Octavia, Vinyl, Watt Sun, and Sharp Eye were sitting in a circle around one side of the stallion’s hospital bed, all of them staring down at New Wave’s diary, which was lying on the bedsheets. The curtains were drawn to hide the sight of the four agents discussing the case from any watchful eyes in the night outside.

“I don’t understand,” Octavia said. After a long rest, she was starting to look more like her normal self, although a trace of the dark shadows under her eyes remained. “Why would she just leave the diary behind?”

“Maybe she dropped it by accident?” Watt Sun offered. “She was probably in a hurry to get out of the subway tunnels.”

“I don’t think so,” Sharp Eye said. “Look at the hoofprints on some of these pages. It looks like she stopped to read it while she was down there.”

“Maybe she didn’t realize what it was until she started reading it?” Vinyl suggested.

“No, she had to know what it was,” Octavia countered. “The moment she saw it on the stage, she focused on it.”

“And anyway, a lot of the pages have her hoofprints,” Sharp Eye pointed out. “If she had picked up the wrong thing, why would she continue reading it? Especially if she was on the run.”

The four lapsed into silence. Octavia rose to her hooves and started pacing around the room. “It doesn’t make any sense! She had a clean escape and the diary was the only thing she was carrying. She must have known its significance, or she wouldn’t have taken it. What’s more, she even stopped to read it. Now, if she knew it was such an important piece of evidence, why wouldn’t she destroy it? Or keep it? Why would she let it slip so easily back into our hooves?”

As Octavia continued to pace, Sharp Eye let out a thoughtful ‘hmm,’ her brow furrowing. “Maybe... maybe she didn’t know it was an important piece of evidence. Maybe she took it for a different reason?”

“What do you mean?” Watt Sun asked. Octavia stopped in her pacing to look up at Sharp Eye.

“I want to go back to my crazed fan idea,” Sharp Eye replied. “What if we’re dealing with somepony who’s obsessed with themerse stars, and took the diary only because it belonged to New Wave?”

“That’s a thought,” Watt Sun said.

“But I don’t think the fans knew about the diary,” Vinyl countered. “For that matter, I didn’t know about the diary. It was only the ponies who worked with her that had some inkling of it.”

“And anyway,” Octavia began, “if it was an obsessed fan, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to keep the diary as a souvenir?”

“Oh yeah...” Sharp Eye murmured.

“Besides, it doesn’t even have her name on it,” Vinyl said, closing the diary to reveal its blank cover. “Whoever it is would have to be really familiar with New Wave to recognize it as her diary.”

“Although...” Octavia trailed off, putting a hoof on her chin and staring off to the side for a few seconds. Her eyes widened and she opened her mouth slightly as an expression of revelation came over her. “My word, I just had a remarkable notion.”

“Is that fancy talk for ‘crazy thought?’” Vinyl said, grinning. “‘Cause I’m all for crazy thoughts right now.”

“We’ve been led astray by so many illusions now. But what if we were led astray from the start? What if the killer is New Wave herself?”

There was a long silence following Octavia’s words, in which the other three Pinkietons gave her blank stares. The silence was finally broken by Vinyl. “Okay, maybe not that crazy of a thought.”

“Think about it!” the cellist exclaimed, speaking rapidly as her tone became excited. “All the murders and attempted murders were of ponies that New Wave worked with and that she had a grudge against. What if she used her themerse skills to stage her own death, then set out to kill these ponies? And when she took her diary, she was simply taking back what was hers!”

“Pretty good, Octy,” Vinyl remarked, nodding. “There’s just two tiny little problems with your theory. One, if New Wave was taking back her diary, then why wouldn’t she keep it? And two, New Wave is definitely dead.”

“But how do you know for certain?” Octavia insisted.

“Because after New Wave collapsed on stage, the police took her body to the station and performed an autopsy on her,” Vinyl answered. “That’s how we found out she had been poisoned.”

“Oh.” Octavia sat down on her haunches, looking down at her hooves. “Never mind, then.”

“Still, it’s an interesting thought,” Watt Sun offered. “I don’t think I would put such a thing past this mare.”

“Heh, I guess I wouldn’t, either,” Vinyl admitted. “And you’re right about all the victims having something to do with New Wave. She’s the only element connecting them all together. Well, except for—” She suddenly stopped as a curious expression came over her. The others in the room were taken aback at her abrupt silence.

“Uh, Vinyl?” Sharp Eye said uneasily. “Are you ok—”

Suddenly, Vinyl’s face lit up and she sprang to her hooves. “That’s it!” she screamed, startling the other three ponies as she began dancing wildly around the room. “Octy, you’re a genius!” she yelled with delight, grabbing Octavia by the shoulders and spinning her around so that their faces were mere inches apart. “I could kiss you!”

“Um, perhaps you could restrain yourself to just calling me a genius,” Octavia hurriedly replied, pushing her friend off. “What are you talking about? What’s it?”

“I think you might just be onto something!” Vinyl grabbed the cellist’s hoof and began pulling her towards the door even as she looked utterly bewildered.

“But you said that New Wave was—”

“Not her! Come on, we need to get to Bronclyn!” Vinyl tugged Octavia out the room, leaving a completely baffled Watt Sun and Sharp Eye behind.

Architecturally, the Bronclyn morgue was just as depressing of a building as its function suggested. Cold, grey, and modern, it looked like an oversized block of concrete with the words “BRONCLYN POLICE DEPARTMENT” in large metal letters over the front door. The inside was little better, with long, dimly lit corridors with no decorative elements. It was simple, with nothing to detract from its function, making it a fitting place for the recently deceased.

“I don’t know what you expect to find,” Detective Gum Shoe said, leading Vinyl and Octavia down a hallway. The three were accompanied by a single Bronclyn police officer as they entered a large, empty room where one wall was covered with small, safe-sized steel doors. Each one hid a compartment capable of preserving a fresh corpse.

“Did you examine the body after you brought it here?” Vinyl asked.

“No. Why would we? The cause of death was pretty clear,” Gum Shoe answered. Vinyl and Octavia glanced at each other.

Gum Shoe pulled out a key and walked up a small door labeled with a paper card that read “CURTAIN CALL.” He unlocked the door and opened it before pulling out a long metal table that had a body bag placed upon it. “Well, there she is,” Gum Shoe said, stepping back to give Vinyl and Octavia a full view of the body bag.

“If you wouldn’t mind opening it, detective,” Octavia said. Gum Shoe rolled his eyes, then grabbed the zipper and pulled it down the length of the bag before opening it.

The moment he caught sight of what was in the bag, he gasped and took several steps back, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. The police officer who had accompanied them took a curious look and also reacted with surprise, and even Octavia’s eyes widened. Vinyl, however, was grinning broadly.

Gum Shoe stepped closer to the body bag, which contained nothing more than a large burlap sack that was roughly the size and weight of a pony. A bit of flour leaked out of a hole on one side. “What the hay is this?!” he yelled. “Where’s the body?!”

“There was no body,” Vinyl answered. “You said it yourself, detective. Didn’t it seem like an awfully big coincidence that we found her right as she was being murdered? Turns out you were right to be suspicious.”

“Sweet Celestia above...” Gum Shoe murmured, gaping down at the burlap sack. After a moment, he seemed to snap back to reality. “Get a unit over to that mare’s apartment!” he ordered, pointing at the police officer in the room. “Get on the radio and find somepony in the neighborhood to arrest that mare!”

The officer quickly nodded and bolted out of the room. Gum Shoe pointed at Vinyl and Octavia. “You, you, and me, we’re heading over there!”

“Can we head back to HQ and get our equipment first?” Vinyl asked.

“No time!” Gum Shoe said, already galloping for the exit. “We’re finally gonna get this killer!”

As they followed the detective out of the room, Octavia turned to Vinyl. “Something tells me that’s going to be easier said than done.”

By the time the three ponies had made it from the morgue to the neighborhood beneath the Manehattan Bridge, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong. The chatter coming through the radio in the police carriage began to be filled with requests for back-up and Gum Shoe’s repeated demands for more information went unanswered.

When they arrived, they found the apartment building surrounded by a huge crowd of ponies. The street in front of the building had been cordoned off by police to hold back the many onlookers. In the dark of night, the flashing lights of the many police carriages parked on the street illuminated the nearby buildings in harsh tones of red and blue.

Gum Shoe leapt out of the police carriage as soon as it arrived. “What the hay is going on here?” he yelled at the nearest police officer. “Why are all these ponies out here?”

“Something happened in there,” the officer replied, looking frightened. “We went in to offer back-up, but the building... it...”

“What?” Gum Shoe demanded.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. In the end, we decided to just get everypony else out of there.”

“Where are the first officers who entered?” Octavia asked.

The officer pointed at two ponies in uniform sitting on the curb, both looking shell-shocked. Octavia, Vinyl, and Gum Shoe walked up to them.

“What did you see in there?” Gum Shoe asked. The two officers didn’t even acknowledge the detective’s presence, instead continuing to stare off into space.

“It looks like they’ve had quite a fright,” Octavia noted.

Vinyl waved a hoof in front of the two, failing to generate a reaction. “Are you sure they’re even real?” she said with some skepticism in her voice. “Maybe they’re just another illusion meant to scare us.”

She prodded one of the two, who looked up at Vinyl and glared. “Screw you, mare.”

“Uh, never mind,” Vinyl said, giving them a sheepish grin before looking up at Octavia. “What do you say? Should we go in or call Sharp Eye and wait for her to bring our equipment?”

The cellist looked out at the crowd of ponies on the street, some of whom seemed just as shell-shocked as the two officers. “I’m not sure we can afford to wait any longer.” She turned to Gum Shoe. “Detective, if you don’t mind, we’d like to try and handle this ourselves. We know what we’re dealing with here.”

Gum Shoe looked uneasy, but after a moment he nodded. “I suppose you haven’t given me any reason to doubt you. But if you run into any trouble, you try to signal us immediately. Wave out the window, make a lot of noise, anything.”

Octavia agreed as she and Vinyl stepped through the entrance, passing from the crowded and brightly-lit street into the dark recesses of the apartment building.

“Uh... we do know what we’re dealing with here, right?” Vinyl muttered.

“I think so,” Octavia replied, walking confidently through the hallway towards the stairs. “They’re just illusions, after all.”

Two minutes later, the agents were inching themselves up a stairwell. Or perhaps it was down the stairwell. It was hard to tell, given that the moment they had entered the stairwell, the world seemed to inverse until they were on the ceiling, desperately trying to avoid slipping off and falling towards the roof. The effect was disorienting to say the least.

“Octy? We have no idea what we’re dealing with here, do we?” Vinyl mumbled. Her voice had gotten unusually high after the abrupt change in perspective and her complexion was pale, an impressive feat given her white coat.

“I don’t think so,” Octavia replied.

The two slowly made their way up the smooth surface on the underside of the stairway below them until they finally made it to the flat ceiling above - or below, from Vinyl and Octavia’s perspective - the nearest exit. Eager to get out of the inverted stairwell, they began reaching up for the top of the doorway.

“What floor are we on?” Vinyl asked.

Octavia tried to read the now upside-down sign next to the doorway, turning her head to the side so that she could read it. “Looks like the second.”

“Okay. Tell me when we get to the fourth. I’m gonna throw up.”

Octavia managed to grab hold of the top of the doorway and pulled herself over, reaching down to offer Vinyl a hoof before pulling her over with her. They both collapsed onto the ceiling of the second floor hallway, breathing heavily.

“Wait, this is absurd!” Octavia yelled, getting up to her hooves. “It’s just an illusion! We don’t have anything to fear from this!” At her words, the world suddenly reversed back to its original position around them, placing them on the floor once again.

“Oh, that’s better,” Vinyl muttered, taking a deep breath. “I was starting to get a little woozy there.”

Octavia warily glanced around the long corridor. “She’s watching us. Why else would everything have returned to normal the moment I said that?”

“Maybe she just got tired,” Vinyl suggested, rising to her hooves.

The door to the stairwell suddenly slammed shut behind them, its loud bang reverberating down the hallway and startling the two ponies.

“I don’t think so,” Octavia muttered. The lights overhead began to flicker. For a moment, the only sound in the corridor was the ‘clink’ of the lightbulbs turning on and off before they all shut down, plunging the hallway into darkness.

Octavia took a step towards Vinyl, standing close enough that their coats rubbed against each other. “Stay close,” she whispered.

Suddenly, the lights came back on, revealing a ghastly sight that caused Octavia’s blood to run cold. Hanging from the ceiling were the figures of four ponies, each strung up by a thick noose wrapped around their necks. They hung limply, their decomposing bodies swaying back and forth ever so slightly as the pungent smell of death suddenly filled the corridor. But it was who the ponies were that caught Octavia off-guard: herself, Vinyl, Watt Sun, and Sharp Eye had each been replicated as one of the corpses.

But while Octavia was momentarily transfixed by the sight of her own rotting flesh, Vinyl looked bored. She casually walked up to her own corpse, giving it an unimpressed look before nudging it, causing it to vanish in a puff of smoke. “Oh, please. The ‘foreshadow the protagonist’s death’ trope is so old hay.” She flicked her tail through the corpse of Octavia, causing it too to vanish. The cellist blinked, her nerves quickly returning to normal now that the effect had been spoiled. The other corpses shortly vanished as well.

“So what other horror show cliches do you have in mind?” Vinyl yelled up at ceiling, grinning broadly. “Am I gonna look into a mirror and see a ghost? Is a cat gonna suddenly jump out and scare me?” She trotted over to a set of elevator doors positioned midway through the corridor and knocked loudly on them. “Are these gonna open and spill a river of blood?”

As a matter of fact, the elevator doors did open right at that moment, although no blood spilled out. Rather, they revealed only the shadowy depths of the elevator shaft before a cable suddenly snapped out into the hallway and wrapped itself around Vinyl’s hindlegs. Driven by an unseen force, the cable quickly dragged a screaming Vinyl back into the elevator shaft before the doors closed shut after her.

“Vinyl!” Octavia yelled, racing for the elevator doors. She banged on them, trying to reach into the gap between the doors and pry them open, but it was too small for her hooves to fit into. The lights started to flicker again for a moment before they suddenly stopped. Octavia heard the door at the other end of the hallway open with a loud creak followed by the sound of heavy hoofsteps, signaling the approach of somepony slowly walking down the corridor towards her.

Octavia looked up and froze at the sight of the figure, who was somepony painfully familiar to the cellist. It was the figure of a tall, handsome stallion, with a tan coat and a horn sticking out of the part in his brown, swept-back mane. He was wearing a fine, black tuxedo and a red bowtie, and on his flank was the cutie mark of a pink, sprinkle-covered doughnut.

“Hello, Ms. Octavia,” he said in a smooth tone, regarding the cellist with a smug grin.

Octavia slumped to her haunches, staring at the stallion wide-eyed and with her mouth agape. “No...” she murmured, her voice barely rising above a faint squeak. “That’s impossible...”

Con Mane smirked and lifted his forehooves to adjust his bowtie. “Oh, come now, Ms. Octavia. Who says you only live twice?”