The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Inspection, Six

"We're approaching the ventilation room," Selma announced, turning a steel-lined corner lit by overhead strips of energy.

Sharpie furrowed her brow. "What exactly do you plan to do there, Gerardo? The fortress's air conditioning has nothing to do with your crates, and we left the surveillance room before even losing track of your friends!" She huffed. "I can't see what this has to do with anything."

"Do you have any better ideas?" Gerardo quirked his head. "In absence of leads, the best I can do is look into anything and everything I come across. Although, it may be time to call this inspection quits..."

"Giving up so easily?" Selma asked, looking back. "Interesting. I thought you were stubborn."

Gerardo sighed under his breath as he walked. Whatever the reason, there was all the proof he needed that Selma was vested in his drawing things out as long as possible. He cleared his throat and continued moving, talons clicking against the sturdy metal floor.

The corridor widened out into a funnel shape, entering a high-ceilinged room with sparse furnishings and a central metal tower. Along the floors and roof, gigantic conflagrations of pipes and engines sat like massive metal spiders, housed within cages that constantly thrummed and beat with the sound of spinning. Like a brain stem, or the roots of an upside-down tree, pipes radiated out from the top of the tower, its highest level ringed with outward-leaning panes of clear blue glass.

Sharpie whistled. "Can't say I've seen this part before. It looks like a guard tower."

"It is," Selma answered with an indifferent shrug. "I told you, the ventilation system is counted as a military asset and thus its core controls were made to be easily defensible."

Rubbing his chin, Gerardo looked around the room. Evidently, the Water District predated the Defense Force by quite some time, which meant any defenses in place were either new or had been built into a recent upgrade of the system... and the level of protection present seemed far more than adequate when the system's importance was as low as Selma had made it out to be. Especially for a force apparently incapable of obtaining real weapons, why choose to protect this part so heavily? It wouldn't come as a surprise if there was more to the room than just ventilation.

"I think," Gerardo announced, wandering off at a slight angle to the ponies, "that here is where I wish to do some poking around of my own."

Selma shot him a measured glance... and nodded. "As you must."

Gerardo spread his wings, flapping through the heightened airspace of the outer ventilation chamber. Alighting on a lumpy, black box that appeared to be sculpted to the shape of moving parts within, he took several seconds to regain his balance against the thrum. His eyes scanned the room from on high, noting periodic fixtures on the octagonal walls... Turrets, perhaps? Unlikely, given the Defense Force's lack of conventional mobile artillery, but they certainly seemed positioned to be useful. The room's donut-shaped floor plan was largely covered in machines, though they were arranged such as to provide poor cover for any hapless invaders.

Soaring again to the back, he noticed a tightly-sealed steel door set into the tower's base, and landed to investigate. A card key slot sat next to it, glowing internally with a dull red light.

"Allow me," Selma's voice requested. Gerardo whirled to see the unicorn standing behind him, brandishing a thin key in his aura. Stepping aside, he allowed Selma forward.

Chink! The card slipped into the slit of metal... and was rejected with a resounding beep, the red light growing briefly more intense. Selma frowned and tried again.

BEEEEEP! Again, the door refused to budge, red light glowing angrily. Gerardo raised an eyebrow. "Captain? I take it this is an unexpected occurrence?"

"Apparently," Selma growled, "the permissions on my key are not properly set following a recent... incident. Unless you have your own, we will have to skip this tower."

"Let me try," Sharpie interjected, landing with a flap of her wings. Coiling them, she pulled a card of her own out of her suit and held it, clasped in her teeth, to the card reader.

BEEEEEP! Rejection, once again. She snorted and shook her head, pocketing the card.

"My apologies for the inconvenience," Selma said dryly. "I imagine you'll want to turn your investigation elsewhere, now? The barracks, perhaps? The upper levels?"

"Not so hastily," Gerardo instructed with a talon. "I don't think I'm done here yet."

Staring at the door, he wracked his brain. Would Selma really not have access to parts of his own base? That seemed suspect. He had seemed hasty or impatient to move on, as well... What if there was something in the ventilation room beyond security and fans? It didn't make sense to invest this heavily in security over a paltry asset, as he had pondered earlier, but if the room contained something more important, the air works could serve as an excuse...

With a blink, Gerardo realized that if his crates were still in the fortress, the ventilation control tower could very well be where they were.

He spread his wings and kicked off, hovering up to the glass pane windows ringing the top of the tower, just below its root-like mass of pipes. Inside, the walls appeared ringed with consoles, chairs, sets of buttons, levers and switches... and in the middle, there was a table. It had a pristine surface that glowed pale white, and above it floated an ethereal nest of lines, paired into sets of four, that could best be described as a tumbleweed with vertebrae and only right angles. It was a hologram, he realized... a projected map of the interior of the fort.

Blinking again, he returned to the ground. "Where are we right now?" he politely asked. "Relative to the fortress. The top, the bottom, the sides...?"

Selma nodded. "This is the lowest floor in the Water District, about ten stories beneath the base of the mountains. You're looking at the map, aren't you?"

"I hope that isn't a problem," Gerardo answered, soaring back up before Selma could reply.

Looking at the map with fresh eyes, he quickly overcame the fact that it was tilted - a pony actually in the room would be able to manipulate it, of course - and pinpointed their location as a large room on the lowest floor of the structure. Halfway through trying to count the levels, his eyes gave up from the monotonous sting and he blinked, losing his progress, but at least one hundred was a good estimate. Perhaps more, but they weren't spaced consistently, making counting by chunks impossible.

He quickly narrowed in on the map's extremities, where three paths somehow left the tangle and snaked off far in their own directions. One departed from the very top and slanted downward and away; a straight forty-five-degree slide into oblivion. Another also left from near the top, in exactly the opposite direction, flat end level yet gently curved, unlike the rest of the fortress's straight, boxy corridors. The final one mirrored the second, only halfway down.

"What are these?" he queried, glancing down without landing. "These three spinoff passages?"

Selma gazed back up at him with an expression that would have been identical were he the one looking down. "Major exits," he replied boredly. "One to the Flame District, one to the top of the dams, and one to a... 'maintenance' platform halfway up the eastern dam. They would..." His voice grew slightly terse. "Take significant time to investigate, and turn up nothing of interest."

Gerardo glanced to Sharpie, then to the unicorn. "I think," he began, descending, "that I would very much like to inspect this dam, if at all possible."

"The lower platform is closest," Selma slowly answered. "It is also presently closed for maintenance."

"Most interesting." Gerardo gave a vague nod. "It sounds like a perfect place to start."

A resigned gaze from Selma told him he would mount no objection. More interestingly to Gerardo, however, was that dam tops and maintenance platforms implied being outside... and that would give him the perfect opportunity to escape, no matter how much Selma wanted him preoccupied.

Comments

[RoboRed]

[bronyheat]

This fortress is massive! I guess I should have picked up on it given our absentee mares fell asleep on an elevator ride, but still...
I feel sorry for the cleaning staff...