Twilight Sparkle and the Stupid Original Pony

“Still no word from the pleasantly purple pony princess?”

The reformed tentacle monster was solicitous in his concern.

“Nothing since that one message, Naughtious.”

“Might her absence be related to what she suffered here?” he asked, cautiously.

The temple of slimedark was no longer the dripping pit of fear and misuse it had been, but the experience had been rough on Twilight. Both due to the longer duration of time she spent here, and the problem that I had not been able to tell Twilight of Naughtious’s reform. It would only take a little additional questioning and I would be in breach of the goddess’s command.

“I don’t think so, we passed this gauntlet mostly without permanent harm. Leon said there was a barrier. I must trust her to break it, I know she will.”

“How is your daughter?”

“She’s three and a half now.”

“I know nothing of how children grow.”

“Her vocabulary is expanding, she learning to help me with small things. She’s forming her own opinions and expressing them. And she reminds me so much of her father that it hurts.”

“You should find a better outlet for your distress.” He gestured at my scarred arms. Residual body image had brought my injuries from the real world into this dream. With a smooth ripple of lucid power the wounds -the freshest pair almost a year old- vanished.

“I haven’t cut in a while.”

“Hiding it doesn’t change anything. What have you come here for, how may I help you?”

“I have a magic question to discuss.”

“I taught you everything that I know.”

“I beg to differ. You have taught me everything that you know that you know. I think if we plumb the epistemological depths of the implications of your conscious knowledge we may find something new. “

“Say on, friend.”

“Okay, here’s my idea, interrupt me if you see any flaws or think I am on the wrong track. For many magic users, particularly unaligned mages working for their own purposes, reliably predicting the future is one of the most desirable abilities.”

Nautious nodded. Soothsayers and self proclaimed psychics had been attempting to tread on the territory of true prophets since the dawn of magic.

“Obviously the laws of infodynamics forbid this working with any kind of bulk accuracy: the more information you try to obtain, and the further away the source, the less accurate it will be.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“At a quantum level, the second law of infodymics works because observation changes that which is observed. If you go further down that rabbit hole, it’s not the bouncing of photons off of an event that is the measure of observation. Observation can be defined as uptake to conscious mind; a trans-temporal mindon mediated quantum feedback which becomes part of the originating event. A recorded event is still unobserved if the recording is never comprehended by mind.”

I paused for breath – Naughtious nodded as he pondered my words.

“I believe that I have found a useful loophole. I can’t use it to get next week’s stock prices or even tomorrow’s weather, but I think I can use this to tell if anyone has observed me for the next few minutes into the future.”

“If I assume that your loophole will work, what is the benefit of knowing whether you are observed in the immediate short term future?”

“Not being observed is the focus. Not being seen is functionally the same as being invisible, is it not? I can feel my way along, taking care not to perform any action which will be observed, dancing between the glances, as it were.”

“You have a point. But if you are using this to be functionally invisible, can you tell a hostile observation from friendly?”

“Nope, I don’t think so. So I can’t use this to march an army into the capitol—” I did have a possible work-around that I needn’t mention “—but I might walk right past an army with out being seen.”

“I do not know any to teach you any, but there are real invisibility spells.”

“I know, but I’ll have to make do with this for now. Logic tells me that this will use less power than true invisibility, and thus less likely to be noticed. I should go test this out.”

I was ready to open the portal back to the waking world.

“Before you go, do you require any, ah, release?”

“I know Twilight said that tentacles don’t count,” I said, “but I think I should resist.”

I’d be lying to say the notion of a fabulous phalanx of phallic feelers philandering through an array of assorted apertures wasn’t terribly temping. She really did say they didn’t count.

“That’s a relief,” he said.

“Don’t you enjoy it?”

“Er, no, not really.”

“But your tentacles ejaculate all over the place when they fuck me!”

Every square centimeter of my outside, and much of my insides, had known the titillation of his tentacular touch.

“It is a purely conscious action – I just do what is expected of me.”

“You’ve been faking it?” I demanded.

“I was doing what I was created to do, only with the benefit of permission.”

“Hey, now that you’re on team consent, your consent is important, too.”

“I would have spoken up if I had been unwilling to assist. Imagine if somebody could have an orgasm from you picking their nose for them. You might be willing to do it out of concern for a friend, even if you didn’t enjoy it.”

“Can you?” I asked, raising a finger, “I guess I owe you a few by now.”

“No!” He covered his nose with his hands. “That was just a humorous example.”

“Well, thanks your help with the magic, Naughtious.”

“I don’t think I did any anything.”

—

I practiced at invisible hide and seek with Gloam. Developing my magic theory, I found that I could sense where it was safe to move without being seen. I would walk right past her and hide somewhere that she had already investigated. If I stayed attuned, I could detect the immanent compromise of any hiding place before she came looking.

It almost felt unfair – after testing the magic, I finished by allowing her the grand denouement of finding mommy. Prizes were given and all was well.

I felt that I had perfected the technique but soon found that Gloam was getting harder to sneak past. At first I thought I was losing the ability to use my spell, but after a test with another subject I realized that the difference was Gloam. Something beyond sight seemed to inform her gaze. It was soon after that when I realized that she had gone further – so young and she could waltz through the gaps in the attention of people around us like they weren’t even looking. She was using my spell. When she tried, and failed, to use it on me I realized how she had been catching me: mastery of the ability included the skill to detect others using it. I had created a spell that grew less and less valuable as more magic users learned it. Two seemed like a good number to me, there would be no need to teach any others. But her precocious use of magic spawned more questions – barely old enough to form sentences and she had picked up on a new spell even as I created it.

I was shaking as I guided her to undress, and then marshaled a spell Nautious had taught me years ago. The golden glow of power surrounded my daughter and she changed.

Before me stood a young filly. Her coat was grey purple – it reminded me of smoke. Her mane was the same midnight purple as her human hair and her horn was a pure dark purple. She was a mix of Twilight’s colours and my own. And she was so beautiful that all I could do was weep at the sight of her.

“Oh my baby girl—” I swept her into my arms “—look at you! Look at you!”

She was trying, turning her head this way and that to see as much of her changed body as she could. I led her to the big mirror in the hall outside the bathroom. Here she turned around and around, examining the changes.

As she faced away from me I shimmied out of my clothes and cast the same spell on myself and stood beside my daughter, a grey mare, disguised still as an earthpony.

“Look,” I nickered gently, “this is mommy.”

Gloam sat on the floor looking at me.

“We can’t tell anyone that we are ponies, my little foal,” I said as I folded my human blouse and skirt and undergarments. “I don’t know where, I don’t know how, but I promise, someday I will find a place that you can gallop freely.”

I wept again when it was time for us to turn human.

—

We had almost finished shopping, wanting but one thing to round out our evening meal.

While I haggled with a fruit vendor, checkpoints had sprung up around the square, a random I.D. sweep. There were rumors of unrest in the upper ranks of the oligarchy, perhaps even extending as high as the office of supreme guide. The fallout for the little people was a random tightening of security.

The enforcers manned their stations like machines. Dehumanized, with their entire bodies covered, they could well have been robots, soulless pseudohuman troopers, or even aliens. Or they could have been real, natural, men like the redheaded fellow who crewed on my first trip to the outside. Regardless, I preferred not to be noticed.

Lifting Gloam up to my hip, held her close and whispered, “close your eyes, baby, mommy’s going to do some magic.”

I slipped between the moments of perception and we were gone.