//------------------------------// // Chapter 11: Ruins // Story: Equestria 485,000 // by Unwhole Hole //------------------------------// Twilight snapped awake and sat up with a gasp. For a moment, she was unable to see and she found herself wondering if she had gone blind. Then she noticed that as dark as the area was around her, the HUD in her suit was still glowing with information on her surroundings. After a few seconds, the combination of the morphiplasm screen and her own eyes adjusting rendered Twilight able to see that she was once again in some kind of dark cave. Silken was standing beside her, waiting patiently.             “You!” cried Twilight. “How long was I out? And if it was eight weeks again- -”             “Only twelve hours,” said Silken, smiling cheerfully. “See, this time you remembered to ask! Wasn’t that easy?”             Twilight pointed at her angrily. “You had better not have touched my brain again!”             “I considered it,” admitted Silken, “but on close inspection of the injury, I did not dare to risk it.”             “Injury?” Had Twilight’s various sweat orifices not been filled with morphiplasm, she would have broken out into a sweat. Her stomach- -she had not eaten in some time- -suddenly felt queasy. “How bad?”             “You sustained a sharp-force brain injury to the base of your horn.”             As bad as she had felt before, Twilight’s heart sunk. “How deep?”             “Deep. Well into the corpus callosum. Attempting to reconnect it without medical training- -or even with it- -would risk horn necrosis to you, and a potential detonation that would render both of us inert for some time. Or permanently, in my case.”             “It will heal,” said Twilight. “I have had my horn torn from my body exactly eight times. It is not a number you can forget. It grew back every time.”             “How long did it take to regenerate?”             “The longest was about seventy years, I think.”             “Was it a nub?”             “Excuse me?”             “When it was growing back. Did it start out as an adorable little nub?”             Twilight glared at Silken and ground her teeth out of frustration. “Yes,” she said. “It was a little nub. For several decades. And when you spend most of your time with Celestia, that’s really, REALLY embarrassing. You will never speak of this topic again.” Twilight attempted to stand up. She nearly screamed. Her entire body ached, especially her head. As she stood shaking the world began to swirl and she tipped. Silken gracefully steadied her.             “You also lost a lot of blood,” said Silken, “I tried to save what I could and put it back in, but a lot fell on the ground and got dirty. It did not seem sanitary.”             “Of course it isn’t! Keep your mitts off my blood! Ugh…” Twilight pushed Silken away. “I’m fine! Let go!”             Silken let go, and Twilight wobbled for a moment before standing upright. She instead looked around on the cave and found that it was substantially larger than the one that had woken up in before. In fact, she was only able to see the floor and that it was oddly smooth. Beyond that was darkness.             Still annoyed, Twilight lit her horn- -or tried to. The tip flashed weakly, and a small spurt of energy drifted down from it. Even more annoyed, Twilight tried again- -and the same thing happened. “Great,” she said, followed by some quiet swearing. It was something she had expected but hoped she had somehow miraculously avoided. The damage to her horn had severed much of the connection between the organ and her brain, leaving her largely without the use of her magic until it healed. “Well, that’s what happens when we let ourselves hope,” she muttered.             “Your magic has been damaged,” noted Silken.             “No, you think?”             “No. Not at all. I’m a remnus, we’re not built for that.”             Twilight’s headache grew worse. “Where even are we? What is it with you and caves?”             “They make me feel peaceful. When you lost consciousness, I was forced to intervene. The blue windigo charged you, and I needed to protect you from the attack. It pursued with great speed, and I was unable to outrun it. I was forced into this cave.”             “And where is it now?”             “Outside the cave. It followed me for some time, but turned back after a certain depth.”             “So, let me get this straight, Silken. You went into a cave that creatures that are drawn to pain, disharmony, suffering and disease weren’t willing to enter?”             “Yes!” said Silken, smiling. “It certainly was lucky they didn’t want to come down here! The blue one was awfully fast.”             The situation had decayed, and Twilight put her hoof to her throbbing forehead. She could not feel her horn- -it was the only part of her exposed- -and it felt numb on half of it. That was a bad sign.             “I can’t produce a light spell,” she said. “The simplest, easiest spell to do, and I can’t make one right now.”             “Then the responsibility falls to me.” Silken stepped forward to stand beside Twilight. As she did, the surface of her chest split in a line running from her chin to where ribs would have started if she had any. The split revealed some of the pale metallic superstructure beneath her hard artificial skin, but also a series of evenly spaced lights that illuminated the darkness with an almost painfully crisp whiteness.             The light was powerful, but the expanse of the cave was far greater than Twilight had initially expected. At first, all she could see was the floor, and that was how she first began to realize that something was wrong. Cave floors usually consisted of rock that had been weathered away by some sort of water. This one was rock- -or appeared to be. Instead of being a smooth, weathered floor, though, it consisted of a number of identical, perfectly cut hexagons, each one nearly twenty meters wide.             Then the light  struck the wall, and Twilight understood. They were not in a cave at all. Before her lay a perfectly flat surface, one that leaned against the rear wall to form an immensely long hall that was roughly triangular in cross-section. The surface was not natural. Twilight could see holes that had once been places for windows, now all long-since broken, and she could see places where the water-streaked material of the exterior had been broken away to reveal the heavily tarnished but still strong golden-colored metal beneath.             “That’s a building,” she said, taking a step back toward what she was sure was no doubt the remnants of other long-collapsed structures. “That’s…that’s a building!”             “Are you sure?” said Silken.             “Of course I’m sure!” Twilight checked the parameters that her suit was giving her. The air outside was stagnant and very old, having built up toxic gasses for a very long time. “It…it must have been collapsed during the Final Troubles. Or maybe the foundation failed after a few millennia, I don’t know.”             “It is remarkably well preserved.”             “It looks like a later model, one from the last centuries we were here…I knew they were durable, but…” Twilight caught her breath, and thought logically. “It must have been preserved here underground where the weathering forces are weaker.” Twilight looked down the corridor. Silken turned slightly, revealing rubble and the remains of smaller buildings, as well as the glimmering of shattered glass. “This was a city,” she said. “These aren’t caves. They’re the space between the rubble.”             “A city?”             Twilight nodded. “Ground-based dwellings. I remember…” She struggled to recall. “Yes. There was one that surrounded my castle. But I don’t remember what it was called.”             “They do not look like the ones on the outside.”             “They shouldn’t. These are far, far older.”             “But they have still been stripped of all machinery.”             Twilight looked up. “What do you mean ‘stripped’?”             “I am not detecting any metallic items, furniture, or machines. Not even wire in the electrical systems.”             “It must have decayed,” said Twilight. “Oxidized.” Except for the fact that the alloy in the electrical grid and emergency hardwire systems did not rust, not even down here. “But it is weird…just like the cities above…”             “There is one difference, though.”             “What?”             “There are bones here. A lot of bones.”             Twilight shivered, suddenly feeling incredibly uncomfortable. “I don’t like it down here,” she said.             “Because it is something you recognized now dead?”             “No. Because this was part of my territory. We’re nowhere near the Crystal Empire.” She started walking. “We need to get out of here and get back to work. Which way did you come in?”             “That way,” said Silken, pointing. “But I think the windigoes are waiting for us there. They won’t let us leave without a fight. And in your current state…”             “Then we go the other way,” said Twilight.             “Excuse me?”             Twilight pointed at the floor. “This was once a road. We’ll follow it where it goes. Move through the ruins until we get to another exit. Or until my horn heals and I can blast my way out of here.”             “This place does not seem stable,” warned Silken.             “It’s been here for half a million years. If it hasn’t collapsed yet, I don’t think it’s going to now.”             Almost as if to punctuate Twilight’s sentence, something somewhere in the distance shifted, producing a sound from some unseen part of the ancient structure shifting with a sepulchral moan, followed by the sound of something metallic striking the ground.             “Probably,” added Twilight, hoping that she was right.             As they wandered, some of the memories returned to Twilight. She had spent so much time on the decks of ever-advancing lines of spacecraft as she had led her kind ever deeper into the void of space that the memories of what Equestria had once held had begun to fade. Seeing what remained underground allowed her to recall what had once been.             They had possessed a certain cold majesty that the deep-space megastructures- -themselves now long-since abandoned now as well- -lacked. The megastructures took many forms, but in every case grew in three dimensions. Without gravity, there was no reason not to. The ancient cities, though, had sprung forth from a flat plane. Now as she walked through their remains, Twilight recalled how these towers had once stood hundreds of miles above Equestria, stretching from the land and oceans beyond the atmosphere itself as if reaching for the space that ponies would one day not be able to avoid inhabiting.             The cities had covered most of the planet. The population had stood in the tens of trillions. They were gone now. The ponies had gone the route that all ponies of that era had gone, and lay- -if they were lucky- -in cemeteries whose location had been forgotten hundreds of generations ago. The cities, likewise, had fallen. Even at their peak, when Equestria’s technology was at its height, they had required constant maintenance. Those systems had failed quickly, though. The buildings had likely kept standing- -one hundred, one thousand, perhaps ten thousand years- -before they succumbed to nature. The slow forces of wind, rain, ice and snow had slowly eroded them, bending and warping their superstructures. Earthquakes and the ever-expanding mass of glaciers had destroyed the rest.             Yet they still remain. Twilight had no doubt about that now. Some remains of them were buried, like this one, beneath miles of ice or endless tons of rock that the very glaciers that had knocked the skyscrapers down had deposited. The roots of vast trees permeated them, pulling them apart slowly and each year adding feet of leaves as the soil of Equestria slowly swallowed them whole.             The ruins were complicated. Buildings had fallen against each other at angles, and the remains of some were left supporting the fallen bodies of others. This meant that there were all manner of odd caverns and spaces between them, some vast and some miniscule. Many were caved in, but there was more than enough space for a pony and a remnus to move through for the most part.             Except that the only direction they seemed to go was deeper. Twilight began to wonder how far down they actually were, and if the land above was rock, ice, or even if it contained the new city build overhead by a new race that had risen and died in the time she had been away.             These thoughts grew, and after several hours- -or days- -Twilight found herself wandering along the inner border of what had once been the base of the building. When these had been constructed, this particular part was called the “root” of the building, a substantial underground portion meant to anchor the immense towers to the rock below. The fact that they were even in the root at all meant that they were likely miles underneath what had once been Equestria’s surface.             The building had apparently been unfinished. It showed no signs of ever having been occupied, and the floors in many places had been left incomplete, sometimes with the mounting brackets for the construction equipment still attached. What once would have been at least thirty miles high was likely now only one or two deep, a massive square chamber measuring several kilometers on each side. All of it now stood silent, save for the dripping and rushing of distant water and the occasional low creak of the earth itself moving around them.             “It’s telling, isn’t it,” said Twilight. It was not really a question so much as it was a statement.             “What is, Goddess?”             “These buildings. At one time, pony architects spent their lives designing them. They did not live as long back then. They hadn’t become immortal yet. Each of these buildings are somepony’s masterwork.”             “Meaning?”             “Meaning they spent all that effort, all that dedication, all that time, energy, and passion…and now here it is. Broken, lost, and forgotten. We are the only being who will ever see it, left behind broken and destroyed. Their creative contributions to Equestria were pointless.”             “I don’t know if I’d say that,” said Silken, “I’m sure they were useful for a long time. And we’re seeing them, aren’t we? Even if it’s just you that sees it, it’s still worth it.”             “Seeing the work of an artist who died half a million years ago,” said Twilight. “One whose entire bloodline is gone now. No. I disagree with you. I don’t think their lives had a point.”             They walked a few more steps, and Silken’s eyes swiveled toward Twilight. “Did ponies really design these buildings?”             “No. Of course not,” said Twilight. “They were designed by computers and built by robots. The ponies of this era contributed nothing at all, let alone anything anypony would ever remember.”             They continued on, taking the unfinished stone stairs of the building downward for some time before reaching a branch point. It led to a darker tunnel, one that was not as apparently artificial as the rest of the building. Twilight realized that they were getting deeper, below the part of the city and into things that would have been forgotten at the times of its construction.             “Should we go down it?” asked Silken.             Twilight looked down the rest of the stairs and into the blackness below. “The root probably goes down another mile, and beyond that will be basic utilities. If those are still passable, I don’t want to be in them. I say we try it.”             Silken nodded in agreement- -as a machine, she was somewhat obligated to agree with Twilight’s orders constantly- -and they entered the offshoot. It was, indeed, stony and dark, although there were portions that showed what Twilight thought was probably extremely old brick. That was both a good and bad sign. It meant that ponies had been here- -but it also meant that they were no longer in the original city, where the buildings were cast as single pieces.             At first, the tunnel dropped, but then began to rise. This was a good sign, and it encouraged Twilight to push forward when the passage narrowed in some points. Silken, being far thinner than Twilight despite her height, was able to move through them with ease. She was extremely agile and almost pliable, reminding Twilight of how ponies had once been. The time when ponies had been like that, though, had occurred long after she was born. Her passage through the gaps was awkward and clumsy without the use of her magic to aid in disintegrating the obstacles out of her path or to teleport her past them.             At one particular point, after barely managing to squeeze through, Twilight fell flat on her face. She looked up and quickly stood. “No, really,” she said, “thank you for your help.”             “Your welcome,” said Silken, who was staring at the ceiling of the now much wider cavern.             “I was being sarcastic.”             “Again, please preface sarcasm by noting that it is such. I cannot understand it otherwise.”             “Fine. You are the best assistant I’ve ever had. Sarcasm.”             “See. That was not difficult, was it?” Silken sounded oddly unenthused, and she had not taken her eyes off the ceiling.             Twilight looked up. “What are you looking at?”             Silken pointed, and as she did her lights fell on a large, perfectly round hole that was oblique to the more chaotic surface of the cave. “That hole.”             “It’s a hole.”             “It is one of many holes. I have seen several like it. Many in the city, in the far parts, but more down here. I wonder what they are for. Perhaps dug by some creature?”             Twilight shivered. In the time they had spent wandering underground, she had already come to realize that they were not alone. The primary form of life seemed to consist of strange bipedal creatures with bluish, chitinous skin and upper limbs that terminated in points of indeterminate function rather than hands. They had no heads- -instead, each had a globular and highly reflective organ in its chest- -and they made a distressing and unpleasant warbling sound. They had clearly not built the tunnels, though; the tunnels were at least forty feet wide, and the bipeds were far too small and seemed far to primitive.             Suddenly, a cockroach ran by. Twilight nearly screamed as she jumped.             “Oop,” said Silken, pointing. “There’s some life right now! I know that one!”             “Eew eew eew!” cried Twilight as the cockroach spread its wings and took flight down the hall, bumping into the walls several time as it went. “So gross!”             “I find them pleasant,” said Silken. “Although one time one did lay eggs inside me. A lot of eggs. So very many eggs. When they hatched- -”             “Stop talking!” Silken did, and Twilight pushed forward, still thoroughly disgusted. “At least it’s not snakes.” She looked up at the perfect hole over her. “It had better not be snakes…”             They moved down the tunnel until its termination point. Much like how it had originated at the root of one building, it ended at one as well. This building- -or what was left of it- -had at one time been complete, but it seemed that as it had toppled in ancient times the root had been forced sideways. This left it lying at a slant over a thin ridge that Twilight and Silken followed across the vast perimeter, taking care to step over small streams that ran across the path and down a deep, dark chasm that sat between the ledge and the lower half of the tower root. That hole seemed to stretch down all the way to the bottom.             “We need to be careful,” said Twilight.             “I am always equally careful,” said Silken. “Or, rather, I am never cavalier.”             “Just don’t fall. If I lose you down there, I’m not going back for you.”             “It is not myself that I am concerned about.”             Twilight looked up at the building. “If this one snapped off, there’s a chance that the top of it is near the surface. If we can get to the other side and find a way in, we can probably follow it up at least ten levels, maybe even all the way out. And if this is meltwater- -”             “Goddess,” said Silken, suddenly turning toward Twilight. “I am detecting lifesigns.”             “It’s probably just those freaky- -”             Before Twilight could finish her sentence, Twilight was picked up and shoved into a small alcove. The ground was wet, and Twilight was almost indignant about being caused to become damp until she remembered that she was still covered in a hazard suit. Her first instinct was to yell at Silken, but instead she became quiet. If Silken were behaving like this, it meant that whatever she was detecting was a lot more substantial than wailing bipeds or cockroaches.             Silken looked out from the alcove for a moment, and then retreated to a small tunnel in the rear. “This way,” she whispered.             Twilight followed, and they moved upward slightly through a small trickling stream until they reached a higher point with a different vantage of the tower outside. That was when Twilight saw it, and she barely managed to stifle a gasp in response to how close they had nearly come to disaster.             It was the same kind of creature as they had seen outside before. There was no name for them, but Twilight could tell instantly, even if it did not look exactly the same. This one, like the other, was coated in seemingly random pieces of metal, many of which had been laced into its numerous long, mechanical legs. The pieces, though, were more well aligned and selected; few of them were extensively rusty, and almost all of them were whitish in color either by chance or by having been painted in some primitive fashion. This gave Twilight an impossible idea that this had somehow been rendered pale by living so deep underground, although that was ridiculous.             The flesh of the creature was well-obscured beneath its armor, save for the front end of it. There, it contained three long, parallel, needle-like appendages that were at present aglow with plumes of blue plasma. A beam was being emitted by the three, focusing on a part of the tower where the stone façade had been removed and on the golden colored metal beneath. To Twilight’s amazement, the creature was actually managing to cut through; it had already assembled a perfect line of several pony-sized cubes drawn from the girder.             “What is it doing?” whispered Twilight, lifting herself to get a better look. Almost as soon as she did, Silken shoved her back down- -and the fleshy part of the creature near its frontal emitter erupted with deep-blue irised eyes. They swiveled quickly, their pupils narrowing into vertical slits from the light of the plasma beam, scanning the darkness. For a moment, Twilight was absolutely terrified, and wished she was able to curse at herself as loudly as possible. The thing had heard her.             To her immense relief, though, it did not react. The eyes eventually closed, as if they were going to sleep, and morphed; they ceased to become eyes at all, and instead became thin tendrils of gray, scabbing flesh that reached out in a gentle spiral around the three long needles. As they did, the plasma slowed to a dull glow, and the tendrils removed another block of golden metal.             The creature then suddenly made a sound. It was not words, exactly, but a low rumble by a type of speech organ that Twilight had no conception of. From the darkness around it, there was a sound of metal and clanking before several metallic quadrupeds appeared at the sides of the creature. From their thin and damaged appearance, it was immediately clear that they contained none of the flesh that the major creature did. They were pure machines.             Their engines hummed and belched smoke as the large creature formed several tentacles from its body. These solidified into multi-jointed arms with horrifically asymmetrical hands on the ends, although even before that the creature’s body had already started welding new armor and machinery around them. The arms reached forward, taking several blocks and placing them on the backs of the four-legged machines. The machines sagged under the weight, but managed to balance.             The creature itself took several blocks itself, and then turned. Once again, Twilight thought that she had been discovered, but she saw that in its current state the creature was blind save for the cameras imbedded in what could be thought of as its chest and shoulders. Instead of attacking- -it had seen neither Twilight nor Silken- -it turned and climbed up the stone wall, retreating into one of the perfectly round holes and trailing its long unarmored rear tentacles and gills behind. The robots followed it.             Silken and Twilight sat for a long time in silence, hearing only the sound of the dripping water that they were standing in. After what felt like hours, Silken turned to Twilight. “Well, I suppose we know who made the holes.”             Twilight stood up and jumped down to the main floor. She walked to the side of the building, not once taking her eyes off the holes. They were perfect: all the same size, all spaced equally, and all in a perfectly level line. Twilight began to scan them with what little equipment her suit offered, although she found herself wishing that her magic were still intact for this purpose.             “We need to keep moving,” said Silken. “There are a great deal of holes here. And I have a feeling there are many, many more than just one of those creatures.”             Twilight turned to her suddenly. “There…there are holes.”             Silken looked at Twilight, and then at the holes. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”             “No, you don’t understand!” Twilight turned back to them. “Do you have any idea what that means?”             “Not much. No one seemed to be using it.”             “No! This substance!” Twilight put her hoof on the golden metal. Just the slight tap made it ring quietly. “This is structum! It can’t be cut like this!”             Silken looked at Twilight, then at the holes, and then back at Twilight. “Clearly,” she said.             “No, you don’t understand! This alloy isn’t metal, it’s an alchemically prepared substance, it’s like aetherite but with a massive inertial profile.”             “Many substances are prepared using magic.”             “But that’s just it! The reason we used it for all the buildings is because it’s indestructible! Well, not indestructible, it’s still really kind of brittle, but you can’t cut it! It just isn’t possible.” Silken looked to the holes again. “Stop that!”             “I’m just stating an empirical fact.”             “It can only be cut with magic,” said Twilight. “That wasn’t a plasma beam. It was a spell. A very complex spell. That thing was using magic!”             “The atmosphere is contaminated with tremendous quantities of fallout. It is entirely possible that the native life here may have accumulated large quantities of zeroth, and that magic has become commonplace.”             “But that’s unprecedented! Historically, it’s only been unicorns and later alicorns that can do that. Even transplanting marrow and injecting concentrated- -” Twilight suddenly cried out. She had leaned too far to reach the last of the holes, to confirm whether or not it really was exactly square inside. Halfway through her description of a type of experiment that was no longer considered remotely ethical, she fell, tumbling down across the smooth surface of the tower root. She reached out with her magic and with her hooves, attempting to gain purchase, but neither worked well for adhering to the wet, slimy substance. Twilight proceeded to fall into the darkness below.             The building was turned obliquely, so this was not simple falling. Twilight was tumbling, rolling across stone and screaming. At several points she dropped suddenly, slamming into rock and debris but each time rolling farther down the tower. Her suit reacted, reinforcing her exterior and providing some level of padding, but each impact was adequate to knock Twilight’s wind free of her lungs and disorient her greatly.             As Silken faded away into the darkness, so did the lights she carried. Twilight was trapped in the dark, unable to see obstacles or where she was going. This building was supposed to have floors, but they had long-since collapsed, both from the building having tilted and dislodged them as well as the erosion from the glacial meltwater that had been pouring down them for almost five hundred millennia.             Then, all at once, the floor suddenly dropped out. There were no more walls, and no more sound. Twilight was surrounded by nothing at all except blackness as she fell freely downward. With her body and ears covered, there was not even a sense of wind. As she reached terminal velocity, she even felt as though she were not moving at all- -instead, there was just a sensation of floating in empty nothingness.             This- -as well as the numerous impacts on the way down- -dazed Twilight for a moment before her mind restored some sense of logic and she recalled that no matter how deep this hole was, it probably had a bottom. She was an immortal being, but her bones were not indestructible. She had learned from experience that falls at terminal velocity were quite painful.             Twilight retracted the morphiplasm from her back and spread her wings. As they opened, she was suddenly forced sideways. Without a frame of reference, she had deployed her flight organs while sideways. This destabilized her badly, but she managed to compensate. She sat, hovering- -she thought- -as she slowly beat her wings.             Getting a sense of gravity took a moment. Twilight could see nothing, and even the idea of which way was up had become challenging. Worse, without any light source, Twilight had no idea how to get out. The best she could do was light the tip of her horn, although that was barely enough to let her see down to her chest.             Then the room suddenly became brighter. Twilight looked around, still terribly confused, before she looked up and saw a set of white lights descending toward her. She covered her eyes and squinted as the lights grew brighter.             When the lights were extremely close, Twilight realized that they were Silken’s and ascended upward with some difficulty. Life in space where there was no sky to occupy had left her wing muscles weak and inflexible.             “Silken,” she said as she came level with the remus. Silken was falling, although at a ridiculously slow rate. Her descent was similar to that of a feather, with her floating downward at a greatly reduced speed. Considering that Silken weighted several tens of tons, it was a ridiculous sight.             “I’m Mary Poppins!” she cried, looking up at Twilight and Smiling. Then she cleared her throat and regained some of her professionalism.  “Goddess. I am so glad I found you. I was beginning to worry. Are you undamaged?”             “I’m fine.”             “Excellent. I was sure you had, well…made a mess at the bottom.”             “If there even is a bottom.”             “Of course there’s a bottom! I’m headed there right now.”             “Well, it’s the wrong way.” Twilight started flying upward. “We need to get back to the top.”             “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Silken, looking down toward the blackness below her. “My mass control gyros can negate my effective relative gravitational effect to nearly zero, but they cannot invert it. I cannot move upward. Only down.”             “Wha- -then why in the name of Celestia’s moustache did you jump down the hole?!”             “I was not aware that the Solar Goddess was in possession of facial hair,” said Silken, confused. “And I jumped down because I was concerned that you were injured. I can see that you are not. I am glad. It gladdens me.”             “‘Gladdens’ is not a word,” said Twilight, descending to Silken’s side.             “Yes it is. And why are you descending? Your wings will tire. You need to the ledge while you still can.”             “But you can’t fly. I can try to pull you- -”             “You can barely support yourself.” Silken looked even more confused. “We had discussed this earlier and settled our official protocol. Why are you still here?”             “What are you talking about? I didn’t- -”             “You said that if I fell, you would leave me down here. I jumped, but it is substantively the same. I will now sink to the bottom, and you will depart. This is the last time I will ever see you. Serving you was an honor, Goddess. Be sure to submit the proper loss forms to the Navy when you get back to the ship.”             “I’m not leaving you!”             Silken raised the equivalent of an eyebrow. “Goddess Twilight Sparkle, you have to understand. Appearances to the contrary, I am just a piece of equipment. I act like a pony, but I am not. Leaving me behind should not have an emotional impact in a normal, sane individual.”             “Emotional? What? No!” Twilight pointed upward. “You have the light source! Without you, I can’t see a thing up there! Do you really think I can get out of this place without being able to see? Especially with those…things?”             “Oh,” said Silken. “I did not think of that.”             “Of course you didn’t. You’re a piece of equipment. Like a screwdriver that can’t shut it’s speech hole.”             “Screwdrivers do not ordinarily have ‘speech holes’.”             “I know that! But I’ve determined that you are mission-critical equipment. Congratulations. You’ve been promoted.”             Silken looked perplexed but then smiled broadly. She lifted her tiny pointed hooves and tapped them together. “Yay,” she said. “I am so proud.”  Her smile faded quickly, though, into an expression of concern. “But then what about you?”             “Like you said. The hole has to have a bottom. We’ll float down there and wait. If we have to, I’ll just meditate until my horn regenerates and levitate us out. But if we do this, we have to do it together. Because I really, really don’t want to step on a snake in the dark.”             “I am gladdened to know that I am a very important flashlight, Goddess Twilight Sparkle.”             “You should be. Because that is exactly what you are.” Twilight sighed. “Just an important flashlight.”