Rainbow Dash and Fierce Current walked through a tunnel built into the side of the mountain that the city rested on. The previous evening, Crescent Moon had barged into their barracks and told Rainbow Dash that she was to learn more of how their Empire functioned. And thus the first thing for her to see would be their food production. Something Rainbow Dash only just then realized she should’ve been wondering about. Just where did all the food they had come from? How did they grow oats up here? Where did they grow oats and everything else up here? Fierce Current was randomly chosen as her guide for the day, she wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not but Crescent Moon seemed to want to get her familiar with everyone else on the squad. So now this morning the two pegasi soldiers had taken a short flight over a dense part of the city to the mountain, where a large building rested right up against its side.
The building had one side that looked like it was a large loading dock where numerous pegasi were busy carrying crates, barrels, and bags of stuff out of. It was a near steady stream of activity. There were also guards stationed outside the front door (something that made Rainbow Dash wonder if she’d ever get assigned to guard duty like that) but they didn’t give Dash and Current so much as a glance as the cherry pegasus led Rainbow Dash inside. The room opened up wide to make room for the hundreds of boxes being taken from tunnels leading deeper into the mountain to the loading dock. Teams of toga-wearing pegasi, so not in the military, wheeled these crates and stuff on carts or pulleys all across the open floor.
Fierce Current didn’t pay that hustle and bustle any mind and they walked past it into one of the tunnels. Sticking along a walkway to the side so as not to get in the way of anything, the soldiers made their way deeper into the mountain.
“So you guys grow all of your food inside the mountain?” Rainbow Dash asked as she looked around the tunnel, more of those artificial lights she remembered from the coliseum were planted on the ceiling to keep it well illuminated. “It must’ve taken ages for pegasi to excavate all this.”
“Long before I was born. Truth be told I’m not sure how old these tunnels are. I would think they’d have to be almost as old as the city itself but I don’t know for certain,” Fierce responded. “As for your first question, yes. And… hm, now that I think about it maybe these tunnels aren’t that old. Unless they were used for something else before food transport.”
“What do you mean?” Rainbow Dash asked with a raised an eyebrow.
“Food only started to be grown here seven hundred years ago. Have you heard of the famous scientist, Weathervane?”
Rainbow Dash nodded. “Yeah. I heard he was the one who made those Ice Sentinel things that guard the Empire.”
“That’s right, but he’s also responsible for so much more.”
“Like what?”
The cherry pegasus glanced over at her and grinned. “You’ll see pretty soon.”
Rainbow Dash decided she might as well take his word for it and kept on walking. She kept watch on the dozens of ponies bringing up cart after cart of boxes and then running or flying back down the tunnel at a far faster pace than Fierce and Rainbow were walking. She saw a couple of boxes had been labeled as “Oats” on the side and a few others that said “Wheat” or “Corn” or any other number of vegetable or crop. They must’ve had some sizable farms inside the mountain. Which was just really weird to Rainbow Dash. First of all that there were somehow farms inside of a mountain in the first place, she was pretty sure that was really different from a greenhouse, and secondly that pegasi were apparently farming all of it. Rainbow Dash wasn’t a history buff but she still knew the Hearthswarming Tale well enough to know that the pegasi got their food from earth pony farmers back then.
At some point the pegasi up here must’ve learned to farm and grow food for themselves, but she didn’t know how they would accomplish that without the innate earth pony magic that allowed them to tend the soil. Sure there were some pegasi down in Equestria who had their own gardens and stuff like that but she didn’t know about any that ran big farms or orchards like the Apple family did.
Whatever answers there were to all this it probably had to do with that Weathervane pony.
To kill some time as they walked down the tunnel, Rainbow Dash decided to chat up Fierce. She had done a decent job of getting to know some of the others so he might as well join them too.
“So you’re pretty strong right? You can lift some heavy weights with those wings of yours,” she remarked.
A short bark of laughter emerged from Fierce Current. “Hah! Slightly stronger than the average soldier I suppose. It’s all inherited from my father.”
“Your dad really strong or something?”
“From years and years of hard labor and lifting heavy crates,” he nodded over at the line of pegasi ferrying things out of the tunnel.
“Your dad works here?” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow at him.
“Indeed he does. He’s a lot stronger than me, nothing like Blizzard, but still enough where he could carry all those crates and boxes by himself without even needing a cart,” Fierce said with no small measure of pride. “Unfortunately I don’t get the opportunity to see him too much, we’re both incredibly busy and our schedules never match up well. That’s why I’m glad Lt. Moon chose me to take you to the farms. I guess I’m pretty lucky since I’m pretty sure he didn’t remember or even knew in the first place that I had family working here.”
“Well that’s pretty cool, you gonna introduce me to him?”
“Perhaps. I’m not sure if we’ll actually even see him. He certainly would be interested in meeting you… but so would everyone else considering just who and what you are,” Fierce Current scratched his chin. “And truth be told, Commander Blizzard frowns upon any sort of fraternization between soldiers and civilians. Unless we’re courting mares or something.”
Rainbow Dash shot him a confused look, a frown tugging down her lips. “Why?”
Fierce shrugged in response. “It’s something about us being above and better than the stallions who have chosen not to continue service in the military. I never cared for that but there are some who take it very seriously.”
Not like that surprised her to hear but it was just one more thing for her to be peeved at Blizzard over.
“What a jerk,” Rainbow Dash spat.
Her squadmate shot her a wry smile. “Don’t let the Lieutenant hear you say that.”
“Yeah, yeah...” she brushed him off, well aware of where Crescent Moon stood.
“The tunnel ends soon, we’re almost at the farms in the center of the mountain.”
She decided to quicken her pace a bit then with him jogging up alongside her. Things still looked plenty bright up ahead so wherever the farms were held they must’ve had a lot of these artificial lights with them. It was getting a little noisier too, more ponies than just the ones going up and down the tunnel likely worked the farms. And hotter. There was a rise in temperature and humidity the closer they got and Rainbow Dash could feel the moisture already starting to mat down her coat and mane.
“This is the warmest place in the Empire,” Fierce told her as he noticed her starting to feel it.
“I can believe that,” Rainbow Dash said. She already knew they used climate control to make the air around the city and mountain inside the clouds warmer than it should be for where they were located and this was already noticeably much warmer than that. The mountain probably kept the hot air in and insulated things.
In a minute Rainbow Dash and Fierce Current emerged from the tunnel atop a small dirt hill and the blue pegasus from Equestria stopped in mid-step as she laid her eyes on the most unusual and impressive thing she had seen so far in the Empire.
They didn’t have artificial lighting. They had an artificial sun.
The huge glowing orb sat at the top of the hollowed out cavern, casting a powerful glow just as impressive as the real sun’s. It must have been at least a hundred feet in diameter and it felt like real heat was pouring down from it. That wasn’t the only thing though; the interior of the mountain had numerous farms covering all of the ground with rows of cornstalks and even some trees growing in the dirt. A low rumbling in the air caused Rainbow Dash to look up and see a number of small clouds forming over one patch of the farms, whereupon some pegasi flew up onto them and started stamping the water out to make it rain on the crops.
“How?” Rainbow Dash asked in wonder as she looked at it all. “You’ve got like… a world in here.”
“Soil taken up from the ground years ago. Seeds and crops as well gathered from afar. Pegasus weather control to make our own enclosed water cycle. And Weathervane’s greatest treasure of them all,” Fierce said as he pointed at the fake sun.
“It’s crazy...” Dash said as she saw a small rainbow forming after the clouds dissipated.
“It’s ingenuity. My ancestors had to do something to do more than just survive up here. I may not quite buy into everything Blizzard pushes but I have a fair amount of pride for my tribe and the ones who came before me. Thanks to them we’ve thrived,” he shrugged. “Come on, lets go down to the farms.”
He started walking down the hill and Rainbow Dash followed after him. She almost felt like a filly seeing something new for the first time with how weird and unexpected this all was. Applejack would like it, Twilight would think it was amazing too. Rainbow Dash was just surprised that these pegasi had managed to do something like this.
“How do you get all this stuff to grow so well in the soil without earth pony magic?” She asked him.
“Beats me. You’d have to ask Weathervane himself. My father said that half the time things don’t grow the way they should and the soil doesn’t listen to them but having the rain and sun under our control gives us a few tools. I don’t think even my father fully knows how it all works though. Apparently Weathervane had some help from another pegasus when it came to making that fake sun, but he didn't write his name or anything else down, and just like the Sentinels we've never been able to recreate something on its scale.”
“Right,” Rainbow Dash nodded. It was something that really made her curious and she wasn’t sure if she fully bought that explanation but there wasn’t much else she could say about it.
There were whole cadres of ponies along the farms gathering up fully grown vegetables and what else to pack into boxes and take to the tunnels. Hundreds of empty boxes and bags lay stacked up and ready to grab. This place was a beehive of activity, never was something not moving. Rainbow Dash watched one pony pulling a large cart on a narrow path between some of the farms as he stopped by the frantic mess of ponies taking stuff into the tunnel and pulled a latch on his cart. The back opened up and a mountain of potatoes spilled out of the cart that all of the ponies went to gather up.
She snorted in amusement at it. Fierce heard her and followed her eyes to what she was looking at, a small grin forming on his face.
“It’s a big city, lot of mouths to feed,” he said.
“It’s a feeding frenzy,” she joked.
The two of them kept walking, now going down a dirt path between a cornfield and a carrot patch. Every now and then Rainbow Dash would shoot a glance up at the big sun that hung at the top of the cavern, just like the real deal you couldn’t look directly at it for long. She still couldn’t quite grasp what it was. The other smaller lights looked like glowing clouds but that thing was so bright and strong she couldn’t really make out anything else about it.
She blinked a couple of times to get the spots to go away and looked to the pony walking side by side with her. Some of the things he had said… gave her the urge to test the waters with him.
“Sooo...” Rainbow Dash started, keeping her eyes up and not directed at him. “What do you think about Commander Blizzard?” Her pupils suddenly darted to him.
The playful smile that had been on his face slowly disappeared into a neutral mask. His own blue eyes silently glanced over at her for a minute while they walked and Rainbow Dash for a time thought he wasn’t going to say anything. But then his eyes returned to facing forward and the cherry pegasus began to speak.
“I think he’s a big, dumb, oaf that wouldn’t know fun if it came up and bit him in the flank. But you didn’t hear that from me,” he sharply glanced back at her. “Like I said I may not like him personally but I do have a great love for the Empire. Let’s leave it at that for now, okay?”
Rainbow Dash nodded. “Yeah, that’s okay. I can respect that.”
“I like you quite a bit too. Your attitude, your way of doing things, and you’re just different. It’s fun,” he told her.
“Well I’m just an awesome pony like that,” she grinned. “I guess you’ve noticed but I don’t let anybody else tell me what I can and can’t do. There’s nothing that can stop me.”
“So it seems,” he grinned.
They walked further through the farms—Rainbow Dash essentially just being led on a tour by Fierce Current. There were a couple of small creaks dug into the ground that water traveled through along with a large reservoir in the center of the huge cavern. All of it was necessary for their artificial water cycle to work. Another group of clouds formed over a quadrant of the farms and started raining down while Dash walked, a lighter rain than what she had seen earlier.
“Hey so, does the sun in here ever… turn off or whatever?” She asked Fierce.
The cherry pegasus shook his head. “As far as I know it doesn’t. My father told me that they cover it with an exceptionally thick layer of clouds at night. If there was a way to turn it off I guess no one knows it.”
“As long as it works I guess that’s good enough,” Rainbow Dash raised an eyebrow at the giant floating sun. “So what else am I even supposed to see in here? Feels like I already learned how it all works and everything.”
Fierce shrugged. “Beats me, I was told to be your guide for the day and the day is still young. I figured we’d just explore the farms and head back to the base afterwards.”
“Do you want to try looking for your dad?” She asked.
He shook his head. “No, no, he’s probably busy as you can see from how everyone else is working. If we see him then that’s fine but I don’t want us to go out of the way for it.”
“Suit yourself. Let’s fly though, I’m getting tired of walking around.” Rainbow Dash said and lifted herself into the air with her companion coming right after her.
“I can show you each individual farm from above,” he told her and pointed at a larger one past the corn. “That’s the oats field, as you can see it takes up more space than anything. Then there’s a lot of wheat, potatoes, broccoli, more corn, lots of stuff. You like the grits at the mess hall yet?”
Rainbow Dash enthusiastically nodded her head. “Oh yeah!”
A shadow then passed over their heads and the two ponies looked up to see some high flying clouds floating over them. They weren’t rain clouds but a thin sheet that no pegasi working these farms were tending to. Rainbow Dash furrowed her brow at the interruption and looked over to Fierce Current.
“What’s up with those clouds?”
“Just shade,” he answered. “For crops where constant strong sunlight would be more damaging than not. Putting some clouds up high creates a little cover for them.”
The two continued their flight over the farms with Fierce pointing out whatever he deemed important. Like a group of young stallions pulling carrots out of the ground and throwing them into boxes for another stallion to stack up on a wagon and take on up to the tunnels. Or a flooded section of one garden where pegasi were stuck up to their knees in mud. They hovered over the large oats field for a while and Rainbow Dash could see the hard work all the ponies put in to gather up every last grain of it and bag it up. With the harsh fake sun beating down on them the entire time it must’ve been really laborious work, the kind that Applejack loves to do but Rainbow Dash would get tired of in about half a second.
“You know what? This really is impressive just like you said. I’d be proud of this too,” Rainbow Dash told her companion.
“Thanks and—oh! Look,” something caught Fierce’s eyes and he pointed to the ground below with an amused smile on his face.
Rainbow Dash looked down and saw a large red pegasus with a balding grey mane yelling at a scared and much younger stallion. The red pegasus was really laying into him but Rainbow Dash couldn’t exactly make out what he was saying. The two were in the middle of a turnip field and a circle of other pegasi had gathered, none of them looking like they wanted to interrupt the big stallion.
“That’s my father, just doing his normal thing,” Fierce laughed.
“Heh,” Rainbow Dash shared in the laughter. “He looks like someone who enjoys his job. You sure you don’t want to go down and say hi?”
“Definitely not,” he shook his head. “Not while he’s in the middle of such a classic performance. I’ll see him again some other time, when neither of us are busy.”
After that the two flew around the immense cavern a little more under both decided it was time to begin their return trip to the base. All the space in here could’ve contained the whole of Ponyville and Sweet Apple Acres along with it and it was just used for vegetables and grain, Fierce was right about them having a lot of mouths to feed. It really made Rainbow Dash think about how this society and Empire had lived for so long up here. Lived and done so much. Blizzard may have been a jerk but Rainbow Dash’s appreciation for these pegasi was growing.