Where there's Will, there's a Way
Another day in Ponyville brought another form of amusement. For Max, this came in the form of Twilight Sparkle.
"Let it go, Sparky. You've walked this path before and you know where it leads," he said, a smile on the face of his latest disguise. In this case, it was a brown stallion with a simple hammer as his cutie mark. Named Ace.
"No, I just- a pony doesn't just ignore the laws of physics! They're laws of reality for a reason!"
"Twilight, you lifted a magical space-bear several times your size with magic. The amount of energy that takes would burn your small form's fat reserves in about twelve seconds. Things already break the laws of physics here, you can't get upset at some infractions while ignoring others."
"Just because you're content to ignore Pinkie doesn't mean I am!"
"No, you'd rather throw her in a scary lab and hook her up to a sundry of spooky-looking devices without letting her get a word in edgewise."
The alicorn stopped mid-step, her emotions roiling at the comment.
"I know it hurt, Sparkles, but you need to be careful. As a nerdy librarian you were expected to watch the books and that's it. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna even agreed, better a prank than an international incident."
At her continued drooped ears, he bumped her shoulder with a hoof.
"Think of it as a friendship lesson slash punishment from a friend you almost hurt. You sometimes ignore the feelings of others when you start getting science-y. I told you draining a changelings magic was painful and you still tried it."
Twilight sighed, hanging her head in defeat. She'd tried to argue that the changeling was being silly but both princesses had been upset at the experiment when he explained why it was dangerous to him. It wasn't like she was going to suck him dry, but Princess Celestia had set a remedial lesson for her on ethics, respecting physiological differences, and proper scientific methods when a living subject was involved. Part of that included giving the subject the option to say no. Not just if they were experiencing discomfort, but at any time.
Max had brought even Rainbow Dash into keeping her in line. If Twilight broke a rule, she'd take a rolled up paper to the nose. Blue was ethics violation, red was safety violation, green was equine rights violation, and pink was personal space violation. Actually that last one was more for Pinkie, through it seemed to be a running joke-
Twilight face-hooved. That was why it was pink.
Shaking the thoughts away for later, Twilight came up to the shed Pinkie kept most of her inventions in when they weren't in use. The flying contraption, the Welcome Wagon, her party cannon and several other strange things the pink pony had never revealed before.
"Hiya Twilight! Hi Max! You ready for some awesome-tastic fun?"
"I'm ready, even brought my popcorn for when Sparky becomes Burny," Max replied, matching Pinkie's smile.
"Oh, ha-ha. I'm ready Pinkie," Twilight said, turning to her friend and pulling an scroll and pencil from her saddlebag. "What's first?"
"Well, since it's kind of the first thing I remember ever using, I figured we'd start with my party cannon!"
Twilight managed to suppress a wince as the baker slammed the perfectly pristine cannon onto the ground in front of them. She knew it was perfectly safe, but that was one of the things that bothered her. A cannon of any size should be dangerous. Anypony...anyone caught in the blast should be injured if not maimed. In spite of this, Pinkie had fired it at several ponies and it hadn't done more than make them sneeze confetti for a little bit.
Lighting her horn with the first of many scanning spells, Twilight began attempting to decipher Pinkie Pie's contraptions.
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Max was suppressing his laughter as Twilight scanned the party cannon for the fifth time. He'd already gone over the damn thing and didn't even see a firing mechanism or a way to light a fuse. It was completely reliant on Pinkie's magic.
'Course, Sparky's dead certain earth ponies don't have magic, or at least the 'right kind' of magic.'
Earth pony magic was as unpredictable as it was poorly documented by unicorns and for, to the unicorns at least, good reason. It wasn't static. Each individual had to learn their own magic and while someone might be able to guide you, they'd never fully understand your magic. It was a case by case basis.
Max was honestly hoping the neurotic unicorn would get this; it would save her so much time. But so far it didn't seem to be happening. All of the scans Twilight was running were looking for spells. There were no spells to look for, just will and a ton of passive magic.
The other contraptions were brought out one by one, with Twilight once more ignoring the huge amounts of energy sitting in the items while she looked for some marks of spell-craft.
Max was by now sitting against a tree, tossing popcorn into his mouth and launching small resin-bolts at a target on another tree to Pinkie's amusement. Looking over to the now-simmering alicorn the changeling sighed.
"You're missing the trees through the woods, Twilight. Stop looking for spells. Pinkie doesn't know any."
"But none of these things should work without magic! The cannon doesn't have any safeties, the flying thing doesn't have any weight-reducing charms, the welcome wagon uses more power than a simple crank should provide-"
"Twilight, the cannon doesn't even have a damned firing mechanism half the time, or at least not one that should work," Max drolled. He turned back to his target only to find Pinkie staring back like a deer in the headlights, her hooves on a wooden frame with large swinging blades that were now in line with his target.
"Death-trap emergencies?"
"Yea. Those aren't like mustaches and bouncy balls. Those can come out of nowhere. You'd be surprised to learn this isn't the first time I've pulled this stuff out."
Breathing deeply through his nose, Max licked a hoof and held it up to test the wind, using a bit of magic to rip up and drop a few blades of grass as well. Sitting on his haunches and framing the target as best he could, Max braced himself and fired.
Right at Pinkie.
The pink pony took the blob right in the barrel, gasping in horror before flailing about while yammering on about the cruelties of fate. After nearly a minute of this, she fell onto her back with her hooves in the air.
"Pinkie, knock it off."
"She can't, Twi. She's dead"
"She's not dead."
"Yes she is, see the tongue? That means she's dead."
"That is the biggest load of-"
"Oh come on Twilight, everyone knows that when you'd die your tongue sticks out. Right Pinkie?"
"Yupperoonie! Oops, I mean bleah."
Max chuckled.
"See? Pinkie agrees, and she's an expert in death. Being dead and all."
"This is not helping! If you know she shouldn't be able to fire the cannon, why does it not bother you?" Twilight finally shouted, stomping her hooves.
"Because it being illogical doesn't mean it's impossible?" The changeling responded easily. "I mean, I've gone on for hours about how many ways magic breaks the laws of physics as I know them including the third law of motion. When you hit something with magic you don't feel the recoil, do you Twilight. When you hit a moving object with a mana-bolt then dispel the bolt, what happens to that momentum? It's just thrown away!"
Finally taking some sort of pity on the mare before she had an aneurism or something, Max walked over and grabbed her muzzle with his hooves.
"Let me be as clear as I can, Twilight. That cannon, the flying thing, all of this stuff is saturated with magic. It-"
"I hit it with every spell I know," she shouted, her eye right eye twitching. "There is no magic in them!"
"You are scanning for spells, Sparky. There aren't any spells. It's all will and passive magic."
"Magic doesn't work that way!"
"It does, you're just ignoring he evidence that doesn't fit in your narrow view of how magic should work, much like the rest of the unicorns. It's why Discord is so terrifying to unicorns in particular. His powers are magical in nature but not the way unicorns try to classify them. So they classify him as an anomaly and forget about him!"
"It's not about spells with Discord, it's a second casting method. One that brute-forces the effects with overwhelming willpower and magic."
"Discord doesn't use magic, he just...does things. I don't know how he does them, but it's not magic. That's why he's chaos, he doesn't follow the rules of magic!"
"That has to be the dumbest line of nonsense to leave your muzzle."
Twilight rounded on the speaker, only to stop short as Discord himself slithered around a tree. He frowned, reaching up and putting out the small fires on his ears before turning his focus back to Twilight.
"I use magic. In fact everything I do uses magic. The old fuddy-duddies that study magic in Canterlot just don't like not being able to classify things their way."
Max nodded, moving to a blackboard Discord snapped into existence.
"Unicorns use horn-casting as the basis of all spells," Max explained, writing a small picture of a unicorn head then several lines branching downward. Below that he wrote out several schools of magic, while writing two other schools as being disconnected from the diagram. "Runes and alchemy are of course exceptions but most researchers don't like to talk about them."
Drawing a line up from the unicorn head, he wrote out the word Magic, then drew two more lines before connecting runes to the unicorn head with a dotted line. The first line from Magic went straight to Alchemy, while under the other line he wrote the word 'Will'.
"Chaos magic is actually a secondary casting method. It involves using your will, your desires and wishes, as the catalyst instead of an array or formula. In this way, we can actually quantify what Discord does. It's not that he doesn't make sense in his spells but that he has so much magic. He can literally overpower reality, and he's been doing so for such a long time that he knows he can do these things. There's no need to match his will against a spell like I would need to, because he knows without a shadow of a doubt that if he snaps his talon, he'll get something."
"But you use your horn for casting! You can't tell me what I know is wrong. Even Princess Celestia uses the schools of magic to explain this at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns."
"Actually, that's exactly why she uses it. It keeps things simple and clean, the way most unicorns like it," Discord cut in, flipping the board over to display the full sequence involved in each method of casting. "Unicorns tend to get a bit neurotic if they encounter something they can't wrap their heads around, case and point," he muttered while gesturing to Twilight "so long ago a very smart unicorn decided the best way to deal with this wasn't to teach that magic was a truly unpredictable thing with many ways to use it, but that those kinds of magic were 'wrong'."
Rolling his eyes Discord pulled out a golden scepter, this one with his grinning mug on the end. He smacked it into the board, earning a grunt of pain from the head.
"This first method you're familiar with. You either think or chant the spell, or maybe even hold the formula in your head, then run your magic though your horn. The brain's close enough to the magic that the energy picks up the shape of the spell along the way and by the time it is forced through your focus, the horn, blah blah blah."
"The second method is a lot simpler. You focus on the effect, will it to occur, and apply both your magic and will as required."
Discord snapped his talon, producing a glass of lemonade.
"I use a little bit of a spell focus myself. By snapping my talons, I give myself a nifty little focus that exists anywhere I go. Because a focus doesn't have to be a horn; that's why chants exist.'
"It's actually how a changeling shape-shifts," Max cut in. "There's no spell, it's all will and magic. Since we're already a mostly magical creature there's not much difficulty in forcing a change like that. Thus it's one of the only will-effects we can pull off without burning more energy than its worth. You'll find that for most changeling spells they found copying the much more energy-efficient unicorn method to be preferable."
For her part Twilight just stared at the drawings on the board. The unicorn method was the one she'd been taught her entire life, but looking at the diagram for will-casting...
'The lack of an actual focus or formula would increase the amount of magic needed by a large amount, which they've accounted for. This would make the majority of unicorn spells impractical for the other races but also keeps things like slowly boosting the growth of plants well within the range of possibilities, especially if it's not so much growing the plant as it is encouraging it to grow.'
"But how would that explain Pinkie's creations?" she asked. "The amount of magic required to break the laws of physics like that would be monstrous. Not to mention her ability to do...other things."
Max grinned widely, his fangs bared fully.
"It's actually not just Pinkie but all six of you. Rainbow Dash's sonic rainboom and high flight speed, Rarity's ability to focus on a ridiculous number of items as well as being able to cast some fantastic spells without formal spell-training, AJ's farming and over-the-top strength and endurance, Fluttershy's connection to animals, and Pinkie's silliness. I think it all goes back to your connections to the Elements of Harmony."
Twilight's eyes widened at the comment and Discord quirked an eyebrow, curious.
"Think about it. Six mares who just happen to excel in magical aspects, who are also linked to a powerful artifact? Personally I think Celestia did you all a disservice by only training you, Twilight, but that's just me. Pinkie Pie's magic capacity is actually fairly close to what yours was as a unicorn from what Discord tells me. Taking this a bit farther I can say that all of you have ridiculous magic levels. Which could mean that all of you are capable of becoming alicorns."
Ignoring the pink pony that was now sitting next to a gob smacked Twilight, as well as the sign said pony was holding that said 'the party will last FOREVER!', Max flipped the board back over to his first drawing.
"Getting back to topic though, because this casting is so much simpler, yet reliant on the belief that a pony is capable of something, or their Will, there isn't anything further to study in this field. There's no breakdowns of theory, no ways to improve aside from increasing either your will or your belief. For instance, if you turn a duck into a frog once, you know you can do it again. Therefore, the certainty increases and you need less magic. Use an ability like Warp enough times and you don't even have to think about it too much. It just happens."
"If this is the case why don't more ponies do things like Pinkie?"
"Because she had enough magic to pull it off the first time," Max responded. "Most ponies can't pull off the initial effect and thus never fully realize just how powerful they really are. Even griffons, diamond dogs and minotaurs can use this kind of magic. It just takes a belief that you can do it and the ability to think a little differently."
"It's actually even more simple than that," Discord added. "Yes Pinkie has more magic and found it easier to break that barrier, but it also has to do with age. As you grow, you become more certain of things. Logic and fantasy become 'easily distinguished' and never again shall the two meet. The more people you've spoken to that have said 'no you can't', the harder that initial break is. You allow others to limit your own abilities. Pinkie's magic reserves were high from even a young age. Couple less mass with high magic and few ponies telling her what is and what isn't possible, and her 'Pinkie Powers' were simple to learn."
"Lets use the basic 'grip' effect for example," Max said, flipping the board to display two new images. One was a pony holding a cup in their hoof. The other was a Pony walking on the wall.
"Why do the magic fingers work for holding things but not wall-walking?"
The purple unicorn opened her mouth but snapped it shut a moment later, clearly realizing what the two were alluding to.
"Wait, are you saying a pony could walk up walls?"
"She can be taught!" Discord shouted, slapping the alicorn's head and leaving a graduation cap behind. "It's all possible, but the amount of energy is much more intensive. Most ponies just assume there's an upper limit to what can be held but the reason they drop heavier items is because they don't increase the magic! They also never learn to grip with their rear hooves.
"Now, try scanning the cannon again. This time don't look for traces of spells, but the magic she's poured into it."
The purple princess nodded, looking over to the cannon again while lighting her horn. She stared off in thought before the glow died out, a look of horror appearing on her face.
"I...I don't know that spell. I don't know how to scan only for magic!"
Discord rolled his eyes before snapping his talons and tossing a rolled up scroll at her head.
"Honestly, Twilight. I would think you have this already. It's only older than Tia herself."
"How do you check for magic?" The changeling asked Discord.
"Simple, I taste it. Magic makes my tongue tingle."
"That seems like it would be a bad idea, Dissy. I mean, what if you need to test something that's been on the ground or somewhere icky?" Pinkie added, frowning at the thought of licking such a thing.
Before the chaos-caster could respond Twilight gave a triumphant shout, lighting her horn and focusing on the cannon. This time she cast the spell, running the scan over the cannon, then the flying contraption, then over the Welcome Wagon.
"They're...they're glowing..."
"She's been pouring energy into these things for years, Princess. I don't know if your spell reads amounts, but he cannon is the brightest to my senses, with the wagon being next in line. The bicycle-copter isn't nearly as strong, but it still has enough power to be noticeable."
"You can learn this in addition to your unicorn casting, Sprinkles," Discord chuckled. "Next time you practice flying, remember you're lighter. It will take a load off your wings."
Max outright laughed at that.
"There's a reason most Pegasus don't care about their weight, Twilight. Their magic is actively lightening them. Dash could ride a sneeze if she really focused."
"I need, I need to think about this," Twilight whispered as she gathered her papers. "I'll talk to you during the questioning tomorrow, Max. I may have some questions regarding this as well."
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Twilight sat in her room as the sun set, still attempting to come to terms with the days revelations. While some of it seemed to fly in the face of what she was taught, she wasn't able to find a single instance of one casting method's rules interfering with another. It even worked out from what she'd seen of Discord's illustration. In fact it explained clearly why some spells became easier as you used them.
'I never could account for some of that energy. It was often negligible for other unicorns but my higher magic reserves meant my Slinger's Spell Residue was exponentially higher. Factoring it in...'
It was an old theorem, stating that the more a unicorn cast a spell, the easier it would become to cast said spell. The reasoning Slinger gave was due to magic remaining in the horn after the spell was cast, making each subsequent cast of the spell easier, but if that was the case new spells should have been negatively impacted by this 'residual mana.' Thus it was widely popular due to its ability to explain the decrease in energy required, but still not a law because Mages kept running into interference when they tried to manually embed 'spell residue' in a casting focus.
Twilight Teleported into her lab, using several sticks of chalk to write out her own numbers as well as the averages for unicorns As she'd grown more comfortable with spells she'd found the margins to increase as Slinger's Spell Residue theorem stated would happen, but if it could be attributed to will and her belief that she could cast the spell and not some guesswork of her horn remembering a familiar spell...
The alicorn squealed and clopped her hooves together. She could do it! She could disprove Slinger's Spell Residue theorem once and for all!
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Max found the purple pony a week later sitting in an outdoor cafe, sipping from a shake with a depressed expression on her face. Spike had explained to him after the reveal to Twilight that she was on a big research binge, and Max knew better than to get between the mare and her papers unless specifically called for.
"Don't take it too hard, Twilight. I told you they really don't like anything that shakes up their world view. Even if it's right."
The mare nodded.
"That's what Princess Celestia told me. I was ready to go up there myself and shove their muzzles into my research in person, let them try to deny it when it's right in front of them, but she said she's been making those same arguments for centuries.
"'The faces change, but the arguments remain the same. They refuse to change, because it breaks the little world they've built for themselves. A world where everything makes sense to them.'"
Taking another sip, a ghost of a smile crossed her face.
"Still, it turns out the Princesses have a whole division of mages who study Will magic. Princess Celestia says she personally has to protect their budget as the rest of the magic department hates that it exists, but it was encouraging seeing ponies from Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns there. It wasn't just unicorns, either. I think it was the first magic research lab I've seen with all three tribes studying magic."
"That's good. It means that you just need to keep bringing it up. Several theories back on Earth were originally scorned when they were first discovered, but as...okay I don't remember who said it, but one guy said 'The greatest challenge of a scientific principle is not to be accepted by the men of its time, but to outlive them. To survive into a new generation that is familiar with it and more willing to accept it.' I probably butchered it, but you get the gist of it, right? It's not fighting for it amongst the older researchers, but making sure the new ones have heard of it."
Seeing a familiar form fly by, he looked to Twilight with a grin.
"You know, I bet-"
"I'm already casting," Twilight interrupted, running the scanning spell over a nearby metal light post. The moment Derpy collided with it the post lit up with magic before snapping in half, leaving the Pegasus mare completely unharmed while the metal post was a total loss.
"You know at first I assumed it was because she was more durable," Max said as the mailmare looked around in confusion. "Now I want to know who convinced her that everything she hits will break."
Sighing, Twilight let the spell go.
"It's all there..."
The changeling nodded, patting her back consolingly. A moment later he smiled.
"You know, next time you see a griffon you should check if they have enough magic. If they do, either let me know or start teaching them Will magic yourself. From what a queen told me, the last Wind-walkers died centuries ago. The griffons' ability to use magic never left them though, they just don't remember how to use it."
Twilight brightened at that.
"It wouldn't be the first legend to be brought back to life in Ponyville."