//------------------------------//
// XV: On-ramp 
// Story: To Outlast 
// by Camolot the Creator 
//------------------------------//

"So. This is it, yes?"

"Mm." I answered in affirmation, "the last subbasement... as far as I can tell, anyway."

Luna grimaced, placing her rifle over her shoulder with magic. "We hope so... this experience has been quite nerve wracking, if w- I am to be entirely honest."

I rubbed a hand over my face, grimace matching hers. "I have to say that I agree... I'll be glad to be out of this elevator and these levels, back on the surface level."

With that, I pressed the button for the final subbasement. There was the familiar faint feeling of sinking in my stomach, and I waited a few seconds for the doors to open. Then a few more. And a little bit more... Luna shifted from hoof to hoof, glancing at the walls and ceiling, looking anxious and muttering to herself, wondering why it was taking so long. I opened my mouth, about to answer her, then closed it again and readied my rifle as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open.

This level was obviously different from the previous two at a mere glance. The room itself was a wide hallway, decorated with some marble and a faded, dusty carpet down the center. Yes, dusty: here, the dust was in a thick layer, coating the floor... odd, that it hadn't been swept up by the same filtration system that had rid the rest of the facility of the dust that hung in its air.

The walls themselves reached up twice my height, ending in a ceiling that was arched, with a number of elegantly curved concrete and steel supports, designed for outward aesthetics as much as for support. A number of pieces of artwork, ranging from paintings to tapestries, from the tattered and old to the obviously relatively new. Most prominent was a painting of the four princesses together, Celestia radiant, Luna self-conscious, Cadance regal with the hint of a smile on her face, and Twilight somewhere between bouncing in excitement at the presence of her mentor and second mother and shyness, her eyes in the direction of the painter.

Luna trotted to the painting itself, eyes roving over each of the princesses in turn, skipping over herself with a frown in the process. I watched quietly as her expression changed with each long look, sorrow for her sister, appraisal for Cadance, and, perhaps not so surprising, fondness for the tiny Princess of Friendship. I allowed her a moment, standing off to the side, before I approached, shoes sending up small clouds of dust as I padded in her direction.

Luna didn't acknowledge me as I walked up to her besides a slight twitch of her ears. Her eyes had returned to her sister, tracing up and down her expression, contemplation written over her face.

"Do you remember this?"

My voice, though quiet, still echoed slightly along the hall of stone, steel and concrete. The sound was, thankfully, quickly deadened by the decorations on the wall, but it didn't stop me from giving the smallest wince. Luna, in the meantime, allowed the sound to die before she replied.

"The painting itself, or when it was painted?"

"When it was painted."

Her head turned towards me, eyes meeting mine for a moment before sliding away again, though this time they stared into the middle distance instead of returning to the paint and canvas.

"Almost... but not... quite. 'Tis almost as if it is a missing tooth, a sequence missing a number... like mine other memories, I am capable of making out the gap, but not the memory itself, except..." This time, her eyes did return to the painting. "I... I remember... in the moment the sketch image was made, Cadance had made a joke... I do not remember what it was, but I remember that 'twas a light jesting jab at Twilight, in good fun." Her eyes turned misty, gazing past the painting, through the wall, into memory. "Sister was amused, though she tried to hide it for Twilight's sake behind her usual monarch's mask, though it, as it ever did, slipped just a tad in the presence of her student. Twilight was, of course, mortified by the joke itself, her big sister in all but blood embarrassing her in front of her greatest hero. I remember that I was... hesitant. I had found the jest as amusing as the both of them, but I wished not to harm poor Twilight's feelings, so I had looked to sister for guidance."

As she spoke, the image almost seemed to change, context filling out what assumption and mere observation had before. An upward quirk of Celestia's mouth, crinkling of the coat about her eyes, head pulled ever so slightly back to hold in a laugh. Luna with a shy, unsure smile, looking to her sister for guidance, not confident in social matters. The fond, slightly mischievous smile on Cadance's face that was reserved for an older sibling, or the closest of friends. A slight blush showing through the fur on Twilight's muzzle, widened eyes with a hint of that self-same mortified embarrassment, and a bit of shock as she realized that the painter had already made the sketch. In that moment, they almost seemed to move, Celestia letting out a light chuckle, Luna making an amused sound that wavered with a lack of confidence, Cadence's fond smile widening, Twilight pulling into herself and groaning.

"It's so... real. Accurate. Candid. It's more like a photograph than a painting."

Luna nodded. "It was a practice invented by a painter five hundred years after my... indiscretion." The same cocktail of emotions that I'd seen more than once before now; guilt, regret, sadness. "The painter would use a spell, or enchanted pencils if they were a pegasus or earth pony, which would allow them to sketch an image almost like a photograph on the canvas. Truly a moment caught in time, the predecessor to the cameras that would come later, allowing life and movement to be caught when normally it would be so difficult. Thus, emotion and reaction, in the moment."

We stood there a few moments longer, gazing at the complex painting, before we moved on down the hall and towards the other end.

There, far opposite the elevator doors, was a single door in the very center of the wall. Heavy doors nearly exactly like the ones that sealed the main entrance to the facility upstairs guarded the entrance, sealed against any intrusion, with a control panel set in the wall to one side. A quick swipe of my admin card and a few key presses, and the doors ground open, allowing us to step through.

This time, it seemed almost like a reception area, with large double doors making some sort of entrance on the far side. Off to the opposite end of a reception desk was a number of elevator doors that were rather unlike the ones that we had just passed through, being that they seemed less... solid. Weaker.

The desk was coated in dust that had gathered in drifts like snowfall, piled up against the short wooden wall that made the outside end of it. The wood itself was withered and slightly rickety, with the entire desk looking as if it would collapse into dust at the slightest of touches, perhaps due to the environment that it was exposed to. Given that, I was mildly impressed that the paintings had held out so well- then again, all Equestrian art pieces seemed remarkably durable, given that some of the tapestries that had adorned the hall behind us were ones that looked remarkably like ones that had hung in the old castle in the Everfree Forest. Actually, come to think of it... we should probably visit that at some point. I turned towards Luna, intent on mentioning this to her, then closed my mouth and tilted my head as I realized she was standing stock still in the exit doors. Curious, I walked up and leaned through, and froze myself.

A huge, circular tunnel lay on the outside of the door. The ceiling was so high that the dim emergency lighting that provided the only light in the space didn't reach entirely to the top, not on its own, but that didn't matter for the simple fact that the entire tube was constructed of glittering crystal.

Light conducted up the insides of the walls, shining through a million facets and faces, shimmering and glittering, managing to make even the faint emergency lights do at least a passable job of illuminating the space. I guessed that the tube went up perhaps two hundred feet, pure crystal walls reaching up to support a vaulted ceiling inlaid with huge lights, twenty feet long and completely dark in their unpowered state.

Below where we stood on a raised balcony, the bottom of the tube was flattened with a thick layer of concrete, evening the space large enough to fit a six lane highway and then some. In fact, from the look of the lines, it WAS a six lane highway, clearly drawn painted lines indicating six lanes on either side of a short median.

I slipped by Luna and stepped out into the room, walking out onto a walkway of glass and steel that crossed the gigantic tube, looking about in awe. Above my head, what looked to be monorail tracks were suspended in the direct center of the tube itself, four tracks in total with steel supports reaching down to plunge themselves into the median. My eyes traced the tracks down the tube, and I balked as I realized that the tube was sealed with a giant wall of steel and concrete. On closer inspection, the construction was actually a pair of doors, one for the highway and one for the tracks, set into a wall of concrete and sealed tight. A glance behind me confirmed that the same thing was present on the opposite side.

"What... is this? How...?" This was... incredible. Beyond anything that I'd seen in the show, reminding me of those few fics that mentioned the long-lost Age of Wonders- and even then, the marvels were constructed of concrete and steel, not crystal as this was.

"Rockwyrms." The word had been whispered, almost in reverence, and as I looked back at Luna, that seemed to be the best description of her expression. She seemed to spend a moment to compose herself to some degree, then hesitantly step farther into the space, continuing, "there was but one true civilization on this continent before the founding of Equestria and the uniting of the three tribes, an empire that stretched back millenia, and cared not for the petty squabbles and intrigue of the surface world above. They... were the Rockwyrms. Great, serpent-like beings, divinely noble in bearing- the dragons were a poor reflection, a fallen remnant of this elder species. They could grow crystal and were attuned to it such that 'twas part of their very bodies, and they constructed great and sweeping wonders that dwarf anything any other species created before or since. Canterlot is built upon the mountain that was once their capital, the crystals part and parcel to a gigantic, mountain-sized, autonomously self-repairing supercomputer."

"They built... this?"

She nodded, eyes wide, taking in the modifications to the tunnel itself. "Their great tunnels of crystal radiated out from their capital in straight lines, linking their array of cities together. They carried not just those of their species, but data, electricity..."

"Data? They had a data network?" I swept my eyes over the interior of the tunnel, fascinated- I could see parts where the crystals, instead of forming the common faceted surface, appeared to have been encouraged to form clear tube-like sections on the outside of the walls, arranged in bundles like fiber optics.

Another nod. "Each city was a... a computing node, in a network. Individual crystal matrices accessed the network, with the nodes handling communication and data storage."

"Personal computers, server arrays..." I whispered to myself. 

This civilization, these Rockwyrms, they'd been a digital age civilization. They had built incredible communications infrastructure that rivaled the infrastructure of human society, though I doubted that they had any sort of orbital network. Incredibly advanced science had driven them, that was obvious just from looking around... and yet, the space was modified for pony use. They'd never shown up in the show, but I wasn't sure that exactly meant anything: after all, the world had hardly burned to the ground, excluding the alternate realities. Still, there was no above-ground evidence of them... "What happened to them?"

"Plague." Luna's voice was grim. "The same network and easy transport that allowed their civilization to reach unheard-of heights made sure that a disease that was perfectly adapted to their crystal-organic hybrid bodies spread far and wide before they even realized what had happened. Nine in ten had died, and many that remained were sterile... they lived long, and their systems were so redundantly built that they could maintain themselves, but there were simply not enough of them left after the absolute reaping of their species." Luna's eyes turned inwards, to memory, once again. "There were a bare few left, when we arrived... by that time, there was naught we could do. Their last few remnants entrusted us with what was left, the secrets of their species, wanting not to be forgotten by time." Luna blinked, shaking her head, then looked up at me with some amount of confusion and fear in her eyes. And... and something else... sadness, and guilt. "We... we did not remember this... none of it. We had forgotten it all. As if it had never existed."

Her wings ruffled, feathers standing up straight. I stepped closer to her side, placing a hand on her wing, feeling the muscles tense under my fingers. I kept it there, waiting as her muscles slowly relaxed and slackened, and she took a deep breath.

"I promised. I promised them myself." She whispered. "I promised that I would never forget them."

"It's not your fault." I whispered back. She simply shook her head in response, but I kept my hand on her anyway until she pushed it off. I stepped back, giving her space, trying to hide the concern I felt.

I fell into step behind her as she trotted forward and out onto the bridge crossing the center of the large, open space, pausing when she stopped at a random piece of railing and turned towards it. I had to quickly suppress a giggle when, despite the somber atmosphere, she turned and placed her muzzle on the railing itself and planted her rear on the concrete floor with a sigh. I scratched the underside of my chin and cleared my throat to cover the sound, feeling a flicker of annoyance as I felt the beginnings of stubble there.

The space was dead silent but for our breathing, and the faintest humming from the lights. It was like a great crystal and steel cathedral, majestic and awe-inspiring, flashing and shimmering in every hue of the rainbow. Every little sound echoed up to the ceiling and down to the floor, and I found myself making tiny sounds just to hear them reverberate throughout the closed chamber.

"I wonder what this place sounded like when it was active, cars blazing through on the highway, trains flying through above..."

She snorted. "Deafening, probably."

"What!?" I yelled, cupping a hand around my ear and frowning in mock concentration. She snorted again, louder, and whacked me with a wing, causing me to let out an indignant "Ow! Meanie!"

"Can you not resist being a dork for five seconds?" She was trying her best to look and sound exasperated, but I could see the corner of her mouth twitching upward out of the corner of my eye. I smiled lightly.

"Nah... you being sad would hurt my delicate constitution. It's an entirely self-centered effort."

She shook her head. "Dork."

I grinned. "Sad sack." 

She pressed a hoof to her chest, looking anguished. "Ohhhh, you have wounded me!"

I snorted in response, and she jerked her head up, letting out a laugh, and I couldn't help adding one of my own. The sound rebounded and echoed throughout the crystal space, bouncing back and forth like the laughter of an auditorium as we traded insult after insult, growing gradually more ridiculous as we went on. 

"Crack-hoof."

"Dinkleburg."

"Poser."

"Skeef."

"Fl- wait, what is a 'skeef'?"

I leaned back, frowning. "You know, my uncle Jimmy was always too wrapped up in his tirades against the evils of the government to explain that one... I always just thought that it was some obscure northern expression."

Luna, shaking slightly in surpressed laughter, waved a wing. After a little time composing herself, she finally said, "I think 'tis about time we declare a cease-fire 'fore we have more casualties, such as our sides."

"Agreed. A cease-fire it is, ma'am!" I offered my hand, wide grin on my face. Luna, in exchange, extended her wing and, after just a moment's hesitation, I took and shook it.

"Besides... we do not want to dawdle about here forever, do we now?"

I nodded. "Definitely. We've got far too much to do, and too little daylight to do it during already."

This time, I didn't trail behind; we walked side by side back to, and through the reception area, into the hallway back to the elevator.