Chapter 1: The Panel Room
Twilight Sparkle stirred and woke. She looked around. All was darkness and indistinguishable shapes in the distance.
"Hello, is anyone there?" She called out. There was no answer. No echo to reply. Simply . . . silence.
She stood up and followed the path with her eyes. It was so dark, she could hardly see. She looked closer to herself and noticed she was giving off light in a three foot radius. She wanted to call out for somepony to help her, to find her. To hear something. Anything to break the silence. But she simply followed the path. As she walked, a platform to her left and below her lit up slightly, adding a near-silent humming to the silent ambiance of the area.
When she neared where the lit path connected to the path she was on, three half-rings of white light lit up. Twilight wanted to say something, but bit her tongue, the lack of silence now making her nervous. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. She turned around and spotted four partially-lit panels arranged in a circle.
"What do those do?" she absentmindedly mused aloud, and winced. Still no echo.
She approached the panels and noticed what looked to be many many padlocks on each panel. Three panels adjacent to each other, with matching padlock layouts, and a fourth panel across from the three, with a different padlock layout than the others. She touched a padlock on a panel, and it did nothing.
She shook her head, confused. 'What do I do now?' She thought. The half-rings over the path to a lower level were still dimly lit.
She walked over to them, and they seemed to glow brighter. As they glowed brighter, the humming returned.
Twilight shivered.
She followed the path down. It looped around to come 270 degrees and one level lower than the path entrance. A platform was lit up with three colors, red, green, and blue, and a display of her horn in a reddish hue, surrounded by magic. She lit her horn. If you asked her what spell, she couldnt tell you. The display of Twilight's horn moved to the side to display an empty white circle split vertically down the middle with the top half of a full circle inside of it.
She touched it with her magic, and the two halves shifted together, the inner circle closing and making a full circle inside a larger circle.
A strange sound played, and the platform quickly raised up and lit up the bottom of the upper platform with white light spreading out almost like a spiderweb. She jumped back in shock and cried out.
Where the platform was, there is now what looks like a doorway, but there was nothing inside but a tiny, round room. Her shock rapidly forgotten, she stepped into the center of the tiny room.
She can't remember what happened next.
Chapter 2: The Empty Terrarium
Twilight Sparkle came to in a large, cave-like room. She looked around and spied three large obelisks not too far away. After a certain long distance, a thick fog overtook all visibility. Three Huge cables jutted out of medium-sized platforms and went Celestia knows how deep into a whitish clear liquid, both near and far.
As she neared the obelisks, an eerie, haunting sound she barely noticed started becoming louder. A Cable was coming out of a platform near the obelisks. She shied away from the obelisks for now and approached the ramp to the platform.
As she stepped onto the platform, Structures quickly formed from plates on the floor of the platform. She nearly had a heart attack.
A small, red circular obelisk had formed when she wasn't paying attention, and she trotted closer to it after recovering for a minute. The horn that showed up before as red, showed up again as green. When she lit her horn, a green vertical slider showed up at the very bottom position.
She hesitantly looked around and slowly lifted the slider to the top. with an electronic-sounding buzz, the roof panels lit up green, and she turned around to see the nearest large obelisk light up green as well. Confident that she was actually doing something, she went after the next platform and cable.
As she walked along, she realized that the white little dots she passed were actually growing out of nothing ahead of her, and fading to nothing behind her.
She stepped onto the second platform, and was prepared for the panels moving around, but these ones moved around slightly differently than the first. She trotted confidently to the mini-obelisk, and the display lit up with a blue horn.
She lit her horn again and the display showed a dial, which she turned all the way clockwise that it could go. The panels above her head lit up blue with the same buzz as before, and she turned around to see the second large obelisk light up blue.
"One to go!" she said, confident and determined. She trotted to the final cable and platform and wasn't even fazed by the panels appearing out of nowhere to rest, floating, above her head. She approached the final mini-obelisk, activated her magic and scrutinized the final piece to this puzzle. The display was a simple, curved red line, but another display had appeared above the first; a horn with four arrows around it in the cardinal directions. She looked around, confused. and suddenly spotted the solution to both her sides.
Circle buttons similar to at the first platform showed up in her vision, the difference being these were red with the smaller half-circle on the bottom instead of the top. She pressed both buttons, and the roof panels lit up red. She turned, the final obelisk turning red ahead of her.
A bright white light shot straight up from the center of the large obelisks, and Twilight trotted to the large obelisks. When she stepped on the platform all the large obelisks were on, the platform began to ascend, a quiet, inspiring techno tune playing. The tops of the obelisks fit perfectly into an inset in the roof of the cave. Light bridges extended down from above to rest in three directions on the platform.
Twilight chose one and went to the one upper platform they all led to. The platform she was currently on turned into an elevator, taking her even higher. An aperture door opened above her, letting the platform pass and come to a stop.