Part Three

“That machine is fascinating...” Daring says, leading the way down the dark tunnel, the rumble of the drill far ahead, probably around five-hundred meters, you guess.

As you walk with her you begin to realise that the grooves left by the drill feel odd under your hooves and wonder if it’s simply the lack of light causing your senses to heighten as the pair of you move through the dark. You can feel the incline of the tunnel, and soon realise that you are moving in an upwards spiral, and that the rock is still curiously warm, similar to the temperature of the sand that you and Daring had had your ‘interlude’ on before Einen and his soldiers had arrived.

“Yeah. He’s always got some sort of crazy mechanical thing.” you reply, thinking about the warmth of the rock beneath your hooves, “He even tried jetpacks once.”

“So... why haven’t you shot him then?” Daring replies, obviously trying to tease you, the tone of her voice putting across the body language that she’d been giving you so far.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” you reply, chuckling slightly, “He’s never directly tried to kill me, it’s always been ‘Bring him to me alive’, that sort of thing. Part of me wonders if he’d actually do it, if he was given the chance.”

The tunnel rumbles, and suddenly light can be seen spilling around the gentle curving incline of the tunnel, which you assume to mean that the drill had finally reached it’s destination.

“Huh.” Daring says, taking a closer look at the wall of the tunnel, “Do you see this, Fedora? They’ve cut through a massive vein of what looks like... well, I think it could be a foundation, but the way it’s catching the light... I don’t know of any building material that catches the light like that.” Daring says, pointing at odd flecks in the foundation that appear to reflect all the colours of the visible spectrum, tiny rainbows reflected over your coat as you hop over the exposed structure.

“Yeah, we should really move faster,” you tell her, starting to worry about what, if anything, the NLR would find at their destination, “I don’t want to get there and find the drill heading back down this way. Let’s go.”

As you peek out of the mouth of the tunnel, you find the mole machine abandoned in a large and ornate hall, but far more technologically advanced than anything pony-kind has ever seen before.

The high, dark ceiling is covered with moving dots, representing what you come to realise is a magnificent stellar map, recognising patterns from constellations you had been taught by your father as a foal, on a dig in a vast and beautiful desert - spending the long and cold nights around the fire with the diggers, being taught local dialects via song, and which of the local flora were edible.

In the corner of the hall, Daring finds a set of steps leading to the ornate mezzanine floor above. She touches something on what looks like a desk, and you hear her gasp as inch-high glowing letters drift out of nothingness onto a sheet of glass acting as a window overlooking the hall itself.

“Oh... oh wow! Fedora! Get over here!” Daring yells, her eyes wide in amazement at the Catlantean words that she had coaxed into appearing by pressing seemingly random buttons.

“Damnit Do, be quiet! What is it?” you call out in a hushed voice from below, looking for the NLR ponies and realising that they’d obviously carried on searching the place on-foot.

“Well, let’s put it this way. We haven’t found the lost city, but I know where it is!”

“But this place is huge! How can this not be the lost city?” you ask again, cursing how loud the attractive mare was being as you quietly move up the stairs, your hooves making a gentle clopping noise on the polished steps.

“I told you, it’s probably just an outpost, but Fedora, you really, really need to read this. I hate to admit it, but I don’t know all of the words...” Daring says, thankfully much more quietly, as you approach her from behind.

“I’ve got most of Oat’Meall’s notes memorised, what are you reading?”

“It’s an account of how they came to Equestria! This is going to be huge! You and me? We’ve hit it big time!” she says excitedly, shuffling on the spot, giddy as a school-filly.

“Do,” you say, pulling her face to yours, her eyes trying to keep following the letters, “Tell me what it says.”

“They were nomads, refugees, from a war. Two factions of a religion, fighting over... I don’t know, something about hats, hot dogs and doughnuts...” she says, frequently pausing to consult a battered, leather-bound book pulled from inside her own hat, “but it could be that I’m translating it wrong... anyway, upon leaving their home, they were guided by a list of directions given to them by somepony named Cloister the... the stupid?”

“McHay’s notes, right?” you say, interrupting with a smirk despite your own notes confirming her translation by giving you the same result.

“Who, from what I’m getting,” Daring says, obviously ignoring you, “was a powerful being ‘frozen in time’. The Catlanteans found our world, and... Whoa.”

“Whoa?”

“They... Fedora, they gave the gift of sentience to our early ancestors, after they took pity on our world. They taught us their language, helped early ponies understand the world around them, explained things like fire...”

“Carry on,” you tell her, still looking around, again worried by the apparent absence of Einen and his soldiers.

“It also makes reference to a star chart, apparently our world was in a really weird decaying rotation around the sun, and they introduced a guardian to protect the planet by magically correcting our orbit every... hmm,” she says, pausing with a confused look on her face and consulting the journal once more, “I’m not sure about the math, they have a different calendar to us, but I think it’s in July, around the time of the Summer Sun Celebration.”

Curious, you take a look at the scratchy text, floating on the pane of glass and then at Daring’s journal, double checking her work.

“When the sun is at its closest. Definitely sounds like the Summer Sun Celebration to me. Do you think this means...”

“Yeah.” Daring replies, interrupting, her mouth hanging open slightly, the two of you together, sides touching as you both read and translate.

“So, where’d they go?” you muse out loud, your hoof scratching your rough, rugged chin.

“They only stopped here for a few hundred years, before continuing their search for a planet called Fuchal.” she says, before waving a hoof towards the screen, causing a new and vastly different series of symbols to appear. You gasp, recognising them as the sequence you hopped over when working your way through the traps, before Daring had found you.

“What? What’s wrong? Daring asks.

“That sequence. I didn’t understand it until now, I knew they were important, but it’s their promised land... this is amazing, Daring.”

“Y’know, we’ll never see it.” Daring says, laying her head on your shoulder.

“No, we won’t. But someday who knows, maybe one day ponies will take to the stars, maybe they’ll make it to Fuchal and find the Catlanteans.” you reply, placing a kiss on her cheek and making the adventurous mare blush in surprise.

Somehow, after a few more button presses, Daring manages to pull up a map of the ancient facility. Several areas of the building appear cross-hatched with red, obviously meaning that they’re not safe. The pair of you notice a green blip, somewhere in the middle of what looks like the room that you’re stood in, with several other green blips moving towards yours via a corridor. As the sound of hooves on rock gets louder, you come to realise that the blips were obviously representative of yourselves and the NLR soldiers you had followed. Daring soon catches on, and she grabs you whilst diving to the floor behind the console.

Whilst she’s sat straddling you, you can’t help but grin like an idiot, feeling the attractive young mare’s perfectly toned body wrapped around you, one delicate sandy-coloured hoof over your mouth with her mane tickling one side of your neck, her breath feeling lovely against the other side. As she looks into your eyes, you see her blush, and she quietly shifts to stop herself rubbing against a particular part of you whose interest had been piqued. Glancing upwards, you notice that the lights on the console had thankfully gone out again, but you can now hear muffled conversation from the soldiers on the floor below.

Noticing her wings beginning to rise, you nod towards them, and she turns her head, turning pale with fright as the tip of her half-erect left wing-tip pokes just over the console - probably visible through the window behind it to the ponies now below.

Without hesitation, you grab the errant appendage and tug it sharply down towards you, making Do whimper, her eyes shooting closed and her perfect teeth biting her lip at the sensation as she stifles a moan.

Realising that she obviously enjoyed the sensation, you play with her wings a little more, making her buck against you slightly, forcing your bodies closer together. Again, a stifled moan is whimpered into your ear, and you smile a little more, with her hoof still covering your mouth. Slowly and carefully she pulls back, scowling at you, her eyes giving a distinct “Not now”, but the struggling wings under your hooves definitely giving a message of “Oh my, yes, please now”.

Sighing, you resign to keeping still with the mare on top of you - her grayscale mane in your eyes, stopping you from seeing anything.

She freezes on the spot as you hear the click of a safety catch being disengaged.

“Nicht Bewegen! Dreh dich um, langsam ab. [Don’t move! Turn around, slowly.]” you hear the gruff and tired voice of Jackboot say as he points his weapon at the pair of you...

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