Lyra's Quest for Pliable Paws
Today was going to be a good day, Lyra could feel it. Ever since she had woken up, she had felt something that told her it was going to be so and a sort of vibrancy had filled her as she got out of bed. Everything that she had done that morning had been a resounding success. She had been the first to wake up, even beating Bon-Bon to make breakfast, which itself had gone off without a hitch. After bolting out of the door, which had opened smoothly without a creak of any kind, she bounced off to Twilight’s castle and to the library that held within.
Flying through the stacks she had found what she was looking for almost immediately, a book on perfectly elementary summoning spells. That book, combined with the perfectly convenient timing of Twilight bounding up to her, informing her that the special order book on pony folk tales had perfectly been delivered last night and that Twilight had just perfectly indexed it into her reference system and it was perfectly available for Lyra to checkout at that very moment if Lyra could just perfectly sign the register then everything could be perfectly completed and squared away.
Now Lyra was sitting in her apartment, the perfect amount of space cleared away in her ordinarily junky room. A quick trip to the thaumaturgist’s store had gotten her the perfect amount of imbued chalk, more than enough for any ritual, along with the rest of her reagents. Everything was so perfect, the plan was coming together so perfectly. Today was the day for all the puzzle pieces to fall into place. Lyra felt a shiver of excitement travel through her body.
Her mind was rushing at what seemed a million miles an hour. Her heart felt like it had stopped beating, and instead was simply vibrating in place. There was a rushing feeling that started in the pit of her stomach that swept through her entire body, giving her little tingles. What had initially started as cool preparation had changed to a rush of excitement. Lyra was so ready that she felt that she could just explode on the spot.
Taking a breath, she clenched her muscles and steadied herself. The rush of energy, or maybe it was a lump of dread, coalesced in her stomach. She still felt it, noticed how her heart was beating a little faster, her hoof trembling if she held it at length. Taking another breath, she concentrated. The ball of emotion in her stomach shrank to a small concentrated marble. Her heart calmed, the jitter in her hoof stopped. Finally, she was collected and prepared.
She opened the aging spellbook to the last page, then scanned through the index until she found the proper incantation, a very old teleportation spell, written 300 years before the Fall of Luna. She wondered for a moment why she was using such an outdated spell, before she remembered. The new-ish spells had too many safeties, too many interlocks. They were perfect for a unicorn teleporting themselves, or a group, but you couldn’t take them to pieces and modify them for what you needed. The second you tried changing the matrix, all the mana simply popped out and you were left with a sooty face for your troubles. That spell was a fail-safe.
Now this spell was a fail-deadly. Written so long ago, it cared little for the safety or comfort of the caster, instead requiring any unicorn stupid enough to try a cast to maintain their concentration throughout the entire process. Difficult when you were being thrown side to side as you shot through the aether.
There had been pictures, she remembered, of a unicorn who had tried to do exactly what she was trying to do. He had been distracted while casting when a fly had snuck itself into his destination grid, and he hadn’t maintained the protective field. Officially, he died instantly. The rumor mill said that wasn’t the case, that he had remained alive for several minutes at a minimum.
It wasn’t the same, she reminded herself. Crescent Moon was a crazy old stallion when the accident happened. He was half senile, and didn’t take the proper precautions. Everypony knows that you're never supposed to try and teleport that much mass. It was doomed to fail from the start. Besides, I’m not using the same exact spell that he was using, just parts of it. It’s not dangerous because I’m not the one teleporting, just the teleporter.
Slowly, carefully, she gripped the chalk in her teeth, mindful to keep it out of her aura, and scribed out the array from the book onto her floor. If she had the entire spell memorized she could’ve simply ignited her horn, but it was much easier to modify a spell laid out physically than mentally. No doubt Twilight Sparkle could do it, but Twilight was both a princess and a prodigy. For a mere mortal unicorn, made of flesh and bone, chalk would have to do.
As she inscribed the runes, periodically she would modify them with a scraped hoof, changing the shape of some, disrupting a connecting line between two sections or sometimes adding an additional line of chalk to reinforce the structure. She kept at her work and soon she had the outline of a pentagram circumscribed inside of a circle on her floor. A pentagram that was filled with figures and glyphs, all carefully chosen, then modified.
Lyra stood back to admire her work. The teleportation spell that she had based her modifications off of was a Here-to-There type of spell variant. It could take you from Here to There somewhat safely, but not from There to Here. What Lyra wanted was a way to pull instead of pushing a teleportation. After inspecting her spellwork, she was certain that she accomplished what she needed. By shunting the mana around in a reversed flow, her spell should be able to pull so hard that it could rip, given the proper foci of course. And oh, did Lyra have the proper foci.
Tearing a certain page from her book of myths (She’d have to tell Twilight that she’d lost it and just eat the costs, Twilight was liable to kill her if she knew that Lyra had defaced a defenseless library book), she gently levitated it into the perfect center of her teleportation spell, which has been bastardized into a crude summoner’s ring. It really wasn’t her fault that she’d had to make do with such an crude spell. You could only find references to summoning spells in modern spell literature, not the summoning spells themselves. However, the distant ancestors of summoning spells were still there, and Lyra had reasoned that she could kludge her way to a functioning spell. Last week’s tests involving small scale transfer from across the room, then across town, had proved successful. Lyra felt certain that she would be successful.
The foci now placed, Lyra sat down on the edge of her circle, forehooves barely touching the outer edge of the chalk. As she flared her horn, pushing magic into the spell’s structure, giving it purpose as well as power, she kept the the image of the torn picture deeply imprinted in her mind’s eye. She was looking past the torn page, past the crude drawing. In her mind she saw the gangly, almost too tall shape rise off the paper on two thin and spindly legs. She saw the arms reach out from the furred and stocky torso, saw every last detail of every last appendage. At the end of the stick-thin arms she saw the ripest, juiciest, plumpest, rosiest, softest, most desirable things. They were beautiful, five individually articulating digits connected to a rigid yet flexible and malleable base. She could imagine them lifting, working, touching grasping. She’d seen Spike working in the library before, but he had claws with sharp pointed tips, and these were hands, soft and flexible throughout.
The pentagram etched into her floor glowed with an unearthly light. A swirling vortex of mystical energy coursed back and forth inside, held in by the outer barrier of chalk. The light it gave off was bright, almost blinding, but Lyra could make out the barest silhouette of a tall bipedal creature inside the circle. She kept pouring energy into the spell as the transitioned her summoning to the next stage, from pulling to calcifying into reality.
As she shifted the spell’s purpose, the creature did something that terrified her. It took a step, then another, inching closer towards the inside edge of the circle.
No, please don’t! It’s not done yet! she thought. Working with an ancient spell, one with it’s relatively few safety measures removed, anything was liable to cause an accident. A painful and potentially deadly accident.
Despite her mental pleading, the creature continued to lumber forward, until it stopped at the edge of the circle, still enshrouded in the lime-green light from Lyra’s spell.
Just hold still for a few more seconds! I’m almost done! Just a few seconds more and I’ll be done! the mare screamed inside her head.
The creature, paused at the edge and standing still, reached forward to touch the shimmering green barrier with the tip of it’s hand. At that moment, everything happened in a long drawn out instant. The imbued chalk circle failed, and the barrier between Lyra and her bastardized spell vanished in an instant. Reality rushed in to fill the void, and fought against Lyra’s spellwork. Reality won. The spell collapsed inward, a fiery implosion that took the strange creature with it.
The runic matrix, filled with power with no place to put it, failed in a spectacular explosion, throwing Lyra the length of the room. Luckily, her oaken desk broke her fall, and she only moderately cracked her head against the tabletop.
“So riddle me this Officer Frizano. What exactly causes a homeless man to explode on Christmas Eve?”
“I dunno, but I think we’ve got this all laid out now. Left leg is over by the dumpster, right leg is by the back door the the 7-11. His head is next to the light pole, and I think that’s a torso with arms… what else are we missing?”
“I think that’s his foot over there.”
“His foot? You sure? How big is it?”
“It’s about a foot long.”
There was a loud sigh. “Just pass me the evidence bag. “
Settled lightly on top of Lyra’s now charred floor lay the softest, most delicate, and supple pair of hands that Equestria had ever seen.
Resting slumped against the wall, clutching her aching and battered head in her hooves, Lyra saw them and smiled. She had finally gotten her hands. A sudden voice from downstairs made her bolt upright.
“Lyra? I heard something! Are you okay up there? I’m coming up!”
Oh shit, Bon-Bon’s home. She’s supposed to be at the market! Lyra thought to herself. How am I gonna explain this!?
“It’s fine, everything’s fine! Just give me a minute!”
Hurriedly, Lyra got to work, covering the most incriminating evidence first, and shoving what she could under her bed. In the few seconds that it took for Bon-Bon to come up the stairs and poke her head inside the door, the most damning of the evidence was hidden.
“Really Bon-Bon, everything’s fine. I was just trying out a new spell… from Twilight’s.”
“Well, if you say you’re fine, then you’re fine I guess.” Suddenly Bon-Bon’s nostrils pinched and she took a good smell of the room. “That’d better not be brimstone I’m smelling Lyra, because you know that I’d at least like to get part of the damage deposit back…”
“Well…” Lyra grinned sheepishly. “They were out of the mix I normally use at the store and I… kind of had to make do.”
“I hope you know that you’re cleaning this up by yourself,” Bon-Bon replied flatly, before she clomped angrily down the stairs.
Lyra squeed internally. She had her hands and she wasn’t entirely in the doghouse with Bon-Bon! They were some pretty nice hands too, so nice and soft. Cleaning momentarily forgotten, she started flipping through the books on her bedside table, thinking of all the fun project she could do with a pair of hands.
I have a hat. I have a hat!
Author's Note
Author’s Note: This story was written over the course of 2 days in my off time at my college freshman introduction camp.
If you see an error, feel free to shoot me a PM or comment below.