Lost...and Found?! A Surprise CYOA

[Syrcaid]

The first thing that hit Nightvine was the SMELL.

"Can anyone else not smell that?  It's almost overpowering!," he said in surprise.  "Putting aside that this isn't even remotely organic, this smells kind of... I dunno, fresh!"

He rarely used the light of his horn, but he let it glow softly against an inner wall.  Light reflected back at him from the surface.  It all looked like it was poured from a main location to him, though he couldn't be sure.

"This is coming from somewhere, I think.  Is this from some kind of accident or was it on purpose?  I'd love to look and see what happened here.  Maybe the last group was curious about it, too."

(Nightvine chooses D.)

[FrostyPeaches]

A: Look for a path.

She noticed the shuffling of the group and watched more than half of them move to the left. Oh good  some have agreed to take the safer path through the dark cave, for now... It had been a while since they've walked forward holding torches as a group. the more they walked the more this place seems to go grow in size both length and height. Is this another theme park mystery tour? she wondered. if so, this will turn out to be a great halloween themed venue to attract more visitors. She looked at the 'decorations' and the objects around her to take notes to hold a similar themed event back at her own place in the future..
Her thoughts quickly vanished when she smelled ....

...a whiff of CHEMICALS and PLASTIC?? stopping to look around where the group led her to, she was in shock at the absurd amount of wasted plastic and discarded goo that once was used to make beautiful blisterpacks. Just what in the world happened here? she thought. This mountain of garbage was bigger than my own shooting gallery! sheesus.


@Maxx
Shifting her focus back at the poor soul in front of her with the beautiful gem-like eyes, the one that sent out all these wanted posters wanting to find her comrades, she gave Paper Tiger a gentle pat on the back. "Don't worry,  we're not gonna die in here! Since this place is already a trash mountain , i will look for a path for the group to move along further. That phony over there found real hair just now. They can't be that far away, right?"

Confident of where to go next, she looked at the babbin and said: "If you get lost or trapped, though i doubt you would, call out Bullseye, and i'll come pluck you out of danger!" With a playful wink and taking a long jump, Bullseye hopped up to the top of a large heap of rejected plastic blisterpacks.  She moved her torch around like prison guards did as she scanned the area.

[Maxx]

"Yeah," Paper Tiger said faintly, looking around in wide-eyed terror of the multicoloured plastic walls, letting herself be soothed by Itsy Bitsy (even though a stray leg brushing by her in the dark might have made her scream in a different circumstance), "the trauma."

In a difference circumstance, she might also have been frightened by Bullseye pointing out stray real Phony hair, but she felt very soothed to be surrounded by Strong Female Phony Phigures. If she had to run screaming away from a giant monster, she felt sure that they would stay and sacrifice themselves for her.

"Thank you Itsy Bitsy, Bullseye," she called around in the darkness, looking around with the light strapped to her little forehead.

In that vein, she continued to rummage around, morbidly D. seeking bits of Phonies like a giant washer or something.

[Jun]

Diamond stared uneasily at the mountain of plastic around them. For a moment, she had half a mind to look for other clues in the possible form of bright red strands, that mayhap could have come from a certain admin pegasus who surely must have known all about this nightmare place. But what else could that serve, aside from letting her have the satisfaction of saying, ahah, I knew it, eat the rich? This was clearly the work of Phonyland. This was what Phonyland was built on, in some respects literally.

Anyway.

At least it was serving a purpose, she supposed.

She decided to look for signs of a camp instead.

C: Look for signs of a camp.

[Nym]

Weatherly was on edge, pressing more and more into themselves as the cavernous surroundings revealed their truest form. How unsettling, and the implications behind it! He shivered, looking from phony to phony and sighing. He shouldn't have come on this expedition -- he was a child, but- He had wanted to; wanted to help those lost from their loved ones and also prove to himself he was more than his anxiety and fears. He had been a lonely foal for ages, lost at sea on a boat that had kept trekking along on its own path, with a crew that didn't care if the small child should or shouldn't have been there. Weatherly wanted to help, but he hadn't expected to walk amongst... whatever this dumping ground represented.

He wished he had asked his sister to join him.

"Um-" He cut off, biting down on his lip instead of reaching out to anyone around him. Go be useful, Weatherly! Go pull your weight! He swallowed thickly and decided to look for signs of rest; surely someone would have set camp somewhere nearby if they felt like there was no way out? A safe place?

(Weatherly picks C!)

[thy]

To be frank, Lemma was surprised she'd managed to be helpful at all. It gave her a little boost of confidence, though the revelation of the horrible plastic dump killed it in its tracks. Win some, lose some, she supposed.

The party spread out quickly to begin their search once they'd noticed the hair, and Lemma narrowed her eyes. Searching for tracks seemed like the best option - but her mind kept going back to the story Paper Tiger had spun to get them all on this expedition in the first place. And there'd been that horrible boulder earlier, too...there had to be some reason the rest of Paper Tiger's party hadn't managed to make it out of the mountain, and it couldn't just be their desire to keep camping forever. (Though camping was fun!)

She stayed back, taking a survey of the dump in general. Did anything here look particularly disturbed? Not by a puny phony's hoof, but by a disaster? "I think an accident is likely," she piped up, in agreement with Nightvine. So it was that she was looking for: was there some sort of structural weakness below, or some place the scaffolding suddenly ended above them? She certainly didn't want the same accident befalling herself, so she did what she could to shine her flashlight at particularly large objects and the ceiling, trying to puzzle out what could've gotten in the group's way.

( @Syrcaid for the mention <3)

( Lemma chooses D. Look for other clues (signs of structural weakness, particularly above them or near large objects) )

[Scaramouche Fandango]

Some of the plastic on the ground looks more disturbed than the waste around it– but it's not just one clear path, it's several. It actually looks a little more disturbed than you'd think– after all, if the phonies disappeared years ago, you'd expect that there'd be one clear set of tracks. But that's not what's going on at all. Instead, there's dozens of paths through the plastic, and as the phonies search... a new sound can be heard aside from shuffling plastic.

A murmur arises as the phonies discuss what to do– a murmur that rises to a growling. The group isn't alone. On the contrary, they're surrounded! Pudgy humanoid creatures, encrusted with gemstones in their midsections and sporting manes of wild hair in all the colors of the rainbow have snuck up on the group. Their heavy brows and wrinkled faces give them a worried expression, although on some of them it's far more fierce than it is worried. They are very nude for humanoids, at least as phonies tend to understand, but their bodies display nothing that isn't safe for Saturday morning children's television.

"Travelers," one says. "Interlopers," says another. "Trespassers," growls a third. "Phonies!" the fourth one shouts. "Those are just like the others that came down here. Years ago. They paid the toll and moved on."

"Phonies!" End of an Era exclaims. "So you know them! When was the last time you saw them?"

"Oh, ages ago," says the creature who seems to be the leader. "They had gotten lost and ended up down here. They spent some time with us– we have a lot in common, you see." The creature takes a breath, and you know you're in for a story.

"Long ago, though we don't know how long, we were awakened. Just like you, we were born of blister packs- and just like you, we have nanites coursing through our veins. But unlike you, our nanites were short-range, and needed to be near a power source to charge. This was deemed a "marketing risk," until somebody got the bright idea for the coin slots."

The creature turns around, showing the group their coin slot, which was situated right between the shoulder blades. "Just put in a coin and the interaction between diodes and metal keeps us going! They called us the Toll Drolls, because we were jolly and droll, and because you had to pay a toll to keep us going. Whatever genius came up with that took us from marketing risk to marketing flop, and here we are, relegated to the scrap heap. Not so droll anymore, but we do charge tolls. There's a freedom to living down here- nobody tells us what to do, nobody tries to rub our tummies for luck, and we don't have to go into the light– it hurts our eyes. And there's plenty of metal scrap down here to keep us going, if you know where to look. But this is our garbage, and we don't just let anyone pass through it. You gotta pay the Toll toll. We used to be all cryptic about it but then one of the phonies that fell down here got all weird and hysterical and tried to pay us with his cape, and. Ew. Clothes. So now we're specific: you cannot pass unless you tell us something about the surface world. What's going on, what's new in the outer world, what do you do. Things like that. Tell us something interesting, and you may pass– and we'll tell you which way they went."

FREE RESPONSE ROUND: What do you offer as payment to the Tolls?

@thy @Nym @Jun @Maxx @FrostyPeaches @Syrcaid @Blinded By Silence @purpleroses @Ruriska

[Maxx]

Paper Tiger was at a loss, for before this incident and memory-blocking trauma, she had been just as out of the loop as the Tolls were. Her current recollections were fairly short term and she racked her little brain for something interesting, a front hoof pushing the debris about in her very little thoughts.

"Oh!" Her head bobbed up, "I saw a poster in Phony City that said there was a deathmatch for babbies to decide who would get to grow Old Enough. It's a pity I wasn't free then."

[purpleroses]

"Oh man!" Torte said. "So last night was the Big Sports Game! Between the Sheeps and the Tigers. 20-31, lots of overtime. One of the best games I saw yet! The bar was packed and I screamed because it was MY team that won The Big Game."

Torte grinned widely. Sports. She loved them.

[Syrcaid]

"Oh, there's lots of interesting things," Nightvine replied after listening to their tale.  "But mostly all I know is the stuff that happens at night.  Like the mushrooms on Phonyland behave differently than the ones anywhere else.  And the same species of fungus can be a totally different color or texture depending on where they grow in Phonyland!  If there's this much plastic under us at any give time, that's probably a bit of a factor."

He looked down at the ground again.  Nightvine swore he saw what looked like melted parts of whole Phony limbs.  He tried not to think about it too hard.

[Blinded By Silence]

Sword-Sworn couldn't even imagine being so out of the loop as these poor toys. She bet that they didn't even get the good channels down here! She knew how painful that would be. Missing even one episode of her favorite shows put her so far behind!

"Oh, oh! Stefan Galaxy is getting ANOTHER season! I suspect we'll learn more about Conni soon, she was on the release artwork this time!"

[Nym]

Weatherly patiently waited for their turn, stepping forward once it finally came.

"It's Lunar New Year," he began, shuffling faintly. "There's a festival ongoing.... did you know it's the year of the tiger?" That was good, right?

[FrostyPeaches]

[imgleft height=235]https://mylittlephony.citycyb.org/phony/bullseye.png[/imgleft]
" tell us something interesting... "

"AHHA!" she shouted out loud in the darkness. "I knew it," she said as she stared down from atop the large heap of rejected plastic blisterpacks, her torch shone into the distance to reveal more than one paths which was blocked by strange looking short creatures that definitely were not ponies... Clicking her tongue, she jumped down to warn the others but was stopped when she heard them call out that they wont' tell the right path to run through unless they tell them interesting facts about phonycity's park that they don't know about since they've lived hidden away all this time. When one of the naked creature mentioned about nanites, her long term memory went and retrieved an interesting event that has happened just recently.

Moving her hair out of her face, to take a better look at the strangers, she shone her torch at their faces before pointing it back towards the ground. "Nanites you say.. heh, just a couple months back, during Halloween- the witches came for a visit... One was rumoured to possess a shiny crystal horn with crystal eyes although i didn't get to see her myself, while one came from the sea draped in seaweed hair, and --" she said with a cunning sly smile -- "and one of them was rumoured to be made of  candy. not just any kind of candy, but of candycorn with a candycorn horn to sboast!! Nophony knows how many of them are in existence. it's very possible that one of them witches already made this very mountain cave their home..."

[thy]

Lemma couldn't help but admire these Tolls: their hair was gravity-defying! Certainly at least something to aspire to.

She watched their expressions carefully as each Phony stepped forward and offered their own tidbit of information, unsure what exactly she could offer herself. Nina had told her she was pretty bright for her age a few times, usually in a tone of frustration (and not nearly so directly). Despite that, she was still, well, a babby. Lots of real knowledge was age-restricted somehow. Still, she liked to observe when she could, and while it might be a stretch to call this a fact...she could spin it that way, right?

Maybe she could start like this: clearing her throat, pulling herself up into an upright and clearly knowledgeable posture. Lemma was totally an expert on perturbative theory, and she had an extremely mature comprehension of the things Nina sometimes studied when she was drunk!

"Some phonies may deny it," she said. "But it's quite clear that Phonyland's demographic has changed somehow, most notably a little over a year ago. The park visitors we've been seeing...they're the same as far as anyone can tell, but it's like we're looking at them through a new lens. The way we saw them...it was limited somehow, before, like they shopped for clothes and hair and makeup in a world with completely different brands, and now suddenly things have opened up somehow." She took a pause. This was where the theory usually lost people, and also admittedly the part she knew the least about. Still, she could make it seem like she'd worked to obtain this information..."I've heard it has something to do with an arcane ritual conducted at a site important to the operations of the park and its administration, and our best bet is that it all happened at some kind of...spiderweb."

She looked toward Itsy Bitsy, coughed, and looked away again. She hadn't really intended to implicate any members of their party, but she had definitely been hearing about webs, at least. She couldn't hide the truth! "But as of now, it's a lot easier to observe the immediate effects than to divine the cause. And we've still been observing the change's ramifications as they develop, but it's important to be at the cutting edge of this kind of research, you know."

There. That was recent and juicy! She looked boldly toward the Tolls, determined to stay confident even if one of the other Phonies here expressed doubt.

[Jun]

"There was supposed to be a Valentine's event!" Diamond blurted out, as if the secret had been weighing heavy on her ever since she overheard Quill screaming at people over Zoom - it wasn't her fault, Fireflight had been taking her to the staff canteen when he put his ear against the office door, "but they were late with the Christmas event so it turned into a Lunar New Year event and now no one's happy!"

She wondered, with a sudden chill, if the plastic bits of scrapped Valentine phonies might be lingering around this dump somewhere.