Chapter Two

Magus

Twilight Sparkle had never been in my morgue before. As she pulled off her snow-capped shawl with her magic and stuffed it into her saddlebag, she looked at everything with wide, clear eyes. She studied everything, even the mundane details. The cutting tools, the freezers, the protective gear. All of it.

I knew that she was the queen of the book-worms, having the great fortune of living in a library. Her boundless curiosity was a pleasure to watch. I have had to deal with reporters who got green-cheeked just looking at the equipment I used to cut open a body with. Twilight was a pleasant change of pace.

“I’m glad you were able to come on such short notice,” I said. “I hope that what I’m going to show you won’t gross you out too badly.”

She shook her head with a smile as she replied, “Oh, that’s not a problem. I’m always interested in what makes ponies tick.”

“This is my assistant, Flashbulb.”

“Hello,” he said cheerfully. Flashy cocked his head at her as he asked me, “So this your team leader, eh?”

Twilight chuckled. “Yes, I coordinate the Mane Six. Oh, I almost forgot to ask: how are your legs doing, Equus?”

“They are still a little sore, but at least I can wave the bed-pans goodbye.”

Wincing sympathetically, she replied, “Eeesh, I can’t imagine being in a hospital bed that long. I’m glad to see you back on your hooves.”

“Thanks. Well, shall we pay our friend a visit?”

“Oh, yes. Do I have to wear a mask or anything?”

Flashy pulled out the pegasus’s body-drawer. “Oh, that’s not necessary. He’s not that messy.”

When Twilight walked towards the body, her eyes bulged. Oh, crud, was she going to get sick?

She approached the pegasus slowly, as if afraid to wake him. “Oh, this is awful.”

“Well, he was shot in the head with an arrow,” I replied. “That’s an ugly way to die.”

“What? No, that’s not it. I know this pony.”

I double-taked. “Huh? Who is he?”

“He’s a famous scientist. Bunsen Flask, I believe. I was at one of his lectures a few years ago. He had some pretty fantastic ideas about quantum metaphysics. Bunsen felt there were other realities that could be explored. He even had a theory that Discord was from another reality.”

“Discord?” Flashbulb asked. “You mean that freaky-looking… what do you call him… Draconequus? Wasn’t his stone body stolen from Princess Celestia’s garden last month?”

“Yes,” replied Twilight. “I’ve been trying to figure out why anyone would want to abduct Discord. The only things that could break him out of his stone prison are the Elements of Harmony. They are still locked up tight in Princess Celestia’s vault,” replied Twilight. “I think Flask might have been onto something.”

She looked at the body with sympathy. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to murder him, though. Equus, you said you found something in his belly?”

I held up the sample jar that was filled with liquid rainbow. “About three cups of this stuff.”

She stared at it, as if it were singing a glorious sonnet to her. Her eyes dilated, then returned to normal. Finally, she said, “That stuff feels weird to me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, I forget that you’re an earth pony. Unicorns are more highly attuned to the magical auras of the world than the other pony races. I know this is going to sound very strange, but this stuff feels… alive.”

“Alive? Is it like blood?”

Twilight shook her head. “I don’t mean alive in a purely organic sense.” She sighed. “It’s like trying to describe the color red to someone who’s been blind from birth. This liquid has a strong aura. A glow, if you will. Like in you or me.”

“What confuses me is why Bunsen Flask felt the need to drink this and then take off for parts unknown,” I said.

“That’s a mystery, isn’t it?” Twilight mused as she rubbed her chin. “Maybe he drank it to provide evidence for someone. That would mean that this liquid rainbow is an illegal substance.”

I looked at the colors slide past each other in the jar. “I realize that the pegasi in Cloudsdale make Equestria’s weather, but rainbows occur naturally by refraction through water droplets, right?”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

I continued. “Well, if water-refraction couldn’t form rainbows, then light itself couldn’t work. If that were the case, we’d be bumping around in the dark all the time. So why would anyone make liquid rainbows?”

Twilight said, “An even better question would be, why would anyone be murdered because of this stuff?”

She looked at the body again, her brow wrinkling. “Listen, can I take this sample back to my lab? Maybe if I can figure out what it’s made of, we can get some answers.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. Go on, take it.”

“Thanks.” She looked down, frowning for a moment. “Equus? Where did you find his body?”

“He was discovered frozen in the Sweet Apple Acres river. Why?”

“Bunsen Flask lived in Manehattan. That’s almost a hundred miles away. How did his body get from there to a Ponyville river?”

“Well, there’s evidence that he’d been in the water for nearly a week before the hard freeze hit. Maybe he was killed in the ocean and was pulled by the currents here.”

“If someone put in the effort to assassinate him, why didn’t they retrieve his body?” Twilight asked.

I shrugged. “Well, this fluid is pretty heavy. He was found a few hooves under the ice. Maybe he dropped below the water’s surface and couldn’t be spotted.”

“I suppose. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

She levitated the sample jar into her saddle-bag.

Her ears flattened as she looked at Bunsen Flask. “Why would anyone kill you?” she asked quietly to herself. She bit her lower lip as she looked away.

She nodded to me and Flashy politely and left quickly.

“Flashy, could you get those files on the guards that were killed when Discord was stolen?”

“Sure, Morty. Why?”

“I’m working on a hunch. Those guards were also shot in the head with arrows.”

Flashbulb grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”

The next morning, I was walking to work when Twilight’s assistant Spike stopped me. He was rooting around in his satchel.

“Hey, Morty,” the little dragon said. How did a supposedly cold-blooded being like him handle the snow? My question was answered when he pulled a thermos from his satchel, popped open the lid and chugged steaming-hot coffee.

“Oh, hello, Spike. How’s Twilight treating you?”

He rolled his slitted eyes with a weary groan. “Little Miss Starbutt’s being nutty as a pecan sandy again. I don’t know what you gave her yesterday, but it’s made her really loopy.”

“What do you mean? I gave her a sample of something we…” I caught myself in time, recalling that Spike was a child. I tried to not discuss my job around his impressionable ears.

“Look. I don’t care where you got that weird-looking goop. I’ve just been told to bring you to her lab. Twi’s got some kind of breakthrough she wants to tell you about.”

“That’s fine. I have some news for her, too,” I replied as I walked with him to Twilight’s tree-house library.

Spike shot me a worried glance. “Please don’t tell Twi that I called her Starbutt.”

“My lips are zipped.”

He breathed a relieved sigh. “How’re your legs doing?”

“Fine. Just fine.”

“Good. You’ll need to be fast on your hooves to keep up with her.”

When we got to the library, I could hear thumping inside and giggling. When we walked inside, Spike said “Welcome to the madhouse." He then went to the kitchen. Probably for shelter.

I fell in love with this place when I first moved to Ponyville. Book-collecting was one of my hobbies, so Twilight and I hit it off fairly quickly. Twilight had one of the sharpest, most analytical minds I had ever witnessed. There never seemed to be a book out of place. Spike undoubtedly helped keep this place in full working order, but Twilight was the main driving force in the library.

Which is why it was disturbing to see a large pile of books in the middle of the floor.

“I am the queen of everything,” sang Twilight from the other side of the book-pile, “and so I dance. And so I sing.”

“Uhh… Twilight?”

Her head popped around the edge of the pile. The unicorn’s hair was frizzed out and her pupils were pinpoints. The last time I saw a smile that big and toothy was when Pinkie Pie hosted a birthday party for some wall-eyed pegasus.

“Oooh, good! You’re here!” She boinged over a few history books and landed in front of me.

“Uhm… yes. I am here,” I replied nervously. “Where are you?” Downtown loony-land, from the looks of things.

“I know I must look like a mess, but I’ve been up all night doing research…”

“And keeping me up since yesterday!” hollered Spike from the kitchen.

“But I might not have discovered anything if it wasn’t for a mistake I did. It’s weird how many times a little clumsiness can lead to great things. It’s just like when penicillin was discovered because a petri dish wasn’t cleaned soon enough. Isn’t that funny?”

“Perhaps if you told me what you did, I might find a reason to laugh.”

Her ears shot up like an alerted rabbit. “Oh! Oh, yes. Well, I was going over some medical history books, trying to see if there were any references to liquid rainbows. Funny thing is, I had opened the sample jar and placed it next to my tea cup. I like to use my magic to handle donuts while reading. I thought I had dunked my donut in the tea…”

I groaned.

“But I soaked my reading-donut in the sample jar instead! When I took a bite, I thought that I had soaked my snack in hot sauce, because that stuff burned my tongue.”

“You probably tasted Bunsen Flask’s stomach acids.”

She winced, but shook off the nausea in a blink. “Don’t ruin the experience for me. Anyway, after I realized my mistake, I put the lid on the jar. It was then that my eyesight changed. I began to see the magic in everything!”

“Uh, Twilight? Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

Spike walked over to me, fresh cup of coffee in his hands, and said, “I asked her that I don’t know how many times.”

“Five, Spike. The answer was ‘no’ all five times. Oh, Equus, I am so glad you’re here to see this. I have officially named this mystery substance… Spectrum!” She waved her hooves over her head, as if she were announcing her marriage. “Nice, huh? It has to be some kind of medical breakthrough.”

I asked, “Twilight? You said that you could see the magic in everything. I thought you could do that already. Your cutie mark signifies magic, after all.”

“Yes, yes, I know that. But did you know that if I stare at you long enough, I can see the earth-magic your race possesses run through your body like water in a stream? I don’t think even Celestia can do that.”

“What a frightening thought,” I replied. In the future, I thought to myself, I’m going to get my own chemical-analysis lab in the morgue. At least any accidental ingestions can be handled in the hospital above my workplace.

Twilight began to canter cheerfully around me. “This Spectrum is liquid magic! I have no idea yet as to how it is made, but I bet it could make your aching leg-bones feel better.”

I rolled my eyes. “You are assuming an awful lot. My legs aren’t hurting me.” Much, I mentally added.

She stared at my legs as if they were about to explode. “Really? I can see the healed sections of your leg bones. Your right front leg hurts worse than the rear left one, I bet.”

“What?”

“Sometimes leg-bones don’t set exactly right. The resulting nerve damage can make a walk on a warm spring day tedious. It can’t be easy walking around in all that ice and snow out there.”

Sighing, I replied, “All right. Yes, they do hurt a bit, but I’m not going to drink any of that stuff to test your theory.”

She lowered her head and pouted a little. I hated to hurt her feelings like this, but she needed to come back to Equestria sooner or later.

“Oh. Okay. I… I’m sorry.” Her pupils were returning to their original size. She yawned and shook her head. “How long have I been up, Spike?”

“Finally, she asks me,” the dragon muttered into his now-empty coffee cup. In a louder voice, he said, “Since yesterday morning.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Just one accidental dose of that liquid rainbow made you stay up all night?”

She pawed the floor, not looking at me. “Uh… it was… two doses, actually. I began to wobble around four in the morning, so I took a tiny little sip.”

“Oh, brother. Twilight, that’s incredibly dangerous. You don’t know what’s in that stuff, do you? Apart from liquid magic?”

“No. I put that fluid through every analyzer in my lab. You know as much as I do now.”

I nodded. “I’m beginning to see why Bunsen Flask wanted to show this fluid off to someone. It can’t possibly be legal. Look what a small amount did to you. Imagine if this was sold as a drug in Manehattan.”

Bags formed under Twilight’s eyes as she lied down, slumped against the pile of books. She blinked away her drowsiness as she looked around at the embarrassing mess she made. “We have to get to Manehattan. Bunsen Flask would never willingly be involved with narcotics. Maybe we can find clues from his journals or his associates.”

“You need to get some serious sleep before you go anywhere, Twilight,” said Spike. “Look at yourself. You can’t even get up, can you?”

She struggled to rise. Her knees began to buckle as she yawned. She dropped with a thud against the book-pile.

“Look, I found out that Bunsen Flask and those guards that guarded Discord’s statue were killed by identical arrows. They’re hunting arrows, often used by griffins during big-game hunts.”

Her head began to wobble like a rag doll. “That’s… really weird, Equus. Are you suggesting that Discord’s abduction and Flask’s assassination are related somehow?”

“Well, stranger things have happened.”

“If Discord is involved in this mess, we had better go talk to Princess Celestia about all this.” She shook away her drowsiness. “She and Luna defeated Discord over a thousand years ago, after all. Celestia might have some insight that would help us.”

“That will have to wait until you at least take a nap,” I said. “I need you wide awake for this.”

I walked over to a nearby table where the sample jar was. “I’m taking this with me, too.”

Half-expecting bargaining from Twilight, I turned to look at her. She was already dozing.

Spike said, “Let me get you a bag for that, Morty.”

“Thanks.”

“No, thank YOU for getting that stuff out of here. I swear, I haven’t seen her this wound up since she ate a dozen of Pinkie Pie’s cupcakes. I always wondered what Pinkie put in those things.”

I nodded politely. Ponies around town didn’t like to talk about Pinkie very much. Most of the populace believed the official story that stated she was mind-controlled by Nightmare Moon when she tortured and killed Rainbow Dash. Others, however, vowed to kill Pinkie on sight if she ever came back to Ponyville.

Looking at the slumbering unicorn, I wondered how the town would react to seeing Twilight acting as loopy as Pinkie when she was still kite-high on Spectrum. How many shocks can a small town take?

As I walked back to the morgue, I began to think about Discord’s possible connection with the liquid magic.

According to the forbidden knowledge that my family’s history book contained, Discord’s designs were not borne of mere malevolence. My dad only briefly touched on the subject when he was raising me, but he hinted that Discord originally had nothing to fear from Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.

Luna became Nightmare Moon for a reason, however.

It was time to do some research. Unofficial research.

Author's Note

Latin lesson #2 Magus (magical) Why are you majoring in Latin Studies anyway? That's like studying to be a VCR repairman.
Soundtrack for this chapter: "Standing Stones" by Jeremy Soule (Skyrim soundtrack)