Twilight the Beta

by TheDriderPony

Rating: everyone
Tags: Comedy, Princess Celestia, Slice of Life, Twilight Sparkle, Princess Luna, Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 3157

Twilight Sparkle makes a discovery, learns a spell, and ruins someone's Hearth's Warming.

Twilight Sparkle is good at finding books even in unexpected places.
She's also a very helpful and proactive young filly.

You'd think these would be good traits, and yet still she manages to nearly ruin Hearth's Warming with an interstellar war.

Written as a gift for Zontan, as part of an anthology. Art by rice.

Published 2022-09-16 13:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2022-09-16 13:00:01 UTC

The Squiggly Line Means You Did Bad

Diary of Twilight Sparkle

NO PEEKING!!

(This means you BBBFF)

Entry 131

Dear Diary,

Today was the best Hearth’s Warming of my life. And I'm not just saying that, I have the statistical data to back it up!

I don’t count my first four Hearth’s Warmings of my life as valid for this dataset because I was too little and don't really remember them. My fifth one was great because that was the year the weather factory messed up and we only got a little snow so I got to go back to class a week early. Hearth's Warmings number six and seven rank pretty high cause I got so many books (which was fantastic!) but now I get books every holiday so I have to curve those years down. My eighth was special because it was my first Hearth's Warming as Princess Celestia's pupil. That was almost enough to wreck the curve entirely, but once it became the standard for my ninth and tenth, things leveled out.

But I digress.

Cause this Hearth's Warming, my eleventh to date, was definitely the best one ever! Not just because Gram-gram and Pappy came down from Silver Shoals to spend the holiday. Not just because Shining Armor got a week-long furlow from cadet school. And not just because Princess Celestia finally agreed to give me homework over the break.

No, this year was special because I got exactly what I asked for. And I got it four times.

One from Mom and Dad. One from BBBFF (though the writing on the card looked like Cadance's). One from Gram-gram and Pappy. And a final one (wrapped in real gold paper!) from Princess Celestia herself!

My fifteen-step plan of subtle reminders, circled magazine listings left on the kitchen table, casual detours past a certain shop, and suggestions whispered in their sleeping ears worked perfectly.

(Note to future me: Remember to use this plan again next year)

Diary, I am now the proud owner of not one, two, or three, but four Stellar Magnus Deluxe Edition Hobbyist Telescopes with Smart-Light-Reduction Lenses and Three-way Adjustable Tripod!

Mom said she'd take one back to the store and exchange it, but that's a silly idea. These are expensive, so obviously I'm going to need a back-up telescope in case something happens to my main one. And a back-up for the back-up. And a back-up for the back-up's back-up. Maybe I should start getting everything in sets of four just in case.

But now I'll finally be able to look at the night sky without the golden rooftops of the noble district reflecting every candle and streetlamp in my face.

Dad said he'd help set it up tomorrow, but I just can't wait so I'm doing it tonight! It's just shy of ten PM as I write this. Once I'm sure everypony's asleep, then I'll finally get my first good look at the sky.

-TS

Twilight Sparkle set her quill back in its inkwell and let the nightvision spell fade from her eyes. Sustained casting still tired her out pretty fast, but if she lit a candle then her parents would know she was still awake and that’d ruin her plans.

She moved with the grace and silence of a cat as she crossed the room back to her window, avoiding the loose scraps of bubble wrap and crackly plastic that had once swaddled her new telescope. Telescopes plural. She could still scarcely believe her good luck. She hadn't intended to get more than one, but that just meant she was four times as convincing as she thought she was! Maybe for her birthday she could convince them to take her to the Manehattan Museum of Magical Oddities four times.

Through her window sprawled the streets of Canterlot, painted in monochrome shades of snow, shadow, and moonlight, with the barest hint of red and green lights in the section of Downtown she wasn't allowed to visit. A nearly-full moon hung low in the sky above like a giant snowball frozen mid-flight.

The lights were out. The house was quiet (save for Pappy's snores from the guest room). The time was at hoof.

She delicately set the telescope down in front of her window, ensuring that all three legs of the tripod were properly tightened and had secure footing, just as the instructions commanded. A set of geared dials on the top let her shift the angle by fractions of a degree in any direction. A dial on the left adjusted the focus. A final one on the right tweaked spell that filtered out unwanted light.

She placed her eye to the lens and watched the world fall away.

Words failed her as stars jumped into crisp clarity. They twinkled and danced like the lights on the tree downstairs. She swore she could almost count the points before they flickered into new shapes.

A pivot brought her view to the Southern sky, where she sought out Magnus. The guiding star of the old Pegasi nomads shone fiercely at the tip of its constellation, pulsing with a nearly yellow glow.

Ten degrees East and five North brought her to Grendel, which the griffons claimed was the spirit of their first emperor. Twilight didn't believe it, because everypony knew that when griffons died they were reborn as either birds or cats depending on how nice they’d been in life. She’d overheard some guard laughing about it once. Spirit or not, it was still a beautiful and important star, the brightest of seven that made up the Winter Stag constellation.

The scroll on her windowsill lay blank and forgotten as its intended author forgot her goal of taking notes and cast her gaze across the heavens, too enraptured by the stellar brilliance to do more than bask in it in the silent endless moment of winter stillness.

She was on her way to find the binary stars Koi-1 and Koi-2 when her view cut across something much larger than mere stars. She stopped.

The Moon, through the enchanted lenses of her telescope, was so much more detailed than it appeared to her mortal eye. She knew the familiar pattern of dark spots that lots of ponies said looked like a mare's head (though she personally thought it looked more like a whale doing a backflip) but the rest usually looked so smooth and bland in comparison. A single glance crushed that misconception.

The Moon wasn't smooth or empty at all. Instead of a cue ball it was like a giant mozzarella pizza, pock-marked with craters of every shape and size. Mountains and valleys. Ridges and cliffs. A patch of faint straight lines.

Twilight blinked. She shook away the awe and looked again with a more analytical eye. Yes. There were lines on the moon. It was only across a tiny part of the surface and they were so faint she'd have never noticed them if she hadn't happened to point her telescope in exactly the right direction.

But she had, and they were there. Unnaturally straight lines on a wide flat plain between the Moon's many circular craters.

Sadly, whatever the lines were was a mystery that would remain unsolved. Her telescope was already at its strongest magnification setting. If only she'd asked for a more powerful model.

Twilight paused and pulled her head away from the eyepiece as an idea came to her. She knew the Moon was really far away. Hundreds and hundreds of miles at least. Her telescope made it look closer by using special lenses to bend the light. Expensive telescopes had bigger and better lenses to see in more detail.

But what if she just added more lenses?

Assembling the second telescope was quicker than the first, since she'd already memorized the instructions. She centered the first's view on the mystery lines and locked it in place. The second one she placed right against the first's eyepiece and slowly adjusted its focus.

Success! She nearly cried out in victory before remembering the late hour as the image wiggled into focus. They weren't perfectly straight, but had a bit of waviness to them, like tilled rows on some giant field. Was someone growing crops on the Moon? Moon crops? Were there Moon ponies who ate Moon food? So many questions!

She needed more clarity, and thus the third telescope joined the chain.

This time she did squeal, though she muffled it into her hooves. They weren't just lines, they were words! Moon words! Still too blurry to read, but there were words on the Moon! What an amazing discovery! And if she was the first to discover it, Princess Celestia would give her extra credit for sure!

Her fourth and final telescope joined the somewhat unstable assembly. Two of the tripods had to be raised up by piles of books, and even then the last telescope was so low she nearly had to lay on the floor to look through it. Violating the written safety warnings? Yes, but with good reason!

Because it worked. As she manipulated four focusing knobs in her magic the words sharpened into crisp and legible letters. Surprisingly crisp even. It almost looked like someone had taken a giant typewriter to the moon’s surface.

Medium aside, they were legible all the same.

Prithee, O traveler, O merchant, O soldier.
Hark, ye learned scholar. Still, yon noble March.
Attend this middling Bard for but a moment of thy time.
Though mine tale be woesome, its lessons art of great import.

Twilight's heart leapt into her throat. It wasn't just a message. It was a book. A Moon book. A book on the Moon.

She grabbed her pillow and propped her head up at the awkward angle she needed to reach the eyepiece.

Of course she was going to read the Moon book!

Several hours later, she somewhat regretted not moving the telescopes to a position that didn’t require her to break her neck to use them.

The tale it told was riveting, though really hard to read. Not just because it used a lot of big unfamiliar words and flowery prose, but also because she had to keep readjusting the focus and the angle to follow each new line and compensate for the Moon drifting across the sky.

It was tedious and patient work, but she was a very patient filly. One time she'd sat alone at the dinner table with a single marshmallow for over three hours without eating it. It was was only after her mom and dad returned from the theater that she found out it was a normal dessert and not a psychological test and she could have eaten it at any time

But Twilight barely noticed the tedium of the adjustments. Just like she didn't notice the soreness in her neck or the foggy weight behind her eyes until she reached the end.

Well, not quite the end.

The story didn’t have an ending. It stopped, quite suddenly, in the middle of a verse where the hero was confronting her sister who had twisted the minds of the populace against her.

It cut off not just mid-word, but mid-letter, leaving the final ‘night’ as little more than ‘niq’ with an oddly blue comma at the end.

Twilight squinted, willing the telescope to work better as she focused on the one odd spot of color.

Then it moved.

There was a pony on the Moon. A Moon pony writing a Moon book. And Twilight was the first to read it.

It really was the best Hearth’s Warming ever.

"Princess?"

Celestia turned to look at her adorable student. She seemed especially adorable today, squirming in that slightly self-conscious way that meant she had an unusual question. "Yes, Twilight? Is there something you'd like to ask me?"

She nearly laughed as her student's eyes went wide in surprise. It was satisfyingly easy to play the role of the wise, all-knowing mentor with foals. And after three years together, she could read young Twilight like a newspaper headline.

"Do you… Are there… Can you teach me a spell to write things from far away?"

Now that was an interesting question. Of course she knew a score of spells that could accomplish the task in one way or another, but a glimmer of intuition honed over decades of teaching told her there was something more to this question. She tugged at the thread to tease out further details. "Write something from far away? You mean a way to improve your magic range so you can use a quill from across the room?"

She knew Twilight wouldn't ask about something so obvious, and was confirmed by the filly shaking her head. "No. I mean a spell that makes words appear. Like... if I was standing on a tower balcony and I saw my friend a few streets away, I could cast this spell and have words show up where she could read them."

That narrowed the field considerably, and also piqued her curiosity. Just what was her student looking into? She could ask, but the look on Twilight's face made it obvious she wouldn't get a straight answer. Not without a good deal of prodding and guilting which risked dampening their relationship. No, the filly would tell her when she was ready.

But what spell to teach her? She couldn't recall one made for that specific goal, but if all it needed to do was leave a mark... there was always that spell.

"Alright, I think I know just the one." She smiled as she watched Twilight's face light up. Simply adorable. "Now this is a very special spell that you won't find in any books. It's one I myself created many years ago." Cue Twilight's eyes widening. She chuckled. "Actually, it was originally part of a game I made for... well, the history doesn't matter. What matters is that it's not too different from a standard light spell, so it should be well within your capabilities. Are you ready? Now, first you need to shape the magic like this."

She lit her horn and displayed the spell in a way that would let her apprentice see its inner workings. No doubt her adorable little genius would pick it up within a few tries like she did most spells. She looked forward to whatever surprise the filly was almost certainly preparing for her.

The moon was a desolate place. Nothing but boring and bare rock endlessly in every direction.

And thus, Luna was bored. Perpetually, endlessly bored.

Still, she found ways to kill the time. Like counting the number of rocks she could fit in a crater. Or drawing insulting portraits of her sister in the dust. Or sculpting small figurines out of saliva and dust. Or making a pantheon of dust angels.

A lot of moon activities involved dust.

Her latest venture (one that had lasted the past several decades), was an epic poem the likes of which bards would have sung in the taverns of her youth. A thrilling tale of her rise to glory and her fall from grace. She'd always fancied herself something of a storyteller, even if she'd never had any formal bardcraft training.

It was tedious work. Carving hundred-hoof tall letters in the regolith without tools. Flying to just within the edge of the barrier to check that her serifs were straight and her kerning even. Spending weeks debating whether to fudge a syllable or rewrite the stanza to accommodate a different word. But she had literally nothing else to do in the meantime.

It was on a day like any other when something finally changed. She was halfway through the fifty-third stanza and taking a break to debate maintaining the historical accuracy of her ‘sun-loving faces' quote or altering it to something with a more pleasing syllable stress pattern.

And then a bolt of yellow light hit the ground scarcely a hundred paces from where she stood.

Cautious, but curious, she went to investigate.

It was... yellow. Not light nor substance, just color. A patch of dust and half a rock that looked as if it had always been the color of a runny egg yolk. If anything, that exact shade reminded her of the tagging spell she'd played with as a foal to train her aim after ascending. The one made by...

"...Celestia?"

A beam of yellow slashed across the landscape in an instant, as wide as any of her letters. She yelped and tripped backwards as a second beam came along a different vector, bisecting the first.

As she stood, she saw another one starting further off and understanding dawned.

Luna flew. Flew as high as the barrier around her prison would allow, then turned to watch as yellow letters painted themselves across the moon.

"I"

Letters most assuredly, but what could the message be? What would make her sister reach out after so long?

"T"

Maybe an apology. Was her imprisonment finally at an end?

"S"

She watched with bated breath as the letters appeared with swifter and more sured motions.

I-T-S S-P-E-L-L-E-D "Y-O-U" N-O-T "T-H-O-U"

Aside from its many dust-based activities, the moon was also an excellent place for screaming.

Entry 132

Dear Diary,

Since my last entry I found out that there are ponies who live on the Moon and I think I made friends with one.

She was writing a book in the dirt of the moon (I guess they don’t have trees and paper there?) and it was a really good story but just full of typos everywhere. I think maybe Equestrian's not her first language. She probably speaks Moonquestrian.

So I used a new spell I learned from Princess Celestia to point out one of her most recurring mistakes.

She was so happy for my help! She was jumping and yelling all over the place! I couldn’t hear any of it, obviously, but I figure it was a lot of "thank you"s over and over. She got so excited, she even started shooting magic fireworks off into the sky! It was so pretty, even if her aim was really bad. She kept firing them right towards my telescope and it blocked the view until they fizzled out.

I think tomorrow night I'll start correcting it from the top. I found a book in the library that’s a guide for professional proofreaders on how to notate grammar and spelling mistakes.

I can't wait to see the look on Miss Moon's face!

Diary, I think this may be the start of a great friendship!

-TS