The sound of hooves striking stone echoed through the hallway.

Have to find her...

This isn’t as disastrous as you’re making it out to be.

Twilight stopped in front of a door, raised a hoof, and pounded on the wooden slab as hard as she could. Moments later, the heavy door creaked open just enough to reveal an orange-colored eye peeking out. Before the owner of the eye had a chance to pull the door open the rest of the way, the lavender unicorn forcefully threw it open with her magic and stepped into the small apartment.

“Ow! Damn, Twilight, what’s your issue?” asked Fireshade, now sitting on the floor after being pushed out of the way by the swinging door.

“My issue!? My issue!?” She paused just long enough to slam the door shut with her magic. “My issue is the least of our worries! What, exactly, is your malfunction!?”

The yellow unicorn’s face twisted into a look of hurt and confusion. “I-I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about that ‘thing’ in my lab!” Twilight shouted.

“What? I thought you wanted a test subject! I brought you exactly what you asked for!” Fireshade yelled back, tears beginning to line the edges of her eyes.

Twilight took several deep, shaky breaths in an attempt to calm herself down, but with every breath she continued to grow more and more irate. “I don’t know what you heard, but I wanted something to test with... Damn it, Fireshade, not a pony! I did not say, ‘You know what would be great? Testing experimental drugs and magic on live ponies!’ I thought you would bring me some rabbits or maybe a dog!”

Tears now streaming down her face, the pyromancer responded. “Why would I do that!? What good is it to test on an animal that has nothing to do with the end result!? If we’re going to ultimately use this research on ponies, you had damn well be ready to experiment on ponies!”

The lavender mare opened her mouth to respond, only to stop short.

She’s right, you know. Those drugs are designed for ponies, the only way to obtain accurate results is to test them on ponies.

She’s right...

An awkward silence hung in the air, as several more seconds passed.

“You know, Section 5 uses ponies all the time for medical research,” Fireshade stated quietly, breaking the mounting tension.

“What are you talking about? Celestia and Arcana both assured me that they didn’t.”

Fireshade quietly laughed to herself. “And you’re going to believe them after all this? The princess said that because she knew it would be a dealbreaker for you. She needs you. She wouldn’t allow some small moral scruple to stop you from accepting your new duties.”

Twilight’s mind reeled with this revelation. Unable to bring herself to respond, she sighed deeply.

“Besides, it’s too late to put her back, but it’s okay, though! I-I found her in Canterlot, she was here to retrieve a package and do some sightseeing... she was by herself and doesn’t know anyone here. It’ll probably be weeks before anypony even notices her missing.”

Too late to put her back...

There’s no reason to put her back.

“Of course it’s too late to put her back, she knows me!” Twilight screamed.

“Wha-What do you mean she knows you?”

“I mean just that," Twilight replied, breathing slow and deep, allowing herself to become calm. "We probably could have let her go and been alright, but you had to go foalnap the only mare in Canterlot that was visiting from out of town and knows me personally,”

“I’m sorry, Twilight.” Fireshade finally stood up from the floor. “I didn’t know... I-I was just trying to help.”

“I would certainly hope you didn’t know... I mean, how could you have known that she’s from Ponyville?” Twilight asked mockingly, her voice steadily increasing in volume as the exasperating nature of the problem made itself apparent once again. “How could you have known that she happens to be a librarian there!? How could you have known that she was my bucking replacement when I left!?”

The lavender unicorn paused, waiting for an answer to the seemingly rhetorical questions as Fireshade looked on in shock.

“How, Fireshade!?” She stopped again for a moment, awaiting an answer that would never come. “Here, I’ll just give you the answer... You could. Have. Asked!” Twilight began pacing around the room as she continued. “All it would’ve taken was, ‘So, where are you from?’ the fact that she was from Ponyville would have probably thrown a red flag that this was not the mare to take!”

Stop... she is helping, regardless of how reckless a manner she went about it.

Of course she is, but she should have told me what she was doing first.

“I’m so sorry, Twilight... I-I thought I was helping,” Fireshade said, looking at the other unicorn through teary eyes.

She is helping. She did something that was necessary, something that you wouldn’t have been able to do yourself.

The lavender unicorn suddenly stopped her pacing mid-step.

But why did it have to be a pony? And not just any pony.

It had to be a pony. Who the pony is makes no difference to the end result. Quillfeather will serve our needs just as well as any other pony would.

Ponies, though! Living, breathing ponies, with families and lives, and dreams an—

Sometimes one must dirty their hooves in order to obtain the necessary results. You know that to be true, now we only have to admit to that being the truth, as terrible as it may seem.

There must be another way...

There is no other way; this is the reality of the situation. Face it, Twilight: She knows far too much to be released, and our experiments require a pony for accurate results.

“Twilight?”

I can find a way to fix this. We can find another pony to test on. This situation is still salvageable.

The situation may be containable, but it is by no means salvageable. We can only make the best of it. Now we need to apologize to Fireshade. She helped us and you allowed our anger to control your response.

“Are you okay, Twilight?”

Shuddering, the lavender mage shook her head a bit, her eyes blinking rapidly. “Huh?” Directly in front of her stood Firshade, much closer than she remembered. “Yeah, I’m fine... What exactly did you mean when you said ‘it’s too late to put her back?’”

The yellow unicorn looked towards her hooves through tear-clouded vision. “I-I-I don’t want to say...”

“I’m sorry,” Twilight said quietly. She lowered her head toward the floor and looked up slightly, trying to look into Fireshade’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at you... now, tell me why you would think it was too late to release her.”

“I already started her on doses of the chemical compound that you made...” Fireshade murmured, gazing up from the floor to her friend. “I needed to calm her down, so I tried it. I was pretty sure it’s a sedative, and it turns out I was right. It works brilliantly in small doses. Next I’m going to try the ‘c’ version of the compound to test its effectiveness on causing the subject to be more susceptible to suggestion induced behavior.”

Twilight’s right eye twitched involuntarily and she began breathing rapidly again. “It’s okay... It’s okay, I can fix this,” she whispered to herself. With deep, slow, repetitive breaths, she regained her composure. “Don’t do anything to her until I say to. We have higher priorities than testing the GL compounds.”

“Like what?”

Twilight groaned loudly. “In case you’ve forgotten, Arcana is extremely suspicious of me, and we need to be ready to leave at a moments notice. Keeping a test subject isn’t going to make hiding what we’re doing any easier.”

“Okay, so we get things ready to go if we need to, and we just leave the experiment behind if we have to leave...” Fireshade paused, scratching the back of her neck. “Wouldn’t really matter what she told them at that point, I suppose.”

“No. First we need to clean up this mess you made and get rid of Quillfeather. Then we’ll worry about having things ready to go.”

The yellow mare’s jaw dropped open slightly. “Get rid of—”

“I’m not going to kill her...”

Twilight stepped forward and turned to stand next to Fireshade. The yellow unicorn felt the fur of her friend brush against her side as the lavender mage’s horn began to luminesce. With a blinding, white flash of light, the apartment suddenly became void and hushed.

At the same moment, a pulse of illumination shone through the dungeon laboratory. The lavender unicorn made her way towards the bookshelf in the third cell. Meanwhile, Fireshade stumbled several steps before falling to the floor.

The mage, laying prone upon the cold stone, groaned. “I really wish you would give me some warning when you’re gonna do something like that... I hate teleporting.”

Twilight walked out of the ‘library’ cell with a large, ancient tome, wrapped in a magenta glow, following steadily behind her. “You’re lucky that’s all I did to you,” she said without so much as looking towards her friend on the floor. Dropping the text on the workbench, she sat upon the stool and began to flip through the pages.

“H-hello?” a voice called out from the far end of the room.

The movement of the pages ceased. Twilight turned her head back, glaring at Fireshade.

The yellow mare quickly scrambled to her hooves. “Sorry... I thought she would’ve been out longer. I’ll get her another dose and—”

“No,” Twilight cut across, “I’ll take care of it.”

The shaky voice sounded once more. “Twilight, is that you? Who’s out there?”

The purple unicorn closed her eyes, her horn letting off a faint glow for a fleeting moment. Several seconds passed as Twilight remained perfectly still. When the unicorn was certain that the new barrier was doing its job of silencing the noise coming from the cell, she opened her eyes and returned to the task of flipping through the pages of the book.

Trotting over to stand next to her friend, Fireshade attempted to view what the book held within, but the pages were moving much too fast for her to comprehend. “So, uh... what exactly is this book?”

“Tactical Offensive Telepathy,” Twilight replied, lifting the cover towards Fireshade briefly before allowing it to drop and continuing her search.

Slowly repeating the title of the book to herself, Fireshade’s eyes lit up with a look of sudden clarity and understanding. “Heh, are you gonna scramble her brains?” the yellow mare asked while motioning her forehooves in circles around the sides of her head.

“What—no... I’m... I thought I saw a memory alteration spell in here the first time I went through it.”

“Memory alteration... is something like that even possible?” Fireshade asked while moving towards the cell housing the banned literature.

“If it’s in this book, I imagine it would be,” Twilight mumbled as her search continued.

While she searched for a particular book, the yellow mare called back, “Uh-huh...”

The mare studying the book on telepathy smiled. “Ah-ha, here it is.” Twilight paused on a page, quickly scanning the words. She then glanced at the next page, her smile slowly fading. Hastily, she began flipping through more pages, her forehead creasing as she frowned. “This is a lot more complex than I had hoped... it’s going to take weeks to make these calculations by hoof.”

A second tome slammed onto the workbench next to the book Twilight had been analyzing. The title read, Theory and Application of Temporal Manipulation: Vol. I. The lavender unicorn looked to her side where Fireshade was now standing, watching expectantly.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Well... I thought...” The yellow unicorn paused. She blushed slightly, realizing that if the answer was so simple, Twilight would have pursued this solution first. “Uhm, I thought maybe we could just go back and stop me from taking her in the first place?”

Twilight laughed at the mare’s naivety. “We probably could... If I had a lifetime to study timetravel. The calculations involved with moving matter through a timeline are so mind bogglingly complex that I can’t make heads or tails of the majority of it, not to mention the nearly unachievable amount of energy it requires.”

“Oh,” replied Fireshade with a weary gloom laced in her voice.

“That’s one of the books I’ve been studying more thoroughly since they came to be in my possession. The best I can do so far is create a localized temporal manipulation field around small objects,” Twilight explained. “And while that may be useful in some situations, this is not one of them.”

“Manipulation field!? Can I see?”

“Another time... We need to retrieve some equipment so I can make the memory calculations faster,” the lavender mage said as she shoved her book into a saddlebag and rose from the stool.

Fireshade bounced slightly with excitement. “Does that mean you’re going to get the stuff I asked for too?”

“Yes... What I can find, at least,” Twilight sighed as she stepped to the middle of the sigil array that she had drawn on the floor three nights prior. The circle was large enough that it nearly touched the walls on both sides of the room. “I’m going to need your help. So stay here, and when the array begins to glow, focus all the magic you can to it.”

“Why do you need my help? Shouldn’t the sigil magic take care of everything?” the yellow mare asked innocently.

“I want to try to get everything with a single teleport, but the equipment is going to have a lot more mass than I think I can handle on my own. Plus, I’m going to be casting multiple high-level spells to bypass the Section 5 barrier undetected,” Twilight explained as she stepped out of the circle.

“The array might handle it just fine, but I would rather not add any more risk elements than are necessary. So, I need you to stay here and help pull the equipment through. All you have to do is concentrate as much magic as you can on the circle when it begins to glow... And whatever you do, make sure you’re not in the circle when the spell starts—I would rather not land a data manipulator or an energy capacitor inside of you. Once the teleport is complete, move the equipment out of the circle as fast as you can in case I have to send a second set.”

“Okay!” the yellow unicorn exclaimed happily, excited to be able to help Twilight.

“Be patient, it may take some time to draw the sending array and gather the necessary equipment.” With that, Twilight Sparkle threw the pair of bags from the workbench over her back and vanished in a flash of light.

As the world fell back into place around her, Twilight found herself in a familiar white hallway lined with vertical metallic tubes. She turned around to look as far up the length of the corkscrewing hall as she could, and then turned back, pointing herself downslope to begin the long walk into the depths of Canterlot Mountain.

The mage’s horn glowed briefly and the echoing clops of her hoofsteps against the hard floor instantly ceased. She continued further down the volute corridor, stopping several turns before arriving at—and well out of site of—the checkpoint and the massive, looming blast-door beyond.

Twilight closed her eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly through her mouth in an attempt to calm down and clear her mind. Moving non-living objects through the Section 5 barrier was one thing, but she was prepared and fully expecting that moving herself through would be much more difficult.

Twilight opened her eyes and began running through her mental checklist to prepare for the teleport. If anything was incorrect she would run a serious risk of being caught, or worse, the energy of the transference spell could contact the barrier mid-cast and disperse her entire being back to whatever came before this life.

Check for ponies coming up or down the hall. Twilight shut her eyes once more, probing outwards with her magic. The only presence she could feel was that of the two guards and doorkeeper ahead.

Remove soft-step, she thought as she opened her eyes and a soft glow engulfed her body for a moment. The mare tapped a hoof softly on the floor, making certain that the effect had been dispelled.

Radiant Magic Dampening. Once again, an illumination surrounded her body as she cast the spell to attenuate her magical signature. Then, reaching into the solid rock with a detection spell, she found the barrier within and cast the same dampening spell on the area of the barrier she was about to open.

Open the barrier. Shutting her eyes down tight, Twilight began casting the next spell on her checklist. Her horn began to glow brightly as she focused more and more energy on a single, pinpoint-sized location on the barrier deep within the rock wall.

A minute passed, then two. At this point the mage was channeling every bit of magic that she could muster on the target. Twilight felt a bead of sweat trickle from her forehead to her muzzle and drip off of the end of her nose. After the fourth minute, and a small puddle forming beneath her head, the barrier finally gave way, and a hole the size of a quill-tip formed. Immediately falling to her knees as the breach formed, the mage continued casting the spell. Though now, her horn glowed dim, only expending enough energy to keep the hole open.

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath, sighing as she exhaled. Not big enough.

With a quiet grunt and a magenta glow, her magic reached out against the edges of the barrier’s puncture, pushing it open like the aperture of a camera. When the hole reached a size no larger than a foal, Twilight stopped casting.

Now to keep it open long enough. She slowly stood up on shaky legs and prepared to cast a spell she had only practiced a few times in her dungeon lab. The lavender unicorn concentrated hard on the very edge of the breach she had created, taking special note of its elliptical shape and the fact that it was already beginning to repair itself, slowly shrinking as every second ticked by.

Like a doughnut, she mused as she stared at the floor in front of her, making the needed calculations in her head to successfully cast the spell. Suddenly, she lifted her head and closed her eyes. A flash of light emanated from her horn, and she opened her eyes with a satisfied nod.

Probing the barrier with her magic she could sense that her entrance was now stabilized. Twilight slumped slightly as she realized something was not right. The temporal manipulation spell she had cast slowed the passage of time to a nearly imperceptible pace, just as it was designed to do. However, it formed itself into the shape of a sphere, encompassing the entirety of the breach. A shiver forced itself through her body as the thought of being trapped—mid-teleport—within the temporal anomaly drifted through her mind.

Damn it. That’s not a torus at all.

She stood quietly, glaring at the wall towards the location of her mistake, pondering how to manipulate the shape of the field without having to start over.

We can’t do that and you know it.

Once the field is established it cannot be changed, only dispelled.

So what do we do? Taking our time is not a luxury we can afford at this moment.

A magenta flash emanated from Twilight’s horn as the slow-time spell dissolved and the rip in the Section 5 barrier began to repair itself once again. She sighed dejectedly at her spell-casting failure, and then put her entire will into further pushing open her ingress.

Minutes passed, and the mage’s magic flared off of her horn like a torch. The amount of energy she channeled in order to push open a barrier of this caliber would have been enough to knock most unicorns unconscious. Twilight continued to force the edges of the hole back as far as she could until, inevitably, the spell-casting was broken as she fell to the floor, panting hard and her entire body damp with sweat.

The mare once again probed the barrier with her detection spell and groaned with disappointment. She was only able to open it to a diameter that of a normal doorway—a normal doorway that was slowly shrinking.

It will have to do. I don’t think I can open it any further...

A muffled pop sounded as the hallway became unoccupied.

Darkness surrounded the mage as her form coalesced near the back wall of a mostly forgotten storeroom of Section 5. She breathed deeply of the acrid smell of ozone lingering in the air before a soft white light at the end of a lavender horn coaxed the face of Twilight Sparkle from the dark void. The small ball of light detached from her appendage and ascended to the ceiling, leaving her, once again, in the shadowy depths. As the sphere of magical illumination contacted the top of the room, the intensity of the discharge increased tenfold, bathing the surplus storage area in a dim, white glow.

Twilight looked around the massive room. Steel shelving stood tall around the perimeter from floor to ceiling, and two more rows of the same type of units—though shorter—ran down the center of the length of the room, causing much of the storage area to be lost in the shadows. Save for the walkways between the shelves, any other open floor space had been reserved for bulky machines and other equipment that had been long taken out of service for one reason or another.

Trotting over to the nearest of the pieces of large equipment, the mage lifted a tag dangling from the side of it with her magic and quickly read the markings:

ITEM #: 42.5846c
DESC: DATA COLLECTOR, ELECTRICAL ENERGY, 32 BIT BINARY
OOS DATE: 6:2 34th NS
OOS DESC: OUTPUT CIRCUITRY DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR, THIS UNIT FOR SALVAGE PARTS ONLY. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPERATE.
DISPOSAL DATE: 9:2 34th NS
NOTES: MAIN HEATSINK AND COOLING FAN REMOVED. 6:2 76TH NS
INPUT TRANSLATOR REMOVED. 7:2 24TH SS

“I don’t understand why they hang on to this garbage,” Twilight stated to the room while moving towards the front where the locked door of the entryway was located.

As she moved down the aisle between the shelves, the unicorn caught sight of one of the pieces of equipment she was hoping to obtain. This one was a huge, black box that stood nearly twice as tall as her. On the front, a large, cracked, glass panel data monitor was affixed along with many buttons for command entry. Twilight approached the box and perused the tag taped onto the front of it:

ITEM#: 37.1024
DESC: DATA MANIPULATOR, ELECTRICAL/MAGIC INTERFACE DEVICE
OOS DATE: 8:2 87th NS
OOS DESC: PROJECT ENDED, AWAITING REASSIGNMENT. OPERATIONAL, NOT FOR SALVAGE
DISPOSAL DATE: N/A
NOTES: DATA STORAGE HAS BEEN EMPTIED. MONITOR DAMAGED, THOUGH STILL OPERATIONAL.

Twilight pondered the date the equipment was put out of service. “I wonder if this piece was involved in the explosion,” she mused. With a small huff, she took several steps back and attempted to pick up the computer with a telekinesis spell. The box shuddered slightly within the magenta aura.

Opening the barrier took more out of me than I thought.

What would normally be a very simple task for her had become exceedingly difficult. She tried one more time with similar results. The heavy, steel box scraped across the floor a couple of feet and came to a stop. Twilight was once again panting with the exertion.

A smile crept across the mage’s face as she began to cast a different spell. As soon as the aura dissipated from around the machine, it began to float, not quite an inch off the ground. Twilight moved around to the rear of the box and placed her forehooves on the side. The moment she put her weight on the box, it quickly moved away from her, careening down the aisle towards one of the many shelving units. There was nothing to do but watch it float away from her on its collision course.

The device struck the shelves with a loud crash, knocking several smaller items to the floor and causing Twilight to wince. After colliding with the shelves, the data manipulator continued on a path across the aisle, once again crashing into another set of shelves before slowly coming to rest in the middle of the walkway.

The unicorn ran up to the machine and quickly looked it over for any obvious damage. She slowly made her way around it, and other than a few deep gouges in the metal case, it seemed to still be in usable condition.

Twilight approached the side of the box opposite of the direction she was proceeding and gave it a very light push with one hoof. The machine slowly moved in the direction she had intended, with a speed that she could easily walk with. She continued towards the front of the storage room, giving the box a gentle nudge every now and then to keep it moving on-track.

Coming towards the front of the room, Twilight took the black box in a telekinesis spell in order to bring it to a stop. It came to rest in front of a bank of file cabinets and a small, wooden desk as the levitation spell was removed and the machine dropped to the floor with a dull thud.

A piece of white chalk floated out from one of the bags strapped to the mage’s side and subsequently began drawing a circle on the floor between the door and shelves. Twilight moved to the edge of the circle and made deliberately short steps, counting each as she walked to the other side. Now sure that it was similar in size to the array in her lab, she began drawing the necessary runes and teleportation sigil.

Standing within the white circle, Twilight began writing ancient letters around its circumference. After making her way completely around the emerging array—leaving a multitude of strange symbols in her wake—she lifted a piece of paper out of her saddlebag with her mouth and set the note on the floor. The unicorn looked to the runes drawn on the paper; then to the white symbols she had just finished drawing. She nodded to herself, satisfied with her progress, and continued scrawling out the remaining required geometric patterns and symbols of the sigil inside of the circle.

Twilight trotted to the utilitarian, off-white file cabinets, her hoofsteps echoing dully against the high ceiling. Pulling open the left, upper-most drawer, she cringed as the metal runners sounded with a screech in the previously silent room. The mare paused for a moment, turning to the room to inspect her surroundings, almost expecting a guard to be magically summoned by the drawer’s outburst.

Greeted by nothing more than a slient, shadow-filled room, she went back to rummaging in the drawer until she found a black binder labeled ‘CROSS-REFERENCE TABLES, EQUIPMENT TYPE/ITEM #/LOCATION’. Twilight picked up the binder in her magic and carried it with her towards the canyon between the tall shelves. Whistling an unnamed tune to herself, she began the task of collecting the items on her list.

The pile of miscellaneous scientific research equipment steadily grew over the next half-hour. Finally, the last piece was placed into the teleportation array and Twilight pulled her list out to check everything one last time, making sure she got everything she and Fireshade needed.

A few items were missing, but for now, they would have to make do with what Twilight could retrieve. She was not about to start stealing pieces from the main lab. By taking the equipment from the surplus supplies, there would at least be a significant time cushion before anyone noticed the theft.

Twilight returned the cross-reference guide to its place in the file cabinet and began to turn back to the array. Though, as she turned, a glittering reflection of light on the shelf along the wall caught her eye. The mage slowly walked across to the source of the glint that she was sure she had seen. As she approached the shelf, three familiar lunch-box sized metallic cases came into view within the dull illumination of the magelight spell attached to the ceiling.

These are definitely coming with me.

The three boxes levitated across the room to the sigil array and landed gently atop of one of the large energy storage machines. The chalk circle was filled from side to side, with smaller items covering the larger equipment. Twilight was ready to move her bounty to the dungeon laboratory.

She slowly walked around the array, making sure that everything was resting within the circle. The lavender mage kicked a large coil of magic-transference cable back into the array as she made her way around.

Twilight’s horn began to glow as she probed the section 5 barrier one last time to check her escape route. Her eyes widened and jaw dropped as she came to a startling realization.

“Oh no... no no no!”

A brilliant purple light enveloped the storage room for a very short moment before Twilight fell to ground with a yelp. With her magic reserves still mostly exhausted from the act of breaking the barrier initially, she was completely unable to open the hole any further.

“Shit!”

Her egress had shrunken to the point that a baseball would not have been able to squeeze through, and the barrier continued repairing itself at an alarming rate. The mage had only a few, scant seconds to make the teleport, destroy the drawing on the floor and get herself out.

I’m not going to make it, she screamed to herself in her mind. She closed her eyes and put every remaining bit power she could into the bone-white, chalk drawing of the arcane magic-amplifier. The outline on the floor began to dimly glow; then the radiance intensified, creating an iridescent, white halo around the gathered equipment.

“Come on... it’s taking too long, I’m not goi—” Her voice was cut short by a deafening, low-pitched howl as the glowing halo erupted—from floor to ceiling—into a writhing column of burning white light, brilliant enough to rival that of Celestia’s sun.

Stumbling back several steps, she fell to her bottom in a sitting position. Twilight’s spellcasting ceased as the sigil magic took control of the spell. The column continued twisting and rising from the smooth floor, only to be seemingly swallowed into the ceiling above. The mage covered her eyes with a foreleg in an attempt to protect her precious eyesight as she attempted to probe the barrier once more.

Her hoof dropped from her eyes and a solemn frown—accentuated by the glimmering light—crossed her features. The barrier was closed; meaning that the spell would fail and all the equipment would return to her momentarily. A look of abject horror covered her face as she realized what else the closed barrier indicated: She was now trapped within Section 5.

As quickly as the cacophony had started, it came to a very sudden end. Darkness, punctuated by the dim glow of her magelight returned, and the only sound remaining was that of the ringing in her ears.

Her pupils slowly adjusted to the darkness, bringing the array into view. Twilight blinked her eyes hard several times, not believing what she saw. A low-lying blanket of smoky fog hovered above the circle, and above that, nothing. Every piece of equipment was gone.

“No... that’s not right,” Twilight quietly whimpered to herself, her lower lip quivering ever so slightly. “It all should have come back...”

The unicorn fell back to sit on her haunches, looking about her newfound prison. “...and now I’m stuck here.”