I looked at the glass cup with uncertainty, and glanced at miss Twilight, who had piles of horn-written notes around her. Spike was running between her and the ink-and-scroll supply as fast as he could to keep her afloat. She was smiling gleefully and nodded in my direction. I focused on the cup ten meters away from us and carefully grabbed it with my magic. The cup slowly rose above the ground and levitated to me until I could catch it in our hand. When I did, I cheered.

"Woohoo! Finally didn't break it on the way!" It was somewhat of a good news for this cup: its nine predecessors weren't as lucky.
"Fantastic!" Twilight said as her quill flew quickly over her current notepad. "Only ten tries to get it right means you have the ability of an eight year old filly to adapt your magic to the situation already. This is fascinating!"
Wow. She said that so gleefully I barely recognized it as an insult. She's good.
"Yay!" I cheered again, ignoring Verso's mean and bored comment.
I thought she would show us spells and whatnot! This is excruciating!
"Now that I know your level, Recto, I'll have to mesure Verso's. I know he's powerful, but I need to properly measure his mastery."
"And how do you intent to do that?" Verso asked as soon as he got to the front. "Because levitating cups just won't cut it."

Miss Twilight smiled and indicated a big device that looked like a modified turbine next to her.

"This is a Harmonic Resonance Tester," she said. "It is used to test the pure magical strength of a blessing. As powerful as you are, I think it will be a good way to judge it."
'The strength of a blessing'? Are you supposed to pray it until it works?
No, a blessing is the name of a group of unicorns.
Oh.
"So what do I have to do?" Verso asked.
"Simple," miss Twilight said, her horn lighting.

A purple beam shot off her horn and hit the device, which immediately started to run, the turbine accelerating quickly before she stopped alimenting it. Verso looked doubtfully at her.

"You want me to shoot at it as hard as I can?"
"Basically, yes."

He shrugged and popped our joints, before he inspected the magical motor further.

"I wonder how it works..." he whispered.

He snapped a finger and deployed his sense field. He then raised a hand and shot a magic beam at the machine. And bruised its metallic encasement. He immediately stopped and looked at miss Twilight, annoyed.

"Do we even have the same definition of 'shooting at it'?"
"Why are you trying to damage it?" she shrieked, running towards the device to inspect it.
"You fucking told me to shoot laser beams at it!" he responded. "Good thing I have half a brain and didn't go all out immediately!"
"But why are you shooting them with the intent of destroying it?"
He gave her a plain look. "Laser beams. They destroy things. That's what they do."
"The intent of the spell is able to change its effects," she explained, sighing. "If you want to power it, your magical beam will power it."
"That's crappy theory," Verso said, crossing our arms. "The spell you used to power that thing and the one I used must be different."
"No, they're not!"
"Well then, show me again. I'll be able to see the difference between our beams with my field."

She sighed and her horn lit again, Verso carefully inspecting how she manipulated her magic this time. And was very disappointed.

"That's the same fucking spell."
"See? I told you!"
"Well then, miss purple horse, let me try again."

He charged another beam and aimed it at the machine again, actively thinking 'power, not harm' when he shot. And the magic worked, the turbine slowly accelerating. He then grinned and started to bring in more and more power into his magical energy beam, making the turbine go faster and faster until he couldn't overcharge his spell anymore. He stopped after several seconds, our breath short, and looked at miss Twilight. Who was now writing on three notepads at once.

"How good was that?" he asked, a bit winded out.
"Astonishingly good," miss Twilight answered. "Why did you stop?"
"I'm not going to exhaust myself for a test. I did shoot as powerfully as I could, though."
"Can you estimate how long you could have lasted at this rate?"
"I'd say around five seconds. I'd have to leave the reins to Recto for a moment afterwards, though."
"Interesting..." miss Twilight muttered.
"So? How powerful am I?"
"I'd say you're nearing alicorn-level." She trotted in place in her excitement. "This is passionating! I don't think of anypony else that ever reached that level naturally, except for Discord and Starswirl the Bearded!"
I snorted. He had a funny name!
"'Naturally'?" Verso asked, suddenly interested. "You mean there are ways to enhance one's magic?"
"Of course," miss Twilight answered without looking up from her notepad. "There are some magical artifacts that can do just that. And you can say that King Sombra's dark magic is another way to do so. And, of course, Tirek did so a few months ago too by stealing ponies' magic." She stroked her chin, lost in her thought. "Now that I think about it, it's mostly bad guys that try to get more magical powers..."
Verso gritted our teeth. "Don't come to conclusion too quickly, sciency horse. Correlation doesn't imply causation."
Miss Twilight nodded and stayed silent while she finished writing something. When she finally took her eyes off her notepad and looked at us, she continued. "Now that I have an idea of your magical power, I'll need to measure your adaptability."
"Please don't tell me I'll have to levitate cups. That would be boring as fuck."
"Language..." she muttered before walking to an oddly shaped metallic ball. "I want you to levitate this and keep it as steady as possible."
Verso glanced at it through his sense field and grinned. "It has a gyroscope inside. I'm willing to bet that it's supposed to move randomly?"
"Exactly!" miss Twilight confirmed. "The deviation in your grip will show me your adaptability."

Verso shrugged and raised the gear-o-scope... huh, gyroscope - the other sounds soooo cooler... - and held it in place. Miss Twilight then activated the mechanism inside with her own magic while deploying a ruler next to its case and waited.

For a good twenty seconds, the ball didn't move at all in Verso's grip. It tried, of course, but Verso's magical hold was too strong for it. Miss Twilight, frowned and put more power inside the ball, until it finally twitched a little. She then continued to pour magic inside the ball until Verso had trouble keeping it in place. When she was satisfied with the results, Miss Twilight stopped and told him to gently put the ball down.

"Well, that was pretty good too," she said. "You definitely have a good hold on your magic, Verso."
"Thank you. Do you still need me active? Being on the front inside of this place gives me headaches. I don't like it."
"Do as you want, but stay alert. We'll be heading for the library now." She gave an excited smile as I took the reins back. "We'll get you some books about theoretical magic for beginners!"
Oh, goody.
That sounds ominous, but if she is excited, it must be fun. Doesn't it?

It wasn't fun. At all. It. Was. Horrible! And here I thought our lessons back on Earth were boring, but it somehow was even worse! How can you get magic lessons to be so boring?

Well, to be fair, it wasn't entirely miss Twilight's fault, as we first had trouble finding a book we could even read. When we didn't, she decided that she would have to read it to us and drew the pictures on a blackboard. That's when it started to bore the heaven out of me. Of course; Verso would have taken over and explained it all to me later in an instant, but since he didn't like being on the front inside the palace, I didn't force ask him to and just watched the entire thing. I quickly phased out, thankfully. So I reacted a bit slowly when I realised that someone was calling my name.

Recto, you hear me? Please tell me you didn't just go brain-dead on me.
"Uh, what?" I weakly croaked, my voice not even loud enough for miss Twilight to notice it.
Let me on the front, please. Something is not right.

I happily did so and he levitated a random book in the library and one of the several magic books miss Twilight tried earlier, without her noticing. He then opened them randomly and ended up with one book with an organized page and defined, if unknown, letters, while the other was covered in strange pictures and funny-looking inscriptions. He cursed in frustration, apprehension taking a hold on his mind, closed both books, put them back into place and cleared our throat several times, getting miss Twilight's attention.

"Do you have a question?"
"Not exactly," he answered, smiling. "I must say, you are a great teacher, Twilight. You know a lot about magic, and I can feel it from the way you talk about it."
She blushed and looked away, smiling sheepishly. "I... Thank you, I guess?"
"I'm just saying that so that I don't utterly crush your hopes of ever having another student one day," Verso quickly explained. She stopped blushing and stared at us, confused "I'm sorry, Twilight, but neither of us understood a thing about your explanations."

Miss Twilight stayed silent for a solid five seconds, just looking at us, probably wondering whether or not Verso was joking. When she came to the realisation that he was dead-serious, she blinked.

"Nothing?"
"From the moment you opened your mouth to read that book of yours until I stopped you, it just sounded like gibberish to us."
Really? I thought she was just using a lot of complex words...
"But... How? This is perfectly understandable for ponies!" she said. "I haven't even started about the spells themselves!"
"I completely believe you," Verso calmly said. "It isn't the first time something like that happened to m... to us."
"But..."
It isn't?
We had a... similar problem a long time ago. You probably don't remember.
Oh.
"I don't think anyone could teach me anything about magic by explaining it or writing it down."
"Are you saying that you have a condition preventing you from understanding a subject?" miss Twilight asked, confused once again. "How does that even work?"
"It's a... A human thing. We didn't find a cure for it."
Are you saying that we're sick? Are we going to sneeze a lot? It gets annoying...
No, we won't sneeze because of it. Just let me do my work.
"But..." miss Twilight started running around in complete disarray, a few strings of her mane getting loose. "I told Princess Celestia that I would teach you magic, and I can't teach you magic because you can't be taught about magic because you can't understand anything about magic because..."
"Hey, purple horse, calm down, I have a solution." Miss Twilight stopped dead in her tracks and looked at us. "You just have to show me. My... Our condition does not affect examples, and I have already copied several spells just by inspecting them once."
"But... But magic isn't only spells!" miss Twilight retorted. "You have to understand how it works and I can't just 'show' it!"
"Well I'll just have to be as awesome as always and get a feeling for it myself. Either way, it's not like we have many choices."
Miss Twilight sighed, her head low. She levitated a notepad to her and sluggishly wrote something. "I'm going to include that problem in my preliminary report to the Princess..." she weakly said.
"Oh? Are you spying on us?" Verso asked, grinning even though he felt a bit angry.
"Princess Celestia asked me to tell her about my first experience as a serious magic teacher..." she said. "It isn't going overly well for the moment..."
"I authorize you to blame me."

Miss Twilight sighed again and put her note pad away.

"We'll just have to practice spells then. We'll start by..."
"Actually, could you start by showing us protective magic?" Verso rudely interrupted her.
"I... We could, but why do you want to?"
"I thought I had made it pretty clear that my first concern was our protection. Funny or even useful spells are less important to me than the capacity to protect us under any circumstance."
"You do know you're in no danger whatsoever, don't you?"
"Let me be the judge of that," he harshly replied. "For now, I'll just stick to the good old idea that I'm never too cautious."

For the next few hours, miss Twilight showed Verso different spells she knew and helped us practice them to get the hang of it. It was so much funnier than the normal, boring lessons we had on Earth! Sadly, it was also rather taxing, especially for Verso who just couldn't withstand the headaches he get inside the Palace for prolonged period of time and had to frequently give me back the reins while he recuperated.

When it was finally time for dinner, we were famished. Apparently, using magic as much as we did makes people really hungry, even though we don't move much. Spike went to the kitchen to cook something while I helped miss Twilight dress the table. Pretty soon, we were enjoying veggie sandwiches and soup, after Verso discretely checked them for possible poisonous plants.

"So, miss Twilight," I said between two sandwich bites. "You asked us a bunch of questions while you were showing us around, but we don't know much about you."
"Is that so? Well then, what do you want to know?"
"I don't really know... How did you and Spike got to know each other?"
"Oh, that's simple: I hatched him."
She giggled at my confused expression. "Does that mean that baby unicorns are baby dragons?" I asked.
"What? No!" she replied, laughing at the idea. "When I joined Princess Celestia's School for gifted Unicorns, the final test was hatching a dragon egg. Needless to say, I passed," she added, rubbing affectionately Spike's head with a hoof.
"Does that make his mother?"
They blinked and miss Twilight blushed. "N... No! Spike is simply my number one assistant!"
"Ye... Yeah!" Spike vigorously confirmed. "That would be... ugh..."
"If you say so," I said with a shrug. "But how did the unicorns get a dragon egg anyway? Did your parents just give you up like that?" I asked Spike.
"I... I don't know..." Spike answered, looking down sadly.
Miss Twilight bit her lip, looking at the baby dragon with eyes full of compassion. "I don't know where the egg came from either," she said. "I learned from Princess Celestia that I wasn't supposed to actually hatch it. It was just a test to see how I would react in front of an impossible task. They had this egg stored for decades, if not longer!"
"You think miss Princess Celestia would know?"
They both looked up at us, shared a glance and hesitantly returned their attention to me. "I... I've never asked..." miss Twilight admitted. "But even then, I'm not sure we should search for Spike's heritage. It didn't go too well last time..."
"Are you denying his right to know his parents, Twilight?" Verso intervened, infuriated.
"No, of course not!" Twilight replied. "It's just... Well, Spike has been raised by ponies. And Ponies and Dragons are really different. I wouldn't want him to be shunned by his own parents if we ever found them in the first place."

Spike looked pretty depressed, to say the least. The conversation was taking its toll on his mood. At least, until he looked at us with a question in mind.

"Hey, how were your parents, you two?" he simply asked.

Verso froze, his sight focused in space as his half of our mind stopped 'breathing' for an instant. It was just like he had been frozen in time, his consciousness away from our body.

"I dunno," I answered, taking the reins from an inactive Verso. "We don't remember them. We were really young when we were taken to the Institute."
"Really?" miss Twilight asked, sounding a bit sad.
I was about to confirm when Verso beat me to the punch: "They were kind people," he weakly said. "Tried to protect us as they could."
You remember them? I asked, astonished. How come you never said that?!
"So you have still some memories left of them, but not Recto?" Twilight asked, shocked. "How is that possible?"
Verso ignored us both and continued with his whispers, looking at the table. "They didn't have much back there, but they always made sure we both had what we needed. They... They sacrificed their own health for us to be healthy." Our sight was blurring, oddly. "They tried to... to keep us safe..." His voice was breaking, even though he was barely whispering anymore. "They failed, and payed the price for it," he ended, barely loud enough for even us to hear ourselves.

We couldn't see much, with how much our sighted was blurred. It fact, it took me a moment to realize that Verso was nearly crying. He sniffed and wiped our eyes clear, before he stared back at an embarrassed miss Twilight and downright ashamed Spike.

"That's how our parents were, dragon," he said with a harsh tone.
"I... I'm sorry..." he whispered back.

We arrived in an awkward lull in the conversation. I would have asked Verso why he never told me anything about our parents, but looking at how he wouldn't be really happy about it, I decided to just keep that for later. Anyway, I didn't like having three depressed people just moping around me, So I got back to the front and changed the subject.

"How did you meet your friends, miss Twilight?"

They got a bit smily-er at that at least, and she told us all about the way she found a book warning ponies about the return of Nightmare Moon, the magical meanie thing that possessed miss Luna a thousand years ago and made her all clingy about Verso and stuff, and how that led her to Ponyville and to meeting her friends. Verso seemed quite interested when she described the Elements of Harmony, magical jewelry that gave them the power to free miss Luna from Nightmare Meanie.

When he asked her about the Elements, miss Twilight said they didn't have them anymore, as they returned them to their original owner, some kind of crystal tree that lives in the Everfree Forest. We then derived on how she and her friends used the power of Harmony to fight that Tirek guy she mentioned some time ago, and how the magical tree of friendship gave her the awesome castle we were currently in.

From there, she told us about several of their adventures: how they fought mister Discord a few years ago, turned him back into stone for a few months before miss Princess Celestia asked them to try to befriend him, with apparent success so far, how her brother's wedding with her princess foal-sitter was nearly ruined by the meanie changelings Verso got scared about earlier.

For some reason, he snorted several times when she told that one.

Where it gets interesting is when miss Twilight started to talk about the Crystal Empire and its old tyrant ruler, King Sombra. Verso got really, really interested when she started talking about how he used dark magic to get immensely powerful, if a bit crazy, and forced miss Princess Celestia and miss Luna to come and stop him from abusing his people. He lost and, being a sore loser, he teleported his entire kingdom a thousand years into the future. When it reappeared, miss Princess Celestia sent miss Twilight save the Empire with her friends, brother and sister-in-law. In the end, the evil King Sombra was defeated by the Crystal Heart and disappeared. Well, he exploded, but you never know. He could into a smoke monster after all, and that's not normal.

"And you said he fought on par with either princess?"
"Yes!" miss Twilight happily confirmed. "His magic was awful, but powerful. If it wasn't for the Crystal Heart, I don't know if we could have defeated him at all, let alone saving the Empire in the process."
Interesting...
What are you thinking about?
Nothing. Yet. For the moment, we must concentrate on handling our own power. Then, we'll get to innovate.
You're strange sometimes.
Yeeees... Sometimes...
I giggled at his silly mental voice and concentrated back on reality. "You really had an awful lot of adventures, miss Twilight! You're like a superhero or something!"
Miss Twilight actually blushed. "Well thank you, Recto. But my friends and I just did what we had to."
"That doesn't make you any less of a hero, does it? It was still you and your friends who did everything!"
She blushed again and looked away, her gaze falling on an old great-grandpa clock. "Oh, my, look at the time! It's nearly eleven! You should go rest, you've had a long day."
"That's not -yawn- true!" I said. "I'm not tired at all!" I said in a sleepy voice, realizing I had trouble keeping our eyes open.
Yes, we are, Verso said. We should go to bed. We rarely used as much magic as we did in the last two days, it's taxing.
"If you say so..." I muttered. I looked at the table that Spike was finally clearing. "Maybe I should -epic yawn- help?"
"Nah, I'll handle it," he answered. "You go to sleep."

I shrugged and wished them a good night before heading to our new bedroom. Of course, I didn't got lost at all in the crystaly castle and Verso didn't have to indicate me the way. And after that, brushing our teeth wasn't a challenge at all either. I absolutely did not put the brush on the toothpaste tube and trirushing with it while Verso was crying out of shame in a corner of our mind. That would have been silly.

When we were finally ready for bed -Verso took over on the last part because I was pretty pathetic- we first gaze at the stars for a moment, in complete silence. Well, in relative silent, since an owl was hooting somewhere, but still. I don't think I'll ever get over how magnificent the night sky is. Luna sure does an incredible job. No wonder she got angry when nobody appreciated it a thousand years ago.

I finally headed to the bed that was comfy beyond my wildest dreams, wished goodnight to Verso quickly drifted to sleep. It didn't take us five minutes to enter the sweet realm of dreams, and therefore ending our first day in Ponyville.

As soon as our body and Recto fell asleep, I found myself back to that horrid places I sadly have to call my true home, as I always do when we sleep. Thankfully, the renewed seal was still holding pretty nicely, so the horrible thunder that made this place even worse wasn't there yet. It would probably return within a day or two, but that wasn't my problem yet. After I waited a solid two hours reviewing and organizing the new magical knowledge we had acquired that day, I carefully woke our body up, taking full control of it.

Not a sound was to be heard in the castle, but I knew better than just assuming that everyone was asleep just based on that, especially with that annoying buzzing sensation I could feel inside my skull when inside this horrid place. I carefully tiptoed out of our bedroom, heading toward what the magical purple horse had described as her room in case we needed her and silently opened the door, to find her lightly snoring in her bed. I also noticed the small dragon sleeping in a basket next to her, a gleeful expression on his face as he repeatedly whispered the unicorn tailor's name in his sleep. I was kinda surprised to find him sleeping like some sort of pet, but it wasn't time to ask those kind of questions.

I silently closed the door and made my way back to the library, when some movement at the corner of my eyes made me spin around, ready to fire magic beams of pain toward anything, barely holding a scream of surprise. Only to find out I had been scared shitless by a fucking owl.

"How the fuck did you get in here?" I quietly growled at it.
"Who?"
"Nevermind..."

I quickly found the library's doors and let myself in, gazing with awe at the sheer number of books it contained. I then shook my head and concentrated back on the task at hand. I wouldn't be able to stay out to long all by myself.

"First, let's take a look at the changeling situation," I whispered, sitting cross-legged.

It took me a few seconds to focus correctly on my city-scan spell and another handful to cast it. I immediately began to sort through the massive amount of information assailing my brain, searching for the prison-pods they had placed all around the town. I could see that there was nearly none of them left, and most changelings were nowhere to be seen anymore. Chrysalis was still around, though, surrounded by other changelings. They all turned roughly in my direction when my spell reached them, confirming that they could indeed see it. They started buzzing around a bit faster. Heh, buzzing around.

"Oh skies, I hate myself for even thinking that one up..." I muttered, silently blaming Lyr... Thingy the changeling for imposing her terrible sense of humor on my mind.

I stopped my search, satisfied. At this rate, the changelings would be long gone by the deadline I had given them. I quickly looked around as I got back to my feet. The library was a bit big for me to just look around aimlessly and hoping to find a text that would fit my current objective. I looked for a desk of some sort and quickly found an index. Written with that awful scribbling they called an alphabet.

I cursed and finally resolved myself to look around like an idiot, pulling out books randomly and replacing them as soon as I found out they were any help. When I crossed a bookcase, I found something that made me smile: lots and lots of illustrated books, clearly designed to be read by kids.

"Bingo..."

I picked one with the picture of a sun with a creepy pony face, rabbits and an earth pony in farmer clothings drawn on it. By opening it on a random page, I found out that I had hit the jackpot: the right page depicted sheep, while the left one was a drawing of the pony farmer pointing at it and saying one word in their gibberish alphabet, probably its name. Not the alphabet book I was hoping for, but clearly a pony version of a Rosetta Stone.

I quickly began to understand their second alphabet, just replacing mouth-written symbols by the Latin ones. Quite frankly, you didn't have to be a genius to get the catch once you had such a tool in you hands. But I must admit that having manual control over your own subconscious helps a lot catching it quickly, especially when you start heading for more complicated tomes. I quickly found the History section, between the Baking and the Alchemy sections, oddly.

"Well, time to practice being a genius, I guess," I whispered, cracking my joints.

Of course, I cheated and didn't even really read the books at all. Just quickly looked at each page and stored the memory for me to review later. That was a bit more straining for my mind, but I could start understanding them later. Mainly, while our body was sleeping and without taking the risk to awaken the other bastard earlier than he would on his own.

When I had finished on the History section, I quickly got over to the Magic department and picked up a few random books, further confirming my intuition that they didn't let me read any of them. I hissed in frustration and began searching for other books that might indirectly talk about that subject, only to find some of their paragraphs blurred. Oddly enough, I could still read the parts that described some unicorns or Celestia using some spell to do something ranging from making flowers bloom to rising the motherfucking sun, but no theoretical knowledge about magic stuff.

That was slightly infuriating, but there was nothing I could do about it. Last time, I had to deduce what they weren't letting me know after it was no use to try and prevent me form learning it anymore. I had no idea how to learn any of the magical theory except by experiencing it. It worried me that they could prevent Recto from doing something when he wasn't directly linked to them, but I suppose I should have seen that coming.

Not wanting to find out just how long I could stay awake alone before the other one started to make my skull a living hell again, I quickly went back to my room and back to sleep. When I was back into our soul place, I willed the access to our memory to open, and the familiar wooden door appeared on a wall. I quickly walked up to it, the chains rattling behind me, and entered.

The form our memory bank took beyond that point usually changed quite a lot, based on my mood or needs. As of then, it was a big dual screen computer with a comfy chair and a huge database. As soon as I sit down, the screens lit up and displayed a similar content: the titles of the books I had just skim through in Equestrian Alphabet on the left screen and in Latin Alphabet on the right one, quickly translating between from the newer one.

I leaned back on the chair and started making the most out of one of the few calm nights I was going to have.

Author's Note

I'm back already, with a new chapter for your eyes! Ain't I just awesome?
I'd sure love to be able to retain info like Verso does... I must admit that I got a little inspired by Sherlock's "mental palace" from the eponymous series.
Pretty good show, I'd recommend it.
Anyway, thank you a lot for reading this. Don't hesitate to point out errors or weirdly said stuff. I'm still learning english after all.
Next Chapter : Training montage, Clothing gifts and Excuses.
See you soon!