The Ignition Spark

PART TWO

GENEROSITY

7

Reading the message over and over, Twilight stood stunned.

OH MANEHATTAN WHAT YOU DO TO ME

She recognised it, of course, as the first line of the song Rarity had sung once she arrived in Manehattan, on the day she had received her Key to the Chest of Harmony. This pony must know me and my friends well, thought Twilight. Probably someone close to me…

She closed her eyes and thought about who might have motivation to destroy Canterlot. Taking a few minutes to go through the list of everyone she knew, she came up blank. No one she knew would want to do anything like this…

A voice snapped her out of her meditation. “Twilight?”

“Wha, huh, yes?”

Lyra giggled. Bon Bon did not. Instead, she looked very worried.

“It’s been almost an hour since the explosion. Have you figured out where the next bomb is?”

Twilight froze. An hour already?! “W-well, uhm,” she stammered. “Not… really…?” she offered with a sheepish grin. The Mare in Black was not amused. Sighing, she thought over what to say. After a good few moments, she spoke. “Something to do with Rarity.”

The two mares stared at her blankly, expecting her to continue.

Silence.

“…go on, Twilight.”

“That’s all I have!” she said desperately, starting to panic, pacing circles around the place.

“Well, we’ll need to narrow it down somehow.” Lyra watched her trot around. “Does Rarity own an apartment in Canterlot?”

A spark shone in Twilight’s eyes. That’s it!

“No!” she said confidently.

Confused at the disparity between her tone and her words, Lyra and Bon Bon waited for an explanation. It soon came.

“But she does own a clothes store! In the Shopping District! Canterlot Boutique!”

Eager to get going, Twilight started to trot off, with her friends in tow. Then, reality sank in for the three fillies.

The Shopping District was half an hour away.

8

They weren’t even close when they heard another explosion in the distance, smoke and fire billowing up from the far away Shopping District. It took twenty minutes to reach the site where Canterlot Boutique once stood, and a further five to weave their way through the crowd that had gathered.

Another scene of destruction lay before them.

The shop and those surrounding it were a smoking wreck, shards of glass from the windows scattered around, having injured a few citizens as they flew away from the blast. Thankfully, no one was seriously harmed — the shards had somehow avoided the critical points, as if by magic.

Twilight and her friends stood before the site of the bombing, eyeing the damage. All of Rarity’s hard work and dedication up in smoke… She knew there was no time to mourn, though — almost half of the deadline for the next bomb had already passed. They had to act fast.

Scanning the area, they found something graffitied onto the side of the building.

Twilight analysed it intently. Could this be the next clue?

“What are you looking at?” asked Lyra. “It’s just some incomprehensible graffiti. By somepony called...” She stepped closer to the apparent signature. “#X?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Bon Bon reasoned. “Vandalists don’t tend to sign their work.”

But there it was, a signature, right at the lower right of the piece.

“It hasn’t faded or bled into the stonework,” Twilight observed. “That means, whatever this graffiti is, it can’t be more than a few hours old.”

“Okay, so we find some kind of weird graffiti at the crime scene that was painted just a few hours ago,” Bon Bon said, standing by her side. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the two crimes are connected.”

But Twilight wasn’t listening. She could swear she’d seen something like this before. And that signature… what could it mean? Casting her air-writing spell once again, she began to think.

“It could be simple code-writing,” she stated, drawing out the code in the air in front of her using her forehooves. “One symbol per letter. But figuring it out with such a small code would be complicated…”

“What?” Lyra perked up an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t it being longer mean it would be more complicated?”

“Well,” Twilight began to explain, “with a longer code, you can analyse it for patterns, like common symbols which could represent common letters. Whereas with something short, it’s much harder to find patterns.”

Lyra nodded in understanding. “So how do we figure out what it says?”

“Well, last time, Master Mind gave us just enough information to solve the puzzle,” Twilight said, thinking back to the note in the book. “A simple letters-to-numbers cipher is much easier to break than a substitution cipher — code-writing — though.”

“So, then, there must be something we’re not seeing here,” Bon Bon continued, understanding the path her leader was following.

No one said anything for a few moments, deep in thought.

“Bon Bon,” Twilight spoke after a short while. “What was that you said earlier?”

“About?” the cream-coloured mare tilted her head questioningly.

“The signature.”

“That it doesn’t make any sense,” she repeated. “Why would somepony sign their crime?”

Thinking over it, Twilight realised something. “There’s nothing that shows that it’s a signature. It could be part of the clue!”

As she wrote the signature in the air beside the code, something clicked. She realised where she recognised the code from. It was such a simple code, one she had played around with when she was a filly.

“A pigpen cipher!”

“A what?” Lyra asked.

“It’s a modified version of the pigpen cipher,” Twilight explained. With a wave of her hooves, the air before her was blank once more. She began by writing the criss-cross symbol twice in a row, then the diagonal cross twice below it. Then, she filled in each square with a letter.

“Every letter is enclosed like this, and you write the symbol corresponding to the enclosure the letter you’re encoding is in,” she described. “But it looks here,” she pointed to the very top corner, following the swooping line as it flowed down the side, “like the artist decided to combine elements of another cipher as well. I can’t remember the name of this one, but it’s just as simple. You extend one of the lines if you’re referring to the dotted variants, instead of adding a dot.”

“Then why is there a dot there?” Lyra pointed out the dot above one of the V-looking symbols.

“Probably because the artist couldn’t fit an extended line in, so they instead added a dot. Combining two different ciphers like this is sloppy, but at least it’s consistently so,” Twilight said with a little chuckle.

“So what does it say?” Bon Bon asked.

“That’s what I’m figuring out right now,” Twilight answered.

Writing in the air, she started to decode the cipher. R-A-I-N…

“Rain?” Lyra read. Twilight shushed her as she wrote out the rest of the code.

R-A-I-N B-O-W-D A-S-H

Twilight stared at it.

“Okay, so we found one of Rainbow Dash’s fans’ vandalism.” Bon Bon watched her leader as she stood stupefied by the writing in the air. “What’s it got to do with the investigation?”

But Twilight wasn’t listening. She understood what the criminal was doing now. The bomb at her home, the one at Canterlot Boutique, and now this…

He’s going after me and my friends!