Density of Memory
by thedriderpony
Prompt: Deep Castle
There are many well known problems with immortality. Outliving one's friends is the most commonly cited one, along with being left behind by a changing world and culture, getting sealed in inescapable traps for millennia, and experiencing cravings for snacks whose ingredients have long since gone extinct.
Another, less often remembered problem with immortality is that one tends to accumulate a lot of stuff.
There are many well know problems with Twilight Sparkle. Overextending herself to try and help all her friends is the most commonly cited one, along with inquisitive tunnel-vision, anxious hyperfixation, and a complete inability to dance.
Another, less often remembered problem with Twilight Sparkle is that she was something of a pack-rat.
Not a hoarder, certainly not. After a summer spend at her Great Aunt []'s place in her youth, she swore to never be the kind of mare who couldn't even walk around her house due to piles of old newspapers tied in careful bundles and who couldn't see her wallpaper for it's exhaustive covering of collectible silver spoons. No, Twilight Sparkle was a collector, thank you very much. She had rules, she had a system. A place for everything and everything in it's place.
Or so was the justification that allowed her to gather up more books than most public libraries. As long as everything was organized, it was fine.
This worked well for her in Canterlot, and largely continued to be fine when she moved to Ponyville. The issues only begin once she became a princess and moved to a living crystal edifice on the edge of town.
The problem with princesses is that they tend to receive a great deal of presents. From official state-sanctioned gifts from diplomatic envoys to bundles of fan-mail from their happy constituents composed of a mix of scribbled crayon drawings and well-intended-but-poorly-executed romantic overtures. And that's before even addressing the issue of birthdays and Hearths Warming. Celestia dealt with the problem by redistributing much of what she received through various charities and, at times, recycling programs. Cadance did much the same. Luna never seemed to have this particular princess issue.
Twilight, for her part, never received any official guidance on how to deal with this particular perk of princesshood.
So, naturally, she decided that the only logical course of action was to keep everything. After all, it'd be rude to throw away or regift something that somepony had put their time and effort into getting for her. What kind of a princess of friendship would she be if she did that? Certainly not one deserving of her title, or so she reasoned.
And thus the Castle of Friendship, little by little, one postal delivery at a time, transformed into the Castle of Storerooms and Filing Systems.
After a few years of reigning, even she had to admit that it was getting out of hoof when she found herself considering reinventing spatial magic so she could compress herself small enough to justify squeezing the rows of bookshelves in Sublibrary Eight slightly closer together. Unfortunately, her problem was one without a simple solution.
The problem with living in a castle grown by the Magic of Harmony as a single massive contiguous crystal is that there's really no good options when it comes to renovating. No retailer in Equestria (nor the Crystal Empire, for that matter) sold whatever unidentifiable family of crystal the Friendship Castle was made of, let alone in sizes suitable for construction, and the sheer uniqueness of it made no less than three royal architects snap their slide rule in frustration for trying to find some method to build on an expansion that didn't look like a mismatched afterthought.
Eventually, after weeks of consultations with architects, months of correspondence with magical academics, and a five minute conversation with Pinkie Pie, she realized the obvious solution was to dig down.
In short order, the Castle of Friendship had a new basement and Twilight found that she did, in fact, have a guest wing.
Obviously, the natural next step would be to build another one. With the completion of the second basement, Twilight rediscovered that the formerly named Room of Extra Birthday Cards was actually supposed to be an indoor pool.
The problem with home renovations is that it is an incredibly invasive process as workers walk back and forth through one's home, making noise, tracking dirt, and helping themselves to whatever they deem as "probably won't be missed" in the fridge.
Her solution? Automation.
Golems were the key. Golems to dig. Golems to reinforce. Golems to spackle and wallpaper. Golems to remove excavated material, which were later upgraded to golems to craft new golems out of excavated material (a breakthrough in efficiency). Golems to bring new acquisitions down into the depths and deliver them to other golems built to organize them.
Zoning laws are for ponies who aren't princesses, after all.
With the final creation of golems to find and bring things back to her at the ground floor, Princess Twilight Sparkle made the process completely self-contained, allowing her to reap the full benefits without detract from her busy schedule of politics, reading, and meeting up with the girls to quash the latest would-be threat to nationwide peace with the force of their friendship.
And her system was completely perfect and without flaw or issue.
...for a good couple of decades.
"I haven't seen Spike around lately," Starlight (technically, a living copy of Starlight's memories preserved in a crystal matrix, but she considered herself as much the real Starlight as the wrinkled grey mare heading the Ministry of Education, so the difference was moot) mused in a brief lull of silence between discussions on trade reform.
Princess Twilight Sparkle (additional titles omitted for brevity) paused as she lifted a very discreetly delivered Princess Burger Haybaconater with extra cheese to her mouth. "I think he mentioned a trip to the Dragonlands. Something about Ember getting married?" She raised her guilty pleasure and took a messy bite, smearing ketchup and mustard across her lips as she did. "Oh, that's the stuff. Do you want one?"
"Sure." Twilight lit her horn and a small beam of magic illuminated the sandwich before arcing towards Starlight's illusionary body. A small mess of colored lights fizzled into view in the unicorn's hoof which quickly resolved into a copy of the fast food, perfect down to the sesame seed. Starlight took a bite and grimaced. "You didn't say there were pickles." She tossed the artificial sandwich behind her and it vanished as it left the range of her projection spell. "Also, no. That trip's not until next year."
"Right, you're right," Twilight replied, thankful as always for her Chief of Staff's perfect memory. Time seemed to become oddly stretched the more of it she experienced. She dabbed the mess off her face with a napkin as she wracked her brain. "Oh that's right! I sent him down into the basement."
"The basement? Where you keep all your junk?"
"It's not junk! Those are precious gifts," she retorted. "I also keep books down there, so I can cycle out what's in the main library." She nodded as the memory connected. "I remember now. The retrieval golems weren't responding, so I sent him down to figure out what was wrong."
Starlight send her a tired look. "Why didn't you just go yourself? If it's something he can't fix, he's just going to have to come back and tell you so you can go fix it anyway."
"I was too busy at the time. My schedule was absolutely packed and I couldn't spare even a minute. You remember, we were trying to fix that problem with the Yak cultural festival before the delegates arrived?"
When no reply came, Twilight finally turned her attention away from her lunch to find her friend staring at her with a gobsmacked expression. "What?"
"Twilight, that was three months ago."
Twilight froze. As her body remained still, the cogs of her mind span into overdrive. Cycling through memories, connecting one event to another, building a more concrete timeline than she'd had to consciously focus on for some time. One of the mental cogs popped loose as it reached an inescapable conclusion.
"Spike's been down there for three months?!"
"Apparently!" Was Starlight's heated reply. "How did you not notice?!"
"I- I don't know! Sometimes our schedules don't line up and we don't see each other for days! How could this happen!? I need to find him right now!"
"Clearing your schedule now," Starlight said, her artificial mind immediately self-regulating back to calm as she brought up little windows and made changes. "Also sending a message to my other self to pick up things if this takes long and--"
*SMACK!"
Starlight blinked, taking a moment to process the uncomfortable sensation of a Haybaconater with extra cheese flying through her incorporeal head before smacking into the wall. "Um, ow?"
"Sorry!" Twilight said as she continued flinging all the important paperwork and less-important lunch remnants off the surface of the Friendship Map. A flick of her magic brought it to life, illuminating a pegasus-eye's view of the nation cast in shades of blue light. "Enhance, enhance, zoo," she urged it, fiddling with the controls to make it focus in on the Castle of Friendship. When the crystal tree filled the table, she turned a feature she rarely had to access and shifted the view along the vertical axis. "Spike, where is Spike, show me his... what in Faust's name is that?!"
"It would appear to be... your basement."
The representation of the castle rose towards the ceiling as the view continued to descend down and down and down revealing an intricate web of corridors and rooms and hallways that continued growing down and out like an ant's nest composed solely of right angles. The image spread to fill the room until the image of the castle and even Ponyville itself was lost in the preserved roots of her old home suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Finally, the illusion stopped scrolling, revealing a singular large chamber at the very bottom where the map very helpfully placed a pulsing green and purple icon of a dragon's claw.
For a moment, neither pony spoke, but stunned to complete silence by the labyrinthine maze that had become of Twilight's "clever storage solution" from years before.
"...you have a dungeon under your castle."
"I do not have a dungeon! The criminal justice reforms I enacted clearly state--"
"Don't try to wriggle out of this with semantics, Twilight!" Starlight cut her off. "That is a dungeon. You have an Ogres and Oubliettes dungeon, that you built, and you never even told me!"
"Told you?! I didn't even know! I haven't been in the basement-"
"Dungeon."
"-basement since Applejack's wedding! The golems have been running perfectly for years!" She paused. "Maybe... too perfectly. If they never had any sort of Stop clause... and so long as I kept feeding them more things to store... I guess it's not impossible this is just a natural progression of their initial programming." Her hoof trailed through the illusion, tracing branching corridors and alcoves until she stopped at a point where the layout started to become less geometric and logical. "At least until here." She tapped it. "Something must have gone wrong at level...B74. Sweet Celestia, fifty-four sublevels and that's not even the bottom of it. How did my castle get so deep?"
"Focus, Twilight," Starlight said sharply. "The important part is Spike."
"Right, you're right. Now that I know where he is, I should be able to just teleport him back." She lit her horn... only for the magic to fizzle out with deflating sound. "Or... not?" She tried again, to much the same result. "I'm getting some kind of interference."
Starlight nodded. "That wouldn't surprise me. Who knows how many magical artifacts and trinkets are between us and the bottom floor. You've created a layered magical barrier by the sheer density of mana."
Twilight narrowed her eyes. "Yes, but it being layered might help. I can't teleport him up, but I should be able to teleport down, at least partway, and then teleport again form there. Then once I reach the bottom I can bring him back the same way."
"Sounds like as good a plan as any, let's go."
"You want to come? It's going to take me five minutes."
"You think I'd miss this? Twilight, I've done nothing but organize your schedule, manage castle staff, and research magic since I forked myself off from my other body. This is the most interesting thing that's happened in the castle in years." A small icon of a scroll appeared in her illusion and unrolled. "Speaking of, my other self just replied."
"And?"
"Looks like she and I still haven't diverged very far, except she's a lot freer with strong language." The message icon vanished in a burst of illusory flame. "Now grab my crystal and let's go! I want to see what you've got hidden away in your dungeon."
"Not a dungeon!" Twilight snapped back, but she grabbed Starlight's crystal all the same and wrapped the both of them in a teleportation spell, soon leaving the room behind in a flash of light.
The room they arrived in was perfectly ordinary. Ordinary save for the fact that it was the size of a grand ballroom and filled with nothing but stacks upon stacks of mail.
"Honestly, I'm a little disappointed," Starlight said. "This is not nearly the kind of dungeon adventure I was promised."
"Because it's not a dungeon!" Twilight again insisted, though the claim was losing its drive. "Also, we're not that deep yet. This is only the fifteenth subfloor." She pulled a few envelopes from the shelves. "Which appears to store entirely old Hearts and Hooves Day cards."
"Boring," Starlight replied, pacing about the limited range of her illusion. "Let's keep going."
"Right."
"Ooh, wine cellar. Now we're talking," Starlight said as they arrived at subfloor 34. Racks of bottles spilled out on either side of a corridor that faded into the distance. She peered at one of the labels. "Twilight, this bottle is from twenty-five years ago."
"Well I don't drink wine much, but it's a very common diplomatic gift. Besides, it's supposed to be better aged, right?"
"That's only in the barrel. Once it's bottled it's good for two, maybe three years." She glanced around. "Most of this is probably vinegar by this point. Such a shame."
"Maybe I should host more parties where I serve wine," Twilight mused. "Anyway, should we continue?"
"Let's go."
"Is this... all romantic proposals?
"Yes! No! We're moving on!"
"Now this is more like it!" Starlight declared as they reached floor 81. Something had clearly gone wrong by this point in the long years of construction. Rooms and hallways seemed to merge into one another without logical architectural thought, giving the whole place a strange and eerie feeling. Things were still organized, but peculiarly, in piles in the center of a room or strung across a wall.
"This is what you were expecting?" Twilight asked, still trying to banish the memory of the room on floor 70 that had been wallpapered in fanart."
"Not specifically, no, but it's new and interesting." She glanced around. "You know, I'm surprised we haven't run into any golems yet. Aren't there supposed to be hundreds of the things?"
"Maybe thousands by now," Twilight confirmed, "Assuming they've still been building more."
The room remained unsettlingly silent.
"Let's just keep going," Twilight said, eyes peering around. "This floor gives me the creeps."
The pair arrived at subfloor 100 to the sound of screams. As Twilight blinked the blinding light of teleportation away, she tried to figure out who was screaming. Starlight, being a construct, didn't have such biological limitations.
"Well, we found where the golems were."
As the spots vanished from her eyes, Twilight beheld a city. A city built of stone and a very creative use of her own possessions. And throughout it were hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of barrel-high creatures made of a myriad of materials, screaming and calling out for help.
{author's note, no time to finish. Spike is down they, acting as their champion and protector. He could leave at any time but also lost track of time like Twilight had. Also, there'a Princess Burger establish down there and they go for a haycionator sogether to catch up,)
There are many well known problems with immortality. Outliving one's friends is the most commonly cited one, along with being left behind by a changing world and culture, getting sealed in inescapable traps for millennia, and experiencing cravings for snacks whose ingredients have long since gone extinct.
Another, less often remembered problem with immortality is that one tends to accumulate a lot of stuff.
There are many well know problems with Twilight Sparkle. Overextending herself to try and help all her friends is the most commonly cited one, along with inquisitive tunnel-vision, anxious hyperfixation, and a complete inability to dance.
Another, less often remembered problem with Twilight Sparkle is that she was something of a pack-rat.
Not a hoarder, certainly not. After a summer spend at her Great Aunt []'s place in her youth, she swore to never be the kind of mare who couldn't even walk around her house due to piles of old newspapers tied in careful bundles and who couldn't see her wallpaper for it's exhaustive covering of collectible silver spoons. No, Twilight Sparkle was a collector, thank you very much. She had rules, she had a system. A place for everything and everything in it's place.
Or so was the justification that allowed her to gather up more books than most public libraries. As long as everything was organized, it was fine.
This worked well for her in Canterlot, and largely continued to be fine when she moved to Ponyville. The issues only begin once she became a princess and moved to a living crystal edifice on the edge of town.
The problem with princesses is that they tend to receive a great deal of presents. From official state-sanctioned gifts from diplomatic envoys to bundles of fan-mail from their happy constituents composed of a mix of scribbled crayon drawings and well-intended-but-poorly-executed romantic overtures. And that's before even addressing the issue of birthdays and Hearths Warming. Celestia dealt with the problem by redistributing much of what she received through various charities and, at times, recycling programs. Cadance did much the same. Luna never seemed to have this particular princess issue.
Twilight, for her part, never received any official guidance on how to deal with this particular perk of princesshood.
So, naturally, she decided that the only logical course of action was to keep everything. After all, it'd be rude to throw away or regift something that somepony had put their time and effort into getting for her. What kind of a princess of friendship would she be if she did that? Certainly not one deserving of her title, or so she reasoned.
And thus the Castle of Friendship, little by little, one postal delivery at a time, transformed into the Castle of Storerooms and Filing Systems.
After a few years of reigning, even she had to admit that it was getting out of hoof when she found herself considering reinventing spatial magic so she could compress herself small enough to justify squeezing the rows of bookshelves in Sublibrary Eight slightly closer together. Unfortunately, her problem was one without a simple solution.
The problem with living in a castle grown by the Magic of Harmony as a single massive contiguous crystal is that there's really no good options when it comes to renovating. No retailer in Equestria (nor the Crystal Empire, for that matter) sold whatever unidentifiable family of crystal the Friendship Castle was made of, let alone in sizes suitable for construction, and the sheer uniqueness of it made no less than three royal architects snap their slide rule in frustration for trying to find some method to build on an expansion that didn't look like a mismatched afterthought.
Eventually, after weeks of consultations with architects, months of correspondence with magical academics, and a five minute conversation with Pinkie Pie, she realized the obvious solution was to dig down.
In short order, the Castle of Friendship had a new basement and Twilight found that she did, in fact, have a guest wing.
Obviously, the natural next step would be to build another one. With the completion of the second basement, Twilight rediscovered that the formerly named Room of Extra Birthday Cards was actually supposed to be an indoor pool.
The problem with home renovations is that it is an incredibly invasive process as workers walk back and forth through one's home, making noise, tracking dirt, and helping themselves to whatever they deem as "probably won't be missed" in the fridge.
Her solution? Automation.
Golems were the key. Golems to dig. Golems to reinforce. Golems to spackle and wallpaper. Golems to remove excavated material, which were later upgraded to golems to craft new golems out of excavated material (a breakthrough in efficiency). Golems to bring new acquisitions down into the depths and deliver them to other golems built to organize them.
Zoning laws are for ponies who aren't princesses, after all.
With the final creation of golems to find and bring things back to her at the ground floor, Princess Twilight Sparkle made the process completely self-contained, allowing her to reap the full benefits without detract from her busy schedule of politics, reading, and meeting up with the girls to quash the latest would-be threat to nationwide peace with the force of their friendship.
And her system was completely perfect and without flaw or issue.
...for a good couple of decades.
"I haven't seen Spike around lately," Starlight (technically, a living copy of Starlight's memories preserved in a crystal matrix, but she considered herself as much the real Starlight as the wrinkled grey mare heading the Ministry of Education, so the difference was moot) mused in a brief lull of silence between discussions on trade reform.
Princess Twilight Sparkle (additional titles omitted for brevity) paused as she lifted a very discreetly delivered Princess Burger Haybaconater with extra cheese to her mouth. "I think he mentioned a trip to the Dragonlands. Something about Ember getting married?" She raised her guilty pleasure and took a messy bite, smearing ketchup and mustard across her lips as she did. "Oh, that's the stuff. Do you want one?"
"Sure." Twilight lit her horn and a small beam of magic illuminated the sandwich before arcing towards Starlight's illusionary body. A small mess of colored lights fizzled into view in the unicorn's hoof which quickly resolved into a copy of the fast food, perfect down to the sesame seed. Starlight took a bite and grimaced. "You didn't say there were pickles." She tossed the artificial sandwich behind her and it vanished as it left the range of her projection spell. "Also, no. That trip's not until next year."
"Right, you're right," Twilight replied, thankful as always for her Chief of Staff's perfect memory. Time seemed to become oddly stretched the more of it she experienced. She dabbed the mess off her face with a napkin as she wracked her brain. "Oh that's right! I sent him down into the basement."
"The basement? Where you keep all your junk?"
"It's not junk! Those are precious gifts," she retorted. "I also keep books down there, so I can cycle out what's in the main library." She nodded as the memory connected. "I remember now. The retrieval golems weren't responding, so I sent him down to figure out what was wrong."
Starlight send her a tired look. "Why didn't you just go yourself? If it's something he can't fix, he's just going to have to come back and tell you so you can go fix it anyway."
"I was too busy at the time. My schedule was absolutely packed and I couldn't spare even a minute. You remember, we were trying to fix that problem with the Yak cultural festival before the delegates arrived?"
When no reply came, Twilight finally turned her attention away from her lunch to find her friend staring at her with a gobsmacked expression. "What?"
"Twilight, that was three months ago."
Twilight froze. As her body remained still, the cogs of her mind span into overdrive. Cycling through memories, connecting one event to another, building a more concrete timeline than she'd had to consciously focus on for some time. One of the mental cogs popped loose as it reached an inescapable conclusion.
"Spike's been down there for three months?!"
"Apparently!" Was Starlight's heated reply. "How did you not notice?!"
"I- I don't know! Sometimes our schedules don't line up and we don't see each other for days! How could this happen!? I need to find him right now!"
"Clearing your schedule now," Starlight said, her artificial mind immediately self-regulating back to calm as she brought up little windows and made changes. "Also sending a message to my other self to pick up things if this takes long and--"
*SMACK!"
Starlight blinked, taking a moment to process the uncomfortable sensation of a Haybaconater with extra cheese flying through her incorporeal head before smacking into the wall. "Um, ow?"
"Sorry!" Twilight said as she continued flinging all the important paperwork and less-important lunch remnants off the surface of the Friendship Map. A flick of her magic brought it to life, illuminating a pegasus-eye's view of the nation cast in shades of blue light. "Enhance, enhance, zoo," she urged it, fiddling with the controls to make it focus in on the Castle of Friendship. When the crystal tree filled the table, she turned a feature she rarely had to access and shifted the view along the vertical axis. "Spike, where is Spike, show me his... what in Faust's name is that?!"
"It would appear to be... your basement."
The representation of the castle rose towards the ceiling as the view continued to descend down and down and down revealing an intricate web of corridors and rooms and hallways that continued growing down and out like an ant's nest composed solely of right angles. The image spread to fill the room until the image of the castle and even Ponyville itself was lost in the preserved roots of her old home suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Finally, the illusion stopped scrolling, revealing a singular large chamber at the very bottom where the map very helpfully placed a pulsing green and purple icon of a dragon's claw.
For a moment, neither pony spoke, but stunned to complete silence by the labyrinthine maze that had become of Twilight's "clever storage solution" from years before.
"...you have a dungeon under your castle."
"I do not have a dungeon! The criminal justice reforms I enacted clearly state--"
"Don't try to wriggle out of this with semantics, Twilight!" Starlight cut her off. "That is a dungeon. You have an Ogres and Oubliettes dungeon, that you built, and you never even told me!"
"Told you?! I didn't even know! I haven't been in the basement-"
"Dungeon."
"-basement since Applejack's wedding! The golems have been running perfectly for years!" She paused. "Maybe... too perfectly. If they never had any sort of Stop clause... and so long as I kept feeding them more things to store... I guess it's not impossible this is just a natural progression of their initial programming." Her hoof trailed through the illusion, tracing branching corridors and alcoves until she stopped at a point where the layout started to become less geometric and logical. "At least until here." She tapped it. "Something must have gone wrong at level...B74. Sweet Celestia, fifty-four sublevels and that's not even the bottom of it. How did my castle get so deep?"
"Focus, Twilight," Starlight said sharply. "The important part is Spike."
"Right, you're right. Now that I know where he is, I should be able to just teleport him back." She lit her horn... only for the magic to fizzle out with deflating sound. "Or... not?" She tried again, to much the same result. "I'm getting some kind of interference."
Starlight nodded. "That wouldn't surprise me. Who knows how many magical artifacts and trinkets are between us and the bottom floor. You've created a layered magical barrier by the sheer density of mana."
Twilight narrowed her eyes. "Yes, but it being layered might help. I can't teleport him up, but I should be able to teleport down, at least partway, and then teleport again form there. Then once I reach the bottom I can bring him back the same way."
"Sounds like as good a plan as any, let's go."
"You want to come? It's going to take me five minutes."
"You think I'd miss this? Twilight, I've done nothing but organize your schedule, manage castle staff, and research magic since I forked myself off from my other body. This is the most interesting thing that's happened in the castle in years." A small icon of a scroll appeared in her illusion and unrolled. "Speaking of, my other self just replied."
"And?"
"Looks like she and I still haven't diverged very far, except she's a lot freer with strong language." The message icon vanished in a burst of illusory flame. "Now grab my crystal and let's go! I want to see what you've got hidden away in your dungeon."
"Not a dungeon!" Twilight snapped back, but she grabbed Starlight's crystal all the same and wrapped the both of them in a teleportation spell, soon leaving the room behind in a flash of light.
The room they arrived in was perfectly ordinary. Ordinary save for the fact that it was the size of a grand ballroom and filled with nothing but stacks upon stacks of mail.
"Honestly, I'm a little disappointed," Starlight said. "This is not nearly the kind of dungeon adventure I was promised."
"Because it's not a dungeon!" Twilight again insisted, though the claim was losing its drive. "Also, we're not that deep yet. This is only the fifteenth subfloor." She pulled a few envelopes from the shelves. "Which appears to store entirely old Hearts and Hooves Day cards."
"Boring," Starlight replied, pacing about the limited range of her illusion. "Let's keep going."
"Right."
"Ooh, wine cellar. Now we're talking," Starlight said as they arrived at subfloor 34. Racks of bottles spilled out on either side of a corridor that faded into the distance. She peered at one of the labels. "Twilight, this bottle is from twenty-five years ago."
"Well I don't drink wine much, but it's a very common diplomatic gift. Besides, it's supposed to be better aged, right?"
"That's only in the barrel. Once it's bottled it's good for two, maybe three years." She glanced around. "Most of this is probably vinegar by this point. Such a shame."
"Maybe I should host more parties where I serve wine," Twilight mused. "Anyway, should we continue?"
"Let's go."
"Is this... all romantic proposals?
"Yes! No! We're moving on!"
"Now this is more like it!" Starlight declared as they reached floor 81. Something had clearly gone wrong by this point in the long years of construction. Rooms and hallways seemed to merge into one another without logical architectural thought, giving the whole place a strange and eerie feeling. Things were still organized, but peculiarly, in piles in the center of a room or strung across a wall.
"This is what you were expecting?" Twilight asked, still trying to banish the memory of the room on floor 70 that had been wallpapered in fanart."
"Not specifically, no, but it's new and interesting." She glanced around. "You know, I'm surprised we haven't run into any golems yet. Aren't there supposed to be hundreds of the things?"
"Maybe thousands by now," Twilight confirmed, "Assuming they've still been building more."
The room remained unsettlingly silent.
"Let's just keep going," Twilight said, eyes peering around. "This floor gives me the creeps."
The pair arrived at subfloor 100 to the sound of screams. As Twilight blinked the blinding light of teleportation away, she tried to figure out who was screaming. Starlight, being a construct, didn't have such biological limitations.
"Well, we found where the golems were."
As the spots vanished from her eyes, Twilight beheld a city. A city built of stone and a very creative use of her own possessions. And throughout it were hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of barrel-high creatures made of a myriad of materials, screaming and calling out for help.
{author's note, no time to finish. Spike is down they, acting as their champion and protector. He could leave at any time but also lost track of time like Twilight had. Also, there'a Princess Burger establish down there and they go for a haycionator sogether to catch up,)