It's Magic

It's Magic

By: Zelkova48

Prologue: It's Magic

* * *

“Come on, what makes you so special!?” said Twilight as she stared feverishly into her microscope that had a simple playing card underneath the observing end of it. For the last day and a half she had been stuck inside her lab, examining and studying a deck of cards that she had... procured through special means in order to understand it.

Now the deck of cards itself isn’t very interesting save for the fact it had an elegant victorian design that each card had but what made it so special was what she saw that was being done with it.

* * *

        It all started when she was showing Pinkie’s cousin, Top Hat, around town when he had arrived from Stalliongrad to Ponyville for a short vacation. He was the magician of a travelling circus that was on an Equestrian tour, and the circus troupe went and decided to take a break in Ponyville. To show his appreciation and thanks for such hospitality to Twilight he had decided to reward her with some magic tricks. Now that’s where the catch is.

Top Hat is an earth pony special talent was supposedly magic tricks, so logic dictates for Twilight to believe that his tricks were all smoke and mirrors, much like a certain blue colored unicorn with a penchant for flare and the need to refer to herself in third person. The only difference between the two was that Trixie could at least perform real magic. You know, the kind with the fancy glow and the telekinesis and stuff.

She’d expect for Top Hat to pull of some tricks that you would expect just to fool a friend and to entertain little foals at birthday parties, and for the most part she was right about it. However, as he went on with her reward, his performance became more perplexing and mind boggling with each trick and the rest that followed.

“Please, krasivaya dama, pick a card” Top Hat asked.

It started off with some simple card tricks, Twilight assumed that it was the kind of trick where Top Hat would affect the sequence of card to find the one that she picked. She found it amusing and fun at first, but when he started to do things that defied all logic she began to feel a bit concerned.

After the first few tricks Top Hat had offered to perform something more advanced. Top Hat asked Twilight to pick a random card from the deck again, the process went like clockwork and she had expected the same outcome again only with some kind of twist to it. When she finally experienced the twist her jaw slammed right into the ground with enough force to shatter the hope diamond in little pebbles.

After he had put the Twilight’s card back into his deck, Top Hat pulled out a match and lit the deck on fire as he let it burn upon the ground. When the deck was nothing more than small pile of black ash he asked her to put her hoof on top of the little pile, Twilight was a little confused at first considering that the deck itself was gone but she complied anyway.

 After a few seconds and the obligatory hocus pocus from Top Hat, he asked her to look at the bottom of her hoof. Her skepticism flowed like river as she went to examine her ash covered hoof but her heart nearly stopped itself went she saw the fruits of Top Hat’s labor. She could remember herself stuttering and stammering for a good five minutes before coming back to her senses.

        In her ash covered hoof was not a card, instead the ash somehow took shape and formed itself into the card that she chose, complete with the decorative borders, numbers and everything.

The queen of clubs

        “Is that your card?” Top Hat asked with a hint of amusement in his voice.

        She stared at her hoof, speechless at what had just happened. She tried to rule it off as nothing more than an elaborate ruse or some kind of special magical powder but the evidence on her hoof rendered all of her hypothesis inconclusive. Oh, but he didn’t stop there.

After she returned to her sense Top Hat ran his own hoof across Twilight’s and an intact playing card slid out from underneath. He then pressed his hoof into the dirt where he had burnt his deck of cards and returned it back to it’s former glory. He casually slid the queen of clubs back into the deck and then put away his deck of cards all the while enjoying the slack jawed look that Twilight was exhibiting.

He soon followed the trick up with another classic, the rabbit out of the hat trick.

Top Hat took off his hat and showed her the inside of it, like any good magician would before he blew everyone away. It was surely empty when she peeked inside but he proved her wrong when he  pulled out an adorable little bunny rabbit out from within it, and then another, and another, and another until he had a small family of rabbits crowding around Twilight.

With a whistle, he called all of his rabbits back into the hat and wore it back on with a wide grin on his face. But before he could finish up the trick, Twilight noticed that his top hat began to shake itself. Top Hat absently ignored the strange occurrence that was happening atop his head and decided that he would say his goodbyes for the day before returning back to his trailer

With a polite curtsy he took his hat off to Twilight where doves flew freely from the confines of the silk hat and into the sky before returning back to their point of origin. After that, he wore his hat again and excused himself before he went on to explore the rest of Ponyville.

“It has been a pleasure meeting you, Twilight Sparkle. Dasvidaniya!” he shouted before he left.

For the rest of the day, Twilight could only think of one thing.

* * *

“Ugh! How did he do it!” she shouted in her lab. Now she had promised herself to be a bit more accepting of certain things after trying to understand the Pinkie senses but because this involved magic she couldn’t stop herself when she felt the need to dissect and understand how Top Hat was doing all of his tricks “There must be something, anything!”

She stared straight at the plain playing card while jotting down some notes. She wrote down every little detail that she could possibly find on a playing card to the point where one would find it positively maddening.

“Okay, card number eighteen, the five of hearts” she whispered beneath her breath “Card appears to be made from the wood pulps of a willow tree. The age and quality of the paper suggest that this deck is around ten years old” she wrote in her little notepad before adjusting the lens on her microscope

 “The edges of the card are worn and the browning of the paper confirms my last hypothesis. Oh, there is a black little dot right next to the five, gotta write that down. Hmm, let’s see, did I miss anything else?” she asked herself before pulling away from the microscope and rubbing her strained eyes. She let out a loud sigh before turning her head and took a good look at Top Hat’s deck of cards that were right next to her, only thirty four more cards left.

        “Grr... stop mocking me!” she yelled at the cards, glad for the fact that nopony saw her yelling angrily at a deck of cards. She slinked onto the floor, feeling both drained and defeated at the same time. She ran over her notes again, double checking to see if there was any relevance in their order.

“Three of spades, the upper right corner of the card has a small tear. Jack of hearts, is slightly bent in the middle. Ace of spades, looks as if it has been used as a coaster for a cup of coffee” she double checked and triple checked her notes before slamming her head against the table from pure annoyance.

“What is it that I’m missing? Are there runes inscribed on these things?” she quickly got back up and checked the five again, this time she examined the borders. The elegant borders of the card doesn’t look like anything special, just some intertwining lines that were artfully printed onto the card itself, not a rune in sight. She sighed again as she laid face down on her table.

She hasn’t gotten any closer to solving the mystery of the earth pony magician. She did everything in her power to try and understand Top Hat’s methods but she always ran into dead ends. Perhaps she wasn’t trying hard enough. She would continue this pursuit again once she got a good night sleep. Maybe she should ask Top Hat again about how he did all of his tricks.

“No, that’s a bad idea” she said to herself. Because the last dozen time that she had asked Top Hat since he came to Ponyville, he had always smiled gently at her and simply stated:

“A good magician never reveals his tricks”