Unsurprisingly the gardens and hydroponics lab were placed close to the cafeteria so it wasn’t a long walk at all for the two of them after finishing breakfast. Rainbow Dash whistled while they walked, her mood pretty good. The ponies here were just so nice and eager to show off their home and all the hard work they’ve put In to make this place work. In some ways Rainbow Dash felt like when she first visited the Crystal Empire and learned about their fair and everything they did.
“The pony who manages the gardens and all is just as important as anyone but he never leaves his gardens to come eat or anything so this is the only way I can introduce you,” Dust Bunny said.
“Never leaves?” Rainbow raised an eyebrow.
“Mhm. Otherwise he would’ve been one of the important ponies at that breakfast back there,” Dust Bunny looked over at her and winked. “And if you’re not in the mood to tell your life story for the third time we can just tell him to ask someone else about it later.”
Rainbow grinned. “Thanks for the concern.”
“Honestly I’m surprised you don’t have a Cutie Mark in oration or story telling,” Dust giggled.
“Pff, nope, just being my usual awesome self,” Rainbow Dash chuckled. “Do you guys grow anything besides beets and spinach down here?”
“Carrots, actually. But not as much. The beets and spinach grow better,” Dust Bunny answered.
A carrot sounded really good right now too, Rainbow hoped she could eat one of them while she was stuck here. She didn’t have much time to think about it as it only took another minute for them to reach the properly labeled “Gardening” pod. But as they stepped through the large doors separating it from the rest of the tunnel it had a different appearance from the egg-shaped janitorial pod. This was more of a long rectangle with a low ceiling and no individual rooms or apartments for ponies to sleep in that Rainbow Dash could see. Instead just rows of mini-gardens and water tanks full of healthy looking vegetable plants lined the entire pod while fluorescent lighting poured down on them. A lot of ponies were working on them right now too, either tilling the soil and checking the health of the plants, or picking fully ripened vegetables. The garden team seemed to have a busy job. There were also ponies cleaning out currently empty tanks or replacing blown out light bulbs. Rainbow wondered if they were on the gardening team too or if they were custodians along with Dust Bunny.
“Is that you, Dust Bunny? What are you doing here today? We didn’t need any extra cleaning,” a voice from Rainbow Dash’s left said and she looked over to see a glasses wearing pony walking over to the two of them.
He was a lean looking earth pony stallion with a yellow-green coat and a vividly blue mane and tail while a lemon tree Cutie Mark grew on his flanks. Behind him was a shoddy and patched up tent that was pitched in the corner of the room, Rainbow Dash hadn’t noticed it when they first entered. As he walked closer he peered more intently at the two of them, his glasses so thick the lenses could’ve doubled as hockey pucks.
“Hi Lemon, I’m just showing around Rainbow Dash. You might have heard but she’s-”
“The one from outside. Yes. Heard about her from one of your moppers,” Lemon cut her off, nodding as he reached out a hoof and grabbed Rainbow Dash’s, shaking it vigorously without even waiting for her. “A pleasure.”
“Likewise,” Dash pulled her hoof away when he was done and gave him a weird look. “So your name’s Lemon?”
“Would think that’s obvious. Chief of the gardening team,” he adjusted his glasses and squinted a little harder at her.
Dash frowned and was about to tell him what for for the uncordial way he was speaking to her when Dust Bunny stopped her, stepping between the two of them with an awkward smile on her face. “Er, don’t mind that, Rainbow. Lemon’s just a little… abrupt.”
“Busy. Direct. Focused. Not one for small-talk,” Lemon corrected.
Dust Bunny rolled her eyes. “Forgive him, he’s been like this even before the storm arrived.”
“Used to have a grove of lemon trees,” Lemon said.
“Sorry about that. Good luck getting those back some day,” Dash said. It’s not like she wasn’t sympathetic to him. Besides, she had met plenty of ponies who were a little weird, she didn’t need to overreact.
He shrugged and walked over to the nearest hydroponics tank to check on it, not bothering to say anymore. Figuring she certainly wasn’t going to get a guided tour from the head of the gardening team just standing here, Rainbow Dash walked right up beside him to see what he was doing. There was a thermometer looking device hooked to the edge of the tank that he dipped in the water and held it there for a second before pulling it back out and looking at it.
“What’s that?” Rainbow asked him.
“PH checker. Important. Also have devices for checking vitamin and nutrient content of the water. Temperature well regulated.”
“What’s pH?”
“A way of checking how acidic or basic something is. Also needs to be done for soil. Very important for growing vegetables,” he put the checker back in place and walked alongside the water tank to individually check each plant growing in it. “The soil and water used for our vegetables is not ideal, it must be rigorously tested and treated.” He grabbed some of the spinach and looked at the leaves, turning them over in his hooves and even leaning down slightly to sniff them.
Dust Bunny walked up to them now too. “Is the next batch looking good?”
“Of course,” Lemon simply stated, not bothering to say anything else without being prompted first anymore.
Rainbow Dash looked down the line to see more ponies doing the same as Lemon, getting curious she walked over to the soil plots to see what different stuff needed to be done with them. Each different mini garden that utilized soil was encased in a metal square that could comfortably fit a few ponies lying side by side. A few sprinklers ran up the sides of it for water while the soil itself had a rich and dark color. The plot she was looking into looked to be for growing beets and there was a pony tending to it, pulling out beets that hadn’t properly grown and turning the soil over to put new beet seeds in. Rainbow Dash took a moment to look down the rows of gardens and hydroponics, inspecting the entire gardening pod. It really wasn’t that big now that she really looked at it. Big for an indoor garden or greenhouse yeah but considering how many ponies they had to feed every day… it didn’t compare at all to the, well, acres of Sweet Apple Acres or the average farm you would see around Equestria.
“You guys must really work hard to feed all the ponies down here,” she absent-mindedly said to the mare working on the beets.
The mare’s ears perked up and she raised her head, noticing Rainbow Dash’s presence for the first time and flashing her an appreciative smile. “Thank you. It’s hard work but it needs to be done. We’re always growing and cultivating new vegetables every day.”
“Trying to find ways to make it more efficient,” Lemon said from his position inspecting the spinach.
“The more vegetables you can grow per cubic foot of soil the better it is for everyone,” the mare said.
Lemon nodded. “Upping volume is the number one goal at the moment. Quality and taste of food, as well as variety, can come later. When more stable.”
Dust Bunny then walked up to Rainbow Dash and whispered in her ear: “We probably shouldn’t bother them much more, I just wanted to make sure you were introduced to Lemon properly. He doesn’t care about showing off as much as the others do so unless you have any more questions we can go.”
A mare wearing a hairnet and carrying a bucket full of beets on their back walked past them and gave the two guests a small wave. Rainbow Dash returned it and glanced at Dust Bunny.
“I guess I don’t. I have a friend who’s a farmer and I always knew how much effort she put into it and how hard she worked but I guess I didn’t appreciate just how tough the work in general can be. I’m glad you guys have found a way to get enough food for yourselves though.”
“Appreciation noted,” Lemon said even though Rainbow Dash hadn’t been speaking to him.
The rainbow mare playfully rolled her eyes. “No problem, dude.”
Dust Bunny held a hoof up to her lips and giggled. “Alright, shall we?”
Both of them waved goodbye to Lemon, who gave the smallest of nods in acknowledgment as he didn’t take his eyes off the spinach, and left the gardening pod. It spoke quite a bit of how busy the gardening team was that they didn’t swarm around Rainbow Dash like the other ponies had. For such a polite and welcoming place it meant a lot that they didn’t drop what they were doing for their guest. Now it would probably be a much longer walk on their way to the turbines but it was something Rainbow Dash was a bit more excited for.
To get to the turbines that generated the power for this entire complex you had to go to the western most edge of the tunnels and take an extra long lift ride to get back up to the surface level. Rainbow Dash and Dust Bunny now stood on that loud lift as the chains pulled it up almost two hundred feet. The lift was much larger than the other one she had used even though it was of the same design aside from also having an opening on the back so you could get on and off it from both sides and two different tunnels whenever it stopped. She found herself pacing back and forth slightly as they went up it, restless from having to stand still and not being able to fly all day. But since the turbines were outside to gather power from the wind that meant there had to be a hatch up here that led to the outside in case any work had to be done on them. Maybe she could fly out for a minute and come right back?
After a few more minutes of grinding up the elevator shaft the lift came to a stop and Dust Bunny led Rainbow Dash out. Immediately Rainbow Dash noticed they were in a bit of a different looking place. Gone were the metal walls and floors of the lower tunnels, instead it looked like they were really just in a carved out cave with rock around them. No more claustrophobic narrow tunnels either, it was much wider up here. She reflexively extended and stretched her wings briefly as she followed Dust Bunny down a corridor.
“So how come this place is different?” Rainbow asked her.
“This area is built right into the canyon wall, we didn’t see the point of making our normal tunnels, it’s structurally sound enough as is and mostly entirely rock,” she explained. “We don’t need to keep things separated from all the dirt or worry about cave-ins.”
With another turn of the corner they came to a large room with some fancy looking equipment Rainbow Dash couldn’t make heads or tails of. It looked like it had a bunch of meters and graphs on it but that’s as far as she knew. Numerous ponies were going all over it, including Bright Eyes, he sat at a console with a bunch of gauges on it with their needles flickering steady at about the halfway point on all of them.
“Yo!” Rainbow Dash said once she saw him, getting him and all the other ponies working in here to look at the source of the loud voice.
A smile broke out on Bright Eyes’ face and he stepped up from his console, walking over to greet her. “Rainbow Dash, I was hoping you’d drop by!” He looked around at the other workers. “Everyone, if you hadn’t heard or seen her yet this is the pony from outside that I met at breakfast this morning, say hi!”
“Hi!”
“Hello!”
“Nice to meet you!”
A chorus of greetings rang out from the ponies working with Bright Eyes. It was clear they wanted to do a lot more than that and come talk to her but they were all busy. Rainbow Dash would have to do something or hang out with them later. For now though she was just here to meet Bright Eyes with Dust Bunny and see how this stuff worked.
“So you really were interested in the turbines? It seemed that way at breakfast. It’s probably the closest thing to weather work that we do here now,” Bright Eyes said.
“Yeah, and honestly I kind of wanted the chance to be able to go outside. But the turbines sounded cool,” Rainbow Dash said.
“Outside huh?” Bright Eyes tapped a hoof to his chin. “I think we can manage that, why not? But first let me show you what we’re doing in here.”
Rainbow Dash was happy enough to get the promise of being able to go outside so she went with Dust Bunny over to the console Bright Eyes had been working at. He sat back down at it and started to explain what it showed.
“So you see these meters?” He pointed at a line of one dozen semi-circle meters that had lines going from zero to one hundred by fives on them, with red needles sitting comfortably between twenty-five and thirty for all of them at the moment.
“Yeah,” Dash nodded.
“They measure the stress level of the turbines. They can safely go up to about seventy-five but any higher than that and they’re in danger of breaking and we’ve gotta turn them off and go out to try and reinforce them or put up wind barriers,” he pointed at a different screen that showed a single red bar that went from the bottom of the screen to the top. “And this is the power output meter. As you can see the turbines are currently generating as much power as possible.”
Dust Bunny cleared her throat and cut in. “Which is actually even more than we need. Excess power gets stored in batteries for whenever we need to turn the turbines off or they get damaged.”
“That’s right,” Bright nodded and stepped up from his seat. “I can show you the turbines now if you want? We can open the outer door for a bit. I have to warn you to be careful though since the storm is still raging out there and the blades of the turbines spin very fast, so don’t get near them.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful when I’m out there,” Rainbow Dash grinned.
“Alright, let’s head to the exit hatch then,” Bright said and pointed to the far wall of the room. There was a heavy metal door on it and Bright Eyes waved the two guests towards it. Like the hatch Rainbow Dash remembered opening up when she came down the tunnel it had a wheel on it that needed to be pulled until it unlatched and swung away from the wall.
Bright Eyes did this for them and led the two mares into a smaller, darker, room before stepping in and closing the hatch back up. There was a loud noise in this room that had been absent just outside it, Rainbow Dash could hear the howling wind beating on the rock wall. In front of them was a larger door made of a long slab of metal that looked like it slid open sideways with another wheel the size of a pony sitting in the middle of the room.
“This is the exit area. For obvious reasons you can’t just open up one door and suddenly be outside. You need to open up that door that leads back to our control room, go in here, close that door, and only then can you unlock this big door and get outside,” Bright explained to her. “Uh, hold on one second.”
The pegasus reached up and flipped a switch next to the door they had entered from and the whole room was now fully illuminated.
Rainbow Dash saw a number of lockers firmly bolted and welded to the floor and walls that were probably full of tools and stuff. There wasn’t much else in the room aside from the wheel that must be the mechanism for opening the outer door. Bright Eyes went up to the large wheel and grunted as he began to rotate it, the metal grinding along and a series of loud shifting noises coming from the floor and sliding door as he did so.
“This opens up the outer door, there’s a series of gears built into the floor...” he grunted in exertion enough that Rainbow Dash flew over to help him.
“Here dude, I got this.”
Together they managed to move it much faster and the sliding door opened up a bit. Of course the moment if opened even just a crack, wind started billowing into the room from the storm outside. Dust Bunny shrieked and covered her face while Rainbow and Bright worked their hardest to open the door up all the way. With their mane’s whipping about their faces they pulled the door open more and more until finally it fully receded into the wall and let the violence of the storm inside their exit room completely. Bright Eyes and Dust Bunny were having a noticeably tougher time dealing with the wind than she was so Rainbow decided she should probably make this quick.
She walked over to the open doorway and saw that they were now at ground level, with nothing but dark rocky ground in front of them and the huge turbines built into the ground. Rainbow looked up at the giant mechanical looking windmills that went in a line down from where she was standing. Made out of black metal the wind from the storm made their rotors spin at incredible speed while shaking the relatively thin frames holding them up. The turbines were a good twenty feet tall that she could see but their bases extended below the rocks, she couldn’t see how deep they actually went. Along with several support beams propping up each turbine they looked pretty stable.
“I’m gonna fly around for a second but I’ll be right back!” Rainbow Dash yelled to Bright Eyes and Dust Bunny over the wind and then took to the skies.
It felt really, really, good to fly like this, even if she had to fight the wind of the storm at the same time. She made sure to keep well away from the blades of the turbines, instead taking the opportunity to stretch her wings and fly up the outside of the canyon. She didn’t envy the ponies down there that had to come out here sometimes and fix up or maintain those turbines when there was a problem. Doing any sort of work in this wind sounded awful. At the moment though she was just happy to get out in the open and fly like this, later tonight she could fly around inside the janitorial pod too.
Making her way back down to the ground after a few minutes she stepped onto the threshold of the outer door. Dust Bunny was in the corner of the room, holding her mane and wincing at the wind while Bright Eyes stood at the wheel.
She flew over to the wheel and helped Bright Eyes close the door up, with Dust Bunny finally sighing in relief.
“So I guess paying attention to those things is a full time job?” Rainbow asked Bright right as the door thudded back into place.
“Oh yeah,” he nodded. “We can’t afford to take our eyes off them for a second. The constant wind is a mixed blessing in that way; we’ll never be short on power but the turbines never get a rest so we have to perform nearly constant upkeep on them and pay attention to their stress levels. There’s even the possibility of the excess power they generate overloading our batteries, that’s just how powerful the storm is.”
“Well good luck with this stuff,” Rainbow thought about how much everyone struggled down here. This job, the work at the “farms”, it all required constant care and attention. If she lived here she wouldn’t get to take any daily naps. “Kind of wish I could help you guys out.”
Dust Bunny shook her head. “Please, don’t. You’re our guest. More than that you’re a very special guest, all you need to do is relax and enjoy yourself while you’re here. We should be the ones helping you out when it comes to this darn storm.”
Rainbow Dash could only awkwardly frown. She was the one used to helping out ponies. And this was her big adventure to do stuff, she’d definitely figure out what was up with this storm or at least find a way to make things easier for these ponies.
“Let’s head back inside, shall we?” Bright Eyes said and opened up the inner door.
Rainbow and Dust Bunny followed, with Bright Eyes planning on giving them a tour on how everything else here worked.
By the time they made it to the new tunnel Flint and Shimmering Jewel were in charge of digging it was pretty late in the day. Dust Bunny said that once they were done here they’d head back to the cafeteria to get a quick meal and then they could go back to the janitorial pod. Normally she would have more work but Pile had allowed her to work more as Rainbow Dash’s guide for the moment, so she got a reprieve from her cleaning duties.
“Are the diggers as busy as everyone else down here?” Rainbow Dash asked Dust Bunny.
“Hmm...” the earth pony thought for a second. “Well actually, I’d probably say they’re the least busy of the big teams. Not that what they do isn’t as important or that they aren’t working hard everyday, but it’s just that what they’re doing right now isn’t as pressing. Like, it’s more about us looking and planning ahead to make sure we aren’t suddenly out of tunnel space one day. Who knows how long we’ll be down here? So they don’t have just a constant wave of work like me or the gardeners do but they still keep busy everyday.”
“Cool,” Rainbow Dash gave a slight nod, looking at the tunnel around them. It wasn’t as pristine as the others and there was metal paneling missing in places and some parts held up by metal beams with bare rock around them. “Is this tunnel not finished?”
“Yep, it’s dug all the way but as you can see it hasn’t been fully furnished. You’ll see more and more open rock and dirt the closer we get to the new tunnel that they’re still digging,” Dust Bunny answered.
Like she said, the further they walked the less maintained and improved the tunnels looked until eventually it looked like they were walking through bare mining tunnels with lanterns hanging overhead being the only source for light. Now Rainbow Dash could hear the sound of metal tools banging on rock the closer they got too along with ponies yelling orders and the tumbling and breaking sound of stone.
They stepped from this tunnel into one running perpendicular through it and turned north, to the sound of the ponies working. Seems they were building a tunnel that went deeper into the direction of the storm. At the current end of it, Rainbow Dash was greeted with the sight of Flint, Shimmering Jewel, and about five or six other ponies digging away or removing dirt and chunks of rock, or putting up support for the area around them while they worked.
“Hey guys!” Rainbow called out to them, not conscious of the fact she was maybe interrupting them.
A bunch of heads wearing hardhats turned to look at her, and despite Flint being mid swing with a pickaxe he did nothing but grin when he saw who it was calling out to him. The ponies here were just too polite and excited about her.
“Rainbow Dash!” He said as he let the tool rest on the ground. “I’m glad you made it out here today.”
“We both are!” Shimmering Jewel smiled at her.
“Yeah I guess I’m making the rounds here all day,” she said as she walked up to them with Dust Bunny bringing up the rear.
“Well we’re close to finishing up for the day and grabbing supper, so you made it just in time,” Flint said. “We’re just breaking the last few bits of rock in the way and then we’ll carry the excess junk out and that’ll be it. I’m not sure how interesting that is for you, maybe if we were building the support structure for the tunnel...”
Actually despite the lack of work to go on at the moment this was probably the job Rainbow Dash would be most interested in doing if she was one of the ponies stuck down here. Instead of standing around either tending to some plants or watching dials she’d get to exercise and really do some physical labor. That was way more alluring to her without there being a job that required flying or something every day. Getting to work her muscles and smash up rocks was more her speed than anything else she had seen so far.
Maud seems like she’d be pretty good at this job. Rainbow Dash thought. Applejack too, with her strength.
“Is it cool if I beat up some rocks too?” Rainbow Dash asked them.
A look of dismay passed on Dust Bunny’s face. “Wait, you know we really don’t want you working here while you’re our guest-”
“It’s not like that,” Rainbow Dash cut her off and grinned. “Don’t think about it like work at all. Maybe I’m just exercising, or having fun, it’s just not my thing to stand around doing nothing. Unless it’s a nap, but that’s different.” She saw that Dust Bunny was still struggling with her duties as a hostess. “Look, I just can’t relax like this, okay?”
Flint and Shimmering Jewel looked between each other and the chief spoke up. “Uh, we don’t mind the extra help if it’s just helping us finish this last little bit for the day. Would be much appreciated.”
Dust Bunny bit her lip. “Honestly we really shouldn’t let you do work like this but I suppose if you really want to and everything...”
“Awesome!” Dash hoof-bumped Dust Bunny and walked up to the two digging team leaders. “Got a hammer?”
“Sure do,” Flint nodded to one of the other workers that had temporarily paused in their duties to listen to the conversation, he grabbed an extra hammer they kept lying around and hoofed it over to Rainbow Dash.
“Alright! Time to bust some rocks and make some tunnels!” Rainbow Dash decided she might as well pump herself and everyone else up as much as possible.
“Yeah!” The diggers cheered in unison and got back to work.
Now Rainbow Dash was really tough but most of her strength was in her wings, and hefting a huge hammer over her head and smashing it into a very sturdy rock took a lot more out of her than she ever expected or was willing to admit. Even with her incredibly peak athletic health and in-shape body she found sweat coalescing on her brow after only a few swings. It didn’t help that the tunnel here was naturally muggy. Each strike of the metal on stone sent tremors up through the handle of the hammer and into her hooves, it felt like her bones and muscles were shaking, if she had to do this for an entire day they’d be like jelly by the end of it.
“Geez, you guys do some tough work everyday,” Rainbow said as she wiped the sweat fro her brow, taking a brief respite.
“We’ve all built up the right muscles for it,” Flint smirked at her and flexed his biceps for emphasis, showing off an impressive line of muscles and veins in them.
Rainbow Dash smirked right back and smashed her hammer down on her rock once more, getting back to the tough job. It was cracked pretty deeply by now and each new whack of her hammer made the faults deeper and generated new lines all over it. She was no rock expert but it probably wouldn’t take many more hits before it broke apart and then they could dig out the shattered pieces and carry them away. There must be some kind of storage or dump or something for all the extra dirt and debris, this place did used to be a sewer and a mine system right? Maybe there was already a big hole or mine shaft that they dumped everything in. Or she supposed they could cart it up to the surface and dump it out up there, anything seemed like a lot of work though.
She was sweating pretty hard by the time she managed to shakingly lift the heavy hammer above her head one final time before dropping it onto the stone, shattering it to pieces. A good deal of loose dirt and other smaller pebbles fell out of the tunnel wall with it when she broke and Rainbow Dash allowed herself a satisfied smile.
“Hey, nice job,” Shimmering Jewel said and lit up her horn with magic, using it to push the debris into one easy to manage pile.
“The rest of us are almost done too,” Flint said as he smashed his pickaxe into the tunnel wall. “Take a breather with Dust Bunny for a second and then we can all go back to the cafeteria and get supper.”
“Sounds good to me...” Rainbow Dash tried to keep the tired out of her voice and walked back to Dust Bunny.
“Enjoy yourself?” The chief custodian asked her with a bit of a nonplussed look on her face.
“Yeah actually,” Rainbow Dash said as she sweated. Giving a low whistle she wiped the worst of it off her face. “More beets and spinach for dinner?”
Dust Bunny snorted in amusement. “How’d you guess?”