I need to know... well, about what you are anyway."

I went to respond, but stopped as I heard a door somewhere outside the room creak open and shut a moment later.

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair before idly scanning the room. Honestly, the library actually seemed to be a lot bigger than the show portrayed it to be, with multiple rooms and even a sitting room in the back, complete with fireplace.

That was where I had decided to sleep for the night as it looked the coziest at the time. Unfortunately there were no windows to tell me what time it was.

Fortunately however, there was an old fashion cuckoo clock on the far wall near the fireplace. From the look of it, I had slept until about six in the morning, though I'm not sure how much sleep I had actually gotten.

Aside from my little wake-up call, I did feel well-rested, so I guess I had gotten enough sleep at any rate.

The room was still dark, but Twilight had apparently lit the fireplace at some point while I was asleep, because there was now a crackling fire casting a dim orange glow over everything.

Twilight...

She still looked like shit, but she did look like she'd regained her senses for the most part. The whole 'stabbing me with a needle in my sleep' thing made me more than a bit leery of her overall mental faculties.

For all I knew, stabbing me with the business end of a syringe could just be the first step. The next step could be me waking up with a knife in my throat.

I resolved to not sleep anywhere near Twilight from now on... or in general if I could help it.

With a humorless chuckle, I pushed the blanket off of me and slipped off the couch. I figured that since Twilight had recovered from her breakdown, she'd be more willing to talk.

As I made my way out of the cozy sitting room and looked around the library, my mind began to wander and I once more thought about just how ridiculous and impossible my situation was.

Outwardly I think I might've been getting used to the idea that this was all happening, but inwardly, I still couldn't wrap my head around the sheer... coincidence of it all.

I had only gotten into My Little Pony roughly a year or so ago, and it became my new obsession—well, the fanfics mostly, but in general, I was hooked.

Then this shit with Discord happens?

I would've called bullshit if it weren't for the fact that I was standing in the Golden Oaks Library. No matter how used to all of this I got, I had the feeling it would never stop being a surreal experience.

I snapped myself out of my thoughts when I walked into some kind of dimly lit back room about the size of a smallish closet.

It was empty, save for a set of heavy looking wooden doors built into the floor. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say this was Twilight's usually infamous basement.

I didn't want to go in there, but at the same time, I was fairly sure this was where the mare had gone with the syringe full of my blood.

That would never stop being weird to think about.

I might've been wrong about Twilight being down here, and honestly I was kind of hoping I was wrong, but it was probably a safe bet given that's usually where the lab equipment was.

With a heavy sigh of resignation, I leaned down and pulled open the doors before straightening up and heading down the wooden staircase.

The basement, as it turned out, was exactly as I pictured it being.

While it was by no means well lit, the basement itself was brighter than I had imagined and it was easy to see my surroundings... though I couldn't find any real light source strangely enough.

There were a couple of large desks here and there covered in pieces of parchment, beakers, bunsen burners, tubes, microscopes, and other scientific instruments I didn't know the names of.

There were several shelves of books and more than a few boxes—both large and small—stacked in a neat pile off in one of the corners of the room.

Well, calling it a room would've been a bit of a stretch. It was more like a giant cave below the giant tree that made up the library. Giant roots lined the walls, which were themselves made up of dark grey stone.

There were also several giant contraptions of which I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of. Giant spiraling tubes, and metal cylinders on one end of the room with weird boxy looking machines that sported knobs and levers and buttons.

Even with all the technology on display, it somehow still managed to look primitive—kind of like what people in the fifties thought future technology would look like in those old black and white sci-fi shows.

After getting an eyeful of the place, I finally turned my attention to the mare standing at one of the desks doing... something.

I couldn't see it from where I was, as she had her back turned to me. A large machine with different gauges and wires whirred and beeped next to her.

As I made my way over, the machine gave one final drawn out beep before spitting a long row of paper out of a slot in the front and onto the table before Twilight.

I stepped up behind the mare and moved off to the side to get a peek at what she was reading. As she took the paper in her hooves and scanned it, I raised an eyebrow.

Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, the letters were in english, and the numbers were the same, but that didn't mean I understood a lick of what was printed out on that long sheet of paper.

"Find what you're looking for, Doctor Sparkle?"

Twilight barely reacted at my joking tone, merely casting me a small side glance before going back to her readouts.

"As a matter of fact, I did," she replied, "I won't bother boring you with the details, but according to this, you just might be able to help me after all."

"Really?" I asked, somewhat genuinely surprised, "that's... good?"

"It is," Twilight replied, turning to face me with a smile, "it really is. It means I just might be able to fix this after all."

I didn't like that smile... I didn't like it at all.

It was the kind of smile you saw just before someone knocked you out and you woke up strapped to a table. It was the kind of smile that promised very unpleasant things in the near future.

Rather than push it to the back of my mind, I decided to voice my concerns.

"You're not gonna knock me out and strap me to a table for your sick experiments, are you?" I asked flatly, "I mean, I'd be happy to help—that's what I'm here for after all—but if you're gonna start getting all psycho scientist on me—"

I was cut off by a loud, sharp laugh that did nothing to ease my worries.

"W-What... what in Tartarus are you talking about?" she gasped out between her bouts of laughter, "what kind of B class villain do you take me for? Torture for the sake of science?"

She nearly fell over laughing, and I got kind of worried around the third minute or so of this. I would've thought she was faking it if it weren't for the tears of mirth rolling down her cheeks.

"So..." I began hopefully, "that's a no then?"

Twilight took a moment to catch her breath before straightening up and clearing her throat. She turned back to her desk and took up a few pieces of parchment and a quill in her magic.

"No, I'm not going to strap you down to a table and remove your innards for scientific study while I make you watch," she replied conversationally as she began jotting down notes, "I'm not a monster, Salvatore."

She paused and looked up, tapping the quill to her chin thoughtfully.

"Although, I suppose I didn't really come off as a sane individual last night, did I?" she mused before looking back to me with something close to an apologetic smile, "yeah... sorry about that. I haven't really felt like myself since..."

Her smile dropped and she turned away, returning to her notes and pointedly not looking in my direction.

"You just caught me at a bad time is all," she finished curtly, "when you've been trapped and alone for three years in a town devoid of anything but the monster you created, your sanity tends to suffer a bit."

"Wait, whoa back up a minute," I replied, furrowing my brows, "you've been trapped in this library for three years? Alone?"

Twilight snorted and let out another bark of laughter before shaking her head.

"Salvatore, I've been trapped alone in Ponyville for the last three years," she corrected, "there's nopony here anymore except for me. You're the first living creature I've seen in three years aside from the Failure."

And yet the first thing she does aside from saving me is have a mental breakdown and stick me with a needle.

"Can we talk about that by the way?" I asked for what felt like the thousandth time, "what exactly is the Failure, and how did you even get in this mess in the first place? What about the Princesses—"

"Buck the Princesses!" Twilight growled, her face twisting in rage and her magic inadvertently tearing the parchment she was working on to shreds, "when i said I was trapped here in Ponyville alone, it wasn't because of the Failure."

"Okay..." I replied carefully as I took a step back from the irate mare, "so... what happened then?"

She turned and stared me in the eye as she spoke—her voice low and dangerous.

"I bet you thought the Failure did something to all the other ponies in town, didn't you?" she asked, "thought they met some horrible fate at the claws of the monster looking for its 'mommy'?"

She shook her head slowly and gave me a grim smile.

"No... they were all evacuated when Celestia realized what was happening, and I was left here all alone with the little monster."

"That's... why?" I asked incredulously.

"Isn't it obvious?" Twilight answered with a mock laugh, "so I could 'fix my mistake'!" she stopped laughing and glared at a far wall, "Celestia and Luna evacuated everypony but me and locked the area around Ponyville behind a large barrier."

"And you were left here alone," I surmised, "that's... pretty damn cold."

"Oh, I wasn't alone... not at first," Twilight corrected, her face darkening once more, "my friends refused to leave, saying that if I couldn't go, they wouldn't either... and they paid for it."

"Spike killed them, didn't he?"

Twilight nodded stiffly after a long moment, her eyes going dim.

"Each and every one of them... gone," she answered tonelessly, "trying to protect me from my own mistake no less. Now I really am alone in this Tartarus forsaken town... or at least, I was."

She smiled that horrible smile at me again, the expression made all the more unnerving by the emptiness in her eyes.

"Now you're here, and you're going to help me fix this because you have something I need."

Good news, everyone!

I've finished about half of the next chapter, and I only have an hour of work today, so I might have the next chapter up before the day is out.