Scootaloo's eyes fluttered open and it was only from the gross taste in her mouth that she realised she had fallen asleep. Groaning, she pulled herself up to her hooves, standing next to the door in the small earthen room. It looked pretty much the same as before: stopped clock, circular rug, metal door, and... pile of bones. Now, however, she had the additional disadvantage of not knowing what time it was even more than she already didn't know. While before she at least could approximately measure it in minutes, now it was anypony's guess. Not that there was anypony else to guess. She thought about leaving the room and continuing through the labyrinth of tunnels, but decided the room was worth one last look around.

Curious, Scootaloo walked over to the rug and peeled the dusty surface of the thing up from the ground, hoping that maybe there was some sort of trap door or something of the like underneath. There wasn't. She sighed and set the edge of the rug back down.

Then, she moved on to the clock. Scootaloo looked at its motionless hands for a few moments and then reached up to pry the thing off the wall. It came surprisingly easily and, once she had pulled it away, it was pretty obvious why—the clock hadn't been fastened to the wall in any way and was rather just set into the surface of the earthen wall. There seemed to be nothing special about it so she set it on the rug and turned around.

The pile of bones in the corner was... unappealing, to say the least, so Scootaloo looked back at the door again. Peeping through the peephole again, Scootaloo still saw the same earth ahead; however, this time, she noticed that there seemed to be more light coming from somewhere beyond the door. Sighing, she took a step back and looked at her face reflected in the polished metal surface.

And that's when she saw it—the solution to her problem—and she scoffed at how she had forgotten in the first place. Scootaloo reached up to her mane with a hoof and unclipped the pink hairclip from her fuchsia bangs; then, leaving it unclipped, she lowered it to her mouth and took hold of it between her teeth. Pointing the thin metal part forwards, Scootaloo leaned in forward and deftly inserted it into the keyhole. In just a minute, using a trick Rainbow Dash had taught her over a year ago, the filly could hear the tumblers shifting inside. With a free hoof, she tested the handle a few times as she adjusted the way the tumblers fell on the holes in the pin.

It took her several tries—maybe five minutes or so—but finally she heard the satisfying click and the door handle pushed down all the way. Scootaloo pulled on the handle as she pushed it down and the door opened smoothly on its hinge. She looked down at the pile of bones, still cowering there in the corner.

"Take that, bonehead," Scootaloo said, smirking, but her smirk quickly disappeared once she thought about the fact that she was speaking to what had once been a living, breathing pony. She grimaced. "Sorry, dude. Better luck... next time? Meh." The filly stepped through the doorway, out of the room.

At first, what was on the other side of the door looked like more earthen tunnels—a continuation of the labyrinth behind her. But there was a rectangular fluorescent light panel embedded in the ceiling instead of the torches on the wall, illuminating the tunnel with whiter tones. And, as she took a few steps, she saw the tunnel slope downward.

But unlike the tunnels she had walked through before, there was a stone staircase that led downwards with wide steps as far as the eye could see. Scootaloo didn't know what this change meant, but she figured that any change was good so she began trotting down the stone steps, hooves clacking as she went.