Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Journey Through the Dark - Part 5

The whole area was surprisingly free of guards and security. No spells to detect her presence, no ponies patrolling the corridor. Nothing besides the illusion hiding the door she'd found at the beginning.

Perhaps it was assumed that if someone made it there they were meant to be there. All things considered it did make sense. No point overloading on security, especially not when there were probably many more layers of it to get to the castle in the first place, all things she'd simply bypassed.

Still, she couldn't shake the feeling that it was too easy. Still, she had made it past Sombra's own security in the past, among other things. It didn't feel right to think of herself as simply being above the challenge, but she had to logically acknowledge no one had designed it around an alicorn with extensive magical knowledge.

And maybe no one had ever made it in in the first place. She hadn't upped the security of her own laboratory until after the incident, after all. And even once she'd reworked it, she hadn't made something she couldn't possibly get through herself, even if that was in part due to knowing the exact details. Though security by obscurity was not a valid plan if that was all there was. But even had she not known the details, she probably could have made it in with enough work, and so could another alicorn or extremely competent unicorn if they knew what they were doing. Given the circumstances, maybe she had reasons to fix that.

She opened a door and closed it behind herself. The room she was in was a bedroom. A used bedroom, too. The bed, the covers still messy, sat in a corner, and the only other piece of furniture in the whole room was a desk with an empty mug on it, some sheets of paper with indecipherable hornwriting on them, and a pencil. She could make out a few mathematical formulae, and that was the only thing that told her for sure she was looking at actual writing and not meaningless scribbles. She wondered how the pony in question even managed to read what they wrote.

Aside from that, nothing on the plain stone walls and floor besides the dust in the other corners. She walked out, then into the door opposite that one. Another bedroom, another bed and desk and nothing else. This bed seemed to have gone unused, or maybe it had simply been done up properly. The desk was empty, though. The only note of anything else was something carved into the wall besides the bed. It looked more like a stylised symbol than like any sort of writing or message. Twilight looked at it up close, curious. A star, or maybe a sun, it looked like that. Finding no other meaning to it, she turned and walked out, then headed deeper into the corridor.

Someone would be down there, of course. She just had to make sure they didn't find out she was.

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

Still, she had made it past Sombra's own security in the past, among other things.

You triggered a painfully obvious boobytrap after just yoinking an artifact off a pedestal without even thinking about traps. Only reason you're alive is that Sombra likes gloating too much.

[Speckle]

Hmmmm...
Could this room belong to this world's Celestia?

[FanOfMostEverything]

Hmm. I wonder if the indecipherable hornwriting is a hint. I've been making some assumptions about the researchers, but some of them may have been mistaken. The likely cutie mark raises a number of intriguing questions.

10985688
And that was after face-tanking her worst fear. The gravity bypass on the second spiral staircase was clever, but Twilight's infiltration there isn't much to write home about