Author's Note

I had to separate this chapter from the rest of The Catalyst because of the terrible effect it would have had on tags and necessary rating, and possibly the psyches of anyone reading it. Also it turned out to be fucking huge. It might end up with as many chapters as the core story

All Tickets Are One-Way

To say that building a train tunnel is grueling, dangerous work would be to make a gross understatement. A stallion had a markedly higher chance of dying in the process than he might while working active duty military, and that was even with the suicide crisis. Even tunnels that exploited natural ones still needed to be expanded, and that meant all of the usual stresses of mining: explosives, potential cave-ins, buried gas pockets, heavy equipment malfunctions, etc. All of that never left Solid State's mind as he struggled to crank in the expansion shell bolts of the timber bracing he was working on, his profuse sweating making the task even more difficult.

Each bolt took nearly an hour to crank into place. All but the last one. Half an hour into the work, Solid heard a faint cracking sound, and the task suddenly became much easier. Nervous, he shone his helmet light up and down the timber beam, but the flaw refused to reveal itself. So he checked as much of the rock as he could, and was about to start unbolting the brace entirely when he heard his boss, Galen Bellows, well, living up to his name.

"State? State! STAAAATE!" The foreman hard marched into the tunnel, his size and cigar complimenting his helmet light in making him look like an oncoming train in the darkness, and smell significantly less promising. "Celestia banishit, boy! You better have that brace up by the time I reach you, or so help me I'll have you working sewers for the next year! Manehattan sewers!"

"B-but Mis-Mister Bellows! I heard a crack! A-and the bolt is loose!" Solid State really wished that he could have mustered the conviction he felt was necessary to get his point across to the grizzled behemoth of a foreman in front of him. Problem was, he was a pony facing a grizzled behemoth, who was his foreman.

"Yah don't say..." Galen surprised Solid by actually taking a moment to search for the damage himself. Finding none, he turned on his employee, menacing him. "Boy, I'm gonna give you one last chance. You skip break and get this bracing finished by close of business tonight, and I'll forget I caught you slacking again. If not..."

"Mister Bellows, please just-" Solid reached over to demonstrate the looseness of the bolt, but the foreman just growled at him.

"Manehattan! Sewers! Boy!" Bellows shouted as he huffed his way out of the tunnel.

"Yes sir..." Solid tightened down the bolt, torqued it, and finished the bracing on time. But the uneasy feeling created by the whole affair never left him.

Five years and two further expansions later, the Canterlot Saddle Tunnel System was completed. Forty miners, including Solid State, had been lost in the process. Under pressure from the RETD for gross negligence of employee safety, Galen Bellows resigned and disappeared into reclusivity. Knowledge of the flaw discovered by State was buried with him. But the damage itself remained, and a little more accumulated with every train that thundered through the dark passage...

* * *

After putting the finishing touches on what she decided would be the last warning sign, Maud Pie looked back on her work with a combination of pride, hope, and terror. Her early forays into the pursuit of her rocktorate had taken her into the depths of the train tunnels had revealed an awful secret to her: by listening closely to the echoes of her hoofsteps in the surrounding calcium sulfate, she had been drawn to a long and deep but impossibly thin crack in one of its walls. Directing her helmet light at it, she tapped the offending wall with her right forehoof and listened carefully. The impure sounds she received in return held orders of magnitude more threat in them than the tipping of Holder's Boulder when she was little. So it was that she made it her duty to do everything she could think of to prevent any more trains from passing through the tunnel until a solution was found to the dire problem. Which at the time meant boarding up both entrances and littering the area with signs declaring the threat of cave-in.

"Oy there now, what is the meaning of this, Lass?" Maud whipped around at the sound of a gruff voice not far behind her and found herself facing... a mare, she deduced after what she felt was far too long an interval. The chin stubble, burly figure, and surly demeanor sure didn't help. "Whaddya think yer doin', blockin' off the rails and stickin' these 'ere signs allovertheplace, eh?"

"This tunnel is a severe cave-in hazard," Maud replied, dry and blunt as was characteristic of her. She met the other mare's snarl with a stony expression.

"It's a what now? Now see here, Lass. Just 'cause yer right clean on doesn't give ya the right to be makin' a mess of our tracks! Yer interfering with grown pony business, now get outta here before I batter ya and see if candy falls out!"

"You really shouldn't try that. I'm trying to prevent fatalities here." Maud protested. "Plus, you probably won't succeed. I don't eat a lot of candy."

"WHY YOU LITTLE-!"

"Okay now, what's all this racket?" Flim interrupted the pending brawl with his sudden appearance, although he had really only trotted in while they were distracted, having been recovering from the trip with his compatriot via maintenance hoof-car by the delay. Even though he was using his magic to facilitate the effort, there was still a lot involved. "What's the matter, Baley? Have you figured out what the hold-up is? We've got customers complaining!"

"Oy Rawny! You made it! This here uppity little schlicker is what's the matter! Look at the right mess she's made! Bloody signs all over the place!"

"Baley, we've been over this, my name isn't Ronnie. It's Flim. Flim!"

"Um..." Maud tried to interject, but her quiet disposition and traditional courtesy made it difficult.

"Whatever you say, Mr. Ponce. Are you going to get this git out of the way, or are we just gonna trample her?"

"But the tunnel..."

"Now see here, Miss Baley! Whatever your grievances with this filly, I'd hardly think any of them merit running her over! Here, just look, I'll take care of it," Flim declared as he used his magic to pull all of Maud's signs from their myriad perches at once and spread them in two neat rows on either side of the rails about the train's height away from the tracks. Then he turned his attention to the offending pony. "Listen, Missy. I'm not sure what your problem with our railway is-"

"I've been trying-"

"No no! I don't want to hear it. These rails and all associated infrastructure are the product of years of hard work and sacrifice on the part of our esteemed Transportation Division, so if you have a problem with them, you'll have to take it up with the institution itself or petition the Princess directly if you think the situation is so dire. I mean really, that's what we have these systems in place for!" As he spoke he danced around Maud, at times randomly grabbing her into a mockery of a friendly hug in the manner that was typical of his and his brother's conversational theatrics.

"But-" Maud started to wonder just who she was trying to save from the dire fate promised anypony who used the tunnel in the near future.

"Good day, Miss... um..." Flim seemed to break character for a moment by being at a loss for words, having realized that he'd not even bothered with introductions.

"Maud Pie." the grey filly snapped, her opinion of unicorns and stallions burrowing for oil.

"All right then, good day, Miss Pie. Miss Baley! If you might, please. We need to hurry back, at once! I may already have to discount all of our round-trip ticket purchases to the cost of one-ways to compensate our customers for the inconvenience." In spite of his words, he was clearly reluctant to start the two-day journey back to Ponyville Station.

"Right away, Sir." Baley responded sardonically as she mounted the other side of the car. "What about the ponies that already only bought one-way tickets?"

"Don't be ridiculous, dear filly. If I cut our profits any further than is already on my mind, how would I pay the crew?"

"You've a heart of gold, Sir." Baley's sarcasm escalated yet still managed to escape Flim's notice.

"Don't I, though?" he responded as though she were noticing something glowingly obvious about him. "Let's be off now!"

"You're all going to DIE in there!" Maud called out louder than she ever thought possible, but was still ignored by the other two as they departed.