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// 2- The Mechanical City 
// Story: The Lost City 
// by Arctic Inferno 
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The mare jumped and coughed suddenly as age-old steam shot out of one of the pipes above her.
The city that was perched on the mechanical island had felt more like a town or village looking at it from a distance, but now the mare had actually stepped through the bronze archway that was its only entrance. She realised just how large it actually was. All around her were houses that lined either side of the outer ring, which turned out to be a road that led in one big circle. Walking around it all the way would take her at least a few hours. A number of street lights lined the road on both sides, illuminating the darkened surroundings and revealing the fronts of the domestic buildings on either side.

The houses were similar to those in her village back above ground, but they had a few strange details that looked out of place for a home. The chimneys were more like steam pipes on trains than anything else, with thick bronze pipes running between them; filled with even more of the musky water. Countless inactive cogs and pistons were built into the outer walls and, on top of that, each house had a peculiar cone-shaped roof of plated bronze. She tried a number of the brass doorknobs, however each one was locked and had no keyhole. Literally hundreds of thin pipes ran above her, connecting the houses from above. They reminded her of the cables that ran above the roads from telephone poles in Manehatten.

Between the houses at seemingly random intervals were a number of additional archways that led into another circular road further into the centre of the island; surrounding this one were market stalls and shops, though they had no windows, much like the houses in the outer ring. Instead, each had a number of faded pictures written in the ancient language she had seen in the book. She tried a door and found it to be unlocked, but gagged a little as the smell of stagnant air mixed with musky water hit her nostrils from the shop she had opened and she hurried underneath another archway between the shops into the smallest ring.

The smallest ring was not actually small at all. It still would have taken her an hour or more to walk around, as it circled the huge structure in the middle of the metal island. She walked a short distance around it and observed a number of the posters put up on its walls; some showed pictures of what she assumed to be food, others seemed to be advertising cigars. A number were displaying pictures of a mare on a theatre stage singing to an audience, but one or two caught her eye. They seemed to be more faded than the others, but she could make out a pony-shaped object on them and a few paragraphs of the ancient text. Theories began to stir in her mind as to what they could be showing but those thoughts were immediately interrupted when she spotted a lever on the wall of the structure.

It was made of brass and reminded her of the ones she had pulled in the hallway, but what set it aside from them, was that the handle had an intricate design of small cogs and pipes that led into a sphere in the centre of it. On the sphere was an engraved cog with two of the ancient letters in the centre, which she recognised as 'S' and 'C'. She placed her hooves firmly onto it and pulled it down with some effort, inducing a slight rumble from far beneath.

A section of the cone's wall suddenly split open and separated. Seeing it earlier she hadn't even noticed that it had been two door panels, but it had been so cleverly built that she likely wouldn't have found them if she had been trying. Another hiss of steam escaped from the floor as they slid open slowly with a soft whirring noise and the inside was exposed to light for the first time in generations.

Taking a deep breath, the mare took a few cautious steps into the interior of the structure and looked around.

The ground room was a huge circle, literally like a gigantic hall, with pillars rising up from the floor and holding the ceiling up in perfect symmetry on either side. The room was full of chairs, all in neat rows from front to back with two aisles running up between them on the left and right. All were very carefully made of bronze and had the same design running up their legs as the one on the lever handle outside. Each row was facing the opposite end of the room to the door through which she had entered, towards a stand with space for one pony to talk to the entirety of the chair's occupants. As she wandered down one of the aisles and stepped up onto the stage the mare noticed a tool sitting on the stand that looked like a gavel, with a handle shaped in the familiar artistic fashion to the chair legs out of gold.

Behind the stand were three metal pipes that came down from the ceiling and faced into the room. Each ended with a hatch bolted down to the pipe's sides, and if she looked up the mare could see another much larger hatch in the ceiling. Looking around, confused, she turned to leave the room, only to see that the doors were closed. A sharp hissing sound came from the pipe on the right and she spun round again to face the thing that fell out of the hatch that had opened.

The thing stared back.