Our combined pluming of the depths of Trott Dome revealed that yes, the robot population had been severely depleted but by no means exhausted. Fortunately, a single robot patrol at a time wasn't much to me, and was easily handled. Copper kept saving the scraps from the robots for...some reason. I only found what the reason was once we found the door to what appeared to be the maintenance systems. At least, judging by all the cords coming out of that particular door. I leaned up against the wall while looking at the keypad next to it, and Copper cleared her throat. I turned to look at her, and she had a crude, metallic helmet being held by one hoof. It looked like it would fit over my head.
"For me?"
She nodded at that, and I plucked it from her and put it on over my cranium. A little loose here or there, but it was protection for my head, so I'd take it. After a moment to catch my breath, I stood up and looked at the keypad. It looked to have space for five digits and judging by the lack of a doorknob, operated the door. I sighed as I looked at the keypad and ran the idea through my head. "Five digits. Ten to the fifth power. One hundred thousand combinations it could be."
"Seven six five seven seven."
I turned to Copper, bemused about the string she'd rattled off. She shrugged before explaining. "An old string that's been passed down through the line. Mum said it was important. Seems to fit."
I punched the string in, and the keypad beeped a few times before the door gave off a clunk and swung inwards a bit. Giving it a push revealed that the code had been correct, and that this place had a terminal within. "Okay, so your family somehow knew the access code to the things in Trott Dome. Along with your family being skilled in mechanical things. Starting to think you might be descended from someone highly important in this Dome...when it still worked."
Copper laughed once. "Anything is possible. So what are you looking for here?"
I walked up to the terminal and pushed the big, obvious POWER button. A screen on the far wall flickered into life, and I was presented with a simple > .
"Well," I said while typing in a query, "I'm hoping this computer has access to whatever records exist about what happened."
>Search: Major Historical Events from year 1004 to present date.
The computer beeped once before spitting a message back at me.
ARCHIVES NOT ACCESSIBLE. CABLE BROKEN.
"Well," Copper said. "That was a bust."
"Not quite," I said. "After all, just because I can't find out what I'm looking for here..."
>Search: Archive Location.
The computer beeped again before it spat another message at me.
ARCHIVES LOCATED IN VILLE DOME.
"...Doesn't mean I can't find it at all."
Copper nodded at the thought. "Yeah...Okay, fair enough, you know where they are. But going there would be silly and dangerous. The surface is home to all sorts of monsters. Plus, you don't know where it is in relation to us."
I smiled and typed in a new query.
>Search: Route to Ville Dome from Trott Dome.
The screen displayed a map, showing a new Dome, and labeled it as Ville Dome. It panned to the north a ways, following a steel rail, before displaying another Dome, and it labeled that one as Trott Dome. I turned to Copper and smiled.
"And now we know. Just follow the railway south."
At that moment, the familiar clanking sound came from doorway, and before I could so much as draw my katana, Copper turned to face the door, and the flamethrower on her back followed. With a flick of a control, the device came to life and...melted the head of the incoming robot, causing the rest of its body to fall to the ground.
I stared at both it, then her, and pointed at the robot while trying to work my mouth. Copper looked at me and bashfully scraped the ground. "I...wasn't sure that was going to work, honestly..."
"You just melted a robot with things you scavenged from other robots. You take credit for that, missy. And then tell me how you did it."
She coughed a bit while walking over to the fresh carcass. "Well, turns out, all these robots have a small magi-tech cube in them. They also run on some sort of oil or something like it. All you have to do is drain it out of them, create an ignition system with the magi-tech cubes, along with a way to spray the fluid in a more-or-less straight line, such as re-purposing their pneumatics and motors, and you've got an industrial flamethrower."
She pulled what looked like a gas tank from the flank area of the robot and filled up a similar tank on her harness. "And...how do you aim the thing?"
She picked up one of the legs of the robot, which whirred slightly. "These things are made of gears and servos and the like. Wasn't hard to rig up a system that would aim the thing based on my body movements."
I smiled and patted her on the head. "You seem to have really taken to hope."
She snorted and made to leave the room. "You keep pushing it on me. May as well give it a fair shake."
The walk along the rail was long, cold, and the eternal twilight provided by the constant cloud cover made it hard to tell how long we'd been walking. Only the occasional break in the scenery gave me any clue that we were making progress instead of walking in a very large circle.
The mutants, at least the ones that had more physical bodies, I dealt with. But when we encountered our first slime...
It took me a good minute of hacking before I shook my head and backed off. The darn thing just kept reconstituting itself from any damage I could dish out. I took a moment, along with a deep breath, and the gelatinous thing oozed closer.
That was when Copper dished out a lance of fire, causing the slime to squeal once before falling silent and immobile. I turned to her with a raised eyebrow. She raised an eyebrow at me in turn. "What?" she asked. "Your fancy sword moves weren't working, so I figured fire might help."
I snorted at that before quipping, "Fire solves everything."
She nodded once before replying. "And if it doesn't, use more fire."
The further we walked, the more keen the pain in my stomach became. It'd been who knows how long since I actually ate anything. The Energizers could keep me going beyond that pain, but...my body knew. The blasted wasteland around us only served to remind me of the things that had been here. Namely, edibles, like the apples I'd had with Ancient Lore.
Eventually, we saw the sight of the Dome we were looking for, and walked in the maintenance door. The ponies within were much like the ones back in Trott Dome, but their eyes lit up when they saw Copper in her battle harness. I walked into their Energizer, and in a few seconds, the aches and pains I'd worked up walking here and fighting off the mutants with bodies vanished. Walking out revealed Copper near an unmarked spout, holding a fuel tank from one of the robots under it and getting her flamethrower fuel.
"Aaah," I said. "These aren't just for the fleshy beings, I see."
She nodded before filling up her fuel compartment and refilling the spare tank again. "I put a hoof under one of them once. The smell didn't leave me for a week."
She then walked into the main compartment of the Energizer, and once she trotted out, I pointed to the nearby stairs down. It would seem the Domes had similar if not downright identical constructions. "Shall we, then? We need to learn where our targets are within the Dome."
She nodded once, and we made our way into the depths, only to be confronted with a familiar sight: a swarm of robots working on maintaining the depths and keeping them clear of any intrusion. And while this blacklist unfortunately included us, we were ready for them. I drew my katana and Copper fired up her flamethrower.
Two beings with nothing to lose pitted against this robotic assault squad.
I almost pitied the robots.
Once enough of the horde was downed, we looked around for the typical cables that would lead us to the maintenance computer. My hope was that once we were there, we'd be able to search for wherever the Archives were. However, we'd found that the keypad keeping the door to the room with the terminal in it didn't accept the 76577 code that Copper knew. I puzzled on the situation for a moment before laughing.
"Of course," I said. "It's so simple, now that I think about it."
Copper raised an eyebrow, and I dug around in my pockets before producing a piece of chalk from my time with Ancient Lore. I then walked to the nearest wall and wrote down two lines. One numbers, one letters.
ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQR STU VWX YZ
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
"Trott Dome had the key of 76577 because that's the numbers the letters that spelled Trott would correspond to," I explained while drawing little lines between the letters and numbers. "Whereas this Ville Dome, if it follows the same pattern..."
"Would be 83442," Copper finished, her eyes dancing between the numbers and letters. Sure enough, when the new string was plugged into the keypad, the door gave off a ker-chunk, and swung inwards. The terminal we were looking for was beyond, and I turned it on, once again greeted by a > on the screen that took up the far wall.
"Okay," I said while typing in my query. "Let's see if this terminal has access."
>Search: Major Historic Events from year 1004+.
The computer beeped once before it spat a similar string at me.
ARCHIVES NOT ACCESSIBLE. CABLE BROKEN.
"Damn," I swore before typing the same follow-up query. "Well then, where are they?"
>Search: Location of Archives within Ville Dome.
The computer beeped again before showing a map of the Ville Dome. Apparently, I was looking for a structure right in the center of the place. I nodded once and turned back to Copper, who was also nodding.
"Right," she said. "Get in, learn, and get out."
I shook my head at that before turning back to the computer. "Not quite. There's something else I want to learn while I'm here."
>Search: Location of fluctuations in local chronosphere.
SEARCHING...
The screen beyond flickered into a map of the world and seemed to zoom around before fixing itself on a Dome and labeling it as Trott Dome.
ONE MATCH FOUND, CONTINUING SEARCH...
"That's where I came from," I pointed out. "The fluctuation there. I know that on the other side is 599, and both it and 999 are intact. So neither of those Gates will help me."
The map zoomed over to another Dome and labelled it as well, this one as Aerie Dome.
TWO MATCHES FOUND, CONTINUING SEARCH...
It took the computer another minute before it beeped again. NO ADDITIONAL MATCHES FOUND.
I began typing in another query automatically before I realized that there was another, greater answer that I needed after this current question was done.
>Search: Route to Aerie Dome from Ville Dome.
This time, the map zoomed out. Ville Dome was on the left side, and Aerie was on the right. Between the two, a red line flashed once, twice, and then the screen returned to normal as the computer explained itself.
BEST ROUTE: USE VILLE DOME STATION TO TRAVEL TO AERIE DOME. ONE TRAIN REMAINS IN THE STATION.
I shrugged at that and typed in the final query I would have of this terminal.
>Query: Current date.
The answer would come as a shock to me.
CURRENT DATE: SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2299.
I choked up at that. Thirteen-hundred years? That's all it would take for ponies to both rise and fall? A few deep breaths saw me under control again, and I looked over to Copper to see her nearly in tears as well.
"Funny, isn't it?" she whispered. "I thought knowing would make me happy. But if you say 999 is fine, that means...somewhere in the last thirteen-hundred years...we both became capable of making...and destroying, these Domes. And nopony knows why or how."
I nodded once and slowly made for the door, patting her on the withers on the way. "That's why we're here. To find out."
Our trip to the Archives of Ville Dome was unmolested, but arriving there revealed a huge skeleton coiled around the structure. It was only when we drew close enough to the thing that I saw the draconic shape and purple scales and then immediately connected the dragon-shaped dots.
Ville Dome. Purple scales. A dragon-sized skeleton. Spike.
Oh dear gods, but this was PonyVille.
Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to leave this ghost town as fast as possible. Seeing the massive corpse of what used to be Spike the Dragon...
It left me feeling ill. Especially when we had to crawl through his ribcage to get at the door to the Archives, which appeared to be housed in a huge, crystalline tree. A terminal greeted us in the lobby, and I walked up to it and turned it on. Upon being greeted with another command prompt, I searched, for the third time, as to what the bloody hell had happened to the world.
>Search: Major Historical Events from year 1004 to 2299.
The computer beeped once before it began spewing out a list of answers.
1022 - RAINBOW DASH DIES IN FLIGHT-RELATED ACCIDENT
1072 - FLUTTERSHY PASSES AWAY, ANIMALS MOURN FOR A WEEK STRAIGHT
1082 - PINKIE PIE'S LAST HURRAH
1092 - APPLE CLAN MATRIARCH APPLEJACK'S LAST HARVEST
1102 - RARITY PASSES ON IN HER SLEEP, FASHION INDUSTRY WILL NEVER BE THE SAME
1250 - PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE COMES OUT OF SELF-IMPOSED SECLUSION, BEGINS HER WORK WITH MAGI-TECH
1400 - FIRST DOME GOES UP AROUND CANTERLOT
1600 - ALL EQUESTRIAN CITIES DOMED
1800 - CIVILIZED WORLD ADOPTS THE DOME
1999 - END OF WORLD, SEE VIDEO THE_END
NO FURTHER MATCHES DETECTED.
I gulped at the foreknowledge I'd been granted into the possible deaths of the Bearers before I typed a new query into the computer. Copper looked at the first five listings while frowning. "Why...are those significant?"
"I might tell you or show you later," I replied.
>Play THE_END.
Instantly, the screen went black, then shifted to look at a Dome it labeled as Canter. It then panned to the south a ways before shaking. My stomach plummeted as a mound of earth suddenly appeared. My feeling of dread only increased as it split apart, showing the glowing, molten core of the planet. And when something emerged from it, I cried out in shock.
A gigantic, porcupine-looking thing, easily as large as one of the Domes, crawled out from the earth and let out a familiar cry before it began shooting its glowing spines into the air. The camera tracked over to Canter Dome and displayed several spines landing on it, destroying it instantly.
MAGICAL SIGNATURE OF ALICORN CELESTIA VANISHES
MAGICAL SIGNATURE OF ALICORN LUNA VANISHES
MAGICAL SIGNATURE OF CELESTIAL CLOCK - INTACT
It then panned over to Ville Dome and displayed the same spines hitting this Dome. A purple streak erupted from it and went directly towards the giant. A moment later...
MAGICAL SIGNATURE OF ALICORN TWILIGHT VANISHES
The camera panned up, towards the Crystal Empire, and displayed quite a few spines hitting it. I already knew what the screen would say, and even intoned it as the text played.
MAGICAL SIGNATURE OF ALICORN CADENCE VANISHES
I beat the desk with one hand and sobbed softly. Copper came up and gawped at the movie playing as it panned back over to the porcupine creature. "What...is that?"
I took a deep breath as the movie cut out and named the thing that had ended the world. "Lavos. Destroyer of worlds. How it got here, I don't know. But I promise you this."
I turned and looked Copper right in the eyes. "I'm going to find a way to kill that damn thing if it's the last thing I do."