Equestria Girls: Cataclysm

Dizziness.

The world beyond her eyelids felt as though it was swaying heavily from side to side, like she was atop a tall tower made of rubber being buffeted by winds. All things were permeated evenly by an equally thick layer of pain - it felt as though the fabric of the universe itself was aching terribly, and she was in the middle of it. Her thoughts spiraled, and everything was confusion. Nothing made sense. Everything hurt. Everything hurt. Make it stop. Make it stop...

She couldn't tell where her hand was, but she felt something hard in it somewhere, and she squeezed it shut on impulse. Warmth spread throughout her palm the moment she did, the feeling as familiar as it was pleasant. As she lay there, she felt her eyes roll into the back of her head as every inch of her body was purged of this pain, flushed out by a euphoria that swiftly replaced it, sweeping her and her woes away on a tide of liquid sunlight that rolled in under her skin. The moan slipped from her lips involuntarily. Under her breath, she all but purred, "Oh baby."

The feeling did not last more than seven seconds. They felt like minutes in the moment, but after it had passed, it felt like it had only been a few instants. She squeezed the gem at her neck tighter, hopeful to get just a few more moments of pleasure out of it, but it was already gone. She missed it immediately.

Blue opened her eyes.

It was dark, and above her was a ceiling. Something very soft was beneath her, square-shaped and covered in soft fabric - a bed, she recognized. The fabric was off-white, and beneath her head was a pillow. The room was relatively small, only a half-meter longer than the bed itself was, and half as wide, leaving only enough space for a small bedside table and the clock that sat atop it, the display dark and lifeless. It was rather tight for a bedroom, and didn't leave much space for anything else. The walls were barren, which left the space with an odd contrasting feeling of being at once very empty and also claustrophobic. A wooden door was directly across from the foot of the bed.

As she realized that she did not recognize this room, Blue sat up with a start, knocking aside the brown quilt thrown over her, hand still clasped firmly around her necklace. A bead of sweat on her face coalesced and rolled down the side of her cheek and down her neck.

How did I get here?

She thought on that. Nothing came to her, and when it didn't, she thought back to the last thing she remembered, which was...stepping across wooden planks. On the...yes, on the roof. Rooftops. They were going rooftop to rooftop, talking about...something. Nothing in particular. Scootaloo was smiling and seemed in high spirits. She was too. They were going...somewhere. Before that, there was the...yes, she had been rescued with that ridiculous plan, and...she didn't much want to think about before that, that wasn't a good time. Got a nice quilt out of it, though...

Okay. So she was with Scootaloo, and now she was not.

The thoughts stopped there. Blue swung her legs off the bed she found herself on, lashing a hand out to shove the quilt out of her way, and immediately she went for the door, heart pounding a bit harder as she grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open.

A hallway sat before her, utterly silent and still as a crypt. Four closed doors sat closed, each identical and sitting across from the other in this small space. To the far right was a window, curtains closed. To the left was a staircase leading down, beyond which Blue could not see past the entry to the stairwell. All was dark, yet despite this, she could see everything here, if in grayscale. She thought little of it.

The door directly in front of her was ajar, so that seemed as likely a place as any to investigate first. Conscious of every single little creak and sound she made with any little motion, Blue stepped slowly, carefully forward, one bare foot touching the center of the hallway, the rest of her weight very slowly coming down through it, such that she could take another slow, careful, creeping step up to the door. She remained crouched partially on an impulse she could not name in that moment, gripping the doorframe to secure her position, then leaned in close, peering in through space between the doorframe and door. She held her breath, equally to be utterly silent, and also to keep her view more steady as she peeked.

Beyond the door was a space that looked basically identical to the one she had just emerged from, except for a gray backpack sitting on the edge of the off-white mattress, bulging with many smaller somethings inside of it. There was a lump there underneath the covers, right where a person would lay. The lump was relatively small, and Blue recognized the short purple hair sticking up out of the covers. Leaning a bit to one side, she managed to barely catch sight of Scootaloo's face, obscured from the nose down by covers, but still recognizable.

Relief washed over Blue, and she bit back the urge to heave out a sigh. She deliberated what to do next for a few more long seconds in the darkness, not really certain about anything in this moment, but eventually her desire to not be alone won out. She placed a pale blue hand on the door and, gently, very gently, eased it open, millimeter by millimeter.

Creep...creep...creeping into the room went Blue, as slowly as she could manage without making unneeded sound. She lowered onto her knees when she was less than a step away from the bed, and she crawled forward on hands and knees what little distance remained, head level with her sleeping friend's. Centimeter by centimeter between them shrunk away until she was so close that she could faintly hear the sound of Scootaloo's breathing.

"Scootaloo," she whispered, as softly as she could physically manage.

There was no response. Just more soft breathing.

"Scootaloo. Hey...Scootaloo."

The eyelids twitched a little bit, but still the girl did not stir.

"Scooooootaloo. Scootaloo. Hey. Scootaloo. Scootalooga. Scootalooloo. Hey. Hey. Scootamorph. Scootlesworth. Scootscoot. Scooty MacScootleson. Scootlebread with a warm cup of cider. Scootamania. Scoot-"

"If I say I'm asleep," came the haggard mutter, eyes firmly closed, "will you leave me alone?"

"Uhh...maybe!" Blue's whisper remained low, for no other reason than because that's the volume that she had chosen and hadn't thought to do differently. "But I kinda want your attention and if you said that you've kinda gotta be awa- oh. Hiii~" Blue beamed brightly. "Hi Scootaloo~"

"Hi." The tone was anything but cheerful, and Scootaloo's eyes opened, face twisted in a groggy, half-awake scowl. "Why did you wake me up?"

"Uh..." Blue put a finger to her chin and had to think about that. Why did she wake Scootaloo up? That seemed like something she'd be kinda grouchy about. That wasn't the best plan. Hm...tactical fucky-wucky not improbable at this juncture. "Well...I just, woke up, and-" Right, she remembered now. "Um, how did we get here?"

Scootaloo's bleary, half-lidded gaze remained on Blue for three full seconds. Her eyelids slowly lowered, then heavily rose again. "What?"

"How did we get here?" Blue wasn't smiling anymore, scooting up closer to the bed and to Scootaloo. Her hand went to her neck closed around the red crystal on impulse. "Where is this?"

Scootaloo's mouth opened, then closed. Her arms rose up from beneath the covers so that she could apply her hands to her face, pressing them against her eyes and dragging them down her cheeks. "Are you serious right now?"

"Yes!" Blue was no longer whispering, voice low but otherwise fully animated with the distress she had felt from before. "What's going on?"

"Blue..." The cylinders were barely working in Scootaloo's head, and it showed in the way she sputtered several times before she managed, "What are you t- what?"

"What is going on?!" Blue was getting increasingly worked up at this point, a desperate quality rising up out of her voice. "I'm serious! I don't know how we got here, I don't remember anything, I j- I woke up, I didn't know where I was, I didn't know where you were, I was scared you were gone, I didn't know what to do-"

"Okay," Scootaloo threw up one hand to stop her. "Okay, okay, just...give me a second here, please..."

Blue, obediently, shut up and stayed shut up. She remained crouched at eye-level with Scootaloo, staring all the while as she waited for everything to be made better.

Scootaloo had her hands to her face for several seconds. She sucked in a long breath behind them, then began to stir some, stretching stiffly as she adjusted herself so she could lean up onto one arm, squinting at Blue in the dark. She raised her wrist between them and tapped on the screen a couple of times- the watch on her wrist lit up, casting a tiny glow over them that Blue did not react to, but caused Scootaloo's pupils to shrink ever so slightly and appear as the lavender color that they were instead of a shade of gray to Blue's eyes.

She blinked and kneaded at her eyes for a few more long seconds, then finally said, "Okay...we're in a house I use sometimes for rest when I'm out looting and the way I need to go is too busy. It was a scary day for you, so we settled in early, because scary days suck. Downstairs is blocked off, so we're safe. Okay?"

Blue nodded quickly, unconsciously gripping the sheet of the mattress she was pressed up against. "How long has it been?"

Scootaloo opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it. When she spoke again, some of the thin tolerance in her voice had ebbed, sounding a little more concerned. "What do you remember?"

"Um..." A moment of thinking back. "We were on the rooftops, and going somewhere. It was light out."

"Oh." The frustration saw itself out at this point. "Oh, jeez, uh, alright...uh...yeah, we've been here since, uh...since mid-afternoon yesterday. We were..." Scootaloo closed her eyes, now thinking back herself, using this opportunity to resume kneading her aching eyes. "We talked about a bunch of stuff. You were asking about like...what had happened, where we were, I was...sharing some, uh...some stuff I knew, we talked about the zombies and stuff, I told you some jokes, we had dinner, you liked the canned squash...talked about food..."

The fear seemed like it would go down at this revelation, but no, not at all. Quite the opposite. Blue thought back, and when there continued to be nothing, her anxiety vibrated louder in the back of her skull. "I don't remember any of this."

Scootaloo's hand fell from her face, blowing out a breath past her lips. "A...alright."

"Why don't I remember?" Blue's voice was quiet, and quaked as she spoke. "How did I forget all that?"

"I- I don't know, Blue."

Blue continued to stare at Scootaloo, silently pleading for answers, for clarity, for...anything. But there wasn't much Scootaloo could do besides stare back, concerned and more than a little worried, but helpless.

She forgot. She forgot an entire afternoon's worth of getting to know this girl that had saved her, forgot everything she had apparently learned about...anything, actually. It was all gone. Nothing was registering, nothing that Scootaloo had said even sounded vaguely familiar. It was as though it had never happened, just like everything that came before her waking up the previous day. Gone, just like her own fucking name.

Was this going to keep happening? Would she lose everything like this, her life skipping entire scenes and deleting itself behind her as she played a doomed game of catch-up?

Blue's head swam as she kept trying to remember anything at all, but nothing came, the distress from this urging her to try again, spinning her mind into a deeper and deeper spiral. Her hands pressed hard against the sides of her skull, which succeeded in nothing but making her already chaos-filled head hurt. Her pink eyes prickled, growing hot with the building tears.

She did not notice Scootaloo sitting up, nor her reaching out at her until her smaller arms were upon her and pulling her in closer. Blue blinked into the hug, but swiftly returned it, squeezing the girl as tight as she dared around the waist as the sniffling started, and the tears became too big to stay in place. Cool water streaked down her burning cheeks.

"Can I stay with you?" Blue croaked, throat tight and congested from the crying she could no longer stop. "Let me stay here please? In case I..."

"Y-yeah, yeah." Scootaloo tried to not let her own voice shake as she said this. Her eyes were wide, and sleep was unlikely to return soon with how alert she was feeling, but such concerns were far from her now. "Sure thing, Blue."

Blue tried to say something in response, but the words were lost to both Scootaloo and herself. She wept fearful tears into the dark, all the while Scootaloo could only feebly try to comfort her and not let her own fear show as she realized the position that she was in, and how badly this girl needed somebody to be here - not just in this moment, but in general. She blinked her own tears back a few times, but Blue never noticed.

At least they could be scared and uncertain together.

Twilight was having a hard time deciding how she felt when she got in the car that morning.

On the one hoof, there was the obvious anxiety that came with delving head-first into an unknown place that was, in all likelihood, dangerous. Twilight didn't have much to base that assumption on besides the fact that everywhere on earth seemed particularly dangerous right now, but she had been told that it was likely that there would be some degree of autonomous security around, given that this lab was government property and seemed to be of a classified nature. The only autonomous security devices that Twilight had encountered so far had stopped her friends in their tracks from a significant distance, and while she did not have much of a sense of how dangerous they actually were, what she had been told sounded like such caution was more than warranted. Unfortunately, staying far away from guns and things willing to utilize them did not seem to be an option in an enclosed space of a building, so that was definitely worth being nervous about, she felt.

On the other hoof, the potential good that could come from this endeavor was difficult to understate. The tactical side of Twilight knew better than to get her hopes up before anything else was known, but the significantly more Twilight side of Twilight Sparkle could not not be excited about the possibilities. The word "cure" kept cycling through her mind, as did visions of families and friends being tearfully reunited after months of hardship, trauma, and grieving. How could the Princess of Friendship not find her heart soaring at the very suggestion, the thinnest probability that somehow, someway, all that was wronged could be made right and that love could win the day once again? How couldn't she be excited by the thought of giving her friends their families back and to put the world back together, piece by piece, one lost soul at a time?

On yet another hoof, Twilight could not stop thinking about what Alex had said back at the ranch, when this mission was proposed to her. Alex had gone with some allies to the hospital, the prospect of a cure in mind, and before she was done, she had - for some reason - lost faith in the idea. It was something she didn't think much on at first, but as the many minutes passed with only the sound of the Mustang's grumbling to keep her mind company, Twilight's thoughts kept touching on it. She didn't know Alex super well, but she knew her well enough to hear the passion in her voice when she talked about providing for people and being the support that the center's population needed to make it through the dark days they were in. That good cause was, in her own words, "about as good as it gets." What had changed to make her no longer want to see that cause through? What had gone through her head to make her lose hope like that? Was she too weary? Had the fear really gotten to her? Or had she realized something that Twilight had not? What had Alex seen at that hospital that Twilight hadn't yet? And what if she saw it?

She could have asked, Twilight supposed. She had thought to, at one point. She'd thought the words, but she just...never expressed them. It would have been wise to, as Alex may have very well told her the answer to her question, but...maybe she was too scared of the answer to want to. You can never unlearn something once you've learned it, after all. Whatever the truth was, once she knew it, it would be a part of her forever. And if it was something bad...

"I know that look anywhere."

Twilight blinked out of her thoughts, turning her head to the driver's seat to her left.

Rarity was looking at her, eyelids almost looking like they were made of crystal in the early morning light, eyelashes long and eye-catchingly defined with whatever she had coated them with. Her gaze was neutral, though her lips had a small curl to them that always seemed to be there - something about her face always made Twilight feel like she was so approachable. "That’s the look of someone thinking entirely too much."

"Ah...I guess so." Twilight smiled sheepishly. "Sorry."

"No need to apologize, darling." Rarity's gaze went forward to the road again, lazily steering the noisy vehicle slightly to the right to be out of the way of the wreckage quite far up the road from where they were. "Goodness knows that there's a lot to think about these days...I can't imagine what it must be like for someone who's not even from this world."

"It is a lot," Twilight admitted. "Every time I feel like I'm getting a decent grasp of it, someone hands me whatever a USB drive is or starts talking about encryptions, and then I feel like I'm a filly back in grade school trying to wrap my head around what the heck a quadratic formula is."

The snort escaped Rarity involuntarily, and she did her best to pretend it never happened. "I've already forgotten the quadratic formula. I was never terrible at math, but it feels like a lifetime ago that we were sitting in Ocean Swirl's classroom..."

From memory Twilight easily recited, "X equals negative B plus-or-minus the square root of B squared minus four-A-C, all over two-A, where A-X squared plus B-X plus C equals zero. And A doesn't equal zero, of course. Solve for X." When Twilight turned her head, she smiled at the vacant look that Rarity was giving her. "It's a really hoofy formula. I use it all the time in magic when I'm trying to pin down variables for where a spell calls for a certain design on a surface. It's especially helpful when you're trying to edit a spell diagram that exists already, or when you're trying to work out how another caster got the design that they did because they didn't leave any notes." With just a pinch of bitterness, she added through gritted teeth, "Not that anyone would ever leave poor documentation of their magic when they knew that somepony else would have to use it later..."

"Oh darling, I know the precise pain you're feeling there," Rarity mumbled, shaking her head. "Programming class was an absolute nightmare. The final project was that we had to design our own programs from scratch, but we kept the documentation separate. Then we had to hand it off to some other group, and then work out how they had gotten everything to function. Then we compared documentation and saw how close we got compared to the original." A loathing, tight smile; the hands squeezed on the steering wheel as she pretended that it was someone's neck. "So. Little. Documentation."

Twilight giggled, sitting back more comfortably in her seat. It was always odd how well these things supported pony anatomy, though the vertical position was definitely something best endured in short doses. "It's surprising to me how many parallels like that there are between our worlds. I don't know the first thing about computers, but it sounds a lot like magic in several ways."

Rarity shrugged. "I suppose that there is a certain magic-like quality to the way computers function...enter a completely arbitrary series of characters to this thing that does nothing, and watch it start to do things seemingly out of thin air...peel it back and there's this bizarre language behind it that looks like utter nonsense until you start to understand what you're looking at, and suddenly you can make that strange little program do all sorts of things that wouldn't normally be possible." A beat. "At least I presume that's how it works. I'm not exactly a wizard, as I'm sure you're aware..."

"I mean, yeah, that's more or less it in a nutshell. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but yeah!" Twilight chuckled. "I guess that would explain all the trouble I had trying to figure out even the basics of computers. It must have been like what someone would have gone through trying to figure out how magic worked...I definitely felt as lost as my first day at school as I did back at that computer at Canterlot High."

"If those videos were anything to go by, you were...relatively without direction, yes, I feel that's a fair description."

Twilight chuckled, shaking her head. She remembered the embarrassment of when Sunset Shimmer had circulated those clips of her all those months ago, trying to perform research while also fumbling through the basics of how to exist as a human...it felt a lot more distant now, more easy to laugh about. She felt what Rarity had said before, about how it felt like a lifetime ago that it had happened. "It's weird how time gets away from you."

The conversation stalled out suddenly. Twilight internally winced, realizing that she had said something perhaps she shouldn't have. An awkward silence moved in, and the Princess of Friendship tapped her hooves uncomfortably together in her lap, trying to think of what to say next to make it better.

Rarity took care of that for her with a question. "May I ask you something a little personal, darling?"

"Oh, sure, Rarity." Twilight smiled, disguising her relief as friendliness. "What's up?"

Rarity's fingers tapped slowly against the steering wheel, one after the other, chewing on her lip as she deliberated how she wanted to ask this...or if she wanted to ask it at all. Her sky-blue eyes drifted to her right arm, tracing the ring of heavy bruising where she could feel it underneath the sleeve of her dark hoodie, where her arm had once been broken only a little over a week ago. "Do you have a faith?"

Twilight blinked once. Her mind clicked and churned behind her eyes, trying to work this out. "What do you mean?"

"A religion, darling." Rarity fidgeted in her seat, re-adjusting her grip on the steering wheel. "I don't know how these things work in Equestria, so if I'm asking something a little...sensitive..."

"Oh, nono, it's fine, don't worry." Twilight thought on this for a few moments. "Well...that's kind of a weird way of describing it, but I guess you could say that we have religions, yeah. Some ponies are very devoted to certain princesses in particular, but that’s not really uh...you know…” Twilight rolled her hoof. “Normal.”

"Are you..." Once again Rarity bit back what she was going to say, visibly trying to phrase what she meant to ask very carefully. Weirdly carefully, to Twilight. "Do you have something you believe in, yourself?"

Twilight's brow furrowed at the way that question was worded. She considered asking, but Rarity was already acting uncharacteristically skittish about this particular line of conversation, so she didn't want to draw more attention to something she was apparently not completely at ease about asking...though saying that, she wasn't entirely sure how to answer what she had been asked. She believed in a lot of things…

"Like...a belief system," Rarity tried, responding to the confusion on Twilight's face. "Like a creed, or something. A philosophy? I don’t know. Something revolving around a higher power..."

Then it clicked. "Ohhh, you mean like Harmony?"

Rarity was not certain, and her expression said as much.

It made sense to Twilight, though, so she went with that as she perkily explained. "I guess you could call belief in Harmony a religion, yeah! Harmony has always been at the core of Equestrian values. Being one with Harmony is how you lead a fulfilling and happy life, and it's crucial to understand the Elements of Harmony in order to better access the power of love inside us. It’s a fundamental part of the equine experience. There's no greater force than the Harmony you share. That’s what friendship is!" Twilight allowed for a pause, to see what Rarity had to say to that. When she didn't respond immediately, Twilight cocked her head inquisitively, a few stray strands of her mane falling in front of her eyes. "Why do you ask?"

The expression on Rarity's face was a very complicated one. Her eyes searched the dashboard as she wrestled with something she did not speak aloud. She glanced at the road, and when she did, she suddenly stiffened, sitting up straighter in her seat. "What in the world..?"

Twilight looked forward, following Rarity's gaze. As the Mustang slid to a swift halt, the alicorn's surprise mirrored Rarity's.

The road turned ahead, sweeping in a lazy right-angle that went ahead another hundred yards or so, at the end of which sat a large round structure that was partially obscured by an alcove of trees that it sat nestled within. Judging by how long they'd been traveling for and the directions they had received to get out here, that was likely their intended destination. This was good. What was less good were all the shapes strewn out across the road and out in the field between the two girls and the presumed laboratory at the end of this street.

There were dozens of them visible, and likely dozens more that were obscured by the grasses that they scuttled amidst, cloaked by waving tails of verdant greens and golds that waved in the morning sun. One of the shapes was less than five meters away, emerging from a ditch and twitching its wiry antennae at the rumbling vehicle where it sat. It was clearly an ant, but roughly the size of a large dog, though only half as tall as one, its six branch-thick legs keeping it relatively low to the ground. Its carapace was a ruddy brown color with a darker, black-colored bulbous abdomen, though other specimens in the area varied somewhat in shade, a few appearing as a mottled red comparable to dried blood. The one closest to them glistened ever so slightly in the light, either from moisture of whatever plants it crawled out of or a natural gloss, though the latter was unlikely, given the sheer number of needle-like hairs and the rough appearance of the carapace that vaguely resembled that of stone. Two compound eye glinted and shone with a thousand individual planes across their rounded surfaces, each positioned just behind a pair of bulging mandibles that hung ajar like a pair of jagged bolt cutters, and likely just as sharp.

"Oh I despise ants," Rarity groaned. "I despise them when they're normal size! What on earth is this?!"

"Formica truncorum," Twilight murmured, voice practically aglow with the fascination that surfaced through her building smile and widening eyes. She watched the twitching, dramatically oversized worker ant's head turn this way and that, perturbed by the noise of the vehicle as it tried to navigate its way forward while clumsily shifting around, searching for a way past the thing it could feel and hear, but barely see with its low-resolution vision. "Wood ants."

"I don't care what manner of ant they are, they're dreadful creatures!” Rarity hugged herself, a slightly manic look on her face, that familiar quality coming into her voice where she got unreasonably upset about something small. “Crawling all over you, always sneaking in where you least expect them, breaking into your home at the first drop of ice cream or piece of fruit on the floor! Every spring, it's always the same: everything's fine, lulling you into a false sense of security, and then suddenly the teeming masses roll in from every crevice, getting all over my FLOOR and my FEET! EUgughh, just thinking about them is giving me the creepy-crawlies all over!" A shudder violently wracked the girl as she let out a high-pitched noise of revulsion that could be felt as much as heard. "Absolute bane of my existence, no matter the size!"

Twilight was so fixated on the insect as big as her that she barely heard Rarity. In stark contrast to the fashionista, Twilight loved ants - she'd studied them casually before magic stole a place in her heart and the space on her rump, and looking out at the giant ant-covered road ahead brought back fond memories from her foalhood. Many hours had been spent staring into vertical ant colonies as they toiled away within the confines of their farm atop her desk, just watching them move and perform their endless tasks during breaks in reading. She left the hobby of ant farms behind when her studies picked up, but she never stopped thinking ants were amazing creatures. Every layer of what ants were had something that had always intrigued Twilight at every stage of her life, and this was no different.

Some of the glitter in her eyes faded, however, as the reality of the situation managed to pierce through the nostalgia, and the obstacle the dozens or so of giant insects between them and their destination was realized for what it was. "There must be a nest somewhere near here."

"And me without my bug spray..." A suddenly much more composed Rarity huffed, looking out across the road they had yet to traverse with lofty disdain. “That’s what I get for not bringing my full travel assortment with me. Truly dark times indeed, they don’t even make bug spray anymore! No wonder so few survived, with an absence of such essentials.”

"To be fair, I don't think you could have brought enough bug spray to kill even one of these ants."

"I do hate it when you're right..." Rarity held her dismissive gaze over the small army of meandering meter-long insects for a few more seconds before shifting her azure eyes over to Twilight. "I'll happily make an exception this time if you can work out how we're meant to get past these things."

Twilight tapped her hoof thoughtfully against the door handle, gears visibly turning. She glanced at the ant that was still clumsily trying to cross the road and skirt away from them, twitching and angling its head in odd directions as it partially side-stepped away and into the opposite ditch into the grasses beyond. "You could just try driving. That one, at least, didn't seem to like the noise this thing makes." Twilight thumped a hoof lightly against the dashboard as the noisy motor growled and boomed away.

Rarity's brow furrowed slightly. "Darling, the size of these things...aren't you at all concerned that they'll just pick the car up and scurry off with it?"

"Fun fact, actually!" Twilight clapped her hooves together as her expression lit up brightly. "Ants are actually not all that much stronger than any other insect of their size, and the reason for that is physics! Square-cube law: when an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier and its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier." She did not mind the blank look this evoked. "Ants are really strong comparatively because they're so light and math works out well in their favor in that regard. Their muscles aren't actually any more developed or powerful compared to any other creature, and if you bloat them up to silly sizes, their strength actually proportionally decreases! Same thing applies to any creature."

Rarity nodded along, more a show of listening than of comprehension, then cast a glance towards the nearest oversized insect seven or so meters up the road from them, feelers twitching at the sky inquisitively. "...and how confident are we that these creatures feel much like listening to what physics have to say?"

Twilight opened her mouth, then closed it. Violet eyes tracked another ant in particular, the starts of one of her several theories replaying itself in her head. "I don't know what it is that's making these things so large, but I can't think of any way that it's magic. It just...it wouldn't work. Not with how magic is behaving, and not for as long as this has been going on. So...I guess I'd say it's pretty likely they obey conventional physics, probably."

Rarity's eyebrow twitched upward a few millimeters. "You guess it's likely, probably?"

"Sort of, yes! Probably definitely maybe, absolutely." Twilight flashed a silly grin. "Give or take one hundred percent. You know?"

There was a beat where Rarity tried her best to keep an impartial expression, but the smile won, and she allowed herself to chuckle, which devolved into full laughter; Twilight began giggling herself. They laughed together for a short while that felt so much longer in the moment, and when they were done, the tension of the air had a sizable bite taken out of it. "As you say, darling," Rarity pleasantly sighed, pushing the gear shift forward out of park and into drive, allowing the vehicle to start creeping forward. "But if I find one of these things crawling up my leg, I will scream."

"I think you'd be pretty justified in screaming at that point."

Not that Rarity ever needed to be justified to scream about something.

It was a slow crawl up the road. For the most part, the insects seemed content to ignore the car’s presence. A few ants seemed curious at first, but as with the first ant, getting too close to the source of the thrumming and low-pitched booming from the grouchy motor of the vehicle did not seem to register pleasantly in the oversized ants’ senses, and curiosity quickly gave way to avoidance. Rarity always had her foot on the brake pedal, eager to give the ants plenty of space before she would consider resuming their slow yet steady advance, and beyond the occasional inquisitive specimen that made the two of them a bit uncomfortable for a few seconds, there were no incidents to speak of all the way up the drive to the lab.

From afar, the laboratory looked to be little more than a nondescript semicircle of gray, looking a bit like a particularly low-sitting observatory with its telescope tucked in. Up close, however, it was revealed to be no observatory at all, and was indeed just a simple dome of stone, which up close was revealed to be actual stone of some kind rather than the concrete it appeared to be from afar. The entire surface of the structure was slightly glossy, either covered in a finish of some kind or polished to the point of being able to see one’s face in the surface.

It looked more like a monument than a building, though to what was not apparent. There were no signs out front - no arrows, nothing indicating parking, not even a ‘private property’ notice. As far as could be told, this structure had no name. There was very little to see besides the structure itself, which seemed very unremarkable at a glance, and pointedly so after a bit of scrutiny. There was absolutely nothing here that would draw any kind of attention from anyone who looked at this place and did not already know what it was.

It was hard to tell where the front of this building was, so indistinct was any side of it from the other, and without parking space that was even more difficult to make out. The only sign of where a front would be were the two stainless steel doors that suddenly became visible at around the point where the road unceremoniously ended.

"Well, this is..." Rarity hesitated for several seconds, searching for an apt descriptor. "...unorthodox, to be certain. It must be one of those places that emphasizes creative takes on architecture, like those buildings designed to look like they're tied in knots, or something. At least it's not as ridiculous as some of those. You can do a lot worse than the polished marble look."

Twilight leaned forward with her hooves against the door, trying to peer closer, trying to make out any details about this place that she just was not seeing. There were no antennae, none of those flower-shaped dishes, none of those blue panels that liked to point towards the path the sun took in the sky...nothing. The indistinct stone dome remained precisely that, to her eyes. It looked more like a carving than it did a proper building, if not for the doors. "There's something unsettling about it. Do you feel it?"

Rarity nodded silently. An ethereal frown crossed over her lips.

Twilight stared a few seconds longer, eyes momentarily catching on another dog-sized ant that bobbed into view, then immediately shied back when it got too close to the Mustang and its noisy motor. Despite the creatures’ reticence to get anywhere near their vehicle, getting out of the vehicle didn’t seem like the most appealing prospect.

"Move us right up to the door, if you can? I want to look closer at it."

Rarity released her foot from the brake pedal and turned the steering wheel. The car responded in kind, turning off of the road that suddenly stopped in front of it and now rolled forward towards the front of the structure, right up onto the pavement that passed for what little walkway this place had, bringing the door and everything around it much more into focus. Twilight had to turn the other way now because of the way the car was facing, leaning forward past Rarity in order to do so.

Up close, she could see that the steel doors were not perfectly smooth and seemed to have small ridges in them, though she could not tell if they were proper indentations or simply odd patterns from whatever process had extruded or melded the steel together. There was nothing on the door to indicate where one would open it - really, it was less a set of doors so much as a pair of metal wall segments arranged in the likeness of doors. There was something beside the doors themselves, though: a horizontal slit perhaps five centimeters across, currently the only blemish in the perfectly smooth exterior of this building that had been identified so far.

"What's that?"

Rarity squinted a bit, leaning forward slightly. "I would guess a card reader. That seems to be a favorite way into these government-type buildings."

That seemed to be the only way in. Which...yeah, that made sense. Government building, extremely secure, restricted access. They did not have a key for this door, though.

...thinking that, Twilight frowned as she realized something, which she asked aloud: "How are we going to get in there?"

To this, Rarity could only shrug, letting her hands slap gently against her tight jeans where they fell back down. "I’m afraid I took programming classes, not electronics. I wouldn't know where to begin with a card reader."

Twilight's frown deepened. Her horn flashed to life, and the bag in the foot space of the passenger seat flipped itself open, what tools they had at their disposal presenting themselves to her, wreathed in magenta light: screwdrivers, hammers, a jagged-tooth hacksaw, wrenches...things that would ultimately prove unnecessary, given Twilight's capabilities...and this USB drive. Absolutely none of which read as particularly good for this task. A quiet, frustrated growl worked up from Twilight’s throat - the glow stopped suddenly, and the raised objects went clattering quietly to the car floor. "How do we get through metal like that?"

"We would need a blowtorch or some such thing, I believe."

They definitely didn’t pack that. Twilight barely knew what that was, and she was confident they didn’t have it. "Do we even have one of those back at the ranch?"

Rarity shook her head, shrugging once more. "I know I didn't come across one. I don't recall spying one in the tool stash, either, unless miss Alessandra decided to squirrel away all the best tools where we can’t reach them.”

One hoof went to Twilight's temple, beginning to knead in small, slow circles. They had just pulled up to the door, and already they were stuck and scrambling for options. "I'm not confident in my ability to pull this door down. I probably could normally, but with the amount of pain that I've been getting from much smaller things..."

"I'd really rather you not hurt yourself if you're not certain it would work, dear."

"What other choices do we have? There's nothing here. There aren't windows, there aren't access points..."

Rarity turned her hands over helplessly in her lap, pursing her lips together. "I know you say you've been struggling with your magic, but you can use it, yes? Don't you have a...an 'open door' spell, or something? Open se-sa-me?"

Twilight tilted her head quizzically at...whatever that phrase Rarity just uttered was meant to be. It almost sounded like words of power, but...no? No. Disregarded. "Not memorized." Twilight turned her gaze back at the card receiver, flipping through imaginary pages in her mind for any spell she knew off-hoof that might solve this problem. She could name a dozen or more that would make this roadblock trivial, if only she were familiar enough with them. Under her breath she mumbled, "What I wouldn't give for my spell book right now..."

Rarity turned her head, taking note of the many ants in the area. A rough line had been drawn where those curious had inched closer, but were not able to approach further and were left apparently confused on what else to do but stand there staring at their brethren. She looked back at the dashboard, eyes finding the clock, then Twilight again. "Well, you're a smart girl, Twilight. I'm sure that you'll figure something out here...and I'm afraid you'll have to, because I certainly don't know what use I'm going to be in this situation."

Twilight squeezed her eyes closed, sitting back down into her seat as she did her best to work through this puzzle with what she had.

Okay, go down the list here. Telekinesis: unlikely to work, given how things are, would be very painful. Last resort option. Dissolve Material…oh how I wish I had that spell right now, that would be soooo nice, just delete this door. Okay…acid? I doubt I could conjure anything strong enough on the spot here…conjuration…Conjure Door?

…

…there’s no way that works.

…

If it works I’m going to be upset.

Almost against her better judgement, Twilight sat forward again, hooves against the door as she peered at the wall beside the steel doorway. She closed her eyes, mentally tracing out the designs of the relatively simple spell as she knew it, envisioning it appearing on the surface of this wall, and felt pressure build up behind her forehead. She held it for a moment or so longer, then pushed that energy out through her horn in a flash of pink.

Twilight opened her eyes a second later. She saw no door there when she opened her eyes, nor any aftereffects to speak of. Frowning, she tried again, this time keeping her eyes open; pressure built up once again in her forehead, causing her horn to start to glow, and as the energy expelled from her horn in a bright flash, she saw it splash against the wall in the vague shape of an entrance, then fizzle immediately rather than take any kind of detail or become corporeal.

Having just witnessed spells being cast for the first time, Rarity’s reaction was about what one would expect: she was sitting straight up in her seat, hands grasping the steering wheel firmly, gaze sharp with alertness. Her ice-blue eyes scanned the wall she had watched mystic lights and glamor interact with, then over to the alicorn, who was rubbing her head with one hoof. “Darling?”

“I’m fine,” Twilight said quickly. She kneaded at the dull ache a bit longer, muttering, “I knew that wouldn’t work…”

“Don’t push yourself. We have plenty of time, and we’re…” Blue eyes flicked about their surroundings again, noting the positions of the various giant insects meandering about on all sides, and her voice was a little less confident when she continued. “…we seem safe, at least.”

Twilight raised her head again, scrutinizing the door once again as she resumed trying to work out this conundrum. Her eyes narrowed in concentration…then widened as her whole expression lit up. “Idea.”

Her horn flashed pink, and the truck door opened. She hopped out of the vehicle, hooves clopping quietly against the pavement as she called back, “This is steel, right?”

“That would be my guess,” came Rarity’s cautious response. She had the revolver out and in her hands now, significantly more vigilant of their surroundings now that the door was open and one of them was no longer sheltered by the car. “It looks like steel to me.”

Twilight sat in front of both doors so that she could place one hoof on either, closing her eyes. Her horn picked up a magenta glow.

Once upon a time, before Twilight grew up into an insecure adult, she had been an even more insecure little filly, and upon discovering that she had a talent for something, she made it her life’s mission to be as useful and productive as possible in a vain attempt to prove her worth. She picked up one spell in particular that excited her, a relatively simple spell whose usefulness was self-evident: Mend. So excited was she to learn something that could help her family that she immediately jumped on the opportunity to fix her father’s pocket watch when it broke. She didn’t know the first thing about watches, nor what had broken in this one, and so she decided - in her infinite filly wisdom - to repair the copper of the watch itself. Turns out, the watch was made of brass. It didn’t end well for that unfortunate watch, but it taught Twilight something very important about not just magic in general, but also this spell of hers, which she exploited here decades later.

Twilight’s horn discharged a flash of pink, causing a nail of pain to lance through the base of her horn into her skull, but also caused the doors to take on an identical shine. A faint black substance began to emit from the surface of the doors, looking like smoke, or a very fine dust that spilled gently away from the shining doors in small plumes. Before Twilight and Rarity’s eyes, the faint line between the door and the stone around it appeared to grow thicker. Hairline fractures began to spread through the stone around the doorway as the two slabs of metal - steadily purifying iron - remained firmly sealed together, hooked together by a locking mechanism that was proving to be extremely resilient. Far more resilient than the stone.

Chips and fragments of the gray-white rock broke free as the doors continued to slowly lose mass, yet remained secured where they were embedded into the structure that tried desperately to hold on. In the end, stone proved to be simply too brittle to stretch the inch and a half of space that it was being pulled, and in fact failed to stretch at all. Metal groaned, stone crackled, and then finally, with a bone-jarring pop and a spray of rock shards, the entire hydraulic system at the top of the door was ripped free, exposing a long broken tube that the slabs of metal beneath them had ripped away from.

When the black and white dust both cleared, there was nearly enough space at the top of the doors between the frames to stick your hoof through, provided you had one. Fractures and cracks spread nearly a foot from either side of the door frame, but still appeared to hold steady, keeping the slabs of now completely pure (read: “mended”) iron securely in place…or at least, securely enough that it didn’t seem inclined to fall. Yet.

Waving away the last of the coal dust with a wing, Twilight inspected the damage with a grin that grew wider all the while. The doors must have been extremely durable, with the amount of coal that they appeared to have shed - the entire walkway around it was stained a gray-black with a millimeter of coal powder that spread out for two meters, forming tiny piles like jet-black sawdust where it gather. That worked way better than she had hoped, and while the way was not yet completely clear… “Her Rarity? Do we have that tow cable that the van got pulled with to the ranch?”

The question was enough to stir Rarity from her stupor she had fallen into, slightly agape mouth closing as she scrambled out of her seatbelt to search the backseat. It had fallen to the floor at some point, but it was indeed there, and was hastily retrieved.

The pink-wreathed pair of metal hooks floated its way out of the car interior, the orange cord connecting them stretching out a bit to the necessary length. One hook slotted itself into a spot beneath the front bumper of the old Mustang, secured to the frame itself, while the other end hooked into the jagged and exposed spot where the hydraulics of the lab doors had been torn away.

Twilight hopped back into the car and pulled the door shut behind her. Rarity, still wide-eyed from the supernatural display she witnessed seconds ago, had just enough brain power in reserve to take the sound of the door closing as a cue to un-park the idling vehicle and to push a foot down on the accelerator.

The Mustang started to crawl away, causing a few curious massive ants a few meters back to begin clumsily and half-blindly seek distance from the noisy booming engine. The orange cable pulled more and more until it could stretch no further - the Mustang jerked to a halt, and the door was pulled slightly forward, though it held fast. The accelerator was pressed down further and further the more the car failed to retreat, the engine’s grumbling slowly rising in pitch until it became a roar - the door tried valiantly to remain in place, though the damage to the stonework had already been done, and as more force was applied to the faults that had begun to grow and resemble lightning bolts, more and more pieces fell away until at last it could hold no more: the now iron doors, firmly sealed together even now, broke free from the rest of the building and crashed to the ground like a draw bridge. Plumes of black and white were thrown up amidst a shower of debris, throwing up one final obstacle in a desperate and doomed attempt to separate the two girls from their goal.

Twilight beamed brightly, and as she watched the smokescreen spread out, begrudgingly revealing the corridor behind it, she breathed a contented sigh. “Magic and human ingenuity, working hoof in…hand.” She giggled. “Absolutely beautiful. Don’t you think so?”

The fashionista in the driver’s seat absently nodded, the beginnings of a smile working its way across her lips at the sight of what lie before them. Perhaps Sweetie Belle was right after all. Maybe Twilight really is a miracle worker…

Twilight admired the sight for just a bit longer, then looked up to Rarity. There was still a job to do. “Ready?”

Rarity swallowed and nodded, the smile fading from her lips as she braced herself for whatever came next. As the key turned and the Mustang’s engine finally got some rest, there was a faint click of a revolver’s safeties being switched off. “I was born ready, darling.”

Both doors to the car opened, and both human and alicorn ventured forth to begin their descent into the laboratory.