Crystal Empire Part 2: ...Eeyuch...

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By the time the Library team arrived at the Crystal Castle, the book had yielded more of its secrets. Perhaps because of the close proximity to the crystals that were discovered earlier, 5 more pages were now filled with text, each describing a new adventure of the mysterious Unicorn. As it was their only clue, several groups were chosen to head expeditions to the locations noted in the newly revealed stories to see if anything could be gleaned in relation to this book or the crystals that floated in their own, separate chamber.

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Though the ground beneath the Unicorn’s hooves was no more than packed dirt, her hoofsteps echoed along the walls. These caverns had begun construction some time ago, beneath the ‘City of Lanterns’, as a project to do...she didn’t know. Perhaps, she thought as she walked along, they were meant to be a secondary pathway between points in the city. Or, it could be that they were created as a special passage for transporting goods. It was certainly high enough to handle a tall, fully stocked wagon. Tall enough to handle THAT wagon. And that was what she was counting on. She’d arrived in the city by boat, after a trip down the eastern coastline from her previous locale. She has asked the first pony she met about the whereabouts of her lost love, but it wasn’t until asking several more that she learned why nopony seemed to want to talk about them. It just so happened that the travelling group had put on a performance to earn a few extra bits, and this performance somehow ended up as a street fight. They had quickly escaped notice and had no one had seen them since. Some further research revealed the existence of this series of caves underneath the city. He must be down here, she told herself. He must have come this way. He must have.

The city of Manehattan seemed to never stop growing. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been huge compared to the other towns in Equestria, but somehow it just kept getting bigger. Perhaps that was because there was always at least 30% of the enormous population awake at any given time. While this city is a tourist's dream and a sight to behold rivaling Canterlot itself, the group that arrived now was destined for someplace far less glamorous. The system of tunnels underneath the ground that had been there nearly as long as the city itself, and had been repurposed more times than one could count, had settled itself now into a sewer.

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Yuck.

When Rainbow Dash heard the word adventure, she definitely hadn't imagined a sewer. It wasn't even a normal sewer. This was the most disgusting thing she had ever seen or smelled. Don't ask her how she knew what a normal sewer smelled like.

Rainbow Dash glanced around, groaning. "So, how exactly are we supposed to find a chunk of crystal underneath all this sewer sludge? We could've already passed it for all we know." Right now, she wished things were more like Daring Do, and less like Rarity's nightmare.

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Fluttershy had put herself in a lot of messy situations for the sake of her critter friends. She had tromped around in mud until she had found the perfect spot for some pigs and she had braved swamps in attempts to accommodate toads. She had even needed to clean some unsavory areas on the critters who needed medical attention, as any hospital orderly would do. But to actually be in a sewer, which had no redeeming qualities other than that it should be home to a piece of a magical relic was very difficult.

She could almost hear her mother's voice telling her that going to the ground would lead to getting dirty. That things were pristine in Cloudsdale in a way they weren't anywhere else. Her mother could have never dreamed of just how extreme a situation Fluttershy found herself in.

"That's true..." she agreed, comforted by Rainbow Dash's presence. It was nice having Thunderlane around as well, but she wasn't as familiar with him as she was with Rainbow Dash. Which, to be fair, could be said about anyone else in Equestria. "I guess it wouldn't be marked..."

She looked around at the walls of the sewer. Everything seemed the same from part to part. But it wasn't a simple structure. If a difference came up that might help them, it could easily go unnoticed.

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"Blech..." Thunderlane grumbled as he glanced down at the sewage he was floating over. Really, it wasn't all that bad. Comparatively. While the city of Cloudsdale itself was pretty clean, all of their waste had to go somewhere. Pegasi didn't excrete rainbows, after all. Not usually, anyway. He'd been sent into the sewers to retrieve a stray thundercloud that had drifted away from the rest, and it was clear that the pegasi didn't think too much about their ground-level facilities.

Anyway, he pondered only for a moment the irony of 3 pegasi investigating an underground maze before realizing that he couldn't imagine having to actually WALK through the tunnels, much less cross the waterways between the sides. He scanned the area as thoroughly as he could, but he came up with about as much as Fluttershy was. "Well...If I know anything about magical artifacts, not that I really do...but from the stories, it always seems like they bring some kind of change to where they are. So...I guess we should just keep our eyes out for anything out of the ordinary." He shrugged and sighed. Truthfully, he was beginning to feel a bit dejected over this whole thing. Perhaps this was all a wild goose chase after all...

Though a wild goose chase probably would have been more fitting to the current company.

And probably a bit more hygienic as well.

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Rainbow Dash smiled, looking back at them. "So, I guess we're looking for crystal formations or something? That shouldn't be too hard. Let's try and get out of here as soon as possible." Dash flew over the mess, trying to look for anything particularly shiny. Too bad it was hard to differ from crystal or bottles or metal... Geez. How long was this gonna take? It was a sewer system! They could be down here for hours!

Part of her wished she had gotten placed in the group with Gilda. As fine as she was working with Fluttershy and Thunderlane, she still wanted to keep patching things up with the griffon. Plus, Gilda got sent to Canterlot, not a sewer.

"Think we should split up?" The thought had come from seemingly nowhere, but it made sense to her. These tunnels stretched all over Manehattan. It could take hours to find it if they all looked in the same places.

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It was an excellent time to ask that question.

The passage they had been flying through opened up into a much larger chamber, shaped spherical, with stone bricks lining its walls. Well, sort of. Also lining the walls and ceilings were countless openings of varying sizes and ages, the smallest being hardly wide enough to put two hooves into, gradating into the largest size, that being which they had just passed through.

From most of these openings, the same noxious liquid that could only charitably be called sewage by the most forgiving of ponies, poured, splashed, dripped, and in some cases, oozed into the chamber. It appeared to be the heart of the sewage system, the place where it all collected before draining away somewhere... And that was why the awful smell that pervaded the sewers before, was here tripled, quintupled, multiplied and magnified into a stench that could not be good for ponies to breathe for long. There were, not counting the passage they had come through, exactly three ways that had the ancient look of old stone. other openings were lined with cement or metal- modern methods. These three were ancient.

To the right, the passage had only a drip of sewage slime coming out of it, and it was noticeably greener than the other two. Moss, or algae, or both, or something inbetween clung to its sides, hung down in lacy tendrils, making it impossible to look far down, even if it wasn't dim. Here and there, the curled shadow of a strange fern or two could be seen to have taken a tenuous grasp here. it looked as though it could be walked, and there was a dim, almost bluish light far off.

The passage to the left was barren of any such plant life, although sewage poured from it. But that was not all that came out of that tunnel. Wind, clean and strong and (comparatively)fresh blasted from it. It would require a steady pair of wings to fly down this way, but there appeared to be a gleam of strong light, possibly daylight, at the end.

The center tunnel was, perhaps, the strangest of all. It's liquid spilled down in a moderate cascade from its mouth, perhaps hoof-deep, no more... but it was clear, cold, water, not sewage! But it led into pitch black darkness, so what lay at the end could only be guessed.

Somewhere in the chamber, something made a scuttling sound and splashed into the muck.

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Fluttershy agreed with Thunderlane's logic and Rainbow Dash's request to make this fast. She did remember stories along the same lines as what he brought up, though she wouldn't have thought of that herself. Practice with adventures hadn't increased her skill with the puzzles they often presented. It would be nice if it did turn out to be that easy. They'd just have to keep moving forward until things started to be different. However, she had just been thinking of how a subtle different would be easy to ignore in this situation. Crystal formations, if that's what it turned out to be, would be much more difficult to miss.

She had no desire to wander about a small tunnel on her own. The farther they went in, the scarier things became as that meant she was another step further away from the exit. Additionally, she wouldn't have much to distract her from those thoughts other than the thoughts of the horrible stench that was threatening to take her nose off. She had been in dirty situations before. Plenty, in fact, that had to do with the types of materials housed by a sewer. But the density of it was stifling. It was almost as if the airborne smell was itself solid.

”Split up? Are you sure? We could just um... go together? How long could these tunnels be?” she offered quietly, not expecting to be persuasive. Her desire became stronger as her mind thought back to those stories and how they had also often ended with monsters. Maybe even a tunnel dwelling dragon! She did not want to be alone, but it seemed inevitable.

As something fell into the muck, Fluttershy screamed and bolted up, stopping herself just short of touching the top the chamber. This was no fun at all.

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Thunderlane frowned and looked around the...room? Chamber? Hub? He didn't want to stay here any longer than he needed to. The three open paths stretched before him, in each cardinal direction. Or, as close to a cardinal direction you could ascertain in this sludgepit. The question arose about splitting up, and Thunderlane couldn't help but compare this to a tabletop game he'd arranged once. Was splitting up really the best idea? He looked in each of the directions and suddenly realized that holding his breath didn't help much with the smell.

"If you ask me, I don't think we should split up. Not yet. This place is a labyrinth, and if we split up we might not find each other again. I say we pick one of these paths and go together for a while, and if we don't find anything we come back here and make another plan. ...Probably not in that order. That said, if we do that, I think we should pick the path where the most nonsensical thing is happening. Air could be coming from an outlet to the ocean, water could be coming from anywhere. But plants growing underground and being that green without natural light is weird. So I say we go that way, but I'll stick with any decision you guys come to anyway."

But please, he thought, come to one quickly. This place was awful.

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"Yeah, good idea Thunder." She was willing to go for anything that looked like it smelled better than right here. And besides, she worked with Thunderlane. He was a lot of things, and dependable was one of them. Although splitting up would find it faster, it might also get them lost, or worse. So, she'd settle with this. Dash immediately flew over there, looking at all the plants. She was no Twilight, so she had no idea what most of this stuff was. If it was rare, or just some weeds or something... Rainbow Dash decided it wasn't important.

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The idea of having to wander around on her own had created a constrictive force upon her heart, but once Thunderlane convinced Rainbow Dash to not take that course of action, Fluttershy could feel herself relaxing again. There was a limit to how relaxed she could feel in such a place, but her ability to feel uncomfortable had no limits and it was nice to be back to regular levels of discomfort rather than within one of the special levels that few other than her could feel. The rest of his thoughts seemed to make sense as well. She had originally been concerned that each group wouldn't have their own Twilight Sparkle to guide them through the mysteries, but Thunderlane was doing a good job of filling that void for their team.

She nodded, ”So the strange way it is...” she added softly, although she was not going to be the first one to actually move in that direction. It was a bit sad since it was the least appealing of all the ways that they had available, but Fluttershy understood the reasoning behind why they had chosen it over the others.

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As they went down the passage on the right, the trio of ponies would soon find it necessary to walk, for the curtains of moss that hung down from the roof of the tunnel were not only quickly discovered to be wet and slimy, but also seemed to be remarkably good at tangling into wings. Not that walking was particularly pleasant either, for while the only a trickle of sewer slime now flowed back the way they had come, the floor of the tunnel was spongy and squishy from countless years of decaying plant matter sinking into the muck.

The blue light became stronger as they went on, and the sound of rushing sewage from the central chamber behind them quickly faded. The muck where they stood gradually became deeper and more spongy. The plants grew more thickly. The air was stagnant and foul and now had a heavy musty odor on top of the reek. There were also more scuttling sounds, and now and again, from the corner of one's eye, there would be a tiny, glittering gleam, as of a pair of eyes. But when you turned your head to look at it, it was gone.

At last, however, as the passageway either opened up a great deal more, or joined some larger way, the source of the blue light was at last revealed.

Glowworms.

An entire universe of bioluminescent glowworms spanned the ceiling of the chamber before them, creating an artificial, moonless night sky to see by. The chamber here was wide and straight, with a smooth-seeming floor, easily big enough for the wagon of the story. Deeper shadows here and there suggested smaller, branching ways leading off. Even the trickle of sewage had disappeared. The way was surely clear now. All they needed to do was follow this road to the end, just like in the story.

Right?