Dead Week

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

Chapter 1

The sound of fluttering pages filled the corner of the library's third floor. Totality pushed up her glasses with one hoof as she dual wielded a book and quill with her magic. She scribbled frantically on a piece of parchment as she speed read the floating document.

Comet Shard, her light blue boyfriend, sat across the library table from her, tapping his hoof slowly on the table, eyes half lidded in boredom.

He exhaled a puff of breath straight up into his wavy white mane. "So… you're not coming with me?" he droned.

"I can't. I'm sorry,” she replied without looking up. “I really have to wrap this assignment up. It’s my last chance since my next two classes are back to back."

"Fine," he muttered, getting up from his chair. "I'll just go to the caf instead."

"We'll do something later," promised Totality.

"Whatever," he breathed.

They kissed goodbye and he left through the stacks in a brooding slouch.

She sighed in disappointment, watching him disappear over the brim of her reference book. He was seriously bent out of shape over this. It was kind of shocking. She’d never had to draw a hard line like this before.

Am I too stingy with my time? she began to wonder. The book and quill idled in the air as she became worried, distracted, now mentally compiling a list of everything she'd done with Comet over the past couple of weeks. We always eat together. We had one real date and three sort of dates in Canterlot. She wasn’t being a prude. No pony was going to accuse her of that. Hell, they’d even frittered away whole afternoons loafing around doing nothing at all but watching clouds and making daisy chains. No, she concluded. He's the one being unreasonable here. He can’t just expect me to revolve around him.

Sometimes you have to do work in college. It was their first year and they were getting close to finals too. What was the point of getting into Canterlot Academy if you were just going to run around and goof off all the time? If anything, she’d sacrificed too much school time for him.

Totality spun in her chair to look out the window. Three stories down, she could see Comet Shard traipsing across the courtyard to the big fountain where their mutual History of Magic classmate, Hazy Sheen, sat alone. Hazy, Totality’s bane from her old school in Manehatten, was easily recognisable from this altitude by her giant purple mane and fuschia coat.

Totality enjoyed being with Comet and they had fun, but he was kind of… greedy and high maintenance, and it was really starting to drag on her academic aspirations. She watched as Hazy and Comet left the fountain together. Totality pressed her forehead against the glass. “That’s not the way to the cafeteria,” she murmured.

She spun back around, intending to finish her work, but she couldn’t put it out of her mind. They were clearly heading toward the girl’s dorm. Totality teleported from her chair, abandoning her bag and stack of books. She blinked onto the front steps of the library and rushed out into the courtyard. The two reappeared in her view just before they entered the dorm.

Totality felt sick but tried to reserve judgment as she entered cautiously behind them. She waited to maintain a safe distance and then followed them up the stairs. She paused to peek around the corner just as the two entered Hazy’s room and the door clicked shut.

Totality slumped to the floor with her face in her hooves. Maybe it’s not what it looks like, she lied to herself. Of course it’s what it looked like. Why did it have to be Hazy?

"Son of a bitch,” she growled. “The one time I blow him off to finally do something actually responsible, he wanders off to find somepony else." She got to her hooves and slunk to Hazy’s door. On the door lever hung a single horseshoe, the universal collegiate ‘do not disturb’ sign.

Totality’s heart ripped in two at the sight. What did I do to deserve this betrayal, she thought. She grimaced. Gross. Traces of my saliva are probably on Hazy’s lips right now.

She raised a hoof to knock, intending to give Comet a heart attack if they answered, but ultimately realized that she really didn't care to barge in on the situation. It didn't matter what they did in there. This relationship was now over, as far as Totality was concerned.

I can’t just turn around and walk away though, she thought. I demand to exact some form of petty retaliation at the least.

She looked around and spotted a little table along the wall that looked about the right height. She grabbed it with her magic and levitated it over, scooting it in just under the door handle, blocking it from turning. Neither one of them could aparate. They’d be stuck in the room until somepony moved the table or they squeezed out the second story window.

Satisfied with her meager consolation, Totality plodded away down the hall, her head hung low. “Not going to cry,” she told herself. “I’d rather be angry forever than cry over this a single time.” But the tears came anyway.

Totality sat in the front row of her history of magic class on the left side of the auditorium. She’d deliberately moved from her and Comet Shard’s usual spot near the back right, hoping that if or when he showed up he wouldn’t sit near her. This was where she wanted to sit all along anyway.

“Hey,” came a whisper from behind her.

Totality turned her head curiously to look back and up. Behind her was a fidgeting mint green unicorn. He had a gray mop of a mane attop his head through which she could only see a single blue eye peeking out. The look reminded her of a yak or a shaggy dog.

“What’s your name?” he asked

“Totality,” she sighed.

“Totality, do you have an extra quill I can borrow?”

“Uh, no." She shook her head. "Sorry.”

“Oh, okay.”

She turned back around and immediately became aware of the soft anxious tapping of his hoof on the floor just behind her.

“Why’s your cutie mark upside down?” he asked.

“Read my thesis,” she grumbled over her shoulder.

"Okay." He paused briefly before continuing the unwanted conversation. "I've never seen an upside down cutie mark before."

Totality closed her eyes and ignored him, hoping he'd just stop on his own but he did not.

“Actually my dad’s cutie mark is a cloud with stars, so I can't tell if it's upside down or not... Woah, I never thought about this before. How can you even tell on some of them? I know mine isn’t upside down. Unless… No, it’s still right side up.”

No wonder there’s so much room to sit over here, she thought.

"My mom's cutie mark is a calculator. If it was upside down, it would say ‘boobless.’”

Totality snorted and hunched over her desk, choking on stifled laughter. It was enough of a disturbance that Professor Moondancer shot a mystified glance her way as she scratched a chalk piece up high on the monumental chalkboard.

Who is this guy? What the hell is he talking about? He'd carefully whispered this to her as if it was some piece of vital information. Was he seriously still talking to her or was he just thinking weird thoughts out loud?

Her brain refocused to anger as Comet suddenly entered the auditorium, face flush from galloping and possibly whatever stunt he had to do to escape Hazy's room. Hazy herself was right behind him.

"They actually came in together," scoffed Totality. "Idiots…"

She looked down at her notes and held a hoof up in front of her face in a feeble attempt to disappear. Her charcoal gray coat usually made her stand out in a pack of unicorns who were in general much lighter and colorful. The high contrast against her fiery yellow and orange mane only made it worse.

Totality grumbled incoherently as she sensed the seat beside her fill up. She looked over at Comet, trying not to scowl. Clearly he thought getting trapped in the room was just some prank of opportunity by somepony else.

"What did you have at the cafeteria?" she mumbled.

"Huh? Oh, uh, cereal," he exhaled.

"Why are you so late?"

"Lost track of time."

The wave of anger and disgust that broke over her was unquantifiable, not comparable to any recorded precedent. She just sat there, her pinched face heating up. It was insufferable but they couldn't just have it out right here in class in the middle of a lecture, so she waited.

Somehow Totality bit her tongue to the end of class when Professor Moondancer brought up the final project again.

“You only have two weeks to do this, which is why I want you working in pairs.” Also, it’s less grading, Moondancer thought to herself. “You’ll find a way to generate the necessary synergy to get it done by the end of dead week. If you didn’t write your group on the list at the beginning of class, do it now. I want to know before you walk out the door today.”

Ponies began leaving their seats, most of them filing toward the door.

“Did you already sign us up?” yawned Comet.

“No,” replied Totality through clenched teeth.

Comet got up casually and walked toward Moondancer’s desk. Great, thought Totality. We’re going to have to do this right here, right now. I am not signing up for a group project with him just so we can break up in a less public setting. She aparated in front of him to block his path.

“What are you doing?” she sneered in a low voice, trying to be discreetly confrontational.

Comet frowned. “Uh, signing us up for the project?”

“I’m not going to be your partner in any sense of the word for anything here on out. We’re done.”

“What are you talking about?"

“I saw you leave the fountain with Hazy and go to the dorm.”

He suddenly looked away. “Yeah, she asked me for help with chemistry.”

“Well, half of that claim checks out because only a dumbass would ask you for help in chem.”

“What the hell?” he growled. “You’re just being possessive and jealous.”

Totality aparated the horseshoe from her saddlebag, scoring a ringer on Comet’s horn. He recoiled in surprise before floating the item off to examine it.

“What…” His eyes narrowed. “You followed me? You said you had work to do.”

“Yeah, and you said you had cereal at the cafeteria.”

Moondancer rolled her eyes from behind her desk at their animated melodrama. "I gotta get out of these 101 classes," she muttered under her breath.

Thankfully the auditorium had mostly cleared out, leaving minimal witnesses to the squabble.

“Okay, fine,” agreed Comet angrily. “Hazy, be in my group for the project,” he shouted.

“Okay,” chimed Hazy from the seats in the insipid airy voice that Totality despised so much.

"Oh, big surprise," snarled Totality. She turned to the desk. "I guess…" her voice deflated to despair, "put me in the drawing."

Moondancer looked at her list. "There's only one unpaired student left and it's… Gamma Burst?" she called.

"Hey, that's my name!" Shouted the mint green stallion, who was still sitting in his seat, folding origami throwing stars with his magic. “Wooooo! Uh, what?"

Moondancer furrowed her brow in confusion. "Yeah… you're paired with Totality for the project."

"You asked to be my partner?" he gasped excitedly.

Totality facehooved and grumbled. “This is the worst day since the one where I literally died.”

Chapter 2

It would have been infinitely preferable for Totality to skip her potions class and instead spend that time crying alone in her room, but now that she was suddenly free of relationship obligations, she resolved to make the most of the time left in the year and to always show up and always do the work. Unfortunately, Hazy Sheen not only had the same class, but the two of them occupied opposing sides of the same lab station.

Totality flipped through her schedule, largely ignoring the lecture as she was already well versed in what they were doing today.

“So sorry about that little mixup earlier,” giggled Hazy. “I just assumed that somepony that easy wasn't with anyone.” She shrugged with her forearms out. “I guess they just get really bored when you don't got the goods."

Totality said nothing, only gazed back with an emotionless, unblinking stare.
Eventually Hazy became uncomfortable enough to turn back on her stool to the lecture. "Freak," she muttered.

You audacious little skank, thought Totality. To think I nearly let you get away with a slap on the hoof. She silently opened the cabinet doors below her own counter space and scanned over the jars of various ingredients. You’re in the wrong part of town to be talking shit to me. She floated out two canisters of powder and set them quietly on the ground. Then she took about a spoonful of dehydrated ice beet and about half as much earth salts. She swirled them together with her magic and lifted the tiny pale blue pile up to the counter, obscuring it behind a stone mortar.

With Hazy's back still turned, Totality floated a pinch of the granulated mixture into nearly every single glass container and apparatus in her setup.

Today they'd be making an antiseptic painkiller potion which Totality already knew would have to be prepared boiling hot. When that liquid hit the grains it would melt the salt which would activate the ice beet, creating an incredibly cold spot in a large hot spot. The rapid simultaneous expansion and contraction of the glass would cause it to fail.

Everypony lit the flames under their little cauldrons and began measuring out the required ingredients. Things went routinely as Hazy mixed her boiling pot together and poured the bubbling mixture into an array of glass vials with a beaker.

The first break could not have been better timed as Hazy was in the middle of pouring the remainder of the mix through a funnel into her alembic. The bottom of a vial popped out, spilling the wouldbe potion onto the counter. Startled by the phenomenon, Hazy yelped and lost her concentration, dropping her pot on the counter, spilling a massive amount of liquid which cascaded onto the floor. Another vial cracked and by this time everypony was looking at her. Hazy turned away from the disaster in a panic. “Um, professor?” she called.

Totality took the opportunity to swap in a random ingredient canister behind her. She turned back just as the bottom of her alembic blew out, leaving no salvageable potion behind. Totality gave her a deadpan stare with a slow clop.

“Woooo! Go Hazy,” somepony shouted from across the room in put-on elation.

“What happened here?” asked Professor Nova, wide-eyed.

“I-I don’t know. Everything just started breaking.”

Potion Nova eyed Hazy’s lineup of canisters. “You’re not even mixing the right ingredients here.”

“What?” She squinted at the canisters confusedly and then off into space as she tried to recall a memory of what exactly she had done. Then she glared at Totality. She didn’t know how, but she knew she must have had something to do with this.

"Uh, I'm going to have to increase your lab fee for this," groaned Potion as she surveyed the devastation. "Help me clean this up."

“I can help too,” offered Totatality with a smile as she grabbed the nearby tub of absorbent pellets. “I already finished my potions." Then she turned to Hazy. "Because I did the assignment correctly and didn't destroy half the lab.”

Totality floated her tray of food along from the kitchen counter into the dining area. Automatically she began heading to the table where most of her friends convened. She stopped abruptly when she realized Comet Shard was included in the company. Of course he was. They always sat here. He looked up at her briefly and quickly looked away like he didn’t know her.

Totality’s eyes dropped to the floor and she turned quickly before any of her friends could greet her. It was an awful, unforeseen ramification of the breakup. Their circle of friends had a big overlap. He was with at least some of them most of the time. Since the thought of even being in the same room as Comet made her nauseated, she was probably going to be seeing them a lot less.

Maybe it was stupid, but the fact that they would still associate with him felt like a hurtful betrayal to her. But they probably didn’t even know what happened yet. They were probably asking where she was right now. What kind of garbage story were they going to hear from him?

Totality sat at a sparsely populated table near a few ponies she didn’t know. She stared forlornly into the wood grains of the table, picking slowly at her pasta salad. It wasn’t long before a food tray landed across from her.

“Hey, project buddy,” chimed Gamma Burst as he sat down. “Do you like ghosts? I’m ninety two percent sure there are ghosts in the kitchen and that’s the reason why all the food in the cafeteria is haunted, except for the carrots and the ketchup.”

Totality sighed and began to zone out, letting his words blur into a muffled warble punctuated by the snapping of carrots dipped in ketchup. What a time in the year for this to have happened to her. She’d invested and lost so much time in that relationship and now, even though it was over, it was going to sabotage the rest of her year if she let it continue to occupy her mind.

“Are you okay?” asked Gamma.

The question jarred her back from her thoughts. Her eyes flicked up to where his should have been, but they were both obscured by his mane. Because of this, she wasn’t sure if it was the shape of his mouth or her own projection that he appeared to possess a look of concern. She’d like to have this discussion, but not with somepony she barely knew. “I’m fine,” she lied, floating another rotini noodle into her mouth.

Gamma shrugged and opened his mouth to continue babbling.

“Did you think at all about our topic?” muttered Totality absently.

Gamma levitated a carrot, spinning it in the air like a marching baton. “Uh… no, I haven’t”

“Me either,” she sighed. “Let’s figure that out tomorrow, I guess.”

“I can’t believe you actually held it together through the whole class after that,” exclaimed Blue Moon, smearing lotion on her face in front of the mirror.

“In a way, I guess it’s my new greatest achievement,” replied Totality, pulling the covers up to her face.

“I’da slapped his shit, the second he sat down next to me.”

Totality laughed weakly. “I know you would have.”

"I'm sure Hazy didn't know he was with you."

She'd already said that earlier. Totality knew Blue was friends with Hazy Sheen, which was what made this conversation so awkward. It was hard to tell if she was venting to an ally or an informant. She'd spent the time conspicuously shifting blame from Hazy.

It was an utterly useless distraction. Totality had grown up with Hazy. She knew exactly who she was and how she operated. It was absolutely a calculated move, just the latest attack in a years-long assault. Totality hated how she always managed to bring out the worst in her and often wondered if she could stop the whole thing if she just played dead and took it for a while… but she couldn’t. That would be conceding defeat, but vengeance was merely a fleeting ego boost with a bitter aftertaste. This sort of childish vendetta war was something that made sense in high school, but they were in college now. The length and cruelty had long since outweighed the cost of entry. A normal pony would have lost interest by now. There was something seriously wrong with Hazy.

Blue yawned and let the light of her horn blink out before climbing into the top bunk. “You didn’t come here to find a guy, did you?” she scoffed.

“Well, no.”

“No one does,” she retorted, pummeling her pillow into a comfy puff. “It’s our first year. Everypony who’s away from home for the first time just wants to fuck around a little bit.”

“I don’t,” Totality muttered to herself. She didn’t do anything unless she was serious about it. That was sincerity. Why couldn’t everypony just act in the same capacity and not waste her time with stupid games?

The whole bed shook and creaked as Blue flopped on the mattress. Inspired by the sound, she began to rock back and forth, intentionally creaking the bed in a rhythmic sexual way. “Ever wonder how many ponies have screwed on your old mattress?”

“No,” droned Totality. “But I will now, so thanks for that.”

“That’s why I took the top bunk. Bottom is the default sex bed for both roommates.”

“But… you wouldn’t do that because you're a good roommate,” charged Totality.

Blue began to snore, pretending to be asleep.

Chapter 3

Totality and Gamma Burst met in her favorite, most secluded spot in the library. She'd yanked a hooffull of books from the shelves to help give them a direction for their research report.

The assignment was to detail the origin and impact of magic within a specific culture. It would be best if they could get the topic done as soon as possible so they could get it approved by Moondancer and dive into the research at their leisure. Unfortunately Gamma, to no pony's surprise, was difficult to keep on task.

The stallion leaned in close over the table, adopting a theatrically spooky voice. "Did you know that under this very academy are catacombs with thousands of bodies?"

Totality rolled her eyes. “As much as I want that to be true, that’s just an urban legend.”

Gamma shook his head. “Nuh-uh. I saw the designs in the archives. The academy used to be a courthouse with a huge dungeon underneath. During the plague, the courthouse got converted into a sanitorium where they stuck all the unclean together. Then the dungeon got turned into catacombs and that’s where they put all the dead bodies from the plague.”

“They burned the dead bodies," corrected Totality, twirling her quil in the air. "There’s even a historical plaque at the spot.”

“Yeah, they burned them after they ran out of space in the catacombs. I know where the door is,” he smirked.

Totality gestated on the admittedly very interesting tale. "We need to do work," she sighed.

"You don't wanna know where the door is?" spat Gamma in disbelief.

"What I want is to get a good grade on this assignment," she snapped.

Gamma thudded back in his seat. "Yeah, so, okay… Hippogriffs or Kirin?” shrugged Gamma.

Totality sighed. "I don't want to do Hippogriffs. Kirin are interesting, but I don't know if we can find enough information to do a good report on them.”

“Hippogriffs can fly, run and swim. Are they too OP? Now that’s a research topic.”

Totality ran a hoof down her face in frustration. “How exactly did you get into this academy?” she tried to ask as inoffensively as possible. Gamma had ‘slacker with rich parents’ written all over him. He had to have bought his way in somehow. Totality was having a hard time envisioning him even making it through high school without significant hoofholding.

“Oh, my test scores I guess," replied Gamma. "I did get perfect on potions. They said nopony had ever done that.”

Bullshit, thought Totality. “Perfect? How? Even if you can do them all correctly, there’s not enough time to answer all the questions in that section.”

Gamma raised a hoof. “There is if you memorized all the substitution conversions.”

Her eye twitched. “Mem- memorized all of them? You can’t. There has to be, I don’t know, at least two thousand easily just for basic.”

“Well I did,” shrugged Gamma. “Wanna see me balance a book on my horn?” He held up his history of magic book and smiled.

Totality frowned and pulled out her potions textbook. She cracked it open, determined to prove he was full of shit. “Okay," she began, squinting back at him. "What’s the subcon for mandragora to pearl dust?”

“Point eighty-one," he replied, one eye looking out through the curtain of his mane at the book now wobbling on the tip of his horn.

He was right. Well, most students have a few memorized, she reasoned. And that was a common one. She scanned over the giant foldout chart for another. “Dragon egg yolk to gold.”

“Point twenty-two.”

Again he was right.

“Amethyst to snail slime.”

“Point twelve.”

“Sweet root to willow bark.”

“Point ninety-one. This is fun. I like this.” He clopped his hooves together in gleeful anticipation. The book fell from his horn, but he caught it with magic.

Totality kept picking out pairs of the more esoteric ingredients, but Gamma didn’t miss a single number. It seemed as though he really had memorized all of them.

Totality clenched her teeth. Quit falling into this stupid trap, she thought. We have to get work done. She slammed the book shut in frustration and shoved it back in her bag.

"Aw, are we done? asked Gamma disappointedly.

"No. We're not done," fumed Totality. "Can we just finalize a topic today, please?"

"Yeah, of course." Gamma opened a book, hoping to find a good section on Kirin magic. Then he noticed the very bottom of the page and smiled. "Hey, somepony made a little cartoon." He began flipping the pages with his magic. "I used to make these back in-"

“Ugh, just shut up Gamma," Totality blurted angrily. "You never shut up, you won’t focus and you’re better than me at the thing I’m supposed to excel at. And no, I didn’t ask you to be my partner. Everything about you is annoying!”

Gamma’s ears drooped and he looked away. “I-I know,” he sighed sadly. “Sorry. Um… well, I do have a hard time focusing in a group so you’d probably do a lot better on this without me.” Lips sagging, he stood up and floated his saddle bag onto his back. “I can ask Professor Moondancer if we can just be in groups of one,” he promised forlornly.

Totality bit her lip. “Gamma, wait. I’m sorry,” she pleaded. “I don’t hate you. I’m just in a really bad mood right now.” Tears began to well in her eyes. “I’m not usually like this… Actually that’s kind of not true, but please don’t leave.”

“Are you just saying that so you don’t have to do the project alone?” he sighed.

She shook her head. “Of course not. We’ve been here thirty minutes and haven't accomplished jack shit. Why would-” She covered her face in frustration at herself. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. Listen, if I’m being completely honest, I... thought you were funny in class yesterday, and I do want to know where the door is but that’s for another time.”

Gamma smiled weakly, took his saddlebag off and sat back down slowly. “I promise I’ll try to do better. I have a tendency to overshare when I meet somepony new. I just want to tell them everything and I have a hard time stopping myself… And you don’t have to worry because I’m not better than you in potions or chemistry. I never even learned how to calculate substitutions. It was too hard for me. But I do have an abnormally good memory, so that’s how I got around it. I’m probably the only pony in the academy that can’t do it.”

“I bet you could do it if you tried again now,” argued Totality.

“I don’t know," he exhaled. "But does it even matter now?”

Totality shrugged. “I guess half the shit you learn in school doesn’t matter specifically. It’s more like a garnish than an ingredient.”

“For your delicious brain?” he offered.

Totality's eyes shifted side to side. “Yes… Exactly. Who needs subcons anyway? You should be counting cards in Las Pegasus.”

Gamma laughed. "Maybe someday I'll give that a shot." He scratched the back of his neck, trying desperately to get his thoughts in order but instead took another detour. “I read your thesis last night.”

Totality blinked in surprise. “Why?”

“Well, ‘cuz you told me to, and I wanted to know why your cutie mark was upside down.”

Totality replayed in her head the snarky exchange they’d had in class the day before. “That was just supposed to be… Why am I such an asshole?” she muttered to herself.

“I liked it,” he continued. “That kind of stuff really interests me.”

“Thanks.” Totality glanced at the clock. “Fuck… We’re out of time and we don’t have a topic. Let’s just try to do Kirin. I’ll check and see if there’s enough literature to work with first though, okay?”

“Yeah,” nodded Gamma in agreement.

Chapter 4

The next day was quite lonely for a newly single mare in self-imposed isolation. Totality ate breakfast alone in her room. She sat in her history of magic class far away from Comet and near, but not within speaking distance, of Gamma.

They got their topic of Kirin magic approved by Moondancer and made plans at the library again.

Gamma was held up in his last class and was a few minutes late meeting with Totality for the project.

"Sorry I'm a little late," said Gamma with an exasperated sigh as he let his saddle bag plop on the table haphazardly. It turned over and a few books slid out. "I had to wait in line after class to ask the professor if she was a beverage, what beverage would she be?"

"Of course you did," muttered Totality. She eyed his flank briefly to see a strange yellow device with a white dial imprinted on him before she dove back into her Kirin book. "What did she say?”

"Rotgut whiskey."

"Which professor said that?" she laughed, looking up again.

"Ultraviolet."

"Sounds about right."

Gamma proactively grabbed a book from Totality's selection. "I talk to her a lot because we're both radiations."

"You really need to learn how to apararate," posed Totality, slumping back in her chair.

"It's on my bucket list," he replied absently.

How was it that at a school for adult unicorns to learn advanced magic that she knew so many ponies that couldn't teleport? Totality thought she'd learned late, but apparently she was about average.

“Is that a geiger counter?” she muttered abruptly.

Gamma looked up. “Huh?”

“Your cutie mark.”

Something sparked in his eye. “Oh, yeah!” he smiled. “Good job. No pony ever knows what it is,” he laughed. “They always think it’s a radio or a microphone or some kind of sound equipment.”

“Well, your name is a good clue, even though it kind of implies measuring cosmic entities with a hoofheld device.”

Gamma shrugged, “Yeah, it’s in the realm of unfortunate coincidence or intentional miss.”

Totality wanted to say she liked it for its uniqueness, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“Uh, so, should we have one of us do research and one do writing, or should we both do both?" asked Gamma, getting out his notes and quill.

"Let's both do both," answered Totality. "We can cover different Kirin points while writing and then I'll put them together uniformly.

"Sounds good."

Totality’s eyes went to Gamma’s saddle bag. It had several weird looking buttons pinned to it, two of which read ‘Appleoosa Mystery Spot’ and 'Cryptid Conservation Society.' The books spilling out of the bag were mostly textbooks but on top was a pulpy horror fiction book with a title that she recognized instantly: Necrosphere.

“Hey, you like the Red Umbra series?” she asked, pointing at the book.

Gamma followed her hoof to the pile of books. “Oh yeah. I have all of them,” he declared proudly.

“Even the limited edition two-parter?”

“Yep.”

“Me too,” Totality tried to cull the excitement in her voice. “Uh, which one is your favorite?”

“This one.” He floated the same book from his saddle bag up in front of him. “I’m reading it again. This is like the tenth time.”

“That’s my favorite too! The ancient occult ones are always the best.” Necrosphere was the only fictional piece on necromancy she’d ever read where the author actually sounded like they knew what they were writing about, and even suggested a possible duality to the practice, pitting a ‘good’ necromancer against a bad one.

Gamma sighed. “I just got to the chase through the woods and I somehow always forget that Cloudy Night gets left behind and dies offscreen.”

“Yeah, that part really sucks,” she groaned. “But I like that the main character is actually weak and always has to think outside the box to eke out a win."

"Oh yeah, like when he had to put the blood seal nexus on a ley line to compensate for his low magical abilities. Or-or when he had to do vox channeling and the only thing he had to imprint on was the guy’s leg so they end up interrogating a severed leg."

Totality laughed. “Yeah that was-” Her face fell suddenly. “Wait, they never called it that in the book. How do you know what it’s called?”

Gamma screwed up his face. “W-what did I call it?”

“Vox channeling,” repeated Totality. “How do you know what that is?” It wasn’t a term somepony got from a horror book or anywhere else but a necromantic grimoire. It was deep, restricted knowledge.

“Well, how do… you know what that is?” He pointed a hoof at her, accusingly.

“Let me see your horn,” she countered, leaning toward him.

“No,” he blurted, sliding backward in his chair and holding a hoof over his horn.

His reaction all but confirmed her suspicions. Her eyes widened. “You're a user, aren't you?” she gasped quietly. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”

Gamma shook his head. “N-no I'm not. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked around the library nervously.

“Are you white hat or black hat?” she whispered.

He gritted his teeth in fear. What was he supposed to do? It was like she already knew somehow. “Eh… White... hat.” he shrugged.

Totality’s eyes narrowed. “Everypony who gets caught is going to say ‘white hat.’ How do I know it's true?"

Gamma shot paranoid glances over his shoulders to see if anyone was eavesdropping. Then he presented his foreleg on the table. He slowly rolled it over to reveal an ugly lateral scar near the joint from repeated blood collecting.

Totality's heart skipped a beat. It wasn't definitive proof, but theoretically if he was using his own blood that much then he was probably not a black hat necromancer. They tended to just take what they needed from their victims.

Totality placed her foreleg on the table just beside his and showed him her matching cut mark where her fur no longer grew. His eyes went down to the scar and his jaw fell open.

"No way," he gasped.

The two stared into each other's eyes, gobsmacked.

“I-I have so many things to ask you,” said Totality, vibrating with excitement. "When did you start?"

"Middle school," he whispered.

“Grade school,” blurted Totality. She quickly covered her mouth with her hooves, her eyes shifting back and forth. “What- what’s the biggest thing you ever raised?”

“A tiny lizard. I sacrificed a big tree… and then felt bad about it.”

“Aww,” she laughed. “How old were you?”

“Thirteen. Does anyone else know you… uh...”

"No." She shook her head. "Oh wait, there is one." She bit her lip in manic glee. "Twilight Sparkle," she whispered.

Gamma gasped and recoiled, almost falling out of his chair. "Nuh-uh, that is not true," he blathered with eyes as big as saucers.

"It is, and she even wrote me a letter of recommendation," she tittered.

"Woah…" He braced the sides of his reeling brain with his hooves.

"And that's not even the most insane part of the story but I'll tell you later. Where'd you get your knowledge?"

Gamma readjusted his crooked chair. "Found a book in my dead grandma's attic. I had a lot of questions but decided it would be best not to ask any. How do you hide the horn thing?"

"Horn polish. But actually it's grown off now so I don't do anything."

"Horn polish," he muttered.

"Yeah. What do you do?"

"I sanded mine off, but I don't like how it smooths out the ridges on my horn."

"I didn't even know you could sand it off."

"Do you still-"

"No. Not really. I sort of… quit. And I don't have any reading material anymore. Do you?"

Gamma scratched his head. "Eh… Well, I haven't done anything in a while, but I do still have my book."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I can show you if you want. My house is actually in Canterlot."

"I'd love that."

"This is so weird," he breathed. "I never thought in a million moons that I would actually have this conversation with somepony."

"Me either."

“It’s so great to finally meet another necrophile.” He grimaced in embarrassment when he realized what he’d just said. “Nec- necro… enthusiast is what I meant.”

“I know what you meant,” she laughed. “We can just call it ‘Red Umbra fan.’”

The two whiled away their research time talking about their experiences experimenting with necromancy and got almost nothing done.

Totality voluntarily waited in line with and sat across from Gamma in the cafeteria. Gamma had the same thing she’d seen him eat before, carrots and ketchup.

“Do you always eat that?” she asked with a disgusted sneer.

“Only when I eat in the cafeteria. I usually eat the food in my room," he replied, biting two floating carrots at the same time.

“Because all the food here is haunted?” she posed.

“You noticed,” he winked.

Totality sniggered at his response. What the hell was that, she thought. Is he messing with me? “Would you eat more cafeteria food if I exorcised it for you first?” she asked with a twisted smirk.

His eye twinkled. “You know how to do exorcisms?”

She adjusted her glasses. “Only on food.”

“Wow, you’d do that for me? Thanks.”

“Well, well.” came a malevolent yet ditzy sounding voice. “Somepony’s moved on quickly.”

Hazy appeared at Gamma’s side and slapped her tray down on the table. "Hey, Gamma,” she began with artificial joviality. “We never talk. What was your major again?"

Totality glared at her but Hazy was intentionally ignoring her presence.

"Books with an emphasis on spooky," replied Gamma, cryptically before licking a dollop of ketchup off of his foreleg.

Hazy laughed and brushed back a loose mane curl from her face.

"What's your major?" he asked.

"Pain in the ass with an emphasis on ass," interrupted Totality.

"Hey, that was uncalled for,” pouted Hazy. “We were just having a nice conversation. And is that any way to talk to a fellow alumnus?"

His eyes pingponged between them. "You two graduated together?"

"Oh, yeah," replied Hazy. "We go waaaay back. A lot of shared history. You should ask her what she did at my fourteenth birthday." Her eyes flicked down the table to see her tray of food slowly migrating away under the influence of Totality’s magic. “Oh dear,” she giggled. “My food seems to be crawling away.” Hazy got up from her seat. “See you later sometime Gamma, maybe without the drag on the conversation.” Her eyes landed on Totality ominously before departing with swaying hips to reacquire her food.

“See?” he whispered with a knowing look. “She got the haunted food.”

Totality laughed weakly.

Gamma floated his plate in front of his face and began to lick it. “So… what did you do?”

Totality sighed. "She wants me to tell you about the time I poisoned her birthday cake."

Gamma raised an eyebrow. "Uh… wow."

"Not with lethal poison,” she clarified flippantly. “It was just a GI irritant. And it wasn't the whole cake, just her piece. I'm not proud of it, but the prequel to that story is that she stole my work, presented it as her own, and won an award with it. That’s where it started and we still haven’t finished it.

Totality folded her glasses and carefully levitated them to her desk. Then she flopped on her back and yawned. She was alone tonight, apparently. Blue Moon came and went on an erratic schedule, especially at night. Sometimes she disappeared in the evening and didn’t show up until morning the next day.

Totality hadn’t thought about Comet since seeing him in history of magic that day. Weirdly, she couldn't stop thinking about Gamma Burst.

It was difficult to put into words the feeling of finding a kindred spirit who shared the same experience and ideas as her after years of longing in seclusion, like an entire part of her was locked away in a windowless cell. To her, at this moment, he was the most interesting thing in existence.

Her mind reeled with the possibilities of what they might discuss tomorrow, maybe something deeper, more intellectual, but she was also worried that she'd now be unable to focus on their project. Somepony needed to be the task master and it probably wasn’t going to be Gamma. Why couldn't this have happened to her much earlier instead of just before finals? What if they started talking about ethics in necromancy? That could take days… She was already drooling at the thought.

Her eyes shot open at the sound of deranged giggling swelling from the hallway. The door crashed open, banging violently against the wall. Blue Moon staggered in and collapsed in the middle of the room with a grunt before mumbling something unintelligible. The door latched itself shut as Blue turned on her side to get comfortable.

“Oh, there you are,” muttered Totality. “Goodnight, Blue.”

Author's Note

That last paragraph is literally just something that happened to me when I was trying to sleep one night in college.

Chapter 5

Totality stacked the research material on the library table and sat down in her favorite chair. They really needed to get it together and actually do some research for a change, but talking with Gamma was so much more interesting.

Gamma came trotting up right on time, smiling widely. He floated his bag to the table and flung it open. "Hey, I brought something for you."

Totality's ears perked up and she watched closely as Gamma shuffled things around in his saddle bag. After failing to produce anything for a while, he began pulling books out one by one, setting them aside. He frowned before just inverting the bag and dumping everything out.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I can’t find my book,” he replied worriedly, spreading out the field of papers and classroom whatnot.

“What book?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. “Uh, well… I went home last night, ‘cuz I live in Canterlot, and I got my grimoire to show you.”

Totality's eyes bulged. “You brought it on campus?" she whispered. "Are you nuts? I thought we’d, I don’t know, go somewhere in town and look at it in a broom closet or something.”

Gamma sighed. “I thought it would be fine. Just keep it in the bag and don’t show it to anyone. That's easy. I know I had it in my saddle bag when I left my room and then I went to two classes and now it’s gone.”

“Please tell me you didn’t have your name in it,” groaned Totality.

Gamma crashed down into his chair. “No. Of course not. Those books are priceless artifacts. I’d never alter them. But I never took it out. Somepony had to have stolen it right out of my bag.”

Totality shook her head. “You’re never getting it back. You can’t ask anypony about it or even admit that you possessed such a thing, and it's just going to end up on the black market.”

“I know," moaned Gamma, collapsing in a mopey puddle on the table. "Can't believe this..."

"Sorry."

For the entirety of the session, Gamma stayed on task though he was inconsolably despondent.

They went to the cafeteria together again later and Totality convinced Gamma to get a sandwich instead of his usual.

"So how does this work?" mumbled Gamma, staring suspiciously down at his plate.

"Oh, yeah, the exorcism," began Totality. "You just do this." She enveloped the sandwich in her magic for a few moments as though she were about to raise it into the air and then released it. "And now all the spirits are gone. Chef's kiss. Bon appetit."

Gamma took a cautious bite of his sandwich and gestated on it.

"Well, does it taste possessed?" asked Totality.

"Nope. Good job," he nodded.

The next day, they did not meet for their project. Totality felt considerably more melancholic about her situation, despite having a nice day where she avoided contact with any undesirable ponies. She used her time to get completely caught up in her other homework.

When they did pick their project back up in the usual place, Gamma was quiet and devoid of his usual levity, absently scribbling notes as his eyes scanned attentively across the pages of his book. They were finally making good progress on the research, but it was sad to see him like this.

“Are you worried you’re going to get caught somehow?” asked Totality, breaking away from her own reading material.

Despite the ambiguity of her question, he knew precisely what she was inquiring about which in turn told her that he was indeed still stewing over the grimoire.

“No,” he sighed. “I think it would have happened by now if it was going to. As you said, it’s on it’s way to a black market buyer like it was never even here. I’m just still upset about losing it in general.”

Totality looked at the clock. "Hey, why don't we take a break and you show me that door?"

Gamma looked up from his book and smiled.

Gamma stamped his hoof on an unassuming stone slab embedded flush with the surface of the ground in the south side of the park. The face was cracked in places with weeds growing out of it, and there was no nearby plaque to mark the spot as there was for many of the other points of interest on the academy's campus.

Gamma cleared his throat. "So, obviously the building's gone but this is it."

"Not really a door," muttered Totality.

"Yeah, they sealed it a really long time ago. This is the only former point of entry I'm familiar with that I could actually locate."

"Have you ever been in there?"

He shook his head. "No. I can't teleport."

"How do you know this is it then?"

"I told you, I checked the plans in the archives. All of them, and then I cross referenced them looking at identifiable architectural landmarks.” He turned around and pointed to an old row of columns.

"That colonnade is original to the courthouse. They repurposed it for a newer building but it still sits right on top of the western edge of the dungeon. That's how I knew this was here and what it was."

Totality raised an eyebrow. "But that still doesn't mean there are bodies down there." In a flash, the whole world around them became pitch black. Totality quickly illuminated her horn and glanced around. “Looks like you can focus on a research project if you want to badly enough," she laughed.

Gamma lit up his horn to see that they were now standing on a stone staircase in a narrow descending passage. Just above their heads was the stone slab embedded in the lawn of the park. He turned back to Totality, grinning ear to ear.

In a communal full body rush of excitement, the two breathlessly descended the steps together.

A pack of rats squeaked in alarm and dispersed at their arrival to the floor of the old dungeon.

It didn't take long for them to spot the bones. In the small square room, full pony skeletons were laid out in repose, stacked floor to ceiling in a sort of hive of inset alcoves. There was hardly a swatch of unused wall space.

"Holy shit!" exclaimed Totality. "Good thing we didn't make a bet because I would have lost."

Before them was a rotten wooden door which led into the dungeon proper. It sat ajar, slumping from its hinges.

"C'mon," beckoned Gamma excitedly.

The two pushed through into a three-way intersection where again every inch of wall appeared to display a skeleton. They walked down the path straight ahead, their hoof falls echoing down the musty corridor.

Totality exhaled in amazement. "I can't believe this place is just sitting underneath the school, never seen. They should be giving tours. You could be the tour guide."

"I would definitely do that," agreed Gamma. "Coming up on your left, you'll see some olden beer bottles and some olden graffiti."

"And an olden box spring mattress and some olden condom wrappers," added Totality. They stopped to peer through a grate of flat iron bars into a converted prison cell that now housed remains, the floor strewn with contemporary artifacts, mostly trash, around a nasty looking mattress. Clearly there had been other, at least relatively, recent visitors. In between nooks and niches in the wall were words scrawled, most of them just names, like a sort of guest book for trespassers.

"Oh, I see how this works," began Totality in mock annoyance. "This was your plan all along. Fill my ears with promises of dead bodies and ancient squalor and then, like clockwork, out comes the moldy mattress. I bet you bring them all down here, don't you?"

"You brought me down here," laughed Gamma.

"A likely story."

Gamma ran his hoof slowly across the sturdy bars with a rhythmic succession of metallic clangs while Totality floated a misplaced skull into her light for closer inspection.

“Wonder who this pony was,” she muttered. “Think they had a family? Or if anypony cried when they went? Think they have any living descendants? Maybe here in Canterlot.”

“Yeah, could be me,” answered Gamma, turning to continue down the corridor.

Totality set the skull respectfully against the wall. “Weird to think about,” she breathed

The two meandered down the row of cells and alcoves casually glancing left and right through the bars, and every one of the doors which were unlocked and wide open. As they came upon another, Gamma slowed and craned his head down at a dark figure curled up on the floor. As his light washed over it, he could see that it was the body of a pony, not a skeleton.

“That looks… fresh?” he declared, unnerved.

Totality gasped as she looked over his shoulder. She rushed in through the cell door and hovered over the body. It was a unicorn with a burnt mane and charred skin over much of the body. She couldn’t smell it, which she thought odd. The parts of the coat that were intact were light blue and as her eyes traced down to the flank, she could still make out a familiar ice crystal cutie mark.

Her eyes widened and she grabbed her mane with two hooves. “Oh fuck me. It’s Comet Shard! He’s dead!”

“Uh, Totality?” called Gamma from outside the cell.

She looked up to see him pointing urgently to the adjacent cell where there stood the skeleton of a pony just seemingly staring at them, head even cocked curiously to one side. It was deliberately corralled in the cell.

“What… the hell is going on here?” breathed Totality.

“Somepony had to have raised this skeleton. They must have sacrificed Comet… but his body’s still here.”

“He’s got magic burn marks,” explained Totality. “That’s what happens when you don’t put something completely inside a blood seal circle. That’s why he didn’t dematerialize.”

“So their ritual was only partially successful,” concluded Gamma. “Sounds like they’re a novice,” He thought on this for a moment. Then his mouth dropped open. He pressed his face into the bars with a look of horror. "Comet’s dead because of me!"

Totality's eyes opened wide. "What?"

"My grimoire. I lost track of it, and then this happened. What are the odds? Him, here, now, like this? Whoever has that book is experimenting with it now, and they just used it to kill Comet. We have to bring him back.”

“Bring him…” Totality trailed off as she began to crunch the numbers in accordance with her scale methodology. The remains were an eight or maybe even a nine, which was pretty good. Time since death was indeterminable, but it couldn't have been long. The rating she guessed was between six and zero. The longer they waited, the lower that number got, and the worse their theoretical results became as the spirit became further dissociated from the flesh. For resources, they had a live skeleton which was a three. She didn’t need to finish the tally. A quick and dirty raising was going to yield a notably subpar Comet Shard, but all this was beside the point.

“We can’t,” she replied. “Without a grimoire, we can’t make blood seals to raise him. Even if we could, without all the proper resources, he’d come back looking like a burn victim with significant brain damage. Without a personal effect, we don’t even know if it would be him in the body. It could be any ambient spirit, of which there are probably many in a dungeon slash mass interment site for plague victims like this one.”

Gamma swallowed. “I know how to draw basic rez seals from memory. We can use the skeleton plus my life force to get back most of his mental capacity. If we hurry, we might not need the personal effect. He’ll have scars and he might never be able to graduate in his major, but he’ll be alive.”

“Your life force?” she squeaked. “You could die if you screw that up.”

“This is my fault!" he railed. "I have to do everything I can to fix it!”

Totality hung her head and groaned. “Well, then at least let me split it with you… and you’re going to need my blood too. I’ll go get a knife or something. I’ll be back in a minute!”

She flashed out of the catacombs and suddenly Gamma was alone… sort of.

Chapter 6

Totality aparated back in the catacombs with a kitchen knife, a paint brush, a pair of glass beakers and a bottle of beer.

“One for you, one for me.” She floated an empty beaker to Gamma. Then she levitated the knife to the well worn spot on her foreleg and unceremoniously drew the blade across her flesh. Blood began to seep from the wound and flow into the glass receptacle she held under it.

“Blood’s here; get going,” ordered Totality.

“Right.” Agreed Gamma, brushing his mane from his eyes. He floated the paint brush tip into the slowly filling beaker and began tracing a circle around Comet’s body. He’d arranged Comet curled into a tight ball, trying to make him take up the least amount of space possible, thus making it possible to use smaller blood seals, thus requiring less blood to complete the ritual. “I’ll try to do this as conservatively as possible,” he murmured.

Unfortunately, Comet had to fit entirely within the nexus between the three overlapping circles, while they also somehow had to cram a reassembled skeleton into the remainder of one of the circles. Gamma was going to paint very thin lines.

Totality bled out about half as much blood as she thought they would need based on eyeballing Gamma’s work. She expected him to pick up the other half.

“Even while dead he’s making me jump through hoops,” she muttered as she put pressure on her cut. “Hey, you should bleed now,” she suggested. “I can keep working on the circles for now. Then you can do the runes when you’re done.”

“Yeah, okay,” breathed Gamma worriedly.

They swapped tools and Gamma began dripping blood into a beaker while Totality painted with it. She hated doing things on the fly like this. She much preferred prepping ahead of time in a lab setting to achieve calculated optimum results.

When Gamma began working on the symbols to be circumscribed along the circles, Totality disappeared to go hunt for any white hat approved resources she could find to help rebuild the damage to Comet’s body, despite her mixed feelings about the project.

“I found three dead rats,” droned Totality as she adjusted her glasses. “They’re biggish and still gooey. It’ll help a little with the burns, and honestly I think they’re highly appropriate for him.” She floated the offerings, setting them down inside one of the blood seals. She also added a bucket of water. Water was always helpful. It was too bad they couldn’t do such a thing out in the open with more help. If they succeeded at raising him, they’d always remember that they could have done a better job but didn’t.

This was so fast, thought Totality. Doing this with two ponies from memory is completely different. It would have taken her hours just to make the seals while having to basically sight-read a grimoire. She carefully tipped an open beer bottle over Comet’s head, drenching him in beer.

“What’s with that?” asked Gamma.

“Red herring," she muttered. "If he comes back, he’s going to have mysterious injuries and no memory of what happened to him. Beer provides a more innocuous explanation. If he smells like alcohol, everypony’s more likely to wonder what he did to himself instead of wondering what somepony did to him. Hopefully nopony’s going to be wondering about necromantic rituals and contraband grimoires floating around campus.”

“I guess that’s worth a shot,” nodded Gamma. “I’m all done.” Lastly he dipped his hoof in the blood beaker and stamped his print in the nexus. Then he stamped a bloody hoof print on the self inflicted cut on his own leg. Totality did the same for herself.

“Theoretically it should be safer if both of us give life force,” she explained. She teleported the reanimated skeleton into the cell with them and entrapped it with her magic, pushing it down into an empty circle of fresh blood. “Sorry, Boney. You have to give that life back.”

Gamma checked Comet and the skeleton one last time to make sure they were correctly situated. “Okay, here we go,” he exhaled. His horn glowed white and the silence of the tomb was shattered by the crash of the magical arc of the spark of life spell as it lashed the blood seals. The artwork burned away in a flurry of sparks. Comet Shard’s body glowed brilliantly as the rats and the water dematerialized into the aether. The skeleton collapsed in a pile as the life left its bones.

Totality and Gamma screamed as part of their life force was ripped through the wounds in their bodies. They collapsed on the cold stone, quivering from the unexpected wallop. The light emanating from Comet Shard dissipated and he let out a pained groan.

Luckily Totality had retained enough focus to teleport him out of the catacombs in a blink.

"Where'd you send him?" panted Gamma, wobbling back on his legs.

"To his room… I think. Now let's just hope he doesn't eat his roommate or something."

Gamma illuminated his horn again. "Can't believe it. I've never done anything like that before… and it worked."

"Did you know that donating life force feels like having your soul kicked in the crotch?"

"Nope."

"Me either." She frowned. "I can't believe I bent over backwards for that fucker again and he'll never even know," she grumbled.

"Well… I was really impressed," shrugged Gamma.

“You were impressed with me? You’re the one who just made functional blood seals from memory.” Totality opened a small leather satchel and produced one of the potion vials she'd filled in class when she sabotaged Hazy’s assignment. She floated it in front of Gamma's face. "Drink this."

"Why?" he asked, squinting at the unidentified liquid.

"So you don't die of sepsis," she deadpanned.

Totality and Gamma sat despondently on the edge of the courtyard fountain, preferring the mask of the running water to the silence of the library where it would be easy to eavesdrop on them.

The high from their apparent success at raising Comet was blunted by the anxious fear of what losing the grimoire now implied.

Gamma rubbed his face in despair. “This is horrible. Some black hat is using my book… It’s a defilement.”

“I think they’re a novice, just like you said,” began Totality as she swished the tip of her tail in the fountain water. “They screwed up the ritual in a stupid way, and why would you reanimate what looks like an arbitrary skeleton if not just for proof of concept? Down there is the perfect place to practice, too.”

Gamma shook his head. “Imagine doing your first ritual. You can barely read the instructions, you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You don’t even know… if it’s real. And you kill another pony just to see… That just seems extra messed up to me. We have to tell the school.”

“We can’t. Unless you want that to be the end of our…” She shrugged helplessly. “Everything.”
“There has to be some way we can,” he argued. “I don’t know, an anonymous tip?”

Totality shook her head. “Gamma, there’s no way we can tip them off without it blowing up in our faces. Are you willing to bet that whoever has your book doesn’t know it’s yours? You said yourself that you never took it out of your bag. You didn’t just leave it somewhere where it was found. Somepony else took it from you. If they get caught by investigators, so will we… or at least you.”

Gamma took a deep breath and locked eyes with her. “If this was the beginning, what comes next? We can’t just do nothing and pretend it’s not happening.”

“No, we can’t,” she agreed. “But we can’t involve the school. Let’s try to keep this an internal affair and fix it ourselves. If we can figure out who stole it, maybe we can steal it back. One way or another, they’re going to realize their project in the catacombs was more or less reversed. They’ll know that somepony else knows what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, and they'll have to rethink things.”

Gamma looked away up at the clouds. "So who do we think would do this then?"

"Hazy Sheen," replied Totality quickly. "She absolutely has a predisposition to mess with me and now by association, you, and she loves stealing. Is she in either of those two classes?"

Gamma raised an eyebrow. "Yes but do you think she'd pick up this new hobby and then sacrifice Comet Shard as an experiment?"

Totality stared at the cobblestone ground and thought for a long time. "I actually think she'd be more inclined to say being a Red Umbra fan is 'icky,'" she finally replied with a derisive use of air quotes. "That being said, she's also surprised me and lowered the bar for my expectations on multiple occasions, so while that sounds shocking to me at the moment, I can't really say it's off the table. I think having that assumption and just searching her room first is a good move."

"Okay," nodded Gamma. "You have to do that though."

"I know," she droned.

“Be safe.”

Chapter 7

Totality skipped her next class in order to stake out Hazy’s room ASAP. She knocked on her door and teleported a safe distance to the stairs. The act of hiding there immediately dredged up memories of the day she’d followed Comet here.

When no pony answered the door, Totality Teleported back and tried the door lever. It was locked. Nothing left to do but dive in blind, she thought. She flashed straight into Hazy’s room and quickly looked around for any occupants.Thankfully, it was clear.

The prospect of searching through Hazy's things sounded gross to her, but wanting to avoid getting caught, she did not hesitate. She started with the stupid obvious places where nopony should put a banned book. She checked every tome which occupied the shelves of the two desks and rifled through every drawer within them. She even removed them from their tracks to check behind and underneath them. Totality had the great fortune to catch Hazy away without her saddlebag. She went through it thoroughly but found nothing. She scoured the mostly empty closets and even the bathroom. Her lips curled in disgust as she patted down both mattresses and tossed the pillows. She tilted the mattresses up to check underneath and then laid down to check the floor below.

Totality grunted in frustration. It wasn't here. She went through everything and couldn't find anything even suspicious. As she began to wrack her brain for any possible hiding spot in the room she might have overlooked, but her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a rattling door latch. In an instant, Totality aparated out of the room and into the lobby.

Gamma and Totality regrouped at around dinner time in the cafeteria, but decided to eat outside in privacy at a little umbrella table.

"I couldn't find anything of note,” began Totality disappointedly, “and I even went through her saddlebag. She appears clean, but also something occurred to me. Hazy can't teleport. Like you, she probably can't enter the catacombs without help. So either it wasn't her or she's collaborating with somepony else."

Gamma puffed out his cheeks. "Huh… In the old days, these rituals were pretty much always performed by groups of ponies. That was culturally normal in that time and place. But today, we're so far removed from that philosophy and religious significance that most ponies that gravitate toward black hat are going to be maniacs who are there for an entirely different experience. If a group did something like this in present times, it would be more akin to a serial killer working in tandem, which I think is pretty rare, right?" He turned to her for confirmation with the correct assumption that she had a working knowledge of criminal profiling.

"That makes sense," she muttered absently. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know what to think now though as far as suspects.”

Gamma scratched the back of his head. “I honestly don’t have a better idea than Hazy at the moment either because of how targeted this feels, but let’s put her aside for now and attack from a different angle. We’ve both walked this line before. We should be able to think like them. What are they going to want or need for whatever it is that they’re doing? If we can predict that, maybe we can pick up their trail.”

“Maybe when they figure out that somepony raised Comet, they’ll just quit while they’re ahead,” posed Totality hopefully but only half seriously.

Gamma just grunted skeptically. He was like a completely different pony when he was being serious.

“Hey,” gasped Totality in inspiration. “Was your book written in Runic Arcana?”

“Yeah,” he replied slowly, trying to give himself time to unravel her thoughts before she could explain.

“Most ponies aren’t going to just know how to read that. In all likelihood our suspect would have needed another book to translate it. Where do you go to get books?”

“The library?” he shrugged.

“Exactly! We can check their records to see who got anything on Runic Arcana in the last couple of days.”

His eyes widened. “That’s brilliant! We can try the same thing with the building plans at the archives. Student’s aren’t allowed to check out the documents, but you can look at them there if you sign in… but both those places are closed right now,” he sighed.

“Tomorrow,” proposed Totality. “Why don’t you do the archives and I’ll do the library?

“Okay,” he agreed. “Wanna do brunch instead of lunch so we have time to get those out of the way afterwards before afternoon classes?”

“Sure,” she nodded, beginning to wonder if this investigation was more or less marking the end of their school year.

Gamma scratched his head. "I know the moment has kind of passed, if not soured, for this but I feel like it got lost in the mail the first time. I had a lot of fun with you in the catacombs until things went sideways, and even some of that was kind of fun. Thanks for taking me down there."

Totality smiled. "I had a lot of fun too. Thanks for showing me where it was."

The next morning, Hazy Sheen was absent from history of magic. So was Comet Shard, but that was to be expected. Totality and Gamma sat side by side in the auditorium now. Professor Moondancer began class with an odd announcement, but not the one that they were expecting.

Moondancer sat behind her desk with her mug, looking like she’d just rolled out of bed as usual. “As part of the history department, I’m obligated to make a public plea for the return of the Zoma mask artifact which disappeared from the hallway display case sometime late yesterday or last night. Please return it immediately and there will be no questions asked.”

Gamma and Totality shot quizzical glances at one another. They’d seen that ugly mask in the hall every day. They couldn’t quite put it together, but having it disappear suddenly right now seemed suspicious.

After class, the two of them gathered at the big display case in the hall where a conspicuously vacant space on the wall had opened up around a naked hook.

“What do you think?” breathed Totality, looking at the simple artifact label.

“It could be connected. It could be for a personal effect, but what’s the motive here? More advanced experimentation?”

“The case isn’t broken,” added Totality. “Somepony must have teleported it out… or had the keys.”

The two flinched in surprise as Moondancer sprang up behind them. “Oh, good,” she smirked. “I’m so glad you saw the error of your ways and have decided to right this heinous wrong. I’ll just turn around and count to ten to give you some privacy while you put it back.”

“It wasn’t us,” droned Totality.

“Who’s this Zoma guy, anyway?” asked Gamma.

“I’m kind of surprised you don’t know him, Gamma. Alicorn? Lord of Undoing? He ravaged nearly a third of Equestria before the Pillars tossed him in a volcano.”

“And the academy had his actual mask?” prodded Totality.

“We sure do, or did.”

“Should we be worried that somepony has it?” asked Gamma.

Moondancer screwed up her face in thought. “It’s unfortunate to lose, but the mask itself isn’t magical. It’s not a danger. We wouldn’t have it on display if it was. Hopefully it will turn up, if not back in the case, then on the face of some hungover frat pony waking up by the fountain… Well, good luck on your paper. I expect good work from you two.” Moondancer turned away, plodding slowly to her office.

“I really don’t like this,” breathed Totality.

“Is this the part where we stick to the ‘internal affair’ plan against our better instincts?” asked Gamma.

“Eeyup,” she replied slowly.

The two broke as Totality went to her potions class. Once there, she found the other half of her lab station vacant. Hazy was also absent from potions. Where was she and what was she doing? What does all this mean? thought Totality.

Gamma and Totality met for their pre-investigation brunch. She exorcised his cereal while they processed through the line.

The eating area was sparsely occupied at this time, but Totality spotted Radiance sitting on Midnight Call's lap. They appeared to be mostly done with their food and we're just fooling around semi-amorously. She nudged Gamma. “This way.”

Midnight Call was the only pony Totality had seen on campus with a darker coat than hers. He was off black with a very subtle purple sheen, usually only noticeable in direct sunlight. He also lived on the same floor as Comet which made him a good source of information at the moment.

Totality and Gamma sat down across from the two. Midnight squeezed Radiance around the barrel with both forelegs, making her squirm.

"Hey, Totality," greeted Radiance. "Haven't seen you here in a while."

"I've been here, just on the other side of the room," replied Totality before casually biting into a dinner roll.

Radiance's eyes flicked over to Gamma. "Oh, you've been sitting with your new…"

"Research partner," supplied Totality. "Gamma Burst."

"Oh, okay," laughed Radiance, rolling her eyes in doubt.

"Did you hear what happened?" asked Midnight, grimly.

Gamma’s ears perked up as he continued to shovel cold cereal into his mouth.

Totality actually hadn't heard what happened but of course she already knew. "Yeah, something happened with Comet. How is he?"

"He went to the hospital. I don't think he's coming back this semester."

Totality blinked in feigned surprise. "It was that bad? What actually happened to him?"

Midnight took a foreleg off of Radiance to scratch his chin. "That's what's weird. No pony knows. Not even he seems to know, but all signs point to him getting fucked up and doing something stupid… like maybe he tried to kill himself.”

Totality’s face fell. They definitely weren’t talking about necromancy, but It wasn’t exactly the innocuous conjecture she’d hoped for. If ponies thought Comet had tried to commit suicide, they were going to ask why, and she was the easiest answer to that question.

“The RA ran into him in the hall,” continued Midnight. “He was just wandering around drunk with half his mane burnt off. It was in the middle of the day and he was so blitzed he didn't know where he was. His sister said today they've been checking him for head trauma because after he sobered up, they realized that the last thing he remembers is from like a week ago."

Totality froze, her mouth hanging open in shock.

"I'm pretty sure he thinks you're still together," added Midnight in a hushed tone.

Totality closed her eyes and hung her head. "Well… that's seriously fucked up," she muttered. She knew there would be memory loss, but she thought it would be closer to a day, not a whole week. She imagined Comet sitting alone in a hospital bed, wondering why she hadn’t come to check on him. Did she need to feel bad when she didn't go visit him? Did she really need to break up with him a second time while explaining that it was because of something that he didn't even remember doing? Could she even muster the courage to do that when her spiteful rage had been eroded away by sobering pity?

He wasn’t a vegetable, though. All things considered, it was pretty good for improvisational necromancy.

Totality stopped eating and just held her face in her hooves in silence for a long time. She felt a comforting foreleg slide around her back. “Thanks, research partner,” she whispered.

Midnight Call cleared his throat. “Yeah, sorry. But you might want to hear what happened straight from his family, if they even know."

"Later, Totality," said Radiance as she hopped off of Midnight's lap. "Bye, Gamma."

Totality nodded as the two departed, levitating their trays to the dirty dishes.

Gamma pulled his foreleg back. “I’m sorry, was that… appropriate?”

She looked at him quizzically. “What? Your leg? Yes. Why?”

“I don’t know. If I were you, I probably would have slapped it away.”

“Why?”

“Because all of this is my f-”

Totality slapped a hoof over his mouth. "Listen, I don't blame you for any of this. Understand?" She waited for him to respond but he just stared at her. "Understand?" she repeated.

He nodded slowly as she took her hoof away.

"Because, guess what?" Once upon a time, I lost my book too and never got it back. I can't say with any degree of certainty where it ended up or what it was used for if anything. These books are ancient, centuries old. They’ve changed hooves dozens of times. You’re just one link in a chain of other owners. You can only be responsible for yourself and your time with the book. You weren't being malicious or careless. You had the extraordinary bad luck of getting pickpocketed by a psycho. It's completely unreasonable to expect anypony to foresee something like this."

"But I could have just followed the rules," he whimpered.

"Gamma, the rules are stupid. They're intended to keep us safe, but look at what's happening right now. They're preventing us from accessing the tools needed to solve the problem because we're terrified of lifelong stigma and punitive action against us. Remember, I told you I wanted to see that book. Also, I can't help but feel like you've been haplessly sucked into a disaster that's been unfolding around me for years, and you didn't fully comprehend what it meant when we became..."

"Research... partners?" offered Gamma.

"Y-yeah…" She looked away, now embarrassed by the stodgy sounding term she'd pulled out of the air."

"We don't actually know it's Hazy," he posed.

"We don't actually know it's your book either,” she replied, “but it's still the best working hypothesis until we find otherwise." Totality sighed and pushed up her glasses. "Gamma… whatever we do, whatever happens to either of us, we need to stick together because we're fighting the same battle, and I'm not just talking about finding the book."

Chapter 8

Totality flipped through the card catalog in the academy library. It was pretty straight forward. There was really only one term to search. After cycling through everything under ‘Runic Arcana,’ only one result stuck out as useable for translating. Perfect, she thought. This’ll be easy. She rubbed her hooves together and plucked the card out of the drawer with her magic.

She checked the location for the book as marked on the card but couldn’t find it. “Oh, wouldn’t you know it,” she muttered to herself in a monotone. “Not here.” Totality zipped over to the front desk where a kindly looking older mare unicorn was sorting incoming books.

“Excuse me, could you help me find this book?” asked Totality, floating the card up before her.

The librarian adjusted her glasses and levitated the card forward and back until it was within her range of focus. “It’s checked out,” she replied simply. “Sorry.”

Totality raised an eyebrow. “You… already know that for sure?”

“Already looked for it once for somepony who came in asking about it. I couldn’t find it then and I haven’t seen it in the return box. It’s still out, I’m afraid.”

“Well, shit- I mean… shoot.”

“It’s okay, dear. You can say ‘shit’ in the library. As long as you’re quiet.” She said this like a mother consoling their foal after they dropped their ice cream cone.

“Thanks… I just really needed that book for a report. Could you maybe tell me who checked it out so I could peek over their shoulder while they read?”

The librarian laughed. “That’s exactly what the other pony wanted. Mossy Boulders has it.”

“Oh, thanks,” replied Totality, then her brow furrowed in confusion. “Wait, the groundskeeper?”

“That’s him.”

“Okay,” she nodded slowly. “Thank you.” She turned away bewildered. Mossy, she wondered. He wasn't a student, and wasn't he an earth pony? That didn't make any sense. He didn't even have the opportunity to steal the grimoire, much less use it.

Totality went straight to his quarters, which were apart from all other buildings on campus, a little hut along the edge of the park. She knocked on the door with no real game plan, expecting no answer from within. But in a moment a tan mustachioed earth pony pulled open the door and she was somewhat caught off guard.

There’s no way this is our guy, she thought, looking at him up and down. Just be direct and turn around. This is a dead end. “Um… Hi? This is going to sound strange, but did you check out a book on runes from the library?”

Mossy’s eyes bulged. “Didja find it?” he exclaimed.

Totality cocked her head to one side. “F-find it?”

“Yeah. Damndest thing. Went missin’. Cain’t find it nowhere. It’s almost due. Gonna have to pay fer it ‘less it turns up real quicklike,” he groaned.

Missing, she thought. If it was really almost due, Mossy had checked out the book well before it became a necessity for translating the grimoire, therefore that couldn’t have been his motive for acquiring it. Just as she thought, this in addition to everything else that didn’t add up, it meant he had nothing to do with this.

“Do you know when it went missing?” she asked.

“Couple days ago,” he shrugged.

The same time the Grimoire disappeared. What an interesting timeline for such an interesting item to go ‘missing,’ she thought. Then she remembered what the librarian had said about the other pony’s interest in finding who had checked out the book. That’s what happened. The suspect tried to check out the Runic Arcana book after Mossy had already done so. Then they tracked it to Mossy and stole it from him.

“So why are ya here?” asked Mossy.

“Oh… I wanted to see if I could use that book for a report but it sounds like it’s gone.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Well… sorry to bother you. Hopefully it will turn up.” She started to leave but then stopped. “But if you don’t mind my asking, why did you even check out such a book?”

Mossy’s eyes fell to the floor and he gestured behind him to a large stack of books on a coffee table. “I feel sorry for the old unpopular books, y’know. Their days till they get tossed in the trash are numbered. I like to think if they get checked out again it extends their life, like feedin’ a parkin’ meter er somethin’.”

“Oh,” she nodded. “I thought I was the only one.”

Totality returned to the library counter and thankfully found the same librarian as before, performing the same task as before.

“Hi. Me again,” she waved. "This is going to sound weird, but you know how you told me about a pony before me who asked about the Runic Arcana book when it had already been checked out? Do you know who that pony was?

The librarian shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know her name.”

So it’s a her then, she thought. Now we're getting somewhere. "Was she a unicorn?"

"Yes."

“Do you remember her mane, or what color her coat was?”

"Uh… Sorry, I'm afraid I don't… Oh, but I remember that her cutie mark had a moon."

"A moon? Okay, thank you." Totality turned away and exhaled. Female unicorn with a moon cutie mark. That narrows it down to what? A quarter of the school?

"It's not looking good for the Hazy theory,” sighed Totality, tapping her hoof anxiously on the little umbrella table. “The evidence is leading us away from her."

"Then let's just follow the evidence," shrugged Gamma.

"Okay, off the top of your head, who was in either of those classes that matches the description of a female unicorn with a moon in her cutie mark?"

“Professor Moondancer has a moon and she taught one of the classes I was in that day.”

Totality thought but quickly shook her head. “It’s not Moondancer. She already knows where to get her hooves on material like that. If she wanted to, she could trot right down to the restricted section of the archives and take her pick. Also, I would think the librarians at the academy would know her by name.”

"That's true," he agreed, his eyes launching up into the sky to think deeper. "Well, the rest are Spider Phase, Orbit and Brassy Cogs and then there's another one with a half moon. I don't know her name."

"You're sure that's all of them?"

"Pretty sure,” he nodded confidently. “I notice cutie marks."

"Any of them have a clear opportunity? Did they sit next to you or interact with you on that day?"

"No."

"This feels hopeless," groaned Totality. The prospect of shaking down a hooffull of rooms on scatter shot sounded not only daunting, but seemed to run a real risk of turning up nothing. "Well, did you come up with anything at the archives?"

He looked back at her. “There were no new signatures for the stuff I’d looked at, and the most recent signatures before me were from over a year ago. I doubt she did the research. She probably knew about the catacombs location via oral tradition. I went ahead and looked at the designs again because I remembered something I wanted to see down there when we went but it mysteriously wasn’t there. Then of course we got distracted and it wasn’t really on my mind anymore.”

“What was it?”

“The torture chamber. According to those designs, we went right past where the entrance should have been at about the midway point of the center corridor on our right. Then it occurred to me that the dungeon was still operating as a dungeon up through the time when physical torture was abolished. When that happened, every torture chamber in the kingdom was ordered to be sealed and left abandoned. I’d thought that the dungeon had been converted before that time and maybe we could just walk right in, but no. They sealed it. That’s why we never saw the door.”

“That’s really interesting, but how is it relevant?”

“I was thinking about what I’d do if I was doing rituals down there and I knew that somepony had found my leftovers. I’d have to move my base of operations, but to where? I’d want to keep it on campus, but there is still no better spot if I’m doing a big project. That dungeon has everything I need: pony remains, holding cells, storage, and until recently, privacy. If I lost that privacy, I can only see myself doing one of two things: quitting while I’m ahead, or moving to an even more private location within the dungeon, and it doesn’t look like our suspect chose the former.”

“You think they set up in this torture chamber?”

“I’m saying that’s what I’d do.”

"Do you want to check it out?"

Gamma took a deep breath. "Yes, but also no, but also… yes."

"Yeah, my thoughts exactly."

Totality and Gamma stood at the edge of the park looking around suspiciously for anypony who might be watching them. When she thought it was clear, Totality aparated the both of them onto the dark stairs below.

They clopped carefully down the steps under the lights of their horns. The place was now creepy in a bad way, with the possibility of danger around every corner. What if they dropped right in on the perpetrator while exploring? The two stayed close to each other as they entered the hall, scarcely breathing.

Suddenly Totality felt a crunch under her hoof. She gasped at the horrifying and very familiar sound. Instinctively she put a hoof to her face to check her glasses and found that they were still there.

"What happened?" asked Gamma, mildly alarmed.

"I stepped on…" Totality took a step back and looked down at the stone floor to see a pair of mangled glasses with one lens broken out. The taped up bridge made the eyewear instantly recognizable.

"Those are Moondancer's glasses," gasped Gamma.

"So they are… What are they doing down here?"

Gamma shook his head. "I don't know, but I can't think of any nice explanations."

“Let’s keep going,” whispered Totality. “Hopefully this will be a short misadventure and we can just look and get the hell out.”

The two continued down the hall, quiet enough to hear rats skittering in the corners. “This has to be it,” breathed Gamma, coming to a stop at a bodiless clearing on the wall. The word ‘Sleigher’ was scrawled in red across it.

“See the arch?” Gamma pointed to the rough but clear stone outline of the door that no longer was. The shape was perfectly flush with the wall but slightly lighter in color. “Bring me inside too, but if we have to run, please don’t forget to take me with you.”

In a different situation, Totality would have laughed at the remark but instead just nodded. “Okay. Here we go.” She flicked her horn as they braced for whatever was on the other side of the wall. The two of them blinked in and out in an instant but did not move from their spot.

“What the…” she muttered.

“What happened,” asked Gamma.

Totality cast the spell again, but the same thing happened. Then she did it a third time, but still they stood in the hall. “I can’t get in. It’s like there is no room there. Could it be completely filled in?”

Gamma shook his head. “No. That doesn’t make sense.” He paused to ponder this strange development. Then he bit his lip. “Let’s just get out of here.”

The sun began to set on another day where a black hat necromancer still prowled the academy campus unfettered and unseen.

Gamma and Totality sat outside for dinner, picking listlessly at their food.

“If this really is the worst case scenario that we’re fearing," began Gamma, "raising an alicorn with no remains, that’s gonna take a lotta ponies. And I am about ready to throw in the towel here and tell the school everything.”

Totality shook her head in alarm.“No, Gamma, don’t do it.”

Gamma rubbed his face with his hooves. “How can you be so cavalier about all this?”

“How can you be so willing to throw your life away?”

“Ponies are going to die if we don’t stop this,” he hissed.

“I understand what you’re saying, but this is a big project for a lone pony to pull off. It’s a logistical nightmare. Imagine prepping everything, getting the supplies, the blood, abducting and holding like a dozen live unicorns somehow.”

“Yeah, that’s why it has to be in that torture chamber,” he muttered before scooping the last of the taco salad into his mouth.

“All I’m saying is that we still have time and we don’t have to cross that bridge yet.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “But I don’t know where we go from here.”

Totality’s eyes fell to the table. She didn’t know either. Their best leads had more or less fizzled out, leaving behind obtuse guesswork. As of right now, it seemed that they were just delaying the inevitable while ignoring what appeared to be a real growing danger.

Gamma pushed the edge of his plate down with his hoof, causing the other side to wiggle up and down like a seesaw. “My, um… roommate’s gone tonight and tomorrow,” he said absently, his one visible eye darting around nervously.

Totality looked up from her plate.

Chapter 9

The alarm clock rang, waking Totality from a dead sleep. She quickly silenced the device with her magic. Then she shifted to slide out of bed, but a green foreleg wrapped around her barrel from behind, trapping her in the sheets.

“No,” grumbled Gamma sleepily.

“You have to go to class too,” she murmured, rolling over to face him.

“You’re such a good student," he muttered. "You’d go to class if the classroom was on fire.”

She laughed weakly “No, I wouldn’t. I’d just petition that we have class somewhere else until the flames were out.”

Totality desperately wished to stay in this moment where everything felt warm and safe and to pretend that nothing outside of the room mattered.

She brushed Gamma’s mane out of his eyes with her hoof and examined both of his blue eyes separately.

“What?” he asked, staring back at her.

“Nothing… I don’t think I’ve seen both of your eyes at the same time. I just wanted to make sure that you had two eyes and not one that was going back and forth between sockets or something.”

He laughed genuinely as she let go of his mane. It felt nice to hear him laugh again, a brief relapse into what she thought ‘normal’ was.

“You know what this means?” she asked.

“We’re out of the research partner zone?”

She rolled her eyes. I will never live that down, she thought. “No. Our first date is arguably sneaking into the catacombs and raising my dead ex with some dead rats.”

He paused with his lips mashed together in concerted thought. “We should probably come up with an alternate first date, y’know… for the non Red Umbra fans.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

The two grudgingly staggered out of bed to begin their morning routines before class. Totality took her glasses and teleported down to the dorm lobby and then to her own room where Blue Moon was beginning to stir, thankfully alone and in her own bed.

“Oh, ho,” smirked Blue from the top bunk. “And where exactly were you all last night?”

Totality scoffed. “Hey, I don’t ask you questions when you mysteriously disappear.”

“It was Gamma Burst, right? Every time I see you recently, you’re with him.”

“His roommate's gone today,” replied Totality evasively, hoping that this wasn't about to turn into an interrogation for details.

Blue scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Oh, well that is convenient, isn’t it?”

Totality went to her anatomy class and had a difficult time putting the weight of the world out of her mind. When she left the building to go to her next class, Gamma was sitting right there on the edge of a planter, fidgeting.

“Hey, what are you doing over here?” asked Totality worriedly.

“I just came from my cultural equipology class, and guess who didn’t show up? Moondancer. All the students were there, so clearly class wasn’t officially canceled. I waited there for half an hour. She just never came… like she vanished or something,” he finished with a low growl.

Totality flashed back to the glasses they had found discarded in the catacombs. “Okay, this does look bad,” she admitted.

“I’m telling you, I can’t just not report this anymore. I don’t know how bad this is but I don’t think the cost is going to be worth saving me.”

Totality’s heart sank. It was impossible to gloss over the direness of the situation any longer. “Don't say it like that,” she quivered. “I know… It’s your book. It’s your decision, but if you really feel like you have to do this, tell me before you do it. I want to come with you.”

Gamma shook his head. “You can still have a future, Totality. There’s no reason for you to have to get tangled up in this with me.”

“Tell me anyway,” she insisted. “Remember, I said whatever happens, we need to stick together. Even if I don’t go with you, I’ll be waiting there for you to come back.”

Gamma stood up and wrapped his forelegs around her. She closed her eyes and did the same to him.

“Go to your classes,” he breathed. “It’s still important. Let’s talk about this at dinner, the usual outside spot, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I… I have a lot of thinking to do.”

It was even more difficult to focus in her classes now with Gamma’s all but impending collision with the authorities and school administration, but she at least showed up. Things couldn’t just end now. They were a once in a lifetime find, and she feared this would tear them apart forever

At dinner, Totality waited near the line at the cafeteria for Gamma, but he was late. She debated whether or not to just get in line alone and get him food, but she didn’t. Gradually the line melted away and the tables emptied out. He still wasn’t there. Something was wrong.

She hurried to his room and knocked just in case his roommate was back. After a few moments with no answer, she aparated into the room. There was nopony inside, but she immediately noticed a chair tipped back and leaning against the wall. The books that she remembered being stacked on the edge of his desk had been knocked to the floor.

“Shit,” she breathed, looking around the rest of the room. It looked like there was a struggle. It looked as though he’d been abducted… like Moondancer probably was. Why them, specifically? It felt strangely targeted.

Totality began panting as panic rose within her. Where was Gamma and what was happening to him? She had to tell somepony about this. It was red alert.

“Son of a bitch!” She stamped her hoof on the floor. “I should be able to figure this out! I know there’s enough here to work with!”

What’s the connection between the missing ponies? Moondancer is a high profile mark, a terrible mark. When she disappears, a lot of ponies notice. It’s stupid. Why take her as a sacrifice?

She thought about both of the scenes and the evidence left behind as she paced back and forth. Her glasses ended up in the catacombs… Was she down there, looking around when she was taken? Maybe she’s not a sacrifice; maybe she’s a witness. But Gamma’s not… except they have his book and they know it’s his… and they have to know that Comet was raised, which obviously would require a necromancer to do. Gamma is the most obvious pony to suspect because he had the grimoire. They’ve had to have known he was a liability to their plans since the Comet incident, but why did they wait until now to handle him? Well… I have been around him a lot, so that makes it more difficult. Why does that sound so familiar?

Her eyes widened. “That was exactly what Blue Moon noticed.” We had that exact conversation this morning. I told her he was alone and then… he disappeared.

Totality aparated in a chain of bursts until she was in her own vacant dorm room. She lit the sconce with a flick of her horn to illuminate the darkened space. Then she quickly scanned the books on Blue’s desk. Her heart stopped as her eyes landed on a spine which read ‘Runic Arcana: A Primer’ and below that, a white library cataloging label. Right in plain sight.

Breathlessly, Totality floated the book from the lineup and opened the cover to reveal the built in checkout slip. The most recent signature was Mossy Boulders from two weeks ago. There was no mention whatsoever of Blue Moon.

She stood frozen in disbelief. My own roommate, she thought. She fits the description that the librarian gave… but she’s not in either of those classes with Gamma. She had no opportunity or motive to steal from Gamma.

Totality shook her head as she began to look around, repeating the same steps she’d gone through when searching Hazy’s room for the grimoire. She checked under both mattresses and every drawer in Blue’s desk. Then she popped out the bottom drawers and there it was, laying on the floor in the hollow of the desk: a leather bound grimoire inscribed with burnt runic symbols.

Totality floated the book from its hiding place, slack jawed. But Blue couldn’t have stolen it from Gamma, she thought. How did she get… Hazy! She’s in Gamma’s class and is friends with Blue. Hazy stole it and Blue got it from her. It changed hooves. That’s why we were never able to connect the two ends of the story. And Hazy’s been missing too! I just never put it together because I hate her and don’t care! I knew it was fucking Hazy!

Just then there came a zap and the room flashed with a burst of blue energy as Blue Moon teleported into the room without warning. Totality looked up with a start, locking eyes with the surprised Blue.

Glass shattered at Totality’s hooves as Blue quickly flung a flask down from her saddlebag. Green gas swirled around her as she began to choke. Totality struggled to cast the spell but successfully teleported outside to the cobblestone breezeway where she collapsed in a coughing fit. Her vision began to blur as she looked around for help but saw none. Suddenly she blinked back into the dorm room and the suffocating gas cloud. Blue pinned her there with her magic. She stood back at a safe distance and watched emotionlessly as Totality coughed and heaved till she finally succumbed to the toxin.

Chapter 10

Totality awakened with her cheek pressed against the cold stone floor, chills wracking her body. She lifted her head, breathing shakily in the dimly lit environment. She tried to pull her hooves together in an effort to stand. A chain rattled behind her and she felt her hind leg stop with a jerk, a metal shackle pressing into her flesh.

“Totality?” called a familiar voice. “Are you okay?”

Totality turned to see the silhouettes of Gamma and Moondancer sitting on their haunches a few paces away. Their horns were… gone. She gasped and raised a hoof to her own horn to find it was nothing more than a stump. She tried a simple light spell, but nothing happened. She was magicless. “I’m… I don’t know,” she replied warily.

She looked about the room to see the dark forms of other unconscious ponies littering the floor. One unicorn was sitting up, weeping into her hooves. It was Hazy Sheen. The walls and ceiling of the chamber glowed a dim blue that warbled and pulsed slowly in intensity, a barrier that would prevent any entry, even by teleportation, except by the caster.

Along the periphery were ancient and long forgotten apparatuses used to cause bodily harm, a rack, spiked chair, metal cages and chains hanging from anchor points on the wall. Before her, laying on the floor, was Zoma’s mask. That was when it hit her; they were trapped in the blood seals for the raising ritual they'd feared. She was in one circle, Hazy in another, Gamma and Moondancer in the third with the personal effect, the mask placed at the nexus where the targeted deceased would rematerialize in a corporeal form.

Blue Moon had been busy. She must have stopped going to class entirely. She stood with her forelegs crossed, leaning casually with her back against the stone wall. Her magic enveloped a floating bonesaw as it worked its way back and forth through the horn of an unknown unconscious unicorn.

“Blue, stop,” demanded Totality. “This is completely insane!”

“Save your breath, Totality,” she replied without looking up. “I’ve already had this conversation with the three other awake ponies.”

“It’s true,” muttered Moondancer.

“You can’t seriously want to do this,” Totality retorted.

“I’m this far into it. What do you think?”

“If it's power you want, Zoma was defeated by the Pillars. Even if you succeed in this ritual, he’d have to defeat the Mane Six to conquer Equestria and they’re even more powerful.”

Blue rolled her eyes and sighed. “I already told you, we had this conversation.”

“It’s true,” repeated Moondancer.

"And who said anything about power? I just want an alicorn boyfriend… Nah, I'm just screwing with you,” she cackled. “But who's to say I can't get both, right?"

Totality shook her head. “Why did you use Comet Shard, of all ponies?”

“Gamma told you about that? I should have come after both of you sooner.” Blue paused in thought and then shrugged. “No real reason. He’s a whore who's easy to get alone. Everypony who’s here is either a loose end or an easy mark. It’s nothing personal. I just needed to collect a lot of sacrifices and also not get caught.”

“I’m sorry,” cried Hazy in between sobs.

“Oh, you’re sorry for getting us all killed?” growled Totality. “Thanks so much for your apology.” She clopped her hooves together in mock applause. “How did you even get yourself chained up?”

Blue tossed the newly sawed off horn in a bucket of other horns, making a solid clunk. “She’s here because we didn’t see eye to eye on the project direction. She was trying to fuck with Gamma when she found that grimoire on him. She took it, gave it to me, told me to find a way to plant it on you and get you expelled from the academy.”

Totality turned and glared daggers at Hazy.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen!” she cried, cowering in her restraint.

Blue rubbed her forehead. “I’m like, what the fuck, Hazy? You know what this is? You know what you could do with this? And you just want to throw it away to get your nemesis expelled?” She shrugged, laughing. “So I go, ‘yeah, sure, I’ll do that.’” She shook her head. “I didn’t do that. I did this instead. When she started driving me up the wall and asking too many questions about how getting you kicked out was going, I kind of had to just bring her down here.”

Suddenly Totality was pushed to the floor by Blue’s magic. Blue levitated the newest sacrifice, still unconscious, to Totality’s circle. She set him down and snapped a prearranged shackle around his hind leg. It was attached to the same metal ring that Totality’s chain was attached to. Once the new stallion was snugly secure, Blue released Totality.

Blue stretched out her forelegs on the floor. “Just one more,” she crooned. “Be back soon.” With that, she vanished in an electric blue fizzle.

Totality immediately laid out, lunging for the edge of the circle that surrounded her. She cried out in pain as the shackle dug in around her leg, stopping her just short of being able to touch the dried blood of the seal with her hoof. “Ugh, we have to scratch the seals!” shouted Totality, flailing against the extremity of her chain.”

“We’ve already tried,” replied Gamma, bashing his shackle with his hoof. “The chains are too short and nopony can reach the blood.”

Totality looked back at him, then to Moondancer who was struggling with her own restraint. She looked weird without her glasses. Totality felt her own face and found that unlike Moondancer, she’d made it there with her glasses on. She took them off and peered down at them, trying to formulate a new plan. It was the only tool available. Could it give her enough reach to alter the seal? The arms… The lenses… The glass. This could do even more for them, she realized, but they needed to do it quick.

Totality placed her glasses on the floor and carefully snapped off the right temple at the hinge. Then she snapped the square frame in half through the bridge. “Gamma,” she called, “Catch.” she pinched the temple of the intact half of her glasses between her hooves and flung it to Gamma. “Break the lens and cut yourself with the glass. Then use the arm to paint a strike through the flow node of your seal.

“Okay. I get it… But what’s that gonna do?” he asked, stepping down on the lens with a crunch.

“It causes a flow inversion,” she replied, crushing her own lens.

“Yeah, but what does that do?”

Totality shook her head. “It’s our best move to survive this. Just do it.” She nudged the glass pieces apart with her hoof and picked up the second biggest one. She turned to the other circle.

“Hazy! Stop crying and grab this piece of glass!” She flipped it to her, hearing the light tinkling on the stone floor. “You need to cut yourself deep enough to draw blood. Do it like your life depends on it, because it does.”

Totality gingerly picked up the biggest piece of glass from the floor with her lips, ignoring how disgusting and unsanitary this all was. She maneuvered it into her clenched teeth and drew the shard across her foreleg, and then once again until she felt hot rivulets begin to dribble down. Then she took the broken arm of her glasses in her mouth and slathered the bent end in the blood of her wound. Laying down with her forelegs outstretched, and the arm pincered between her hooves, she began painting the necessary alteration to the blood seal. The plastic didn’t retain much blood so she had to continually refresh it with more, but soon, even in the dim blue light of the barrier spell, she could see the dark line she’d created across the node symbol.

“Hazy,” she called. “Are you bleeding yet?”

“Y-yes,” she whimpered.

“Take this piece of my glasses and use it to paint with your blood.” She tossed the arm to her. “Directly behind you, there’s a symbol on the edge of your circle that looks like a zero. You need to put a horizontal strike through it.

Hazy swallowed nervously. “Okay,” she breathed, gathering up the discarded arm.

“It doesn’t take much, just a solid line of any thickness all the way across should do it. Gamma, did you do yours?”

“Yeah,” he exhaled.

With the addition of Totality, Blue had actually hit her sacrifice quota and didn’t even know it. Her upside down cutie mark made her worth three live ponies in a necromantic ritual. The only reason they were still alive was Blue’s unawareness of this fact.

“I think I got it,” reported Hazy, and none too soon.

The room flashed as Blue Moon returned with her latest prey. She skipped on the horn amputation for the final sacrifice, knowing that she wouldn’t wake up in time to use her magic to escape. Blue just put the unicorn mare straight into an empty shackle in Hazy’s circle. Then she sighed with relief and rolled her head from side to side to pop her neck. “Alright, one alicorn bad boy coltfriend, coming up.”

"There's still time to sing a song, unlock the shackles and hug it out," argued Totality.

Blue’s eyes shifted back and forth. "Hmm… Actually when you think about it, there really isn’t a good offramp for me at this point in the process."

"I know, but I had to try."

"Parole denied," declared Blue abruptly. Her horn charged with a glow and lightning arched from the tip to the edge of Hazy’s circle with a loud snap, like the crack of a big whip. The blood burned off of the floor in a ripple pattern, sending sparks swirling through the air. The symbols glowed white, but nopony inside them did as would have been usual.

Totality covered her eyes as the runes changed to black. Suddenly a black lightning bolt leapt back at Blue with a deafening bang, striking her on the horn. No pony was watching as Blue's flesh was rent and scattered through the air. A blast of warm blood sprayed across the remaining occupants of the room. The barrier enveloping the space dissipated, plunging everypony into total darkness.

Totality grunted and wiped off the part of her face that she hadn’t protected. “Should have read my thesis,” she muttered.

“Oh… neat trick, Totality,” panted Gamma.

“Thanks.”

“Ugh, is this what I think it is?” asked Moondancer, spitting.

Totality ran a foreleg over her mane, trying to detect how wet it was. “If what you think it is, is lots and lots of blood… then yes. Just be thankful we can’t see.”

“We’re still chained up and it’s pitch black,” cried Hazy. “What the hell do we do now?”

“I guess we have to just wait for the last unicorn in to wake up and pray that she knows how to aparate,” answered Totality.

“Or can scream very loudly,” added Gamma.

“Yes,” Gamma,” she sighed.

"Seriously? That's our only way out of here?" whined Hazy.

"Actually,” began Gamma, “since torture was abolished midway through the War of the Serpents while Canterlot was cut off from its primary stone quarry, it's quite likely that this room had to be sealed with inferior construction materials like rubble and debris. If we can break a chain and find the original door's location, we can probably buck it down… But then after that we’d probably be digging our way out. I suggest starting from half way up the entryway stairs.”

“If you still have the temples of my glasses, you should start trying to pick your locks with them,” suggested Totality.

“It’s the mare next to me that still has her horn,” said Hazy. “How long till she’s awake?”

“It took Totality about forty minutes to wake up,” answered Gamma.

“How do you even know that?” asked Totality.

“I counted the seconds.”

“Aww…”

Things were still bad, but the worst thing was not being able to hug Gamma.

Totality stood in the shower, staring vacantly into the drain as her roommate’s blood washed down it. Luck was with them and the intact unicorn, who they all knew now as Golden Grace, knew how to teleport and bussed all twelve of them out of the catacombs to the surface. It was almost two in the morning when they all got out and it wasn’t really clear what was to be done after escaping a horrifying episode that no pony noticed at a time when they were also all asleep.

Moondancer encouraged everypony to go to the academy infirmary. The three students who cut themselves got stitches and antiseptic potions. Totality was eager to leave in order to secure the grimoire, strangely at the behest of Moondancer who took her aside. She found the book still in her room, rehidden by Blue in the same place. Unfortunately, she didn’t clean up the broken flask.

Surreal, thought Totality. The most disturbing thing to her wasn't what happened in the catacombs, it was the fact that she’d been sleeping in the same room for months with the pony that did this.

Totality dressed her stitches with bandages and laid down in bed. This is batshit insane, she thought. How does something like this happen and then here I am going to bed alone in my homicidal roommate’s room who just exploded herself on me. Do we just… go to school tomorrow? Do we get crisis counseling or something? She was sure that in the morning it would be a different game. They’d have to talk to the police at some point. The four of them were the only real witnesses to what happened.

Suddenly she heard a knock at the door. Her body tensed. Shit, that couldn’t really be them, could it? It’s almost four in the morning. She slid out of her bunk and approached the door. She pawed at the lever and pulled it open to see none other than Hazy Sheen standing there. "Ugh," Totality grunted in disgust before immediately shutting the door again.

"Wait, Totality," she called through the door. "You weren’t sleeping, were you? I just want to talk."

Totality growled back at her. "For the last six years you've never just wanted to talk. If you’re talking to me, you’re either doing it to hurt me or doing reconnaissance to get ready to hurt me. So what is it that you're here to do to me? In just the last week, you intentionally fucked my old boyfriend, almost got my new one killed, and almost got me killed after attempting to get me expelled from the academy and blacklisted from my field of study forever."

Hazy put her muzzle to the door. “I know and all those things are really… terrible. I’m sorry. I know that’s like taping a cotton ball to a gushing leg stump, but I don’t know what else to say. Almost dying put a lot of things in perspective for me. I don’t want my identity or legacy to be the pony that tormented you forever.”

The latch clicked and Totality slowly opened the door again. When she looked into Hazy’s eyes, she saw something that she never remembered seeing in them before: humility. What a monumental backfiring of her actions, thought Totality. She’d been abducted and chained in that abysmal place for days. Her blood had undoubtedly been harvested by Blue to help make the seals, and all the while she believed she was going to die. It irked Totality that she couldn’t just believe without reservation that she didn’t deserve such an unspeakable ordeal.

“When you saved everypony, you didn’t even hesitate to include me, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Totality shook her head. “As much as I’d love for you to believe that I’m some kind of saint, the reality is that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t exclude you from the rescue without it hurting somepony else. But even in a different scenario, I’d still like to think that’s something I’d never do even to you even after learning what I did.”

Hazy nodded and swallowed. “I want you to have this.” She held a first place blue ribbon up in front of her.

“What the… hell?” breathed Totality, squinting curiously at the article without her glasses.

“It’s the science research paper award from middle school,” explained Hazy.

Totality laughed weakly as she took the ribbon clumsily. “I don’t know which is weirder: that you still have this, or that you brought it to college.”

It was never really about the ribbon, but it was impossible to ignore the cheapness of the symbol of where their feud had started. It really drove home the feeling of how disproportionate and stupid it all was.

“I liked the little bit of attention that stealing your paper got me, but the award never meant anything to me because I didn’t earn it. After you retaliated against me, I started to see it more as a trophy symbolizing victory over you. Now I can’t look at it like that anymore. It’s meaningless again. The only way I can give it meaning is to finally give it to the pony that actually earned it.”

Totality wiped a tear from her eye. “Thanks,” she whispered. “I’ve wanted to stop for so long now but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let you win. I guess if you're serious about this, then I should apologize too… and thank you."

Hazy's eyes bulged in shock. "Thank me? For what?"

"Just one thing. Sabotaging my relationship with Comet."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Even though it was out of malice and devastating to my self esteem, in the end, you actually did me a favor. I don’t want to waste my time with somepony that was eventually just going to do that to me anyway. And if it hadn't happened when it did, I might never have met Gamma."

"You've only known him a week, though," posed Hazy.

"I know,” she nodded. “But it was a hell of a week, the kind that tells you exactly who a pony is inside.”

“I see,” Hazy’s eyes went to the floor in thought. “I know a lot of damage has been done, but we still have three years left here and that’s a lot of time to start over.”

Totality nodded in agreement. If we’re lucky enough to be allowed to continue here, she thought. “I hope we’re not just both in shock from what happened and have no Idea what we’re saying right now.”

Hazy laughed. “I don’t think so.” Then she lowered her voice. “But just so we're all on the same page about that, if anypony asks… that was Blue’s book, right?”

“Eeyup,” smirked Totality.

Chapter 11

Totality and Gamma walked down the hall to the history of magic classroom but stopped just before the closed door. A sign taped to the window said 'History of Magic canceled.'

"Shocking," droned Totality.

"Got a minute?" asked a voice from behind them.

The two turned with a start to see that Professor Moondancer had snuck up on them again. She cocked her head toward her office.

Totality and Gamma exchanged worried looks but followed her.

She opened the office door, turning the round knob with her mouth and showed them in. "Sorry. I would have just teleported us in but, y'know, no magic."

Totality laughed nervously. "Our magic should be back in a couple of weeks. Obviously the horns won't, though."

"Speaking of horns," muttered Moondancer, locking the door behind her. She shuffled behind her cluttered desk and rumagaged around on the floor, out of view. When she reappeared, she dropped two severed horns on the table from her mouth. "I believe these are yours."

"Hey, our horns!" exclaimed Gamma. He pawed clumsily at his light green horn to coax it closer. "When our magic comes back, we can have little sword fights with them!"

"I'm happy this moment brought you joy," said Totality dryly as she accidentally knocked her own horn down onto the floor. "Ugh. How do earth ponies live like this?"

Moondancer cleared her throat. "I've decided to give everypony involved in the incident an extension on their final project."

Gamma and Totality side eyed one another awkwardly as they were reminded of the project they'd all but abandoned to hunt down a necromancer.

"Yaaaaay…" they replied in monotonous put-on celebration.

Moondancer shook her head. "You haven't talked to the police yet, have you?"

"No," they replied with confused expressions.

"Anypony in school administration?"

"No."

"Good. I know you two are at the center of this somehow. I don’t think you’re bad kids and I don’t want to see you get expelled because of a stupid mistake you made with a book. I’m not going to rat you out… But you have to tell me everything that happened so that I can successfully avoid doing that.”

“Isn’t that exactly what the ‘good cop’ always says?” argued Totality.

“Yes, but if that’s the angle I was going for, I’d be talking to you separately, wouldn’t I? If I wanted to screw you, I would have done it last night. I’m not a cop or an informant for the school. You don’t have to talk to me. You can walk out the door right now if you think that’s really in your best interest.” She gestured to the locked door.

Totality and Gamma looked at eachother.

Gamma swallowed. “I brought a necromantic grimoire on campus.”

“Why?” asked Moondancer.

“He wanted to show it to me,” answered Totality. “We found out that we have the same interests and it was really exciting… for purely historical value, you understand.”

“You heard this part, but Hazy stole it out of my saddle bag and then gave it to Blue Moon, and then Blue started using it. But until the very end we only knew that the book was taken by somepony, not who took it.”

Moondancer put her hooves together in a thoughtful pose. “What did she do to Comet Shard?”

Gamma licked his drying lips. “We think he was her first experiment. She sacrificed him just to reanimate a random skeleton in the catacombs.”

Moondacer’s eyes widened. “Wait, she sacrificed him? But he’s still alive?”

“We think she messed up her ritual and it left his dead body behind. We found him and the skeleton when we went down into the catacombs for fun and we… brought him back to life.”

Moondancer’s jaw went slack. “Who did you sacrifice to do that?”

“No pony!” they blurted in a panic. “We don’t do that!”

“We used the skeleton, some already dead rats, and our own life force,” clarified Totality.

“Dead… rats? You can do that?”

“You can do a lot of things. We still didn’t know who had done it at that point, but we were sure they were using the grimoire. We tried to figure it out and stop them ourselves without telling anypony because we knew what would happen to us if the school or authorities found out, but things got out of hoof and you know the rest.”

Moondancer took off her never used, backup pair of red framed glasses and rubbed her face. “It’s clear to me that much of this was avoidable had there been different policies regarding said literature other than zero tolerance and veritable excommunication. You needed a safe way to help defuse the situation, but the laws and the school didn’t provide that, and I don’t think that’s safe or fair to you or the rest of the students. Totality, without your knowledge and quick thinking, who knows what would have happened. You’re a hero and it would be egregious for anypony to just throw you in the same box as Blue Moon. We wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you.”

"Yeah, but we wouldn’t have been endangered in the first place if it wasn’t for me," cried Gamma.

Moondancer sighed. "Gamma, good historians like you and I make a point to learn the whole story whenever we can get it. When necromancy originated, it was considered wholesome and revered by entire communities. Ponies who had experienced a tragic loss had the power to reverse it. If a foal died, an elder might sacrifice themselves to bring them back. If a pillar of the community died before their time, somepony else might enter death in their stead for the good of the village. It was always voluntary. It was always communal. It followed a strict doctrine. It wasn't evil or dark. It was just a different philosophy of how life works."

The professor leaned back in her seat to look up at the ceiling. "When viewed through a modern day lens by ponies like us without that mindset and that reverence, all we hear about is the blood and the death coupled with a selfish motive where consent is removed. That's when it becomes a horror story instead of something beautiful.

"Yes, you broke the law by simply owning that grimoire. Yes you broke school rules by bringing it on campus, but it’s important to never equate legality with morality. At the end of the day, the only thing that book can do is give knowledge. Knowledge isn't good or bad. What we do with it is, and you can't hold yourself responsible when somepony else chooses to abuse it."

Totality nudged Gamma in the side. "See, that's exactly what I was trying to tell you. It just sounds a lot better coming out of a history professor."

Gamma turned back to Moondancer "But shouldn't I have been more responsible with that knowledge so that this didn't happen?"

Moondancer scratched her nose. "Okay, here's a question for you. If you were to stab me with my letter opener right now, would that be my fault?"

Gamma frowned. "No. Of course not."

"Why ‘of course not?’ It's pointy and I left it right there on my desk where anypony can just grab it and start stabbing." She gestured to the brassy, dull blade.

"It’s not your fault because… I made the decision to stab you."

"So?" She shrugged. "I could have been more responsible with the letter opener."

Gamma paused, struggling to come up with a counter argument. "Okay… I see your point."

"I don't need to be more responsible with the letter opener,” declared Moondancer, “because at some point it becomes perfectly reasonable to assume another pony is going to be responsible for themselves. It's perfectly reasonable to assume no pony's going to stab me with my letter opener if I leave it on my desk. It was perfectly reasonable for you to carry that book on campus in your bag and assume it wouldn't get stolen off of you and fall into the hooves of a lunatic. It was perfectly reasonable for the history department to display that mask and assume it wouldn't get absconded with for use in a necromantic ritual. That’s not to say that nothing bad can happen anyway, but if it does, you shouldn’t beat yourself up for it. You can't blame the clock maker for the time bomb.”

Gamma nodded solemnly.

“So when you stab me with my letter opener, whose fault is it?”

“Mine.”

“And when Blue uses your book to perform a nightmarish ritual, whose fault is it?”

“Blue’s.”

Totality cleared her throat. “Uh… what’s going to happen to Hazy Sheen?”

Moondancer cocked her head curiously. “What do you think should happen to her?

“Ugh, come on,” grumbled Totality in annoyance. “Just tell me.”

“I already spoke with her. I think it’s reasonable to say that the three of your fates are tied together. Either you all get out of this, or none of you do. I know that’s infuriating to hear after what she did.”

“It’s fine,” muttered Totality absently.

Moondancer’s eyebrows raised. “It is?”

“Yeah… I spoke with her too.”

“Huh… Did you recover the book?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Take it back to your house, Gamma. Do it now. Use your wouldbe class time. I’m sure they’ll be looking for some sort of materials in Blue’s room, but If anypony asks you, you don’t know anything about any grimoires and we all ended up down there because of bad luck with no prior knowledge of these necromantic activities and Blue clearly botched the ritual herself. If the four of us can keep that straight, everything will be fine.”

“Thank you, professor,” said Totality.

Gamma held his hoof over the table. “Stump buddies,“ he smiled.

The two looked at him quizzically.

“‘Cuz we all have stumps.” He pointed at his head with his other hoof.

Totality and Moondancer held their hooves to his like a team break “Stump buddies,” they answered in unson.

Chapter 12

Gamma leaned in over the table, his chin cradled in his hooves. “But seriously, how did you know I wasn’t the black hat?”

“You can’t teleport,” answered Totality simply.

“I could have easily lied about that,” he countered.

“You’re too kindhearted to be a black hat.”

“Oh, come on,” he groaned. “That’s not gonna hold up in court.”

“It’s true though. And I totally believe you when you say you cried after sacrificing a tree.”

Gamma frowned. “I didn’t say that! I didn’t cry. I said I ‘felt bad.’”

“Whatever. Same difference,” argued Totality, twirling her hoof in the air.

“It was a big nice tree. Well it wasn’t one of those huge ancient trees, but it was older than I was and I respected that.”

“See?” muttered Totality. “Okay, how about this: it doesn’t make any sense for you to wait for me to take you down there to find the stuff you left from your last experiment, and then reverse it with me.”

Gamma held up a hoof. “I was making an alibi for myself and stoking the illusion of some other bad guy in the shadows after making up the story about the book being stolen. It’s all part of an elaborate ruse to get an upside-downie cutie mark sacrifice. That’s you.”

“You already had me down there where you wanted me without the decoy ritual and reverse ritual on top of that and the alleged stolen book. That stuff was all a waste of time that added nothing. Stupid plan. All you actually need is the catacombs story and I’m there.”

Gamma put a hoof to his chin. “Oh, you’re right,” he muttered flatly. “That is stupid. Let’s talk about something else.”

“I should have listened to you about getting help,” breathed Totality.

He shook his head at this. “But if you had listened to me, things would have ended worse. It’s fine. We got out of it.”

“But it was sickeningly close to being very very bad,” she frowned.

“Yeah… but we still got out of it,” Gamma repeated.

“It was a gamble that ended up paying off and I wouldn’t take it back, but I still think it showed bad judgment.”

“Well, now you’re just sounding like me,” he shrugged.

Their conversation was interrupted by the reappearance of the waiter. “Here are your drinks,” he said, floating a glass of juice to each of them.

Gamma thanked him before he left and then turned back to Totality. “To our fake first date,” he smiled.

“And many more,” added Totality.

“Yes, many more fake dates,” agreed Gamma.

Totality squinted back at him. “That’s really interesting, Gamma. I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that the real date was inside us all along,” he explained dreamily.

Totality nodded thoughtfully with a strained expression as she tried to suppress her laughter.

The two of them carefully clasped their glasses between their hooves to try and lift them for the toast. Totality gasped as hers slipped from her grip and slid away, sloshing some of the juice over its sides. Gamma’s fell from his hooves and banged on the table, almost tipping over.”

“Oh sh…”

“Woah, did you just almost swear,” laughed Totality, trying to retrieve her glass.

“No… I wasn’t expecting weirdly shaped glasses. Maybe we can…” Gamma stuck his tongue out as he concentrated hard on clamping the juice.

Totality thought about trying to raise her glass again, but was now very doubtful about the logistics. “There has to be a way to do this without looking like idiots,” she muttered.

"Actually learning how to use our hooves?" asked Gamma.

"Little late," she sighed.

“We can just… push them together,” suggested Gamma, carefully maneuvering his glass to the center of the table.

“Fine, that works,” agreed Totality, smearing a trail of juice across the table.

“Clink,” said Gamma after the lack of an audible sound at their glasses’ meeting.

“Nonalcoholic toasts… my favorite,” put Totality dryly.

“Now what do we do?” asked Gamma, staring into his juice.

“We ask the waiter for straws,” answered Totality. “But then… what do we do when the food gets here?” she wondered aloud, suddenly aware of the fact that a couple of debilitated unicorns eating like slobs was less a spectacle at the academy.

“We ask the waiter to feed us,” suggested Gamma.

Totality rolled her eyes. “Just make sure to tip him well.”

Author's Note

Thanks for reading!
Ignore the date on the last post and don't be afraid to leave a comment if you have a thought.