“Is it open?” Sweetie Belle asks.
“The lights are on,” Applebloom responds.
Scootaloo tests the handle. It clicks open, and shrugging, the three ponies walk into the Ponyville library.
“What’re we even lookin for?” Applebloom asks.
“Codebreaking books!” Scootaloo tells her. “Nightmare Moon probly used some kinda easy code, we just gotta find out what kind.”
“I still think it might be an acronym,” Applebloom says.
“How do you even find an acronym?” Scootaloo asks.
“Encyclopedias?” Sweetie Belle offers.
“I guess,” Applebloom says. “Alright, I’ll do that, Scootaloo will look at code books, and Sweetie Belle, you uh… I dunno, just poke around.”
“On it!” the other two ponies announce, and they all run off into the library.
Applebloom drops a huge stack of books onto a reading table and flips one open. A general encyclopedia, first, but she’s prepared with everything she could find, no matter how specific. Textbooks on philosophy, electronics manuals, lists of lists of lists. Anything that could contain a long, unwieldy set of words.
Luckily for her, glossaries exist for just this purpose. It’s simple to find terms and phrases when they’re all provided in alphabetical order at the back of every book. All it takes is a quick glance at the right section, and you can rule out an entire book. Applebloom is able to tear through an entire stack in a matter of minutes.
Still, there are a lot of books in the library. Every stack she exhausts is another stack she has to carry back to the table. Before long she abandons this approach, opting to just check books at the shelves and drop them on the ground if they give her nothing. A layer of discarded tomes marks her path as Applebloom works her way along.
Scootaloo’s task is a bit more challenging. As it turns out, ponies have needed to hide their messages for a long, long time. The problem with this, as any aspiring secret agents would find out, is that learning an existing code means other ponies have learned the code too. So, ponies continued to create more and more complex codes, and other ponies continued to document those codes, until entire libraries could be filled just with codes and how to break them.
Twilight, naturally, has built up just such a library.
Not many ponies have seen just how many books are in Twilight’s library. It’s easy to just see the main room, maybe a side collection, and think to yourself, “Wow, that’s a lot of books.” Very few venture further in- Twilight keeps the most popular sections near the front- so they never see the vast labyrinth of wings and additions hidden away behind the scenes.
Scootaloo, having just stepped out of the ornithology hall and into the codebreaking wing, is just now grasping the full breadth of this place.
This happens to be one of the larger collections, larger even than the main hall itself. There are a lot of codes in Equestria, and for every code, there are at least two books. Plenty of these books are just lists of codes and their ciphers, yes, but the majority of them don’t even cover multiple codes. Lengthy diatribes on the political climates that led to the development of a particular code, or breakdowns of how another code impacted the field of mathematics at the time. These books are as much biographies as they are educational tools.
Twilight, naturally, strives to have them all.
Scootaloo’s first instinct is random chance. She goes to a random shelf, grabs a random book, and picks a random code from the book. Then, she runs the string of letters through the code to see if she gets anything usable. This brings her mixed results. Sometimes, she gets lucky and picks a rather simple code, running through it in a matter of seconds. Other times, she picks less forgiving codes and spends many long, grueling minutes trying to understand it. More than once, she picks up a book only to put it down minutes later, unsure of what code the book is even referencing.
When entropy fails her, Scootaloo falls to order. Slowly, methodically, she decides to just check every book, from left to right. She skips any codes that have multiple steps in the decoding process, hoping this will speed things up. Which it does, but that doesn’t bring Scootaloo any results, just a brain filled to the brim with letters and numbers.
Sweetie Belle is flipping through a drawer of index cards when Scootaloo slumps back into the main hall, ragged and exhausted. “I never wanna see another number for the rest of my life,” she groans as she plops down into a chair.
“I never wanna see another book,” Applebloom mumbles from underneath a pile of textbooks.
“At least you didn’t have to do math,” Scootaloo tells her.
“At least you didn’t have to do manual labor,” Applebloom retorts.
“At least you didn’t-”
“Got it!” Sweetie Belle shouts.
“Got what?” Applebloom asks, pushing books off of herself and sitting up.
Sweetie Belle holds up an index card. “‘Nightmare Night and the Impact of Candy Tariffs on the Local Populace: A Treatise on Childhood,’” she reads off of it. “It’s in the Holiday Economics wing.”
“Huh?” the other two ask.
“The code!” Sweetie Belle says. “It’s the first letters from the title of a book. I found it while you two were goofing off. Let’s go!”
Scootaloo leads the other two through the maze of rooms. “Here it is,” she says as the walk into the Holiday Economics wing.
“What do you think is gonna be in the book?” Applebloom asks.
“Duh, Twilight said it’d be the key out,” Scootaloo says. “I can’t believe we’re the ones that found it.”
“Here’s the book!” Sweetie Belle calls out, and she reaches up to pull it off the shelf. As she does, a click reverberates through the room, and the floor underneath the ponies vanishes.
Wailing, the ponies plummet, and with a series of thuds they land on the floor below. Before they can be relieved, though, they start to slide, and realize they’ve been dropped onto a steep slope. With no way to find traction on the smooth stone, the three find themselves plunging into the unknown.
Lights set into the walls whiz by in a blur, illuminating a winding chute before them. Sharp turns and sudden dives toss the ponies to and fro, never allowing a moment to find their bearings. With each bend the lights change, growing darker, more sinister. A red hue casts over their ride before long, painting the three into a shared nightmare. Then, without warning, the red gives way, replaced with a flash of yellow, a vibrant wall, and finally, a crashing stop.
Fluttershy yelps as a chute opens in the wall beside her and fires three small ponies into her side.