//------------------------------//
// Journey Through the Dark - Part 29 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

"Over the ocean, like the last time?" the red pegasus suggested.
"Boring," Torque replied.
"Safe," Sharp replied back. "But we need to test something different. Mountain tops?"
"Always a chance somepony sees that." Carrot tapped his chin, thinking. "Frozen wasteland? Ought to be one close to the Empire."
The red mare shrugged. "As long as it's not the forest again." Twilight noted how she seemed to be shuddering at the memory, her eyes growing distant as she looked to the side. She saw a scar on her neck she hadn't noticed before, the other end of which disappeared beneath her lab coat.
"Works for me." Sharp headed for one of the machines on the tables, and rolled around a couple of knobs on it while squinting at the screen. "Should be good."
"Right." Torque stretched his wings. "I'm going to purposefully mess this up to see if it works fine," he said.
"If this almost kills us, I'll make sure to finish the job with you," the yellow unicorn with the braided mane said, without lifting her eyes from whatever she was reading. There was no detectable trace of irony or humour in her voice.
That fact didn't stop Torque from chuckling at it. Then something happened, and Twilight felt like she'd skipped over a page while reading a book. One moment the pegasus was moving his wings, the next there was a portal where the machine stood. The same kind of portal scales and their various variants across the universes produced, only different because of minor black crackles of energy and an almost glassy texture around it that Twilight could tell were there because of the machine and not the portal itself.
"The good news is we can safely turn it on while we're drunk or sleep deprived," Torque said. "No idea if it actually goes where it's supposed to, though," he cheerfully added. "Lime, what tables are the probes on?"
"Always the same one," the unicorn replied, while Torque began to dig through a pile of papers and folders.
Twilight was still distracted. There were no other unicorns besides Lime in the room, and she hadn't cast a spell. Either way, her eyes were almost on the machine when it had happened, and she hadn't seen anything. Had parts of it shown signs of activating that she'd missed? Had someone pushed a button or flicked a lever that she hadn't noticed? Was there another team in a separate toom that had been instructed to turn it on? And what was Torque supposed to be doing as he stood there, anyway?
She pondered this as she watched the pegasus in question retrieve a telescoping metal rod with an odd looking silver ball attached the thin end, that had something like a circular blue gemstone embedded in it. He then proceeded to head back to the portal in the middle of the room, and stick the sphere through. 

Twilight was still thinking things through when she heard the unicorn with the short bangs clear her throat. "I'm going to check the archives," she said, opening the door. 

Seeing her chance to learn more and easily get out of there, Twilight quickly followed her outside the room.