Fallout Equestria: Fractured Memories

I wake up after banging my head against the wall. Sunset was already up and was looking amused at my rude awakening. She looked much better than she did yesterday. She had apparently healed herself with something in this place.

I stand up and then go to sit in a chair near her. When I sit down, she starts to pass me a prepackaged meal.

I take it and set it down on the table. I ask her, "You had some questions for me, right?"

"Yes," she says, "You appear to be an earthpony. How do you cast magic?"

"To answer that, first I am not what I appear to be. . ."

She rapidly stands up and backs away from me, saying just above a whisper, 'Changeling'. I pause at the word and ask, "Sunset, what is a changeling?"

She looks shocked and confused before she relaxes slightly but remains distant from me. She contemplates my question before saying, "Changelings are a group of creatures that absorb emotional energy as food. They had a tendency to replace people and absorb love from the people who love the people they replaced."

I chuckle, causing Sunset to start charging her horn for some kind of combat spell, before saying quickly, "I am not a changeling, Sunset. I am what is known as an Argaroth from where I am from. I absorb magical energy, not emotional energy. I use that energy to cast spells in addition to eating it. My race has no natural ability to reshape ourselves into other forms, I am using a spell created by my mentor that enables me to alter my form to better fit within other societies."

"Let's say I believe you," Sunset starts, she mummers something, but I only make out, 'saved . . . benefit . . . doubt,' "You didn't answer my question: How do you cast magic?"

I stammer before saying quickly, "My race uses runic structures, or spell matrices, to cast spells. I, in particular, use a mobile framework to store and quickly use spells I have defined within the framework. It takes me time to assemble a spell in my framework."

Sunset nods with understanding, still maintaining that spell in her horn, "So, you use this framework like a unicorn would use their horn, as a focal point for the magical energy. How did you get here and where are you from?"

I close my eyes and try to relax over a few minutes. Sunset gets impatient and says, "You said you are not a changeling. The only creatures I know of that can cast magic while being an earthpony is changelings. Where. Are. You. From?"

I huff and open my eyes, meeting Sunset's gaze as I rise from my seat, my voice steady and composed as I explain, "I am not certain you would believe me, but I am from an alternate universe. I can only guess it is very remote from this one, as where I am from, humanoids are the normal intelligent life, not equines."

As I begin pacing the floor, I maintain my composure, despite my voice becoming strained by emotion, "The world I came from is, or was, being slowly taken over by the human race, and I don't know what they called it, but my race named it 'Monah,' or 'mother' in your tongue. A great and cruel power tore my dimension apart and cast the parts into other realities. I was spared only because I was in the middle of being teleported by my mentor. I don't know if there is any other survivors."

"I reappeared in the void between dimensions, and there was a sense of . . . well, I guess you could say I felt my . . . existence slipping away. Then, an unexplainable force tugged me into another reality. Once I find the part or parts of my dimension within another dimension, I feel a tugging slowly pull me out of that reality and into another. I don't really understand it."

I pause briefly, my expression contemplative, "I eventually came to this reality after finding the parts of my dimension in a few other realities, and was confronted by your princess of the night when I arrived."

I pause, reaching a large blank in my memory. "Um. . . That is strange." I say, as I tap my head repeatedly and more forcefully several times.

Sunset looks at me with increasing concern before she says, "What is strange?"

Her question gets me to stop tapping my head and I say, "Um. I don't remember what happened after that. There is like this huge blank space from the night of my arrival to my arrival in that slaver encampment. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

She looks at me as if debating before saying with a huff, "Go ahead."

"Where are we?"

"We are in my safe house. I worked to secure and hide it over at least the last year and a half. It is nearly inaccessible without the use of a Gate or the knowledge of its exact location to teleport."

"This is an awfully well made structure for a year and a half of work," I point out dryly.

She sighs and says, "Like you, I am also from a different, alternative universe. When I arrived here, I was . . . troubled by what I found. I went to my old home and found . . . clues that led me to this safe house that my doppelganger here created. The pony me that lived here was apparently a very careful doomsday planner, and this place held enough food and supplies to last a single pony almost a decade."

"They had also carefully gathered reading material for themselves, given the amount of books stored here. All I had to do was make small repairs to the stonework and security of this place, and . . . well, clean up." She seemed to shudder at that last statement, and I could guess that cleaning up was not as simple as cleaning up dust and dirt.

Sunset paused a bit before asking, "You mentioned a mentor. Does that mean you attended a school for magic?"

I answer simply, "Yes, I did attend a school for magic. However, I was mentored in magic before I attended such a school. I am particularly gifted with abjuration and enchantment spells."

I pause, seeing the confusion in Sunset's face, and elaborate. "In my understanding of magic, magic is broken down into eight devotions, fields, schools, or whatever term you care to use. Each devotion has a different approach to its use of magical energies. My fields correspond to protection and security spells and placing spells within objects, areas, or creatures. Have you attended a school for magic?"

"Yes. I studied under Princess Celestia in her school of magic in Canterlot. My special talent covers most forms of magic in general, although I have been most interested in translocation and elemental magics. This is actually somewhat related to what I have been working on in this safe house. You wouldn't happen to have knowledge about traveling between dimensions? I am trying to make something to get me back home."

"Well. . . I have traveled to and from several dimensions so far. The issue is that I have not controlled these movements, they have occurred almost at random. Trying to get to a specific place is beyond what I know. However, I have a good amount of experience looking over magical spells to improve efficiency. If you want to show me what you have, I can look over it. But, first I need to find a source of magical energy so that I can eat. I don't really want to accidentally absorb something you don't want absorbed."

She . . . whinnies, I guess? . . . and then heads away. She comes back with three cylindrical devices and some bandages. "These are called Spark Batteries. They are used in some sort of energy weapon. Perhaps you can use them as a source of energy? Also, these are magic bandages. I figured I could use them to help with that bump on your head you made much worse by hitting."

I look at the batteries. They have some sort of port on the top that enables access to the magic. I tap one against my leg, I mean foreleg, and feel a short jolt of magical energy. I then press the battery ports hard into my skin and properly drain the battery after a few minutes of time before putting the other two into my bag. "Yep. Each battery looks to hold enough energy to last me a couple of days. If you want to use the bandages, sure, but I can use some of the magic from this battery to heal myself. You may want to save them."

"Okay. I'll just put them back then." she says. Once she leaves, I use a small amount of magic to heal my throbbing head. I have learned that sometimes using my magic to heal is not a pleasant sight, and so I try to avoid doing it in front of people.

When she comes back, she brings a large sheet of paper rolled up in with her. She motions me over to the table; She rolls it out, revealing an extremely complicated mess of a spell. I take several hours to look over it before I say, "Hot damn Sunset, that is a spell. I may not deal typically with translocation, but abjuration magic can construct a banishment spell. Wouldn't that be easier?"

She sets me with a hard glare before she says, "Banishment spells require a large amount of energy to use, are typically detrimental to the recipient of them, fall outside of my typical spell range, and, well, technically I am not trying to get back to my original dimension, so a banishment spell would not have the same end result."

"Well that explains a good portion of the placeholders and relations involving the creature the spell is cast onto. For combining what appears to be twenty-six different spells, it doesn't look unstable. . . well, too unstable, given the number of spells. Given enough time with the spell, I could probably knock off about 6% of the total cost in mana from the spell, and might lower the chance of it failing by a small fraction."

"Whoever is planning to cast this spell would need to be powerful. I would need to be close to my maximum amount of stored mana to even attempt a casting. And even then, I don't think I could sustain a magical construct containing the spell, or spell matrix, of that size without external help."

Sunset just started staring at me when I mentioned casting it. Her pupils apparently narrowed down to pinpricks, although I didn't catch the change until about a quarter of the way through calculating the mana required to cast the spell. "What?"

"YOU COULD CAST IT!?" she explodes.

Holding a hoof up, I finish my calculations before responding. "No. Right now it is a fair bit above the maximum amount of mana I can store safely, and even with my adjustments, I still would not be able to do so. I would need to be able to store an extra quarter of my maximum mana to be able to cast it directly."

Confused at her reaction, I ask, "What were you intending on doing if not having the spell cast?"

"I thought I would have to build a machine to be able to cast it for me. My doppelganger was doing research with creating hand-held weaponry that casts specific offensive spells with those spark batteries in this universe, and I figured with some tweaking on mana supply and the focusing crystal, I could get a machine to cast a specific spell."

"That makes sense. If you use a crystal, the spell is unlikely to be inadvertently miscast or to require an insanely large casting time. Even then, the conditions would have to be almost perfect and I still am not sure the spell would function as it is intended. I only understand dimensional mechanics as far as its part in banishment, and your spell goes much farther than that."

She tilts her head and asks, "You talked earlier as though it is hard for your mana pool to reach your mana threshold. Unicorns like myself steadily regain our mana through rest and avoiding straining our bodies. Wouldn't whatever you are do the same?"

"I am an Argaroth. Argaroths are . . . well, our normal body is only semisolid and is flexible due to the amount of magic present in our body. Most of our mana is devoted to preserving this body. Although I look like an earth pony, it really is only a surface level modification: I still need to consume enough mana to preserve my normal form. As such, while I can absorb energy from the background magical field of this universe, that absorption is not even high enough to sustain my diet."

"I need to locate enough sources of energy to absorb to get to my maximum threshold: I don't naturally regenerate mana. Unless we can find hundreds, or even thousands, of these batteries, I cannot use them to get to my maximum threshold in enough time to still have the energy necessary to power the spell. And, based on the conditions here, I would say anyone with a significant source of energy would not be willing to part with it easily."

After a few more moments of thought, I add, "I'd be happy to help you do this, as I have skill in enchantments and it is wrong for you to be trapped away from your home. We find a pure enough crystal, I can set the spell matrix up within it, and help with tweaking mana supply lines so that enough mana is flowing into the crystal to support the spell casting. And two is better than one to locate these materials. . ."

It was just then that it dawned on me why she was there, "Wait. One of these materials is somewhere in that slaver encampment. That is why you were there."

Sunset just sighs before answering, "Yes and No. That's why I initially gated into the complex, but I can't be certain that the material is still there. This slaver complex was originally a noble's manor and grounds, specifically owned by somepony named Lady Albite. What's surprising is that she appears to have been a very studious earthpony noble — some of the books I found were written by her."

"I thought, at the time, that it would be at worst looted, not that it would become a home to those... monsters. It just so happened that the first stop on my search led me to that place!"