A Story Never Told

I waited in my dream, with a chessboard in front of me. The chessboard wasn't really for anything, I just wanted to have my hands (hooves) occupied during the conversation, to look cool.

"We see thou wast expecting us."

I looked up, and saw Luna. I hadn't seen her before, as I was unconscious when she had been cured. She looked... Malnourished wasn't quite the word. It was obvious she was very weak; unsurprising considering the harshness of the Elements. I tried to scan her, but she was blocking me.

"I was told to. I believe you wanted to ask me some questions?"

"Yes. Our sister did give us a list, but she also directed us to learn anything else we could about you."

"Lovely," I moved a piece on the board, and turned my focus to her, "Let us begin"

"Firstly: Wilt thou stop that?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You continue to poke our mind, and it bothers us."

"Sorry. I do that to everyone I meet to learn about them. Just a habit"

"In that case: Stop."

"Alright."

Luna continued to regard me slightly suspiciously, "Secondly: Where art thou from?"

"That one is fairly complicated. What is the name of this planet?"

"Earth."

"That makes this even more complicated. I'm from another planet, but we also call it Earth. Let's call it 'Terra' for now."

"Very well."

"I was created using a process involving genetic code by a group known as the Foundation. I was created highly intelligent, and with the ability to alter my own body at will. Eventually I left Terra so that I could pursue my dreams without being forced to serve masters I hated."

"We can understand that. But thou said thou wast created? Thou hast no family?"

I moved another piece, "none whatsoever. Just because some of the people there taught me what I know doesn't mean that I have any bond with them. Also, I would like you to not tell my friends, I would prefer to tell them myself after I cure this curse. "

"You seem very sure of your success."

"I've faced more complicated problems in the past. My current lack of resources and faculties is merely a complication."

"Thou hast an over-inflated ego, but we will honor thy request. Next question, what was your occupation?"

"I was a creator. I built things. The place I came from had no concept of magic, so everything we built had to be technological"

"How did thou travel to Equestria without magic?"

"To even begin to answer that, I need to know what the most technologically advanced thing you have is."

"Somepony created a basket that flies because of a large capsule filled with heated air."

"The most advanced thing you have is a hot air balloon. What if I told you that I knew of a way to make a wagon-like object move on its own?"

She scoffed, "Bring to life spells are both short and unreliable. Any use for them other than novelty would be new to me."

"I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about technology. Imagine a fire. This fire grows bigger when you put things like wood onto it. We've found better fuels, but imagine that the fire is solely burning wood. Around this fire is a device that collects the heat from the fire, and turns it into motion. This motion is is used to power a wagon, so that it moves without needing to be pulled."

"Interesting. Most ponies would still prefer to pull a wagon, rather than constantly fill it with wood."

"We don't use wood, though. We have even built machines that can not only fly, but travel several times the speed of sound."

"Sound has a speed?"

"Yes. The best way to find the speed of sound is to watch lightning. The sound of thunder comes after the lightning because the sound is slower than the light."

"Impressive. Have you build anything that can travel faster than light?"

"Actually, traveling faster than light is impossible with technology. That seems to be one advantage magic has."

"We see. And how many other limitations dost thou take for granted that magic so easily ignores?"

"A few. I haven't had the time to properly examine the differences. But just imagine a train that did not have to be pulled, rather have the fire fed by a single pony."

"We are not trying to ignore the possibilities of technology. We are simply doubting the value of abandoning magic in favor of it."

"Of course you shouldn't! I want to explore the capabilities of using magic and technology together. Imagine a train that a single unicorn could power, without even trying. Imagine devices that allowed any two ponies to communicate freely, no matter their location. Imagine something that could take you to the stars!"

"Why would we want to go to the stars?"

I retraced my mental steps, "That brings a question. What are the stars?"

"Stars are elementals, whose souls were bound to the sky long ago."

"Better question. What is the sky?"

"The dome that surrounds Equestria, that holds the sun, moon and stars."

"What is beyond the sky?"

"We... Do not know. We know that in dimensions other than space and time reside other worlds, but we don't think anypony has ever questioned what is beyond the sky."

And idea occurred to me, 'Where I come from, both the sun and stars are immense balls of energy, millions of times larger than our planet."

"That is very hard to believe."

"Just hear me out. I've been racking my brain as to the source of magic. An immense amount of energy is constantly entering the world through various forms of magic. What if the sky was placed inside one of these balls of energy, and magic is simply what is being gathered through it?"

"Who would do such a thing? Nopony would just put something like the sky inside a 'star' without using the gathered energy for their own purposes."

"What if they are? I don't know the details, but if this Earth is completely artificial, that would explain many things."

"We will have to think on this further. However, there are still things we wish to know about you. Why did you come up with the name you did?"

"I made up a name because I was never given one. I was always referred to by a number, and I don't identify with my current name anymore than I identify with my old one. If someone said 'Nightmare Moon' when they saw you, you'd know they referred to you, even though you don't identify with the name. It's the same with me, except I don't have a 'real name'."

"Interesting. Just a few more questions; when thou first came upon this world three days ago, you became a pony—"

"Explaining how would literally take years."

"That wasn't our question. Twilight said you were capable of very basic magic when she met you, and that you learned other magic frighteningly quickly."

"That's simple. I got the knowledge from observing her mind, as well as inventing a little myself."

"We also understand you have reconstructed the theory for several spheres of dark magic."

I was genuinely surprised, "How did you learn that?"

"From you, now."

That was embarrassing, "I see. Although, I would like a good definition of what exactly counts as 'dark magic'. "

"That seems quite obvious to us."

"How about this. I say something I could do with magic, and you say 'no' if it's okay, and 'yes' if it's forbidden."

"Very well."

I began moving a piece every time I spoke, "Firing a beam of energy into a wall."

"No"

"Heating up a block of metal until it melts."

"No"

"Heating up a pony until they melt."

"Just because it isn't dark magic doesn't make it not murder!"

I acknowledged her statement with a nod, "Heating up parts of a ponies brain, causing permanent brain and personality damage."

She was clearly shocked, "Such a thing is possible?" I nodded, and she shuddered, "in that case: Yes"

I returned to less dark territories, "Creating a shield around myself"

"No"

"Creating an invisible shield around my skin, making myself effectively invincible"

"No"

"Drawing on ambient life force to do the same"

"Yes"

"Creating a barrier that a certain monster or demon cannot cross."

"No"

"Creating a barrier that only I can cross"

"Yes"

Interesting, "Spreading the contents of my mind across my body so that I can recover from even a severed head."

She thought for a while, "No"

"Placing my mind inside an object so that I can survive the complete destruction of my body."

"Yes"

"Magically increasing the endurance and healing capacity of an individual, making its death much more difficult to carry out."

"Yes"

I stopped moving pieces, "Really?"

"All forms of healing are in the sphere of 'blood magic' which is forbidden to all but a few select unicorns, chosen by Celestia."

"Interesting. There's also the obvious stuff, like soul stealing and necromancy."

"Yes. Do you have any questions of your own?"

"Actually, how much math do you know?"

"Math? We mostly know addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Mostly useful for finances and statistics"

"So you have no concept of engineering and physics?"  I already suspected they didn't, as I hadn't found the words, so I had to use the English versions.

"No, we don't believe we've heard of those before."

"Math can be useful for many different things. For example, you can use math to find exactly how much force each part of a building or bridge needs to hold, so you can plan for it."

"Interesting. Pony architects simply increase the strength of walls and bridges magically until they no longer tended to fall apart."

"In that case, we're going to have to start from the beginning. First, I'm going to give you a rundown of the Laws of Thermodynamics, some fairly general rules about how objects interact with other objects. The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics states that if any two objects are in thermal equilibrium —meaning that there is no net heat exchange when they are in contact— with a third object, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. This means that temperature is absolute, unlike some other parts of existence, such as space and time, which are relative."

"Do you mean to say that our observation of time may be different from thine, but not the temperature?"

"Yes. Although it is very difficult to alter space or time in a very noticeable manner, your position and speed can slightly alter the rate at which time passes."

"Interesting. Forgive us, but it seems quite obvious that temperature would work that way. Also, why is it called the zeroth law?"

"For your first question, while the laws of thermodynamics are fairly intuitive, they aren't a basis for calculating the behavior of anything on their own. Their main purpose is to give some ground rules as to how the world does and doesn't work. As for the second, it was added later, but was considered so rudimentary they called it the zeroth law."

"Please, continue."

"Alright. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that whenever energy enters or exits a object, the energy inside that object changes accordingly, meaning that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the amount of entropy in interacting objects  will increase. Entropy is the amount of energy that cannot be used. For example, if a room got warmer, that room would have more energy. However, you can't do anything with ambient heat. It's useless."

"Thou art not only saying that the amount of available energy cannot increase, the amount of available energy will always decrease? That is a... Frightening concept."

"Indeed. The third law states that the colder something gets, the less entropy there is, but it hardly alleviates the concept that everything will end eventually."

"Could we speak of something more... Practical?"

"Very well. I will teach you how to calculate the height something reached when it was tossed in the air solely from how long it was up and how hard you threw it."

"We were hoping for something more practical than that."

"You need a basic understanding of these things in order to get to the really practical stuff, but with the time amplification of dreams, and the intellect possessed by both of us, we should be getting there soon."

"We see."

"First, you need to start with basic units. Numbers, although useful, mean nothing by themselves. 46.4 * 12.8 means nothing if you don't have the values they represent. You following so far?"

"Yes."

"We need units for thing like distance and time. Distance is measured in d. The base value is a meter, which is about this big," I created a line a meter long, "However, it doesn't actually matter what unit you use—"

"How could it not matter? Changing the number you are working with changes the outcome completely!"

"No, not really. All that's important is that you use a unit that measures the distance between two points. The formulas I am about to teach you will work even if you use a completely different system. If the number you get is in miles, you may just have to do a couple extra steps to make sure you get a correct answer. It's somewhat complicated, but it works."

"In that case, continue."

"Time will be t and measured in seconds," I provided a quick reference, "There are many others, but that is all we need for now. Of course, we still need a couple of other things, speed for example. Luna, how would you define speed?"

"The distance covered in an amount of time. We don't see how... Oh. We art beginning to understand why thou enjoyest math so much."

"Absolutely! Instead of speed, velocity, or v, is generally used, as the direction of the motion is included in velocity, and that is important. Velocity, can be defined as d/t, because the amount of distance divided by the amount of time will always be the same. However, we still don't have all the parts we need. We still need acceleration, or a, which is the change in velocity over time—"

"That would be d/t/t, correct?"

"No. You see, the division in that case goes from the bottom up, so you would divide t by t, and then divide d by the result, which is not what we want. Rather we use d/(t * t), or d/t^2. ^2 means multiplied by itself, which we will get into later."

"Why wouldst thou multiply t? We were dividing."

"Think of it this way. If you divide twenty by two, you get ten. If you divide that ten by two, you get five. However. multiplying two by two gives four, and twenty divided by four equals five. This isn't a coincidence, it always works this way."

"It is impressive to see how many loopholes thou manages to find in basic logic."

"Wait until you see the quadratic formula. Anyway, now that we have acceleration, we can finally write the equation. d = do + vot + ½at^2"

"What doth the little 'o' mean?"

"That means 'original', or the value you start out with. xo is the height you start at when you throw the object, which you can probably ignore, and vo is the velocity at which you throw the object. Now to solve the actual equation. Since you want to find out how far the object went at its peak, you can halve the amount of time that it was in the air, since it spent the same amount of time going up as down. The acceleration from gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Lets say it was in the air four seconds, and was going at two meters per second at the start. We can then use this equation to learn the height. Would you like to try?"

Luna only needed seventeen seconds to solve the equation, impressive considering she probably had almost no math training. I estimated her at roughly 9000 Rellings, just above my own current intellect.

"Twenty-three point six."

"Very good. I'm impressed you got it so quickly, and without paper."

She was obviously proud of her achievement, but didn't let it go to her head, "We request you continue to teach us math, that we may understand this 'engineering and physics'"

"How would you like to learn about pressure?"

"We are intrigued."

***

"Kinetic energy is equal to ½mv^2, so—"

"Dost that mean that each increase in velocity takes more energy than the last?"

"Yes it does, and here is an explanation of why:  Say you have an object flying through space at a certain speed, and it gets bumped. The object ends up going slightly faster, but the acceleration was perpendicular to the original velocity. Say the original velocity was ten meters per second, and the acceleration was one meter per second. Because of the Pythagorean Theorem —a^2 + b^2 = c^2—, we can find that the end velocity is only barely above ten meters per second. The extra energy didn't disappear, it just takes a lot more energy to get from ten to eleven than from zero to one."

"Although we find this conversation interesting, we grow weary of it. Perhaps we can continue another time. Is there anything else you wanted?"

"Do you play chess?"

She smiled, "Yes, we do. And we are quite good at it."

"This is my own variation on chess. The original chess weighs too heavily on analyzing every possibility and predicting against them. I wanted something that requires you to act on instinct and exercise your intuitive logic skills. I give you: six-dimensional chess."

"Six dimensions? How is that possible?"

I brought up the board, "At first glance, this board seems three-dimensional, but you have three buttons, each of which exchanges your x, y, or z axis for the xi, yi, and zi axis, respectively." I made a rule book appear in front of Luna.

After reading for a while, she spoke, "This likens normal chess to tic-tac-toe!"

"Complexity is the point. Fair warning though, you will lose very badly. And you will lose again. You will keep losing until you get better, and eventually you will become expert. It's not a quick process, but I promise it will hone your mind quite a bit."

***

"Twenty-three moves."

"Do not say that as if it was impressive. You completely defeated us!"

"I beat most people in eight on their first try. Most don't get to twenty-three until their twelfth game."

"It does not feel impressive."

"Do you want to play again?"

"Not really."

"Let's go!"

—5 Games Later—

"That was actually really impressive."

"The fact that thou took forty seven moves to defeat us?"

"No, the fact that I wasn't able to use tricks designed to take advantage of your inexperience. You're still a long ways away to beating me, but you've progressed quite a bit."

"We'll end it on a high note, then," she said dryly.

"When I wake up, I won't be able to talk to anyone. I'll only be able to communicate in charades, unable to effectively communicate anything more abstract than verbs. Besides, I haven't actually been able to teach anyone anything before."

She smiled, "Thou art a strange pony, Recumen. But I also believe thou art a very good one. I very much hope thou can manage to overcome the curse and live thy dream, and that thou can fill the world with the wonders of technology either way."

I was impressed she had abandoned the royal we, "Luna?"

"Yes?"

"Once the citizens of Equestria get to know you as you visit their dreams, I believe they will grow to love you even more than your sister."

"Thank you. That means a lot to me."

And she left.