"Unscheduled beacon activation. Security Team Alpha, report to Gate Three."
Twilight Sparkle blinked into existence on the floor of Gate Three, standing triumphantly atop the piled bodies of her teammates, victorious and unmarked.
“Yes!” she cried, hopping down from the pony pile and levitating the beacon off her horn, a smug swagger in her step. “Sparkle, Twilight. Insider. Team One-Five. Beacon clear, no contamination. Mission accomplished.”
The guards lowered their weapons fractionally, eyeing the elated unicorn and her piled teammates with a suspicious eye.
“Twilight, you foal,” Walleye groaned from underneath the pile. “Our equipment is still back there. And my rifle.”
“Oh…”
“Yes. ‘Oh.’”
“Well it’s hardly my fault that the four of you were about to tear each other apart!” Twilight rebuffed, allowing her saddlebags to be levitated off by a nearby guard. “I acted to defuse the situation.”
“Retrieval can collect your belongings,” the lead guard informed them, gruffly. “You need to be debriefed, especially since you arrived overdue.”
“Blame Twilight,” Rainboom muttered, pulling herself free of the pile.
“How was our arriving late my fault?”
“If you hadn’t taking your sweet time in rescuing us, we would have gotten back before the deadline!”
“Oh, here we go again. Somehow this is always her fault.” She pointed emphatically at Twilight. “Why are you so eager to lay blame on everyone?”
“Well it’s certainly not mine,” Walleye countered, advancing menacingly. “This mission was bucked into oblivion before we even arrived, and now we’ve wasted twelve hours that could have been better spent looking for Lunatic.”
“At least we know where she is now,” Twilight muttered.
“Yes, about to get beheaded.”
“Remind me again, featherbrain,” Lyra shouted, her eyes narrowing. “Which one of us is too busy arguing with everypony to bother trying to rescue the pony she claims to be so concerned about?”
Walleye dove at Lyra, only to freeze in mid-air, a lavender aura enveloping both her and her intended target.
“I will stun you both,” Twilight threatened. “Seriously, I’ve seen foals who are better-behaved than you two.”
“Get your filthy magic off me, Insider.”
“Word to the wise,” Twilight continued, tendrils of malice edging into her voice as she matched Walleye’s glare. “It’s not a smart move to insult someone who has you in their grip and could crush you with nary a thought.”
Walleye went to respond, only to have her mouth clamped shut by Twilight’s magic.
“And since you’re too stupid to take that advice voluntarily, I shall do it for you.”
The two glared at each other through the undulating magical aura, Twilight’s expression mixed with equal degrees of distaste and exasperation, while Walleye’s radiated pure fury.
“What is the reason for your late arrival?” the lead guard asked, breaking the silence.
“We were captured,” Lyra replied, her voice oddly at ease despite being suspended several hooflengths above the floor. “Guards bushwhacked us the moment we arrived.”
“And I landed in Canterlot,” Twilight said. “Turns out it was my homeworld and no-one thought to tell me. Had to stay overnight before heading to Ponyville and doing the spell deconstruction.”
“So you succeeded then?” the guard prompted. “You know where Lunatic is?”
“Yes, she’s-”
"Unscheduled beacon activation. Security Team Alpha, report to Gate Three."
Her answer was cut off as a grey-blue alicorn blinked into existence, clutching at what appeared to be a pony-shaped suit of metal.
“-right there?” Twilight finished, inadvertently dropping Walleye and Lyra to the floor in her surprise.
“Lunatic?” Walleye asked, not even bothering to right herself after being dropped.
“Hey boss,” Lunatic replied, her voice wavering as she rose to her feet, color draining from her face as blood loss from her missing wing set in. “I got her!”
Her eyes rolled upwards as her body chose that moment to relinquish consciousness, a wet squelch echoing through the chamber as she fell sideways onto the blood-stained floor of Gate Three.
------
Containment is one of the few locations aboard the Exterior in regular, consistent use that very few ponies even know exist. Fewer still know exactly how to reach the labyrinth of heavily-reinforced chambers that comprised the Exterior’s high-security storage facility, held behind thaumically-reinforced bulkheads, near-impenetrable force fields, and spatial geometries folded back upon themselves in a manner solidly beyond comprehension of most physical lifeforms, ponies included.
Despite this, if the greater population of the Exterior had caught wind of the existence of Containment, along with the myriad items and creatures that warranted confinement within it, the Exterior’s population would drop rapidly enough to make statisticians fear it would plunge into negatives on the way down.
Celestia stood at the edge of Chamber L-55, surveying the interlocking mechanisms that held the chamber’s occupant in place. Numerous force fields shimmered as they interlaced and distended, dynamically adjusting themselves to provide the maximum tensile strength against any impact, while a second, sympathetic field automatically nullified any ambient magical energy within the containment field’s bounds. Fifteen separate shell segments hung in the air around the force field, ready to slam closed at the slightest hint of a breach and allowing time for a second set of containment protocols to initialise, suspending time flow within the shell.
A single pony floated in the centre of the system, held painfully in place by a gravity well that prevented her from assuming any form other than a tightly-packed ball of limbs. It was a cell that was provably impossible to escape from, at least without outside help.
However, Celestia felt uneasy. The pink-maned ball of mad alicorn floating there had evaded capture for years, slipping through other ‘provably escape-proof’ nets in the past and leaving a trail of bodies, Insider and Outsider alike, in her wake. That she was there now meant that either they had gotten very lucky, or that Theta was capable enough to escape from the cage she now found herself within.
There was a third possibility, of course. But it wasn’t one that Celestia was particularly eager to entertain, given that it required her to consider the possibility that Theta had allies.
“I know you’re there,” Theta mumbled, her voice picked up by the array of monitoring devices in the chamber and helpfully reconstructed for Celestia to hear. “Have you come to gloat?”
“I’ve come to talk,” Celestia replied, slowly approaching the containment field, stopping short when she reached the line of shell sections.
“Talk?” Theta spat. “You expect to talk? And you call me crazy!”
“You are crazy!” Celestia cocked her head, trying to follow the pink alicorn’s logic.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Princess Pink,” Theta taunted, her voice happy and chirpy despite her physical construction. “Once I get out of here, you’ll get your answer.”
“That… wasn’t a question. I know you’re crazy.”
“Not that, dummy. The other question.”
“I haven’t asked you any questions at all yet!”
“Oh haven’t you? I thought we’d just skip past that bit of you asking the questions and me acting all coy and villainously flirtatious, fun though it is to watch you squirm, Pink.”
“If you think you can unnerve me with mind games, Theta, you’re wrong.”
“Oh, I don’t need to play mind games to unnerve you, Pink. You’re already unnerved from my reputation. And the fact that you don’t know the answer to your question.”
“There has been no question.”
“Just because you haven’t asked it yet doesn’t mean I don’t know what it is. No it’s not.”
“...What?”
“You were going to say, ‘that’s horseapples’. I’m proving my point. Yes you are.”
“I’m- stop that!”
Theta giggled, making Celestia shiver.
“Fine,” Celestia seethed, circling the outer shell boundary. “So you’re not going to tell me the answer to a question I haven’t asked yet.”
“What’s the fun in telling you now? Then I don’t get to see your reaction when you find out for real!”
“Thing is, though,” Celestia continued, ignoring Theta’s infuriatingly sing-song voice, “I can’t trust any answer you give me anyway. If you say you are working with somepony else, it could just be a ruse to divert my attention into finding somepony that doesn’t exist while you tear us apart from within. But if you claim you’re working alone, it’s just a way to distract me from finding whoever it is that’s going to stab me in the back.”
“I’m hungry,” Theta complained after a moment of silence, her voice petulant. “Think you could bring me some food?”
“You’re not hungry. The field overrides your metabolism.”
“Okay, fine, I’m not hungry,” Theta admitted. “But this is all so boring. I already know everything you’re going to say years before you say it. Yes I am.”
“You’re not- Buck!”
Theta giggled again.
“This is getting nowhere,” Celestia groaned, turning back to the exit of the chamber. “Enjoy your new home, Theta. You’ll be in it until you start giving straight answers, or I drop you into the Void. Whichever comes first.”
“Buh-bye Pwincess,” Theta sung. “ Enjoy your emergency!”
Celestia stormed from the chamber, extinguishing the chamber’s lighting spell on her way out, Theta’s increasingly-manic laughter following in her wake.
------
“Why exactly am I here?” Twilight asked, barely keeping pace with her grey-coated CO as she cantered down the corridor at speed. “What in Tartarus do you need me for, Walleye?”
“You’re my lockpick,” She replied, skidding around a corner. “You can magically unlock things, right?”
“Yes. Well… most things that aren’t already magically locked, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Well, we’ll just have to hope you’re skilled enough to unlock what I need.”
“Walleye, stop dodging the question. Why are you trusting me with this? You hate me, last I checked.”
Walleye skidded to a halt outside of a heavy dual door, turning to fix Twilight with a look of frustration. “Because, much as I would rather otherwise, you’re the only magic adept I can call on right now to get what I need out of the Armory.”
“Why don’t you just ask them for it?”
“Because there’s no way anypony is going to let me into that section,” Walleye said, pressing her beacon to the door’s access plate, prompting it to neatly fold away into the adjoining walls to reveal racks upon racks of weapons. Twilight eyed the racks with curiosity, awed not only by the number of familiar implements, but the variety of unfamiliar ones.
“That was easy,” Twilight observed, once again following as Walleye trotted into the Armory. “Bit small, though.”
“She says to the mare that carries around a rifle that’s longer than she is.”
“Okay, fair point...” Twilight trailed off, stopping to look at an array of jewels set atop pedestals, equally spaced twelve hooflengths away from each other.
“Would you keep up?” Walleye said, gritting her teeth and turning to glare at Twilight
“What are these?” Twilight asked, levitating one of the stones off its pedestal so she could examine it further. “Some kind of spell stone?”
“Probably,” Walleye replied, trotting over to read the label. “Um… This is all gobbledygook to me… ‘Self-Recharging Thaumic Energy Stone. Two point five… Kith?’”
“Kith?”
“I don’t know that word. K-T-H.”
“That’s a unit of measurement. Kilothaum. Used to measure… magical…” Twilight trailed off as what she had just said sunk in, staring at the stone with a mixture of wonderment and horror. “...energy.”
“And… what? 2.5 is a lot?”
“Yes,” Twilight breathed, delicately setting the stone back down. “It’s immense. Normal unicorns can barely leverage ten or fifteen thaum without exhausting themselves, this stone is storing more than one hundred and fifty times that!”
“Take one, then,” Walleye said, tapping her hoof in impatience. “It’s not like it’ll be missed. I’ve seen Ops teams wearing those like they’re going out of fashion.”
“Okay, pertinent question,” Twilight began, gently attaching the stone to her beacon ring, reforming the metal to clasp around the stone. “Back home, this stone would be considered a weapon of mass destruction. Nopony bar Celestia herself has ever managed to create a powerstone with that kind of capacity, and you have them lying around, unguarded.”
“Yes,” Walleye replied, rounding the corner and stepping onto a wall, her subjective gravity rotating with the change in perspective. “Not hearing a question yet…”
“If this is something you don’t think is dangerous enough to lock up with any degree of seriousness,” Twilight continued, pausing for a moment to following Walleye, shaking her head with the disorienting change in gravity. “How dangerous is whatever it is you’re wanting me to help you steal?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Oh, no way,” Twilight said, stubbornly shaking her head. “I’m not moving another step until you tell me what we’re here for.”
“Now you listen here,” Walleye growled, rounding on Twilight. “I don’t care. I don’t take orders from you. Now, you can either shut up and keep cantering, or I can escort you back to your room and good luck ever getting me to trust you with anything, ever again.”
“...Fine,” Twilight acquiesced, ears drooping slightly.
They continued in relative silence for over a mile, Twilight choosing to occupy her time by pinging the powerstone now bound to her beacon ring, pulling various parameters from the stone, when it was made, the exact energy capacity, how much she could requisition for immediate use in a single go…
She was so enthralled in the crystal that she almost missed Walleye taking an abrupt turn, leading them both into a small, nondescript domed chamber with a hoof-thick crystal floor, underneath which lay a locking mechanism that, to Twilight at least, could be described only as ‘beautiful’.
Walleye, however, was less impressed by the lock, standing off to one side and pointing at the floor. “I need you to open this.”
Twilight trotted forward, analysing the myriad of interlocking gears and mechanisms with a critical eye, occasionally probing the construction with a carefully-placed ping of magic. Her expression grew steadily more dismayed with each component identified.
“I can’t.”
“Oh, so Miss ‘Mission Accomplished’ can’t get past a simple lock?”
“This lock is by no stretch of the word ‘simple,’” Twilight snapped. “This is probably the single-most-complicated thaumomechanical device I have ever seen or likely will ever see in my life. I wouldn’t know where to start!”
“Why does that matter? You’re a unicorn, just dump some magic at and make it open.”
“That wouldn’t work. I can’t just fire a spell at it with the order of ‘open up,’ because there’s a far more powerful spell, several far more powerful spells, actually, sitting in there with the explicit instruction of ‘no, don’t open up.’ Without knowing the exact timing and exact strength each locking component needs to be triggered, I can’t open it.”
Walleye waved her hoof in the air in a clear ‘blah, blah, blah’ gesture.
“And the fact that I know that much is a miracle in itself! This entire plate is covered in a field that screws with magical interrogation, so I’m having to guess most of this based on the thaumic equivalent of shining a light on something and trying to figure out what its shape really is from the shadow it casts! That’s not mentioning the structural reinforcing, the layers upon layers upon layers of thaumic field interference that basically result in any external magical effect being rendered impotent after a few hooflengths. I can’t levitate anything inside, I can’t teleport in or out, it’s a magical black hole!”
“You’re talking,” Walleye said, “but I’m pretty sure you’re not speaking the same language as me.”
“Gah,” Twilight facehoofed, groaning in frustration. “Okay, lay-ponies explanation. A normal mechanical lock works by little segmented pins. You put a key in, it pushes the pins up until all the little lines of segmentation align, and you can turn it. Simple, and with magic you can just fire a spell that finds the right amount to raise the pins to unlock it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Walleye said, rolling her eyes. “I follow you.”
“This,” Twilight gestured to the floor, “works by examining a pony’s magical field. There’s dozens of tiny little collector pins in there, which react to a certain frequency of magical excitation. Each individual pony has a unique magical ‘signature,’ if you will, and you can only unlock this lock if your magic matches the magic that’s programmed into the lock.”
Walleye nodded, clearly bored and impatient.
“The thing is, though, this whole ‘Outsider’ thing makes it more complicated, since my magical field is the same as any other Twilight Sparkle on the Exterior, or in the Interior, for that matter. That’s what I don’t get. It’s quite obviously a magical signature recognition lock, though a very, very thorough and complicated one, but that alone wouldn’t work. Unless Outsiders have some extra field component that this thing reacts to that is different from pony to pony, any Twilight Sparkle could just come in here and pulse their magic, and the lock would open.”
As if to punctuate her point, she loosed a mild thaumic ping, a barely-visible purple wave echoing off the walls of the chamber, motes of light flickering through the floor as the lock reacted to the pulse, reading and responding to her magical imprint.
Two seconds later, the entire mechanism slid sideways with a solid mechanical thump.
“...Much like that,” Twilight breathed as the lock rotated and a panel in the centre of the floor rose, revealing a simple metallic-silver cylinder covered in warnings.
“Good work, rookie!” Walleye exclaimed, trotting forward to retrieve the object. “Never doubted you for a moment!”
“That shouldn’t have worked.”
“And yet it did,” Walleye said, swinging the cylinder onto her back, a strap looped around her barrel.
“But it shouldn’t have!” Twilight yelled, turning to Walleye as the floor section sunk back into place. “It’s impossible!”
“I’m not going to complain that we got what I came here for, but apparently, you are.”
“What is it, anyway?” Twilight asked, trotting forward to read the prominently affixed warning sign, a red circle-enclosed six-pointed star denoting the presence of high-energy magic components. “Thaumonuclear Implosion Assembly. Two Megathaum Effective Discharge. Handle with Care.”
Twilight turned to look at Walleye, all color drained from her face. “Two megathaum?”
“Yes,” Walleye snapped, purposefully walking towards the exit. “It’s a very large bomb. Those monsters are going to pay for what they did to Lunatic, and I wanted an appropriate weapon. Now, are you coming or not?”