Cozy finished her sixth book on reading draconic runes, then returned to studying what she had come to understand was the transport room.

As Cozy was reading the instructions for the room, Runa came up beside her.

“Making any progress?”

“I think I’ve figured out why we wound up here.”

“Yeah?”

“This ruin is a support location. Under normal circumstances, only entities with ‘registered personal terminals’ and those accompanying them can use the system. However, in the case of a system malfunction, all ‘suitable’ entities are automatically transported here to get parts to repair the system.”

“So the ruins we were in are busted, and they want us to fix them?”

“Seems so. Thankfully, they seem to assume that if you’re reading the instructions, you’re completely clueless. Our first step is to go to storage level two, room three, to acquire a personal terminal. We need it to read the transport log, which should tell us what needs to be repaired, along with the coordinates of where we came from.”

Cozy began making her way to the stairwell, with Runa following closely.

“How’s everyone doing?” asked Cozy.

“They all seem to be having a lot of fun. I tolerated it. To be honest, I’ve never been the ‘goof around and have fun’ type. Clef, Midnight, and Blossom are always trying to get me to goof off more, but I just feel like I’m wasting my time, you know? Of course, I don’t know… maybe I do need to learn to relax more. Even Dusty has told me I need to ‘enjoy the little things in life’ more, and he’s a hopeless workaholic.”

“It is important to learn to enjoy your moments. You won’t have them forever,” Cozy said, as she reflected on her recent conversation with Zeph. Cozy always enjoyed her time when Flare dragged her along on things, far more than when she went places on her own, even if they were substantially less productive, if at all productive. There was just something special about being around ponies who wanted her around.

Before meeting Flare, Cozy really hadn’t had anything she would consider a true friend. She mostly had acquaintances, such as the guardians of the forest, and mostly one-sided interactions with ponies before then.

“That’s what Willow says too,” replied Runa. “But that seems more like a good reason to work more and play less to me. My time is limited—why waste it?”

“True. If it feels like a waste of time, then why bother?”

“Precisely.”

“But if it doesn’t, cherish the moment and worry about work another day.”

“I’m kind of surprised to hear that from you.”

“It’s not something I always thought. And it’s something I’m still working on understanding. Though it’s like this moment, right now. It’s made slower and less productive by me walking with you rather than flying to where I need to go, but I’m enjoying it.”

Cozy looked over to Runa and smiled, causing her to blush heavily.

“Oh—uhm,” Runa chuckled awkwardly for a moment. “I’m really enjoying this moment too.” Runa stared into Cozy’s eyes and smiled awkwardly.

“Which I’m sure there are more productive things you could be doing. Yet, here we are, enjoying a fleeting moment together that doesn’t need to be, but we both want it to be.”

“I really do want this moment.”

Reaching the stairwell, Cozy’s attention was caught by a series of strange noises echoing down.

“W-what are they doing up there?” squeaked Cozy.

“Not sure. Sounds noisy, though. When I left last time, Ash and Cedar were talking about gardening… which may have been even worse than the Yoodle-doddle-dee song.”

“Not a fan of gardening, I take it?”

“Not really. I appreciate ponies who garden. Willow grows some amazing stuff, but when it comes to learning it myself? If I’m not cooped up in my workshop, I want to be out exploring. Plants require too much time.”

“They do. I spend—a lot of time taking care of my glowberries. Though I have them pretty low maintenance nowadays, outside of having to harvest them.”

“You grow glowberries, why?”

Cozy nodded. “Glowberries are one of the few sources of pure magic you can cultivate.”

“Pure magic? I thought they just glowed via a chemical reaction.”

“Magic with no base signature, element, or domain.”

“Okay, element I understand, but what’s signature and domain?”

“Domain is creative or destructive. But not destructive in terms of blowing things up. Fire is an element, for example. Using it to cause an explosion to destroy things would not make it destructive domain magic, as fundamentally, you are still creating fire.”

“So then destructive would be… nullification?”

“Precisely. You can’t use creative magic to nullify. You can do things like cancel it by, say, using water against fire. Though you ultimately make steam or some other byproduct. You can also disrupt with creative magic by creating an interference pattern, but you cannot truly nullify with creative magic. The opposite is true too. You can nullify about anything with destructive magic, but you can’t create anything.”

“I see why destructive magic isn’t very popular. How many things do you want to just erase out of existence? Anyway, what about the signature?”

“That one is… harder to explain. If you think about magic like animals, you have the animal kingdom. Within it, you have different phyla, which are the fundamental types of animals. So if you were to apply that same logic to magic, you’d have the magic kingdom, and the signatures would be the phyla of that kingdom. Which I’m using that example for a reason. Fundamentally, different groups of magic users require unique signatures of magic in order to use it directly. Dragons can use dragon magic directly. Ponies can’t use dragon magic directly. They can use relics or other means, but not directly within themselves. Pony signature magic doesn’t seem to exist anymore, which is why modern pony magic relics don’t function. However, old primitive pony relics do, and that’s because they were built in ways that were signature-independent. Dragon relics are almost always signature-independent. For whatever reason, it seems dragons really didn’t like using their own magical power.”

“Probably because of the Peace Keepers’ curse. I know I wouldn’t be too interested in using magic if it meant sleeping myself to death.”

“Peace Keepers’ curse?”

Cozy listened to Runa’s explanation of the Peace Keepers’ curse while she guided them into the storage room and followed the instructions to acquire a registered personal terminal, which, for all intents and purposes, was simply a much smaller version of the obsidian slate she had been using in the library.

“That certainly does explain a lot about why dragon relics work the way they do. It’s always an exciting feeling when you learn something that shifts your view of something, and everything feels more in focus.”

Runa yawned, then smiled contentedly at Cozy. “I know that feeling.”

Cozy looked up from her terminal and smiled back at Runa, then glanced back to her terminal before looking back to Runa. “It’s been a long day. We should find you someplace to sleep,” Cozy said as she put her terminal in her saddlebag.

“I’m fine.” Runa yawned again while stumbling slightly.

Cozy shook her head and chuckled as she recognized the same stubbornness she often saw in Zeph and Flare when it came to sleeping when something exciting was going on around them. Having learned that sleep is rather important to most things, Cozy had learned that she needed to trick the stubborn ones into sleeping at times.

“Let’s go back to the library. I need to study more runes before I can continue on.”

Author's Note

Updated the name of the series. Given the direction it's been going, I no longer feel like its original starting series name made any sense. I also never really liked the original series name. I finally did some cover-ish art for it, though it's just design art. All of the concept art is still in the rough thumbnail phase or foggy mental image phase. I barely do HD art nowadays, so concept art has been extremely slow. Most of the art I've made in the past few years has been game dev pixel art, except for the few rough character concepts I did for my non-pony series.