Twilight greeted Pinkie at the door. The Sun was low on the horizon and the alicorn looked like she was not well in the least, but Pinkie knew better than to comment on that given the situation. If other ponies were outside, trying to get in, they were kept far enough by the guards for Twilight not to see them as she opened the entrance just enough for Pinkie to squeeze in. Pinkie being Pinkie, that meant less than a regular pony would have needed.
Things were going horribly. No progress. Nothing found. Twilight was running out of things to even test, barring hurling the cube into an exploding scale or getting the Behemoth to step on it. Celestia had found nothing. Sunburst had found nothing. Everything they tried led them nowhere and Twilight wasn't even sure the cube could be opened at that point. Except she knew for sure Stellaria would open it in front of her when she came back, at the end of the whole thing, just to rub it in. Though if things got to that point Twilight would just stay in Ponyville as it was blown up.
Sunset wasn't there yet, probably not up as a whole yet, definitely yet to see the message. Twilight had to remind herself not to lose hope. Pinkie was there, Sunset would be there, soon they would... It was possible that they would have a breakthrough. It was possible that they were missing something. They still had time before sunset to figure things out. The biggest problem was simply trying to figure out what to try at all at that point. The black box continued to be literally that to every single examination, and it continued to remain unaltered whichever way they tried to interact with it. They'd even tried getting to it through dreams, that hadn't worked. By that point they'd searched enough that if something like it was in the archives it was mislabelled, so it was a matter of luck whether they'd find it in time or not.
The point of the week long time limit wasn't to have them figure things out. It was for them to exhaust all possible options by going through everything unreasonable when everything reasonable was already ruled out, as the population grew restless and desperate and creatures were killed every day, only for them to still fail. It was about destroying Twilight, not anything else. She'd sent ponies to try to detect Stellaria's magic in the area they'd met, to work off that, but she had doubts it would work. Sweetie Belle couldn't find her even with a clear visual projection. Twilight was growing restless.
Twilight came to a halt as she heard a sound coming from the wall. She looked at it. The wall, or a section of it, slid to the side. A stallion stepped, more precisely stumbled out. He was wearing clothes clearly not meant for him. Pinkie Pie perked up at her side. "Oh, hey Otty!"