A diagram of the hallway
Twilight and Rainbow Dash continued down a long torch-lit hallway. As they walked, they reached another door, which they opened and entered another, larger hallway. This hall was about 50 feet tall and 20 feet wide. However, unlike Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie’s room, this one was well-lit and the two could see about two thousand feet off into the distance. However, they could not see anything beyond that. For all they knew, the grand corridor went on forever.
They looked behind them and noticed there were three giant fans above the doorway they had just entered. The giant metal blades lazily churned along, not producing anything more than a slight breeze.
“I wonder why that fan is here. I can’t imagine it ever gets very hot in here,” Twilight wondered aloud. Rainbow nodded her head in agreement.
The two walked down the hallway for about a mile until they began to grow tired.
“Man, all this walking! Who in Equestria even built this place? It’s huge!” Rainbow Dash lamented, “Why would princess Celestia need such a long and huge hallway in her palace?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t built during her time. You know Auhizotl; he’s big enough to fill this whole hallway. I’ll bet he could probably have built it himself over time. That or maybe he used his magic to do it. That or he enslaved some woodland creatures to do it for him,” Twilight hypothesized.
“You mean like in Daring Do and The Somnambulist, where he uses his army of monkeys to construct a maze for Daring Do?” Rainbow recalled.
“Exactly. But then again, we have no idea how closely the character from the book matches the character in real life. But needless to say, both the real and fictional Auhizotl would have no trouble building a giant structure if he needed one built.”
“Well either way, we need to reach the end sometime this year,” Rainbow complained.
“I agree. We will never reach the end of this hallway by just walking. We need an alternative mode of transport. So, how do you want to approach this? We can fly, or I can try and teleport us as far as I can,” Twilight offered.
“Let’s fly. Who knows how long this passageway is? Also, knowing Ahuizotl, you
might end up teleporting off above a pit or something. Or it might not even work. Best stick with what we know he won’t mess with, and that’s flight,” Rainbow Dash said.
“Very well, that makes sense,” Twilight agreed. Rainbow hovered in the air and locked hooves with Twilight, lifting her gradually into the air until they were twenty feet above the floor.
Twilight and Rainbow Dash, like the other two pairs of ponies earlier discussed, were decent friends but not especially close. Though the duo did share two traits exclusively among the mane six. One, of course, was their shared love of the Daring Do novels earlier mentioned. Though Dash had previously spurned Twilight’s love of the books as an ‘egghead pursuit,’ she had come to love reading them as a guilty pleasure.
The two also were unique in that each was the undisputed master of her race’s natural ability. Rainbow was, bar none, the best flyer in all of Equestria. No other pegasus in living memory had managed to break the sound barrier and perform a Sonic Rainboom but her. Though she always wanted to join the Wonderbolts, she had saved three of the Wonderbolts and her friend Rarity from plummeting to the ground in a tailspin.
Twilight Sparkle was acknowledged by the princess herself as the most magically gifted unicorn that she had ever seen. In fact, she was the personal protégé of the princess. She was also one of the only ponies who was capable of performing the advanced spells in the Canterlot Archive such as time travel or mind control. Needless to say, both ponies were at the peak of their respective disciplines.
“Hold on!” Dash sped up, propelling forward at twenty miles an hour. The hallway continued seemingly endlessly. Twilight glanced down below her. Though she was at first afraid of the height, she shook it off and soon came to enjoy zipping through the air.
“You know, this is the first time I think I’ve ever actually flown before. I mean, I’ve been in my hot air balloon, and I’ve gone on a slow ride in the Princess’s chariot when I first came to Ponyville but that was nothing compared to this!” Twilight squealed in delight.
“Pretty exhilarating! The freedom, the wind in my mane, I wouldn’t trade it for anything!” Rainbow grinned. She sped up by about ten miles an hour.
“Yeah, magic can do a lot of things, but not anything like this. unicorns have never mastered flight, though Celestia knows they’ve tried. The closest thing I can think of is the temporary butterfly wing spell, but that’s not even close to this,” Twilight said.
“What if you had to choose between your magic and the ability to fly as well as me?” Rainbow inquired. Twilight thought about it for a moment, her mane blowing in her hair distracting her slightly from her pondering.
“I’d stick with magic. I mean flight is cool and all, but it’s just a single skill. I can do a lot of neat stuff with my magic. None of them individually might be as impressive as flight or as a sonic rainboom, but together I think it’s a package deal that’s slightly above and beyond even your aerial mastery. I mean: I can teleport, levitate large objects, turn rocks into clothes, the list goes on. I can do over two dozen tricks at last count,” Twilight answered.
“Ah, no way! Flight wins, hooves down. Or should I say, hooves out in front of you as you zip through the air at two hundred miles an hour!”
“Two hundred miles an hour? That’s how fast you can go!? That’s amazing!” Twilight’s pupils dilated.
“I’ll have to take you flying that fast sometime. And that’s not the fastest I can go, that’s just standard. The fastest I’ve ever been is EIGHT hundred miles an hour, when I was doing the sonic rainboom, and it’s absolutely radical! Though I wouldn’t go above a hundred in here, we might run into the end of this hall and into a wall at any minute. This is about as fast as I feel safe flying right now. But yeah, anytime you want to go flying just hit me up.”
“Definitely!” Twilight responded.
Twilight looked around and saw that they were going faster than before. “Hey Rainbow, how fast do you think we’re going right now?” she inquired.
Rainbow glanced in front of her and noticed that the corridor was no longer empty. The two were in fact approaching a row of columns.
“Uh, I don’t know. Probably too fast, and we’re about to hit some obstacles. I’d say we’re going about fifty. Let’s slow down.” Rainbow flapped her wings against the air in an attempt to brake. But it did no good! There was some sort of air current which kept her going at her current speed.
“Twilight, do you feel that wind blowing from behind us? I can’t stop!” Rainbow informed Twilight.
Twilight darted her eyes, and then cried, “The fans behind us… they must’ve been turned on! This entire hallway is a giant wind tunnel!”
Twilight, now panicked, eyed the fast-approaching columns ahead of them.“AAAAH! We’ll crash into those columns!” Twilight screamed.
“No we won’t. There’s room for us. Hold on tight!” Rainbow yelled. She zipped through a gap in the columns and continued on for a hundred more feet, only to find that there were more columns up ahead, and she was about to crash into one!
She veered off to the left, passing through the gap between columns. More columns were zipping towards them.
“Okay, hang on, we’re about to have to do some crazy maneuvers. Good thing I practiced this!” Rainbow zipped through the columns with expert accuracy, never so much as letting a feather touch the edge of one. Soon they got through the forest of columns and continued into open space.
“Man, is this all Auhizotl can throw at us? Bring it!” Rainbow egged on to no one. As if in response, (though it was entirely coincidence) a row of columns approached with gaps of only a foot wide each in between them. They would almost certainly crash.
“Okay, now I’m the one who’s scared!” Rainbow desperately flapped to attempt to brake, but lost no speed.
“Hang on, I’m going to try to teleport us further back,” Twilight’s horn glowed and the two disappeared in a flash of light. They re-appeared a thousand feet further back than they were before. Twilight’s teleport had simply delayed the inevitable.
“Is Auhizotl messing with your teleports again?” Rainbow yelled.
“No, he’s not; it’s very difficult to teleport an object moving as fast as we are over any appreciable distance,” Twilight noted, firing off another teleport in desperation. They moved back, but this time only another five hundred feet.
“Well you gotta figure something out in the next ten seconds or so!” Rainbow despaired.
“Okay, how about this!” Twilight charged up her horn and aa beam of light extended from it, moving ahead of them and blasting a column in front of them to pieces. A loud shattering sound pierced the air as shards of the ceramic column fell to the floor.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” Rainbow awed as she squeezed through the gap that Twilight had created mere moments ago.
“Yeah, I’ve been practicing magical energy beams.” The two reached another set of impassable columns but were prepared this time as Twilight blasted an opening through them. Beyond those columns, the hallway began to curve gradually to the right.
“Okay, hang on, and don’t lose your lunch!” Rainbow advised. She leaned into the turn, her mane rapidly whipping back and forth into her eyes. She could hardly see through her hair. Twilight, glancing up at her friend, used her magic to move Rainbow’s hair out of the way.
“Thanks!” Rainbow shouted, and continued around the curve until the hallway had fully made a U-turn. Rainbow tried to brake again.
“I think I can slow down now!” She gradually lowered her speed and descended towards the floor, reaching a full stop just in time to reach a back brick wall and the dead end of the miles-long, cane-shaped hallway. The roof in this section of the hallway was significantly taller, as if it were at the bottom of a pit. Rainbow Dash could see the ceiling, but it was over a thousand feet in the air at least.
At the end of the wall was nothing more than a giant boulder. It measured about five feet in diameter, about the size of a pony.
A diagram of the hallway
“Well THIS is a letdown,” Rainbow Dash lamented, “I was expecting that we would use your super powerful magic and my incredible flight skills to fight some bad guys at the end of this or something!
“Yes, that is odd. I would have expected the same thing. All that is here is just a giant boulder. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this.”
“I know, right?“ Rainbow responded, “Aren’t boulders in these temples and tombs supposed to roll towards us, and then we have to get out of the way? They aren’t just supposed to sit there!”
The two stared at the boulder. “Well, maybe we’re supposed to lift up this boulder to find something,” Rainbow figured, “I mean, the boulder must be here for a reason.”
“I got this,” Twilight reassured. She strained with her telekinesis a bit, her glowing aura around her horn extending out farther into space than normal. However, with a bit of applied effort, the boulder levitated a foot off the ground. Rainbow leaned under it and checked the floor. It was barren.
“Well that option’s no good. Maybe there’s something inside the boulder,” Rainbow guessed.
“That’s an idea. Let me see if I can find out,” Twilight said. She cast several different types of spells at the boulder until one of her spells found something.
“There are gems in this rock! I tried Rarity’s gem-finding spell and I can sense some gems. They’re sort of shaped like a key, so I’m guessing it’s a gem-encrusted key of some variety. We’re probably supposed to get it out somehow.
“See if you can smash it, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash suggested.
“Already on it!” Twilight, groaning under the incredible effort required, slammed the boulder back down onto the floor. A few chunks of an inch in diameter fell off but for the most part it was intact. Twilight then fired more magical energy beams at the boulder. However, this only managed to dislodge a few more chunks.
“You can blast through a column but not a boulder?” Rainbow asked incredulously.
“I think those columns were ceramic or something, since they shattered easily,” Twilight noted. “That or this boulder is solid iron!” Twilight attempted a few more tricks, including teleporting the boulder up to the ceiling and dropping it from a height, but it did not break.
“That… was… exhausting,” Twilight panted, “I don’t… think I can do that… too many more times… ugh,” Twilight fainted to the floor.
“You can’t just teleport whatever key there might be inside the boulder to the outside of the boulder?” Rainbow asked.
Twilight leaned up and responded, “Nope. It’s solid matter. You can’t teleport through solid matter. Teleportation involves matter moving from one point in space to another. But there has to be a path for it to go; it can’t move through other matter. To get the key from this rock, we’d need an explosion of some kind to fracture the rock open.”
“Well, I guess I can do a sonic rainboom. Except…” Rainbow eyed the ceiling. There was not nearly enough room. “I’m going to need more space to work with, Twilight. If I tried a rainboom in an enclosed room like this, it wouldn’t work. I’d just hit the boulder and break my neck and my wings! Usually I have to be a few miles in the air at least before I can build up enough speed.”
“Well, hmm…” Twilight thought about it for a minute, “I suppose that you could fly down towards the boulder, then I could teleport you back up so you could keep gaining speed, and we could repeat the process until you have enough speed to break the boulder.”
“Then how will I stop?” Rainbow Dash asked. Twilight thought about it for a moment before replying, “Well, after you’ve done the rainboom, I’ll teleport you back facing towards that fan in the long part of the hallway. That way you can work off your excess velocity and you don’t crash.”
“Sounds dangerous. I like it!” Rainbow exclaimed.
“Well, it’s dangerous to me, too. In fact, I will have to fly with you. In order to teleport another pony who’s moving as fast as you will be, I will simply have to be in direct contact or else it wouldn’t work. That’s the only way I was able to teleport both of us earlier, because you and I were touching.”
“Looks like you’ll get to go on that eight hundred mile an hour flight with me sooner than you thought,” Rainbow remarked.
The two ponies stood in front of the boulder as Twilight scribbled some calculations down on parchment.
“Rainbow Dash, can you fly up to the ceiling and tell me how tall it is?”
Rainbow looked at her friend puzzlingly. “How in Equestria am I supposed to know? I don’t have a measuring tape. Can’t we just get to doing this rainboom already?”
Twilight sighed at her friend’s ignorance, but answered, “We have to calculate how many times I am going to have to teleport you, and where I am going to have to teleport you to in order for this to work. Just approximate the height of one of these bricks used in the wall’s construction, fly up to the ceiling, and count the number of bricks as you’re flying. Then multiply the number of bricks by the average height of a brick.”
“These blocks are different heights, Twilight. Some of them are as tall as me, some are twice as tall as me.”
“Ugh! Come on, Rainbow Dash. You know how tall you are, just measure it in terms of your own height. Do I have to explain everything to you?”
Rainbow blushed, “Oh, I guess that would work too.” She flew up to the back wall and measured the height of it, which took about five minutes.
“It’s as tall as I am, times three hundred seventy five. I’m four feet tall,” Rainbow said.
Twilight Sparkle thought about this for a minute. She did some calculations on parchment and then her mouth dropped.
“This isn’t good. To break the sound barrier, you’ll have to travel 1,126 feet per second, approximately. If the roof is only 1,500 feet in the air, I’ll have to teleport you nearly once per second by the time you get to go that fast! And, I’ll have to teleport you over a thousand feet away! I could barely teleport you a thousand feet when you were going a fraction of that speed down the wind tunnel earlier!”
Rainbow assured her friend, “It will be easier than you think. Also, remember that the sonic rainboom makes magic more powerful. Remember your entrance exam to Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns? The Rainboom that I did back then helped supercharge your magic. When I do my Rainboom this time, it could help your magic be stronger now, too.”
“Very good, but the spells I cast then only happened after the rainboom. Not before it. Before it, I was not doing a good job and I was about to fail the exam.”
Rainbow refused to back down. “Well, what about Rarity? Her magic guided her towards the rock that my rainboom shattered open. But she was guided to the rock before it was shattered. You were compelled to take the exam before the rainboom. Maybe the magic-rainboom effect isn’t bound by time. You have to be a bit more confident, Twilight. Never say that you CAN’T do anything. I learned that the hard way. Never doubt yourself. Just have faith and confidence and nothing will stop you!”
Twilight thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know. If I mess up, we both could end up splattered and dead on the floor.”
Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Come on, now. It’s Auhizotl. Has he ever designed a riddle or temple for Daring Do that was unsolvable? No. He put her life into danger, yes. But all of his riddles have been solvable thus far. You’re a smart pony. Just think, the six of us have made it through everything he’s thrown at us up until this point. There’s no reason to think we won’t make it through again.”
Twilight smiled. “Thanks, Rainbow. I appreciate it. You’re right. Let’s make this explosion!”
“That’s the spirit!” Rainbow grabbed Twilight once again and lifted her up into the air. They ascended towards the ceiling.
“This is more stressful than a roller-coaster. At least on those, I’m not the one responsible to ensure its safe operation!” Twilight shuddered as they approached the brick ceiling.
“Remember what I told you to do, Twi? It’s simple. Just be brave and have no doubt. Alright, we’re at the ceiling. We’re going to dive in three… two…”
Twilight gulped.
“One… NOW!”
Rainbow locked up her wings and entered a nosedive. She held onto Twilight, who was flailing in the air.
“AAAAH!”
“Don’t worry Twi, I’m not letting you go! I’ve done this before while carrying three ponies!” Rainbow flapped her wings vigorously as she picked up speed. The air was absolutely blistering on the descent as they accelerated. Soon, they were a mere hundred feet from the boulder. Twilight fired a spell from her horn.
The duo was back up at the ceiling again, their momentum preserved. They continued to pick up speed as gravity and Rainbow’s flapping propelled them faster and faster. Twilight fired off another teleport.
This time, they did not reach the ceiling again. They only teleported five hundred feet up into the air.
“FOCUS!” Rainbow Dash yelled as she picked up more speed.
At this point, a white cone appeared around the two ponies, indicating they were close to the sound barrier. Rainbow’s hooves were turning white from the effort to hold onto Twilight Sparkle, whose heart was beating so fast that she was visibly trembling. She teleported them again and again without thinking about it.
Twilight gathered all of the strength that she could muster and charged her penultimate teleport. If this one did not take them all the way up to the ceiling, they would hit the ground before performing a sonic rainboom! Her horn glowed immensely as she teleported them up to the ceiling a final time.
It was a success, and the two found themselves back up, nearly touching the ceiling for a brief moment as they continued their rapid descent. Twilight barely had a fraction of a second to think before she instinctively fired off another teleport.
The two were suddenly back in the long part of the hall with the fans. A mere moment later, an explosion of every color conceivable graced the hall as it was lit up like a disco. A deafening crack exploded through the air from behind them. The Sonic Rainboom had worked, and they had been spared death.
“Hang on, I’ve gotta work off some of this speed!” Rainbow called out to Twilight.
Twilight felt an immense sense of relief. She had done it! Then, she realized how fast she was going. Holy Celestia!
“Woohoo! We did it!” Twilight called out in excitement, her mane whipping her eyes.
“We’re not out of the woods yet! Hang on!”
Rainbow zipped through the rows of columns at a breakneck pace. Twilight felt light-headed and thought she was going to faint. All she could see was wall after wall of white as Rainbow navigated the columns.
About a minute later, the duo found themselves back at the entrance to the great hall. They lost speed as the rapidly churning fans from the front entrance worked against Rainbow’s momentum. When she had slowed to a crawl, she descended, letting Twilight down and then herself onto the ground.
“WE DID IT!” The friends both yelled out. They bumped hooves in excitement.
“Omigosh omigosh omigosh! Twilight, you were amazing! How in Equestria did you know exactly when to use that last teleport before the sonic rainboom? I didn’t even realize I was doing it!”
“That was nothing, how did you navigate those columns so quickly? I hardly saw them! That was incredible, Rainbow Dash!”
In their excitement, the two ponies barely noticed the key which was floating behind them. It was a platinum key coated in amethyst gems.
“Hey Twi, did you grab that at the last second? What amazing reflexes!” Rainbow noted.
“Actually, I didn’t do a thing. I’m not even using my magic right now. I have no idea where that key came from or why it’s floating behind us right now.”
“Well, either way, it’s following us, so it must be important. Let’s go back to the main room,” Rainbow suggested. Twilight nodded in agreement and they ran back to their friends in excitement, with quite a story to tell.