Lyra's World

It took a couple of weeks to make any progress on the cutie mark front, so I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail. I’ll just give some highlights that stood out in my memory. A training montage!

Day 1:

“Ahhh! Nngggg….”

I screamed as Dr. Vahlen sliced open my cutie mark. It’s one of the more sensitive areas on a lot of ponies, which is kind of strange since it’s right out there in the open – most erogenous zones are in places that are harder to touch without being intimate. I think it might just be a social construct – ponies think it’s weird to touch someone’s cutie mark, so they never get touched there, so when you do get touched there you really notice it. That would explain why it’s a perfectly comfortable place to have saddlebags bouncing – I wouldn’t want to wear something like that over my teats, or whatever.

“Are you sure you do not want the anesthetic?” she asked, as she wedged a thin sliver of cold metal into the wound before it could close, and started slicing a thin strip off one of the flaps of skin with agonizing slowness.

I whimpered, and shook my head. “I want to keep my head clear,” I managed to say. “Besides, pain isn’t so bad when you know it’s not going to do any permanent harm.” I felt my tail starting to raise, and forced it down to cover myself.

“That is not medically accurate,” she said, removing the strip holding the wound open, and letting it heal. I shivered with pleasure as the pain receded, only to return again in a different place as she sliced me open again. “However, this should not be sufficient pain to cause permanent mental damage. These incisions are only skin deep.”

I giggled. “Strangely enough, I keep most of my nerve endings in my skin. What are you doing this for, anyway? Couldn’t you take these samples from the body I left behind?”

“We will study it as well,” she said, taking the next strip from my shoulder. “But it no longer has a purpose mark.”

“Cutie mark,” I corrected.

“The commander has forbidden the use of that term,” she said. “At any rate, we will compare all of these samples – the skin where the cutie mark is displayed, other skin taken from a living subject, and a sample taken from the deceased. We also have taken samples from Johann. I will note that he accepted the anesthetic.”

“Johann?”

“The other unicorn,” she said, letting the second wound heal. “The one you transformed. He has no purpose mark.”

“Ah,” I said, giving a sigh of relief as the pain faded. “You won’t find anything. The coloration is magical, not –“

“Stop!” she said. “Do not contaminate my examination with your bias! If you tell me what I will find, then I will tend to find only what you tell me.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “I do know some things about cutie – er, about purpose marks. Are you sure you don’t want me to tell you what I remember? I took the class ages ago, but I could give some background at least.”

“Do you know how to change them?” she asked.

“No… it’s supposed to be impossible,” I said. “Although that’s obviously not true, since it’s happened a couple of times before.”

“Then I would prefer to approach this subject with an open mind.”

Day 2:

While the scientists examined the samples, Johann and I were told to practice magic in ‘the box’, a room-sized machine that had every sort of detection equipment known to dragonkind pointed at the interior. “It cannot read your mind,” Dr. Vahlen told me, “but only because we do not yet know how to properly interpret the data it gathers from your brain.”

I wondered what it would make of the timelessness. I wondered if the dragons would be able to replicate that. It seemed unlikely; the timeless chaos created and manipulated matter and energy, not the other way around.

But magic was subject to physical forces, so maybe they’d make some progress there.

So, I spent a couple of hours with Johann trying to remember how we’d first been taught levitation back in magic kindergarten. “Your body knows how to use magic,” I told her, “but as a baby you were conditioned not to use it because of the negative effects caused by uncontrolled magical spells…”

“I didn’t have magic as a baby,” she said.

“Oh!” I smiled at her. “Then it should be easy. Most of the trouble young unicorns have learning to use magic is overcoming their ‘housetraining’.”

It still took a while for her to figure out how to light up her horn, but once she could I was able to take hold of her magic and guide her through the basics – light and levitation. She picked them up instantly, although both her power and control needed work.

If I was a real teacher I probably would have just made her practice that for a while, but she was eager to move on to more complicated stuff. I started teaching her how to read and write magic, since I didn’t have very many spells memorized.

That took a bit longer, since it was essentially learning a new language.

“Can’t I just write it out in English?” she asked.

“You could, but the runes are mnemonic,” I told her. “It’ll make more sense when we get to actually casting some of them.”

We spent the rest of the day studying that. I had her hold up the flash cards with levitation, and indicate her answer in multiple-choice drills by making the cards light up, so she got some practical work in too.

Day 3:

“You want to do what?”

Dr. Vahlen kept her demeanor professional. “I wish to observe the process of a purpose mark fading. To do this requires you to die again. If you have any preference as to the method of your demise –“

“Chopping off my head worked,” I said, feeling a bit of a thrill as I remembered her standing over me with the axe, blood splattered across her white coat. “You need to make sure the cu—the purpose mark isn’t part of the new body that forms, so something has to be cut off. It might as well be my head.”

She nodded. “I suspected as much. We have assembled a guillotine in the box. If you will follow me…”

“You’re not going to use the axe again?” I asked, pouting a bit.

She frowned at my response. “I assure you, the guillotine will be much faster, and far less painful.”

She was right. I set my head down on the padded rest, and let them buckle me in, strapped to a cushioned bench, with a metal retraining collar locked around my neck. Straining my eyes upwards, I could see the blade glinting. When they pushed the button, it didn’t just fall – it was propelled downwards by a pair of hydraulic pistons, and by the time I realized it had happened my head was already in the basket.

Day 4:

Johann was a bit distracted at magic practice. “Why is there a guillotine sitting in the middle of the room?”

I shrugged. “I guess they think they might need to kill me again. Just ignore it.”

Day 5:

“So, any progress?” I asked.

“After examining the data from your death in great detail, we believe we were able to isolate the… probabilistic anomaly representing your purpose mark,” she said.

“Probabilistic – oh! You mean you were able to see it messing with chance? That makes sense, since cutie marks—“

“Purpose marks,” she corrected.

“Right, sorry. Purpose marks are related to a pony’s destiny.”

“It was strange,” Dr. Vahlen said. “We were expecting it to be similar to the quantum particle effects emitted by your magical spells, but there is no apparent relationship between the two. It’s almost as if your cutie marks are not magic, at least not as you know it.”

“I could have told you that,” I said.

She nodded. “I am glad that you did not. That I was able to reach the conclusion on my own makes it a much more significant finding.”

“So what’s the plan for today? Are you going to kill me again? I notice you left the guillotine there.”

She shook her head. “No, no, that should not be necessary until we know more. For today, we simply wish to observe how your purpose mark interacts with your magic. You said that it only let you cast weather magic, but we have observed you casting other spells during your work with Johann.”

“Ah, right. I might have exaggerated a bit,” I said. “I’m only able to cast weather magic well. I’ve always been able to cast other spells by reading them off a scroll, and of course any unicorn can use light and levitation.”

She waved a claw dismissively. “I figured as much. But we wish to compare a spell that your mark assists with to a spell that it does not assist with, and if at all possible, to an effect generated by a wish.”

I shuddered at the last one. “Okay,” I said. “I assume you want this done in the box.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

So I cast ‘Woodwinds’, at a normal volume and wind intensity, and then cast the spell to summon my lyre, which didn’t work because my lyre was stored in a concept space attached to a completely different universe. Their engineering crew made me a new lyre, and I was able to work out how to attune and store it after a few tries – I don’t have that part memorized, but I’ve had to do it a few times and the theory is simple enough.

For the wish, I wished I had a million dollars, letting the briefcase of worthless counterfeit paper appear at my hooves. For a second I considered summoning the molten gold, but to be honest I’m not a big fan of burning to death, and all that gold would have been a bitch to clean up. It’s heavy.

Day 6:

“That’s so cool!” I said. “How did you do it?”

Johann blushed. She was cute when she blushed – almost as cute as Bon Bon. The pink highlights always look ridiculous against my green or Twilight’s lavender, but when a white or pink pony blushes, it just works. “It wasn’t that hard. I was studying computer science before I was recruited for X-Com, so I just whipped it up in XAML.”

What she had was a magic slate with all the magical runes in a box at the side, labelled in English when you touched them. You could drag them around and build spells right there in the middle, without having to draw the runes out or erase them or anything, and related runes would snap into place with little lines indicating the relation. “This is amazing,” I said. “I mean, I’d heard that some of the old wizards had things like this – glowing runes hovering in midair that they could move around and adjust – but that’s a long-lost art. Even Twilight Sparkle just uses a chalkboard.”

“Do you think… that we could actually cast a spell? With this the memorization isn’t as crucial. I mean, I’ll still work on it, but I really really want to actually cast something.”

I perked an ear at her, then nodded. She’d earned it. “Sure. Now, if I was a real professor, I’d have this certain sequence of simple spells that exercise all the magical runes between them, but I’m not and I didn’t bring any textbooks with me, so we’ll have to improvise. Let’s see…”

Woodwinds and Hammerspace are not simple spells, but they’re the ones I know, so we did those first. It wasn’t a terrible choice -- between them they used all the runes except for Spear and Loki. Hammerspace was a bit too big to fit on the slate at first, but Johann was able to poke at a few things and ‘recompile’ and all the letters got smaller. Judging by my brief view of the other ‘apps’ the slate had on it, ‘Runedit’ really was pretty simple, but I was still impressed.

For Spear, I worked out the Magic Laser spell that I’d learned back in the day and forgotten how to cast. I remembered that it had a Spear array as the central active construct, and went from there. I don’t think I got it exactly right, but I got something that worked, and the real point was just to demonstrate Spear, anyway.

I didn’t know what to do with Loki, so I messed around attaching a bunch of copies of it to a Light spell, and ended up with a seriously nauseating version of Dazzle. After we finished throwing up, I tried to make Johann promise to never, ever cast it again, but she wanted to try it out on the aliens if she was ever sent out into the field.

“It doesn’t have the range,” I said. “You’ll always catch yourself.”

She frowned “I can close my eyes?”

I looked at the Loki runes suspiciously. “I’m not sure that’ll help.”

Day 7:

Dr. Vahlen didn’t take me to the box. Instead, she took me into a room with dozens of large magical windows everywhere. One of them had two sets of similar magical rune arrays up on it, looking like they’d been made in Runedit. “On the left, we have the Woodwinds spell you diagrammed for Johann yesterday,” she said. “On the right, we have the spell you actually cast.”

I compared the two. They looked pretty similar. “I don’t see any difference,” I said.

“Indeed,” she said. “That time you cast the spell directly from his tablet, and it was cast exactly as you described. However…” she pushed a button, and the right-hand array changed significantly. “This is the Woodwinds spell you cast yesterday, when asked to cast a spell enhanced by your purpose mark. We reverse-engineered the runes from the data gathered during the casting.”

I boggled. “You can do that?”

She smiled. “I will not say it was easy, but we have the best minds at work on this project, and the theory was simple enough. You had already given us the Rosetta Stone, all we needed to do was apply the translation in reverse.” Her smiled faded. “We are not as adept as you in interpreting the meaning of the new arrangement, however. I was wondering if you could provide any insight.”

I was already up on my hind legs, tracing the connections with my hooves. The spell was still Woodwinds – there was the weather magic assembly, there was the harmonic conjunction – but the entire control structure was missing, replaced with what looked like an optimized version that only cast the exact version of the spell that I’d used. Most of the internal adaptive buffering was missing, too, with only a few amplifiers in the exact places where this configuration would need them. And that connection between vortex dampening and pitch levelling? That was genius!

“I… don’t even know where to start,” I said. “It’s like some magical prodigy took the exact version of the spell that I wanted to cast, and took out everything that wasn’t needed, making the whole spell simpler and easier. And this!” I pointed to the new connection. “They have this little piece doing two different things for two different parts of the spell at the same time! And it’s not the same as either part that it’s replacing.”

“Like an optimizing compiler,” Dr. Vahlen said. “Or perhaps, given the purpose mark’s connection to probability, like a series of fortuitous mistakes that just happens to make things better?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Back home, we don’t have… this. There are ponies that can look at a spell being cast and copy it, and then work out how to write it down later, but it’s always just an approximation.” I stared at the marvelously psychotic version of Woodwinds my cutie mark had helped me cast. “What about the wish?” I asked. “Did it do the same thing to a conjuration spell? I mean, I don’t know any real conjuration spells, but if you were able to capture it in runes I might be able to spot the same sort of shortcuts.”

Dr. Vahlen nodded, and pushed the button again. This time, the whole screen filled with a tangled mishmash of runes and… other symbols, lit up in red. “The effect generated when you ‘made a wish’ appears to be a magical spell, but not every part of it used the runes you enumerated for Johann. The red symbols are unique unrecognized rune-like magical atoms.”

It didn’t look at all like a conjuration spell. It didn’t look at all like something anypony could actually cast, even if they knew what all the new ‘runes’ were supposed to be. There was a Mist rune with sixteen connections. Sixteen! “Now I really, really, don’t want to make any more wishes,” I said, backing away from the... thing. I knew it was just a diagram with no actual power, but looking at it made my skin crawl. “Push the button again,” I said. When she didn’t, I leapt for her and pushed the button myself, but while it made the runes smaller, and put them in a series of boxes surrounded by little pictograms and labels, it was still there, staring at me. “Make it go away!” I said.

She moved the pointer to the appropriate pictogram to hide the display, then gave me a curious look.

“I’m going to have nightmares about that,” I said, sitting down, ears flattened, eyes squinted shut.

Dr. Vahlen patted me on the head, and I rested my cheek against her side.

Day 8:

“I think I’m ready,” Johann said, a serious look on her face. “Teach me how to transform.”

“I don’t know any transformation spells,” I said. “I tried learning them but I could never get the hang of it.”

“If you tried learning them, then you must know where to start?” she asked, hopefully. “What runes do the transforming?”

“Um…” I said, my mind going blank. “I know that the safe version stores your body in concept space, so you’d have to have something like a Hammerspace spell involved. I think. And they’re associated with Princess Luna, so maybe some Moon runes?”

She frowned, and brought up a saved version of Hammerspace, trying to figure out where she could attach Moon runes and have them do anything. “The wish?” she suggested. “You transformed me into this thing with a wish. You could make another wish that transformed something, and then Dr. Vahlen could record the results –“

“It wouldn’t be useful,” I said, cringing. “Wishes don’t use coherent spells.”

“Even incoherent spells might have some hints,” she said.

“It’s not worth the risk,” I insisted. “We already knew the million dollar wish was repeatable. I don’t know if what I did to you would happen the same way if I tried it on some other dragon, even if they wanted to be transformed.”

She wouldn’t give it up. “Then just wish for the transformation! I know at least three people who want to be able to use magic, even if it means turning into a unicorn.”

“It’s not safe,” I said.

“We’re at war,” she said. “Nothing’s safe. They could all die tomorrow on some mission gone wrong, or even on a mission gone right where their little part of it went wrong. If they want to take the risk, you should let them!”

“Do they want to take the risk? Even after what happened to Poindexter?” That being the name of the dragon who’d wished for gold.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I only thought of this just now. If they say yes, will you do it?”

I reminded myself that I couldn’t be hurt, and that I didn’t really care what happened to these stupid, violent dragons. “Fine,” I said. “If you find a volunteer, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to look at the result. That’ll be up to you.”

She spit on her hoof, and held it up. “Deal.” I clopped my hoof against hers, rolling my eyes a bit. “Now teach me more about spell construction. How do you figure out how to make a new spell?”

Day 9:

“Three volunteers,” I said, flatly.

Dr. Vahlen nodded. “They’re waiting for you in the box.”

I sighed. “Have two of them wait outside. There’s no sense having them all killed at once if the first wish goes really badly.”

The first wish turned its victim into a crystal statue of an alicorn, which then exploded, showering me with sharp little bits of glittering stone. By which I mean, my body was torn to pieces and splattered against the wall, and I reformed standing knee deep in a pile of my own guts.

For the second wish, I tried to concentrate harder on the person still being alive afterwards, and maybe my mental image of what I wanted slipped a bit, because he disintegrated into a swarm of bats, which flew all around the room in a panic. The science team eventually captured them all and put them in a cage, where they would be watched carefully for any signs of individual or collective intelligence.

The third sacrifice stepped into the room as if she was walking up to the guillotine. Which she was, technically, since it was still standing there in the middle of the box. But she was acting like she was about to have her head put in it and cut off.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

I motioned to the door. “Then get out of here. This was a dumb idea.”

She took a step towards the door, then turned back. “No,” she said. “Do it.”

So I tried again to focus on the important parts – alive, intelligent, pony – and made the wish again. There was no particular fanfare, but where she’d stood was a perfectly normal, yellow and green blank-flanked earth pony. “Oh, horseapples,” I said. “I forgot the horn. Let me try again.”

“No!” she said, holding up a hoof. “This is good! I’m still alive. I’m… still…” she waited, nervously, but failed to explode or keep over dead or anything. “I’m good. I’m going to leave now.”

Then she backed out of the room, almost tripping over her hooves a few times, but keeping her gaze fixed on me.

I gave her enough time to make a clean escape, then went to find Dr. Vahlen and Johann. “Did you get that?” I asked.

Johann nodded. The two of them were looking up at the big screen, where something I carefully wasn’t looking at was displayed. Probably displayed. Judging by how they were staring. I certainly didn’t look.

“Okay, have fun,” I said. “Just don’t blame me if it drives you crazy and you start murdering all your friends.”

“All my friends are dead,” Johann said, not taking her gaze from the screen. “Except Mike, who’s apparently a bunch of bats now.”

“And… er… that last one. The girl,” I said. “She lived!”

“The other volunteers weren’t my friends. The rest of my friends were killed in action.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “The war really isn’t going well.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You’re nothing like the other aliens. Even Bradford doesn’t think you’re in league with them, anymore.”

“Well…” I said, cringing. “You can make new friends?”

“After the war, maybe,” she said. “No point making friends with more people who are just going to die.”

Day 10:

As I walked up to her to begin our lesson, Johann wordlessly held out her slate. It had a complicated spell on it that I didn’t recognize. I took the slate and looked at it more closely.

“You don’t have any control structures,” I noted.

“I don’t know how to make them,” she said. “It sounded like they were fairly generic?”

“Woodwinds has a pretty good setup,” I told her, looking through the spell in more detail. I didn’t recognize the active elements, but there were a few bits that were mechanically wrong. “You can’t have five connections to one Moon rune. Use two.” I made the correction, and half a dozen similar typo-level fixes that I’m not going to list here because I’d be making most of them up anyway and I don’t think anypony really cares. “And you don’t have any buffers. The whole matrix is going to collapse if you feed power into it.”

“I didn’t just want to stick random buffers everywhere,” she said. “How do you know how many to put, and where?”

“Trial and error,” I said. I set the slate down between us. “I guess it’s time for some practical magical research. I’ll put in some fake controls, and we’ll cast it on a null target and see what explodes.”

A lot of things exploded, but mostly it was just the spell matrix which is relatively harmless. It hurts like a bitch, but unless you were putting a LOT of power into the spell it’s not all that dangerous. I mean, there are standard shielding and buffer spells that actual spell researchers use that I had no idea how to cast, but transformation is more of an intricate spell than a high-powered spell unless you’re trying to force it through an unwilling target’s resistance, and besides I couldn’t be killed. So it wasn’t all that reckless in that exact situation, but it’s not something you should ever, ever do at home, kids. Magic circles are your friends!

At the end of the day, we had a spell to turn a wooden block into a thick puddle of goo. Johann messed around a bit with the central elements of the spell, and I spent a half hour making everything else work around her changes, and then we had a spell to turn a wooden block into a sort of inverted geode, with crystal spikes pointing everywhere. We repeated this procedure five or six more times, getting other random, useless transformations.

“I think I get it,” Johann said, suddenly. She stood up and cast another version of the spell, without even writing it down first, and the next wooden block turned into a little yellow songbird, which chirped happily and flew around in circles for a few seconds before turning back into a block and dropping to the ground. She laughed. “I get it! It’s so simple!”

I stared at her, and then down at her flank, and then up at her face, and pointed at her flank. She turned, and saw her new cutie mark – a yellow songbird surrounded by little stars.

She grinned. “Neat!”

Day 11:

“This is a breakthrough,” Dr. Vahlen said. “We were able to track the probabilistic anomaly when it manifested as Johann’s purpose mark.”

“How is that a breakthrough?” I asked. “I thought you were able to do that with mine since last week.”

“No,” she said, “you do not understand. We were not just able to detect the anomaly, we were able to track it, backwards in time, all the way up until the moment he stepped into the box. Taken on its own, the data from before it manifested is simply random noise, but working backwards, we can follow the coincidences chaining from one to the other, like a trail through the woods.”

“Or like a thread,” I said. “Her thread of fate. Do dragons have a destiny? Or did she get one when I transformed her?”

“I believe…” Dr. Vahlen said, carefully. “I believe that she acquired it at the same moment she acquired her purpose mark, and it was only after the fact that the chain of causality that led up to that event became immutable. This will require further tests, but if I am correct --”

“No, that’s wrong,” I said. “Ponies are born with a destiny. Every foal knows that. You find your purpose, you don’t invent it.”

“The data suggests otherwise.”

“There are spells that show your fate,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never actually seen them cast, because they’re dangerous and restricted, but I know they exist and there’d be no reason for Twilight to lie about that. She’s a terrible liar, anyway. I’d know!”

“It is good that they are not used often,” Dr. Vahlen responded. “It was perhaps imprecise to say that your destiny did not exist before you were marked. It is more correct to say that every possible destiny existed, superimposed atop one another, and when the mark itself appeared the true destiny was selected from that infinite array. Observing the result by any other means would have the same effect.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “You can’t change something just by looking at it.”

Dr. Vahlen laughed. “Then perhaps I am mad, but if my theory holds true, we should soon have the first practical application of this line of research that you have forced us down.”

And, believe it or not, whether her crazy theory was the true explanation for how cutie marks worked or not, the tests she started to run on the soldiers in the base played out exactly as she’d expected. Over the next couple of days she had engineering build this big complicated machine that shot an invisible ray at somedragon, and BAM! They got a cutie mark in whatever they were doing at the time.

And it was a real cutie mark – you could see the effect on their performance immediately. Dragons with cutie marks in shooting never missed, and barely even had to aim. Dragons with cutie marks in sneaking knew just when to move to avoid being seen or heard – they were like ghosts! And one of the scientists was zapped with a cutie mark in data analysis and started making these insane leaps of logic that somehow always turned out to be exactly correct.

Everyone involved in the project was excited and giddy – I kind of got caught up in it myself, even though it didn’t really bring me any closer to solving my own problem since it didn’t work on ponies who already had a cutie mark. It was progress!

So we started getting really stupid with it. Somepony zapped the janitor while he was on break, and he got a cutie mark in looking at porn.

“What the hay?” I shouted at the dragon responsible. “Why did you do that?”

They didn’t seem to understand what they’d done. “What does it matter? He’s just the janitor. Who cares if he’s good at his job?”

“It’s not just a magic skill-granting thing,” I said. “It’s your purpose in life. Your destiny!”

“Are you implying there are mental effects?” Dr. Vahlen asked, having apparently overheard the conversation.

“Yes,” I hissed. “There are mental effects. Why do you think I want my old cutie mark back? Since I got here, have you heard me sing, even once? I should be writing war ballads and epic arias and folk songs about being imprisoned underneath the earth. Music was my life! And now it’s just… ugh.”

I sat down, and hung my head. “Dr. Vahlen. This is great. This thing you built, it’s nice. It’ll help you in your war. But do you have any idea how to use it in reverse? To take away this mark and give me back those infinite possibilities?”

“It is not possible,” she said, flatly. “Your waveform has collapsed.”

“I refuse to believe that,” I told her.

She sighed, and sat down next to me, stroking my mane, in a somewhat successful attempt to comfort me. “I will continue my research,” she said. “Every time throughout history that a scientist has declared something impossible, they have eventually been proven wrong. But from here, I do not see how the thing you desire could ever come to pass.” She gave a little scritch-scratch at one of my ears, and I leaned into the sensation. “Perhaps you should use a wish.”

Maybe I should have. But I didn’t, so I had to live through what happened next.