A Cordial Agreement

Hello, Twilight,

As always, here is your payment for the product in advance.  It is precisely four thousand and twenty bits.  My brother and I have included the twenty extra bits with the request that you select priority shipping, as we ran out of the product sooner than expected this month.

I still do suggest you try a sample, as it seems you could do well to loosen up.  This has nothing to do with a bet I made with my brother, of course.

It is a pleasure doing business with you,

–Flim

"That vile, sub-equine cretin!" Twilight's voice thundered through the library, tossing the letter to the wall with a quiet fwap.  She fought to keep the blush on her face under control.  Shaking her head, she held the valuable check close to her  That tiny piece of paper was the key to the next development, her next breakthrough, in teleportation using enchanted gems instead of unicorn magic.  For months they had poked fun at her for not testing the "product", but this was the crudest letter to date.  It was exactly their style, too: formal, but still doing absolutely nothing to conceal exactly what they wanted to say.

It didn't matter.  A letter was words, and no more.  The agreement she had with Flim and Flam was necessary if she wanted to continue spending so much on lab equipment, and all three of them knew it.  It was an easy job with ridiculously high pay because nobody else knew how to do it but her.

"Twilight?" called a familiar young dragon's voice.  "Are you okay?"  Although Spike showed some concern, he had lived with Twilight long enough that skepticism had become his default response.

It occurred to her that she had to get Spike out of the way.  She sighed.  I'm definitely not telling the whole story about this one.   "Yes Spike, I'm fine.  The lab equipment contractors are being difficult."

Spike shrugged.  "If you say so..."

"Hey, Spike, do you remember the sleepover with the Crusaders you wanted to have?"

Spike rolled his eyes.  "The one you said I couldn't go to yesterday?" he quipped.

"Yeah, uh, that one," Twilight replied sheepishly.  "I changed my mind.  You can go, but tell them it has to be tonight.  I'm doing some dangerous lab tests and I don't want you to get hurt."  At least that wasn't entirely false.  She'd actually held off on his little slumber party deliberately, because she was expecting the letter from the Flim Flam Brothers.

Spike lit up.  "Really?  Wow!  Thank you so much, Twilight!  Don't hurt yourself doing teleporty magic stuff, I'llseeyousoonokaybye!**" With that, he darted out the door, presumably to Rarity's house.

Well, time to get down to business, Twilight thought as she walked upstairs to her lab.  The room was previously an unused bedroom adjacent to her own.  Although her research on teleportation happened in here, her synthesis of the ...product... did as well.  She sighed in frustration at having to resort to such drastic measures to get the materials she needed.  If she were to use her librarian stipend to purchase the same, it would take years!  The world doesn't wait for trivial things like that.  The sun keeps rising and setting no matter how many excuses a pony makes, and Twilight was not one to make excuses.

"No interaction with the product," she muttered to herself, still unable to shake a sense of embarrassment.  "My role in this exchange is synthesis and synthesis alone.  The product I am creating is a means to an end and I have no relationship to it besides the profitable enterprise of selling it."  It was like a mantra, one that she repeated to herself whenever she felt ashamed of her new method of acquiring bits.  It had a calming effect, which helped her clear her head and get to work.

The four walls of the room had tables slid up next to them, and each table had an assortment of complicated devices laid out on top of it.  A small, empty "island" table in the middle of the room was meant to be a sort of working space.  The table on the left, however, was the only one she needed to focus on, as her thaumochemistry set was essentially all she needed.  Following her checklist, she first placed a ruby, the gemstone of choice for these sorts of enchantments, on the table.  It was saturated to one tenth of a Swirl of magical energy, a fact that made her feel envy only because she wanted a unit named after her too.  Next, she laid out the necessary enchantments, including one to allow it to dissolve in water at room temperature/standard pressure, as well as one to give the potion its... effect.  The idea (patented, but licensed to those in need, thanks to a Miss Twilight Sparkle) was that the enchantment contained in the gemstone would be deposited on the drinker, and then would pass through the pony's system inert thanks to a variety of complicated enchantments.

After filling an Erlenmeyer flask most of the way with water and setting it to boil, she began using her magic on a mortar and pestle to crush the ruby into a fine powder to increase its surface area.  The heat was necessary in order to dissolve the gem, even with the enchantments.  It didn't really matter how much liquid was in the flask, as long as it was enough solvent for the gems; the only relevant feature was the volume of the gem before being crushed, which was the active ingredient.  Flim and Flam would later dilute it with hundreds of liters of water, to be distributed in single doses the size of small vials.  The potion she was making was actually intensely concentrated.

Twilight poured the finished pink powder into the flask.  All I have to do now is wait for it to boil, she thought.  Sitting down in the only chair in the room, she stared at the bubbles forming at the bottom of the glass.  Her thoughts were elsewhere.

She wondered how she landed in this bizarre arrangement.  Thinking back to the strange day when the Flim Flam brothers returned to her doorstep, showing their faces for the first time in over a year, she remembered them shamefully confessing that their business had collapsed.  Having sworn to be changed ponies, (though to this day she was still highly skeptical) they made their proposal, the same arrangement they had kept monthly to this day.  At first she was hostile... but she found herself unable to refuse when the check was floating in front of her face.  She was in a unique position with that patent.  A very profitable position indeed.

A fizzing sound came from inside the boiling flask, which was now tinted a shade of red.  The triangular shape of the glass, with a very narrow opening, was designed to prevent fluid from spilling out when stirring or boiling.  She removed the heat, knowing her enchantments would prevent the solution from re-crystalizing on the bottom of the flask.  Now she simply had to wait some more while it chilled to room temperature, thanks to yet another spell of hers.

Whether they had genuinely changed for the better was irrelevant, she had decided, as long as they had found a new long-term business that was legal and... by society's fickle standards, ethical.  Part of her motivation, she had told herself, was to help keep the Flim Flam Brothers out of trouble, though she wasn't sure if she believed it.  Twilight chuckled.  She and the Flim Flam brothers were a perfect match.  She had the raw intellect, but they had the street smarts- the type of practicality that allowed them to make connections and be exceptional entrepreneurs.  She felt half the reason the business trio worked so well together was because neither party was capable of outsmarting the other.

She flushed with embarrassment just wondering how many ponies were going to... get off using the liquid in the flask right in front of her.  It was a strange thought. There were so many doses of aphrodisiac waiting to be used within that flask.

With the potion cooled, it was time for the final step: packaging.  Obviously not willing to ship off a perfectly good Erlenmeyer flask when other containers were around, Twilight picked up a jar to give to the Flim Flam Brothers instead, and, as always, she wrote a small heart with a red marker on the metal cap of the jar.

Another batch completed, she thought with a contented sigh as she poured the flask's contents in.

It was then that she made her grave mistake.  It happened so fast that she didn't realize what was going on until it had already landed upon her fur.  She had simply tilted the flask too quickly, and the last of the contents made a slight glug on its way down.  A single drop had separated from the stream and landed on her leg.  The enchantment was already depositing its effects through her fur.

Oh no, oh no no no no bad very bad! she thought, terror on her face as she sprinted to the bathroom.  Reaching her leg in the sink, she turned the water on and frantically shook her hoof as if to ward off the enchantment that was already in her system.  It was a futile effort; she knew it was already too late.  Thirty seconds was easily long enough for the entire effect of a droplet to be deposited in the user.

Twilight had ten minutes to prepare before the effect took hold.  As she was aware, the effect would last either thirty minutes or until... climaxing, whichever came first.  It suddenly occurred to her that she had absolutely no mitigation procedures in the event of failure of some step in the synthesis process.  She was utterly unprepared, without even a counterenchantment to reduce the effect.  To develop one on the spot would take at least two hours.

She leaned against the wall and slid to the floor, groaning.  Why did I completely overlook the possibility of equine error?  What could I possibly do now to fix this?  Her eyes, blank but at the same time expressing deep despair, motionlessly bored into the wall in front of her.  Dosage.  I need to know what dose I took.  Her horn lit up, measuring the saturation of magic with the same signature as the ruby in her body.

The result astounded her.  "A milliswirl?!" Twilight exclaimed.  "That's four doses!"  Panic overtook her.  She ran down the hallway into her room and plopped herself onto her bed.  I can sleep through it.  I have to fall asleep before it hits.  How long had it been?  Maybe about four minutes?  Then she had six minutes left.  She sat up in the bed and sighed.  Who am I kidding.  No one can fall asleep in six minutes, much less while under stress.

Her only choice was to wait it out.  A sense of calm anxiety descended upon her.  How strong was it going to be?  She blushed at the thought of what was about to happen to her.  Every door, window, and opening clapped shut thanks to her magic as she toured the house for openings.  One by one, lights were put out until the only luminance was the glow coming from her horn.  The Sparkle residence is under lockdown until further notice.  A critical breakdown of the synthesis process has occurred.  She laughed to herself at how sophisticated she sounded when in reality it was something so crude.

As she passed by her notebook, Twilight paused, turning towards it.  I might as well document the effects from a first-person perspective.  You know... for science.  Levitating it with her, she returned upstairs to her room.  She climbed onto her bed and slipped under the covers.