THE EQUESTRIA FILES

A RIDICULOUSLY OVERTHOUGHT MY LITTLE PONY FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC FAN FICTION BY RANDOMMAN295

There was darkness for a long time in the small room. There was a man inside. No, two men, but one of them did not know that the other was there. That man was named Damon Carter. He was a middle aged, scrawny man who had spent the last five years as a janitor for an archive system in Sacramento, California. Why, you may ask, was he here for? Crammed into this mysterious room? Thrust into darkness? Well, rumor had it that he was insane. Batshit crazy. So crazy, in fact, that in the last week, he started talking to himself about things. Absurd things that nobody else had heard of. Things that he had never heard of before until this very week. Things that nobody understood.

Nobody but him.

A horribly bright light blazed to life right in front of Damon in the room. His eyes strained desperately to adjust to the now bright room, revealing to him in the process that he was in a confined concrete room, almost like an interrogation room. 'Am I being interrogated?' Damon thought to himself. After shaking around a bit in fear, he revealed himself to be in a sitting position with his hands sloppily cuffed to the armrests of a wooden chair. Damon nearly panicked.

Giving him nearly no time to think any more, a mysterious voice spoke to him. It was deep and raspy, but sounded strangely familiar. Damon couldn't see the face behind the bright shine of the light, so he couldn't tell who it was.

"What happened last week?" the voice said.

"What is this place? What are you doing to me?!" Damon's voice sounded panicky and squeaky, on the contrary to what it used to sound like, which was smooth and calm.

"Please calm down. I need to know what happened last week."

Damon tried his best to calm his voice. "What do you mean, 'last week'?"

"You act as though you know something we don't, and we need to find out what it is. Please tell us."

There was an awkward silence, then Damon spoke up again.

"The last week for me was nothing short of bizarre. I can hardly remember any of why it happened or who made it happen. All I can remember is what happened. Vividly. It was almost as if I was there... But I wasn't supposed to be. As if it was forbidden..."

"What is? What's forbidden?"

"...But I still read it. I read all of it. It felt as if I was there... There. That describes my experience with the E File. I was there."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm sorry if I'm confusing or frustrating you, but words can't really explain to you what it's like. Well, maybe words can... It would just take a lot of them. And a lot of time."

The mysterious man suddenly seemed interested. "I have time... Tell me more about this 'E File' you speak of."

"I'll do my best, sir. But before this account of events gets pinned down as ridiculous and absurd, I would like to point this out. All of this happened. You just don't remember any of it. But I do."

"Get on with it."

[FROM THE MIND OF DAMON CARTER]

It was a long day at work. Being a janitor was much more difficult than one might think; you seem to clean up after everybody, and nobody seems to appreciate it. I hated it. Every single day seemed to be exactly the same, and nothing ever changed. I loved change. Call me weird, but that's me.

I worked in the basement of an odd building in California, which was an archive for all sorts of things. I liked reading things, so I figured the job would be fine for me. As it turned out, you don't really get to read any of it. People came and went, picking up and dropping off files, but I never got to see most of it. Well, most of it. I'd often stay at the building after work. tricking everyone else into thinking that I had already left. I would read the open files, finding unpublished historical events, classified news, never before seen screenplays, and all sorts of other good stuff.

But of the thousands of file cabinets in the building, one intrigued me the most. It sat, alone, locked up in the basement. I can recall everything about it. It was old and rusted, and it obviously hadn't been touched, let alone opened, in years. However, the most peculiar part of it was what was on front of it. Right on the handle, in stencil font and made of brass, was the letter 'E'. All of the other files in the entire building had some elaborate name, like 'PkT459K' or '55gRT22', but this one was just a single letter. I figured that it must have either been really old or important.

Directly under that letter was something even weirder. I had seen nothing else like it in the entire facility. It was a shield, with half of it resembling a sun, and the other side resembling a moon. Over that, which perplexed me the most, was the black outline of a horse. A horse with wings and a horn protruding from its forehead.

I had seen that file on the first day of the job, and I wondered what it meant ever since. It was always locked, and as far as I was concerned, it hadn't been touched, even in the time that I was there. I was admittedly frightened of it.

That is, until today.

Like I said, it had been a long day at work. I was returning to the basement to lock up, but I wasn't interested in reading today, so I was just going to leave.

Taking my key ring, I started to shut off the lights, one by one. I slowly went down the line of ten switches, making the room ever so dimmer as I activated each one. Soon enough, I got to the last switch. The room was almost dark now. In one absent-minded routine, I lifted up the key, jammed it in the slot, and crammed it down with the weight of my own arm.

Something very unexpected happened in that very moment. I heard the crack of plastic, and a sudden twisting in my wrist. When I looked down at the switch to see what had happened, I was shocked; the key snapped. This had never happened to me before, and I was almost scared that it did. Now that I couldn't shut off the light, the room suddenly had an eerie glow coming from the back corner, which I could barely see shining through several isles of archives. I could feel my heart race inside me as I locked my eyesight on it.

Overcoming my fear of how creepy the room suddenly looked, I decided that it would be best to investigate, and maybe take out the lightbulb if I had to. I quickly found myself walking towards the light, never dropping eye contact with the source of light. I treated it as though it was dangerous, although I couldn't exactly say why.

As I rounded the isle corner and faced the light, I realized why I treated it dangerously. The single lightbulb was dangling over something that made my heart skip several beats. The light was gleaming in one area: Straight over the cabinet that contained the E File. I wouldn't usually be terribly alarmed at this, but there was one small thing that made me have a heart attack.

The E File was open. Wide open.

Slowly moving myself towards it in fear but curiosity, I felt an increasingly large drive to find what was in there. I had no second thoughts; nobody else was there, so who could stop me? I wanted to reveal what mysteries were in there. Badly.

Really badly. The drive was intense now, but for some reason, I didn't want to resist it.

Without even thinking about it, I found myself kneeling down to pick something out.

As I neared the cabinet and pulled it open further, I was shocked by what was in there. Well, more specifically, what wasn't. There was only one file. It was thick, yes, but the rest of the cabinet was empty. I was intrigued...

I slowly picked the file out of the cabinet with a shaky hand. I admired it, wondering just how old the file was. It felt hefty and satisfying in my hands, as I realized how rare it was. But without any warning, the file stared to do something on its own before I had a chance to open it. I couldn't believe my own eyes; it looked as though it was melting! I did a hardcore doubletake, then came to an impossible realization that it was actually happening.

But it didn't really melt like it should have; rather than seeping into the floor and in between my open fingers, it simply... disappeared.

I did another doubletake, this time feeling even more fear than before.

It was gone.

Everything went white, but in the process, did what I now believe to have told me what was in the file. I felt a spinning feeling, then felt myself hit the ground, now completely limp. Everything went from white to black in an instant. It almost felt like someone wanted me to read it.

Actually, I take that back. It felt more like something.