Sunflower: Harmony - Supplemental files

Author's Note: This story takes place during Chapter 13 of Project Sunflower.

  Twilight yawned hugely as she made her way through the streets of Canterlot, which were painted a cheerful gold by the freshly-risen sun. Breakfast that Friday morning was at The Silver Crescent, at Rarity's suggestion. According to her, the place had just opened up recently and had quickly become locally popular.

  Rarity had been right. Twilight saw the line before the café itself even came into view. The line of ponies went out the door and down the street before disappearing around the corner at the end of the block. Twilight let out a short groan at the sight, and started wondering if she’d be able to convince Rarity to eat elsewhere. As she got closer, though, she noticed that there were two sets of doors. The set on the left was for to-go only, which was responsible for the long line. The second set of doors was for sit-in dining and had no wait at all.

  Her mood much improved, Twilight picked up the pace at the prompting of her grumbling stomach and let herself into the second set of doors. She immediately spotted Rarity sitting at a small table in the dining area, reading from a menu and sipping tea. Her friend’s mane was up in a business-like bun on the back of her head, though, for Rarity, ‘business-like’ still included several jeweled pins to keep it in place.

  “Hi, Rarity,” Twilight said as she sat down, slinging her saddlebags over the empty chair between them.

  “Twilight!” Rarity beamed and put aside the menu. “How lovely to see you. You look… hmm… Not exactly well rested, actually.” She offered a sympathetic smile. “Yesterday didn’t go smoothly, I take it?”

  Twilight uttered a short, bitter laugh. “You could say that. Their paperwork was such a mess, I actually took a break to bring Spike back to help out. They only had half of the visas completed and signed off. I had to run over to the Ministry office itself to rush everything through! And, even then, I had to drop Princess Celestia’s name more than once to get anypony moving.” She sighed, massaging her temples with her hooves. “At least the most crucial stuff should more or less be ready by now. I’m heading back there after breakfast to make sure.”

  Rarity smiled. “Another crisis averted by Twilight Sparkle’s amazing organizational skills! This calls for a celebration.”

  Twilight chuckled. “Well, yes. I am good at organizing. I just wish everything hadn’t been so…” she waved a hoof vaguely, trying to get the right word to pop up in her tired and stress-addled brain.

  “Last minute?”

  “Yeah, that works.” Twilight looked around. The line at the to-go window was moving pretty quickly. Ponies would walk up and order their drinks, shuffle off to one side, and a few moments later one of the baristas would pass over an insulated paper cup full of coffee. “This place sure is busy,” she noted.

  “They have excellent coffee,” Rarity said. “It doesn't hurt that they're also very quick. Plus, they have their logo emblazoned on every cup of coffee they sell. It’s all about branding, dear. Ponies see those cups everywhere, and so they want the same thing.”

  Twilight frowned at the logo printed on her menu. “You know, I have to think Princess Luna might be upset about that, since it looks an awful lot like her cutie mark.”

  “Well, it’s not as if a crescent moon is an uncommon symbol,” Rarity replied. “Doesn’t your father also have a crescent moon cutie mark?”

  “Well, yeah, but it looks totally different!” Twilight sighed. “Okay, you’re right. Maybe I’m just a bit cranky after the day I had yesterday.”

  “It’s quite alright, darling.”

  Twilight smothered a yawn behind her hoof. “Sorry. Anyway, how did your day go?”

  “Quite well, actually! They desperately needed my help with the aesthetics of the planned designs, the poor dears. Here, I have something to show you that I think you might be interested in.”

  Rarity’s horn glowed, and a bundle of papers came floating out of her own saddlebags. Twilight took the papers in her own field and looked at them with growing interest.

  “Is this...?”

  “The diagram for the magical construct that goes into the cachettes?” Rarity grinned. “Why, yes it is!”

  Twilight tilted her head, perking her ears forward curiously. “Cachettes?”

  “It’s what we’ve been calling them. ‘Magical batteries’ and ‘aetheric storage’ sounds so technical, and ‘torc’ doesn’t apply to earrings, necklaces and the like.”

  “Oh, I see!” Twilight said as she leaned in to get a closer look at the diagram. “Wow, they’ve made some refinements since I worked on it last.”

  The initial concept for the magic batteries had been to form an incomplete spell circle, one that lacked any release conditions or triggers. The circle would gather magical energy up to its maximum capacity, but not be able to release it on its own. A pony would have to consciously draw magic from it for it to release any of the stored energy.

  “Hmm… Looks like they’ve made the energy gathering even more efficient than when I helped with the initial design.” Twilight's eyes traced along the circle. "They've simplified it considerably, as well."

  “So I understand,” Rarity said. “It’s fairly easy to replicate, though it is a little tedious.”

  “It would be.” Twilight took out a sheet of paper from her own saddlebags and began taking notes. “So, what new materials are they trying to use for infusing this circle?”

  “Well, they have some success with various precious metals, and some dense hardwoods. Those go fairly quickly, but aren’t as stable. Gems have the highest stability, but take considerably longer to inscribe.” Rarity smiled. “That’s what I wanted to ask about. Altering crystal structures enough to etch this design into it takes a qualified unicorn a good amount of time. I was wondering if you could think of any way to speed up the process?”

  “Hmm... “ Twilight frowned while she studied the designs. They really were elegant in their simplicity, with hardly any room for improvement. Still, Rarity was counting on her, so she set herself to studying the designs, looking for any way to improve things at all.

  Her quill flew as she took notes, even going so far as to replicate the design itself on a piece of paper in minute detail in order to make sure she understood the circle in its entirety. While her quill flew, so did her mind, trying to figure out any small tweaks or changes that could result in an even simpler version of the circle.

  “Twilight?”

  “Yes?” Twilight looked up, flushing when she saw both Rarity and their waiter looking at her. “Oh, sorry. I was a bit caught up in this. Did you order already, Rarity?”

  “Yes, I did. Did you know what you wanted, dear?”

  “Um… I’ll have whatever you’re having, I guess,” she said.

  The waiter made a note on his pad. “Right. I’ll have your food out in a jiffy!”

  “You do that,” Twilight said absently as she returned to studying the design in front of her. She chewed on her bottom lip, making notes and writing out calculations on a piece of scratch paper beside her. “Maybe... invert the second matrix,” she muttered. “No… That would throw the third quadrant out of balance. We’d need to adjust the initial phase to gather… Hmm…”

  As she kept working on the problem, she slowly became aware of something tugging at her attention. Finally she looked up to see Rarity looking at her with an amused smile.

  “What?”

  “Your food is getting cold, Twilight,” Rarity said, pointing with the fork held in her magical grip.

  Twilight looked down to see a plate with a single poached egg, rye toast, and some sectioned grapefruit sitting before her. She poked at the toast with her hoof while frowning. “Uh. I really should have ordered something else.”

  Rarity smirked. “Consider it revenge for tempting me with garlic bread yesterday.”

  “Okay, okay, fair enough.” Twilight’s eyes slowly gravitated back to the design schematics. "I don't think I'll be able to simplify that any further, though I do have a suggestion."

  Rarity lowered her teacup and smiled with a twinkle in her eye. "Yes, Twilight?"

  "We could increase the capacity for storage by making larger circles," Twilight said. Her horn glowed and her quill began sketching. "Look. You could make a larger structure that would store a similarly larger amount of magical energy and ship those to the homes of the host families where the Equestrian students will be staying. That would decrease their reliance on torcs, which, in turn would allow for fewer torcs being required."

  "Twilight," Rarity said.

  "And I bet we could even use the larger stations—I should come up with a name for that, really—I bet we could make it so that they could actually recharge the torcs! Right now, we're planning on recycling the ones we ship to Earth. You know, having the students send theirs in to be recharged and sending back fully charged ones in replacement. This could cut down on a lot of the logistics required for that!"

  "Twilight, dear, I—"

  "Material composition wouldn't be as large of a problem, either. It could be made out of any kind of metal or wood. Or, heck, even stone for a circle this large." Twilight frowned and crossed out some of the notes she'd written down before starting over with some calculations. "What would really be perfect, though, is if we found some way to convert other forms of energy into magic. Say, electricity."

  "That's not—"

  "I mean, humans have electricity in abundance! They even make it directly out of sunlight. Sunlight! That's pretty amazing, don’t you think? If we could make a solar-powered thaumic converter—Ooh, I like that name! I'll make a note of it—then a pony could stay on Earth indefinitely!" Twilight looked up and grinned. The grin started fading when she noticed the glassy-eyed look on Rarity's face. "Um... I got carried away, didn't I?"

  “Just a bit, darling,” Rarity said. “I was asking for the jewelers, not for the sake of the exchange students. Though, I must say, having a larger store of magic to charge the cachettes is a grand idea, and solves another problem we’ve been having.”

  “What problem would that be?” Twilight asked.

  “Well, apparently the smaller cachettes have storage issues.”

  “Well, they would have,” Twilight said, nodding. “The ability to retain magic increases drastically as the size of the circle increases. Something the size of an earring would last less than a day of minimal-to-moderate use.”

  “And that is the issue they’re having,” Rarity said with a sigh. “However, if we can give them something larger to use to recharge it… well, that opens up many new possibilities, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.” A flash of inspiration hit Twilight right then and she grinned hugely. “And I may have a way to speed up the inscribing process!”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Rarity beamed and leaned forward eagerly. “What would we need to do?”

  Twilight’s quill was already racing over a new sheet of paper as she answered. “Simply put, we can use a mockup of the design, scaled to the correct size and adjusted for the materials used. A unicorn could use a simple transcribe spell to push it from the first medium to the second. If you use a printing press for the circle and the target material used is standardized enough, then you could push through several inscribed cachettes in the time it takes to do a single one now!”

  Twilight sat back, feeling a warm glow of satisfaction at the overjoyed look on Rarity’s face.

  “Oh, Twilight, you have no idea how much time this will save us!”

  “Well, I could probably come up with an estimate. How long does it take now?”

  “For a gem inscription?” Rarity hummed and tapped her hoof on her chin. “On a good-quality gem, it takes a skilled unicorn roughly a full eight hour day.”

  “Well, then, if this works out as well as I hope it will, then I believe you’d be able to complete an inscribed gem in roughly one-tenth that time. So, seven hours and twelve minutes per gem, at a guess.”

  Rarity was staring at her with a confused little smile on her muzzle. Twilight decided to clarify.

  “Of course, that’s just a rough estimate based what you’ve just told me and on what I believe would be the optimal results from transcribing onto a gem. I may be missing some variables, since I’m not all that familiar with the current process.”

  “Oh, Twilight,” Rarity said before she began laughing. After a moment, Twilight joined in, though she wasn’t completely certain how what she said was funny.