//------------------------------// // 8 - Forgotten Peoples // Story: The Needle // by Rambling Writer //------------------------------// “So what’ll it take for us to turn back?” Windrose asked. “I mean, no, not, I can’t expect just the- river to…” She gestured back. They’d left the river behind them five minutes ago and were heading east. “It’s, that’s just… weird… space. But, but is there… anything that… you know?” “When someone gets hurt,” said Daring, her eyes forward. Eventually, Windrose nodded glumly. “Okay.” In reality, it was hardly that simple. This was the main reason Daring liked working alone: she only had to worry about herself. Now she had the lives of four others on her shoulders. If anything happened to them, it’d be partially her fault for bringing them into Needle Vale in the first place. Was it really her right to keep them out here and possibly doom them? She didn’t even need the help, not really. She’d thought the terrain would be worse than- Daring called a halt as they reached the eastern edge of the valley and the entire team gathered around her. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, pacing back and forth. “I hired you in case I needed help with bad terrain or animals. And so far…” She gestured out at the valley. “We haven’t had much of those. What we have had is sudden amnesia and twisted space. So…” She looked at each person in turn. “If you want to turn around, go back through Needle Vale, and return to Light’s Edge, you can. You can keep the money I’ve paid you. This is probably going to get worse, and I don’t want you to feel like you have to stay.” She sat down. “What’ll it be?” Not the greatest of speeches, but that had never been one of her strong suits. “Go back?” Fallende blurted. “Now? Are you kidding?” She put a hoof to her mouth and snickered. “Daring, it’s just getting good. I didn’t think we’d see any weird crap like looping rivers. Yeah, not turning around in a million years. Not now.” “While I certainly appreciate the concern,” Stalwart said, flicking her ears, “I think it’s still a bit much at this stage of the game. We’re farther than anyone’s gotten before, seeing things no one’s seen, and while, true, we have encountered some, ah, issues, I hardly think they’re worth turning tail and running.” She shook her head. “No, I plan on staying, seeing this through for as long as possible, until we-” Rangifera lightly bopped Stalwart on the head and shrugged. “Half interested, half too lazy to turn around. Staying, my practical pegasus.” She smiled, the wounds from the wolf attack on her mouth twisting slightly. “I…” Windrose bit her lip. “I… kinda want to go back, but… It’s, like Fallende said, now? I’m… kinda curious, too. Besides…” Her voice dropped to a mumble. “…going back now means going back through that blizzard alone. Nope.” Daring nodded. “Okay, then. Glad to hear it.” Partly. She wasn’t sure if any of this was a good thing or a bad thing, but she definitely felt a bit less responsible. “Now, let’s find us some more weirdness.” The sun was about two-thirds of the way to the mountaintops when she saw it. They were heading north again, following the edge of the valley. The cold clawed at her and the sun beat down on her and Daring continued to see nothing out of the ordinary. She kept a special watch on the landmarks; thankfully, nothing repeated, and when she glanced at the mountains Windrose had pointed out, the peaks were overlapping. Then she spotted a dark shape through the snow spanning a tiny gully, distant, probably too distant for non-pegasus eyes to see. It wouldn’t have caught her attention except that it was suspiciously rectangular. She held up a hoof. “Hang on. I…” She squinted. Yes, it was rectangular, with clear right angles. “I think I see a…” What was she thinking of? “…a bridge.” She broke into a trot, bounding through the snow. “It wouldn’t happen to just be a log that fell over, would it?” called Stalwart. The shape was becoming clearer. “No, no, it’s definitely a real bridge!” yelled Daring. She slid to a stop at it, spraying snow everywhere. It wasn’t much of a bridge, just something to cross a small ditch, but it was obviously artificial, with the rectangular stones and clear arch. Daring brushed some snow from the top. The surface of the bridge was well-worn. By what, she couldn’t say. Once the others had caught up, Stalwart cocked her head. “Huh,” she said. “Curiouser and curiouser. There goes the mystique of being the first people in this place. Kind of a disappointment, really. You get to be the first at something, and then, nope! Someone else did it first, and they did it years ago, too! And for some reason, they lied about doing the thing, and the lie didn’t even help them, not really, because-” “Just for clarity,” Windrose said loudly, “this-” She jabbed at the bridge. “-should not be here, right?” “Right,” said Rangifera. “This should not be here. Obviously.” She shot a Look at Windrose. “Juuust for clarity, my blunt backpacker.” She slid down into the ditch and crawled underneath the bridge to inspect it. Fallende grinned at Windrose. “You’re not re-thinking not backing out, are you?” “No, just… No, I’m not. Just… a way to get my thoughts in order.” Rangifera pulled herself out from the other side of the bridge. “Whoever built this, they built it to last,” she said. “I didn’t see any signs of weakness.” “Hmm.” Daring stared at the bridge, then up the slope, where a path leading from it would go. There was no sign of one, if only because the snow covered it. Her wings twitched; she knew exactly what she needed to do. “Who’s up for a little detour? Come on.” She headed up the slope, pushing through snow drifts, her team close behind. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. The slope curved between two ridges and came to an abrupt halt at the bottom of a cliff, invisible from ground level. And set neatly into the cliff was a giant rusty steel door. “Whoa,” said Stalwart. Somehow, that was all she could say. “Whoa indeed,” said Rangifera. Daring couldn’t believe it. An Equestrian bunker, here, where no one was supposed to have reached. And it had to be Equestrian; Celestia’s cutie mark was emblazoned over the door like a neon sign. The door itself was big and, in spite of the rust, obviously sturdy. Iron bands crossed it at the top and bottom and a rotating handle was set at one side. If there was a way for the ponies inside to see out, Daring couldn’t find it from this side. Aside from the cutie mark above the door, there wasn’t anything identifying, no signs or plaques or anything. “That’s some building,” said Fallende. “They definitely didn’t do this by halves.” She rapped the door with a hoof. A deep, bell-like peal rang out through the valley. “That’s the butt tattoo of your princess, right?” “Cutie mark, but yeah,” said Daring. “Close enough. What do you think ponies were doing out here?” “No clue.” Daring tilted her head this way and that. The door and frame continued to both look plain. “Maybe they were researching Needle Vale. Like we’re doing, but more thorough.” “Maybe. But no one in Light’s Edge heard of anything like a pony construction group going in. Why keep it a secret?” “Dunno.” Everyone stared at the door. The wind howled through the trees below. “So, uh… mysterious closed door, strange building, middle of nowhere. Should we be worried?” asked Windrose. “I don’t think so.” Daring ran her hoof over the door as she examined it closely. No runes were carved into the metal. No warnings were etched into its surface. No blood coated it like paint. Nothing. Just an old door. “Maybe a little if it’s locked, a lot if it’s been welded shut, enough to run away immediately if it’s been welded shut from the inside.” She pushed hard at the handle and, with some effort, spun. Once it could spin no more, Daring grabbed the handle and tugged. The door wobbled, but didn’t move. She wrapped both front hooves around the handle, planted a rear hoof on the doorframe, and pulled with all her might. Groaning like it hadn’t been opened in ages, the door slid forward an inch. “I could use some help,” grunted Daring; no matter how much she pulled, the door refused to move. Stalwart and Rangifera quickly added their own magical pull. The door wailed, a hideous metal-on-metal sound, as it ground open. Once there was enough space, Windrose darted forward and threw her strength into pushing. After that, the door opened easily, although it released a cloud of rusty dust. Beyond the frame yawned blackness, like the maw of some great beast. Fallende lit up her antlers. A corridor stretched away, the beast’s gullet. The floors, walls, and ceiling were all the dull, utilitarian gray of concrete. Light gems were set into the ceiling; Daring fiddled with a switch just inside the door, but they didn’t come on. After taking a few steps inside, Daring sniffed. The air was dry, still, and sterile, like an overclean operating room. She shrugged off her bags and set them carefully on the ground. “A bunker, built here in secret, long abandoned,” she said, half to herself, half to the others. “I think something like this is worth investigating. Don’t you?” Her voice echoed back at her. She walked down the hall without waiting for a response. She’d bet money that the others would follow her. And once they’d gotten rid of their own bags, they did. Rangifera was behind her in a second, her antlers glowing even more brightly, still with her spear. Fallende and Stalwart followed in another second, and even Windrose quietly pulled herself along. Daring sniffed again. No change in the air. After passing through the featureless corridor, they came to another door, lighter than the first but otherwise in the same design. This one opened more easily, revealing a large room that Daring guessed was some sort of lobby or hub. There was nothing on the walls or floor in the way of decoration. Several hallways led out from the walls, each with at least one plaque next to it. This deep underground, even their hoofsteps were echoing loudly. “Find out what those signs say,” Daring said to no one in particular, pointing to one side of the room. “I’ll check the ones over here out.” She pulled out a portable light gem from her bags, rattled it, and trotted over to a hallway. The plaque was metal and the letters were raised, so she could still read them easily. “Dormitories and… Hydroponics,” she yelled across the room, then flinched at the sound of her echoes. “Maintenance and Storage over here, my loud-mouthed leader,” said Rangifera from a circle of light on another wall. She managed to keep her voice down to a reasonable level. “Laboratories, Offices, and Cafeteria,” added Stalwart from yet another wall. The group reconvened back in the center of the room. “We’ll start with the dorms,” Daring said. “Anything the ponies here left might tell us what was going on here without us needing to go to the labs, because, well, nothing good happens in abandoned labs.” Everyone nodded at that, with the exception of the obvious. Windrose was at the back of the pack as they walked down the corridor to the dorms, but Daring could still hear her easily. “Of course,” Windrose muttered to herself, “I just had to sign up for the trip where we have to go and do stupid things. Any other expedition, we’d be noping it straight out of here. But noooooooo, let’s go into the creepy abandoned underground facility that shouldn’t even be there in the first place! It’ll be fuuuuuun!” She snorted. “I swear to the Sisters…” “You don’t need to stay in here,” said Daring, unable to keep a little bit of annoyance from creeping into her voice. “Just wait back outside. It’ll be-” “Stars above, no!” squawked Windrose. The echo sounded a lot like a chicken. “We are not splitting up! The second we do, something’s gonna start picking us off one by one!” “Picking us off one by one? You read too many horror stories, my panicky pansy,” said Rangifera. She lightly poked Windrose with her spear. Windrose batted it away. “You don’t read enough!” It was a mistake of her to yell; everyone flinched at the echo, which didn’t let up for half a minute. Rangifera and Windrose looked at each other and mimed zipping their mouths shut at the same time. Daring had expected the hallway to the dorms to be less spartan, if only for morale, but was sorely disappointed. It was the same blank, austere gray everywhere else in the facility, made worse by the lighting from everyone’s horns, antlers, or light gems. All the different sources combined to make colors that, while not nauseating, definitely weren’t nice to look at. Daring was almost relieved when they reached a junction in the hallway. Several signs were up, pointing them in the relevant directions. Just a few feet into the hallway leading to the ponies’ quarters were more doors at regular intervals, wooden but still preserved from the chill and still air. Nothing that could make them rot could survive here. There were more signs next to the doors. Daring peered at the first one. “Alpha Dorms,” she read aloud. “This’s Beta Dorms,” Rangifera said, reading the sign across the hall. Fallende pointed down the hall; another set of doors was visible at the edge of the gloom. “Who wants to bet those are Kappa and Delta Dorms?” “I certainly don’t,” said Stalwart, “because they’d be Gamma and Delta. Kappa’s closer in position to K than to C.” “You three check that room,” Daring said, pointing at Rangifera, Fallende and Windrose. “Stalwart and I’ll get this one. And stay close. We don’t want to get lost in here or-” She glanced sideways at Windrose. “-get picked off one by one.” (Windrose pouted and stared defiantly at Daring.) Unfortunately, that method of splitting up meant Daring was down two of her three best light sources, and the Alpha Dorms were cloaked in darkness when she entered. She absently flicked at the light switch on the wall. She got exactly what she expected: nothing. She rattled her light gem to brighten it and did a circuit of the room. The walls were the same gray concrete as everything else. There were four sets of utilitarian metal bunk beds, all with simple, cotlike mattresses and a set of folded sheets on top. Steamer trunks sat at the foot of each bed; Daring eagerly brought her light gem up close and, after a bit of searching, found their name placards. Unfortunately, the names there meant nothing to her: Polar Vortex, Thaumic Current, Dynamo, Meniscus… She tried one, but it was locked. “Reminds me of my time in the guard,” Stalwart said. She nudged one of the bunks; it wobbled slightly. “You’ll sleep on these piece-of-crap beds, and by thunder, you’ll love it. But I guess whoever was working out here didn’t do so for the amenities like the beautiful weather or the convenient location. Wonder if they knew just what they were getting into. They probably had an idea, at least partially. Can’t imagine somepony expecting a luxury resort out here, but you never know…” Daring pulled open the drawers in the bedside tables, always coming up with nothing. She found a journal in one and eagerly opened it, only to find it completely blank. She threw it away in disappointment. “It’s like they stopped moving in halfway through and didn’t bother to take anything away,” she said. She took another look at the trunk she’d tried. “Think you can open this?” “Most definitely.” Stalwart poked her horn at the lock and bit her tongue in concentration. “Ah… Eh… Ha.” The lock clicked and she tugged the lid open. Inside was mostly neatly folded cold-weather clothes with some books. Daring dug through to the lower layers of the trunk, but that was it. “Hmm. Bit of a disappointment, really,” Stalwart said. She looked around the room and shrugged. “Don’t think we’ll be finding anything more in here.” Daring and Stalwart exited Alpha Dorms at the same time the others exited Beta Dorms. “There was some luggage, but otherwise, a whole lot of jack squat,” Fallende said. “Like they set up for ponies who never came.” “Same in ours,” said Daring. “And those’re probably the same.” She pointed down the hall. “There’s no point in sticking around here. Let’s check out hydroponics.” That proved to be an even bigger disappointment that raised even more questions than the dormitories. Tables with dry tubs for water were set out around a series of rooms, nice and neat and orderly, and that was it. There weren’t even any bags for seeds. “Why would they set all this crap up,” Fallende said, running a hoof through one of the tubs, “if they weren’t going to do anything with it? It’s not like they left in a hurry.” “What makes you think they didn’t?” Daring asked. She reached beneath the lower shelf of a table on the off chance there was something she couldn’t see. Nothing. “Everything’s neat and the doors were closed,” said Fallende. “I’ve seen places that were quickly deserted, and believe me-” She wagged a hoof at Daring. “-this doesn’t look like any of those.” “Yeah.” Windrose was flipping through cupboards, all empty. “It’s creepy as Tartarus, but I don’t think there was any mad dash to get out because they dug too deep or something.” She paused. “Unless the storage rooms are messed up something fierce.” They weren’t. They were filled with large, still-sealed crates set up in neat rows on pallets, just waiting to be unpacked. There was no sign of panic. The group pried a few crates open one by one and found- “Lots of cans in here,” said Fallende from one crate. “Stars above, how can someone like diced tomatoes this much?” “Cleaning supplies,” said Stalwart from another. “Toiletries,” said Windrose. “Holy crow, that’s a lot of shampoo.” “They weren’t planning on running out of pencils,” said Rangifera. “I think these are spare parts for maintenance and upkeep,” Daring said as she turned over a box of screws. This place was making less sense by the second. Stocked and ready to go, yet never used. What had happened here? “Wait, hang on,” said Fallende. “These cans have expiration dates on them.” Daring was looking over her shoulder in a second. “Really?” she asked, trying not to jump in place in anticipation. “What is it? What year?” Fallende planted a hoof in Daring’s face and pushed her away. “It’s, uh…” She squinted at the bottom of the can. “1010, I think. That’s, what, two years from now in your calendar? Three?” “Three, yeah.” Daring picked up another can. 09 15 1010. Hmm. “I thought canned food didn’t have expiration dates,” said Windrose, examining her own can. “Technically, canned food doesn’t have expiration dates, my confused cohort,” said Rangifera. She had decided not to partake in looking at can bottoms. “Canned food has ‘best by’ dates. You could eat those four years after that date, but they’d look unappetizing.” Stalwart frowned as she looked at can after can. “This can’t be right,” she muttered. “This cannot be right.” Then she spoke up. “The ‘best by’ date on canned food,” she said, “is usually four to five years after processing. Trust me, you learn the weirdest things in the Royal Guard. So from these, this place can’t be much more than a year old.” “There’s a lot of things in here that can’t be right,” said Daring. “They’re right anyway.” Truth be told, Daring had been hoping something that was more obviously not right, more measurably not right. Yes, the place was strange, but that was all she could definitively say about it. It had nothing that was more clearly wrong that she could put her hoof on, that she could examine. “So…” Stalwart cocked her head at Daring. “We’re going to simply ignore the fact that the Crown had some kind of research facility out here, in the middle of nowhere, and for some reason, decided it needed to be so secret that no one in Light’s Edge knew about it.” “This is Needle Vale. Until we find better clues, yep.” “…Well, alright, then.” Daring turned over a can in her hoof. Unfortunately, there was really only one more place where they could look for any sort of information. “Alright,” she said, tossing the can back. “We’ll swing by the labs, then we’re heading back outside.” “Joy,” muttered Windrose. It was probably Daring’s imagination, but the hallway to the labs seemed longer and darker than the others. The echo of their footsteps was deeper and the blackness pushed in more. She couldn’t deny that her throat got a little bit drier as she approached the labs. She was going to be either very lucky or very unlucky. She proved to be very unlucky in a very lucky way. The labs weren’t mad scientist labs or experimental technology labs, but the same kind of plain-desked, random-piles-of-junk labs you might find in colleges. There were strange machines inside that briefly got their excitement up, but Stalwart was quick to put that excitement back down. “These are bog-standard oscilloscopes and arcanometers, things like that,” she said. “Good for monitoring environmental magic, but not much else. I’d say this was setting up some kind of long-term surveillance of the magic in the area if there were still ponies here.” She shrugged. “Sorry.” Searching the first few labs was fruitless and made Daring even more sick of concrete. For all the expensive equipment, there were no records of any sort, nothing they could investigate, which might’ve been more tolerable if she hadn’t had to do all the searching with light gems. Fallende actually gave up looking halfway through and started testing the swivel chairs. (They weren’t that good.) Eventually, Daring decided to throw in the towel. “Come on,” she said reluctantly. “Let’s go back out.” The problem with investigating folk mysteries was how easily they mushroomed into something far more complicated than most ponies could imagine, sometimes without any easy answers. Daring had known Needle Vale wasn’t going to give up its secrets easily, but wow. This place hadn’t opened a can of worms so much as suffered a malfunction at the worm-canning factory. Utterly deserted and nothing about why, nothing about what it did, nothing about Needle Vale. It didn’t even have a name that Daring could ask the Crown about. She sighed and glanced at the end of the hall, to the doors she knew wouldn’t have any answers but a little voice in her head kept saying, Maybe, maybe, maybe… Then she saw the cobweb. It was a simple thing, strung across the last doorway, looking just like an ordinary cobweb. Maybe a touch more silvery, its strands a little thicker, glinting in a way that grabbed her attention. There was nothing particularly special about it. And that made it out-of-place in this messed-up valley, with its amnesia cliffs and repeating rivers and deserted facilities. She knew from experience that some of the most dangerous things in the world looked incredibly mundane. That innocent little cobweb was so innocent that it made Daring’s coat stand on end and forced her ears back. And only now did she realize that the halls and rooms had all been void of webs before now. “Anyone else see that?” Daring asked, pointing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to take another step forward. “No,” said Fallende, “I-” Then she sucked in a breath. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Yeah, I see it.” “That spiderweb?” Rangifera walked straight up to it, looked closely at it, then stared at Daring. “Yeah, I see it. What of it?” “Something’s up with it,” Daring said. She knew it, even if it was nothing she could put a feather on. “What, do think something’s going to happen to you when you break it? You think that’s what’s up with it?” “It might. Why’s that the only web we’ve seen here? How come there aren’t more?” Stalwart’s voice shook a little when she spoke. “Yeah,” she said, “we shouldn’t-” Rangifera rolled her eyes. “Just because it’s the only web we’ve seen here doesn’t mean it’s the only web that is here.” She raised a hoof. “Look, if it scares you so much, my haunted headmare, I’ll break it for you.” Before Daring could stop her, she brought her hoof down through the cobweb. And Daring swore she heard it snap. Everyone waited five, ten, fifteen increasingly tense seconds for something to happen. Nothing did. An agonizing minute. Still nothing. “See?” Rangifera said with a grin, stretching the cuts across her mouth. “Nothing to worry about.” She chuckled as she walked through the door into the lab beyond. Daring hadn’t even raised a hoof before the laughter had died. “Girls,” Rangifera said quickly, “you need to come in here now.”