//------------------------------//
// Confrontation 
// Story: Think in Ponies 
// by Silver Arctic Wolf 
//------------------------------//

At long last, they found an elevator clearly marked as going to the surface. “Oh, thank goodness!” Fluttershy was ecstatic to finally get out of that place. The whole time she’d been terrified of running into something from any of the dangerous experiments, but now that they were on their way out, she no longer had to keep looking over her shoulder. “Oh wait, I forgot! We’re heading straight back to her! Oh no, oh no!”
“Don’t worry, Fluttershy! I’m sure we can just sneak on by!” Spike said.
“You don’t understand! The only way out now is through her chamber! And we don’t even know where this elevator’s taking us right now! What if it takes us to somewhere on her grid?! Oh no, oh no, why did I ever agree to this?!”
“Uh oh… But maybe she won’t notice us?” Spike sounded hopeful.
Going up, the light grew brighter. As their elevator passed into the pristine white-tiled area of the facility, a mechanical buzzing rung through the area, followed by a robotic voice. “Oh. There you are. I wasn’t sure you’d make it back. I told you you weren’t going the right way.”
“Eep!” Fluttershy ducked down and threw her hooves over her head.
“She found us…” 
With a concerned look, Twilight put her hoof to her chin. “Testing?”
“The test is over now,” Celestia said. “You had your chance, and you chose to disobey me instead of going to your party for cake. Now it’s time I got rid of you.”
“Twilight, get us out of here!” Fluttershy hissed.
“But she can’t do anything with the portal gun.” Spike said. “There are no portal surfaces in this elevator!”
Following Celestia’s speech, a tumultuous crashing noise shook the facility. And then there was another crash and another. Looking up, the two ponies and Spike saw a giant masher getting ready to mash their elevator.
With a manic look, Fluttershy grabbed Twilight and shook her. “Figure something out! Anything! Hurry!”
“Hmm…” Twilight pressed her nose against the glass so she could study their surroundings.
“You know,” Celestia began, “Attempting to resist will get you a black mark on your record, and your test results will be affected.”
Twilight let out a horrified gasp.
“No, don’t listen to her.” Fluttershy said. “You already passed her test. Just like you passed all of those tests down there. And I’m qualified to make that assessment, because I’m a scientist.”
“Yeah, and we’ve got one more test for you!” Spike said. “Get us out of here, alive. Think you can do it?”
Twilight narrowed her eyes and raised her portal gun. “Let’s do this!”
After taking careful note of all the portal surfaces around them, Twilight formulated a plan. The first problem was the elevator, with its lack of portal surfaces and its glass that trapped them inside. Easily solved: Twilight picked up the Fluttercube and, ignoring Fluttershy’s shrieking, smashed the glass in with it. Second problem, there were no portal surfaces they could reach. But there would be once they got closer to the masher, as the walls closed in. So they’d just have to wait until the last second to escape. That left only the final problem: where to put the exit portal. All of the test chambers were still above them, so Twilight couldn’t aim a shot into them. The only places she could shoot a portal at would just drop everypony back into the abyss they’d come out of. It looked like she was going to have to get creative with her solution. Well, that was what she was best at.
Twilight grabbed the cannon from Fluttershy’s saddlebag and reattached it to Sweetiebot, then used the robot to shoot the anchor point for a tile that was being transported on a rail, thus dislocating the tile and causing it to fall down, right past their elevator. Taking only Spike and her portal gun, Twilight leaped out of the elevator and in midair shot one portal at the falling tile and another at the tile above. 
“Whaaa! This is crazy, Twilight! What are you doing?!” Spike cried out.
“Oh my! Oh my!” Terrified, Fluttershy trembled in the elevator. “What is going on? I don’t understand! Are we supposed to jump too?! I’m so confused!” She threw her hooves over her eyes.
Hitting the falling tile at high speed and passing through her portal, Twilight flew out of her exit portal high above, and got a bird’s eye view of hundreds of test chambers below. She ignored those, and instead looked towards where she was flying towards, a concrete area with a metal ring fence. She looked down where the masher and elevator were, and shot a portal there so her friends could escape, and she shot another portal at the concrete ground. After that, she hit the concrete and skidded across the ground on her hooves. Once she came to a stop, she leaped over to her portal, reached her hoof through, and pulled Fluttershy, Sweetiebot, and the Fluttercube out of the elevator to safety. Seconds after doing so, they heard the sound of metal crashing against metal, as the masher crushed their elevator.
“You did it, Twilight!” Spike cheered.
Whole body still trembling as she lay on the ground, and a look of horror frozen on her face, Fluttershy shot suspicious glances in every direction. “Who?! What?! Where?!”
“Oh. You survived that. I don’t know how you survived that,” Celestia said. “Actually, I do know how. I have the whole thing recorded. But you should know, you didn’t survive that the correct way. The correct way was to not survive that.”
“I want my test scores!” Twilight declared.
“Yeah, that’s right, Celestia!” Spike said. “We’re coming for you, and we’re going to get Twilight’s score, and then we’re getting out of here, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us! How d’you like that, huh?!” In a murmur, Spike added, “Oops… Got carried away. Probably shouldn’t have said that.”
“You think you can escape?” asked Celestia. “Go ahead and try. I’ll make you regret it. And even if you did escape, what you find out there will make you wish you’d stayed.”
“Go, go, go!” Spike yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Eeeep!” Fluttershy let out a squeak before running after Twilight.
They made their way up through the facility. Desperate to stop their advance, Celestia threw all sorts of traps and obstacles at them: laser fields, Sweetiebot ambushes, mashers, emancipation grids, lethally sarcastic remarks; but using her wits and her portal gun, Twilight overcame everything thrown at her, and they advanced rapidly upward, until finally reaching a long hallway that led right to the room that housed Celestia.
“Before we go in there, I think we should consider other options, like-”
Heedless of Fluttershy’s concerns, Twilight rammed right through the door, into the chamber where the maniacal AI was awaiting them. The room was spacious, circular, with a very high ceiling. In the very center was Celestia. She was a giant robot hanging down from the ceiling, with a head shaped like a unicorn’s, horn and all, and a pair of glowing yellow eyes.
“So you made it. Well, I’m in control of this facility, and you’re not going to get through me. I hope you like being tranquilized, because I’m warming up my horse tranquilizer dispensers.”
“Oh my… Well, uh, you’ve got this, Twilight! We believe in you!” Fluttershy said, before ducking into a corner with the Fluttercube and Sweetiebot. She trembled with her hooves over her head.
“Look out, Twilight!” Spike yelled.
“Whoa!” Twilight just barely managed to dodge a tranquilizer shot that came from a little robot cannon near the wall. The shot flew by and hit Celestia, causing a sphere to fall off of her. It was then that Twilight noticed that there were a whole slew of personality cores just like Spike attached to Celestia’s body: including the one that had fallen off, there were five in total. Twilight stole a moment to portal over to the fallen core to pick it up. The core was labeled as “Derpy”, and its yellow eye was drooping off to the side while it prattled on and on about muffins.
“Heh heh heh…” Celestia’s voice grew colder and less robotic. “Did you think you’d done some damage? That’s just an intelligence dampening sphere that the scientists put on me to try and control me. It isn’t important to me. By knocking it off, you’ve just made me smarter, which means you now have even less chance of escaping. Huh… It seems I can’t turn off the tranquilizer dispensers.”
Celestia claimed it wasn’t important, but it seemed that losing it had made her lose control of her tranquilizer turrets. That made Twilight think knocking off the other cores just might be worth a shot, and she’d already formed a plan for doing just that. All it would take was a few portals.
Twilight dashed around the room, dodging tranquilizer shots, looking for the perfect places to put her portals.
“You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, your personnel file does say you’re good at testing. But you know what else it says? It says your parents didn’t like you. They dumped you off at magic school as soon as they could. Did you think you hadn’t seen them in so long because they were too busy? It’s because they didn’t want to see you. And it also says your brother thinks its lame how you call him your BBBFF, because he doesn’t like you either. And your mentor didn’t like you either. She thought you were annoying. That’s why she sent you away, and why you ended up a test subject here.”
“Don’t listen to her, Twilight! She’s just lying! Obviously!” Spike said.
Celestia’s remarks stung. Tears were welling up in her eyes, but with some encouragement from Spike, Twilight got back on her feet and got back to her plan. She shot two portals and then she stood in front of one, waiting. When a dart shot at her, she ducked out of the way, and it flew right into her portal, hitting another of Celestia’s cores and knocking it off. Twilight grabbed the core. This one was a Luna core, and its primary purpose seemed to be to annoy Celestia by nagging and complaining about everything she did. Once she had the core, Twilight tossed it in the corner with Fluttershy.
“Ugghh…” Electricity sparked from the place where the core had fallen, along with a soft buzzing noise. “S-Stop it! If you don’t stop, then I’m going to banish you far away from here! And then I’m going to throw you into a dungeon in the place you’re banished to!”
Ignoring the threat, Twilight continued to tear the cores off, one by one. There was a Discord core that generated a nonstop stream of insane ideas and a Cadence core trying to moralize Celestia through her preaching about love. And then there was only one core left: a Pinkie Pie core incessantly going on and on about cakes and parties. She never stopped talking. She was always reviewing the birthdays in her personnel files and planning her next party, or prattling about random things faster than anypony could follow, or sometimes just saying “cherrychanga” over and over. With a well-placed portal to redirect a tranquilizer dart, Twilight knocked this final core off of Celestia.
“Bzzzzzt!” A shower of sparks flew off of Celestia. “D-Did you think that would do something?! Ha ha ha ha!” Her mechanical voice and maniacal laughter broke up as she spoke, and her tranquilizer turrets were spinning in circles and firing shots at random.
Twilight shot a portal high up on the wall and dove through one on the ground. She dropped back into her portal on the ground to build up speed, launching herself right at Celestia, so she could wrap her hooves around the AI and give her what she needed: a big hug. With a warm smile, Twilight said, “Friendship is magic!”
“You monster…” The sparks stopped and Celestia was silent for a long time. “… Just go.” With a puff of pressurized air, an Aperhoof Emergency Escape Elevator rose out of the ground.
“What?! Seriously?! You’re letting us go?!” Spike asked, incredulous. “Woohoo! You did it, Twilight! I knew you could!”
“I knew it too!” Fluttershy said as she dragged the Sweetiebot and the Fluttercube to the elevator. “I knew you’d figure something out, Twilight. In all this short time I’ve known you, you’ve never given up! But who’d have guessed all we needed to do was show Celestia a little kindness?”
With a jubilant mien, Twilight waved to Celestia as she squeezed into the elevator with her friends. “Bye-bye!”
Celestia gave no reply. She was still processing everything that had happened.