Size Up Starlight

"Three hundred and ninety eight, three hundred and ninety nine... Four hundred!"

Starlight Glimmer levitated the last batch of dangerously blue flowers carefully into the large wooden cart behind her. She pat herself on the back, congratulating herself. "That should be more than enough Poison Joke to experiment with for a while. Now to get back to the castle..."

She took a step forward, and struggled to move the overloaded cart of magical, poisonous flowers. Dragging her hooves along for only a meter, she soon stopped to catch her breath. The awful creaking of the wooden cart's four wheels stopped as they depressed into the muddy ground, making Starlight look around herself nervously. It was dark inside the Everfree forest at this time, and she had spent all afternoon picking up all these samples which made her lose track of time. It could've been late in the evening, midnight, or even early morning. All Starlight knew was that she had to get home.

Starlight, being the unicorn that she was, and not too far unlike from her mentor Twilight Sparkle, quickly relied on using magic to solve problems quickly. "Oh, who needs to walk when you can teleport?" she said to herself, as she usually did, and turned around to face her cart which was full to the brim with blue flowers. Raising her head, she closed her eyes as she cast the spell on herself and her cart. There was a blinding flash, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself standing inside a familiar crystal library, back in ponyville. The cart had been teleported as well. Starlight hadn't noticed it, but a dim blue glow seemed to escape from the packed cart of poison joke behind her. Taking no notice of it, she swung her head around, and with a flick of her horn, the library's lamps and candles lit up, which dampened out the cart's weak mysterious blue light, making it even harder to notice.

"Oh, Twilight is going to be so proud of me!" she whispered to herself to no-pony in particular, her voice echoing around her as she beamed happily. Taking a good look at the collection of blue flowers she had collected, she continued talking to herself. "Not many ponies have attempted to study the effects and workings of poison joke. Sure, the zebras have experience with the stuff, but that's just not scientific enough. I'll hopefully be one of the first ponies to make a full, detailed, scientific report on them! And I've got more than enough to perform experiments with."

She carefully slid out of the heavy cart's handles and secured it in place. She made sure not to get too close to the flowers, and levitated a long tablecloth over them tightly to be safe. Her eyes drooped a little, clearly tired from the day's work. "Whew," she sighed to herself, "I'm beat. I better get some shut-eye and start experiments tomorrow." She yawned as she walked around the eerily empty castle, back to her room, and snuggled up in her bed to think about all the experiments she'd try tomorrow.

A rude knocking on her door eventually woke her up. Starlight opened her eyes suddenly, standing up in bed. She glanced over at the window, realizing it was daytime. She then turned her attention to the door, which was knocked on again. "Yeah...yeah.." She said groggily, "in a minute."

Starlight got up and walked up to the door, opening it to start walking downstairs, only to find Twilight standing in front of her excitedly in the doorway. Opening one eye and struggling to keep the other open, Starlight gave a half-hearted smile while staring in Twilight's general direction.

"Good morning, Starlight!" Twilight greeted in a cheery fashion. Starlight's eyes slowly glanced towards Twilight's glowing cutie mark, and then slowly looked back up as Twilight continued explaining. "I have just been called by the map to solve a friendship problem outside of Ponyville, so I wanted to let you know that you might be alone in the castle for a little while."

Starlight blinked her eyes in an unsynchronised fashion, licking her lips disinterestedly. "Yeah. Okay," She responded. She was about to turn around to get back into bed, before Twilight began speaking again.

"Which means I've decided to keep Spike in the castle to keep things running smoothly. And this time, he's fully in charge."

"Yeah," Spike said proudly, pointing at his chest with his adorable little claw, "which means I'm going to keep an eye on you and make sure you don't mess up and mind-control your friends again, and if things get out of hand, I can just send a letter to Twilight and she’ll pop back here in a flash!"

Hearing Spike mentioning her previous mistake made Starlight's ears droop down sadly. Twilight noticed this, and nudged Spike in the arm with her elbow. "Come on Spike, be nice." She turned her attention back to Starlight. "But he's right. I'm trusting him to make sure everything goes all-right until I get back. I'm sure you have some friendship lessons to catch up with, too."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Starlight snorted, but then remembered her recent research project. "But wait, Twilight, before you go, I wanted to tell you about my recent project."

"Of course, Starlight! What's it about?" Twilight asked with a friendly smile. Starlight, who was excited to talk about her recent research project, was beginning to wake up properly now.

"It's about poison joke," Starlight began. "You see, not many ponies have researched too much about poison joke, mostly because they can't get too close, since they'd risk being infected. The only knowledge we have is from observation, but I wanted to perform some in-depth experiments to see what really makes them tick."

Twilight was clearly impressed and interested. "That sounds like a potential break-through waiting to happen, Starlight. I noticed the covered cart in the library, and I assumed it was important for you so Spike and I left it alone. I'm assuming you collected some samples?"

"Yes, I've collected four hundred samples of poison jo-"

Twilight gasped. "Four hundred?! That's kind of a lot, isn't it?"

"Well," Starlight said, rolling her hoof in the air in explanation. "I'll need a lot of samples because of how varied the effects of poison joke can be. I'm sure it’ll be fine, I'm handling them with the utmost of care. Unicorn's promise."

Twilight squinted her eyes, clearly unfamiliar with the made-up saying. "Well, I trust you, Starlight. Just... be careful, all-right? Don't hesitate to contact me using Spike if anything bad happens. Oh, and I believe we have a book with information provided by Zecora in the library about Everfree flowers, if the need arises. Most importantly, it has the cures for each one, so do take a look."

"I'll be fine, Twilight. I might not be the best at friendship but I'm an expert at magic and scientific research. When have I ever messed up with something that wasn't friendship related, anyway? Haha...ha..."

Starlight's intensely nervous laugh trailed away into nothingness. Spike was jumping up on his tippy toes, eagerly wanting to answer that question with a long list, but Twilight pre-empted his movements and nudged him in the arm again to stop him from speaking. Spike, rubbing his scaly little arm in defeat, kept silent.

"Well, I wish you the best of luck, Starlight," Twilight said, wrapping up the conversation, "Do keep up with your friendship lessons though, if possible. If you get too worked up about this project, you might miss out on hanging out with your friends, and that might not end well..." Twilight rubbed her head nervously as she continued, "personal experience... trust me, hah..ha.."

Starlight, judging nothing of her mentor in friendship, simply shrugged. "Right... Okay then. Bye Twilight." Before Twilight could respond, Starlight gave Twilight a quick yet awkward parting hug, and quickly jogged downstairs. "Hope you have a good time, and stuff." Clearly, excitement was getting the better of Starlight, so she wasn't too bothered about Twilight leaving. After all, she was a grown mare, a powerful unicorn even, who could easily take care herself, right? She wasn't a little filly any-more, despite the fact that she'd secretly like to be one again. (But that's another story...)

Everything seemed to fade out of Starlight's mind as all her thoughts got replaced with the project. What would she find in these strange blue plants? Would she find a way to increase resistance to them? Could their effects be adjusted for beneficial purposes? The possibilities appeared endless, and she was determined to explore them all.

She entered the castle's library, and found that her cart of poison joke samples was left untouched next to the bookshelves. The cart's wooden planks where slightly bent outwards from the immense weight of compact flowers. Taking no notice of the cart's distress, Starlight prepared a long clear table in the middle of the library for her experiments. She also kept a book on Everfree flora nearby just in case she needed reference. She was about to sit down when a loud sound took her off-guard. It was the castle doors opening and closing, a sign that Twilight had left the building.

She looked down at the table and clasped her hooves together thoughtfully, getting herself to focus and ignore the distraction. Sitting down, she levitated one of the flowers from underneath the cart's cover, and brought the dangerous little flower onto the table at a safe distance from her face. She then looked over and opened her book, finding the article on Poison Joke. "So what's already known about it? It's blue, yeah, I knew that. It grows in the ever-free forest in large patches... Yup, already knew that. Now, according to the book, it acts much like poison oak, but it's effects are like that of a 'joke'. Okay then. So it pulls pranks on ponies based on their physical and emotional characteristics? That's a little strange for something as simple as a plant to achieve. Clearly these plants aren't sentient or anything, so there's got to be something else going on here." she levitated a microscope from a nearby table, and cut a piece of the poison joke's leaf under it. "Hmm, looks a lot like poison oak to me, just with a natural blue tint. I can't really see anything out of the ordinary here." She stopped for a moment, writing her observations on a notepad. "Maybe I should perform some magical tests, to see if there's any magic involved."

She stood up, and levitated the plant in the air. Her horn glowed, and sent a beam of warm air and concentrated onto it. "If this plant... is sentient... it will try to react and save itself from being burnt up." She increased the temperature of her magical beam onto the flower, causing it's blue petals to relax and loosen towards the ground. Finally, the flower simply melted onto the ground from the moderately intense temperature. "Well," said said to herself, "that was anti-climatic, but I should've expected that." She wrote 'does not react to pain' on her notepad, and was about to levitate another plant of poison joke from the cart when the door swung open.

"Hey Starlight!" a familiar little dragon said. "Twilight's probably waiting at the train station by now, so that means we're alone." Spike kept walking towards Starlight, taking a slight interest in the whole ordeal. "So whatcha doin’?"

A blue plant gently floated through the air under Starlight's levitation spell, as she explained. "Well, Spike. I'm doing some research on poison joke. I've got a suspicion that there's more to these little plants than what's been initially observed, and-"

"Right, right. That's pretty cool, Star." Spike said casually. Starlight wasn't sure if he wanted her to shut up, or was just trying to be nice. "Well anyway," he continued nervously, "I know I'm going to be in charge and all that, but I really, really wanted to hang out a bit with Rarity today..."

"You know, Spike, you don't need to ask me if you can leave or not." Starlight said in a monotone way. "I'm probably going to be in here all day anyway."

"Oh, right. But, what about your friendship lessons?"

Starlight bit her lip, as she usually did when she was uncomfortable or put on the spot. "I, err, uhh..." She stuttered, trying to think of an excuse. Suddenly, she remembered something. "Trixie! Right. Yeah. I was going to hang out with her later today. Since she's visiting for another upcoming show."

Spike folded his arms doubtfully. "Trixie." He dead-panned, raising an eyebrow.

"Trixie." Starlight reassured, biting her lip tenfold.

"Riiight... You have fun with that, Star. Remember, if anything bad happens, or if you think you're going to do something that might be bad, let me know first, okay? We wouldn't want you to accidentally cast some mind-controlling spell on your friends again-"

Starlight was visibly upset now. "I literally just saved the whole of Equestria a few months ago, give me a break already." She rolled her eyes and looked away from him. Spike looked down and kicked his feet, not wanting to leave just yet.

"Hey, Starlight?" Spike said, a little softer this time, "Sorry about that. I was going a little bit too far. I'm just looking out for you, like Twilight asked me to, okay?"

Starlight didn't look back at Spike, but she seemed to loosen up just a little bit. "Sure. Whatever. I get it."

Feeling that it was best to leave it at that, Spike left the room, leaving Starlight fully on her own. Hearing the big castle doors open and shut again made Starlight sigh, she knew Spike didn't meant to be hurtful.

However, science does not wait for friendship or drama, and Starlight quickly got absorbed into making further tests with these strange blue plants. It barely felt like minutes to Starlight when she found herself yawning and losing track of time.

"Wowie, that was quite a fun session, and the results are interesting so far. It seems as though these plants seem to have some kind of magic flowing within them, but I can't draw enough magic from a plant without killing it and losing it completely..."

She thought for a bit, until an idea hit her horn. "That's right! I'll extract as much power from all the plants at once, so I'll have enough to examine!" She focused on the cart, tossing the cover off with her magic, and shot a powerful beam into the middle of the pile of poison joke. She staggered slightly, as blue light seemed to increase in intensity from the cart. Starlight was extracting and trapping the plant's pure magical essence and packing them up into an increasingly large, blue ball. The powerful, bright blue ball of trapped magic was trembling in it's magical containment, making Starlight struggle.

She was about to regret trying to perform this, as she began to feel weaker and weaker, but she was instead amazed by the amazing sight of the collected pure magic of three hundred magical plants, floating above the cart and her head. It turned around in place with an almost blinding light, and it seemed to be getting bigger and more powerful as Starlight kept it afloat with her magic. She began to panic, realizing that through an unintentional feedback loop, her own magic was being collected and mixing with the floating ball, making it heavier and more powerful.

If Starlight didn't contain the intense concentrated ball of magic soon, it might blow up, and she had no idea of the magnitude of it's destructive impact. She sweated, trying her best to keep it as stable as possible, but she became much too tired, and passed out. There was a deafeningly big bang as Starlight and the massively unstable ball of magic that was almost as big as half of the entire library, crashed to the floor.