The land was barren and menacing. Blackened, but not charred by lava or fire. As far as Daring Do could tell, this was the natural state of the landscape: nearly devoid of life. In fact, the only life she saw aside from herself on the entire ominous plain was one of those annoying tumbling creatures. Essentially blue cat balloons, she had seen them bouncing around and meowing without a care for the world for weeks now. Were they plants? Were they animal? She had no idea.
All she knew was that they were way too cute to be bouncing across such a desolate landscape. She had to resist the temptation to scoop them up in her hooves and snuggle them all. Given their size, she knew this was impossible. That said, she had tried in the past, and a pile of bouncing cat balloons wasn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to wrangle.
Not to mention the claws. The creatures were only mostly harmless.
Doing her best to ignore the bright blue attention-grabber rolling across the ashen waste, Daring took to the skies, the wind blowing through her feathers. The arid scent of the land was unusual, to say the least. Not a plant in sight to adjust the air, only rock to stagnate it.
Which wasn’t to say the landscape was completely empty. There was her destination amidst it all.
In the middle of the flattest section of rock, there was a cylindrical structure made almost entirely out of a silvery metal. Unlike most structures Daring explored, this one was not overrun with moss and roots, for there were no plants to introduce such decomposers to the site. However, she could still tell it was ancient. The power of the sun alone had tarnished the metal and a sizeable mound of gray dust had settled on the structure’s flat top. There were no windows, no markings, not even a path leading to it. Just an old cylinder with a single door at ground level.
That crazy griffon was right, it really isn’t like anything I’ve seen before…
She landed directly in front of the entrance. It was definitely a door, given its rectangular shape, but there was no knob on it. Tracing a hoof around the edges, Daring found them solid, but rough from centuries of wear.
After pushing on it and pulling with her wings, she decided it was time for a more direct approach. She planted her front hooves in the ground and bucked the door with all her might.
On the first hit, it buckled. With the second, it had twisted enough that she could put her hoof onto the other side of the sheet metal and pry it open, revealing the interior of the structure: a hall of seemingly endless darkness.
Daring squinted, trying to make out anything inside the structure. As her eyes adjusted, she could see sharp corners in the metallic walls. Since the structure had been sealed, the metal within hadn’t been tarnished and was significantly more reflective, to the point where she could see her reflection even with the low lighting conditions. In the distance, she saw—
“Meow!”
One of the cat balloons bounced over her and into the structure, startling Daring considerably. It bounced off the walls like a rubber ball, vanishing deep into the darkness.
“...Hope it can find its way out…” Reaching into her pack, she pulled out her lantern. Hefting it in her left wing, she lit it, bringing light to the interior. The walls were reflective, though they weren’t mirrors—it was an effect more like silverware. She could tell it was her the walls reflected back, but the details were fuzzy and muddled.
There were several options she could take: staircases to the side designed for creatures larger than herself, hallways that seemed to follow the edge of the cylinder, or the obvious choice: directly forward. Daring always liked it when forward was an option; it simplified things.
She marched onward, trying to remember if the balloon cat’s trajectory would have taken it this direction. Maybe she could help it get out of this maze of corridors and back to its confusing, tumbling journey.
This thought was torn from her mind when she noticed the writing on the hallway walls. Pure, matte black symbols had been placed on the metal through an adhesive process Daring couldn’t even begin to process. The black was almost rubbery to the touch of her hoof and seemed fused to the very wall, as if it were part of it rather than added on. The writing in this dark pen was not like any language Daring had ever seen from any race, alive or dead. She couldn’t trace anything she was seeing back to any civilization. Regularly, what she assumed were letters would break off from a seemingly standard sentence structure and take up positions in a grid, organized to communicate some concept Daring couldn’t fathom.
Some of the words came with diagrams, but they didn’t help her. Repeated over and over again was an image of three circles in a line of ascending size, each one with a different letter inside. What these circles represented, she had no idea, but they were everywhere along the walls. Larger diagrams showed many other circles with different symbols in them all connected by a bunch of arrows, with complex lettering focused around the angles between these arrows. Did these circles represent the gods these people worshipped? Some kind of magical spell recipe? Something to do with the stars?
She didn’t know. The longer she walked, the more confusing the diagrams became. More circles, more arrows, and a lot of lines drawn in seemingly random directions. One of the images was just a bunch of waves drawn overtop of each other. When she saw spirals twirling around in complex, beautiful patterns, she wondered if she was in an art museum, though the rest of the images were far too ordered for that… right?
The largest image brought her to a stop. There was a massive circle with a single arrow cutting through it from top to bottom, like a knife through an apple. At the top were three lines of varying height. At the bottom were three lines again, but the heights were different.
Why are those lines so important?
“Ah, Daring Do! I was wondering when I would find you…”
Daring entered a fighting stance, turning to face her age-old nemesis, all ponderings about the images on the walls fleeing her mind. “Ahuizotl…”
The dog-like beast grinned. “It is interesting, I must say, to be in a temple outside my sphere of influence… but there is a certain something about hunting you down just to take your glory from you.”
“I won’t let you hurt this place!”
“I have no intention of doing that, merely stopping you.” He opened his mouth and charged her.
Daring threw the lantern into Ahuizotl’s face, sending the flaming oil in several directions. It was unable to ignite the metal, but that didn’t stop the hall from going up in flames, surrounding Ahuizotl in a swirling inferno.
Pulling her hat down, Daring ran further into the structure. The center room was not far from her starting location, close enough that she might have been able to reach it without distracting Ahuizotl with the flames. As it was, she arrived with light from the fire and Ahuizotl struggling to snuff the flames on him before his precious fur was charred beyond what a simple grooming could fix.
The central room was cylindrical, much like the building itself, though this cylinder was flatter, only two stories tall. Empty doorways dotted the walls with rectangular sheets of glass on the walls above. Daring’s first thought was windows, but she couldn’t see through them. The center of the room had a six-pointed asterisk drawn in the ground with the black writing, directly below the primary object of interest.
Mounted in the ceiling was a segmented device made of three slanted cylinders, all made of the same metal as the building itself. Together, the smooth segments approximated an elongated cone, with the tip pointed directly at the asterisk, a bit like a cannon. The other two segments were covered in glass bubbles of various shapes spaced seemingly randomly. And, at the very base, there was a switch made of the matte-black rubber Daring had recently become familiar with.
Daring Do knew an on switch when she saw one.
She flew up to the device and kicked it on, dropping to the ground as fast as she could, careful not to stand directly below the artifact. The asterisk helped in that regard—perhaps it was a safety precaution? Planting her hooves in the ground, she flared her wings and turned as if to face Ahuizotl.
While the dog continued to roll and shout unflattering remarks as he made progress putting out the fire, the artifact turned on. Every little glass knob revealed itself to be a multicolored light. Most of them came on with a satisfying green color, though a few were blue and one star-shaped bulb was a bright crimson red. Shuddering with scraping noises and sparking with magical energy that twirled off like agitated fleas, the tip began to glow an intense white. With an audible thunk and a whirring not unlike a cyclone, a pulse of energy traveled from the base to the tip, unleashing a beam of white light upon the floor below.
If Daring had to bet, she’d say this was a laser. The perfect trap to lure an unsuspecting Ahuizotl into.
Her nemesis managed to roll all his fire away and walk into the room, growling. He paid no attention to the artifact in the ceiling; it was just a light, after all. “You will live to regret that, Daring Do…”
“Why don’t you come here and make me?”
“With pleasure!” He marched menacingly towards her, stepping right onto the asterisk.
Nothing happened.
“...Come on!” Daring let out a pained groan. “It made all that noise! It has to be more than just a light!”
Ahuizotl looked up. “A light. Your amazing plan involved a light?” He let out a delighted laugh. “It seems as though your plucky luck has run out Daring Do. It is time to meet your en—”
“Meow!”
The balloon cat bounced lazily out of a doorway toward Ahuizotl. Surprised, he smacked it with his tail as hard as he could manage. The creature bounced off a wall in an uncontrolled arc and hit the ceiling artifact dead on.
The artifact detached from the ceiling. Still glowing, it landed squarely on Ahuizotl’s head with a deafening thud, knocking him out in an instant.
“Nice one, cat!” Daring shouted, a second before the cat smacked her in the face at high velocity. By the time she’d gotten her bearings about her again, the cat was gone. Ahuizotl and the artifact were still there.
Daring picked up the artifact in her wings and raised an eyebrow. It was still on, humming and sparking like the piece of rickety machinery it probably was. It pushed against her like the air while she flew, always pushing the opposite direction of the light. And yet, besides the light it was emitting, it didn’t appear to be doing anything. Waving her hoof in front of the tip, she didn’t even feel warmed by the light.
“...You have to do something,” Daring said, frowning. “And I’m going to find out what.”
~~~
Daring set the artifact on the private desk of Dr. Gilded Jewel, employee of the Canterlot Museum of Natural History. The wrinkled green mare didn’t even look at it. “A.K., you can’t be around here looking like that.”
Daring tipped her pith helmet up, smirking. “I’m not going to be here long. Plus, if anyone sees me, they’ll just think it’s a really good cosplay.”
“That excuse won’t work forever.” She finally tore her eyes from Daring. She cleared a few red gemstone artifacts to the side of her desk so she had more room to examine the artifact, examining its features for the first time. Tracing a brush, she carefully stroked the edges of the segmented cone, coming to a stop at the barrel-like tip. Sensing the purpose of the device was to shoot something, she sat back cautiously. “What is this?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea, that’s why I’m here. I found it in a temple that didn’t match any civilization I’m familiar with.”
“Then how did you know it was a temple?” Jewel asked, tapping the artifact with her horn.
“...Eeeeeeh, I guessed.”
“This is why you should never assume.” She turned the artifact in her magic, frowning at its surprising heft. “What does it do?”
“As far as I know, all it does is spark a lot and then send a beam of light out. I know it’s doing more than that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Just watch and you’ll see.” Daring flipped the switch. Immediately, Jewel’s telekinetic aura vanished, dropping the artifact onto the desk unflatteringly.
“What gives!?” Daring asked as the artifact’s lights turned on like a Hearth’s Warming tree.
“It just… sucked my spell away.” Now supremely interested, Jewel watched the main light turn on in fascination, carefully examining every spark that flew off. She lifted it with her hooves, discovering the mild recoil. “I can’t light my horn. It’s drawing as much ambient magic as it possibly can.”
“For what?”
“A lot more than making a light,” Jewel admitted, waving her hoof in front of the beam’s path. “It’s not even generating much heat.”
“I tried to zap Ahuizotl with it.”
“No effects at all?”
“Nothin. He was fine until it fell on his head.”
Jewel glanced at Daring nervously.
“You don’t have anything to worry about. It was on the ceiling and a ‘mewon’ hit it.”
Jewel’s nervous expression was replaced with a deadpan one.
“...I’m not explaining any further.”
The doctor focused her attention back on the artifact, tapping it directly with her hoof. A magic spark landed harmlessly on her. “Well, I don’t recognize the material or the design as consistent with any ancient society.”
“The temple—”
“—Structure—”
—The temple,” Daring reiterated, “was tarnished from centuries of wear on the outside. It’s old.”
“Then I wonder why we haven’t found anything else like it…”
One of the red crystals Jewel had been studying prior shattered suddenly. Frantically, Daring turned the artifact off. “Why did that happen? Did we find out what it does?”
“No. They were just magic crystals.” Jewel picked up one of the shards. “The artifact was just draining its power for… something. Something a lot more complex than a simple light spell. But I’m afraid magical theory is not my area of expertise. However, I hear you know a certain mare that would be more than willing to lend her knowledge to you?”
Daring nodded. “On it. Let me know if you think of anything.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
~~~
Daring Do adjusted her cloak, which was rather difficult considering the large suitcase she was lugging around with her. Under normal circumstances, she would have just used her wing to steady the luggage, but her wings were under her cloak, making the entire operation a mess. In the end, she dropped the suitcase. It tipped forward and knocked on the doors of Friendship Castle for her.
She glared at her cloak like it was a traitor, an effect only magnified by the glasses currently plastered on her face. Why do I keep the wings hidden? It’s not a secret that I’m a pegasus!
“Uh… A. K. Yearling?” Spike the dragon asked as he opened the door. “Do you need help with you—”
“No. No, I do not.” Daring let her cloak off the hook and turned to Spike. “I’m here, the Princess requested an audience.”
“Didn't you request th—”
Daring made a cutting motion across her neck with her hoof.
“—aaaaactually I just remembered, she totally called you! Yep!” Spike laughed nervously. “Come on in and bring along your totally inconspicuous and not-suspicious-at-all suitcase!”
Daring facehooved. Had anypony actually been around, that would have been disastrous. As it was, the only effect was making Spike look like a fool.
“She’s in her lab, setting things up,” Spike said after he’d shut the doors.
“Couldn’t contain her excitement?” Daring asked, memories of being young and excitable flooding her mind.
“Yep. I’m not sure she slept since you asked.” Spike yawned. “I know I barely did…”
Spike led them down a few halls before eventually entering a large set of doors, on the other side of which was the personal lab of Princess Twilight Sparkle. Unlike professional labs, where everything was set up in organized sections and the tables were clean, Twilight’s appeared a haphazard tangle of crowded tables and bubbling concoctions. It didn’t seem messy—Twilight would never be caught dead with a mess on her hooves—but her personal organization strategy was inscrutable by the minds of mere mortals.
Or that’s how Daring felt, at least.
“Great, you’re here!” The Princess teleported out from behind a desk, jumping right in front of Daring. She was wearing a labcoat embroidered with her starburst cutie mark and an oversized pair of safety goggles that made her already enormous eyes appear even larger. “Do you have it? Do you have it?”
Daring wheeled the suitcase out and opened it. “Before you start prodding it with everything you’ve go—”
“I have no intention of damaging such a precious artifact…” Twilight said, rubbing a hoof over the curved edge, careful not to place anything in front of the tip. “All my tests are non-invasive. We can’t afford to break it, then we may never figure out what it does.”
“Any ideas as to what it does?”
“High or low energy electromagnetic wave emission. I’m thinking radio or X-rays or something. You don’t feel anything when they pass through you, but they definitely do things. Turn it on, please?”
With a shrug, Daring flicked the lever, shooting a small spotlight onto the ceiling. It refracted into the rainbow through the castle’s crystals.
“White light contains every kind of light,” Twilight said, waving her hoof through the beam. “But, what most ponies don’t know is that radio waves and X-rays are just different kinds of light so high or low in energy that we can’t see them! If I’m right, you have a device that can emit all of them at once!”
“...So it’s just a fancy flashlight.”
“An object that could emit such a wide range of EM waves is unheard of! What are we waiting for? Let’s test it!”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Daring moved to pick up the artifact, but Twilight teleported it to a desk just as Daring touched it, making the poor pegasus fall over. “...Mmph…”
“I’ve got a radio antenna right here,” Twilight said, prodding a long metal wire sticking out of a speaker box with a hoof. “Just to prove that it’s working…” She twisted a dial, setting it to Ponyville radio.
“It’s currently forty-seven degrees outside with possible showers in the evening. And now, we’ve got Bore with the news…”
Twilight turned the dial back to the off position. “Okay, we’re good.” She flipped the ancient device’s on switch, waiting for all the lights to turn on. “Now… if this thing is emitting radio waves we should be able to pick up a signal on one of the channels. We’ll know if we pick up some strangely loud static or some other strange signal. Listen closely…”
Starting at the lowest frequency, Twilight carefully adjusted the knob through every setting. Mostly they got silence with soft static and occasional messages from official stations. But no matter how slowly Twilight moved the dial, there was nothing unusual to find.
“Well…” Twilight pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s only high-frequency waves. Let’s try taking an X-ray.” She pulled out a piece of thin, reflective white paper. She laid her hoof overtop of the artifact, blocking its beam. Carefully, she placed the paper overtop of her hoof and let it sit for a few seconds.
Nothing happened.
“Aren’t X-rays supposed to show your bones?”
“Yes…” Twilight muttered, glaring at the paper unhappily. “This wouldn’t have been a good one since I’m just waving it around, but X-rays should have blackened the paper. I’m not getting anything.” She tapped her hoof, annoyed. “I’m not feeling any heat coming off of the beam, so it’s not infrared. I suppose I can try a test for UV rays.”
“If it was just a big black light, one of the rocks I pointed it on the way back to the Canterlot History Museum would have lit up like one of Trixie’s firework shows.”
“Right…” Twilight sagged. “Well, I do have backup theories! I set up plenty of extra tests we can run! My second thought was that maybe it was a magic battery, and all the light is just a byproduct. It sucks everything out just to store it. And the best way to test that is…” She dragged them over to a desk with what looked like a black hula hoop mounted above it. “Magic, passing through an enclosed loop of thaumic conductors, creates a surge of energy that can be detected on this meter here.” She tapped what looked like a pressure gauge sitting on the desk. “If we just toss the thing through it, we’ll detect a massive shift if there’s stored energy.”
“How are you going to lift it while it’s on?” Daring asked. “Your horn won’t work.”
Twilight picked it up with her wing and pushed it through the ring.
The needle twitched slightly.
“Is that it?” Daring asked, excited. “Is it…?”
“That was nowhere near enough,” Twilight muttered, her left eye twitching. “It’s disabling my telekinesis, and I can move the needle a lot more than that. It’s definitely using the magic for some kind of spell.”
“Can’t you, just…” Daring twirled a hoof in the air. “Magic to find out what the magic is?”
Twilight whirled to face Daring, her smile just a little too large. “That’s next on the list! But it’s not going to be that… simple.”
“Why not?”
“Just… just watch.” She trotted to the other side of the room and lit her horn. “This is the copy spell. I’m copying it… copying… done! And now… cast.” Twilight’s horn became enveloped in three layers of lavender aura and her eyes gained a faint glow, a level of magic exertion Daring had only seen rarely in her adventures.
Nothing happened.
“Do you…?”
“No, I don’t have any idea what it did,” Twilight gasped, seemingly out of breath. “All I know… is that it took a ton of magic energy… geez…” She glanced at the machine. “What is it doing?”
“You just did it, shouldn’t you know?”
“That’s not how it works. I could cast a spell that made a pony two miles away hiccup and I’d never know. ...Never mind, bad example, I’d detect a displacement of magical energy if the effect was far away. The effect is instant and present. Whatever it is.”
“Is it just burning magic for no reason?”
“I know the burn spell, this isn’t anything like it, and that costs almost no energy at all.” Twilight tapped her hoof on the ground angrily. “That’s A, B, and C, all out! Time to get creative!” She pulled a crystal ball from another table and set it next to the artifact. “Oh ball of mystery, what does this bizarre artifact do?”
“This doesn’t seem very scientific,” Daring deadpanned.
“Shush, let me have this.”
A big, empty circle appeared in the crystal ball.
“Zero…?” Twilight cocked her head. “Zero? Zero? That doesn’t make any sense! Are you saying you have no information? Are you…?” She put her hooves to her head, grimacing. “Okay, think, Twilight, think, there has to be something else we can try…”
“There were a lot of circles on the temple walls,” Daring pointed out.
Twilight pressed her muzzle into Daring’s. “Take me there.”
“Wh…”
“Now.”
“...All right, fine, hold your horses.”
“I’m. Calm.”
“No, you most definitely are not.”
“Just get us there. I don’t care how long the trip is, I’ve got teleports.”
~~~
I should bring a unicorn along more often, Daring Do thought. Travel is so much faster.
A full day hadn’t even passed since they were in Twilight’s lab, and here they were, standing in front of the ancient structure’s door.
“Here’s the temple.” Daring gestured at it with her wing.
“How do you know it’s a temple?” Twilight asked.
“Oh for the love of Celestia, not you too… Come on, I’ll get you to the room it was in.”
“I’m more interested in the glyphs. With the circles.” Twilight tapped her hooves excitedly, that crazed smile of hers returning in full force.
With a roll of her eyes, Daring marched into the cylinder.
“You know, I’ve never seen this alloy before,” Twilight began. “Not quite silverware, not quite steel… I’d love to study this place.”
“You and everypony else,” Daring commented, marching down the hallway. “Behold, a lot of alien gobbledegook nopony can read.”
“Hmm…” Twilight scratched her chin with a wing. She placed a hoof on one of the images of circles. “I think I recognize this…”
Daring looked at the picture she was prodding—a bunch of smaller circles placed around a collection of large circles overlapping each other. All the small circles and half the large circles had symbols in them, while the other half of the large ones were blank. “What is it?”
“I think it’s an atom.”
“A what?”
“The smallest component of matter. Or, well, what we thought was the smallest, recent experiments by J. J. Tomtom and Earnest Raddishfort have shown it’s actually made of two other things. A bunch of tiny things spinning around the outside and… well, we think it’s a solid thing in the center.” Twilight placed a hoof on the collection of larger circles. “Maybe it’s made of smaller things too.”
“So, what’s this mean?”
“Either I’m crazy—which I don’t think I am since this would explain the charge matching in atoms—whoever or whatever made this place knew a lot more about physics than ponykind. If they’re able to make accurate models of atoms beyond even our cutting edge research…” Twilight’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks. “We might not even be able to comprehend what they were doing here.”
“Cheery,” Daring deadpanned.
“I’m going to figure this out,” Twilight muttered under her breath. “Even if it’s making something none of us have ever seen or heard before in our lives, I’m going to figure it out.”
“Room’s this way,” Daring called.
Twilight had to be dragged away from every last image. The ‘atom’ model was the only one she could recognize with any certainty, the rest of them baffled her completely. Some of the symbols were the same between circles, but the sizes never seemed to be consistent, and she couldn’t make out any sort of meaning for the arrows.
With much complaining, Twilight was dragged from the last image with the big arrow through the circle to the room in the center. Daring pointed at the ceiling. “Here’s where it was hanging.”
Twilight nodded, taking the artifact out and levitating it to the ceiling, easy to do now that it was off. “Hmm. Shooting down.”
“Right at the asterisk. Yeah. If it was supposed to hit it, you’d think it’d do something, right?”
Twilight traced a magic line from the artifact’s barrel to the ground. “Straight down. ...maybe even perfectly down.”
“Yep. I was kind of hoping it’d drill into the ground when I turned it on, if you want to know.”
Twilight started giggling.
“What?”
Twilight ran back into the hall, stopping at one of the images.
“Wh—hey! This is where it was, not th—”
“This is it,” Twilight said, pointing at the image with the big arrow going through the circle. “This is what they were doing.”
“...You’ve lost me.”
“The artifact is shooting something. But, like X-rays, it's passing through things. But not just our flesh, our bones, the metal in the ground, everything. Including…” she tapped the circle. “The entire planet.”
Daring looked at the image taking in the massive circle and the arrow cutting right through it. She blinked. “Holy ponyfeathers, you might be onto something.”
“And, if I were a betting mare, I’d say they were shooting at something. Something directly at the other side of the planet.” She took out a notebook and made a sketch of the image in her notebook. “I’m going to record everything I can. And then…”
Daring smiled, tipping pulling her hat over her eyes. “We’re going across the world to find the other half to this puzzle. You’re paying for the airship, though.”
“Paying for it? I’m the Princess, I have a personal airship we can use.”
“That sounds a million times better.”
~~~
Twilight hadn’t been kidding about it being a personal airship. It was state of the art, built of the finest materials, glittered like an amethyst, and only had one seat. It was a large seat designed for a growing alicorn, so both Twilight and Daring could sit in it, but it wasn’t exactly a comfortable arrangement.
It would have been bearable if Twilight wasn't twitching around so much as she pored over pages and pages of notes she’d taken in the structure. She’d deduced a few things—the biggest of which was that the circles usually represented microscopic particles. She’d identified the ones that were part of the atom by the symbols within the circles, but there were several others. In fact, the most common particles shown on the wall were three that weren't on the atomic model at all. There were a lot of arrows that showed relations from the atomic particles to the three mystery particles, but Twilight had no idea if this meant they were attracted to each other, made up each other, or had some other relation. It was beyond her.
And then there was the final image, the one of the arrow through the planet. It was simple enough: they were clearly shooting something through the planet, but how could she figure out what it was? Was it one of the three mystery particles? Did it have something to do with the lines off to the side of the diagram?
She twisted in irritation, ramming her wing elbow into Daring.
“Would you quit that?” Daring shouted, doing her best not to twist the airship into a nosedive.
“Sorry!” Twilight blurted, smiling sheepishly. “I’m just… having a hard time here, is all. I feel like we’re so close. I’m sure it’s one of these particles the thing shoots.”
Daring grumbled.
“I just don’t know why I can’t detect them at all. The other particles we know about have a charge that you can see with magnets. Negative and positive. I mean, look at the model of the atom! Magnetism is what keeps the thing together. A negative for every positive, a… hmm. Well, there are the other, blank particles. I guess they could be… neutral.” She frowned. “Could that mea—”
There was a loud rumbling that shook the ship considerably.
“What was that?” Twilight asked.
“I have no idea, and that concerns me,” Daring said, tightening the grip of her wings on the controls. “Be on the lookout.”
For the first time in several hours, Twilight looked outside. The landscape was absolutely beautiful. It may have been a bog, but when a bog is made out of pink trees and water that reflects the sun into multi-faceted rainbows, a lot of the natural disgust that came with the mud vanished. Above them, islands floated, cascading pure rainbows to the water below, feeding the myriad of lifeforms that called the bog home.
Twilight gasped as they passed over a tribal village of frog-people. “Did you see that?”
“Yes, I saw that.”
“Have you ever seen frog people before?”
“Only on occasion,” Daring admitted. “I wouldn’t go say hi. Amphibians tend to be… grumpy.”
“Oh, psh, I’m sure they’d like a friend!”
“Let’s not risk it right now, okay? Let’s jus—” They heard the noise again, this time closer. “Okay, what is that?”
“I don’t know! A monster? Some kind of weather phenomena?”
“I’m going to go with ‘monster’.”
An eel larger than most dragons dove from the skies above, slimy skin shimmering with a rainbow of colors that were somehow more menacing than the wonderful scenery around them. Blobs of compressed air released puffs of pink clouds that lined its body, pulsating like a series of tumors to keep the beast afloat in the air. Four eyes dominated its front end, each occupying one side of the moist body. It opened its toothless four-segmented maw to devour their tiny ship whole. Daring managed to swerve the ship to the right, narrowly avoiding becoming lunch.
“Do we have any weapons?” Daring asked.
“Uh, no,” Twilight admitted. “I asked for it to be made without them.”
“Of course you did…”
“Weapons are not a very good thing for the Princess of Friendship to have!”
“We’ll argue about this later, it’s coming around for another pass!”
This time, the eel came from behind. Daring knew airships were terrible at gaining altitude quickly, so she sent it into a dive, avoiding another bite.
“Woah! That was amazing!” Twilight cheered.
“I can’t keep this up,” Daring said, grinding her teeth. “One of these times it’s going to hit us.”
“No it won’t. I believe in you, Daring!”
The eel bit off the back half of the airship, removing every bit of control Daring had.
“...Well, I appreciated the vote of confidence,” Daring deadpanned.
“Heheh…” Twilight laughed nervously.
They crashed into the rainbow water. As it turned out, just because it looked beautiful didn’t mean it felt pleasant. The mud was still just as slimy, disgusting, and sticky as mud in a bog back home would have been.
Daring tore herself out of the gunk with a groan. “Well, this is just great. Halfway across the planet, stuck in a bog.”
The eel roared again, coming down to finish gobbling up its meal.
“Oh, and this thing doesn't give up. Wonderful.” Daring took out her whip, ready to lash the creature across the nose in a vain hope that it would run away.
Twilight burst out of the mud with a swirl of arcane energy. “Get back!” A multi-layered beam of amethyst energy launched from her horn, hitting the eel square in the nose. The eel screeched in pain but continued on its course.
“...Why weren’t you doing that in the ship!?”
“Didn’t want to break the ship!” Twilight said. “Figured that it was broken now, so…”
“Keep shooting!”
“I’ve got a better plan.”
“Twilight…”
The eel opened its maw to devour them.
Twilight raised a shield larger than the eel’s head. It smashed into it at full velocity, cracking its jaw as though it had smashed into a solid mountain. Letting out a pained whimper, the levitating predator swam back into the sky without so much as another menacing growl.
“Wow.” Daring blinked. “I don’t see many wizards like that.”
“Got a power boost with the wings,” Twilight admitted, ruffling the appendages in question. “Although, I might have been able to do that as a unicorn. Hmm, I wonder if I could have… Would have taken a lot more of my reserves than I had…”
“Let’s worry about your magical fortitude later. We’re currently stuck in a bog without an airship. Without the navigation instruments I have no idea where we even are.”
“Oh, psh, there’s a spell for that.” Twilight lit her horn and a small arrow appeared over her head. “Our destination is this way! Come on!”
“...I’m supposed to be the one dragging you to the ancient temple.”
“We don’t know they’re temples.”
“They’re temples if I say they’re temples,” Daring hissed.
Twilight shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you’re not the one with the magic map, so I’ll take point!”
“Do you even know how to trek through the wilderness?”
“I crossed the Bone Dry Desert, how hard could this be?”
“...You’re doomed.”
~~~
Twilight pulled a starfish covered in green needles off her face and threw it to the ground. Her mane was a mess, one of her eyes was swollen, a significant cut ran across the left of her jaw, and part of the hair on her legs had been removed after a run-in with a tar-slime. But she was still leading, still following the arrow through the wilderness.
“You’re doing a lot better than I would have expected,” Daring admitted. She still had her hat and showed little, if any, signs of wear. Her monochrome mane was somehow perfect. The sack which held the artifact was the only dirty part about her.
“I… am going… to find this place. And then… I will make it reveal its secrets…” Twilight cackled. “I’m going to figure it out, you hear me? I’m going to figure it out!”
“I’m taking it this is why Rainbow talks about ‘Twilighting’.”
Twilight ignored her, pushing back a tree leaf that made her feel as though ants were crawling up her leg. Shivering as though she’d been dumped into the arctic ocean, she jumped forward into a clearing.
In the center of this clearing was a small metal cylinder, maybe large enough to be a house. She gasped, casting the navigation spell. The arrow pointed right at it. “I found it! Oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes!”
“Would you look at that. You actually did it.” Daring smirked. “I’m proud of you, Princess.”
Twilight shot her a look. “Don’t patronize me.”
With a chuckle, Daring trotted toward the structure. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She walked up to the door, shocked to find a wooden doorknob embedded into it. Something about the presence of the door removed any desire she had to bust it down, so instead she knocked.
“...Do you expect someone to be here?”
“Not really,” Daring admitted.
The door opened, revealing a blue frog in a nice brown suit and top hat. “Ribbit.”
“Um. Hi.” Twilight blinked. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle, and this is Daring Do.”
“Ribbit.”
“We were wondering if we could, I don’t know, have a look inside?”
“Ribbit.”
“Please?”
“Stop trying, Twilight,” Daring said. “He’s not able to talk. Just some poor animal dressed in a suit by some cruel sap.”
“I say, I dressed myself!”
Twilight and Daring stared at the frog’s unusually high-pitched voice.
“Oh, bother, I seem to have startled you. Terribly sorry about that, my name’s Pibb, but you can call me Pib.” Daring couldn’t discern a difference in how he pronounced the name. “I was busy thinking to myself. ‘Self,’ I thought, ‘these are talking horses at my door, what should I say to them?’ And then I kept thinking, ‘oh no, they’re still talking to me, asking me questions, oh no, bother,’ and then you insulted my suit!”
“I didn’t insult your suit, Pib,” Daring deadpanned. “I just thought you were an animal and someone had forced you to wear it.”
“Oh! Well, that changes everything! Am I a slave to my clothes? Is that why you walk around in your natural coats, saying ‘naught!’ to the cloth?”
“I… what?”
“We don’t normally wear clothes,” Twilight explained. “Our society considers the coat enough. If you’re uncomfortable I’m sure I can cover up with something.”
“Perish the thought! You are my guests, you can act as you wish so long as you don’t lick my eyeballs without permission!”
“We would never, ever, do that,” Daring said, shivering slightly.
“Splendid!”
Twilight gave Daring a sideways smirk. “Well, Pib, I have to say I’m glad I met you. You’re quite the charming individual! I’m sure we’ll be great friends.”
“Absolutely! After we deal with the reason you are here, of course. Which is…?”
“Oh! We followed a trail from an artifact to your home here. We’re trying to figure out what it does. Can we come in to see?”
“Sure, you seem amiable enough!” He walked into the cylinder, allowing the two ponies entry.
This was clearly his home. A bed made of leaves was set to one side, a few shelves of collected food on another, and lots of dirt and grime all over the floor. The center, however, was untouched: a set of three blue crystals that ran from a center pedestal all the way to the ceiling.
“What are these?” Daring asked.
“Crystals, my fair friends!” Pib answered.
“Time to test it out…” Daring took the artifact out of her sack and set it on the ground, pointing it at the crystals. “Do you mind?”
“I have no idea what you’re doing and I’m absolutely fascinated to find out!”
“Good.” Daring flicked the switch. She braced her hooves to account for the slight knockback. The light came on…
And one of the three crystals lit up with a brilliant white light.
“It worked!” Twilight and Daring declared at the same time.
“My, that’s bright, brighter than it had been!” Pib said.
“...It’s lit up before?” Twilight asked.
Pib nodded. “Just last week, it did! Though it wasn’t as bright, and all three of my fanciful pillars graced me with their charm.”
Twilight scratched her chin. “Last week… that’s when you turned it on the first time, right Daring?”
“Yeah?”
“So… When we shot it here, only one lights up. But when it passes through the planet…” Twilight gasped. “I think I get it!”
“Get what? What it’s making?”
“Well… not really, but I think I know why they were doing it! See, uh… Pib, do you have somewhere I can write?”
Pib gestured at the wall. “I’m always in the mood for new art!”
Shrugging, Twilight used her magic to etch a copy of the image of the arrow going through the planet, complete with the unusual lines on the top and bottom. “Up here, we have three lines, two of which are small and one of which is very big. This is what the artifact emits.” She pointed at the crystals. “Only one of these crystals lights up when hit directly. However…” She traced the arrow’s path through the planet, coming to the other set of lines. “As the beam travels, some of them change into the other two types. It probably only happens like that over immense distances. This is why three particles were repeated over and over again.”
Daring clapped her wings together. “Those were the particles they were detecting. Am I right?”
“I think so!”
“So… let me see if I can follow this myself…” Daring scratched her chin, examining the crystals. “The spell creates one particle that can pass through virtually anything and seems to do nothing. But, somehow, by shooting it through the entire planet, some will change into other particles, to be detected by this thing here. Which will… light up depending on how many hit it? What is this, some kind of science experiment?”
“I think that’s exactly what it is! They were trying to figure out some kind of relation between these particles by shooting them through the entire planet!”
“Seems like a lot of trouble,” Daring commented. “And, I don’t know, there could be another explanation.”
“You’re right…” Twilight drooped. “I am jumping a bit. I’m just so excited…”
“Twilight,” Daring said. “How can we test these theories of yours?”
Twilight blinked. “Wait, you want to test?”
Daring shrugged. “I might try it out for a bit, I’m a little curious. I’m kind of hoping it turns out it was a temple the whole time and this was some kind of particle-worship ritual.”
“Well, to perform more advanced tests I’d have to set up a communication spell between here and back home. I’d shoot the particles through the planet using the copy spell, and here… well, Pibb would have to agree to use the artifact on his end.”
Pib bounced up. “If I can light up my crystals anytime I want, I’ll be an even happier frogg than I was! And we froggs are a naturally happy people, I always say.”
“Oh, thank you, Pib!” Twilight clapped her hooves. “So we can run the tests with the particle ourselves and use the results to find out what was going on in the lab.”
“Temple,” Daring corrected halfheartedly.
“It’s a lab, I’m sure of it now,” Twilight said. “Particle in, three particles out…”
“Okay, we need to come up with a name for these things,” Daring muttered. “What are you going to call them?”
“Well, previous particles have been named based on their charge. These particles can’t have any charge, so they’re neutral. They also have to be really tiny to be able to go through the planet and not hit much of anything. So… how does the term neutron sound?”
Daring frowned. “...Doesn’t sound ‘small’ to me.”
“Okay, neutrino then.”
“Works for me,” Daring said. “And who knows, maybe if we figure out what they were doing, we can figure out where all their other buildings are. They couldn’t have just made these two things!”
“That does seem odd…” Twilight admitted. “Anyway, I’ll just set up the communication spell here and we can head ho—” She stopped short.
“What?”
“We don’t have an airship anymore.”
Daring Do, adventurer extraordinaire, only smiled. “Then we get to go home the old fashioned way. Don’t worry, this happens all the time.”
“Have you ever had to travel halfway across the globe before!?”
“Nope, but this sure will make a good book!”
Twilight sighed. “Well, at least I got you on board with the science.”
“I’m still not sure you were being very scientific here.”
“I will perform proper trials with controls and repetition before trying to publish anything! You just wanted to do this fast.”
“I did. You wanted it to go faster.”
Twilight laughed. “Maybe. At least we had some fun. ...And might still have some fun.”
“Sounds like a regular adventure!” Pib said.
“Yes, it will be, Pib. I’ll be sure to call you using the spell regularly to tell you all about it.”
“I will wait with anticipation!”
“I hope my friends won’t worry…” Twilight said, frowning.
“They’ll know you’re fine,” Daring assured her. “Although… Celestia might get mad that you left your duties…”
“Oh no. I only have a week left of vacation time.” She grabbed Daring by the cheeks. “We have to go now!”
Daring tilted her hat up, chuckling.
This was going to be absolutely, definitely, positively terrible;not to mention exhausting.
And yet she was fairly sure she was going to enjoy every last minute of it.
Daring Do and the Fountain of Neutrinos… has a nice ring to it.
Author's Note
Message from Sponsor
Thank you for reading the story. This work has been commissioned as part of a project creating pony stories about particle physics research topics. The neutrinos revealed by Daring Do and Twilight Sparkle exist in our world and are just as elusive. Our technology is different, but current neutrino experiments are also shooting beams through the Earth to investigate how these particles oscillate between different flavours as they travel long distances. To read more about, see my blog:
Daring Do and the Mysteries of Particle Physics (Click. Click it.)
This fic is part of an experiment to investigate the ability of pony fan fiction to communicate particle physics. To help us evaluate how well it works, please complete this questionnaire: https://forms.gle/u3cEqAh8nMmATqeo7
– Pineta, Particle Physics and Pony Fiction Experimentalist
