Chapter 6: Experimentation

It actually made sense.

Magic worked by resonance effects. The thaumic output generated by a single Pony was limited, and no mage could achieve much trying to bend the Universe to her will by brute force. Instead, a mage tuned her thaumic output, through the variable emitter of her horn, to resonate with the effect she was attempting to achieve. This meant that her energy accumulated, pulse after pulse, until it could overcome the opposing magic resistance. Against an inanimate object, this was simply a matter of finding the right emission frequency; against an actively resisting target, of course, this was more difficult.

For an experienced Unicorn mage, achieving the resonant frequency was fairly automatic. Not only would she have a good idea of the approximate range in which the frequency lay, as she emitted magic at a target, she would receive feedback regarding her effort in the form of the thaumic return. The Unicorn horn was basically a magic antenna, with biological structures that aided in pre-processing signals both sent and received, connecting to the appropriate sensory centers in the cerebral cortex. Tuning was mostly subconscious, though a mage could consciously focus on it to achieve specific efects.

Sunset Shimmer was of course most familiar with Unicorn magic, having been one, but she knew that the other Kinds had analogous structures to achieve their effects. Pegasi used their flight feathers as emitters and receivers to shape their flight fields and perceive the air currents through which they maneuvered. Earth Ponies used their hooves and hair to interact with the energies of rock, soil and metabolic processes.

Sunset knew something, from her personal tutelage by Celestia, that most Ponies did not. There had originally been five, rather than only three, Kinds of Ponies. In addition to Unicorns, Pegasi and Earth Ponies, there were the Flutter Ponies, whose magic had been mediated through large chitkeratinous wings, and had been tuned to the larger flows of life in the ecosphere. They had been lost, vanishing long ago -- of the few who even knew they had ever really existed, many assumed that they had long since gone extinct. Their fate was uncertain.

Then, there were the Sea Ponies.

Their magic had been mediated through their voice boxes -- it was a magic of song. Of music.

The Sea Ponies were not wholly gone. Rather, they had long ago fled from contact with the land-based Ponies, split into several distinct sub-races and now interacted with the land only occasionally and under circumstances the Sea Ponies controlled. They were shy and distrustful, and hence their magic was only poorly understood by Equestrian thaumology.

But they could be very powerful. They could generate force fields, control the ocean currents, raise or quell great waves. They could mesmerize with their songs -- there were cases in which they had overcome entire towns of land Ponies in such fashions. Sirens -- roughly their equivalent of warlocks, though the term did not have the same ethical implications to the Sea Ponies, whose morality could be quite alien to Equestrians, had been known to affect whole cities, even provinces.

Sunset Shimmer did not think that she had been transformed into the Human equivalent of a Sea Pony. Her current body showed no particular water-adaptations, though the Human were in general at least as good swimmers as were the Three Kinds of Ponies, which was to say fairly good swimmers by the standards of non-aquatic mammals. Nor had she shown any especial capabilities with sung magic -- though, come to think of it, she'd achieved most of her active magical effects in this world, pitiful as they were, by verbal incantations in the Human traditions. It hadn't even occurred to her to try to sing the spells.

What a musician did when playing was conceptually complicated. What if, without realizing it, she'd transferred some of her skills from Unicorn magic over to her guitar? She knew that she could still sense magic, though only fuzzily without her horn to focus what she felt. What if she tried to generate magical effects through music, using her guitar to guide her thaumic emissions?

If this worked, she could get back her magic.

She considered the problem for a moment. She should do some sort of experiment, perform a test. What should she attempt?

Pyrokinesis, she decided. That would succeed or fail unequivocally, and it was her special magical talent. And she had the test apparatus she'd used the last time. She'd even saved some of the unlit tinder she'd collected from before.

She quickly set up her experiment. A bronze brazier, filled with torn-up paper and wood chips, set on a cinderblock for safety, on a bare patch of floor, clear both of her books and her chemical supplies. A small home fire extinguisher -- these Humans were clever artisans! -- by her side, to extinguish any blaze, should she manage to produce one. She'd long ago disabled her smoke detector, so there should be no distractions.

All was in readiness. Swallowing nervously, Sunset picked up her guitar.

She quickly improvised a melody to match the lyrics of the pyrokinetic incantation she had adapted from the Human magical tradition. She had always been a gifted musician, and she soon slid into her sweet spot: self and song and instrument, music and magic joining to become one. She attuned with herself, then turned her attention outward, to the target.

She could feel her own thaumic output, sense the return from the target, with a power and precision like nothing she had known since she had stepped through the Mirror Portal into this accursed world. The clarity was still far, far less than it had been in her memories of Equestria, but it was so much greater than the fuzziness she had felt ever since becoming Human that she might have gasped from the sheer bliss of it, would it not have disrupted her song.

She shifted frequencies, found the resonance. Something was damping it out, but she locked onto the combination, and then there was no more damping. At that she increased the intensity of the song, of the spell, pouring all her power down the channel. She could feel the target's own vibrations in response to her magic, and she pulsed psychic power into it in time with those vibrations. She could feel the amplitude of the waves peaking higher and higher ... just a little more ...

FWOOMF! The tinder almost exploded into flame, igniting at several points simultaneously and sending a tongue of fire ascending to the ceiling. So did a foot-square section of carpet underneath the brazier, which was immediately engulfed in flames from below.

"I did it!" she crowed, jumping up and down like a little filly. "I have my magic back!" It was exceedingly weak magic by the standards of an Equestrian mage, but powerful in terms of this magic-impoverished world. Proof of it was plain in the fire in the brazier, under the brazier, starting to spread outward ...

Her reason caught up with her emotions, and she realized that she had just set fire to her own apartment.

"Yikes!" she shrieked, and leapt for the fire extinguisher. Her dextrous hands pulled the pin, worked the lever. Chill chemical fog sprayed forth.

A few moments later, the fire was out, but the room was full of a nauseating combined stench of burnt tinder, burnt carpet, heated bronze and chemical foams.

I've got to improve my focus, Sunset reflected as she flung open the door, leaned outside coughing, and was very glad that she'd kept that fire extinguisher by her side. Also, find a better place to do my tests. I nearly went out in a literal blaze of glory.

She took a breath of the relatively-clean outdoors air -- polluted by the exhaust of countless internal combustion engines, as was the case in all Human cities, but nevertheless purer than the combustion products within her apartment -- and sighed. Then she grinned.

I'm back in business, she exulted. Now I can really get to work.