Chapter 3: The Paths To Magic

Since she had arrived in this world and established her new identity, Sunset had studied the ambient magic, and read the laughably-amateurish, wildly-speculative works that passed among the Humans for thaumaturgical lore. Most of it seemed nothing but vague fantasies born of pure superstition, and a distressing amount of that which was more specific dealt with invoking a whole bestiary of frankly-terrifying extradimensional beings, many of them explicitly servants of the Morningstar, and possessing extremely-malign natures.

If these entities were imaginary, then the lore regarding them was useless. If these were not imaginary, then the last thing that Sunset Shimmer wanted to do was attempt to summon them. These were the sort of creatures that, in Equestria, would have been banished to Tartarus. It was not generally a good idea to treat with such beings. No matter what they promised, since in any case most of them were reputed liars.

But amidst the mystic woo-woo and the dire demonologies, Sunset discovered statements here and there that corresponded -- though often in very distorted forms -- to the findings of scientific thaumatology. When she was neither maneuvering through the social labyrinth of Canterlot High School nor regaining her mastery of music, she built her own little home laboratory -- there it was, sitting well-separated from her bookshelves with cinderblocks to protect her books from any psychokinetic surges -- and undertook occasional field trips, trying to understand how magic worked in this dimension.

It did work, that was one of the first things she ascertained. In proving this, she achieved something beyond the thaumatology of the whole Human civilization, but it was really not all that surprising. She had already suspected the truth, because for the portal to operate at all, it was only logical that there had to be a thaumic field on both sides.

Also, she had one huge advantage over the Human wannabe-mages. They merely aspired to magic, while she was a trained mage, well-versed in magic theory, who merely had to figure out how to adapt that theory to the practice of magic in an alien world and form. Difficult, but surely not beyond her capabilities, given who and what she was in truth. When she started her studies, she hoped to work out the answer in a few weeks.

Now, almost four years later, she was frustrated by the difficulty of the task. She had learned that she could cast certain spells, substituting extensive vocal chanting and complex rituals for the almost-instinctive use of her horn to generate the necessary psycho-kinetic wave forms. For instance, an incantation lasting merely a minute would let her control a die roll about 40 percent of the time -- a useless cantrip, as no sane gamblers would fail to be suspicious if she did any such thing in front of them in a game.

But it did show that she could telekinese. Or, possibly, ontokinese. She wasn't entirely sure which she was actually doing, though telekinesis had been her original aim.

She could also summon fire. To her fingertips. Just enough to light tinder, and after a ten-minute long ritual. She suspected this was only possible because her main magical Talent as a Pony was for pyrokinesis.

Of course, she could do this much faster with a flint-and-steel, let alone a hydrocarbon-based lighter. Both of which she actually owned.

Sunset Shimmer was starting to understand why the Humans had neglected magic in favor of technology.

There were two fundamental problems. The first was that the ambient magical field in the Human world was so terribly weak. A caster normally drew her power from the field, and -- based on one horrible experiment which left her ten pounds lighter, starving, and very glad she'd chosen to do no more than manifest a tiny pyrokinetic spark -- the technique of draining one's own body to power spells would not be even remotely practical here.

This did make obvious to her why some of the nastier Human tomes advocated animal and even Human (preferably virgin, due to less interference in the source's thaumic fields) sacrifice, as that might have gotten her enough energy to achieve more useful effects -- however, her soul was still Equestrian. Yes, she wanted to force her way back into Celestia's recognition -- but not by doing something such as that, practically the pure definition of the vilest warlockry. There was only one virgin sacrifice she was in any moral position to make, and that would have been an act she only could have done once -- so, no.

Reading about that sort of thing did help decide her against contacting any Human mages of the diabolic traditions, though. She did not for a moment trust any being who recommended such procedures, things that she was sure no civilized Equestrians would have countenanced.

It was because she was limited to only a trickle of thaums, though, that her casting times were so impractically-long to achieve even trivial effects. It was only because of her great skill that she was able to achieve any effects at all, and she could clearly see, from her experiments, why Human scientists had been unable to verify the reality of magic. An untrained caster would have taken far, far longer than Sunset Shimmer, and probably given up on it as useless long before any noticeable discharge manifested.

The other possibility was improving her focus. Human mages used manual gestures, which made it obvious that they used their hands as (inferior) analogues of Unicon horns. Sometimes they employed swords, knives or wands, whose purpose Sunset immediately grasped -- they would crudely channel the caster's psycho-kinetic energy, allowing longer-wave emissions, though limited by the relatively inflexible nature of such a simple prosthetic device, compared to the wondrous pinnacle of evolution that was the horn of a Unicorn.

Sunset Shimmer experimented with wands, but found great difficulty in so directing her magic. When she tried to use the reflexes she had developed over a lifetime with her Unicorn horn, she inevitably wound up trying to channel the power through her nonexistent Human horn; which accomplished nothing save giving her a headache, if she tried it for too long. The equivalent in her true form would have been to try to cast spells by waving her hooves around, which wasn't even how the (rare) Earth Pony mages operated -- they meditated, compounded potions and did ritual magic by walking patterns.

Eventually she accepted that -- despite her current Human form -- her magic was tied to her soul, which was Pony. This meant that she had to work within Pony magical techniques, using her studies of Human magic to adapt them to her new form.

Sunset now had neither horn nor wings -- did that mean that she was an "Earth Human?" She had already enjoyed some theoretical successes with ritual magic, though power limitations rendered it impractical for any serious work; meditation was absolutely necessary for the slow castings she performed. Perhaps she might attempt to compound potions? She didn't have the materials for Equestrian alchemy, but what if she copied Human formulae?

She plunged into the Human tradition of alchemy. She lacked the funds for a full laboratory, but did what she could with an electric stovetop and makeshift crucibles.

After various failures -- numerous annoying stenches, several hair-singeing flares (which convinced her of the importance of safety goggles) and one outright explosion (fortunately a very minor one) -- she concluded that much of Human alchemy was just poorly-understood basic chemistry, just as her school textbooks told her. Neither wanting to kill herself in a chemical accident in her very-inadequately-equipped home lab, nor have to explain to Principal Celestia why she was messing around with mercury in the school lab, she eventually abandoned this avenue of research.

Herbal potions were more promising -- and she indeed succeeded in making some effective herbal remedies, by dint of long effort producing compounds which duplicated the effects of medicines she could buy cheaply at any nearby pharmacy. She could have done the same sort of thing in Equestria, with similar futility. Eventually she gave up on this approach: it was gettintg her nowhere closer to true magic.

She did succeed in making several herbal compounds which had strongly psychoactive effects, and which some of the sources claimed would augment her psychic powers and open her perceptions to other worlds. Sampling the fruits of her labors, she managed more than once to get incredibly inebriated, and on one memorably-frightening occasion suffered horrible hallucinations -- at least she hoped they were hallucinations -- of some of the nastier creatures of Human demonology.

Normally, Sunset didn't even like getting drunk, and she could see that this was not a path to power, but rather to madness. After she awoke, still shaking in terror, from those visions, she abandoned all further attempts at doing more than making soothing teas to aid her in her meditations.

Afterward, she judged this a lucky escape -- had she continued this direction of research, she might have hit upon the Human world's equivalent of witchweed, and wound up temporarily boosting her thaumic output at the cost of destroying her sanity. As it was, she was still occasionally troubled by nightmares; the worst being ones in which yellow-eyed formless black horrors hatefully hissed offers of assistance for some dreadful unspoken price that she knew she could not and must not pay, not if she meant to remain the mistress of her very soul.

One of the few solid and useful successes of her many attempts had been her construction of a crude and clumsy, but workable thaumometer. This had enabled her to measure her output, and gain feedback as to what techniques actually generated thaumic effects, as opposed to merely being mystical nonsense, like the majority of Human "magic." She left that machine -- roughly the size and shape of a small refrigerator, though it required no external electrical source -- set up and running, keeping a continual digital record of the ambient thaumic field in which it sat.

It was due to this machine that she realized when she'd made the breakthrough.