The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Fiery Descent

"I notice," Gerardo said to Maple as the elevator began its descent, "that you've obtained for yourself a hat!"

Valey grinned, tapping her own beret with her good wing. "Hats are the best. We should find you one too, Birdo."

"Yes, I have..." Maple looked up at the brow of the hard hat obscuring the topmost part of her vision. Somehow, the elevator capsule was air conditioned, and the badly-needed rush of cool air had made her forget the itching of the padding against her mane... until Gerardo brought it up. "It's supposed to be magically armored," she added.

"Practical and stylish." Gerardo nodded. "I approve!"

"Well, it also isn't very comfortable," Maple grumbled, fiddling with it with a hoof to try to get her mane to settle down. "Unless we're going back into an area where things fall from above, or get into a fight where I need armor, I don't think I'll be wearing this a lot."

Deftly, she pocketed it... and instantly went rigid, a buzzing filling every inch of her body and triggering all the nerves she had at once. She tried to gasp and couldn't tell if she succeeded, feeling as if her conscience was disconnecting from her body to protect her sanity. Ten rapid heartbeats later, her mind adjusted to it, tuning out and dulling the alien sensation and giving her back control. It was still there, buzzing through her heart and veins like the harsh flicker of a dying manalamp, but it didn't hurt, and it wasn't overwhelming. It was just... strange.

Everyone else was looking at her in concern. "What happened?" she asked, trusting her balance enough to hold a hoof to her chest.

Valey blinked hopefully. "It looked like something turned you on!"

Pushing her aside, Gerardo concernedly asked, "I was hoping you could tell me."

"I don't know," Maple murmured, thinking carefully as Starlight lurked against her legs. "All I did was store the helmet, and then..." She blinked in realization. "The helmet had an active mana core. And my cutie mark can store magic. I found that out two days ago when we ran into the Spirit, remember? With all the things that have happened since then, I'd completely forgotten we wanted to test it to see how that works! I guess this is what storing magic feels like..."

Valey's hat popped off. "The question is..." She grinned, pulling out Neon Nova's former sound stone and pointing it at Maple. "Can you do anything useful with it?"

Uncertainly, Maple touched the stone with a hoof, concentrating on the magical buzzing and trying to direct it inside, just like controlling where a physical object would appear when withdrawn. After a second or two, the sensation completely petered out, and the stone was charged and glowing.

Valey whistled appreciatively, slipping the stone back under her hat and meeting Maple's eyes. "That's actually a pretty useful trick you've got there, Ironflanks," she remarked, nodding imperceptibly. "Any chance you can do other stuff with it? Say, hold enough to attack, or do telekinesis or something?"

"I don't think so." Maple shook her head. "In the Earth District, it absorbed a cannon blast, but I couldn't hold it and it went back out immediately. Maybe if I practiced, but..." She wasn't keen on doing that. While the mana charge wasn't strictly painful, there was a kind of wrongness to it, as though it didn't belong in her body. Trying to hold it for long periods of time would be irritating at the very least, and if the strength of the sensation scaled with the amount of magic... She didn't want to think about it.

"Eh. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Valey let it drop.

The elevator dinged to a stop, and the doors slid open into a metal-plated chamber separate from the chaotic, burning core. Valey bade everyone out, and they followed.

"Where are we?" Gerardo asked. "I was under the impression that we had quite a bit further to go than merely stopping halfway down. Have I let my sense of drama run away with me?"

Valey shrugged. "I dunno if I said that or not. But the elevator's only programmed to let us off at the stop we need if we use my card key to board it from a certain other stop... and none of the normal stops are programmed to ever stop there. Basically we have to get off at this floor, walk down a floor, and get back on. It's convoluted, but that's yak security for you."

"Aha," Howe wheezed, still looking slightly beat up from his crash earlier. "I take it this is the area protected by the fiendish security trap you fell victim to earlier?"

"Spot on, Pancake." Valey nodded, opening what looked like a maintenance closet and instead finding a disused tunnel sloping downwards. Graffiti on the walls labeled it as a certain unregulated type of worker's break room. Maple blanched.

"Come on, you lot!" Valey beckoned, slipping underneath a flimsy strand of yellow tape informing visitors the area was closed for maintenance. The hall curved in a semicircle, creating the disquieting effect of having no corners yet being unable to see far forward or behind. Eventually, it straightened out, the wall and ceiling panels taking on an unusual texture.

"Is this the place?" Maple asked, wary of the panels, deliberately looking away from a side door she presumed led to the break room. "With the security?"

"Just a little further," Valey answered, continuing and taking a left at a crossroads. They were once again going down, and then that too evened out. "This is."

Maple gulped. Unlike the earlier hall, this one looked completely ordinary.

"It's probably totally safe," Valey said, striding forward. "I doubt anyone is watching it now. Selma should have better stuff to do. But just in case, let's go through two at a time so that there will be someone on the outside to open it if we need to. It has a manual override, and all that."

Gerardo and Howe crossed first. Then her and Starlight. Then Valey and Neon Nova. Nothing happened.

"Remind me where we're going, again?" Maple asked, nerves completely shot. "And why we're going there? After that fall, I think I'm ready to play it safe and not go looking for trouble in extremely secure areas..."

"To a place I stashed something super important to me," Valey chirped, swiping her card key through a terminal. She bounced in delight when it lit up. "So I can get it back and take it with me when we bail. Anyway, looks like nobody messed with my privileges for this elevator! Let's go!"

---

The elevator continued its smooth, air-conditioned descent through the Flame District. The shaft was set exactly against a far wall, and the elevator capsule was a cylinder of glass, so half of the view looked out over a doubly-insulated view of the smoggy cavern, and the other was warm, red rock. They passed drilling apparatuses used for strip mining, some dormant and others still belching flame, they slid below giant box fans blasting ventilated outside air downward into the chasm, they saw massive closed cooling loops pumping in ice water from the reservoir and funneling out scalding steam to melt snow above and create more water for the reservoir. Ponies grew more common as they descended, as did open flames, and eventually they broke through the final cloud cover separating the bottom from sight.

Maple gaped at the hot, craggy floor, steam billowing from vents in the wildly uneven rock. It had no semblance of flatness, not even pretending for it between massive ridges and broken plates jutting up at sharp angles, making traversal by hoof impossible... or, at least, it should have. The bulk of the construction, she realized, was on the bottommost rung of metal pipes and lattices to the drill, which itself was poised dormant over a giant crater like the tip of a diabolical quill, waiting to be called to action. Most of the floor was covered in power machines, giant bright-blue treaded things with buckets and shovels and cockpits for ponies to sit, that had stabilizers propping them steady even on wildly-angled terrain. All of them were empty, signs of the shutdown visible everywhere.

And then the elevator stopped. The pit contracted as it grew closer to the bottom, and their glass shaft window was swallowed by rock, becoming enclosed entirely. Its descent after that didn't even last long enough to clear the bottom of the pit. Maple estimated that they were still three of four floors up, on level with the very top of the drill bit.

It landed on a pedestal in a room half-plated with steel, looking as if it had been abandoned midway through construction. The room was a broad tunnel, big enough to build a small road through, giving up on straight-edged architecture and moving forward like a cave, and as the plates broke up and it traced away from the core, the rocks gradually lost their angry heat, being further and further from the kiss of the infernal machinery.

It was also completely dark, save for several mining lamps that looked like they had been lit recently, then left on the floor.

With Valey in the lead, they approached a metal wall that looked like someone had teleported three separate floor-to-ceiling chain-link fences inside of each other, letting time and brute force work out the collisions. Warning signs littered the fence, jammed in wherever they would fit in the mish-mash of metal, leaving just enough space between that Maple could make out what looked like a cave-in beyond. DANGER, they read. RESTRICTED. NO ACCESS.

There was a gate in the middle that looked like it had been padlocked shut with chains and an exorbitant amount of padlocks. But the central clasp was a hole, the metal around it melted into slag, and the gate was left wide open. When it was Maple's turn to walk through, she could feel its residual heat on her cheek, still burning.

"Valey, this is making me really nervous..." she cautioned, slipping closer to the batpony. "You said the other pony you were with was going here? Did they do this?"

"See for yourself," Valey said, stopping and pointing a hoof forward.

There had, indeed, been a cave-in. It fell from the roof, cracks spreading outward, a sea of boulders and shorn rock spilling out into the cave with crushed mining implements visible beneath. The emphasis, in this case, went on been.

Valey whistled. "You know, this was supposed to be me-only because I could shadow sneak through the rocks, but I... guess this works too..."

Another tunnel had been carved through the boulders, round and solid and partially gouged into the floor. Heat radiated from it even some distance in front of the entrance, and the force of whatever blast created it had been great enough to fuse the boulders together into a solid passageway. If there was one thing Maple liked about it, it was that it wasn't likely to collapse on her. She also doubted she would survive setting hoof inside it.

"On second thought?" Valey backed away, apparently just as rebuffed by the furnacelike tunnel as Maple. "There's the Flame District, and then there's this. I think I'll shadow sneak us past anyway."

---

"What kind of pony do you think could have power like that?" Maple asked, sitting with Starlight on the opposite side of the collapse and staring at the tunnel, waiting as Valey ferried more ponies through. "It looks like they just shot a laser, and it burned the rocks away..."

Starlight shrugged. Her opinion on the entire detour was one of mounting frustration; first, Howe had dropped Maple and left her with nothing she could do to help, and second, it was clearly putting her adoptive mother on edge. She wasn't sure what their goal was anymore. It felt like they had too many conflicting plans: stop the fight at the Water District, save Sosa from a flood, get some trinket, protect their friends, help Shinespark with her ship, escape Ironridge... and what they should have been doing was trying to figure out what they should have been doing, not sitting around and guessing at more mysteries that would only lead to more assumptions and confusion. But the tunnel's origin was what Maple wanted to know, so she gave it her best shot.

"I dunno," she said, leaning against the mare. "Back at my old home, they said Princess Celestia could shoot big lasers and burn things up like that. But she's an alicorn. Maybe someone used a Sosan weapon like that cannon from two days ago."

Maple grimaced. "I bet if I tried to pocket whatever made that tunnel, I'd just explode."

"Please don't," Starlight said, looking away, further down into the cave.

"Hmmm..." Maple wrapped a hoof around her shoulders. "This day really is getting out of hoof, isn't it? I wish we could help and make a difference, but now I'm afraid we just aren't the right ponies for the job like I hoped earlier. I guess I let our good luck last night go to my head..."

"It's fine," Starlight insisted. "It's fine."

Maple leaned against her. "I wonder if it's me," she hummed. "I get scared and back off or want to retreat when I'm following someone else, like the first day with Gerardo, or right now with Valey. Last night and this morning, somehow everyone decided to let me say what we did, and then I got so bold and decided we should try to save the city. I wish I could figure out how that lines up with how much I want to trust Valey and you and all my friends... Do you think I have trust issues, Starlight?"

Starlight didn't have time to reply, because Valey reappeared with Howe and Neon Nova, dropping them gasping as one at the edge of the rockslide pile. "Gotta get Gerardo, be right back!" Throwing a salute, she eagerly dove back in.

---

The ground tingled beneath Starlight's hooves as she continued to walk, the tunnel's direction straight and purposeful as if whoever had bored it had known exactly where they wanted it to go. It felt energized, eager, like it wanted to see her keep going. Perhaps it was Maple's nerves getting to her, but Starlight knew if she was personifying the rocks, she was far closer to cracking than she thought she was.

Either that, or the rocks were alive, and this place had been sealed for a very good reason.

"I like to call it the project room," Valey rambled, trying to keep the mood upbeat as they walked down the broad passage. "Actually, that's its official code name, according to the yaks, though apparently Skyfreeze used to call it something cooler. It's not a small part of why I'm here in Ironridge, either. They designed the security around making me the key. Though, it doesn't look like that was quite as foolproof as they thought..." Lackadaisically, she rolled her eyes.

"I'm not actually sure how long this place has been here," she continued. "I know they discovered it accidentally while doing test digs about... twenty, twenty-five years ago? Not long before the whole Project Aslan thing went kablooie. I bet the yaks were involved, since they probably knew it was here. Anyway, the few who initially knew about it were promoted, transferred, sworn to secrecy, whatever, and they buried it and made a rule about no digging too deep so nobody else would find it. I guess they thought it was dangerous or something. Or maybe that was also yaks and they wanted to hog it all for themselves, and save it until they had enough influence in the city that they could cover an operation with it. Remember, this wasn't long after the yak war, so their government back then was still getting its stuff together."

Gerardo raised a talon in curiosity. "I recall a conversation about something similar in Sosa, actually," he remarked. "Only vaguely, but I seem to remember something about a no-digging-too-deep rule? Might that be the one?"

"Probably is." Smugly, Valey tipped her hat. "Remember, messing with laws and loopholes is kind of my forte. Anyway, the yaks have been interested in doing some sort of project here... which mostly means sitting on it and not letting anyone else in. Except me. I can come and go as I want, because I'm the key. So, I figured, why not make it my lair? That's why I hid my stuff down here. I don't really have a safe place or house of my own aboveground, you know. All my stuff is either down here, or kept safely in my hat."

"One thing though, if I may..." Gerardo peered ahead, worried. "I'm aware that this tunnel is sloping down, but we still must be fairly close to the level of the drilling cavern, and surely they intend to keep expanding that downward. How much more of this tunnel is there, if we are to gain that sufficient of an altitude loss?"

Valey grinned. "Oh, you'll find out."

---

They reached the end of the tunnel, and Starlight staggered.

It was a circular room, with stalactites on the ceiling and walls that looked vaguely like they had melted, as if the air was rich in some kind of mineral that hardened over the natural construction. The floor was perfectly flat, almost polished, made from white stone. A few abandoned wooden pallets and metal cans sat against the walls, and in one corner, a power crane was parked, a treaded machine with stabilizers and a cockpit just like the ones in the core.

In the center of the room, there was a hole.

It was dim and impossibly sheer, wide enough to take up half the room's radius, with a vertical grain that made its edges look like they had been sliced up and down with a legendary sword many times over. The edge between the floor and the pit walls might have been sharp enough for Starlight to cut herself on. Everything was perfectly lit, a magical charm on the ceiling spreading clean daylight and seemingly receiving power from nowhere.

A wooden bridge stretched halfway out over the pit like a pier, and abruptly stopped.

At the sight of the hole, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia washed over Starlight, forcing her to ditch the group and rush forward despite Maple's cries. She skidded to the edge and onto the pier, compelled by a sensation she knew she had felt before and had been missing for all of eternity. She needed it. But what was it?

She looked over the edge, and the pit was bottomless. It faded away into black, mile after mile, until it was like looking up into the void of the night sky... and a single star twinkled back at her from below. Whatever that light was, she had once had it, and needed it back.

...With a spike of lucidity, she wrenched herself away from the pit with a yell, falling back onto cool stone. It was messing with her head! She clenched her eyes shut, fighting back every bit of longing and insubstantial positive memory that flowed out of the pit. It was a trap. It wanted her to jump in, and that couldn't possibly lead to anything good. Her friends would probably be in trouble too. She had to beat it so that she could stop them, maybe freeze them in place before they gave in and jumped-

A powerful hoof hooked her around her barrel and dragged her back. Valey deposited her in front of the rest of the group, where Maple was staring at her, aghast. The others looked on in concern.

"Heh heh..." Valey wiped her bangs out of her eyes. "You sure looked curious, right there."

"I-I-It was..." Starlight sucked in a breath. Had none of the others felt that? Had the pit's magic spoken to her alone? Was it because she was a filly? Lacked a cutie mark? Equestrian?

"Just wait for us, okay?" Valey nodded toward the mobile crane.

To Starlight's horror, she realized that it was connected to a platform dangling out over the abyss, right next to the half-bridge. She gulped. "We're going down there, aren't we?"

"Yep!" Valey smirked, pacing towards the crane machine. "Kiddos and, uh, everyone else? Welcome to the Shadow District."

Comments

[alamais]

Well that's not ominous at all.

[Davidp1522]

8740101
Well valley keeps her stuff there, so it's gota be fine. Right? Yeah im right.

[HURTBOTPEGASUS9]

Curiouser and curiouser!

[Venlinelle]

Huh, now that I think about it, I guess “death laser” is a pretty rare magical ability. Twilight uses it a lot, and it’s kind of Ms. “I just banished him from school grounds forever”’s signature, but it doesn’t seem like something your average unicorn can do easily.

Reread edit: Valey, you made that name up.