NOV 1 Sunday.

I slowly open my eyes and stare vacantly at the ceiling for a few minutes while my mind slowly wakes up.

I review the night before and try to remember how it ended, only to flip over and bury my face inside my pillow at the realization. The last thing I remember is feeling tired and being hugged in a fluffy blanket, great now she has that to tease me with.

I reluctantly get up and look around my room to see nothing out of the ordinary.

After my blush dies down I get out of bed and walk into the main room to see Entropy sleeping on her perch. I leave her be and grab my teakettle, as I'm making some tea I realize I never washed or put away the tea I made for yesterday's meeting. I can't help but smile at the conclusion I come to.

"She rules a country yet has enough time to clean up my house." I chuckle and look around to see several other small things cleaned up, at least she's a good guest. I finish my tea and start on some breakfast, I haven't eaten in a full day and used all of my magic, so it's no surprise my body hates me right now. I make some basic food for myself and Entropy, as I cook I think about last night more.

Last night was interesting in several ways, but something that was very important was a detail in Celestia's story that brought up an interesting point. She said something took over and corrupted Luna, which would imply that it wasn't a part of Luna but a separate something that took over.

I admit that's mostly speculation on my part, but it still brings up a good point. What did take over Luna? And I'm not really sure, to be honest. It's one of the things the show was never really clear about, it could be a repressed psyche or a monster possessing her, I simply don't know.

I leave those thoughts alone as Entropy wakes up and seems just as hungry as I am. As I sit down at my table to eat I see a small folded piece of paper on the table. I raise a brow while shoving a piece of fried potato in my mouth.

Thanks for last night, I hope you slept well.

I nearly choked on my food as I read the piece of paper. I stare at the words for a moment and feel my blush come back again. "No way in hell the wording wasn't intentional. Well, I do need to get her back for the last glitter incident." I smile while eating as I think of ways to get my overdue revenge.

time skip

NOV 6 Friday.

I sit down next to Blaz in the break room and look over at Maple. She looks tired again, just like last year the cold seems to sap away some strength from her. That could be a good gift now that I think about it, it should be relatively easy to make a basic spell to keep her warm, I make a mental note of that.

I turn to all of them. "I know it's a little early, but are we planning to meet up for Hearth’s Warming like last year?" It's still several weeks out but I would rather not find out one of them is busy before we can plan around it.

I get an immediate nod from Daisy. "I'm in! Last year was fun, and I don't mind hosting it again?" She offers with a beaming smile, always the helpful mare.

Maple just gives us a tired nod of agreement. But Blaz seems to think about it for a moment, "Maybe? I have a visit with my son planned on Hearth’s Warming itself, but if we plan for a closer date I can make it just fine." Everypony gives an understanding look.

I nod. "Sounds Good." I turn back to Daisy and change the subject. "So I've noticed that that one annoying stallion isn't here, it's been two days, so what happened?" I saw the annoying stallion yesterday and the day before but not much since then, and while I could care less I feel it might be entertaining.

Daisy gives me one of her rare vicious smiles, oh that'll be good. "Well, he had something of a disagreement with the head of the cleaning crew. And he's been moved to the night cleaning crew." I chuckle at that. "He lasted three days, and now Blaz owes me ten bits." She says with a cheerful tone.

Blaz groans at that. "Fine, I'll pay up... Or, we double down!?" I laugh at Blaz, don't bet against Daisy, it rarely ends well. I eat as they descend into a small argument over the terms of their newest bet. I just stay silent and enjoy the good company.

The rest of the workday goes as normal and a few hours later I'm free to head home. I have to trudge through snow for a while to get home, the weather ponies went a little overboard this past week. When I reach my apartment I'm greeted by the gluttonous bird that I live with.

"Hello." A new word I taught her recently, she's been slowly picking up more and more words, but most of them are still basic and she doesn't seem to like using full sentences. No idea why, she just seems to prefer simple short words.

"Hello to you too, let's get you some lunch shall we." The talk of food gets her excited as it always does. One quick and simple meal later I gather a few things I'll need and have Entropy take me to Gaia's Eden so I can work on a few things. When we arrive I let Entropy sleep in my shadow or follow me around as I go about my tasks.

I store a few things in my shack, my wooden sharpening block and my wooden kitchen knife. I leave them be for the moment and check on my crop experiments, over the past few weeks I've been trying to crossbreed the Frost Bloom with a few crops and I've seen some limited success.

A few plants show promise but they still need time and further work to see if they're viable and safe to eat. The largest difficulty I've encountered so far is the fact that the Frost Bloom isn't edible, and that seems to affect every plant I've bred it with to some extent.

I suspect it has something to do with its ability to resist the cold, it seems it might be reliant on some substances that aren't edible, but I have grown a few things that I can eat and grow well in the cold so I'm still not entirely sure what's causing this. Either way, I still think it's worthwhile to pursue, but I don't expect good results for a while.

As I'm inspecting the snow-covered crops my mind wanders to an idea I've had knocking around in my head for a week now. Last week Celestia put a large amount of trust in me, more than she ever has before, and I feel as if I need to return that trust in some way.

I know I don't necessarily need to do it, but I feel like I should, and that brings me to Gaia's Eden. Originally I intended for this place to be a totally private retreat for me alone, but now I'm wondering if she needs something like that more than I do.

Her work leaves little room for peaceful moments and having a place to simply be alone could help. But I'm hesitant to show her Gaia's Eden, this is my private place and I simply don't want to give that privacy up. On one hoof I'm just not sure I want to take that step. But on the other hoof, I think it would be a good way to return the trust I've been shown.

I sigh and decide to give it more thought and decide later, for now, I return to my shack and focus on a few things. Recently I made the sharpening block and after a little refinement it proved to be a success, but I've quickly noticed my approach to this problem has its flaws.

The main one is simple, sharpening something with any wet stone takes skill and time, you have to form and sharpen an edge properly or you'll end up with an even duller blade than what you started with. It's not some monumental task but it takes time to do properly. There are a few easy fixes for this, things like a guide rail or simply a notch in the block to slide the blade through.

And after some thought I decided to go with the second method as I can easily modify what I already have to work with it. However this method also comes with some downsides, the main one being that one notch won't work with all blades, so I'll need to make a custom block for different-sized blades.

I could probably make some type of adjustable sharpener, but I'll need something beyond just wood for that so I'll look into it more later, this works well enough for the time being. I start my work by removing the enchantments and using my wood gouge to make a basic notch in the block.

I need this notch to be as smooth and even as possible and I'll need to make two of them, one to hone the blade's shape and the other to refine the edge. I'm basically doing the same thing I did with the full wooden block in a smaller area. I continue to chip away and sand down the wood until I reach my desired shape.

The enchantment has the proper strength already so after changing the area affected I re-enchant the block of Iron Oak and link it back to the small ruby. Once it's done I take the wooden kitchen knife and try to run it along the notches a few times, it seems to work well but after a few passes, I see a few imperfections in the wood I missed before.

I'll need to refine the wood more and try to smooth it out more, but for now, I note down my progress and move on to the next project for the day. After my last meeting with Cricket and Cicada, I've been trying to think about how to more effectively gather emotional magic.

And yesterday Celestia sent me a letter with what little information and old studies she could find on emotional magic. And after reading through it all over the past few weeks I've learned a few problems that I'll need to either fix or find workarounds for.

The first problem I've learned about has to do with the nature of emotional magic itself. Unlike many other magical affinities, emotional magic is much better at mixing together and changing its form. Most types of magic resist this type of change but emotional magic seems almost eager to interact with other emotional magics.

They mix easily and like Cicada told me emotional magics also counteract each other. This means I need to gather specific emotional magic and keep it as pure as possible without letting it interact with other types of emotional magic. And that brings up the second problem, filtering.

Emotional magic works in what I've come to call tiers. Very basic emotions are tier one, those basic emotional magics mix and form more complex emotional magics that are labeled tier two. This is only a rough way to visualize emotional magic as it interacts in many complicated ways. But to simplify, the higher the tier of emotional magic the more energy a Changeling can gain from eating it.

So something basic like simple joy is good but not that complex, while love is a mix of many complex emotions that form an energy-dense emotional magic. Back to the second problem, how do I separate complex emotional magics from simple ones if those complex emotional magics are made up of the same simple emotional magics?

If I say love is a tier three emotional magic, and I try to gather only love then I'd need to filter anything that's not love but also all the emotional magics of a lower tier, even those that make up love. And to make matters worse none of the runes I have will be of much help with the project.

The rune I've been using for my emotional shield has a runic context that is just vague enough to make a working spell, but not specific enough to be that efficient.

The few other runes on emotions I do have aren't made for this task. Their runic contact is wildly different and the wording used doesn't describe emotions as a resource and has nothing to do with filtering them in any way. While they still have some use it won't be enough to make what I need.

Celestia seems to have also realized this same problem as she has several ponies working on finding more runes, but Twilight was decently thorough in her first search, and runes of this type are basically nonexistent to begin with. Ponies simply don't have a reason to make runes for emotions and the vast majority of those that were made have had parts of their runic context missing or weren't made with this type of project in mind.

And this leaves me at a bit of a dead end, I can't make this spell with the things I have on hoof, and until more runes are found I can't do much. I'll still continue to search by myself and try to think of better solutions, but this seems to be a long-term project that will need much more time.

But it's not all bad, while the E.M.G Spell I made isn't the best it still makes food for Changelings without the need to do it themselves. Seems I may have jumped the gun on this project, maybe it's time I also rethink my approach to this entire spell.

With nowhere better to start, I sit down, open a blank notebook, and try thinking through different ideas while watching the snow slowly fall outside the window.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. :}
Current year is 993

A smaller simple chapter to tide you over as I take tomorrow off, I'm sleeping in. :D