[Misplaced]

by awesomesauce4

Chapter 7 - Inferno

“Are you sure? You didn’t do anything that might’ve caused them to go away?” Sombra pressed, as the four of you continued walking.

“Yes, I’m sure,” you answered patiently, kicking at a rock. You still weren’t sure if you should tell them about your abilities, but you weren’t lying when you said you’ve no idea what’s going on with those things.

The four of you came across an imposing door to your left, a stark difference from the few, sparse prison cells that occasionally lined this tunnel. “Another lab?” you wondered, staring at the access panel to the left of the door. It looked as though it’d already been set to the ‘SUN’ configuration, but the door wasn’t open.

“Anything in there we need?” Chrysalis asked, looking at you curiously.

“No idea… but it’s worth checking, if we can get this door open,” you answer, digging through your backpack.

[ITEMS]

Ruby Key
>Lv 1 Keycard
Pencil/Paper/Clipboard

Pulling out the faded keycard from your backpack, you search for a place to put it. It turns out the panel with tiles on it has a small slot to the right that you can slide your card through, but as soon as you do so, the screen on top flashes red, and reads ‘HIGHER CLEARANCE NEEDED.’

“Well… darn, thought that’d work,” you mutter.

“Doth thee needeth higher authority?” Nightmare Moon wonders.

“Seems so… hmm. What about this hole, here?” Chrysalis asks, pointing to a cone-shaped indent to the right of the door, opposite the access panel.

“Verily, that be a means of allowing Princess Celestia entry directly, forgoing these bespelled ‘keycards.’ Only her horn may allow entrance,” Nightmare Moon answers after a moment, looking at the hole intently.

“Her horn, you say?” Chrysalis muses, before a flash of green washes over her. You get your first look at not-really-Princess Celestia.

She’s… almost identical to Nightmare Moon. Exactly as tall, exactly the same wingspan, even her hair sparkles like Nightmare Moon’s. The only major differences are that her coat is a bright white tinged golden yellow, and her hair weaves and undulates through the air in a pastel rainbow of soft colors. Her armor is golden, with what appear to be amethysts inset into the peytral and crown.

The faux-Celestia’s eyes flash green, and the illusion is broken. “Let’s see…” Chrysalis hisses, inserting her newly-shaped horn into the lock. The panel lights up yellow, and ‘WELCOME, PRINCESS CELESTIA!’ scrolls across it. “Too easy,” Chrysalis scoffs, transforming back into herself and grinning at the three of you.

“Not bad,” Sombra allows.

“Nicely done. Seems I can toss this, then, if you’re going to be around,” you joke, making to throw the keycard behind you.

“Hold onto it, actually. If we get separated by a door, I’d rather you have a means of getting back to me,” Chrysalis denies, taking it and placing it back in your backpack. Shrugging, you follow her into the lab, Sombra and Nightmare Moon bringing up the rear.

Almost immediately, you spot the latest documentation laying on a table, and pick it up to read it. “So this is what they think of you,” you note to Sombra, before reading aloud.

“P-0063 – ‘Sombra’

Subject Characteristics:
Phenotype: Unicorn (var. Shadow)
Gender: Male
Height – 8.58 hooves (1.31 m)
Weight – 45 kg
Coat color: Coal gray
Mane color: Black (style: smoky, may be side effect of shadow magic)
Eye color: Red (Green sclera, cause unknown)
Cutie Mark: None (???)

Psychological evaluation, 1003-12-15, Dr. Shield Array conducting:
-Subject remains as silent and inscrutable as ever. Only growls have been heard from the recording system placed in the opposite cell, and attempts at transcribing or analyzing these have proved entirely fruitless. The most we can tell is that he’s unhappy… but we knew that already.

Containment Procedures (Updated 1003-012-12):

-Electrum cage disguised as standard prison block cell, fitted into remains of cell 0060 and furnished with similar furniture to that seen in the Crystal Empire’s dungeons. Shadow-magic dampening rune arrays (Type Gamma) hidden in adjacent cells 0059 and 0061 to dissuade escape attempts. All Guards are to avoid casting their shadows over the cell until the lighting system arrives, to prevent P-0063 from traversing their shadows and escaping.

-Additional note: Under no circumstances is P-0063 to be allowed any contact with either P-0061 or Her Majesty of the Moon, for reasons that should be obvious. – Her Majesty of the Sun”

“Just like the Crystal Empire’s dungeons… oh, how ironic,” Sombra growled when you were done. “A cruel mockery of my attempts at enslavement, is that what they were after?”

You shrugged. “Dunno, but I’m wondering what all these different ‘Rune Types’ mean. The Delta ones could teleport, the Lambda ones prevented regular magic, and apparently the Gamma type prevent shadow magic? Maybe there’s some useful information around here…” you trail off, searching for more papers. After a few pulled-open drawers, you finally find one with a few papers inside.

“Dear Dr. Shield Array,

Why do we have open slots for up to 9,999 prisoners, anyway? We only have 5 right now, and we don’t even know if they’ll die of old age. Historically, as far as I know, we’ve only ever had 13 at most.

“Dear Junior Intern Carving,

It’s a good question, and has a lot to do with the historical categorization system of Tartarus and Princess Celestia’s new mandate for organization. Truth is, there are over 2,000 cells that have been built in the Prison over the centuries, and before the mandate, they weren’t categorized – Guards wishing to view a certain prisoner would have to be escorted by somepony who knew how to get to said prisoner. With the new numbering system, everyone knows where cell 0683, for instance, is located. This particular complaint of yours, having gained… popularity, is being distributed among the upper-level Guards, so that each of them knows what it says in the event this gets asked again.

Hey, haven’t you seen this paper before? You search through the papers you’ve collected so far, but can’t find it. Wait… no, it was a different complaint of Crystal Carving’s. You put this one in the clipboard anyway, and resume searching. A desk drawer reveals just what you were looking for – drawings of runes line the top of the page.

“Review: Magical efficiency of various types of Barrier Replication Systems”
Researcher Sapphire Spell
Interns Crystal Carving, Doped Amine, Metal Wing
1007-2-24

The Barrier Replication System (BRR) has undergone many modifications, changes, and branching attempts over the three short years following its introduction by Princess Luna. Initial versions were highly unstable, magically inefficient, and tended to break more often than work. Their modern counterparts, however, have improved dramatically, and this short paper serves to categorize the findings of other researchers as to the most recent magical efficiency calculations for each known system as a means of shorthand reference.”

Alpha: At 83% efficiency, this one remains the undisputed princess of the lot. However, its slow charge time, poor dynamic behavior, and ability to be easily overridden by a skilled magic user mean that this is not a useful metric for considering it for future prototypes at the moment.

Beta: 2%. Beta runes were discontinued immediately because of the immense magical strain needed to manufacture just one, putting Princess Celestia in the hospital for three weeks for a cracked horn and minor magical burns around the skull. What little remained of the Beta rune after the incident (a molten puddle) had lost much of its magical enchantment, even when measuring from afar while it was still molten.

Delta: 34%. Delta runes, featuring an ability to sense and teleport away from high concentrations of magic while also locking down a specific magical signature, have excellent response time and dynamic behavior. However, their response to nearby unicorn Guards and Researchers is essentially a waste of magical power, and has been included in this figure. Removing this, their magical efficiency improves to 51%.

Epsilon: -4%. Because Epsilon runes require a constant magical charge by a nearby unicorn, their efficiency drops into the negatives. If they could be powered by a reservoir of magic, their efficiency is speculated to be somewhere around 20%. Epsilon runes can only be made of diamond material instead of the typical sapphire-amethyst hybrid, making them both expensive and difficult to manufacture. However, they are more or less indestructible.

Gamma: 81%, with recent research suggesting these can in theory be improved to 100%. Gamma runes feature a focused beam effect instead of a radial magical emitter, improving efficiency but requiring a complex array of intersecting waves to ensure the target is completely engulfed at all times.

Recently, the Head Researcher has suggested we begin looking into alternate methods of containment that don’t utilize runes. So far, only one has been developed and implemented, using research conducted by Princess Celestia in year 603. This ‘memory spell’ serves as an effective means of containment for the short term, but the spells tend to fade after one year of continuous use, meaning subjects can escape simply by waiting. In addition, they require an alicorn to be cast, making repeated manufacture a tedious use of Princess Celestia’s time.”

“A tedious use of her time?” Nightmare Moon grumbled.

“Hold on, there’s a note here,” you notice, pulling out another paper. To your half-surprise, it’s yet another complaint from Crystal Carving.

“Dear Dr. Shield Array,

I’m filing a formal complaint on the grounds that four years passed during my coffee break. My girlfriend left me and my house has been resold!

“Dear Intern Carving,

First off, interns don’t get coffee breaks, so I’ll be having a talk with your supervisor. Second, this was all outlined in the contract you signed when applying for work here. Third, time and space aren’t linear here, and so far I’ve woke up one morning and grown thirty years older, co-authored a research project with myself, and exited the Isolation Wing directly into a pit of lava. If it’s any consolation, everypony lost four years, and I’ve had to spend the morning reassuring Princess Celestia that nobody’s died and all her research projects are still going. By the way, the current date is 1007-2-13, and ex-King Sombra of the Crystal Empire is on his way to containment. Also, I’m negotiating repayment funds for everypony who’s lost something due to this jump, but if any of you come to me with frivolous repayment demands, I’ll be the one to personally inform Princess Celestia who’s wasting her time.

“Four years…” Nightmare Moon whispered.

“I must have gotten here just before the jump… does that make me four years older?” Chrysalis worried.

“I don’t think so…?” you guess.

“And I got here just after. It’s only been three years for you lot?” Sombra wondered, and the three of you nodded. He grumbled something unintelligibly. “Somepony should’ve said something. What if we get out there and the planet’s not even inhabitable anymore?” Sombra worried.

“…I guess we’d have to find a way to time travel, or go to a different planet,” you remarked in return.

“…Those are very high-level spells, youngling. I know of a place we can go to get to a different world, but it’s not exactly easy to find. As for time travel, well…” Sombra trailed off.

“Let’s not bother worrying about it just yet. We’ll see what the surface is like when we get there,” you decide.

You’re about to leave when something catches your eye – it appears to be a small hatch, maybe half your height, hidden behind one of the filing cabinets. You think it’s probably an air duct or something, so you decide to leave it alone. The four of you step out into the cell-lined corridor, the flickering torches a stark and eye-straining contrast to the even lighting of the lab.

The stone corridor, to your surprise, terminates in a dead end. “…Wait. How do we go deeper, then?” you wondered.

“Not here, obviously. Maybe that secret Key you found unlocks something around here?” Sombra wondered.

You pull it out, inspecting its facets and looking around for anything that might accept a shape like them. “…Well, guess we’ll look around,” you decide.

But after a while of searching every cell in the corridor, even all the way back to the ones near Sombra’s own former containment unit, the four of you are unable to find anything that might even suggest a path forward. “Figures they wouldn’t make it this easy,” Sombra spits as he turns away from yet another empty cell.

“Hold fast, Sombra. It must be possible. Anon, mayhap we hath missed a clue somewhere – human, check thy scrolls?” Nightmare Moon suggests. Shrugging, you take a seat and pull out your backpack, Sombra and Chrysalis sitting beside you as you start pulling papers off the clipboard.

“What’s that?” Sombra snarks, looking at your scribbles.

“A map. Not a very good map, but it works,” you defend.

“Hmph. Well, we’ll find no clues there. Keep going,” Sombra orders. The three of you each take a paper, and begin reading.

You get the one describing Crystal Carving’s complaints about the cell numbering system, and you stare at it. You don’t think the Head Researcher would reveal the whereabouts of a hidden area in Tartarus to a lowly Intern… right? Sombra, evidently, disagrees: He’s stopped reading his own paper and is now reading yours, his horn dangerously close to the underside of your chin as he leans over.

“That’s the one,” he declares, reading thoughtfully.

“How can you tell?” Chrysalis wondered.

“The mention of all the upper Guards having a copy of this, as well as a precise cell number. Let’s see… ‘0683’… that should be…” Sombra trailed off, looking around.

“Up there,” you remember, pointing.

“Nightmare Moon!” Sombra thundered, catching the attention of the faraway lunar demon.

“What?” she calls back, galloping towards the three of you. When she sees you, she slows to an irritable stop, frowning in annoyance. “We thought thou in peril! Wherefore, pray tell, art thee so distressed?!” she lectures.

“We think we found the way out. Can you go check cell number ‘0683’?” Sombra asks, reading off the paper again.

Nightmare Moon sighed. “Anon, then,” she mutters before flying upward. You can see her shift into her vaporous ‘starry’ form as she enters the cell, searching around and muttering some more before returning, a screwdriver clutched in her maw.

“A screwdriver? That’s it?” Chrysalis wonders.

“No…” you trail off, a flash of memory hitting you as Nightmare Moon abruptly stops herself from delivering what would have presumably been a furious retort. “I think that’s exactly what we need.”

Heading back to the Lab, you return to the cabinet, slowly pushing it aside and knocking over a few bins of paper, which spill over the floor.

“…An air vent,” Chrysalis dryly observes.

“That’s what I thought, too…” you agree, panting with exertion. “But why would there be an air vent all the way down here… behind a cabinet?”

Sombra perks up, clearly processing this. “So this is how the upper-level Guards get to the deepest parts of Tartarus? Not very dignified,” he remarks.

“And therefore unlikely for anyone ‘dignified’ to spot and use,” Chrysalis rebuts. “Who, among us, would truthfully think to go through an air vent?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Him, apparently,” Nightmare Moon points out, jerking a hoof at you, and you stifle a chuckle.

Sombra, meanwhile, is inspecting the screwdriver. “Curious…” he notes.

“What?” you ask, glancing at it.

“This handle. It’s got oil of some sort on it,” Sombra reveals.

Chrysalis takes one sniff and recoils. “Sweat. Really old sweat,” she explains in disgust.

“Sweat, not saliva?” Sombra clarifies, and she nods. “Then the last creature to use this was not a pony, nor an equine. That… is more interesting still,” Sombra ponders.

“It also smells of old ponies… Don’t ask me how I know that scent,” Chrysalis mutters.

“An elderly prisoner, then? Hm,” Nightmare Moon trails off thoughtfully.

Meanwhile, you’ve taken the screwdriver and wiped off the cold, slightly sticky sweat on your shorts, before setting to unscrewing the cover to the air duct. While you do so, you look back at your friends, making a few quick judgments and determining that they could just barely fit inside if they really stretched themselves. Then again, they all did have some kind of alternate form that would allow them easier access…

“Looks like we’re ready to head out, then. Does anyone have anything else to do before we enter this thing? I really don’t want to go back through it, and we might not even be able to,” you note. Hearing nothing but denials from the others, you begin crawling through the vent shaft, and you can hear the others transforming into their various forms and following behind.

As you crawl through the darkness, the way lit only by Nightmare Moon’s soft blue glow behind you, you briefly see something peek out at you from far down the shaft, what looks to be more than a hundred feet away. It looked like one of those Melted ponies, except its mouth was set in a horrifying rictus of a grin and its eyes… they were open as wide as they could go, pupils staring right at you even as the eyeballs themselves seemed to rotate in their sockets… Shuddering, you pressed on.

The duct slowly began to warm, what was at first a welcome change to the cold, damp caves and corridors of Tartarus quickly turning to an uncomfortable, then unbearable heat from the metallic duct. The air in the shaft, though, was still pleasantly cool, and your clothes protected you from the worst of the hot metal surface.

“Ghh… this burns…” you hear Chrysalis mutter from somewhere behind you.

“I can see a light up ahead,” you spot. “Not much farther now.”

The four of you slowly emerge onto a bright red, rocky outcropping. Stalagmites litter the ceiling, some looking as big as houses, but they don’t catch your eyes quite as immediately as the lake of lava directly below you. The bright orange-and-black surface roils, churns and bubbles, seemingly far too nonviscous compared to the slow-flowing magma you recall seeing… somewhere. There is what appears to be the outline of another tunnel in front of you, but it seems the crystal passageway over to it has crumbled into the molten liquid, the white crystalline stairs being all that’s left. “Looks like our way forward… melted,” you remark, panting and sweating slightly – even up here, the heat is broiling.

“We canst fly across… nay…?” Nightmare Moon points out, panting as well – none of you seem to be doing too good in this heat.

“There’s a bulletin board on the other side, looks like it has some items next to it,” Sombra spots, somehow seeing through the hazy heatwaves that make everything look fuzzy and indistinct.

Nightmare Moon lowers herself to the floor, and you look at her strangely. “Doth thee possesseth wings to fly with?” she snarks.

“…No,” you admit with a small smile.

“Then we shalt carry thee. Now get on,” she orders.

The flight across isn’t very eventful, aside from the burning feeling intensifying due to the updrafts from the superheated lava below. Once the four of you land on the opposing side, Sombra immediately trots over to inspect the bulletin board. “Level 03: Experimental – LEVEL 3 CLEARANCE REQUIRED,” he reads aloud, wrinkling his nose.

“Experimental?” you repeat blankly.

“A place for experimentation on the various runes, mayhap?” Nightmare Moon wonders.

“Or experimentation on us,” Sombra rebuts, and a memory stirs for you.

“I read a paper near the surface that said something called ‘Tirek’ had been moved down here after some kind of incident. Anyone who wanted more information had to deal with either the Head Researcher or someone called ‘Her Royal Majesty,’” you recalled.

“Her Royal Majesty is undoubtedly Celestia,” Chrysalis hisses in distaste, pausing to flick some sweat from her wings by buzzing them.

“The Head Researcher is an old mare named Shield Array. If I recall, she was responsible for my capture,” Sombra notes, equally annoyed.

Nightmare Moon, however, looked distinctly fearful. “Tirek…” she whispered.

“What is ‘Tirek?’” Chrysalis asked, noting her expression, and even Sombra looked over curiously.

“A centaur, from a faraway land. Of all prisoners here, he is one to be avoided. His mere proximity can result in magic drain from nearby creatures, which in turn strengthens him. We – Princess Celestia and Princess Luna – successfully contained him in his rampage, shortly after the Crystal War, with stronger magicks than he couldst handle. We art not aware of what ‘incident’ caused him to be moved down here, but we are aware that the transfer also occurred so that we could be placed in Isolation in his stead,” Nightmare Moon explained.

“Come to think of it, I did see a massive cage being transported past my cell shortly before I got here. How’d they get that thing through the air vent, anyway?” Sombra wondered.

“Maybe it didn’t used to be just a vent?” you theorized.

“Enough talking, some of us are boiling alive here. Can we move?” Chrysalis interjected.

“Yes,” Sombra begrudgingly agreed, tugging at his cape.

As the group quickly heads towards the next path, a somewhat-solidified magma channel between two massive stone monoliths, you pull out that strange statistics page again. Your ‘magic’ has since increased to [10/50], and the ‘SPARED’ count has gone up by one, but apart from that, nothing’s changed. Shrugging to yourself, you close it and focus on not incinerating your feet as you hop from solid platform to solid platform.

As the four of you traverse the channel, you notice even the solidified portions of magma are still extremely hot, and you can feel the rubber soles of your shoes melting when you stay in any one place for too long. Nightmare Moon and Sombra are having an especially rough time of it, wincing every time they take a step – you suppose the metal in their shoes isn’t helping much. Strangely, Chrysalis appears to be largely unaffected by the heat of the ground beneath the lot of you – maybe she shapeshifted the bottoms of her hooves into something heat-resistant?

“Maybe turn into… your ‘vapor’ forms?” you suggest, pausing to leap over a particularly wide river of magma. Nightmare Moon sighs and nods, turning into her usual starry mist, but Sombra shakes his head.

“Too tired… can’t do it. I’ll just have to bear it,” he explained. Without another word, you bend over and scoop him up, straining against his weight but refusing to drop him as you quicken your step a little. “Wha-“ Sombra exclaimed, initially struggling before seeing your logic. “Don’t drop me…” he mutters, eyeing the small streams of magma around you uneasily. “I won’t,” you promise.

The path continues on for what feels like an eternity, but is probably just a half hour or so. Eventually, you come out into another atrium cave, and looking back, you can see that the narrow channel through which the four of you were traversing is actually an area between the bases of two of the giant stalagmites that hold up the structures far above your heads. Ahead, a rickety wooden bridge is suspended over another lake of magma.

“Wood? Here?!” Sombra remarks exasperatedly.

“Didn’t they like building with stone up above?” you agree, looking at it suspiciously. Beyond the bridge, a grayish-blue, decrepit-looking facility awaits, and you can feel a cool breeze from somewhere in that direction.

“Who cares? There’s air conditioning over there, let’s go,” Chrysalis retorts, already making her way for the bridge.

“Are we sure this bridge is safe, though? You can’t fly over?” You point out.

Chrysalis, looking back at her wings and attempting to buzz them like she normally does, gives up with a sigh. “It’s no use – they’re soaked from all the sweat. It’ll be fine,” she scoffs, stepping onto the bridge without hesitation. Sombra, sensing what’s about to happen, hops out of your arms.

This gives you just enough time to sprint forward as Chrysalis’ leg goes through a board, the vibrations causing the other end of the bridge to snap off and begin falling. Without even thinking about it, you dive over the edge after her, ignoring Nightmare Moon’s and Sombra’s anguished cries.