Survival is Magic

Twilight Sparkle, faithful student of Princess Celestia, Element of Magic, dispeller of Nightmare Moon, resealer of Discord, did as a student did. She was reading. Ponyville had completely recovered from Discord chaotic magic, but Twilight, being the magical prodigy she was, almost wished it hadn’t. Discord’s magic may have been a nuisance, but she couldn’t help but be curious, and now she was left curious about something she could learn nothing of; these books couldn’t tell her anything!

Twilight was now faced with the problem that she had never been good with. She was in the dark. She didn’t understand, and even worse than the fiasco with Pinkie, she knew that this was something that could be understood. Discord’s magic was unique, but it was still magic. Magic followed very specific rules that were difficult to get pass (a feat Discord had proven himself capable of on multiple occasions). It was about to drive Twilight CRAZY! She was Princess Celestia’s personal protege; she should be able to figure out some simple chaos magic! She hadn’t even gotten a proper chance to examine it before it had all been wiped away! It wasn’t fair!

Twilight decided that planting her face into the book in front of her would definitely be the best solution to all of her problems. She also decided that there was nothing wrong with sitting in that position for a solid five minutes. The green and purple dragon she shared the tree with disagreed.

“Twilight, you’ve been going through those books since yesterday.”

“Mmph.”

 “You were still reading when I fell asleep.”

“Mmmph.”

“And you were still reading when I woke up this morning!”

“Spike, I can’t just let this slip by!” Twilight shouted as her head bolted up from the book. “What he could do defied a number of the basic rules of magic!”

“Well he was the spirit of chaos. Doesn’t it make sense that what he could do, well, didn’t make sense?” Spike attempted to logic the mare out of it before she started taking drastic measures- the sort of drastic measures he’d seen her take first hand. Instead it appeared he broken something.

Twilight had a far off look in her eyes when she spoke. “You’re right. It would make sense. It would make sense that his magic wouldn’t make sense… and that doesn’t make sense! Discord is the embodiment of disorder and disharmony, nothing he does should make sense, not even that it doesn’t make sense- Spike I missed something I know I did and I have to find it!”

Spike sighed. He had a pretty good idea what the next few days were going to be like.

Twilight groaned from the aftershock of her blast of magic she’d been hoping would properly mimic Discord’s chaos. Like the several hundred tests before, it had just come out as an uncontrolled blast of energy. The fact that most of the tree was covered in scorch marks didn’t mean much to her.

“Well, test 243 was a failure. Time to try pattern 244.” Twilight didn’t care how tired she was or how much energy she’d used in the past several hours. She was on a mission for answers, and she would get them one way or another. She wasn’t all that sure what another way was until it spoke to her.

“Say pal, you look like you’re having some trouble there.”

Twilight jumped and looked around for the source of the voice that had suddenly interrupted her experiment. She couldn’t find the source until it spoke again.

“If you’d like I can give you what you need to get your results.”

It was coming from a phonograph in the corner of the room. Twilight had bought it a couple days earlier on a whim she couldn’t exactly expl- wait what did it just say!?

Twilight rushed over to the device, to desperate and sleep deprived to acknowledge just how suspicious this voice coming out of her phonograph was.

“What do you say? I don’t anything in return; seeing it come to fruition will be all the payment I’ll need.”

Twilight instinctively grabbed at the old-timey record player with her hooves and suddenly felt an overwhelming flood of information rush into her head. She wound up on the floor, but rising, there was a manic grin on her face. Suddenly, it was all so clear.

Spike arrived home from his shopping trip to see a huge wooden and metal machine sitting in the middle of the main room. Next to it was a Twilight who didn’t look particularly sane judging by her messy mane and tail, and her hoof bandaged for some reason. She was staring at a lever on the side on the machine and grinning like a maniac. Spike didn’t even have time to speak before the lever was enveloped in purple glow and shifted downward, and the device sprung into monstrous action, the gears and belts whirring as the center piece rose higher towards the roof, somehow resembling a strange creatures face with wooden slats for teeth and eyebrows over machinery eyes. Lightning struck outside; bolts from the blue. Spike could see Twilight’s expression rapidly shift from that crazed happiness to pure terror.

“Twilight!”

She turned to him as the shadows on the floor rose into the material world. They ran for eachother as quickly as they could, only a few meters separating them, but the shadows, now forming strange claw-like shapes that wrapped around Twilight pulling her backwards, were literally pulling her into the floor.

“SPIKE!”

He had no chance of reaching her.

“HEEEEEEELP!”

She was gone before she had finished. Spike clawed at the floor where she’d disappeared as her cry continued to echo out.

“Twilight! Twilight come back! What’s going on!? Twilight!?”

The baby dragon was breaking down into hysterics.

“You can’t just leave me here! You haven’t left me a note! Or a list of things to take care of! You put that on your list of regulations that you made me write out for you! This is definitely a violation! Twilight come back! Twilight! Twilight!”

Spike sat there on his claws and knees, tears forming in his eyes, as he tried to gather his thoughts. He knew she just got dragged into the floor by shadows, and that it happened after she threw the switch on that machine (which he only vaguely noticed was back to the way it was before), and that he had no idea how to fix it, so he’d have to get someone’s help- of course! He had to tell Celestia and get the girls together ASAP! He took a few deep breaths to try (not very successfully) to calm down, and hastily wrote out an explanation of what he saw, sent it to Celestia, and shot out of the library to find the Twilight’s friends and fellow Elements of Harmony.