Chapters I sighed in frustration as I stacked another bag of apples in the large shed that was serving as a makeshift garage and flattened down the large cardboard box that they came from. Luckily this was the last of them— for now, at least. I’d probably have another mountain of them cluttering up the base of my treehouse whenever the next delivery of bulk bug chow came in. I was getting pretty tired of putting cardboard boxes away— I’d been doing it for what seemed like an eternity now, even though intellectually I knew that that’s just what happens when you move into a new house. Any more and the cardboard cuts on my hooves would have their own cardboard cuts.
Ugh.
I trotted back up the wooden stairs to the door of my house, glancing at the hastily made placard that I hung up on it yesterday evening.
TWILIGHT SPARKLE- WIZARD
LOST LOOT LOCATED. PARANORMAL PICKLES PREVENTED .
MISCHIEF MANAGED, GHOSTS GELDED.
REASONABLE RATES. INQUIRE INSIDE.
NO PARTIES.
“Hopefully, I’ll get the paperwork filed and I’ll be able to start this side gig soon.” I said. I turned from the sign and looked at the building underneath my humble abode.
The Golden Oak Library was pretty impressive, as far as everyday libraries went, though I’ve definitely seen better. It stretched for what would be a quarter of a small Manehattan city block, and was about two stories tall. The top of the roof was roughly the same height as my front door. One of the benefits of living in a large tree was that you always had a good view of the surroundings. The view that I had of Ponyville from the top of the stairs leading to my door was breathtaking, even if I felt a little dizzy. I’m sure I'll get used to it eventually. The house was kind of small for a house, but it was still really cozy. It was also free in the sense that I didn’t have to pay any rent, but it also came with a host of responsibilities that I was busy dodging as best as I could.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the mailmare trotting down the street outside in the direction of my new home. I eyed the mailbox next to me before glancing down to the dirt path that preceded the winding spiral staircase of polished wood built into the titular Golden Oak. The thought of trotting all the way back down the titanic tree just to get a package almost made my forehead break out into a cold sweat, and I absentmindedly lifted a hoof up to wipe the imaginary salty liquid away. I hated sweating, even the thought of it. It was icky and gross.
“Yeah,” I muttered, turning towards the doorknob. “I’m... just going to let you come up here. Teleo .”
With an ounce of will I cast a spell. It wasn’t a particularly impressive one, just the telekinesis spell that every unicorn foal learns at some point or another. My horn lit up with a familiar magenta glow, as did the doorknob, and with another twist of mental effort the round piece of brass turned and the wooden door opened. I made a mental note to replace the door— doorknob, hinges, and all— with one made out of steel or iron. A lot of supernatural nasties that went bump in the night didn’t like the touch of iron, and it never hurt to be too careful.
I moved into the entranceway of my house, wiped my hooves off on the large rug I had bought a few days ago to make sure that I wouldn’t track too much dirt in the place, and went towards the kitchen. Another muttered word and a bit of focus and the half-full coffee pot in the corner of the room started sloshing a few cups worth of caffeine-enriched goodness into my favorite mug while I got a sandwich out of the fridge. I took a few bites out of it while heading over to slurp some coffee down. Cream cheese and lettuce on toasted whole wheat bread. Sandwiches were just about the only thing I could cook well, and though this wasn’t my best work, it was acceptable.
Food is pretty much just a way of shutting my stomach up anyway.
The coffee mug floated over to my lips and turned itself upward at the optimal drinking angle. I took a few sips, swallowed the rest of the food, and washed it down with a few more gulps of the delicious brown nectar. I gently floated the empty mug back down on the kitchen counter next to the coffee machine. I made a mental note to call the repairpony about removing the oven again, maybe mention a large tip or something so that it gets done faster. It would be slightly more expensive, sure, and my finances were a little tight right now (at least in the sense that I had most of my bank account and income budgeted out to various expenses over the next couple months), but getting the thing removed and the natural gas lines in the place turned off was something I wanted done ASAP. I preferred doing all my cooking with a toaster and a microwave in the worst-case scenario.
I did not like fire.
I waited for a few minutes. The house was silent except for the faint snoring of Spike a few rooms over.
Spike is my familiar.
Spike is also a baby Dragon.
That’s “Dragon” with a capital “D”. A dragon, lowercase, is merely a large, flying, fire breathing lizard. Stereotypical monster, barely magical at all, most often found in storybook tales or lurking in far off out-of-the-way corners of Equestria or the Nevernever—the spirit realm. A Dragon, an honest to goodness capital-“D”-Dragon, on the other hoof, was a different class of being entirely. Those were the sorts of creatures that you found playing pivotal roles in ancient myths and legends—the real old stuff. The amount of lore I could find on Dragons could fit into a thimble with room to spare, so practically speaking, all I had to work with was firsthoof experience on the matter.
Spike was also still very young. Barely a baby, as far as I could tell. While it had only been about five months since he hatched out of his egg, he’d been growing pretty quickly. Not much of a surprise, since all he does is sleep, eat, and offer the occasional bit of assistance in the two or three hours of the day that he’s awake. As far as I can tell, members of his species hatch mostly ready to live their lives, walking, talking, and sneezing Dragonfire, but they certainly seem quite dependent on a parental figure to raise and feed them.
Dragons mostly eat precious gemstones and metals, which was mostly why my finances were fudged up beyond belief at the moment. That was okay, though.
Spike was a good friend.
I was thrust out of my musings on all things Draconic by a knock on the door.
“Finally,” I muttered. I moved into the entryway, whispered the all-too-familiar minor telekinesis spell incantation and yoinked opened the front door.
The mailpony outside was an earth pony with a cream coloured coat, some pretty hefty saddlebags, and a worn blue hat. As far as I could tell she was a mare. The pony reacted with surprise and shuffled in place, clearly not expecting me to open the door so quickly. I noticed she had a stylized image of black work boots (with some fancy silver trim towards the top and a nice shine to them) on her flank. Nothing that was overly flashy, as far as cutie marks go. She was probably hard working or loved getting things done (or something like that, it's tough to tell). Maybe even a craftspony of some sort—it’s not necessarily the case that ponies will have an entire career that conforms to whatever their cutie mark indicates their special talents or closely held virtues are. My own cutie mark was a magenta six pointed star surrounded by smaller white stars, one of the symbols of Magic. That happened to be pretty stereotypical, since as far as I was concerned I was a wizard first and foremost.
Technically speaking though, right now my official occupation on paper was “head librarian” at the Golden Oak Library.
I like books.
That’s kind of the understatement of the year.
The mailpony recovered from my abrupt door opening pretty quickly, modulo half a minute of fumbling in her saddlebags for a package. Afterwards, she was holding a large brown envelope in her hoof that had “Priority” marked on it in large red letters.
“Package for Twilight Sparkle, is that you, miss?” she asked. Her eyes flickered over to the placard on the open door.
Ah. Most ponies were pretty used to the everyday, mundane sort of magic that existed all around them. Most ponies with any real magical abilities didn’t tend to advertise it at all, let alone stick a sign up.
“Yup, that’s me,” I said, reaching a hoof out for the envelope. “Do you mind waiting here for a few minutes and taking something back to city hall? I just need to open this and fill out a bit of paperwork.”
The earth pony shuffled a bit more, clearly a bit taken aback at the request.
“Um… I’m not sure I can…”
“It’ll only take a minute,” I said. I muttered a word under my breath and tore open the envelope before floating a pen out from my side satchel. I quickly scrawled through the documents (it was so much easier to read through a pile of forms when you had telekinesis, let me tell you), jotting down check marks and bits of tax information at lightning speed. “Mhm, mhm. Okay, almost done.”
“Uh, miss— “
“No, seriously.”
I signed my name at the bottom of the forms in triplicate and quickly folded and stuffed them in the accompanying return envelope before licking it closed. I floated out a postage stamp onto the front, and jotted down the relevant address information. Finally, I took a crisp twenty dollar bill out of my saddlebags as well, floating it and the letter back to the mailpony.
“Here you go!” I said, cheerfully. Doing paperwork is pretty fun. The mailpony evidently didn’t think so, because she gave me a bit of a look—I’ll interpret it as a look of awe at my mighty intellectual thews—before nodding slightly and giving me a short-but-polite goodbye.
As a wizard, I have to do complex arcanomathematical calculations in my head on the fly sometimes. IRS forms are a piece of cake.
I closed the door, and noticed some sounds in the kitchen. Ah, good, Spike wasawake.
I trotted over and stuck my head in through the door.
Spike was a tiny, foot and a half tall baby dragon. He had light purple scales, a yellow-ish white colored underbelly, and emerald-green spiked ridges that ran up his back from the tip of his tail to the top of his head. He had very large eyes, white with green irises and a pair of slitted serpentine pupils. The little Dragon was currently chomping down on a handful of gem shavings from the box in the pantry— those I managed to get from a local jeweler for a discount, but it looked like I’d need to get more soon.
“Hi, Twilight!” Spike said, causing a small amount of multicolored crumbs to spray out from behind his serrated teeth. My little familiar bounced from one three-toed foot to another in excitement, tail swinging back and forth. “Good morning! Is there anything I can help you with today?”
I smiled, and it definitely reached from ear to ear. Spike was cute as a button. The smile stuck to my face as I shook my head.
“Not today, Spike,” I said. “Why don’t you just relax and— “
Before I could finish the sentence, I noticed that the little guy became cross-eyed, as if he was confused about something. At the same time, he sharply inhaled through his snout, head tilting back slightly.
Oh no.
The second reaction was one I recognized: he was just about to sneeze. I quickly slid to the side, and for good measure pivoted behind him to get clear of the line of fire.
Literally.
“ACHOO!”
A blazing jet of emerald flame shot out of his nose into the air in front of him. I twitched involuntarily at the sight of the flame, but clamped down on the reflex to turn and gallop away, as well as the instinct to throw up. It wouldn’t be good for Spike to see me getting spooked at him sneezing, even though I was afraid of the flames shooting out of his nose.
Usually Spike's sneezes weren't so volatile, but sometimes they could be. This was definitely one of those times. I looked at the small fireball as it shot through the air,then noticed something strange.
The small ball of Dragonfire was hovering in mid-air, slowly shrinking, burning itself away.
My eyes widened, and I mentally prepared myself to take some sort of action, just in case something else unexpected happened.
It did.
One instant there was a ball of green fire crackling away a few feet above my kitchen floor. The next, the fire… morphed into a scroll of parchment.
I don’t have words for it, it was like it reverse-dissolved into a piece of paper, as if entropy itself decided to take a holiday right there in the middle of my house.
Huh, that’s an incredibly improbable event that we never would have expected to happen in a million years , some patient and rational part of my brain thought.
FUDGE, SHIELD NOW , the rest of my brain screamed. And I listened to it, mustering forth my considerable will into a spell I’d practiced a thousand times. My horn shone.
“Teleo defendarius!” I barked. An instant later, a translucent, magenta-shaded dome of pure force appeared around me and Spike; a shield spell that was conjured forth at the speed of thought itself once my verbalization was completed and the spell formulae was fixed firmly in my brain.
I peered from behind the shield, staring at the scroll of parchment as it hung in midair for another few seconds, before floating gently down to the ground. Whatever it was, I didn’t trust it. My shield spell was rated to stop a live grenade. I didn’t get an A in Advanced Applied Defensive Magicks because I mailed in a pile of cereal box tops.
(Although, that’s not saying much. I received straight A’s in every single course I took, even Intro to Divination, a subject which I was pretty sure was a pile of made-up mudpies.)
Spike rubbed his nose with the back of one of his clawed hands before blinking and examining the scroll. His eyes widened, and he once more adopted that excited side-to-side shuffle.
“Look, Twilight,” he said, pointing at the scroll. “You got a letter!”
I stared at the scroll for another ten seconds. It could be some sort of dangerous conjuration, or some bizarre being from the Nevernever that—
I turned my head sharply and looked down at Spike, meeting his eager and entirely too wholesome draconic eyes. He stared back at me, smiling, as if he just said something entirely intelligible.
“Are ya gonna look at it? I wonder who mailed it!” he exclaimed.
I kept staring at him.
“What.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing the word out. The pause word was meant to help me calm down almost as much as it was meant to give me a moment to think. “So, let’s take it as a given that there’s a letter for me that appeared out of one of your fiery sneezes. How did you know that’s what it was? Do you know who it's from? Is this a thing we have to worry about often? Can you...” I fumbled for a bit as my thoughts ran ahead of me. “Can you uh,… not um… receive mail...?”
I trailed off with a nervous laugh accompanied by a nervous smile. I looked down at the Dragon expectantly.
“I, uh,” Spike said. Spike tapped one of his claws against his closed maw and furrowed his scaly brow. “I guess, in order: I dunno! I dunno, it’s kind of rude to look at mail that’s addressed to you, right? So I didn’t look. Um…”
The little guy shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know. I guess I could stop that from happening again,” Spike said. He seemed to spin on that thought for a bit, before his reptilian eyes became as wide as dinner plates. Spike looked at me with pure, unfiltered concern in his face. “But that would be horrible , you wouldn’t be able to get any of your letters!”
Uh. Yeah, that’s kind of the point.
I was pretty darn concerned about the prospect of things teleporting into my house without my consent — what if somepony tried to, I don’t know, “mail me” a bomb or a bucket of venomous snakes— but I wasn't really sure what else to say. I had no idea that this was a thing .
Was this a thing, another thing I’d have to keep in mind when dealing with my familiar? Were there more of these surprises in store? How many more would I be facing, weeks, months, or years down the line?
I felt a migraine coming on.
“Alright, Spike,” I said. “How about… no more ‘letters’ for the time being, okay? At least not until, uh,” my brain spun uselessly for a moment. To be fair, I was still using most of my concentration to hold up the spell around us. Large domes weaved out of mystical force and willpower weren’t exactly cheap in the brainpower department. Eventually I thought of something.
“It’s probably not a good idea to be accepting mail until we can figure out how to tell if it’s junk or not,” I said, nodding confidently. “Y’know, build a safe sender list! We don’t want people sending us magazines and advertisements and all that. Think of how much sneezing you’d be doing!”
Spike paused to consider that. I could almost see the gears turning in his brain. Finally he turned to me and gave a nod and one of those big innocent smiles of his.
“Wow, yeah that makes a lot of sense. That’s really thoughtful of you, thanks Twilight!”
I almost felt guilty for making up reasons to his face to get whatever the hay was going on right now to hopefully not happen again for a good long while. Almost. I took home security pretty seriously, and “Teleport something inside Twilight Sparkle’s house” was as big of a security vulnerability as they come.
Besides, while Spike was capable of intelligent thought and conversation, he was only about five months old. I spent half an hour yesterday explaining to him how the toaster worked. We hadn’t yet had a big talk about how the world was filled to the brim with terrifying monsters that were out to hurt you. Maybe I should pencil that one into the schedule.
I looked back at the little guy. Still smiling faintly, bright-eyed and tail-wagging again, full of hope and wonder and buckets of innocence.
Maybe not.
I stood there with Spike behind my shield for another half a minute, still absolutely flummoxed by the craziness of the whole situation.
Well, if something bad was going to happen, it probably would have already , I thought. With a focused thought, I released the shield spell, looking cautiously at the scroll that had spent the better part of a minute on my new floor.
I couldn’t be certain that it wouldn’t react badly to a spell being applied directly to the parchment, so telekinesis was out. Guess I’d have to pick it up and read it the old fashioned way. Carefully.
I walked over to the pantry and grabbed a pair of salad tongs with my left hoof. I carefully walked over to the scroll and gently, ever so gently, picked it up with the tongs. Nothing. I tried to open my arcane senses up a bit, going through a mental motion that was somewhat akin to stretching a leg forward, except all in my head, and almost instantly I felt the hot, unyielding radiance of the afternoon sun start creeping up my left foreleg.
Right . That’s magic alright, and now I had a pretty good idea who sent this scroll. Gulp.
I grasped one of the ends of the parchment in my right hoof and unfurled it.
And then I read it.
Dear Twilight Blackstone Copperfield Sparkle,
I hope this Sending finds thee well. In accordance with our bargain made several months past, I bestow on thee a task to fulfill: there is black sorcery run amok in Ponyville, and it is to the advantage of me and mine that this matter be quickly resolved, and be resolved by you and yours. Should this task be successfully accomplished, it shall be tallied against the seven favor debt that thou owe the Sunshine Court. Fail, and it shall not bode well.
There was no signature, only a blotch of yellow-orange ink in the shape of a burning sun . The ink was dry, yet hot to the touch, and a cursory sniff picked up a faint smokey smell— like fresh logs crackling on a fire. More than that, running the tips of my hoof over the insignia caused me to shiver violently. I felt it deep in my bones, my flesh, and my blood: I owed this being, and that debt was one that would be repaid.
I owed Queen Celestia of the Shiny Fae, Queen of the Sunshine Court, the Breaker of Day herself.
The terms of my bargain were hastily negotiated. I didn’t have much room to, since at the time I was too busy screaming “Somepony save my purple behind!” over and over at the top of my lungs. Negotiate? I was desperate and my graduation exam had been hijacked by some sort of hunter-destroyer demon, so the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Seven favors in return for surviving near certain death was a bargain as far as I was concerned.
My mentors had explained to me afterwards how foolish that was. The gist of the explanations ran from “deep regret” to “better off dead” to “wish I was never born”.
Oh well. Even if Queen Celestia left me high and dry at the time with a literally-just-hatched Dragon familiar and no hint as to how to use him to save myself, I still managed just fine. Asa it turns out, monsters don’t like blasts of Dragonfire to the face.
“Twilight, do you need me for anything else today?” Spike asked, visibly stifling a yawn. “I’m getting kind of tired, so I think I might go take a nap.”
And at the very least, I got Spike out of the deal.
“No, Spike,” I said. “You can go to sleep.”
The little guy yawned and waddled away. I heard the click-clack of his claws against the wooden floorboards, and the soft opening and closing of his bedroom door.
Right.
Work time.
I used the back of my hoof to brush some lathery sweat off from beneath my mane, before it got a chance to cling to the hairs (mostly purple, though with a brilliant streak of magenta hairs that ran down to my tail) and make it a matted mess. I ignored the pounding sensation in my skull, it would hopefully be gone in an hour or so anyway.
Keeping up an active defensive spell for more than a few moments wasn’t something I’d been able to practice all too often. For the majority of my tenure as a wizard in training, I always figured that if I needed to hide behind a strong shield for more than a few seconds, I’d be in a mess of trouble a few orders of magnitude beyond anything I’d ever expect to get into.
That opinion was swiftly and cruelly corrected during my graduation exam. My reward for surviving was admitted to the White Council of Wizards as a fully fledged member. I had spent what free time I could the last few months brushing up on my combat magic, but I was still a far cry from any of the junior wizards in the Council.
I contemplated contacting some of them for help. The letter had said something about black magic, and the Council very much cared to know about that sort of thing, in the same way that my lungs very much cared to be filled with air.
My pulse pounded in my head. Loudly.
I muttered a word and grabbed some aspirin from the medicine cabinet while the coffee pot floated over to me. I swallowed the pain meds with the scant few mouthfuls of cold coffee leftover— light roast, much more caffeine per unit volume and an excellent taste— before gently massaging my forehead.
Yeah, that’s definitely a migraine.
Author's Note
Hi all, going to be posting a few of these tonight and then hopefully about one every day (maybe more depending) afterwards, for the time being.
Story took a while to get approved (at least it seemed) and it sort of slipped my mind to push updates to the site. Merp.
“Bleh,” I grumbled. I sauntered over to my bedroom. The treehouse had two bedrooms, a large closet that we retooled to be Spike’s bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, and a couple smaller closets. One of the bedrooms was being used as my actual bedroom — which was more or less a bed, a dresser, and a mountain of bookshelves— while the other bedroom served as my office— just a desk, some experiments and tools, and a mountain of bookshelves for my arcane reference texts. One day, maybe I’d be able to get a proper research lab built. I was used to conducting experiments in heavily warded rooms that were in the basement of my teacher’s country home. A small bedroom just doesn’t allow for the same wiggle room.
I flomped down on my bed, not even bothering to slide under the sheets. I fiddled with my Daring Do mechanical alarm clock— I’d had it since I was five, and it was one of the only possessions I still had from my childhood. I grumpily set it to wake me up in just about an hour, before letting my head slump into my pillow. Hopefully I’d be more functional after a nap than my current state of “being a useless pile of ouch, oof, owie” that goes along with suffering acute arcane exhaustion. That’s maybe being a little melodramatic, seeing as I’m pretty strong, mystically speaking. I could have held that shield for another minute or two and probably tossed out a blast of force and a gust of wind on top of that, but that would have been my limit. Limit in the “I’m about to pass out from exhaustion” sense. Magic was tiring stuff.
Let’s talk about magic.
Let me tell you the reality: magic was a fundamental force of the universe, fundamental in the same sense that “gravity” or “time” are fundamental. They simply are. There’s a sort of… presence that all living beings— living souls, if you believed in souls— had, that cast a sort of shadow on physical reality. Changing it, ever so slightly. If you’ve ever wondered why you can suddenly sense somepony entering the room you’re in, or why you seem to have scarily appropriate dreams that have just a sliver of foresight? Have you ever felt, deep in your bones on a lonely starless night, that something was watching you , and gotten that crawling feeling running up and down the back of your mane? Have you ever wondered why, very rarely, it seems like the world itself will reflect your expectations of it in some tangible manner, positive or negative?
That’s magic at work. Bubbling up beneath the surface in ways that might not be so obvious.
There’s things about magic that everypony knows, of course. Those were the obvious ones, the ones that nopony in their right mind would even try to hide. They were just normal , everyday things that you didn’t bat an eyelash at.
Earth ponies had an unbelievably large amount of physical strength and stamina compared to anypony else. They were generally tough as nails. They also seemingly had some amount of inherent proficiency with gardening, farmwork, mining, all sorts of things that involved, well, the earth.
Pegasi have the innate ability to fly just by flapping their teeny-tiny wings, obviously. Even though normal wings of that size definitely shouldn’t support their weight, if you ran the calculations. They also could physically interact with clouds and other weather phenomena: standing on them, laying down on them, moving them around and rearranging them. It’s why most densely populated areas in Equestria had a weather schedule , it was their job to make sure everything ran according to however the federal meteorologists said it should.
Unicorns have “spells” that they were able to cast with some incantations while focusing energy through their horn... at least according to the public. The reality is, compared to true-blue honest-to-goodness, magical spells, they were mostly a pile of silly cantrips. I could use the telekinesis one in my sleep, en masse .
(The White Council had cracked that mystery ages ago: the reason unicorns could seemingly develop minor levels of magical talent much more frequently than any of the other two types of ponies was simply because we were born with some pretty efficient magical focuses stuck in our heads. You had to try pretty darn hard to make a staff or a rod that was more efficient at channeling magical energy than a unicorn’s horn. In fact, I’m not even sure that that’s technically possible, as far as I understand things, but I’m definitely no expert on the matter. )
Now, I’m not saying any of that isn’t magic, but it’s not really what I’m talking about when I refer to magic. When I do proper magic, like the shield spell I used earlier today, I’m reaching out to the world and channeling a pile of fundamental forces together to make something happen , usually using my thoughts, my will, an incantation, and my horn (of course) as structural components to guide those energies to not only achieve some sort of result or have some sort of tangible effect on the physical world, but to also do that in exactly the way I want.
That was magic. And it wasn’t easy. I had almost a decade of regular experience— both practical and theoretical— at doing what I do, and the average wizard would maybe consider me a particularly talented amateur. On a good day.
I still had quite a lot to learn about magic.
(Which was kind of great, actually, since I absolutely loved learning!)
But I definitely knew more than most, and one thing I knew all too well right now was that the words “black sorcery run amok in Ponyville” were, going by the Official Twilight Sparkle Dictionary, synonymous with “call for help immediately”.
The White Council of Wizards only had seven laws, but those seven laws were pretty serious stuff, and they governed the use of magic by mortal practitioners everywhere on the planet. If somepony somewhere broke one of the laws and the Council found out about it, then it was off with their head. Literally, and they didn’t give a horseshoe nail about extenuating circumstances.
Luckily, they were pretty simple to write down:
The first: Thou shalt not kill by use of magic. This one is pretty self explanatory, I think. The Council can be pretty extensive on what does or doesn’t count with this law, and I don’t think anypony sane would ever test how indirect you’d have to be for them to not care. If you really need to kill somepony, just shoot them with a gun.
The second: Thou shalt not change the form of another against their will. No involuntary shapeshifting of another mortal being, since the cognitive dissonance and feedback from being stuck in a body not their own will probably destroy their psyche in most cases. It’s also a terrible thing to do to somepony, obviously.
The third: Thou shalt not invade the mind of another. No mind reading. Telepathic communication is slightly different, in most circumstances that you’d want to apply it anyway.
The fourth: Thou shalt not enthrall another. No mind control. Ugh.
The fifth: Thou shalt not reach beyond the borders of life. Basically, don’t do a necromancy.
The sixth: Thou shalt not swim against the currents of time. I don’t really know what circumstances would allow this to happen in earnest, but this law is the reason the aspects of divination magic that we are allowed to practice boil down to vague prophetic nonsense that I personally would never waste my time with.
The seventh: Thou shalt not reach beyond the Outer Gates. In short, don’t summon up eldritch horrors from beyond reality.
The Laws of Magic had good reasons to exist. Breaking the laws required doing something termed black magic — basically, it was taking a force of creation and life and joy and freedom in the universe, and twisting it to evil and existentially destructive ends, in an act that usually ended up corrupting the practitioner as well. Once you performed black magic, you were named a warlock, because, as far as anypony who had ever explained to me could tell (also, wizards live a long time, so that's a lot of statistical evidence right there) sooner or later you’d be cackling in a dark cloak and plotting the end of the world as we know it like some sort of psycho supervillain.
Yeah, it’s that bad.
I drifted off to sleep.
o-o-o
I woke up to my alarm clock about thirty minutes later.
Blah. That’s not nearly enough sleep, but it’ll have to do.
I blinked wearily, and crawled out of bed with a yawn. I don’t really do naps, but sometimes they’re the only thing that’s going to cure a particularly bad headache. I shuffled over to my office.
My office was a small room with a desk on the far side opposite the doorway, a large sturdy bookcase on the right side, a rug in the middle of the room with an ornate summoning circle carefully woven into it (every square inch was glued securely to the floor, mind you), and a bit of shelving on the left as you came in that was covered with all sorts of experiments I didn’t really have time to poke at right now.
Even though I really wanted to get more data on how my thaumaturgical fridge project was going — I had two silver discs, one served as a heat sink, the other served as the cold component, with inscribed spells on both that allowed for a one-way thaumaturgical link that forced heat from the cold one to the heat sink, that I had safely buried in a pot full of dirt at the other end of the shelf. It was my hope that the sympathetic link between the two would be efficient enough that they’d be able to power themselves indefinitely(!) without too much energy loss, or at the very least that they’d last until the spell inscriptions needed to be redone and the enchantments needed maintenance and the —
No. Focus Twi, focus!
I blinked, mentally forcing the runaway train of excited thought to quit doing its thing, and walked over to my desk. I unlocked the big drawer on it with a key from the key ring that I kept in my saddlebag, and began pouring through the files inside.
“Aha,” I said, finally finding what I was looking for: the contact information of one Donald Morgan, regional commander of the Wardens in my geographical jurisdiction.
I left for the post office immediately, since it could very well be the case that sending a telegram out as soon as possible would save somepony’s life. Luckily it was just down the street from the Golden Oak Library. After a short walk and a tiny bit of waiting in line, my distress message was sent out into the world, to hopefully arrive at Mr. Morgan’s doorstep within the next day or two.
That done, I stopped to consider my options.
Warlock or not, if strange things were happening in Ponyville, it would definitely be to my benefit to become a bit more mobile, which means I had to go pick up my ride, if I didn’t want to trot everywhere. I was a wizard, a bookworm, and a nerd, not a world-champion athlete.
So I started walking towards Fluttershy’s place to pick up the Blue Beetle.
Author's Note
AN: A bit more exposition that I didn't get a chance to get to in the last chapter (grumble grumble) and stuff that probably isn't news to someponies reading, but this is definitely in the bin of "I'm going to get this crap out the door now so that I don't have to remind you every 30 chapters what a wizard is."
Updooting the rest of what I have for today shortly (in a few hours + before I go to bed, at least) after some quick edits. Sorry for the notification spam.
Fluttershy is the best veterinarian in town. She’s got a knack for animals, and manages a fairly large clinic located at the city limits. The clinic itself had a central building that resembled a small hospital, large glass windows, waiting room, smell of chemical disinfectant soap and all. The main building was flanked by green grass and a number of satellite buildings used to house larger animals and specialty cases. Some of them were specialized too. I had seen a large aquarium setup in one of them, and another resembled a large terrarium. There was a modest cottage perched atop a small hill farther away in the distance, maybe half a mile or so, that I presumed was her house.
There was a crowd of ponies at the clinic’s entrance, right beside the large sign near the entrance that stated, simply, “Every animal deserves love and compassion.” As I came closer I heard various sounds of panic, distress, and anger all coming up from the rabble. A sleek yellow form hovered a few feet above them, wings gently beating, head pivoting anxiously back and forth from face to face, mouth moving up and down faintly— though I couldn’t tell if she was actually saying anything. Her normally gorgeous pink mane was heavily disheveled, as if she hadn’t taken care of it in a few days.
I wondered what was going on. I hoped Blue was alright.
“Alright, alright folks! Simmer down now y’all!”
The crowd did just that, quieting down into a din of hushed whispers and grumbling. A light orange mare— earth pony, I noted— pushed her way through the crowd. She had a straw colored mane, most of it tucked underneath a brown cowpony hat, and she had a trio of apples for her cutie mark. She walked like she meant business, and moved through the crowd without bothering to wait for anypony to get out of her way. The mare made a one-eighty and leveled a stern glare at the crowd.
“Ain’t none of this rabble rousin’ is going to do a darn thing to fix the situation, now is it?” she asked. “How ‘bout we all shuddup and let the gal speak?”
The yellow pegasus closed her eyes for a moment.
“Thank you, Applejack,” Fluttershy said, nodding to the cowpony, looking like she was about one-quarter visibly relieved, and three quarters mind-numbing anxiety. She turned to the crowd, opening and closing her mouth a couple times.
“Um. I’m sorry that you’re all so upset,” she said, her voice as soft and quiet as a mouse. “Dr. Fauna and I are still investigating what’s going on, but it seems a lot of the larger animals are experiencing some pretty bad digestion issues. Hopefully, we’ll have everything sorted out within the next day or two, so if you can come back then that would be better. We’re doing our best, but I’m sorry that you all have to wait a little longer, but if you want to go visit your pets, then you certainly can.”
Fluttershy floated down to the ground. She seemed to deflate, almost literally, her neck and head slinking down as she appeared to halve her size. She looked down at her hooves as she gently tapped the grassy lawn with them.
“Thank you for understanding,” Fluttershy finished, lamely.
I don’t think anypony had the heart to argue with that. The crowd dispersed, most of them scattering in a bunch of different directions, while a few stayed behind to go see their animals in the larger holding pens behind the clinic. I approached Fluttershy and the cowpony— Applejack, apparently — to talk to them. The cowpony gave me a bit of a look, and raised a hoof as if to head me off. I quickly averted my gaze so that I didn’t keep eye contact for more than an instant.
“Now, listen here missy, I think...” Applejack said. She looked like she was about to start in on me, but then she trailed off and got this puzzled look on her face. “Huh. I don’ think I’ve seen you ‘round these parts before.”
Applejack pronounced her I’s in a very country drawl, more like an “uh”, really. I wondered absentmindedly which region of Equestria her dialect was from. Somewhere south of here, for sure.
While Applejack was getting ready to treat me like another member of the angry mob, Fluttershy looked over at me and her tired and sleepless eyes brightened slightly.
“Oh, I remember you,” Fluttershy said, her voice more of a breath than not. “Twilight, right? You were here the other day to drop off that large blue rhinoceros beetle. You’re new in town, here to be the new librarian?”
“Ayup,” I nodded, “That’s me. Twilight Sparkle, here to see my pet beetle.”
Blue Beetle— who I affectionately called The Blue Beetle, because it sounded pretty awesome— was named after a comic book character that I really liked. She had the heroic responsibility of being my trusty ride as we went to and fro, battling annoying minor errand after annoying minor errand, all in the name of eschewing meaningful amounts of exercise and anything resembling cardiovascular fitness. It was only natural that I thought the heroic naming scheme was fitting.
“Pardon my manners there, Twilight,” Applejack said, now looking a little abashed. “Names Applejack, nice to meet ya.” She stretched forth a hoof, and I put forward one of my own to give hers a light tap in greeting.
“I probably already introduced myself when you came by a few days ago, but just in case, I’m Fluttershy,” Fluttershy said, stretching forth a foreleg. One more hooftap later and the round of introductions was complete. “I was just taking Applejack over to the same building, actually. Feel free to join us on the way there, although you don’t really have to.”
Okay, that was… surprisingly thoughtful in how it was worded.
“That sounds good to me,” I said, falling in step with the other two as they turned to head towards one of the buildings in the back of the property. “So, it sounds like you’ve been having some sort of situation here?”
“Oh, yes,” Fluttershy grimaced. “Dozens of animals with serious indigestion all at once. Either a bug has been going around— oh, dear, pun not intended, I’m sorry.”
Wow, that’s an almost pathological amount of consideration.
I waved her off. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, you were saying?”
“Right,” she said. “Either somethings been going around the clinic and it’s only been bothering the larger animals, or something is wrong with the animal feed. I can’t think of anything else it could be. That’s why I asked Applejack to come over today, actually, her family’s ranch provides some of the produce that we use.”
“And I said already, that I reckon it ain’t something like that,” Applejack said, bluntly. “We sell ya the bruised and battered ones for feed, which means you get a pile of random assorted fruits and veggies. “If it was something dangerous in all the produce, then we’d be seeing a whole lot more than just a few big animals puking up their lunches. Sweet Apple Acres sells to the whole town.”
Huh, that’s where I get my feed from too , I thought. That could be a problem.
“That does sound pretty strange,” I commented, as we arrived at a building with a sign that said “Large Insect Pen #3”.
“Here we are.”
The building was mostly empty, except for a reddish-brown pegasus at the other end that was walking from pen to pen with concerned interest. Blue was in the second pen from the right, and she looked absolutely exhausted. The poor girl was slumped down on the ground, mandibles and horn resting against a bed of hay. I walked over to the pen’s fencing, and she perked up. I reached a leg through an opening in the fence, and she slowly scuttled over.
“Hey there girl,” I said softly, tapping her chitinous exoskeleton lovingly. “Who deserves some headpats?”
Blue was a massive insect, her thorax was large enough to seat two ponies riding butt to butt, and her abdomen had enough space for a few more riders or a particularly large pile of luggage— that was exactly how I moved most of my stuff over here. She ate about two bushels of apples a day, along with an assortment of various other vegetable refuse and some light afternoon grazing.
(It was somewhat concerning to me that on average, and going purely by the financial data, I ate the least out of my entire household by about an order of magnitude, especially given that one of the members of our household was about a fifth of my size. Perhaps that’s not a fair way to measure it, but I’m the one paying the bills there. Oh well.)
I could tell that something was wrong. My mane stood on end, and I suddenly felt a greasy feeling in the pits of my stomach, as if I had swallowed a bucket full of butter.
Magic.
Duh! I almost kicked myself for not connecting the dots sooner: this was probably related to the thing from Celestia’s letter! What were the chances that they just happened to be two entirely separate events that were completely independent? No, no, this was not a coincidence.
I looked down at Blue, and started opening up my Sight to try to investigate.
Remember how I was talking about how magic was similar to a force of the universe, like gravity? That’s true. It’s also all around us, in various subtle ways. The Sight was a term for the sense that wizards have the ability to use (once you’re trained in how to properly open yourself up to See, that is) and it allows the wizard to sense the undercurrents of the arcane that flow all around them, and most importantly, actually process that information as various types of sensory input. The most useful of these was obviously vision— hence the name— but sound, taste, smell, touch, all of those senses were completely hammered with feedback when you used the Sight. It was an incredibly useful tool, and I would probably be using mine literally all the time to satisfy my titanic curiosity in all sorts of ways, if it weren’t for one massive, glaring, critical flaw:
The things you experienced with the Sight were burned into your memory. Forever.
So if you Saw the wrong thing, if you heard the wrong sound, smelled a smell that was never meant to be experienced, touched a horror beyond imagining, or tasted a thingy most foul…
It could be goodbye, sanity. Each time you used it, it could be a one way trip to the loony bin, if you weren’t careful. Even in the average case, you wanted to be careful with the Sight, because stacking together a massive pile of intensely-unforgettable memories just wasn’t something that mortal minds were meant to cope with.
But I knew Blue, and I had no reason to believe there was anything around me that was particularly dangerous, so hopefully it would merely grant me some info that I could put to good use.
I opened up my Sight, and the world entered technicolor. I tried very hard not to look back at Applejack or Fluttershy — though my curiosity at what they would look like with my Sight up was eating me alive. I just looked at Blue. Blue was still a massive rhinoceros beetle, which was something I expected. I saw the sapphire color of her insect body starkly and how it starkly contrasted with... it was almost like the entirety of her body was covered with this cloud of weird yellow-green smoke. As I looked, the smell of rotten eggs suffused my nostrils, and I tasted gunk and bile on my tongue. Eugh.
That’s definitely new. Maybe some sort of… magical sickness? A vomiting curse? Who would do something like that? That didn’t really fit into the category of “black magic” though, now that I thought about it, so that was sort of weird. Well, at least I had some tangible info on why all these animals were sick.
I twitched as a loud bang — the sound of a bucket clanking loudly into a bunch of others, I think— rang out from behind me. I swiveled instinctively, accidentally Seeing a whole lot more than I expected.
Applejack was like looking at the ponyfication of a stone pillar. A strong wooden support beam that simply existed , as plain as the day is long. There was a quiet strength echoing from how she stood in the pen, as if she half expected to have to put the world on her back and start walking forward. As if she woke up this morning knowing that what awaited her was a day of ceaseless and thankless work, and knew that she would go to bed tonight only to wake up to the same thing the next morning, and so on, a thousand thousand times. I could See all of that, and I could See little frustrations and fears and regrets, as if she was wearing her heart on her flank.
It was… oddly refreshing. Fluttershy though?
Looking at Fluttershy while using the Sight was like getting blasted with the mystical equivalent of a bottle of anti-anxiety pills mixed with ten cups of Manehattan espresso with a shot of adrenaline and a soothing massage on top. The trio of pink butterflies that made up her cutie mark floated gently off her skin, and orbited her head. It was like… she was simultaneously the mortal incarnation of a mental health breakdown internally, but that externally she was… just…
Smiling.
She was just smiling anyway, just to make you feel better, just for you.
And it almost made my eyes tear up, to See somepony like that.
But unfortunately Applejack and Fluttershy weren’t the only ponies I saw, since I also managed to get a glimpse of the other pony in the stable as my head swiveled.
And that terrified me.
Because that pony? That pony wasn’t a pony at all. When I glimpsed that pony under the Sight, I saw a heaving mass of flesh and sinew being drawn tight over a quadrupedal monster, an insidious, fanged, furry, batlike creature that was only pretending to be a pony. I looked at that… that thing , and I could feel sticky liquid running down my face, a coppery taste in my mouth, and a sick sense of wrongness in my gut.
I shut my Sight off immediately and closed my eyes.
Deep quiet breaths, Twilight, deep quiet breaths. Don’t let it know that you know.
“Are you alright, Twilight?” Fluttershy asked. “You look like you’re in a lot of pain.”
A rasping breath escaped through my teeth.
“Yeah,” I lied, as my adrenaline shot through the roof, and then some. “I’m totally fine. It’s just painful seeing her this way.”
I was not, in fact, totally fine.
I was, in fact, twenty feet away from a vampony of the Red Court.
And it was walking this way.
Fudge.
Fear is a pretty powerful emotion.
There’s a reason ponies have fear. Fear is a great big burst of energy that you’re generally meant to do something with, whether that’s “fight” or “flight”. Those are the two most common responses at least, and that’s the case for a very good reason: for a long, long time throughout history it was the ponies who did one or the other in the face of imminent danger that survived to pass down their traits and habits (whether that’s to their offspring or their students).
When faced with something terrifying, usually they either fought it, or they ran away.
I sure felt like running at the moment. While screaming, loudly, and flailing in panic. But there was a third common response to fear that some ponies tended to display in the moment, and that was the one that my brain’s primal instincts had unfortunately decided we’d be doing right then and there.
I froze up.
The vampony (vampegasus? vamp?) slowly made her way towards us. Her coat was reddish-brown, and her wings were colored to match. She wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, the lenses were cut to be almost razor thin— probably just an accessory, since I very much doubted that vamponies needed to see the eye doctor. She had a … calendar on her flank? Not the sort of cutie mark I expected to see, but I wasn’t even sure that the flesh she was puppeteering was necessarily hers, per se.
“Why, hello there,” the monster said. “Just the ponies I wanted to talk with this evening.”
Applejack let out a weary sigh, whereas Fluttershy just looked slightly confused.
“Um, not to be rude, miss,” Fluttershy said, “but who are you?”
The vamp looked momentarily astonished, before collecting herself. “Oh, where are my manners? My name is Nectarine Calendar, I work as an executive manager for Wokefoal Food Corporation?”
“Oh.” Fluttershy said. She might have looked slightly less confused than she did a moment prior, but not by much. I was still on guard, since I knew that this was a giant batlike monster wearing a pony for a skin that was talking to us. I’m not a very good liar, so the best I managed was a blank stare. I hoped the vampony chalked it up to some amount of confusion mixed with emotional pain coming from seeing my pet in such a sorry state.
Applejack just looked tired, and annoyed.
“The corporation I work for owns Ruby Red Ranch,” Nectarine said, her tone matter of fact and her expression neutral. “We provide some of your produce here?”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened in recognition. “Oh, yes! Thank you for coming by, I was hoping that I could discuss something — ”
Nectarine cleared her throat with a cough, and Fluttershy stopped talking.
“My time is a bit limited at the moment,” Nectarine said, “I want to offer sincerest apologies for the current situation here at your clinic, of course, but I can assure you that our food distribution chain goes through various quality checks — Federal, State, Local, and our own— and that it’s incredibly unlikely there were any issues with our product. We will of course offer to run samples of your stock through some additional chemical testing at zero charge, as well as send you the results back, but I’m quite confident that they won’t find anything wrong.”
Nectarine’s expression changed from an impenetrable wall of corporate monotony to a warm smile.
“Now that the official claptrap is out of the way, I am here for another reason. Namely, I would like to invite both you, Fluttershy, and you Applejack, to a bit of a corporate luncheon this Friday. I’d like to help you get to the bottom of this — perhaps even arrange for some charitable donations, if you’re in need of resources? We’re always looking for tax write offs— ”
Wow.
It’s like she’s not even trying to hide that she’s a soulless bloodsucking monster.
“— and of course your friend here can come too.” The soulless bloodsucking monster turned to address me. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I got your name…?”
Another jolt of nervous energy ran through my body.
“Ah, haha,” I laughed, partly to try to coax my vocal chords into working again. “Twilight Sparkle, nice to meet you.”
“Quite.”
Okay, this was not happening, I needed to figure out a way to —
“Oh, that sounds delightful,” Fluttershy said. She turned to me. “You’re new in town, right? This would be an excellent opportunity for you to meet other ponies, isn’t that right, Applejack?”
“I guess,” Applejack said. Her teeth were gnashed together in the fakest smile I’d ever seen. “I reckon it’s not a bad idea .”
“Oh, wonderful.” Fluttershy must’ve picked up something from my reaction or Applejack's— note to self: figure out why Applejack really doesn’t like this pony— because the happy look in her eyes died ever so slightly. She caught herself too late, though. “Y’know, if you wanted to.”
Nectarine Calendar looked at me expectantly.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said, in the most noncommittal fashion I possibly could. “Anyway, I have to get going, places to be, ponies to see, busy librarian work, you know how it is!”
I quickly turned around.
“Wait!” Nectarine said, loudly. I turned around. She walked up to me and offered a hoof.
I froze for a second.
Alright, one hooftap and I’m out.
I tapped her hoof, and the instant I made contact I could feel a slight shiver run up and down that leg. The subtle exchange of energy that one felt when you were touching the hand of another practitioner.
Uh uh ummmmmmm...
Nectarine Calendar, vampony of the Red Court, and apparently, sorcerer of nebulous strength and skill, looked me in the eye and gave me a wink.
Dang.
She planned that out.
This was getting pretty bad, I needed to get out of here.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, stammering slightly.
“Likewise.”
This time I turned around and walked straight out of the building and down towards the road. I think Fluttershy and Applejack tried to say goodbye as I left, but I wasn’t really paying attention. In fact, I picked up the pace as casually as I could.
My heart was doing a drum solo. Several, I think.
I trotted briskly out of sight of the clinic with my head on a swivel and a knockback spell ready to be fired at a moment’s notice. After I was confident I was out of sight, I broke into a swift gallop. I put all that fear and adrenaline to good use and absolutely tore down the streets of Ponyville. My lungs burned and my legs ached, and by the time I reached my front door I was pretty sure my body was on fire — layer of sticky sweat all over me notwithstanding. I fumbled with my keys for a second, panting desperately, before I finally managed to unlock the door and open it. I darted inside and slammed the heavy wooden door closed again and hurriedly locked it, before collapsing in a heap.
I need to work out more, sheesh.
I lay down there in the entryway for a while. At some point, I became dimly aware of a sleepy Spike poking at me with a claw. The door slamming had probably woken him up.
“Twilight, are you okay? What’s wrong? What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Spike asked.
I tried to respond once, and couldn’t get the words out. I tried again, but I was still out of breath.
“Water,” I said, after giving up on actually answering any of his questions. The little guy darted off into the kitchen, returning with the whole pitcher of cold water that we kept in the fridge. He held it up to my mouth and I drank deeply from it, swallowing the whole thing in a couple long gulps.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be fine, just… had to run home for something. Go back to bed.”
Spike gave me an uneasy glance, but he turned away and went back into his bedroom.
I relaxed a bit, now that I was inside my home and not about to pass out from physical exertion or have a heart attack or have my neck bitten into by ravenous creatures of the night. Home was safe, generally. There was a reason for that.
Houses that are well-lived in by a family tend to acquire a sort of… mystical inertia, inherent to the building. Over time, mortals getting together in a building and treating it like home — sharing meals, bathing, sleeping, having moments of joy and intimacy, and just generally living their lives— tended to slowly build up a protective barrier around the place. We wizards call that a threshold, and the big thing I cared about at the moment was that it would stop Ms. Vamponyface from being able to just waltz through my door without being invited inside. Well, she could do that in theory, but a supernatural being entering the threshold of a home uninvited usually seriously hampered them. If she came in uninvited, she’d be leaving most of her powers at the doorstep, and I’d be able to blow her into next week.
Hmm . That might be a problem, actually. I’d have to wake up to somepony breaking into my house first. I think I had a solution for that though… Well, one more thing to my to-do list tonight.
I felt bad for leaving Fluttershy and Applejack alone with the vampony. I felt bad for leaving Blue alone while she was sick. I sort of just... felt bad. In general. But I needed some time to recuperate and prepare, because letting a monster get the drop on you was a bad idea. Ditto for letting that same monster set up a social event so that she would have the home field advantage.
I was a wizard, dang it! Wizard, is a word that etymologically means “wise one”, and it's the same for equivalents in most languages. I just needed to put my brain to use and I’d be able to come up with something.
I yawned. Evidently my body didn’t sign off on that course of action, whatever, vetoed. I didn’t have the time to be tired right now.
I trudged into the kitchen and refilled the pitcher from the sink, tossing a few chunks of ice from the freezer in for good measure. I muttered a word and telekinetically lifted my cutlery tray up and out of the drawer, holding it aloft, before opening the pantry and levitating out a box of cookies with it. I felt the drain from doing that, a sign that I really had put myself through an obstacle course today. I opened the box of cookies, swallowed a few for good measure, before taking everything and dragging myself into my office.
Yeah, you’re in prime condition to be productive tonight, aren’t you, Twilight?
Sometimes my internal monologue (or my subconscious or whatever) just decides that we would take a nice, good piece of snark and shoot ourselves in the hoof with it. What was it that my teachers used to say? Something about sharp wits being a blade that could cut both ways.
I set the stuff down, yawned again, and went back to grab the coffee pot.
All-nighters are my specialty.
I sipped some more coffee and reclined in my backup desk chair. It was a sturdy old piece of polished wood, a hybrid between a standard chair and a rocking chair, it would lean back slightly to accommodate me (but not too far, that would be too relaxing). It was important to have an optimized seating situation at your workspace, especially if you thought you needed to stay up for a long while past your bedtime. I wasn’t sure that I’d need it, but I wasn’t in the mood to take any chances. My wakefulness was currently being fueled by the remainder of the adrenaline in my system, an ever increasing amount of caffeine, and the mix of stubborn determination and all-consuming curiosity that I inevitably sunk into when I was Working On Solving A Problem.
I had a couple problems, actually.
First, and most concerning to me at the moment: I needed to install some sort of security system in my house. That one I had some ideas for and was fairly confident I could do it in a few hours. Even if it wouldn’t last more than a few days, it would do for now.
Second, and most obvious: I needed to figure out how to deal with the vampony sorceress that was apparently in town, who may or may not be related to the rest of my problems (though, it was sort of unlikely that they were all entirely coincidence). I could always sit tight and wait for the White Council to respond to my SOS, but while appealing (in the sense that not having to deal with flesh-eating monsters was appealing) that seemed like the wrong move.
Third, was the fact that it was probably up to me to figure out what was going on with the magical indigestion sickness thingy that was plaguing some of the animal’s at Fluttershy’s clinic. Since the sickness was magical in nature, that implied a magical cause. It was entirely possible that it would simply go away on its own, but given that my pet rhinoceros beetle was currently sick, I wasn’t going to be taking any chances on that front.
Fourth, there was Celestia’s letter. “Black sorcery” heavily implied that there was a mortal warlock in town— so it couldn’t be Ms. Nectarine. That means there was another player in the game. At least one.
I thought about all of these and tried to picture what the world would look like after I had already solved these problems. What would I have done?
It would definitely start off with me sitting in my office for the rest of the night, working on some anti-burglary measures and doing some research on what reference guides I had on my shelves. After that, my mental map of how things would go became a bit cloudy, as if I was trying to solve a puzzle that was missing a couple pieces, or I was trying to walk through a dangerous woodland trail that was absolutely enshrouded in fog.
That usually meant that I was missing some information (or just not able to see or remember a crucial bit of information) that I needed to Solve The Problem. Not always, but usually.
I kept at it for another couple minutes, trying to make some progress on the off chance that something would click. My brain tossed another hint at me before giving up on that front.
“Alright,” I muttered, “Tomorrow’s to-do list: delegate some things at the library before heading over to Sweet Apple Acres and talking to Applejack. Her reaction at the clinic wasn’t what I would expect, and learning why that was the case might lead me somewhere else.”
After that, I started prioritizing: first, I’d sort through my books here looking for vampony lore in case they had some glaringly obvious weakness I could exploit with some advanced preparation. After two hours of that, I’d put that task aside and set up some alarms throughout the house. The rest was a pile of issues for the Twilight Sparkle of tomorrow morning.
I floated over several White Council approved encyclopedias and field guides on supernatural creatures. I opened my favorite one, A Manual of Monsters Moste Malicious which was a door stopper written in the exact same style as an Ogres and Oubliettes monster manual was— in fact, it presented itself as some sort of faux-official expansion content. I had suspicions that the wizard who had authored it was either directly involved in the company that owned that Tabletop RPG or that they were a massive fan of the game as well.
This earned them some brownie points from me.
I flicked through the pages until I got to an entry marked “Vampony-Red Court”. There were other types of vamponies, of course (primarily the White Court and Black Court vamponies, but there were a scattering of other types as well) but I didn’t want to waste time looking at their entries. The danger of getting lost in an all-evening encyclopedia binge was just too high for me to ignore.
The entry was a couple pages long. I skipped straight to the section on how best to deal with them in a fight, since it was probably most important to read that one first. Unfortunately, the author managed to lose some major brownie points, since the vast majority of the tactical information it contained was limited to the same advice.
“What kind of advice is this?” I complained. “Who thinks that two full pages worth of ‘use Fireball, and only Fireball’ is practical!?”
Fireballs were out, as was anything else that did fire anything. Nope, nada, not on my metaphorical spell list.
Some of it was presumably useful, at least if you were more experienced than I was, or you had a more experienced wizard helping you out. I had no idea how I would go about “folding the essence of dawn” into a napkin, nor did I have the expertise needed to execute a number of other suggestions.
The most useful bit of advice was to acquire a sawed-off shotgun and some ammunition, and get good at using it.
That’s it.
I groaned and went back to the start of the entry, reading the whole thing this time.
They had something of a distaste for being around during the day, and the book claimed that the light of dawn weakened them somewhat. Their puppet bodies were apparently called a “flesh mask” and they were pretty sturdy. Red Court vamponies apparently had some pretty impressive strength and speed, but they were still within a stone’s throw of a mortal. That was a relief, there were some supernatural beings that could juggle train cars and casually tie railroad tracks into knots as if they were spaghetti noodles. It was apparently inadvisable to fight them underneath a blood moon. They didn’t seem to be capable of crossing a threshold without giving themselves a serious debuff, but that didn’t mean it was impossible.
Alright. I still needed some more information. Was there anything else I could be doing in the meantime? It would be beneficial maybe to get some more eyes and ears somehow, since I was mostly flying blind still — metaphorically, since I couldn’t actually fly. Self-powered flight was very difficult and super exhausting if you weren’t a pegasus.
I popped an Oreo into my mouth and chewed on it thoughtfully. An idea slowly formed in my head. I eyed the summoning circle in the center of my great big office rug.
“Hmmm.”
I floated another Oreo up into the cookie consumption queue and grabbed a binder of notes labeled Twilight’s Conjuration Compendium from one of my desk drawers.
I decided I was going to summon up some minor spirits to help me in the eyes and ears department.
I walked around the circle, inspecting it for the third time. If you were going to summon something from the spirit realm and try to compel it to do your bidding, then you wanted your circle to be foolproof, regardless of how innocuous or nonthreatening the being you were calling up was.
A summoning circle didn’t have to be a literal circle in the geometric sense. It had to at least resemble a circle superficially, and the more circular and exact the physical shape was, the more efficient it was going to be to infuse the circle with your will and “close it”, which was a term for the mystical motion of formally erecting a barrier of focused willpower around the perimeter. You could do this with any closed curve — one that looks simple enough I suppose— but again, super inefficient unless the curve is approximately a circle.
Mine was carefully woven into the dark blue floor rug with some very thick bright green thread. The circle itself was fairly large, enough that I could comfortably stand inside if I ever wanted to (or if I ever needed to for that matter) and the interior of the circle had a green five-pointed star touching the boundary. The whole diagram was one of the symbols of Magic. The five pointed star represented the five classical elements: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit, which was sometimes called Aether. The circle enclosing it represented Will, so six elements in total.
If you ask a random pony what the most magical number is, they will often tell you that it’s seven, or thirteen, or three, or hand you some random gibberish number. Though all of those numbers are somewhat magical (depending on the context) very rarely will anypony look at you confidently and say “six”. A hexagon, a six-sided regular solid shape, is one of the only regular shapes capable of tiling the plane in such a way that you optimize for volume covered with respect to the shape's center — this is why honeycomb is hexagonal and grocery stores stack oranges the way they do. There are six queens of Faerie. My cutie mark is a six-pointed magenta star, another symbol of Magic, surrounded by smaller stars. This is not a coincidence.
Technically speaking, some would call the whole thing a pentacle, and the star inside a pentagram, but I’ve never been able to find a solid source that could state that with authority one way or another. My teacher just referred to it as a circle, so I did the same. The sweet joy of being technically correct (not just technically correct, esoterically technically correct!) was sacrificed at the altar of clear communication long ago, while the remains were buried somewhere in the graveyard of shared lexicon.
I walked around the summoning circle, placing an object that served to represent one of the elements at each point of the star. For Water, I placed down the half-full pitcher of water that I had been drinking from. For Air, I’d constructed a shoddy wind chime out of various bits of cutlery, some string, and a box of rubber bands. I’d be spending some amount of time later tonight trying to engrave some spells into that “wind chime” as well as do the same with a few others, but at the moment it was more than adequate for what I needed. For Earth, I gently put down one of the chunks of quartz that I kept in reserve at the top of the pantry, just in case Spike was getting particularly ravenous. For Fire, I used the heat sink disc from my thaumaturgical fridge experiment. It wasn’t burning hot by any stretch of the imagination, but it was comfortably warm, and that would have to do. For Spirit, I reverently placed my copy of Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone , the first book in the Daring Do series, one of my favorites. Daring had tons of Spirit.
Last, but not least, in the center of the five-pointed star, I placed a single cookie, and not a crumb more. I gave the whole setup another once-over, before backing up and standing a few paces away. The being I was attempting to call up wasn’t particularly dangerous — so long as I was careful, of course— and probably didn’t merit so many degrees of caution, but that was no reason to get sloppy.
I readied my will, and I imagined a barrier forming along the boundaries of the circle, taking that mental image and suffusing it with all of the determination I could muster. My horn started giving off a gentle glow during the process.
I whispered the Name of the being I was trying to summon, gently.
Names are very important. They can grab your attention even though your mind is worlds away. They can be used to emphasize something in a way that couldn’t be otherwise. They’re very intimate parts of ourselves, from both magical and non-magical perspectives. If somepony (or some thing ) gets your Name, the whole thing, from your own lips, then they will have some measure of power over you, magic or no magic. The magic just makes for a better lever.
I said the Name of the being I was trying to summon, as if to grab its attention from across a crowded room.
I felt a twinge of resistance. This entity probably didn’t want to be interrupted from whatever it was doing and dumped into my office. It wasn’t much resistance, actually, and it would take a token effort to surmount it. I had gently called it up a few times before, back in my studies, but this was the first time I was doing this sort of summoning with the intention of making a bargain with a creature. I figured some melodrama was required — I have to at least pay lip service to the whole wizardly mystique thing — so I stomped my right hoof down and brought the entirety of my stubborn personality to bear.
I shouted the Name of the being I was trying to summon, as if the syllables themselves would rip open a hole in reality. I felt the small ounce of resistance shatter, and then the entity appeared.
It was a blue ball of fuzz maybe two inches in diameter, and that was being generous. It had large, almost insectoid eyes, four tiny feet, and a pair of large dragonfly-esque wings that were beating at a furious pace. The entity, a small denizen of Fairie known as a parasprite, seemed confused for a moment. It attempted to leave the circle once or twice, bouncing into the barrier of solid will (which to the little fairy was about as impenetrable as a two-foot wall of concrete) before it realized that it was trapped. It looked up at me with a furious expression— the sort somepony gets when they’re really about to give you a piece of their mind, but in miniature — but its eyes darted over to the Oreo in the center and lit up.
The little fairy’s body seemed to stretch as an almost comically large maw (for its size, anyway) opened up and swallowed the cookie whole, creamy filling and all.
“Hello, Nom,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “I’d like to make a deal with you.”
The parasprite looked up at me again, a little puzzled, as if noticing the cookie had completely derailed its mental task list. Which it probably did, since fairies of this size tended to have some pretty short attention spans.
“Hello!” Nom the parasprite exclaimed. “I remember you! You’re the pony that gave me the chocolate chip cookies!”
Parasprites loved eating mortal food. It was like their equivalent of drugs, only much more addicting, as far as I could tell — and I ran the experiments of course. Most entities loved eating in general, that's a universal fact. Whether they’re a mortal, a fairy, a Dragon, a vampire or some sort of weird unstoppable demon monster, everypony has to eat something. The real monsters just tended to have an appetite for the blood of the innocent or the souls of crying little fillies.
“Yes,” I responded solemnly. “I was the one who gave you the chocolate chip cookies. Did you like the cookie you just ate?”
Nom made a sort of… satisfied ringing noise, a series of musical notes that sounded like a cluster of teeny-tiny bells being rung.
“Yes! More! More!”
Excellent. I figured I could bribe the little guy with sugary baked goods to give me some tactical backup. I had to be a little careful about that — dealing with fairies of any sort can be tricky, and it was very, very super-dee-duper ultra-mega important(!) that I did not feed the parasprite too much while it was still in the mortal world. With enough fuel, they multiply like bacteria, and I wasn’t necessarily sure that any bindings I put on this one would extend to any of its metaphysical children.
“I shall give you more cookies,” I entoned, as ominously as I could manage. “If in return you serve me dutifully for the next three sunsets, doing any task I ask of you, and only those tasks, without partaking in any mortal food that I do not explicitly direct you towards.”
Nom paused, considering this. “How many cookies are we talking here?”
“If you accept this bargain, then you shall have…” I levitated the half-finished box of Oreos up. “... the rest of the box! After three days are up, of course.”
“Hmmm.” Nom said, “Any task?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, “I’ll give you the rest of this box and another full box when you’re done. Final offer.”
“Deal!” The parasprite shuddered and buzzed around the confines of the circle.
(In anticipation, I think. Or joy. Or maybe it was just trying to work off the first cookie to make room for more. I’m not the biggest expert on pony body language, so the best I had to work from with respect to the tiny floating cotton ball was a handful of past interactions and some context.)
I nodded. “Excellent, the pact is sealed. Now, get out of that circle and fly around my house for the rest of the evening— out of sight of anypony, please — and let me know if it looks like anyone is trying to get inside.”
I relaxed the mental vice grip of will that was invested in the circle boundary, and the little creature shot off into the distance with a soft whirring noise and a small puff of sparkles.
“Okay,” I muttered, “Now to work on the burglar alarm.”
I collected the items from the pentagram and set them aside, barring the cutlery, which I put back on my desk next to two other makeshift wind chimes. I muttered a word and floated my set of jeweler’s tools and a magnifying glass out from the drawer they were kept in. With a few hours of work I’d be able to link the makeshift chimes together, and weave in some sort of alarm spell that would go off if anyone but Spike and I entered the house. This sort of enchanting work wouldn’t last, they’d probably wear off in a few days to a week, but they would be good enough for now.
I really needed to set up some proper wards now that I was finished moving in.
“Note to future Twilight,” I muttered, adjusting an engraving tool slightly against the blade of a butter knife. “Install wards to home as part of the moving-in process, and not after the fact when you’ve run into a scenario that actually needs them to be there.”
I worked uninterrupted throughout the night, finishing by about sunrise.
Author's Note
AN:
Okay, backlog (somewhat) generated. Hopefully getting at least one out a day at least for the month (we'll see where we're at at the end of Job One ).
I was out the door as soon as Twilight Sparkle’s Makeshift Wind Chime Alarm System (Mark One) was up and active, sparing just a few minutes to leave Spike a note with instructions to shoot fire at anyone else that he sees in the house after hearing those wind chimes going off.
I was halfway down the stairs before remembering that I left the parasprite with the same set of instructions. Sometimes I wanted to kick myself. I blame the sleep deprivation.
“Nom,” I said, quietly but with some authority. “Follow close to me and keep an eye out for anything threatening looking — that isn’t a pony or an inanimate object. Out of sight, and quiet please.”
I heard a soft musical chime in response. I looked around, but I couldn’t see the little fuzzball anywhere.
“Nom, chime three times if you can still hear me.”
Three chimes answered me. Alright then, we were good to go.
Almost.
I trot down the spiral stairs and along the small path towards the Golden Oak Library at a brisk pace. The library didn’t open until a few hours from now, but I wanted to get inside and set up a quick to-do list for the junior librarians. I completed enough paperwork, filing, and reorganizing on the first week of the job that I still had a massive backlog of finished work to delegate to them. I could maybe get away with being absent for a couple days with a flimsy excuse but after that somepony would probably start asking questions.
(Maybe I’d say that I caught a cold from one of the teenagers that was out sick last Friday. Lilyturf, I think her name was? I’d have to doublecheck.)
On the bright side, I’d definitely have more filing to look forward to when I eventually get back.
I entered and reached the head librarian’s office without too much trouble. I managed to quickly scribble together notes for all my employees with the aid of a quick telekinesis spell, several pens, a few separate sheets of paper, and a wizardly ability to have at least two separate trains of thought going on simultaneously (it was just something you picked up after a while, really).
I was in and out in less than ten minutes.
I started the journey towards Sweet Apple Acres.
Applejack seemed like the best pony to approach about this whole situation. I might have just met her yesterday, but I got the feeling that she was fairly trustworthy. She seemed to know something about the Red Court vampony — likely from dealing with her mortal guise — and information like that might help me piece some things together that badly needed piecing together. Anypony that is able to stand up to a crowd of frustrated people on behalf of their friend is probably a pretty good pony, all things considered. At least that’s what I figured.
(Given that that friend was Flutttershy, that logic might be null and void. I’ve only met Fluttershy twice now, and as far as I could tell I probably would have not been too far behind Applejack if that had gone on a minute longer. It was pretty hard to not like her. She was just one of those ponies.)
The main issue with this brilliant plan was that my bug was currently still sick with some weird eldritch illness, so I had to get all the way to Sweet Apple Acres on hoof. This was a problem, because the farm was a couple miles outside of Ponyville proper, the maximum distance I generally walked each day was about a mile and change (to the post office and back), and my legs were still incredibly sore from galloping back home yesterday evening.
Oh, I also didn’t get any sleep.
Twilight, you are a complete genius.
After an hour of trudging along, a ringing noise filled my ears.
“Look!”
Nom shot into view about an inch in front of my nose, gesturing wildly behind me. I turned and looked.
Coming up the dirt road from town was a larger carriage being pulled by four large earth ponies, there looked to be an even split between mares and stallions. The wooden carriage was painted a darker shade of lavender, so dark that I mistook it for black at first glance. It was otherwise unmarked.
And it was moving . It would be on top of me in seconds. I quickly shuffled to the side of the road, since I wasn’t sure that it would be able to stop in time even if the earth ponies pulling the thing noticed me. Better to be safe than sorry, given that carriage accidents kill an alarmingly large number of ponies each year.
Something was off though, like there was something on the tip of my tongue and I just couldn’t put my hoof on it…
There was a noise— somepony yelled something, I think, though I couldn’t tell what was said exactly— and the earth ponies started slowing down. The carriage passed me, slowing to a halt a ways ahead. One of the windows opened, and a hoof was waved at me. As if to…
...invite me in?
I cautiously approached the dark purple vehicle. As I came closer, I noticed that the smell around it was slightly off. There was the faint odor of dirty fur in the air. I pulled up to the big carriage’s side. A unicorn popped her head out of the open window.
She was beautiful.
I don’t mean she was pretty, or attractive, or that she had floof in all the right places. No, this mare was beautiful , like she had a team of professionals spend hours doing her mane (which was also a dark shade of lavender) and her makeup every morning.
“Hello there,” the mare said. She had a white coat, a very blank eggshell white, white in the “Oreo filling” sense. It had an almost visible sheen to it. Her eyes were the exact color of one of those rare blue diamonds that you only see in a museum or in a royal treasury. “Are you heading to Sweet Apple Acres, by any chance?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. I am the best with words.
“Delightful,” the mare said. It was almost a pur. “We’re heading that way as well. Would you like to hop aboard? There’s a lot of room inside, and you look absolutely tuckered out.”
“Sure,” I said. Was this some sort of Manehattan actress or somepony like that? Why was she riding over to a farm?
The unicorn smiled. Her teeth were perfect too. “Excellent. Tom-tom, Hendricks, if you would be so kind.”
The carriage doors opened and two massive dogs walked out to flank the carriage steps.
Diamond dogs. They were one of the less common non-pony sapients that inhabited Equestria. They were large, bipedal, dog-like creatures that generally ran around in small packs. They could dig holes faster than any other creature on the planet that I was aware of, and they possessed enough innate physical strength that any one of them could probably pick me up and tie me into a sourdough pretzel if they managed to reach me.
If.
I heard a few soft musical chimes in my ears again.
Ah, this definitely fits the “non-pony threatening creature” clause.
I shushed Nom. The two dogs glowered down at me. They looked very intimidating, and it probably would have worked if I wasn’t confident I could pick them both up and send them careening off into the nearby woods with a quick spell.
You have to step your game up a bit when intimidating wizards.
I gave them each a blank stare back— politely, of course— and walked up into the carriage.
The interior of the carriage was a simple affair. It was empty except for three large rows of cushioned seats and what looked like an ice box filled with several bottles of (presumably) alcoholic substances. The pony who presumably owned the carriage was sitting at the back, and gestured for me to sit on a cushioned seat on the other end of her own row. I noticed that she was wearing a dress that looked absolutely stunning. It was plain black, with some slits that allowed ample room for her to move while showing off a bit of leg. It looked exceptionally well tailored. Custom design maybe?
I noted with a slight pang of jealousy that I couldn’t pull off a dress like that, not a snowball’s chance in Sunshine.
Grumble, grumble.
“Why hello there, please take a seat over there, if you please,” the pony said. “I’m glad that these gentlemen and I are able to get you out of the summer sun. Rarity is the name. And you?”
I sat down on the cushioned seat. My legs thanked me. The two diamond dogs came back inside and sat down opposite us. I offered my hoof to
“Twilight. Twilight Sparkle. Nice to meet you, Ms. Rarity.”
“Likewise.” Rarity looked at me from the side as the carriage started moving once again, light from the windows dancing across her eyes, causing them to gleam. Like polished gems. “So, Ms. Twilight Sparkle, tell me: what’s interesting about you?”
Huh?
I had to say, I wasn’t prepared for that question.
So, Ms. Twilight Sparkle, tell me: what’s interesting about you?
I struggled to think of a response. We rode in silence for a while longer.
“Um,” I said. “Well, I just moved here, actually. I’m the new head librarian for the Golden Oak…”
Rarity shook her head and made a sort of so-so gesture with her hoof.
“Yes, I know that.” She looked at me with those eyes again. They were twinkling. “But is that really something interesting about you? Do you find the work you do there interesting?”
I fidgeted.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t… I don’t really see why it wouldn’t be? Books are pretty useful, they can tell you all sorts of things that you’d never know otherwise, facts about places you wouldn’t be able to go, information that someone else has discovered, etcetera. If you find a good story, you can sink your teeth into it and really experience it, and that can be a really valuable experience.”
Rarity seemed to consider those words.
“Hmm,” she said. “In a more general sense then, it’s mostly about the acquisition of knowledge and experience? I can agree that that’s interesting at times, but it’s hardly something interesting about you .”
She waved at the carriage as if to demonstrate a point.
“I suppose I shall lead by example,” Rarity said with a slight huff. “Here is something interesting about me: I am the pony who is ultimately in charge of all of the organized crime that goes on from the borders of Appleloosa to the suburbs of Manehattan.”
“I— what?”
Rarity just looked back at me expectantly, as if… as if she had asked me to pass her a salt shaker at dinner, or made a passing comment about the weather.
I just sort of stared.
This is a very strange and uncomfortable social interaction, my nerves told me. They told me this by making my heart rate shoot up into the sky.
Yeah, we probably shouldn’t have gotten in this carriage, in retrospect, my brain told me. At the moment I couldn’t help but agree.
Okay, but can you give me something useful to say in this conversation, brain? Can you calm down, nerves?
I didn’t get a response.
Figures .
“Let me repeat myself a bit more clearly,” Rarity said, with a bit of a smile. “My organization is in charge of various illicit activities such as smuggling, racketeering, drug distribution, and prostitution. That’s not an exhaustive list, of course. But that is an interesting fact to know about Rarity, this pony whose carriage you are currently riding in. Wouldn’t you say?”
This pony is having me on, right?
“Haha,” I said with a forced smile. “Now can you pull the other one?”
Rarity’s smile vanished. “I’m being completely serious.”
Huh?
I bit my lip to try to dispel some of the sleep deprivation induced haze that was currently clouding my thoughts. It worked somewhat.
“Okay,” I said. Some amount of exhaustion and frustration crept into my voice despite my best efforts. “Look… yes, that’s an interesting ...fact ... but, like… why are you telling me any of that? Do you just… pick ponies off of the road and start launching into explanations of your criminal organization? Suppose I disagree with an organization that does any of the things you just said , on principle. How do you benefit from giving me that information in such a blunt fashion? You could just be some rich pony spinning me a story for kicks. Are you just some sort of weird pathological liar?”
I left out the “And what is wrong with you???” but I had a feeling that it got communicated anyway.
Rarity smirked a bit.
“Assuming I’m telling you the truth,” Rarity said. “Well, it’s not exactly some sort of secret, I’m fairly certain every pony in Ponyville knows. The politicians in the state know, as do local law enforcement. I’m just doing you a courtesy here by letting you into the loop— you do value gaining some new knowledge, don’t you?”
Something about the way that was phrased or the matter-of-fact tone in which it was said really ticked me off. It might’ve been the flippant way it was stated, or the familiarity with how she said it — yeah, that was it actually. She acted like she knew me already.
But she didn’t know me.
“To answer another question of yours, suppose you do disagree with my professional life as a matter of principle. What is a little pony like you possibly going to do about it?”
My temper flared.
When I replied, my voice sounded much more calm than I actually felt inside. “Well, I could pick you, your dogs, and your whole carriage up and toss you halfway back to town.”
I was being hyperbolic— the best I’d be able to manage is to knock the carriage into a tumble, and in my current state that would definitely leave me gasping and wishing for a cold glass of lemonade. It would be a while yet until I could be casually tossing things that large around. My mentor, Ebegeezer McColt, could pull off such feats of evocation with relative ease, but he’s been around the block for a couple hundred years. Magically speaking, I was definitely more of a generalist at the moment. That had some drawbacks— I couldn’t be throwing out lightning bolts and tossing giant boulders around willy-nilly, or slapping up ultra-impenetrable defensive wards at the drop of a hat— but it definitely had some advantages. I was pretty decent at everything.
The diamond dogs across the carriage seemed to actually register my statement as the threat that it was intended to be (maybe they picked up on my body language or something, I don’t know) instead of parsing it as some insane claim— or maybe they were just reacting to my intent, yeah, that made more sense. They both growled threateningly at me, and I reminded myself that I didn’t really want to start a fight in close quarters with these two behemoths around.
Rarity stilled, eyes darting to her bodyguards (minions? flunkies? lackeys?) before looking back at me. She seemed to consider her next words just a bit more carefully.
“I see,” she said, after some thought. “And you would actually do that? In this purely hypothetical scenario, of course.”
Probably not.
“At this rate? I might,” I said, a bit testily. “Or I might not. In this purely hypothetical scenario, of course.”
“Quite,” Rarity said. “Well, I’m happy to inform you that I was, in fact, lying to you just to have some fun at my own expense. It’s an unfortunate vice of mine that I indulge now and then. My apologies.”
Oh, of course. That makes much more sense.
She’s just a complete bitch.
“Alright, so you really are just — “
“I only do white-collar crime. Tax evasion, money laundering, that sort of thing. I look down on the more unsavoury aspects of the criminal underworld quite heavily.
“Now, the fascinating subject that I actually wanted to speak to you about: I’ve heard rumors on the grapevine that you claim to be a ‘wizard’, or at least that’s what the signage on your front door is telling everypony. I find that claim incredibly interesting. I also find the specifics of your little household pet to be quite intriguing, since it doesn’t appear to be any animal that I’m aware of. But to sidestep an awkward conversational segue, I’ll skip to requesting a breakdown of your rates for various… let’s say ‘consultations’, for now.”
She leveled a measuring look at me, as if I was a piece of fruit at the market that she was sizing up and deciding whether or not it was pretty enough to buy.
“My organization has a sizable benefits package, and I can provide you access to a large variety of resources, should you choose to sign on for the little odd favor here and there.”
Bitch, I might be tired, but I know bait when I see it. I gave her a side glance and prepared myself to begin deploying the snark.
“So, you’re watching my home, or something?”
“Well, naturally. You’re new in town, and there are enough quirky little details about your appearance here that you’ve caught my attention. I make it my business to follow up on things that catch my attention, sooner or later. It’s fortunate that we picked you up on the road, really. Saved me quite a lot of effort arranging a meeting.”
“Uh huh.” I tapped my hoof against my chin. “So… do you go through my trash too?”
Rarity blinked.
“I wouldn’t figure you to be the type. I can leave some fancier food in the compost bin if the current selection is a little lackluster. You do look like you could use a few more pounds.”
It was a cheap shot. Not my best, but sometimes the cheap shot is the one that gets underneath a pony’s coat.
Rarity huffed indignantly at that. She actually looked offended for a moment, before letting out another laugh. It sounded very practiced and very-polished, like it was tailor-made to fit some sort of high-society ball.
It got on my nerves.
“You aren’t very polite, are you Twilight?” Rarity said. “Well, I can see that I’ve been overstepping my conversational bounds a bit—my sincere apologies for that. Now that I think on it, you do appear to be quite tired, and I wouldn’t want to be inconsiderate in light of that. Here, let’s enjoy some refreshments for the remainder of the ride. Would you like some wine? Something to snack on?”
I felt my eyes narrow down to slits. My mind went through about a thousand retorts before I slammed my mouth shut. I decided to wait for the carriage to stop, and to not say anything further. I didn’t touch any food or drink. My stomach grumbled slightly in protest, but I decided that it didn’t get a say in the matter.
Luckily the rest of the trip only lasted a couple minutes, because there was a solid chance that the next words out of my mouth would’ve been a spell to give this pony the wedgie of the century with her overpriced designed clothes.
I stepped out of the carriage.
The vehicle was stopped at the main house of Sweet Apple Acres. The house was a large ranch style house that looked like it had enough to fit a large family and about half of their extended family. There was a big red stallion on the porch that was eyeing us with some amount of apprehension. The stallion had a close cropped mane and tail, and he was wearing a work collar around his neck. His muscles had muscles.
“Good morning, Big Mac,” Rarity said politely. “We’re here to see Applejack, is she around?”
The stallion, Big Mac presumably, nodded at us, but didn’t make any move to invite us in. Rarity made some sort of motion at the minions that were undoubtedly glowering behind us and I heard a round of thumps and bangs as they re-entered the carriage.
“It’s nice to see you outside of the tavern,” Rarity continued. Plainly, as if she didn’t just absentmindedly order two massive brutes around with a twitch of her hoof. “I’d like to talk to Applejack, if that’s possible. I know that she’s probably not going to want to see me, but I’d like to talk to her all the same.”
Big Mac squinted at the two of us for a moment.
“Ayup,” he finally said. He beckoned us over and entered the building through the large open doorway. Rarity began following him inside, and I was a step or two behind. I could feel the house’s threshold part around me as I walked into the property. It was almost tangible, like walking through a set of heavy stage curtains. That wasn’t something I saw everyday. This was an old home, and this family had lived in it for many generations.
We walked down a main hallway, passing a few closed doors and the occasional open room on the way. Eventually we were brought to an incredibly cramped kitchen. There was a large old fashioned oven at the far end of the room, complete with a stovetop and a set of recently used pots and pans cluttered on top. The fridge jutted out near the doorway we were entering, and the massive Big Mac had to squeeze somewhat to get through. There were stacks of various culinary odds and ends piled all around the kitchen counters, and a pile of dishes soaking in the sink. The room smelled of fried eggs and the faint scent of apple pie. In the middle of the kitchen was a small wooden table covered in a checkered red and white tablecloth. It looked large enough to seat four comfortably (maybe three, if one of those ponies was as large as Big Mac) and had an array of rickety wooden chairs circling it.
Applejack was flomped down in one of the chairs, bent over with her forehead resting on the table. The table was bare save for a newspaper and a crumb-covered plate. Big Mac cleared his throat pointedly and Applejack looked up. She noticed Rarity and pursed her lips.
“What do you want, Rarity?” Applejack said hotly. “If you’ve read the paper this mornin’, which I bet dollars to doughnuts that ya have, then you’d know that I’m not havin’ a great start to my day.”
Big Mac turned around and left the way we came. Rarity stepped up to the table, her mouth opening as if she was about to speak, but then she stopped short and her mouth closed.
“Hello,” I said. “Twilight Sparkle, we met yesterday at Fluttershy’s, um…”
Wow, talking to ponies about problems they were having was awkward when you knew them. I barely even knew these people. Where in the world did I start?
“I came here to talk to you about that pony we met, since you seemed to know her. I’m not sure this is really the time for that— you said you were having some major problems, y’know, but if those are ones that I could help with I’d gladly…”
I trailed off. Applejack’s annoyed gaze turned from Rarity to me. She looked back and forth between us, frowning. Finally she turned back to me.
“You some sort of lackey of hers?” she asked me. “I got no patience for games today, so answer me plainly.”
Lackey!?
I made a face. “Please. Why would I want to work with this pony? She just spent an entire carriage ride playing some sort of mind game with me. No thanks.”
Applejack nodded at that, but Rarity rolled her eyes at my response. Applejack shook her head and turned to glare at Rarity.
“None of that now, ya hear me? You’re a guest in my house and you won’t be actin’ impolite to folks underneath my roof, if you don’t want to get shown the door.”
Rarity’s laissez-faire demeanor wilted ever-so-slightly at that. “Quite.”
Applejack stuck a hoof out at me. “And that goes fer you as well, though I reckon she probably did start in on you on the ride here.”
I nodded.
It’s not like I was the rude one, anyway.
“Anyways,” Applejack said. She held up the newspaper. “More cases of food poisoning been goin’ around, at a lot of places linked to the farm, and it’s not just pets and animals this time. Some of ‘em were bad enough to get some ponies hospitalized. Paper says it might be some bug goin’ around, or some chemicals in the food, yadda yadda, but they got our name here down in the speculation, clear as day.”
Rarity raised a hoof. Applejack looked at her sourly, before nodding.
“That is precisely why I’m here,” Rarity said. “I was hoping to help you sort that out. Simply put, I suspect foul play on the part of some of your competitors.”
Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“Competitors?” I said. “Plural? Are there a lot of large farms around here?”
“Two others,” Applejack replied with a wave of her hoof.
“There’s Cabbage Patch Farms over on the south side of Ponyville,” Rarity explained. “They produce roughly a third of the local food that Ponyville consumes. They mostly deal in vegetables. Second, we have Ruby Red Ranch, which is located several miles out of town, and owned and operated by a corporate entity known as the Wokefoal Corporation, who are in turn a shell company for — ”
“Yeah, yeah,” Applejack said. “I don’t need to hear their life stories. What about them has got yer interest?”
“They’ve both been hiring more employees the last couple months. Quite a large amount.”
Applejack gave a weary sigh. “Okay, let’s suppose that has somethin’ to do with the price of hay at the market— and it don’t, because the Cabbage Patch folk’ve been talkin’ about gettin’ new help since I was a little filly, and those Wokefoal schmucks churn through workers like Big Mac churns a load of butter. What else ya got?”
“I know a pony who knows a pony at the tax department in city hall,” Rarity said matter-of-factly, “and suffice to say that the individuals at Cabbage Patch are sorely in need of a financial planner. On the other hoof, the financial strategy of Ruby Red Ranch’s parent organization seems to indicate that they’re already trying to undercut everypony else. There’s been a suspicious amount of rumors regarding mistreatment at all of their companies in addition to that.”
“Alright,” Applejack said. “So?”
I wasn’t really following. I badly needed a nap. Ugh.
“So,” Rarity said. “Where there’s smoke, there’s undoubtedly fire of some sort. Both groups seem like they’re positioning themselves to run everypony else out of business— and believe me when I say I know exactly what that looks like.”
“Gosh dangit, Rarity,” Applejack quietly swore. She laughed, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. “You know that farmers don’t do this criminal chessmaster thing? These people put plants in the ground for a living.”
Alright, so that’s confirmation that Rarity is actually some sort of weird crime boss. That’s some information that actually meant something.
I was tuning some of this conversation out, because to me it was as obvious as a ninth-grade calculus problem. I knew that one of these organizations was associated with a vampony— a vampony sorceress, no less— which meant that “Wokefoal” was probably just a mask for “Evil Vampire Business Incorporated”, so if there was any funny business going on, it was probably them.
Sock’em’s Razor: the simplest explanation is often the correct one.
But it’s not like I could outright explain any of that to Rarity and Applejack. If somepony starts going on about vamponies and black magic and wizards and so on, the best case scenario is that I’ll get laughed out of the room. I suppose I could try to use some magic in front of them as supporting evidence, but my tired brain was telling me that wasn’t the best option to open up with.
Plus, I was the new pony in town. It’s a thin chain of logic from “wizard moves to town” to “horrible things soon start happening” to “this is somehow Twilight’s fault”. It wasn’t guaranteed that they would see things that way, but I wasn’t confident.
“Okay, I don’t mean to interrupt,” I said, trying to steer the conversation a bit. “So, there was a very weird social interaction yesterday at Fluttershy’s with this Wokefoal corporate pony, and I wanted to ask you, Applejack, what was up with that, since you seem like a straight shooter and she gave me some bad vibes.”
That seemed to get their attention.
“Plus,” I continued on, ”I have a pet beetle over at Fluttershy’s that's being treated for whatever this bug going around is. I’m sort of invested in fixing this situation as well— and from what the both of you are saying, it seems like there’s something to get to the bottom of. Would you mind helping me do that? It might help if I inform you that I am, in fact, a licensed private investigator.”
That last statement was factually true, in the same sense that the statement “I have a bachelor’s degree in library science” was true. I had a very real diploma from a very real university saying so. Similarly, I had a private investigator’s license.
When applying for the job in Ponyville, I neglected to mention that I had gotten the degree through Wizard Connections, and that it was in part a fictional credential designed to explain what I was doing with most of my adult life while I was learning magic. Only in part, since I had taken a few classes on the subject.
Similarly, I neglected to mention that I received my PI license after completing a correspondence course.
It just didn’t seem that important of a detail at the time, you know?
Applejack and Rarity seemed to take my statements in stride. Rarity raised her eyebrows and gave me a look.
“Well,” Rarity said, “that’s certainly intriguing.” She raised her hoof. “Do go on then, dear detective.”
Rarity put a strange emphasis on the word detective, as if she was amused, or maybe just surprised. I cringed mentally at the appellation. Hopefully she wouldn’t keep calling me that constantly, or something.
(It was also technically incorrect. A detective was generally employed by a law enforcement agency of some kind. A private investigator is merely licensed to investigate things as an independent contractor (or as part of an agency).)
“Well,” I said. “I’m new in town, right? But I figure that Applejack seems pretty convinced that the smaller farm— the privately owned one— is probably not at fault here? Like, Applejack, you don’t think they’re trying to actively sabotage Sweet Apple Acres or anything, right?”
“If they were,” Applejack said, “It’d sure be news to me. Those folk tend to keep to themselves, sure, but they’re pleasant enough. Can’t fault a pony for enjoying their privacy.”
“Alright, then,” I said. “I figure your instincts are better than mine here, and that’s that.”
Rarity squinted at me for an instant. It didn’t last long, but it was definitely noticeable. I might’ve been a bit too obvious with how I was biasing the conclusion there.
“It appears,” Rarity said,”that the two of you are in agreement that this family is probably not at fault?”
“Yep.”
“Yeah.” I nodded at Rarity’s question. “I don’t really think that makes sense. Sure, there's a motive there, but I doubt that they have the resources? These other ponies sound very… uh, evil, for lack of a better phrase.”
I was maybe laying it on a little thick, but it’s not like I could break out the monster manual and give them a three hour lecture on supernatural creatures. It would have to do.
“Yeah,” Applejack muttered darkly. “Those Wokefoal fellas are real pieces of work. They’ve been goin’ around Ponyville the last couple months tryin’ to buy out small food businesses and family owned farms. That Nectarine gal has been here at Sweet Apple Acres near a dozen times now, try’n to convince me and Granny Smith to sell the place.”
Rarity considered that. “That seems very persistent. Unusually so.”
“Ayup,” Applejack said. “Last offer came close to about fifteen million. We told ‘em to get lost, but I’m sure she’ll be back with more charts and higher numbers and some extra dollar signs soon enough.” Applejack sighed and slumped back into her chair. “Those ponies just don’t get it, the farms been in the family for generations. We just ain’t for sale, doesn’t matter how much cash they try to pile on.”
Fifteen MILLION??
I started running some numbers in my head. Supermarkets and farms were decently profitable, but they weren’t that profitable. Not if you were undercutting your competitors at such a ridiculous percentage. You still had to pay for transport of goods — a squad of earth ponies to pull a large cart or food to feed a pack animal weren’t cheap by any means— and even if you were mystically good at figuring out appropriate amounts of inventory to order at exactly the right time, it would be inevitable that a lot of that would be wasted. The economics just didn’t work out at scale for that sort of strategy to work.
Did I mention I do my own taxes too?
“That sounds a bit fishy,” I said. Applejack quirked an eyebrow at me, and I could see the gears spinning in Rarity’s head— she was probably coming to the same conclusions I was.
“I don’t really know,” Applejack said. “The land might fetch a pretty penny all on its lonesome, and the existin’ infrastructure we got here comes out to a fair dollar. They’re offerin’ a fair bit more than what I think it would go fer, but it doesn’t seem strange if they just want to buy us out and be done with it, right? Am I missing something?”
I nodded.
“The margins for a business that operates like that — specifically deliberately undercutting everypony else by such a ridiculous degree— would be so thin that you could fit them in between the wall and the wallpaper,” I explained. “With some room to spare. Buying your farm for millions of dollars? I don’t see how they’d make money on that sort of investment, no offense. Not anytime soon.”
Rarity chimed in. “It’s a bit ridiculous, yes.”
“Well, why on earth are they tryin’?” Applejack replied. She put her hooves up to her eyes and shook her head. “I’m plum tired of dealin’ with all this! I just want to run my dang farm!”
We sat for a while without speaking, the silence broken only by the distant sounds of farm work and noises from the barn animals. I decided to wait for somepony else to pipe up first, since I was the least familiar with everypony here, and it seemed like Applejack was having a moment.
“It would seem that — given Twilight’s excellent observations,” Rarity continued, nodding politely to me. “That it must not be about the money.”
“Okay then,” Applejack took her hooves from her face. “You pairs of smartyhooves explain to me, what’s this business all about? Doesn’t make sense to me, that’s fer sure.”
“I can think of one explanation,” Rarity said.
“Go on then.”
“Territory,” Rarity stated. “There’s likely some sort of criminal aspect to this.”
Applejack froze for a bit, mouth slightly ajar, before her eyes narrowed and she slammed a hoof on the table.
I don’t know what the particulars of her relationship with Rarity were, but it seemed like the two had a pretty rocky friendship at the moment. I had the distinct feeling that Rarity had just brushed up against a major sore spot.
“Look here, Rarity, I’ve told you time in and time out: I don’t want nothin’ to do with any sort of shady business that you’re mucked up in.”
“Applejack, believe me: it isn’t anything I’m involved in. Let’s just calm down — “
“No, you calm down!” Applejack yelled. “I’m mad for plenty a good reason. Farm’s gonna get all sorts of trouble from the animals at Fluttershy’s getting sick, just this mornin’ we been getting a few calls today about ponies coming down with a nasty stomach bug and having to go to the hospital, and now you’re telling me that that could all be some sort of criminal funny business? We got a livelihood to protect here! Our reputation, even. Don’t be comin’ here out of the blue after years and be sittin’ down in my kitchen and get the nerve to tell me to calm down. After all the cockamamey horsehockey we been through together growing up, you owe me that much.”
My jaw dropped a bit, since that seemed to come out of left field.
Wow. She was furious.
Rarity’s eyes were glued to the floor, as if she didn’t know what to say. It was pretty clear by now that Applejack and Rarity had a history. I kept quiet for the most part, since I didn’t see any point in butting in while they were going at it.
I was also busy tying myself in knots.
My conundrum was as follows: I could actually, probably, solve some of the problems Applejack was having, at least in part. This would require me to use my wondrous wizardly wisdom to figure out a way to locate all the maliciously enchanted food on her property — that probably wasn’t going to be so complicated, and it might just boil down to an afternoon of hard work. That would ensure that nopony else would be getting sick off her family’s crops at least. If I really put my mind to it, I might figure out some way to get rid of the food poison spell altogether, which might save her a lot of money to boot. That would be the right thing to do.
The downside was that there were two major issues with running around willy-nilly and just showing people how to use magic. First and foremost, was that the White Council frowned very heavily about that sort of thing. It was much easier to exist as a wizard in Equestrian society if nopony went around burning the metaphorical commons and letting the secret out the door. If I started doing that beyond the level of wizard-themed advertising for my side job (which is what I could inevitably explain it away as, and nopony would really look too closely) there might be some Consequences with a capital ‘C’ coming my way down the line. I had already done the responsible thing and contacted the local warden, which guaranteed that somepony would be around in a few days at most to be checking things over with a fine-tooth comb.
The second issue was way less complicated: I was partly involved with this mess because Queen Celestia called in a favor that I owed her, and it struck me as a good idea to step incredibly carefully because of that. I didn’t want Celestia angry with me. That’s a good way to have my entire apartment glassed from orbit, or get turned into a statue for ten thousand years, or whatever absurd sorts of shenanigans Faerie queens can do.
Come to think of it, I should probably try to sort most of this out before the White Council warden gets here.
Hmmm. Maybe that one was more of a reason to be a little more open with these two ponies than not.
Rarity and Applejack were also operating under some false assumptions: that the organization behind this was operating with some sort of funky criminal interests. That might be true at some level, but I knew that a Red Court vampony was heavily involved in this mess— which meant that the motives could range from ‘some obscure plot to weaken the populace so we can eat them more easily’ to ‘because sowing suffering and despair among ponykind is what we do every Tuesday’. They might run into some very real danger as a result of that lack of info. They could get hurt.
And it would be on my head if they did.
A few of the lessons that I was taught over the last few years weren’t related to magical theory at all. Some of the hardest to learn were about why you should use it. The philosophical questions pertaining to that were difficult to arrive at an answer to, mostly because your answer to that question had to be your answer to that question. Mine turned out to be surprisingly simple, mostly.
I believed in using magic to make the world a better place.
Which made my decision simple, if not easy.
I cleared my throat.
“I would like to demonstrate something that I think might be helpful,” I said. I said it with a lot more confidence than I actually felt. “Can we go outside and head over to the orchard? It’s one of those things that I think would be easier to show than to explain.”
I turned to leave the room. Applejack and Rarity looked at each other, then they both shrugged and followed along.
I would have to demonstrate something to the two of them that really stood out. It would have to be something that they couldn’t explain away, so I needed to do something that produced a real, tangible effect. Illusions were right out, as was anything minor like telekinesis, card tricks, or some minor divination, thaumaturgy, or evocation. Most evocation was probably off the list as well, since the real flashy stuff wasn’t something that I could necessarily reproduce consistently. The spectacular acts of tossing around a lightning bolt or conjuring up a miniature tornado could just be explained away as a freak coincidence unless I did it repeatedly, and I didn’t have the energy, efficiency, or the requisite control to do that and have it remain safe (for any bystanders or for myself). Whatever bit of magic I would be demonstrating to convince them would preferably be more fantastical than the average stuff they were used to from unicorns, earth ponies, or pegasi. That limited my options significantly.
Luckily, we were on a farm. I had spent several years of my apprenticeship on a farm, and my mentor had insisted that I help out with the farm work one way or another. I hated physical labor, so that meant that to fill my daily chores quota over the course of those years, I had to get creative .
I left the way we came in — it wouldn’t do for me to try to go out the back and look all silly, that wouldn’t be very impressive and wizard-like — nodding to Big Mac as we passed him on the way out. I strode down the length of the old wooden porch and went down the side stairs.
The farm itself was split into a few large areas, with a series of fields and barns dotting one side of the main household, and a massive apple orchard flanking the house on the opposite side. The trees in the orchard were arranged in long rows, only broken up by a small pond that cut into the northernmost rows. Bushels of apples were stockpiled here and there.
I was walking towards the pond.
“Ya mind fillin’ us in?” Applejack piped up. She still sounded slightly ornery, and her accent got a tad thicker as her mood worsened. “What exactly are we doin’ out here?”
Rarity sniffed. “Quite.”
“Simple,” I said. “I’m going to cast a big magic spell and do something straight out of a foal’s bedtime story. After that, I’m going to explain to you that I’m a wizard, and that one of the ponies we are dealing with is a bloodsucking vampony, and that there’s probably a warlock — dark magic user — up to no good in town as well. I will try to fix the issue with the food so long as I can get your assistance with that, and hopefully figure this whole steaming pile of confusing fudge out.”
I noticed that Rarity and Applejack had stopped, so I looked back with a raised eyebrow.
“Coming?” I asked. Silence.
“Hah,” Applejack said. Her tone was dry as straw. “That’s a laugh. If yer gonna’ pull my legs any more than you can git.”
Rarity was giving me an odd look. “A magic spell, you say?”
“Ayup,” I said, echoing Big Mac’s matter of fact tone. I looked at the other ponies expectantly. “Are you coming, or not?”
“Listen here — “
“Applejack,” Rarity said. She said it.. not sharply per se, but she said it in a way that commanded attention. Applejack paused before she could really put any steam into her tirade — which I’m sure would aptly describe what she was about to say — and shot Rarity an impatient look.
But she didn’t say anything.
Rarity and Applejack locked eyes. “Maybe we should give the mare the benefit of the doubt.”
Applejack continued to not say anything. She broke eye contact a few moments later and shrugged.
“Eh, fine by me,” Applejack said. She was clearly still displeased, but seemed to reign her emotions in a bit. “I can spare a few minutes for politeness’s sake, I s’pose.”
We continued walking down towards the pond. I stopped a few yards short of the pond edge.
“Teleo,” I muttered. I ripped a ripe looking green apple from a nearby tree and floated it over. I turned to Applejack with the green apple in hoof. “Can you carve out a good piece of ground to plant one of these? It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to have a decent amount of nutrients and moisture. Maybe by the pond over there?”
I received some questioning looks in return — Applejack’s was particularly sour — but Applejack seemed to go along with it without any verbal objections. Rarity seemed to be convinced that I wasn’t completely wasting their time, so that was a plus. I guess it helped that I was pretty confident that I could actually do the thing I was about to try.
It was important to follow up on your own hype.
“I don’t really see where this is going,” Applejack said, “but sure thing.”
Applejack tore open a small hole in the earth with a few powerful and well-placed kicks. I handed her the apple, and she placed it gingerly down in the divot before shuffling a few hooffuls worth of dirt on top of it and packing it down gingerly with some well placed stomps.
I inspected the mound of freshly upturned soil. The dirt looked pretty moist, so I was probably good to go.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “How long does it take for one of these to grow into a full tree?”
Applejack bobbed her head in thought. “Depends on what you mean by that, but ‘bout seven to ten years from the seed, if the tree manages to grow without issue.” She shook her head. “Usually we grow the saplings separate with some supports and plant them down in the orchard when they’re partly grown. Takes a long while and we get around to expandin’ every year or so. What you askin’ for?”
Well, I want to prime you with that question so you really think about how impressive the thing I’m about to do is.
“Oh, just curious,” I said. “Now, stand back a bit and watch.”
The two of them looked at me like I was completely out of my mind.
“Hortus, “ I muttered. “hortus, horti equestris. ”
I gathered power to my horn and channeled it, continuing the repetitive chant in a low monotone. This spell was just a high powered version of the gardening spell I’d invented years ago. Theoretically speaking, there was no reason it wouldn’t work to produce an apple tree. I just had to be more careful.
Plants weren’t really the most well understood things on the planet. They were just one of the more understood things. I had no idea what sort of strange biological processes were going on in them constantly, beyond the basics that you could check if you spent several days in your master’s library researching all manner of things.
I stumbled on a few interesting studies. One in particular was done by a pony a few centuries ago, where he set out to discover how his plants grew. He grew the plants in isolation on his workbench, and measured the mass of the soil carefully after they were fully grown. He discovered that the mass of the soil changed very little from beginning to end, so he hypothesized that the ferns mostly got their substance from the water that he added in. Some time later, another botanist did a different series of experiments (the same idea actually, except measuring the water poured in and the starting and ending masses of both the soil and the tree) and discovered something that this couldn’t be the whole picture: plants must be getting some of their mass from something else while they’re growing.
The conclusion of all this was that they had to be getting something out of the air, as well.
“Hortus, hortus, horti equestris. ”
I kept up the chant. A small seedling began to sprout quickly in the dirt, as I worked. I could feel the little thing pushing roots down through the soil, snaking through the ground and soaking up water and nutrients. I progressed to the second stage of the chant.
“Hortus, ventus, horti equestris. ”
A draft picked up through the clearing and whisps of wind whirled around the little sapling as my spell slowly did its worth. Exhaustion hit me like a runaway train car, but I ignored it. Moving around large volumes of air was difficult, even if I was doing it very carefully and slowly. But I needed to keep a fresh supply of air present for the plant to leech whatever it needed from it. Ditto for lending the young apple sapling energy to execute the metabolic whatsits that it needed to do to kick its growth into high gear.
“What in tarnation?” Applejack said, breathlessly.
Even so, I had to stop once it grew a few feet further and a couple more leafy branches. A whole adult tree would take a bit more time than I felt like, and a great deal more energy than I could provide without some serious ritual preparation.
For now, at least. I’d been told my general skills would improve over time.
Rarity and Applejack were staring at me, slackjawed and wide-eyed.
See, growing a plant from seed to sapling in a matter of minutes isn’t something that any earth pony could do, nor any old unicorn, or any old pegasus, or any normal creature as far as the general public were concerned. At the end of the day, it took honest to goodness magic to do something like that.
It took a wizard.
I gave the two of them my best cocky grin. I was mostly posturing for the sake of it at this point. I was absolutely, positively spent . I needed to sleep.
I wobbled slightly and blinked a couple times.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “I’m going to get around to explaining the rest soon. Talk more after my nap.”
“A nap? What the sam hill— “
My body hit the grass with a soft thud. There was a lot of shouting, but I couldn’t parse any of the words. I think I felt somepony try to physically check over me as I drifted off into blissful unconsciousness.
