Magic tests, friends and sprit runs
Previously:
“I’m late! I’m late!” said a speeding purple and white blur that sounded a lot like Twilight Sparkle. “I can’t believe I forgot my nine thirty two magic purge!” Twilight ran past Sophia and out the door. Soon after this a bolt of pure magic went skyward.
Sophia walked outside to where Twilight was putting some kind of metal ring onto her horn. Twilight looked a lot like her cannon self except she wore a white bodysuit and the aforementioned ring, which despite its intricate set of runes, would have looked more appropriate on a prisoner then on a magic student.
“Princess Celestia would like you to go to Ponyville and—” said Sophia.
“Stop,” said Twilight. “I don’t know what my brother has been telling the Princess, but tell her she’s been misinformed. I am much too dangerous to leave this campus, let alone travel anywhere. I turned my parents into plants. I failed my entrance exam! The only reason I got in was because I was too dangerous to leave untrained!”
Celestia landed by Twilight. “Twilight, you passed. Let me be perfectly clear. You are capable of fully controlling your magic, and I don’t mean with magic restraints, or magic purges or any of the other silly tricks you have been trying. I mean you, on your own, without anything or anypony else helping you.”
A few days after Sophia, Spike and Twilight settled into Ponyville, Twilight returned to the library after rushing out early that morning, she was wearing her horn ring and white spell safety suit.
“Twilight why are you still wearing that magic suppressing horn ring and safety suit?” asked Sophia.
Spike dropped his broom. “Why!? Because her magic is wild, unstable, incontrollable, unmanageable, overpowering—”
“Ahem! While normally I would applaud your rich vocabulary, I was asking Twilight.” Sophia turned to Twilight. “So why are you?”
Twilight looked off to the side. “Um, it is like he said. My magic is uncontrollable. I’m trying but either I have to do a magic purge or risk a magic feedback.”
“Ok, Celestia is no idiot. So there is some way for you to control your magic.” Sophia thought for moment. “Let’s see, you suffer from magic surges which make your magic go out of control. Magic surges? Twilight, how similar is what you suffer from compared to what all unicorn foals go through?”
“It’s the same thing, I had them all though foalhood. The difference is scale,” said Twilight. “Most unicorns magic surges are confined to telekinesis or one sustained spell applied to themselves or to a nearby object. But in my case it was mass telekinesis bad enough that my parents had to remove everything but my crib from my nursery. Then as I became a filly they got more and more infrequent until the test. Then they got more powerful and branched out into temporary, lasting, and permanent spells. Thankfully enchantments are too complex for wild magic.”
“And most unicorns grow out of it?” asked Sophia.
Twilight nodded.
“Then we just need to figure out why you have not. Hm.” Sophia thought then smirked. “To the self-help section, parenting shelf and pull all the books about raising a unicorn foal.”
Spike spoke up, “One problem. You haven’t actually got around to reorganizing yet. You’re still working on adapting the systems you know to an Equestrian library.”
Sophia blinked. “Ok, we might have to do a little more looking than I expected but it’s still a good plan.”
It took an hour, but Sophia, Spike and Twilight finally found a parenting book that talked about unicorn magic surges.
Sophia read, “Question: My child is five years old or older and still has magic surges? Answer: Magic surges can continue up to age eight. Beyond this age, magic relaxation therapy can fix the problem. Magic relaxation therapy involves having the child stop or cut back on the intentional magic they cast and let the magic naturally leak out. The reason this works is because magic surges are most often caused by a miscalibration of the magic regulation network and letting magic build up lets the network recalibrate.”
Twilight turned back to the bookshelf. “Let’s keep looking. Maybe there’s…”
“Twilight,” said Sophia. “We have our answer. Well basically.”
“NO, WE DON’T! Letting a magic surge happen isn’t an option!”
“But the book says—“
“I don’t care what the book says! It isn’t an option!”
Sophia blinked. “Ok, maybe you should tell me what happened, I get the feeling that what happened was worse than in the show.”
Twilight took a deep breath. “Ok, it started after I failed my test or thought I failed. I went home with my parents….”
Twilight and her parents were riding to their home. Her parents had been talking to her the whole way home but Twilight wasn’t really paying attention. Finally the carriage pulled up to the front door. Twilight got out and trudged to the library. She plopped down on the floor in front of ‘basic spell primer grade 9’. Finally she said her first words since her apology to the examiners, “Ugh, What’s wrong with me! I couldn’t open one stupid egg. I didn’t even know how to start! My books never covered that! Stupid book!” Twilight threw the primer across the room. “Stupid me.”
The primer bounced off the wall and hit Twilight in the head, more specifically the horn. Twilight’s world went pure white.
“Ack, now she’s astral projecting. Wait, she’s not tearing herself part anymore. Princess, keep her occupied while we fix her body,” said a mare near Twilight.
Twilight Sparkle was confused, last thing she remembered was something hitting her horn. After that her memories were a jumbled mess like she was seeing everything from everywhere at once. Twilight turned toward where the voice had come from.
Twilight saw ten medical ponies around a table. On the table was what could vaguely be called a pony, if you call something that looked like Twilight’s last attempt at making cookies a pony. Twilight had no idea how she managed to burn part of each cookie without cooking other parts and she had no idea how she got little pockets of red food coloring that exploded during baking.
Back in the present, Spike spoke up, “How bad are we talking about? Was it like the sal—”
“No, I didn’t explode,” replied Twilight. “I have no idea how I managed to make the salad explode during dinner last night.”
“That reminds me,” said Sophia, “I used the last of the salsa testing the emergency generator last night. So if you mix up another batch…”
“That wasn’t salsa. It was supposed to be salad dressing!” said Twilight. “And we aren’t using my cooking as an emergency fuel supply. Now if we’re done talking about my inexplicably bad cooking skills, can we get back to my story?”
“Sure,” said Spike. “Sparky”
Twilight rolled her eyes and continued her story.
Suddenly Twilight’s view was blocked by a wall of white feathers. “Come, little one. We have much to discuss,” said a voice Twilight had only heard once before but would never forget, Princess Celestia.
Twilight stared up at the ruler of all ponies.
“Twilight Sparkle—“ said Princess Celestia.
Suddenly Twilight’s memories started sorting themselves. She had turned her family into PLANTS! She had messed with the local flora, weather, and space-time, all of which required a license to do. A license she didn’t have! The princess was here to put her in a dungeon or banish her or banish her and put her in a dungeon in the place she banished her!
Twilight turned and ran out the door. Twilight turned around and saw Princess Celestia right behind her. When she turned back forward she found herself one foot from a wall. She tried to stop but she slid right though the wall. Twilight blinked.
Twilight heard a smack on the wall behind her. Twilight looked around and saw she was in a filly’s bedroom.
Twilight didn’t get much further in her inspection because there was a flash of light and Princess Celestia was in the room rubbing her muzzle. “Twilight—“
Twilight ran though the alicorn’s legs and out the door. She ran down the hall and tried to open the front door but her magic was responding, so she ran through the door. Ok, I have no magic but apparently walls and doors aren’t stopping me. Twilight turned and ran through the nearest house, literally. After running another thirty minutes without any sight of Princess Celestia, Twilight found a closet and stopped.
Ok, I’m running from Princess Celestia because I broke every law on magic. Twilight started crying into her hooves. I-I turned my family into plants. Mom! Dad! Shiny! They be alright, right? I’m just a filly surely somepony can reverse what’ve—OH, NO! My horn it’s not lit that means that was a permanent transformation! Those require a counter spell but I don’t know any plant transformation spells those were next week! That means… That means… There is no counter spell! My family is going to be plants permanently! What do I do? What can I do? Twilight, get a hold of yourself you need to think logically. … I have to run away. I have to go somewhere far away where I can’t hurt anypony, ever again. That is the only answer.
Twilight managed to sneak back to her home after getting lost a couple times. Her house was piled on a mishmash of everything, including the kitchen sink. She saw the earth ponies trying to get the rapid plant growth under control, normally not a problem but these plants made Kudzu look like the celestial century lily which blooms only once every hundred years. There was a group of unicorns by the plants that used to be her parents and BBBFF and a second group unicorns working on a whiteboard descripting a non-euclidean discontinuous geometry, which apparently described the inside of her house given by how they would go inside then erase and rewrite part of the board.
Twilight swallowed. I did this. I did this because I couldn’t control my magic.
“There you are. We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Your body is ready to house you again,” said a voice behind Twilight.
Twilight jumped away and spun. She could now see the voice came from a blue unicorn in a doctor’s coat. The name on the coat said Hygiene, M.D. Her mane was cyan and her cutie mark was the international symbol of medicine, a single snake wrapped around a wooden staff.
Twilight thought about running but was curious about what Hygiene had said. “M-My body?” asked Twilight.
“Yes, you astral projected while we were operating on you. We fixed your body while you were away, well as much as we were able to. Your fur, mane and tail will take time to grow back and one of your legs will need to be in a cast for a couple weeks.”
“And I’m not in trouble?”
“Is that what you thought? No, child. Princess Celestia would never punish you for something that wasn’t your fault. Are you ready to return to your body?”
Twilight nodded and followed Dr. Hygiene.
Doctor Hygiene led Twilight to a room with what looked like a filly sized mummy.
“Is that me?” asked Twilight.
Hygiene nodded. “You weren’t easy on yourself. Now back in you go. The faster you return to your body the sooner you will be better.”
Twilight gulped and immediately wondered how she could do that without a body. Twilight crawled onto the bed and into her body.
Back in the library (four days after Luna’s return), Twilight was finishing her story, “After that Celestia tried to make me her personal student but I thought it was because I was so dangerous. She said it was not but it was my choice. I turned her down and we all saw how that worked out.”
“And your parents weren’t there?” asked Sophia.
Twilight shook her head. “No, it took weeks for the royal mages to undo what I had done to them. Until then I lived with another unicorn family.”
“And have you had any magic surges after that?” asked Sophia.
Twilight nodded. “But only twice in the same uncontrolled fashion, the first time, well there’s a reason why my old dorm room is now being used in ‘studies of wild magic’ and ‘non-pegasus managed weather systems’. The second, last I heard the apple tree I turned into a pony got adopted into the Apple family and was called Sundance Apple.”
Sophia tapped her hoof on her muzzle. “So not a one-time thing. Think Twilight, Celestia said you could control your magic without magic purges, what did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know! My magic is uncontrollable. But if I don’t stop the magic purges, I’ll disappoint Princess Celestia, if I disappoint her—“ said Twilight at an increasing pace.
“You are not going to disappoint Celestia,” said Spike.
Sophia started pacing, thinking about the task ahead while Twilight had her panic attack.
“—she’ll think I’m not taking my task seriously, and if she doesn’t think I’m not taking my task seriously—” continued Twilight
“You are taking it seriously,” reassured Spike
Twilight continued “—she might start doubting my abilities, and if she starts doubting my abilities—”
“She isn’t going to doubt your abilities,” replied Spike.
“—she might think I’m not worthy to be in her school and if she thinks I’m not worthy to be in her school—”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
“—she might kick me out and if she kicks me out—”
Spike face palmed.
“—my family would be shamed and if my family was shamed—”
“Why would your family be shamed?”
“—they’d be forced to kick me out, if they kicked me out—”
“Why would your family kick you out?”
“—I would be forced to live on the street, if I was forced to live on the street—”
“Aren’t you forgetting someplace?”
“—I would be forced to do that for money.”
“Ok, that would be bad but it’s—”
“I DON’T WANT TO WORK IN A WAREHOUSE MOVING BOXES!!”
Sophia snapped towards Twilight. “How did we get to you working in a warehouse?”
Spike held up his claw and started counting. “Let’s see, Celestia’s going to doubt her abilities and is going to kick her out of school, her family is going to be shamed and kick her out then she’s going to live on the street and that somehow leads to her being a warehouse worker.” Spike shrugged. “Don’t ask me how. I could see how living on the streets could lead to a life of crime but a warehouse worker, no idea.”
Twilight blushed. “Spike! I would never… crime is illegal!”
“No kidding,” said Spike.
Sophia walked forward. “Anyways, during Twilight’s panic attack I figured out some ideas of how to let her magic surge safely. In my world we transported electrical energy long distances using metal rope—”
“You mean power lines?” deadpanned Spike.
“Yes. Is it possible to do something similar with magic?”
“Thum conduction lines! Tesla Coil used them in technologically assisted magic!” Twilight smacked her head. “His undirected magic experiments! Why didn’t I think of it before! He designed an interface that allowed a unicorn to power a magic device with just raw magic. He abandoned it when he invented an interface that converted common spells like light or telekinesis into power because those were much more energy efficient but his original designs should work with even wild magic!”
“Sounds like we—“ said Sophia before Twilight cut her off.
“We need the complete magical engineering kit, twenty ccs of ground unicorn horn, ten ccs of ground diamond, a pound of pure gold, a tetrahedal mold and a smiting forge. I need to find his original…”
“Our solution,” finished Sophia.
“I’ll get a first aid kit.” Spike thought a moment. “And contact information for local construction companies.”
“Spike, we aren’t going to destroy the library,” said Sophia adding under her breath, “Even if we have to go a mile out of town to make sure.”
“It is not for that,” deadpanned Spike. “Tesla Coil didn’t think small. He planned to send electrical power everywhere via giant lightning generators.”
A week later Twilight, Sophia and Spike were inside a large shed on the exterior of the Golden Oaks Library. The inside of the shed was nothing much to look at, just a gray cabinet all along the far right side and a row of metal shelves, but it was the start of Equestria’s first data center although only the power supply (inside the gray cabinet) had been completed.
Sophia looked around the shed. “When you said that Tesla Coil didn’t think small, I thought we could improve on it and shrink it down, but we actually needed to make it bigger.”
Twilight blushed. She was wearing her magic suppression horn ring, but if everything when as planned this would be the last time for long while. Twilight turned to Spike. “Spike are we ready for operation?”
Spike nodded. “We did the power tests, the stress test, tested all the inputs and completed the final post-tests inspection. The system is ready to power absolutely nothing.”
“Spike! It not powering nothing. It’s hooked up to the test load,” said Twilight.
“You mean the giant fuse that blows if the power exceeds max operating voltage?”
“Spike, it’s not a giant fuse,” said Sophia. Twilight nodded along. “It’s a giant fuse box.”
Twilight’s head snapped to Sophia. “It’s a test instrument that measures the system output up to the max allowable voltage.”
“Twilight, it’s a box with a bunch of fuses in it,” said Sophia. “We selected it as the test load because it would be cheap to replace should the whole thing blow.”
“Let’s just hook me into the darn thing.”
Sophia nodded. “Beginning long term spiky unicorn power test. Connecting unicorn subject TS.”
“You never did explain why we are specifying the type of pony. Only unicorns and alicorns can power the converter and I don’t think Celestia, Luna or Cadence will ever be hooked in.”
“Oh, you don’t know, a new nerdier alicorn could pop up any time.” Sophia removed Twilight’s horn ring and replaced it with a horn ring connected to a wire.
“Ya, how likely is that? We got what? One in a thousand years?”
Sophia smirked and hooked line from the horn ring into an inlet on wall. “You’d be surprised.”
