It’s close to two weeks later when she finally lays the final plank of her new hallway… again. She’d built it once, then found that her generator is too large to fit through the door in the thing… it needs a name. But regardless, her generator is too large to fit in, and she can’t leave it in her third basement without defeating the purpose of the secret door, so she’s built a little alcove off to the side of her hallway, near the bottom; in a few seconds, she’ll be putting the generator here. She levitates it up from where it had been rather effectively barricading the lower end of the walkway, slides it into the alcove, and applies the rotational enchantment on the cut-off shaft that normally goes to a massive turbine head, to be spun by water. She’ll have to recharge it every week or so, just like the one still in her basement, if she expects it to work indefinitely; unfortunately, magic is not an infinite resource.
With the generator set and running, she lifts the coiled cable resting on top of it, plugging one end into the generator and uncoiling it as she trots to the open door at the bottom of the tunnel. She navigates quickly to the location she’d first found it to be electrical and, selecting the big cable she’d assumed to carry power, makes an attempt to connect the two.
Well, that worked, she supposes. It’s taken her fifteen minutes of poking, prodding, and connecting, but she’s finally found something to connect her wire to that does something: A light came on, flickering dimly in the distance. She leaves the cable connected- good thing she’d thought to bring such a long coil- and trots over to the flickering light.
She hadn’t been able to figure out what those weird panels were back when she found the thing, but now it’s rather clear it isn’t far off from what her electric lightbulb is up… hall? Eh, upstairs is close enough; she’s easily six levels below her basement’s lowest point right now, albeit under the neighbor’s house. She’d made sure to put this thing deep, since it’s far larger than her property.
Now, she looks along the ceiling, identifying the lights. She tries a restoration spell on the blinking one, and it stabilizes to a steady, soft glow… very unlike the one upstairs. Oh well- perhaps this is another version of bulb, much like the ones in the displays on her second-level basement kitchen appliances? … Whatever- it’s a gentle white, much like the magical light emanating from her horn. She tries switching off her hornlight for a second- and yes, that light is definitely much nicer than the one staring at a blackboard upstairs. She starts casting restorative spells on the rest of the lights- starting with the path out, but then she moves further into the thing. She’s only gotten the lights on the right side of each hallway, going in; this way, she’ll always know which way is out, and never get lost. She’d had to restrict her exploration before, thanks to the lack of a way to track her position.
Just like she’d done while she was still in the desert, she has to force all the doors open. Just like before, when she pushes them open, they stay open. Not that she expected anything different without a switch, but the one she’d pulled what she thinks was an access panel off of had definitely been electrical. As a matter of fact, that’s where she’d attached her power- to what looked like the main power line feeding the door control.
This thing is enormous. She’s been walking, restoring right-hand bulbs, and opening doors for almost half an hour. In actuality, it’s probably only a five or ten minute walk, when she’s not slowed down by lights and doors- but so? She forces open another door. She’s so far found a few rooms. Some of them have had rows and rows of what probably used to be strange thronelike chairs. Some of them had been empty, some others had the remains of something on the floor. She’d even found one with a great big collapsing lump of metal in it.
This one is a little different. It forces open just as easily, though a hiss of pressure greets her when she opens it. She flares her hornlight into the room… The giant room. It takes her a few seconds’ spellwork to safe the stale air for her consumption before she steps into the mostly empty room.
She looks up at the truly enormous ball of something in front of her. Given the numerous cables connecting to it all over, she’s inclined to believe it’s something important… Which reminds her- those tiny little chip-brains in her upstairs appliances have lots of little wires poking out of them, varying by appliance. The heatless oven has the most… and whatever this is, if she’s found it’s equivalent structure, it’s got to do something significantly more impressive than heat food without using heat. She trots around it… And finally finds something familiar. Not just cables and weird balls- this one is most certainly still abnormal, but she at least recognizes the construction as some kind of ‘circuit board’, albeit using odd not-silicon materials, and much of it has disintegrated with time.
It takes her a minute to verify; this is the only one of these boards- out of several places around the room it looks like others used to be mounted- that hasn’t completely disintegrated. Unfortunately, even the most powerful restorative spell can’t recreate that which was completely destroyed or lost, only restore that which is still there. So, she focuses on restoring this one. Duplication… probably won’t work, but she can give it a try sometime else. At least restorative spells don’t require her to understand how it works… or even what it is in the first place, only that it had a different state in the past she wants it to reacquire.
… It’s doing something, she supposes, but she can’t tell. Perhaps this is just the brain-chip, and the display is elsewhere? She scowls, checks the rest of the room for anything interesting, and leaves, returning to her journey past. She peeks into a few more rooms, climbs a couple flights of stairs…
Huh. Another kind of room. This one’s got only one of those thronelike chairs in it, facing a wall of broken… stuff. One of them remains… and it has a striking visual similarity to the display on her oven, despite being far larger. She directs her restoration spell at it- and, some fifteen seconds later, is rewarded with a dim, black glow coming off of it- something none of her appliance displays had done.
Then, with a faint click noise, it goes dark once again. She scowls; perhaps it has nothing to display? It’d make sense for it to stay off if that’s the case. A diagnostic spell… Yep, the cables connected to the back are broken… More restoration casting.
Two hours. It had taken two hours of tracing and restoring to finally get the display to come back on again. Not that it helped much… now, there’s a blinking line on it.
Perhaps it does help that, in restoring the chair (it’s connected to the same place, who knew), she’s discovered what looks like some sort of control panel. It’s got quite a few more buttons than her ovens upstairs, though- and unlike those, these actually move when you push on them. She pokes at them a little bit, standing next to the strange chair, with a hoof. They’ve got those strange characters on them, much like that book- the same characters, as a matter of fact. She has no clue what each individual letter is called, nor how they’re pronounced- but this is clearly intended for entering stuff into…
She looks up at the display once again- and nearly breaks down laughing at herself. The blinking horizontal line has moved down and over. Above it is two lines of white writing. The first one looks like jibberish- probably her random key pushing. A similar, yet different, stream of random characters precedes the blinking line on the third row.
The second, row, however, is red.
Command Not Recognized: ’lsb.x026t,b
It replicated her first stream of characters flawlessly. And, probably, instantly… She looks back at the input thing, positions her hoof, and watches the screen as she lowers it on that “Enter” button.
File Not Found: ,457z/2-vu4nt
Yep, instantly. She builds an evil grin, lights her horn, and starts tickering away at these buttons, punching out sequences to produce words… Yep, it’s working.
>hello
Command Not Recognized: hello
>who’s
Command Not Recognized: who’s
>there
Command Not Recognized: there
>7/25
0.28
She stares at the result of her input of the date for several seconds. Then, she tries some more.
>9/3
3
>4-5
-1
>9=7
False
>4x5
Command Not Recognized: 4x5
Disappointed, she finally turns away. So, it can do math. Some math, that is- it had gone all ‘not recognized’ again on multiplication. Unless this thing uses a different symbol to represent it…? She’ll also have to figure out how to reach the plus sign she’d shot for. She hadn’t realized it had given her an equals instead until after she had eagerly punched the ‘enter’ button again and looked up at the display.
At least, she thinks it’s a plus sign, and she thinks it’s an equals; her book uses those symbols enough she understands their functions, and has taken to using the names of the Equestrian equivalents. Much like the numbers they’re surrounded with, too- though that had involved a lot of trial-and-error. It does seem that this strange language uses a base-ten number system, just like Equestria; she’s also taken to using the Equestrian names for the numbers. The rest of the symbols, presumably letters, are a little harder to name- so she hasn’t. She hasn’t needed to.
On that thought, she casts a momentary spell… Oh shoot, it’s getting late! She volunteered to show the new mare around town today; the mayor finally talked Pinkie Pie down from exploding in everypony’s face, though the new mare will probably still get a party. Oh, forget probably. But regardless, she’ll be getting off the train in about fifteen minutes! She takes off galloping, thankful for her previous decision to only fix the lights on one side of each hallway.