“Handlebar! Horseshoe! Toothbrush! Walrus!”
Spike shouted any name he could think of, feeling the tingle of magic on his lip with each casting of the spell. With hardly seconds between each transformation, he was given different kinds of facial hair on command. It was a veritable marathon of styles, from the short and sleek to the big and bushy. He even threw in a few beard names here and there, but nothing seemed capable of tripping up Twilight at the moment.
“Curly Fu Manchu!”
Twilight’s horn hardly seemed to be glowing as she gave Spike the called out style of mustache. It was a long one, hanging down past his chin before it formed into a pair of curly ends, looking almost like he had a pair of lollipops hanging from his nose. “Well, that’s all I got,” Spike said as he ran a claw down each side of the mustache. “You just gave me every kind of mustache I can think of in under three minutes.”
With a smile, Twilight glanced up between the bangs of her mane. If her horn had been overheating from the exertion, she might have blown on it gently, but there was no signs of heat or strain. She probably have been able to continue for another half hour without breaking a sweat. “And I didn’t even use my alicorn magic. My unicorn magic has just been on a whole other level since I became a princess.”
“I bet you could even handle an Ursa Major now.” Spike then snickered a little to himself. “Maybe we should go ask Snips and Snails to go find us one.”
“I’d rather not tempt fate,” Twilight said. She cast out her magic again, this time removing Spike’s facial hair instead of transfiguring it into some new shape. In the past he may have complained, but he had learned recently that Rarity really didn’t have much fondness for any kind of facial hair.
Which actually worked in Spike’s favor, since dragons didn’t naturally grow hair anywhere.
“So, what next, Spike?” Twilight asked, looking across a nearby stack of books. “What old trick should I try now?”
“I don’t know. For the last ten tricks you’ve hardly broken a sweat. I doubt any one of your old spells would give you any trouble now.”
Twilight nodded. “Okay, what about new spells?”
Spike trotted across the room, approaching a drawer in Twilight’s desk. He pulled it open, rummaged around inside, and withdrew a scroll. A quick flick of his wrist, and he unfurled the scroll and began reading down its length. “There’s a couple, but we’re waiting for some books to be delivered from Canterlot.”
“But... then that means...” Twilight frowned, pouting a little as if the library itself might feel sorry for her. “I don’t have anything new to learn.”
Spike used both claws to roll up the scroll, keeping his eyes focused on ensuring an even roll. “Well, nothing new magically, but I thought alicorns were supposed to be some ideal mix of all three pony clans.”
“They are,” Twilight confirmed. She turned her head, horn glowing as she removed a book from a nearby shelf. She leafed through the pages for a moment before turning it around to show Spike an illustration. “The predominant theory on alicorns and why their magic is so strong is because, within them, the unique magical auras of earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns exist in perfect balance.”
“Well then, why don’t you try doing something an earth pony might do, or a pegasus?” Spike placed the scroll back and closed the drawer. “I mean, you haven’t really tried to do anything else besides magic since you became a princess. You’ve kind of been learning to fly from Rainbow Dash, but isn’t there more to pegasi than just that? And what about earth pony traits?”
Twilight closed the book and returned it to the shelf as she rolled the idea around in her head. “That’s not a bad idea, Spike.” She then smiled and bounced once on her hooves. “Oh, it could be an experiment. A proper scientific investigation of the changes a unicorn undergoes when they become an alicorn. It would make a wonderful report to Princess Celestia.”
“Don’t you need a control set for an experiment?” Spike pointed out. “Unless you want to travel back in time and steal a copy of yourself from when you were a unicorn, you don’t really have any baseline to compare your data to.”
Spike bent down to pick up a book, but then stood back up and pointed a claw at Twilight. “By the way, I am not suggesting we do that.”
“Oh, of course not, that would be silly. We just need to find another unicorn that has comparable physical prowess to the way I was before I was a princess.” Twilight began heading for the stairs, the prospect of science putting a skip in her step. “And I know just the mare.”
Lyra looked a bit puzzled at the scroll that had appeared magically in front of her. A royal summons to Sweet Apple Acres. She hadn’t been summoned anyplace in her life, except for perhaps jury duty, and there wasn’t anything royal about those. She had almost been tempted just to ignore it, but Bon-Bon had been insistent that it was no joke or prank. The royal seal of the recently crowned Princess Twilight Sparkle had been stamped onto the summons.
To reject the summons was a jailable offense.
So Lyra found herself walking onto Sweet Apple Acres. While she came to the edge of the property for zap apple jam and cider fairly frequently, she hadn’t been on the other side of the fence since a school fieldtrip. The place looked remarkably similar to the way she remembered it, though perhaps the trees didn’t look quite as tall as they had when she was a filly.
“Oh, Miss Lyra Heartstrings! Over here!”
Lyra turned her head, seeing a pony waving at her from in front of the barn. It was the princess, looking much like the down-to-earth pony she was. No royal regalia or guards. She was just standing there, the only sign of her recent rise into royalty being the wings that adorned her side. Could Lyra say she knew the princess? No, but when somepony is living in the town library and you like to borrow books to read, you at least become acquaintances.
“You summoned me, Princess Twilight?” Lyra said when she was close enough to be heard without shouting.
“Yes,” she said, though she was keeping her eyes focused on the spell she was casting. She was assembling a few strange devices. Each one was littered with lights, buttons, and looked like they just might explode if someone too inexperienced with magic or technology came within five feet. “You see, you’re a lot like me.”
Lyra tilted her head a bit to one side. “I’m like you?”
“Yes,” Twilight said with a firm nod. “So very much like me, it’s almost surprising. We could be genetic sisters, even, or perhaps we share a great, great grandmother. It’s hard to say, but there’s no denying it. You are a lot like me.”
Lyra began to smile a little, standing a little taller and flexing the muscles on her back, as if fidgeting imaginary wings. “Does that mean you want to make me your student so I can become a princess?”
“Ye—” Twilight turned her head quickly, all the bits and bobs she was assembling into her equipment freezing mid air. “Wait? What!? No, sorry, I don’t mean like that. I mean you're a lot like me physically. You are approximately the same height and weight I was before I became a princess, and of all the ponies I surveyed, you are the one closest to me in strength, speed, and general coordination.”
Lyra forced a laugh, scratching at the dirt with a hoof. “Oh... okay, that makes more sense. So then... why did you summon me out here?”
“I’d like to enlist your services for an experiment, and if you’d be kind enough to agree, I’d gladly make it worth your time.” Twilight clicked a few final lights into one of the larger devices, causing it to spark to life and hum like a barbershop quartet that was warming up for a performance.
“You see,” Twilight continued as she turned to face Lyra, “I want to scientifically measure how much I’ve changed since I’ve become a princess, but I don’t have any data from when I was a normal unicorn. Disregarding the differences in magic, you are the closest mare in Ponyville to what I was like. So you would be the control for this experiment: the baseline I would be comparing myself to.”
“And you want to pay me to do this?”
“Well...” Twilight smiled awkwardly. “I can’t really pay anypony for this. I don’t really have the bits and I have to get another princess to co-approve any expenditures to the kingdom. But, I’d gladly negotiate a return to the favor. Is there anything you want? I could teach you some magic, like you mentioned earlier.”
Lyra was silent for a time, her eyes wandering first to the side then down to the ground. She had an idea of what she wanted, something that, to her friends, was nothing but myth and legend. But she had heard the story from a friend of a friend of a guard in the Crystal Empire. And this was... perhaps... her best chance.
“Can I... go through the mirror?”
Twilight cocked her head to one side. “Pardon?”
“I heard there’s a mirror in the Crystal Empire, and that if you go through it you go to another world. I want to go there, just for a little bit.”
“No pony is really supposed to know about that,” Twilight said. “Why would you want to go there? I mean, it’s a nice enough place, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also very... strange.”
“Feet,” Lyra said flatly, as if she was stating the factual answer to a mathematical problem. “I want to have feet, and toes, and ankles. I want the whole shebang.”
Twilight titled her head one way, then another, as if shifting her perspective might give her some insight into the inner workings of Lyra’s mind. However, when that proved ineffective, she asked, “Is there a reason you want feet?”
“Yes.”
“Do you... want to tell me why?”
“No.”
“Is there anything else I can do to get you to participate in the experiment?”
Lyra hesitated a moment, but then nodded. “I suppose there is, but that’s what I really want.”
“You want feet.”
“Yes.”
Twilight and Lyra stared at one another for a few, uneasy seconds before the princess shrugged her shoulders. “Well... alright, I suppose there’s no harm. The portal won’t open for another moon, so it will be a little while before we can do it. But, and this is if I get Princess Celestia to agree, it would give me a chance to check in on Sunset Shimmer. We could be there for maybe an hour or two. Would that be enough?”
Lyra could have just nodded her head, but instead she rushed forward and hugged Twilight. She squealed a little, like a filly at a birthday party who had just been presented with a mountain of presents. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
All Twilight could do was smile and plant her hooves, accepting Lyra’s hug while trying to keep herself from falling over. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement. Now, we just need to wait for Applejack and Rainbow Dash to get here, and then we can start.”
Twilight and Lyra stood on a single white, fluffy cloud, Lyra given the needed boost of a cloud-walking spell. They were floating a few yards above Sweet Apple Acres, the orchards laid out around them with the farm’s swimming hole directly below. On each hoof they wore mittens comprised of dense clouds, much like superiorly fluffy socks. In all, there was nothing in their immediate area to cause them distress, yet both mares looked like they were about to face the executioner’s ax.
“Rainbow, are you sure this is a good test?” Twilight asked.
“Ya, any pegasi worth their feathers knows how to do this.” Rainbow was standing on her own cloud several dozen yards away. She wore a pair of her own cloud mittens, but their white color stood out in stark contrast to the threatening black of the cloud she was standing on. She looked excited, eager, and perhaps even a little devilish as she stuck her hoof downward. “Trust me, this will be fun,” she said as she used her mittened hoof to withdraw a sparking, spherical chunk of lightning from the cloud.”
“But we’re playing catch with lightning!” Lyra protested. She stepped anxiously around the cloud, not wanting to remain where she was but not wanting to make the long jump to the swimming hole below either. “Lightning is dangerous.”
“Only if you don’t catch it with your hoof,” Rainbow said, tossing the ball up and catching it. “That’s why we’re wearing these boots.”
“But what if we don’t catch it with the boot?”
Rainbow laughed a little as she tossed the sphere of lightning up again. “To quote my dad, you’ll only not catch it once. Besides, this is just a little ball. It isn’t going to hurt you. Unless you have metal fillings. You don’t have metal fillings, do you?”
Twilight shook her head, but Lyra’s eyes narrowed. “I... I don’t know.” She then turned to Twilight, opening her mouth as if she was going to gobble up the side of Twilight's face. “Are my fillings metal?”
Wincing, Twilight backed away from Lyra as her eyes began to water a little. “What did you eat for lunch, a basket of onions?”
“Applejack, are you ready?” Rainbow looked down, over the edge of her cloud. At the edge of the pond, Applejack was standing with a full bucket of water, her fire-proof boots, and a small arsenal of water balloons.
“Just try to catch them all. My idea of fun ain’t running around putting out fires you three start,” Applejack shouted back.
“Hey, I promise, I won’t drop the ball.” Rainbow looked back at Twilight and Lyra, smiling as she began to wind up her pitch. “Can’t really make any guarantees about these rookies though.”
“Princess! Do I have metal fillings!?” Lyra demanded, trying to put her gaping mouth straight into Twilight’s line of sight. It was something Twilight was doing all in her power to avoid, scrambling away from Lyra while never leaving the cloud.
“Lyra! Stop! Rainbow’s about to throw the ball!”
“But Princess!”
“Here it comes!” With that Rainbow threw the sphere of lightning, which stretched out into a long javelin of energy as it flew. Lyra yelped at the sight, diving into the cloud and trying to bury herself. Her fervent digging efforts threw bits of cloud into Twilight’s vision, making the princess yelp and shake her head. The lightning loomed closer, an expert toss by Rainbow that could have been caught by just about any pegasus with rudimentary knowledge of the game.
It, however, was not caught. It hit Twilight square on the horn, making her convulse and fall from the cloud. She hit the water of the swimming hole with a deafening smack, which made Applejack and Rainbow Dash wince. It was the worst kind of belly flop, and Twilight began to sink even as Applejack raced in to help her.
“Did we catch it?” Lyra asked a few moments later, poking her head out of the cloud.
“No, no you didn’t,” Rainbow said as she flew over to Lyra to help her down from the cloud.
“You sure you’re okay, Sugarcube?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Twilight said, even as she held an ice pack to her head. “It was just a little lightning.”
“But it hit you on the horn, and the horn goes straight to the brain. You basically got struck by lightning in your brain,” Lyra said, tapping the side of her head with a hoof for emphasis. “Isn’t that supposed to be really bad for unicorns?”
“Yes, but not as bad for pegasi.” Twilight shifted the ice back, balancing it on the base of her horn so she could put her forehoof back on the ground. “The inherent magic in pegasi make them somewhat immune to the effects of lightning. It’s like wiring; lightning just passes through them without doing a lot of drainage.”
Applejack and Lyra glanced at one another, then looked to Twilight in concern. “Drainage?” Lyra asked.
Twilight flapped her tongue in her mouth, feeling around her teeth as if it had been numbed by a dentist. “Sorry. I meant damage. It passes through them without doing a lot of damage.” She clicked her tongue again, then shrugged her shoulders. “Anyway, that may have proved part of my hypothesis, at least about the increase in pegasi magic in me.”
“Don’t you have to do an experiment multiple times before you can say something like that?” Lyra asked.
“Yes... but I don’t think I want to repeat that experiment right now.”
“I do,” Rainbow Dash said with a snicker. She had broken off a chunk of the white cloud from earlier, and was using it to lay about lazily just above the other mares’ heads. “The face you made was priceless.”
Twilight glared at Rainbow for just a moment before turning her head towards Applejack. “Still, we have a lot more testing to do. Applejack, what did you have planned?”
“Well, it should be a sight safer than Rainbow throwing lightning at ya.” Applejack turned, pointing to a pair of logs that had been set about a meter apart. Across the gap a few boards had been laid, and several more waited in a stack nearby. “Part of earth pony magic is seeing and feeling where the soft spot in something is. It’s how we buck apples from trees, and how Maud smashed that boulder to save Pinkie Pie.”
Lyra’s mouth formed an O shape before she smiled. “Oh, that’s why that looks familiar. You're going to have us break those boards with our hooves, like that stallion was doing at the Foal and Filly Fair.”
“Yep, something nice and simple.” Applejack said as she went up to the boards. She looked at them for a second, then lifted a forehoof and stomped it down. The boards snapped like flimsy twigs under the blow.
“But isn’t that aspect of earth pony magic normally talent dependent?” Twilight asked while Applejack set up the next set of boards. “You can break boards because you work with apple trees, and Maud smashed that rock because she works with rocks.”
“Seeing the weak spot isn’t the same as knowing how to hit it,” Applejack explained. “If you can even see the weak spot in the boards, then you’ll get it to crack for sure. Now, come on, Lyra. Why don’t you try first and let Twilight sit with her ice pack for a bit longer?”
Lyra nodded, stepping forward and squaring her shoulders with the boards. Unlike Applejack, who had made the boards break with a swift stomp, Lyra examined the pieces of wood for several seconds. Her eyes went up and down the grain, lingering on knots or imperfections before moving on. She was trying to find, to see, the weakness Applejack had been able to spot in seconds. She even lifted her hoof a few times, as if intending to stomp only to put it back down again.
Finally, Lyra lifted her hoof and held it above the board. She positioned herself very carefully, shifting her other three hooves and leaning forward to try and center her hoof above a very particular spot on the board. She then smiled and stomped, only for the boards not to budge a single inch.
“Ow!” Lyra yelped, drawing back her hoof and dancing a little on her remaining three. “What are those boards made of, stone?!”
“No, but they are rock pine from mountains,” Applejack said, even as she snickered at Lyra’s behavior. “Didn’t want to make it too easy for ya. After all, I didn’t want to go ruining Twilight’s test.”
Lyra shook her forehoof, as if the throbbing pain was just water clinging to her fur. “How considerate of you.”
“I know.” Applejack changed out the boards for a fresh pair before looking to Twilight. “Now come on, Sugarcube, it’s your turn.”
Tilting her head, Twilight made the bag of ice slide off her horn and fall to the ground. “Okay, I’m bready,” she said, only to once more click her tongue as if it had suddenly gone numb. “I mean, I’m ready.”
Approaching the boards as if they were a great monster to be slain, Twilight positioned herself carefully. She did as Lyra had. Her eyes scanned the boards, and at first she wasn’t sure she saw anything. But then... there was almost a tickling in her vision. Whenever she looked at one particular part of the top board, she kept getting a sensation. She could not put a word to the feeling. It was completely foreign and unknown to her, but at the same time she felt like it had to be what she was looking for.
She raised a hoof, taking the same care to position it just above the spot on the board she wanted to stomp. She then sucked in a breath and drove her weight down on her hoof. She stomped on the board, and almost immediately it began to crack under her weight. It fractured, then it splintered, then the boards broke entirely as her hoof passed through them like an unstoppable train. A smile of triumph began to spread onto Twilight’s lips.
The smile, however, was quickly wiped away as one of the broken ends of the boards flew up and struck her square on the forehead, knocking Twilight to the ground and leaving her ears ringing.
Sunset Shimmer had to cover her mouth to keep herself from laughing outloud. She sat next to Twilight Sparkle on the bleachers of Canterlot High’s soccer field. Twilight looked like she was one sneeze away from being put in a hospital bed. She had a ice pack taped to her head and a big swollen lump that almost looked like her unicorn horn had come through the mirror. She was covered with other bumps, bruises, and bandages. She had even brought a crutch along with her from Equestria.
“That’s pretty far to go just to prove a hypothesis,” Sunset said, still snickering behind her hand.
“I know.” Twilight hung her head as far as she could while not letting the ice pack fall. “An alicorn does have the properly balanced auras of all the trials...” Twilight rolled her tongue. “Of all the tribes, but you don’t automatically get the skill needed to use those auras effectively... or without hurting yourself.”
Sunset shrugged. “Well, I’d think that would be obvious. You can’t just slap a horn on any pony and expect them to do magic without some practice.”
Twilight turned and looked at Sunset for a moment, then slapped her palm against her face. She then winced, every muscle in her body tightening as fresh explosions of pain came from the bruises on her face. She sat there, enduring it for a few seconds before the pain subsided and she was able to un-grit her teeth. “Why... didn’t I think of that? That makes so much sense!”
“Even Celestia’s prized students can make mistakes. I think we both know that.” Sunset Shimmer pointed a finger to the soccer field. “Why did you bring her with you again?
“She was the control grape... group and this is what she wanted in return?” Twilight answered as she looked to the soccer field. Lyra was there, just running around barefoot with a wide smile on her face. She seemed to be in utter bliss, and any moment it seemed to start going away she’d stop, wiggle her toes, and then start giggling again. Several students had stopped to watch the strange display, but Lyra didn’t seem to notice or, if she did, she didn’t care. She just bounded around until she came to a stop in the center of the field, toes digging into the soft dirt as she lifted her arms above her head and shouted.
“Feet are awesome!”
Author's Note
This story was largely written over a three hour google-doc live stream done on Saturday, 7/20/2014. It was an interesting experience writing with an audience watching and comment on the fly. I didn't see the highest numbers, but at some point there were thirty eight people with the doc open, which is more than I thought I'd get.
Still, of the three prompts I picked from the suggestions given, the one that was voted for by the views was from Rinnaul. Other contributions by the viewing committee was the inclusion of Lyra, feet, lightning bolts, ka-rock-te, and brain damage.
I hope you all enjoyed this fun little bit of writing, and those who were on the stream, feel free to shout out in the comments.
