The Making of the Underground Tunnels
Chapter One
My cutie mark. If it hadn't been for my friend Rainbow Dash performing a sonic rainboom, I wouldn't have gotten it.
Now I rarely see her anymore.
Because of Discord's evil reign upon the pony kingdom, we are now separated from each other. Me and my other five friends.
Discord has created a marked territory for each type of pony. Unicorn, Pegasi and Earth Pony. No pony is allowed to visit any other type of pony, and no pony is allowed to take one step across the line that mark the territories.
Discord has done this in the hopes of destroying Equestria's united ways and dividing the three types of ponies again.
Only one pony can help us. Or two.
Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.
But none of us know where they are now.
Discord has hidden them somewhere dark. Somewhere evil. None of us Earth Ponies can access or see it. We are hoping that the Unicorns and Pegasi will serve some purpose to help us find out where the two princesses are trapped.
My name is Applejack, and I live with my family and my other Earth Pony friend Pinkie Pie. We live in the hope that we will be able to contact the other types of ponies someday.
Until one day.
At dinner, Big Macintosh decided that we needed to find out how to get to the Unicorns and Pegasi now.
And that's when everything started. Our family, Pinkie Pie, and a Earth Pony called Bon Bon formed the Resistance. We resisted against every evil force that hit us from that moment on. And more earth ponies decided to follow us. The unicorns, having heard of our resistance, formed one of their own, Twilight Sparkle being the leader.
And I'm happy today that the Pegasi did too, using my friend Rainbow Dash as their leader.
I was the Earth Pony leader.
We resisted Discord as long as we could, and we even stopped bothering to wear the dark, uncomftarbly scratchy uniforms Discord made us wear.
Discord's security cameras couldn't see much, because the unicorns enchanted normal cloaks and made invisibility cloaks out of them. They passed them with their magic to us. And to the Pegasi, too. United as one, we all resisted against Discord.
And we even had co-leaders-Pinkie Pie as the Earth Pony co-leader. Fluttershy for the Pegasi.
And Rarity for the Unicorns.
One day, we decided we could all go underground and meet each other. So it was our job (and the Pegasi's job) to dig a large tunnel leading underground. Then the Unicorns would teleport over and dig a giant room with their magic (well, Twilight Sparkle, of course) and Rarity would find gems to decorate our room. The rest of the Unicorns would dig wherever Rarity said there were gems, and Twilight would even it out with her magic by digging deeper.
We all took part. When Twilight was done digging, Rarity embedded gems into the walls to symbolize the Unicorns. Each unicorn stuck one gem into the dirt wall. The Pegasi each stuck a feather into the wall across from the Unicorns, symbolizing the Pegasi Resistance.
Every pony in the Earth Pony Resistance stuck a small line of sticks right into the ground, and embedded the tops of the sticks into the walls so they looked like little bended rods. It represented the Earth Pony Resistance.
We never had to hear of Discord again-until one day, when security cameras mysteriously all appeared, embedded into the walls of our tunnels and in the room we had created. Everything we had decorated the walls with lay fallen on the floor.
We all knew that Discord had struck again. The Pegasi and Unicorns retrieved the cameras from the walls, and we, the Earth Ponies, carried them outside, where we gathered them into a large pile and burned them.
Discord, knowing this, installed security cameras all over the walls the next morning. We couldn't see even a tiny piece of wall, for the whole wall was covered with cameras.
There was no way we could possibly remove and burn them all, but Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash proved themselves helpful as a leader by automatically burning off the cameras with magic, or dashing them off, in the case of Rainbow Dash.
I even helped, proving myself worth of being a great leader.
I bucked those cameras off one by one. Fluttershy noticed that some of the cameras were locked into the wall, and helped pick the locks.
Pinkie Pie helped by shooting her party cannon at the cameras.
And when Rarity dug for gems, cameras went flying.
We were of a big help to our Resistance, because we cleared all the cameras off in one day! And Discord seemed to have given up, because the next day, it was obvious that out room had been done no harm. No cameras, nothing.
Until the time when Pinkie Pie realized something.
"Look! It's a tiny microchip thingy!" she exclaimed one day.
After examining it closely, Twilight Sparkle explained that it was a bug, used for listening in on people. In fact, Discord was hearing us talk at the very moment, probably hoping to eavesdrop on our conversations and figure out or secrets. But that was not going to happen. We found even more bugs in the walls, and Pegasi found some on the ceiling. Earth Ponies found lots on the ground and inside the ground. The Unicorns were fastest, dutifully finding millions of bugs clustered together in one side wall, obviously put together by Discord to create the largest listening device ever possible. We all noticed that Discord had quite a bunch of powerful items in his collection.
We all knew that Discord was a villain to never be underestimated, which explained how we had prepared our room so well for attacks.
Except that we didn't get any.
All we got were spurious disguises and listening devices.
It wasn't very promising to live underground, but at least we were safer from Discord and his henchmen than we would be outside. It didn't help that we were cramped in large beds. We decided to make a large network of tunnels throughout the ground and dig more rooms. Then we wouldn't be so squished inside the only room we had.
So that's exactly what we did. While we and the Pegasi dug tunnels, Twilight Sparkle, Rarity and the unicorns helped by digging rooms with their magic as best as they could. We ended up with a secret network of rooms and tunnels, and each 5 ponies got their own large dorm room, with two bunk beds and one normal bed.
And the leaders and co-leaders got their own giant room. Me and Pinkie had our bunk bed, Rainbow and Fluttershy had theirs, Rarity and Twilight had theirs too, and it was very easy to notice Rarity's gleaming gems that beautifully decorated the walls. They gave the room a rainbow-colored gleam, almost as if there was a rainbow right in our dorm room.
It reminded me of the sun and rainbows, out in the sky. Rainbow particularly liked how it looked so much like a rainbow.
Oh, Princess Celestia..
I wished she were with us so badly.
She could have helped us return to the life we knew..
I climbed out of my bed and down the ladder-I was on the top bunk. My alarm clock was ringing so early in the morning-no, it wasn't my clock. It was Rainbow Dash's. She was the type to wake up early.
I groggily climbed back up the ladder and snuggled myself back into the various quilts I had.
Now wasn't the time to wake up.
Yet.
In the next few minutes, two alarm clocks started ringing, both with slightly different tones. I looked at mine. Nope, still not ringing. Good. Fluttershy and
Pinkie's clocks were the ones that were ringing.
Pretty soon I was the last one still sleeping. I eventually saw that my alarm clock was already past the time it was supposed to ring, after waking up from my fourth dream I'd had since 7:00. I'd overslept.
Maybe I set my clock wrong.
I got out of bed, only to find that my friends had woken at the wrong times as well. Twilight examined our alarm clocks for us, as we had no idea why all of us would have set it at the wrong time. Twilight later concluded that there was nothing wrong with the clocks, but she could sense something wrong flowing throughout the room. It wasn't even 5:00 yet-our alarm clocks all said it was 7:00 when they rang, but really, now it was only 4:30.
Twilight suddenly woke me up again at what felt like sixteen minutes later. I could hear ponies groaning in the background, and various alarm clocks ringing loudly.
"All the other ponies are having the same problem as you guys-their alarm clock is off-time. I think that Discord has somehow managed to jinx our time zones, which means he changed all our time zones so we would be waking up at strange times. It's just like him to pull a big trick on us at a moment when we think he's gone for good."
I nodded. "It's probably not going to last for long, so lets try and figure out what our current time actually is."
Twilight nodded, jumping out of her bunk bed beside me and levitating her groggy self down the ladder. She then let go, and she dropped to the ground. Trotting over to the table, she picked up her comb with magic levitation and combed her hair a little.
"It may be too late to do that," she said as if it were too late already.
"But maybe we can hack through the time zone.."
Twilight's voice was abruptly cut off, for a deep rumbling sound could be heard throughout the tunnels. "This has to have something to do with Discord," Twilight said, worried. "Everypony keep watch for approaching enemies." She hopped slowly onto a large rock sticking out of the dirt.
The rumbling abruptly stopped as Twilight stepped forward, feeling something being pushed down beneath her feet. She turned around, feeling the small thing that lay on the ground underneath her foot. Lifting her hoof, she saw a small control panel embedded into the ground, and that she had stepped on a red button that was on the controller.
Picking up the controller with her levitating magic, she examined it closely and concluded that the controller must be for a machine deeper down underground, and that the controller must have been lost years ago.
The controller was very rusty, which was why Twilight had concluded that it must be years old. She looked the controller over again, and saw that it was merely just a controller, nothing strange about it. Yet she couldn't stop feeling that this single controller was vital to the ponies living along with her in the tunnels. She felt as of the controller must have something to do with..
Princess Celestia?
That was when she noticed the large crack in the controller.
And I saw it too.
Twilight pried it open and we all saw a small piece of paper sticking out the crack. Twilight disassembled the controller and threw the wires to the ground.
I picked the wires up, thinking that there could be something in them. But Twilight levitated the piece of stuck paper out of the now totally broken controller, reading it.
And that was the complete answer to all of our problems.
I take back what I just said about having all of our problems solved.
Not ALL of them were solved.
Just one of them.
This is what the note said, in very bold pencil writing:
Dear whoever is reading this now,
I know that you are under the endless rule of Discord.
And also that you live in the network of tunnels you have created underground.
I have good news for you.
I have found the recipe to make a liquid that will heal anything.
Here is the recipe. You can find all the ingredients either in your cooking supplies or underground, and some ingredients in the natural resources around your towns.
Take some underground minerals. Crush them and pour them into a cup made of cloud. (as you may know cups of cloud can only be fashioned by Pegasi.)
Take a pinch of dragon berries and squeeze the juice into a bowl of lake water. Add a teaspoonful of sugarcane to take away the bad taste.
Now, just add some magic dust and two drops of edible petroleum oil.
Mix thoroughly, then put in a watertight and very closed container with no openings or cracks to use later when wounds must be quickly healed.
(This magical healing liquid is very quick-acting. You should expect results in under 50 seconds.)
This recipe was fished from what is left of the important files left in the office of the old castle in Canterlot (the abandoned one that Celestia and her sister used to live in along with the other royalty.)
Please try to realize that this recipe took a lot of hard work to create and that you should never give away the recipe to anyone except the princesses who will have read it before and usually even involved in the making of it.
Applejack, still reading the letter, sat down on a large, flat stone and read it out loud once again, loud enough for every pony in the room to hear. Twilight covered her ears as Applejack's voice echoed through the large cavern and through everypony's ears.
Still managing to keep her balance on the flat stone, which strangely was now teetering on the floor as if it were about to fall through the ground, into the earth below, carrying the orange Earth Pony with it. Applejack, unsure as of what to do next, looked up at the group of ponies standing over her, who all had gasping looks on their faces. Jaws dropped, mouths opened wide, and gasping sounds could be heard. The rock started rocking and shaking even faster, with even more force. Applerack stared at the petrified group of ponies, bewildered as to what they were all staring at, But then something lifted Applejack up until she was pressed against the cave's ceiling. The orange pony screamed in pain and confusion as her entire body was impaled on the ceiling of their underground tunnel. Trying to squeeze out of the gap she was stuck in, she used with all her might, but she didn't budge one bit. She was still stuck between the strange metal item that was appearing from the ground, and the dirt ceiling of the ponies' underground hall. Curled up in between the closing gap, Applejack tried to usher herself out.
The large metal item that was now rising from the ground did not look as if it were built in a pony-friendly pattern. It looked like a giant fork, with a tank engulfing the bottom of it. as it came up, everypony's except Applejack could see its menacing pattern, with spikes sticking out the ends. Words could be seen on the tank . The words were faint, as if they had been carelessly printed onto the tank years ago. Applejack, whose eyes were barely open at the moment, stopped her hopeless pushing and let go. The metal object, surprisingly, also let go for a moment, sending Applejack barreling out of the hall and onto the ground above, just as the metal object pushed itself completely out, revealing what seemed to be a control area of a ship, it's whole walls all made out of dirty glass. Applejack,sprawled on the ground, opened her eyes, and tried to stand up, only to stumble hard a d fall to the ground.
