The message from those who were here before us; The Ancients

The harsh sun pummels you with its intense heat and light as you work. You have been scraping and digging for the past three hours, and becoming disgusted at your slow progress you take a few steps away to take a quick break. Your gaze sweeps around and you marvel at the beautiful sight that greets your eyes. You are standing in a large clearing in the middle of the Everfree Forest, while the surrounding trees fill the horizon with a never-ending sea of green. The calls and howls of various creatures in the far distance create a mystic background ambiance as you gaze.

Shaking yourself from your dazed stupor, you fixate your attention on the structure you have been excavating for over a week. It is a large square that was a hill until you began digging into it. As you unearthed its surface you couldn’t help but give a shout of joy. At that moment you knew it was a structure built by the Ancients or those who “were here before”. It was made of what you called ‘manufactured stone’. It was hard and had the properties of rocks and boulders but was not found naturally, leading you to believe the Ancients created it and used it as a building material.

You have already uncovered the top of the structure and are in the process of clearing the dirt from the sides in search of doors or windows, or another way you could gain access to its interior. The side facing the North had already been cleared and to your dismay, had no doors or windows. Now you are clearing the East side and are almost at the halfway point. You grunt from the exertion as you use your magic to wield a shovel and have it fling dirt away from the structure’s side. The clang of the shovel hitting against the side of the ‘manufactured stone’ is slow and monotonous like a large bass drum.

You start to daydream and imagine what untold plethora of information could lie inside the structure as you hear a large BANG! Frightened, you stop the shovel and pause for a second as you analyze the cause of the sound. It sounded like metal hitting metal but that is impossible unless... You bring the shovel against the side of the structure near where you hit it last time, and another loud BANG! reverberates through the clearing. Becoming excited you hurriedly shovel away the dirt over the next few feet making countless BANG!s and CLANG!s as you dig.

As you finish excavating the small stretch you are greeted by a large, red, metal door. It is almost twice as tall as you, since your eyes are only about four inches above the door handle. A small rectangular sign on the door near the top is covered with dirt and is illegible. Using your magic you levitate a small dirt brush you always carry with you and dust away the dirt covering the sign. You look up at the newly cleared sign and gasp in shock. The sign is red and is written in large white letters. What shocks you is that you can read the letters on the sign. The Ancients apparently used the same writing language as Equestria does, or rather, Equestria uses the Ancients’ writing system. You hurriedly jot this discovery down into your personal notepad, barely containing your excitement.

Your excitement quickly fades into caution as you read the sign. It says, “DANGER! AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY! TRESPASSERS WILL BE TERMINATED!” You gulp as you gaze at the door, wanting to hurl it open and explore the structure’s interior thoroughly. You would but the warning on the door has made you pause. Taking the cautious route, you step to the side of the door and grip the handle with your magic. You close your eyes as you turn the handle and yank it all the way open. A blast of foul, rancid air rushes through the doorway making a loud rushing sound. After a few seconds the sound stops and everything is quiet, save all of the animals in the forest making sounds in the distance.

You open your eyes and tentatively step in front of the open doorway. A dark corridor the height of the door stretches out until it is enveloped in complete darkness. The mysterious darkened corridor beckons to you, and the urge to leap inside and explore surges throughout your entire body. You stop and catch yourself as you look into the sky. Celestia’s sun has touched the horizon and is disappearing rapidly. On the opposite horizon Luna’s moon is peeking up slowly, hailing the start of the night. You resolve to explore the structure tomorrow and you hurriedly run to your tent to prepare your exploration gear and try to sleep.

Morning couldn’t arrive soon enough in your mind’s eye. You had awoken hours before dawn giddy with excitement of what you might find down in those dark corridors. To kill the time until dawn you had checked, double checked, and even triple and quadruple checked your supplies and equipment. As the sun appeared over the horizon you dash towards the large red door. You open it and the vast dark corridor beckons to you once again. Lighting your lantern you enter the doorway and begin walking down the dark corridor.

You walk about 30 feet down the corridor and it opens into a very large open room with a high ceiling. Your lantern illuminates most of the room and you notice several things. This room along with the corridor, are both made of ‘manufactured stone’ as well as a very wide descending staircase across from you on the other side of the room. The left side of the room has countless crates and boxes stacked on top of each other. The right side is mostly empty except for large reddish brown stains on the wall and floor, as well as the skeletons of several ponies. You quickly put your hoof to your mouth to prevent yourself from vomiting in disgust.

You step over towards the bodies of the numerous ponies as you hold your breath. The smell of decay and death hang in the air. As you step closer to the macabre scene your hooves hit and send several small objects flying and rolling away. They made distinctive “ping” sounds as they rolled and bounced over the floor. You look down and inspect a few of them. They all appear to be small, shiny, hollow, metal cylinders that are closed on one side but open on the other. They once contained something but are now empty and discarded. You grab one with your magic and hold it up at eye level. Curiously, you smell it and a strong acrid and sulfurous scent greets your nostrils. That smell combined with the scent of decay makes you gag as you struggle to keep yourself from vomiting again. You place the cylinder in your pack as you draw closer to the bodies.

You get as close as you can without touching the bodies and examine the bones. Some are broken and mangled, while most of the skeletons are complete, whole, and show little or no damage. You can only imagine at what caused the deaths of these poor ancient ponies. “Perhaps the cylinders on the ground had something to do with it?”, you think to yourself. You mutter an inaudible prayer over the corpses and proceed to the left side of the room.

You inspect the boxes and crates and find that all of them are nailed shut. You read the labels and stencils painted on the boxes to try to guess their contents. Most said, “FRAGILE”, “HANDLE WITH CARE”, “PERISHABLE”, or “EXPLOSIVES”. Becoming curious, you open a box of each label with the crowbar you brought along. In the “FRAGILE” and “PERISHABLE” boxes you find various types of foods, no doubt rancid and rotted away by now. The small box labeled “HANDLE WITH CARE” contains a bunch of small metal orbs packed loosely in some sort of straw-like material. These orbs have what seem like metal stems poking out of them with metal pins sticking through the stems.

You have no idea what they are and you contemplate taking the pin out of one and seeing what would happen. You decide against it, keeping the box’s warning label in mind, and remembering that you shouldn’t tamper with unknown objects. Replacing the small orb in the small wooden box, you move to the box labeled “EXPLOSIVES”. Opening it very carefully you remove the cover and stare into the box. What you see are numerous, stacked, rectangular blocks that say “C4 Plastic Explosive” on the side. You pick up a block between your hooves and examine it carefully. After finding nothing else of notice about these weird blocks, you carefully replace it and begin to trot towards the stairs.

A few crates you’ve missed stops you in your tracks, as you turn around and hover over them. You pry the top off of one of them and the sight that greets you is bizarre, to say the least. Sitting side by side on a rack are several, black, long, metal tubes as far as you can tell. Picking one up with your magic you levitate it in front of you, turning and inspecting it. The black metal tube has another black material in a strange shape on one end of it. While this strange other material also covers most of the other half of the tube. A black, curved, rectangular shape sticks out from the bottom near the strange shape on the one end.

Staring at this strange contraption you have become extremely bemused by it. It was obviously useful to the Ancients for some reason, otherwise they wouldn’t have had it. But what was it used for? You gaze down at the side of the wooden crate and it simply stated, “M16”. Confused even further you put the “M16” or whatever it was, back in its place on the rack in its box. You turn to the staircase and begin to follow it as it descends further into the dark labyrinth of the Ancients’ strange structure.

Descending for what seems to be several minutes, your only company is the sound your hooves make as they hit the steps. The hollow notes of this sound echoed and reverberated up and down the never-ending staircase until you thought the sound would drive you mad. Thankfully, the bottom had entered your view and you happily jumped over the last few steps and landed on the floor below with a slight, jarring thud. Another large and dark corridor loomed in front of you as you started to move forward. This corridor was wider than the first one as it was the width of the large flight of steps you just descended.

As you travel down this wide corridor you notice several metal doors with no handles lining the walls, but you make no attempt to inspect or open them. You have seen several similar doors in other ruins built by the Ancients and no matter what you tried, you could never open them. Eventually, you noticed the corridor started to narrow and it came to a fork. One path forked right, and the other went left. You decide to explore the right path first. SLAM! A metal door with no handle shot up through the floor and hit the ceiling of the corridor, blocking the entire right pathway. It made a loud “CLANK” a second later, as if it locked itself.  Recovering from the near heart attack the door gave you, you think to yourself, “Alright, left then...”

Walking down the left passageway you notice some strange tubes sticking out from the walls near the ceiling. You have the unnerving feeling that you are being watched, but continue regardless. At the end of the long hallway you see a strange white door ahead of you. You approach the door and lay your hoof against it. You push on it firmly and it slowly begins to open. A blinding white light strikes you as you open the door. Holding your hooves in front of your eyes you stumble into the room, and fall to the ground as you trip over yourself. After your eyes adjust to the bright light you get back up on your hooves. You scan the room then stop, your eyes riveted to one particular spot in the room. Your mouth flies agape in shock. You point a shaking hoof towards the spot and stutter out, “I-I c-can’t believe it. “Its... its...” You faint from the shock and surprise and as you pass out, the darkness of unconsciousness takes ahold of you.