Twilight Sparkle and the Enigma of the Ancient Tome

Chapters

Pinkie finds a book
Twilight definitely knows what is wrong with the book
The gray
The library
Deciphering
Experimenting
Epilogue

Pinkie finds a book

“Oh no! This was the last page of this book? Really-really no more pages?” said Pinkie. Her usually sharp voice sounded muffled, which could be attributed to the fact that she held a green pencil in her mouth. “Why are these color books always so sma-a-al? Well, time for the next one!” said she carelessly, the pencil falling out of her mouth.

She trotted to the cardboard box with coloring books, conveniently positioned in a corner of her room. She then glanced at the book on top of the stack and observed, “U-u! This one is so large! What’s this thing on its cover? Is it some sort of a plant? No! Cupcakes! Wait, these are not cupcakes. Normal cupcakes always have a thinner bottom and a larger top — everyone knows that…”

Her racing thoughts ran for a whole ‘nother five seconds before she quickly bit the large book and carried it to the center of the room, where the pencils lied. “This one is so-o-o large; this is gonna be so much fun!”

The pink pony promptly opened the tome on a random page and gasped at what she saw.

“An alligator! Wait, no it isn’t. A… cat? Mew-mew! I love cats! An owl? Speaking of owls, I wonder why Twilight didn’t want to take a look at these old books. They are very-very-very fun! And she loves books. Maybe my books are not saiensy enough? Maybe she knows how much I love my books and so she did-not-want-to-take-them-awayfromme-becauseshe-ismy-bestestfriendever?”

This was indeed the case. Having known Twilight Sparkle’s passion for books, Pinkie Pie had previously offered the box to her. The answer was utterly predictable.

“Pinkie, I love that you care so much about me. But don’t worry, there are still many books in my library that I have yet to read. Besides, I can always borrow from the Canterlot Library if I ever run out. You can keep the box.”

And so the old box that Pinkie took from the Pie farm stayed with her, continuously supplying her with fantastic coloring material.

“A-a-a-a rock! An extra-very pointy messy rock with magic gems!” Pinkie finally decided which colors she will use for this specific page. Before grabbing a gray pencil, she almost instinctively started to look more closely at the page. Her eyes, nearly closed from squinting, followed the sharp shape of the “rock”. Unlike any rock she had ever seen, this one barely featured any curvy or rounded lines. Instead, the lines were nearly flat and mostly arranged in very regular shapes: squares and triangles. The geometric shapes were connected, again, with lines.

“What a weird rock! Lines, and lines, and squares, and small cracks inside the squares, and triangles and six-sided squares and lines…” Her eyes quickly but carefully traced one of the numerous lines of the image, as if she was trying to chase a small invisible bunny that leaves a trail wherever it runs. At some point, the line split and moved into two different directions, and so did Pinkie’s eyes. Trying to catch both bunnies with one stare, she didn’t notice how crossing her eyes made her lose her balance and collapse to the floor.

“These flat lines are black magic! It put me in trances!” she confidently stated. “I know lines. And those lines? They’re just not right. And what are those squibbly scribbles?” She pointed her hoof to the mysterious writings (that she did not even look at before), positioned next to the thing… that now definitely no longer seemed to be a rock. “Oh! An idea! I will show it to Twilight and she will definitely know what is wrong with this book.”

Twilight definitely knows what is wrong with the book

The weather in Ponyville was calm and cloudy. A couple of big, mischievous clouds schemed to descend as low as they could, threatening to cause fog. Some ponies already started to feel the effects of sleepiness on them.

Pinkie knocked on the door of Twilight’s library and entered without waiting for an answer. “Twilly, where a-a-are you?” Twilight, in fact, was standing next to a lectern, studying a book about artistic applications of optical illusions.

“Oh, hey, Pinkie. How is it going?” Twilight said cheerfully, trotting towards her friend. With some confusion, she continued, “Is that… a book in your saddlebag?”

Pinkie gave the book a suspecting glance and took it with her left hoof. “This, this is a book with ancient curses! It made me fall to the ground!” Pinkie felt a bit anxious while holding the mysterious book, but she found calmness in Twilight’s light, friendly smile.

A purple glow promptly encased the dusty tome. “Let me see,” asked Twilight. Pinkie eagerly helped her to open the tome to the right page.

“Look! This is definitely not a rock, see? And these curvy lines — spo-o-oky! This book is a doozy, I can sense it. Maybe it belonged to a powerful sorcerer, or a vampire.”

Twilight was not too quick to adopt Pinkie’s predisposition. “Pinkie, you know vampires are not real? Let’s take this mystery apart piece by piece.” She looked at the page on the right. “This thing indeed does not seem to be a rock. Actually, I don’t think this is a real object at all. It looks more like some sort of a… scheme. The triangles, squares and hexagons are all connected with line segments, which all connect at right angles.” Twilight touched the scheme with her right hoof and said with some confidence, “Whoever put it here, has to have put it here for a reason.”

“An evil reason!” Pinkie interjected.

Twilight was not scared a bit. “Let’s not jump to a conclusion so early.” She then started to carefully inspect each element of the page. “These scribbles inside the shapes certainly look like… letters, of sorts. And look! The… text next to the scheme seems to consist of similar letters. Pinkie! This is likely a language and I had never seen a language like this before. This book is a great find!”

Staring at her friend’s glowing face, Pinkie was all too happy to relinquish the possession of this otherworldly artifact. “You can take it if you want. I for sure don’t want to color it anymore. Just… please be careful.”

“Thank you, Pinkie! Don’t worry, I will take all the necessary precautions.” Twilight only said that in order to comfort her friend, but it wasn’t technically a lie. She would indeed follow all the necessary precautions — all zero of them.

Twilight then asked Pinkie, “Wait, you said, that you don’t want to… color it anymore? Where did you get this book from?”

Pinkie didn’t really know herself. “Oh, it is from my box of coloring books, the box from the rock farm. Remember I wanted to show it to you?”

Twilight was stumbled by what Pinkie said. She needed confirmation. “This book is from that box?” asked she with disbelief.

“Yup, and I have no idea how it ended up there.”

Twilight realized that not giving Pinkie’s books a glance was a mistake. She also felt a bit downcast. Pinpointing the origin of this relic felt no less important than understanding its contents, but trying to find the original owner of a forgotten old book on a distant rock farm didn’t sound like a fruitful research direction.

“Let’s look at the other pages. There may be clues.” Alas, the other pages generally looked similar to one another and none of them had any obvious clues. They all had intricate schemes, blocks of scribbles, or both. However, one thing stood out. One thing Twilight was quite familiar with. “Pinkie, look! Page numbers! And they use Arabian numerals, too. This means that this book can not be more than two thousand moons old. But I can’t quite put my head around why the next page number after forty-seven is fifty. Maybe there is a page missing?”

Pinkie answered non-enthusiastically. “I don’t know, I certainly did not see any spare pages flying out of it.” However, it was not only 47 and 50. There was a skip between 57 and 60, too, as well as between 67 and 70. However, the most confusing of it all was what followed the page 77.

“One hundred?” Pinkie and Twilight both widened their eyes. “Well, there must be an explanation for this,” continued Twilight. “But what puzzles me the most is what’s on the page.”

The gray

The ponies stared at the special page. Besides the number 100, the only thing it featured was a large gray rectangle. It occupied the entire page, save for the large page margins. In fact, there were 8 pages with rectangles: numbered from 100 to 110 (exclusive). Upon closer inspection, Pinkie and Twilight noticed that the rectangles weren’t really gray, but rather composed from incredibly small black and white squares. The squares of each rectangle all had the same size and were neatly aligned into a grid. Each axis of a rectangle fitted no less than a hundred squares.

“What’s this?” Pinkie asked. It seemed that her curiosity overcame her fear of dark magic.

“I don’t know,” unemotionally dropped Twilight, “I don’t see any patterns… First these odd page numbers, and now this mess! It doesn’t make any sense. This is pure chaos!”

“Looks and feels like it, doesn’t it?” said a new voice that could not be mistaken for anything. In the same moment, a couple of black dots appeared in the zeroes of the page number. These oddly looking pupils first gazed above, at the rectangle, and then at the ponies. “But for the keen eye, it is nothing but…” The eyes started popping out from the old tome, quickly followed by the head and the paw. The rest of the draconequus’ body followed suit.

“Discord! Were you secretly spying on us?” shouted Twilight.

“Did you make that book evil?” Pinkie asked angrily.

“Oh, why would you hurt my feelings with such accusations, my dear little ponies? My heart breaks from hearing such words…” Discord shed an overly exaggerated, but genuine tear; his body momentarily became translucent to reveal a cartoonish heart split in two. “Don’t you know that I hear whenever anyone utters the word chaos? I just can’t ignore it, especially when somepony prepends The Word with pure! Quality chaos in Ponyville that is not of my making is just so exceptionally rare and I would never miss an opportunity to witness it firstclaw.” Twilight and Pinkie just stared at him. “However, what you have here is definitely not it.”

Twilight’s expression became puzzled. “What makes you say that?”

Discord scratched his chin. “How about a little science lesson? This you certainly did not expect! As I was saying, if you look very closely, you will start noticing patterns. Any object with any sort of a pattern becomes at least a little bit predictable. Pure chaos, on the other talon, is completely unpredictable. Let me show you.”

Pinkie was quick to interject, “Don’t you dare, Discord!”

Draconequus gave her a neutral, joyless expression and remarked, in a slightly bored voice, “Don’t worry, you will be safe.” With these words he clapped his upper limbs. As soon as he moved them apart, the ponies saw something they hadn’t seen before.

“Introducing… pure chaos!” stated Discord with pure joy. Both Twilight and Pinkie tried to stare at whatever just appeared before them, but they just could not focus their eyes. Their heads spun at the incoherent mess of colors. On a void-black background, green, white, red and blue dots flickered with violent speed. Ponies could not even tell whether the dots were close to their eyes or far from them. It was actually neither, since every dot could only be seen by one eye. “As you may see,” continued Discord, “it is impossible to guess where the dots will appear and what colors they will have. Any guess is no better than any other guess, because they could appear in literally any configuration, no one more likely than another. Pure randomness; pure chaos.”

“Make it stop!” Twilight’s voice came from a place of utter discomfort. “My head will explode!”

Discord certainly did not want to torture the ponies; their reaction caused him dismay. He hasted to close the window to pure chaos and uttered as if in a hurry, “And this is why I am careful with how much chaos I create. What fun is there in just causing you pain and making you lose your sanity?” Pinkie Pie fixed him with an angry gaze.

Having seen just how distressful it was for them, Discord felt bad for what he did. Every villain’s reformation is a process; and in that second two paths — two ways of action — appeared in Discord’s mind. Taking one of them would make Fluttershy happy, taking another — sad. Discord managed to muster the courage to choose the right one. “Oh, I shouldn’t have opened that window. Pinkie Pie, Princess Twilight Sparkle, I… ~~I am sorry.~~”

Twilight, still recovering from the headache, was the first to respond. “Apology accepted. What? Princess?”

Discord was more confused than Twilight. He’d suddenly appeared to become very small, while somehow still occupying the same physical space. “Oops, sorry, that’s another timeline… What season is it here anyway?”

Pinkie’s grudge for Discord already started to dissipate (especially since he apologized so nicely), but she was still confused by everything that just happened. Nonetheless, she was eager to answer this simple question. “Spring!”

Discord’s apparent size returned back to normal. This answer was something he was expecting, but not something he was looking for. “Nevermind.”

The trio stayed in silence and stillness. This started to become unbearable for Pinkie, but Twilight finally stepped in. “Could you please tell us what are the patterns of these gray rectangles? And why are the page numbers so odd?”

Discord somehow wore both the smile and the frown at the same time. “My dear little ponies, the time will reveal it all; I don’t want to mess with the time. Enough chaos caused by me today already… Also, speaking of time, check out my new wristwatch! I love how it fits on my paw and especially I love this button. One simple press and…”

Discord’s body was being violently sucked into his watch. “Wait!” and “See ya around” propagated through the air, being responded with a simple “Goodbye!” The watch first devoured the entirety of its owner and then sucked itself into itself. Instead of becoming infinite due to recursion, the watch instead became incompatible with reality and simply vanished.

The library

Twilight looked once more at pages 77 and 100, with confusion. She stared blankly at the rectangle. She looked again at the page numbers, with more gloom this time. None of that gave her any idea of where to look for the answers.

She then turned her attention back to the weird scribbles in the book. As she observed, they not only appeared next to the schemes, but also occupied entire pages. This was especially frequent near the start of the book. Twilight was quite confident that the scribbles were actually letters of some alphabet. All the signs were there: only a hoofful of different scribbles were present in the book, all they were easy to tell apart, they aligned horizontally and, the most important of all, Twilight noticed that some combinations of them frequently occurred together.

She needed to visit the Canterlot library. The trip was not short, but Twilight didn’t need to think twice about it. “Who knows what secrets this book holds,” she thought. “It is quite unlikely that nopony had studied this language before. I just need to find out what this language is. Surely the library will have something like an index of all known languages...” During her trip, she allowed herself some time to look through the train window and appreciate what it displayed. Sunny meadows, sparse maple forests and small lagoon-blue lakes. “If this language was studied, I may be able to understand what is written in the book.”

In the linguistic wing of the library, an old book titled Languages of the World: Living and Dead<\it> by somepony graph Bronze Armchair lay dormant on one of the countless bookshelves. Twilight pulled it out from the shelf to examine it more closely. The cover was clean; however, the fore-edge of the book was blanketed with a thin layer of dust. A silent sob escaped Twilight’s heart and echoed throughout her body. “All the books are cleaned from time to time to keep the appearances, but some of them don’t get nearly enough attention. Reading<\it> attention.” To partially rectify the situation, she opened the book on its contents page.

Foreword, Glossary, Living languages, Dead languages, Artificial languages, Appendix: Writing systems... “Here!”

The appendix indeed contained alphabets, sets of hieroglyphs and families of pictographs — about a hundred of different ways to transform sounds, words and/or concepts into images. Twilight could not help but to appreciate the sheer creativity that went into developing so many ways of communication with text.

One of the alphabets grabbed her attention the most. “This is the one!” she said outloud. The scribble shapes of this known alphabet perfectly matched the scribbles in the old tome, proving her hypothesis was correct. Twilight immediately looked at the caption next to the alphabet. It read: “Alphabet of Takapony, the language of the now-extinct Ever-moving unicorns.” Despite Twilight’s vast knowledge of history, she could not remember if she had ever heard of the Ever-moving unicorns. She flipped some pages to find the section about Takapony.

The book by graph Bronze Armchair read: “At the time of writing, the language of Takapony remains one of the most underresearched and underdocumented of all the known extinct languages of Equestria. The research of Takapony is hindered in particular, aside from the usual reasons applicable to the extinct languages, due to the low volume of available textual information.” When reading a book, Twilight usually narrated it in her head with a voice she imagined the author would have. This one sounded like a needlessly pedantic professor with a golden watch, who probably gave an oath that he will never utter a sentence shorter than twenty words. “It is theorized that the Ever-moving unicorns (also known as the Booming unicorns) produced written works in large quantities, whereas only a small subset of them was discovered. This theory is substantiated by the fact that many of the known texts reference works currently undiscovered, bearing their names in Takapony (see below for commentary on the semantic of Takapony).”

She kept on reading, she had to.

“One of the additional factors aggravating the linguistic research prospects is the nature of Takapony.” This was the first sentence in the entire text shorter than twenty words, but Twilight needed to read it three times to understand it. “It is stipulated that due to various factors, including, but not limited to, relatively small size of the population, remoteness and separation from the other groups of ponies, purposeful obfuscation of the communications in the presence of an outside attacker, controlled linguistic experiments, Takapony was developed to become highly abstract and general.” Every new sentence Twilight read annoyed her a little bit more than the last. It was a rare case of Twilight hating a book. Regardless, she knew what she must go on. “As of time of writing, the academic community remains divided on the question of the possibility of Ever-moving unicorns possessing the scientific advances prescribed to them by some of the researchers of the said language. The most prominent figure in the research of Ever-moving unicorns, Dr. Blue Monocle, holds the position that the Ever-moving unicorns were highly capable of...”

Twilight paused for a second and conceptualized. Her mind didn’t even need to use words to bring a glaringly obvious idea to her attention, “Let's now switch the author; I can return back if needed.” Searching for the next book to read was not hard, since she now knew what to look for. She didn’t need to look for long.

Ever-Moving Unicorns and Their Fascinating Language written and illustrated by Blue Monocle was Twilight’s book of choice. Before opening it, she sighed, thinking, “I wish that the new author’s writings would be more...” Trying too hard to generate respectful sentiments only, her train of thought derailed. When Twilight put it back on track, it continued, “I hope this new author won’t waste my patience on stupidly complicated sentences.” Twilight thought of Rainbow Dash, but decided not to over-analyze why. She just started reading the book.

“Ever-moving unicorns were a fascinating settlement, distant from their contemporaries in so many different ways. Living in isolation from everypony else, they developed a unique language and science, the secrets of which we unravel to this day.”

“Before they founded their settlement, the Ever-moving unicorns, well, moved, but the name stuck even after they found their home. The unicorns lived in harmony, until the roaming changelings started to undermine their strength. Unicorns knew they were in a trap: simply moving won’t work. The spies would know immediately. Using code words was probably considered, but I wager we will never know for sure, since no records of that kind survived.”

“Changeling spies were disguising as ponies, as griffons and even as flies. They forced the poor unicorns to encrypt all their speech and writing, so changelings won’t understand it. This led to the development and adoption of a new language, Takapony.”

“Unicorns, being as clever as they are, designed the language to have all the necessary qualities. First, it was completely new — all the changelings’ previous intel became worthless. Second, the language was relatively easy to learn. It had only hundred amd fifty (!) words.” Twilight looked at the misprinted word for a second, then carried on. “The language supported only the most basic grammatical constructions; it was devoid of any unneeded complexity that is typical for a natural language.” Twilight stopped for a second and laughed at the thought of graph Bronze Armchair trying very hard to learn this language. But, before long, she was interrupted by the voice of Blue Monocle, speaking from the page. “Third, the language was extremely versatile, allowing the unicorns to express all the thoughts they wanted to express (although with occasional simplifications). Unbelievably, it even allowed them to continue their scientific research.”

“An observant reader may ask...” Twilight was indeed a very observant reader. She read the question, simultaneously asking the book the same thing: “how can a language have so few words and yet be so versatile?” The book was quick to provide an explanation. “The unicorns found a brilliantly simple solution to this exceedingly difficult problem. They generalized, abstracted the language, by making every word correspond to a very broad concept, a concept as non-specific as reasonable. For example, the word that is usually translated as “sun” actually means sun, light, lit, reveal, etc. — all at the same time. It would be incorrect to say that every word had many meanings (or many translations). Instead, every word had exactly one meaning, but this meaning was so broad that modern natural languages struggle with expressing such broad concepts. Every time the unicorns needed to refer to something in a more specific way, they used extra words, each word refining the meaning of a phrase or a sentence. For example, the concept of science was captured by appending the word “sun” to a word that broadly meant “communicate”. A word appended to the end of the phrase refined the entire phrase, rather than just the word before it.”

“The language experiment worked. The spies could not learn anything, nor spread any rumors to destabilize the settlement. Unicorns lived in peace for some time.”

“Sadly, this came to an end when the changelings accumulated in numbers. A large insectoid swarm launched a devastating attack. The unicorns defended as best as they could, but the attack was ravaging. The settlement was completely destroyed...”

“I believe that the Ever-moving unicorns had created a buried library. A backup of all their science, if you will. One discovered Takapony book even has instructions on how to access it. The problem is... it is protected by an advanced cipher. The Takapony caption next to the ciphertext read: <-to-> *.”

Twilight followed the star, ending up at the bottom of the page. There, she found: “I follow a convention, where words in triangle brackets contain “translations” for the Takapony words. Words that are known to separate phrases are additionally enclosed with hyphens.”

She then returned to where the main text continued: “I take this sentence to mean: the path to the abundance of science (a library) will the bright ponies find, with the power of friendship. Alas, so far no one could crack the code.”

“With the help of friends, Takapony is easy to learn. What it is not is easy to decipher. No one can tell us how exactly the language worked. It’s a miracle we can understand anything at all! If you are brave enough and want to understand some Takapony text, I can only say to you: good luck and may this book help you!”

Twilight skimmed through the rest of the book, finding more facts that were known about the Ever-moving unicorns (frankly speaking, not many), the general explanation of the structure of the language (reverse engineered and, as the author put it, “quite likely not entirely correct”) and the partial dictionary. She also looked at the appendix: a lovely personal story of the author that is tangentially related to their studies.

After that, she turned her attention back to the previously long-forgotten artifact. On the page with number 0, ten words were written in a bold monospace font: <action> <many> <tool> <-of-> <know> <exist> <-inverse-for-> <sun> <alive> <thin>.

“Of course,” Twilight thought with frustration, “I have an old tome written in a dead language. Even with a dictionary there was never a chance that it could be easy...”

Uncertain Twilight boarded the train to Ponyville. On her, she had Blue’s book and some other works that she thought could potentially prove useful. The riddle could not wait, of course — Twilight started solving it right away, giving it her absolute best.

The old tome was not ready to reveal its secrets. From the abyss of time, an Ever-falling Unicorn was raising their hoof, holding a shard of knowledge, hoping that somepony would catch it and save it from drifting into the darkness. But Twilight could not grab it, as if held back by a barrier that she could not break even with all her strength.

No matter the angle, from which she looked, she could only see portions of the puzzle, never realizing what the entire picture was. Her mind, losing the concept of time, was split between the two books. Weird scribbles, like snakes, left their imprints on her eyes. Getting absorbed into the dry, sand-colored pages, she entered a hypnotic-like state. Her body was calm, but her mind — a brave nomad, who’s traversed numerous universes by paths both well-lit and hidden in the darkness — her mind was furiously fighting an uphill battle for the meaning.

The nomad was losing, lost, in a desert, with nothing familiar around. Flickering glyphs, long flying transparent eels, dead bushes, growing sideways from the thin air, rotating triangles and teapots. Her confidence and her limbs succumbed under the pressure from this alien, barren world. She was all alone… A sudden gust of wind swept sharp, bruising, blinding sand grains across the boundary of her essence. The air vibrated, resonating a chord outside of any musical scale. Deafening, volume-shifting, tone-morphing. Yet something within it almost resembled… Speech.

“You are not alone!”

The nomad looked around. Amidst the infinite valleys fully lit with the oppressive sun, a dark goddess far away graciously cast her shadow. Her forms unclear and mane entangled from an uneasy journey; she spread her wings across the horizon, devouring all the light…

Twilight’s focus returned to the Equestrian world, looking at the paper and ink before her. “Thank Luna,” gasped she with relief. Twilight breathed for some time. Recollecting her thoughts, she remembered where her real strength lies. “My friends… No need to panic, for I am not alone. With my friends’ help and Blue Monocle’s assistance I can solve any challenge. We definitely will solve the riddle of the book.”

Deciphering

Three ponies stood around the round table in Twilight’s library. Twilight was the first to speak, “Maud Pie, Doctor Hooves, I am so glad you could come here today. How was your trip?”

“It was delightful, Twilight. As soon as you told me about the book and the research you did on it, I knew that we might be on a cusp of discovering something extraordinary, an ancient invention that has been lost in time. Sending things back in time would be great, but losing things there? Not on my watch!.. Can there be anything more exciting than recovering this piece of science history? It is my pleasure to be invited!”

Twilight smiled and said, “I am happy to hear this. Maud, and how was your trip?”

Maud looked in her eyes and said, “It was ok.”

Twilight’s mirror neurons caused her smile to melt a bit, but she fixed it up almost immediately. Twilight understood what Maud’s words meant — that she was happy to be there and to help her friend. “Nice you could come.”

“As I mentioned, I was researching this book for a couple of days. I am pretty confident that it is a manual to create some sort of a contraption, but I could not quite figure out what is this contraption for and what are the materials that should be used. Also, I am not sure what to make out of these schemes. Doctor Hooves, you are the best engineer I know; I hoped that you could help me figure it out.”

Doc was flattered. “I am happy to help you!”

Twilight passed the book to Dr. Hooves by hoof. He opened it and proceeded to look at the pages.

“Oh, of course!” gasped Doc after he skimmed quarter-way through the book. “These are all wire diagrams! Look, every geometric shape always has the same number of wires connected to it, there are inputs and outputs on each diagram, and most importantly…”

He was interrupted by Pinkie Pie rushly opening and jumping through the front door, this time without even knocking. “I am so sorry! I am late! Am I late?”

“Pinkie! But why…”

“Maud told me that you have a super-secret sitting book-studying meeting at your library and so I brought some charms with me!”

Before she learned about the meeting, Pinkie actually planned to go to the Sugarcube Corner and eat some muffins. However, the mystery of the old tome still loomed over her head; her hunger for answers was not yet sated. Plus, she still hadn’t gotten over her fear of missing out.

Seeing Pinkie come unannounced and declaring the meeting secret was not something that Twilight expected, but it wasn’t something unexpected either. “Thank you for the charms. This meeting is not actually a secret, you can stay if you want,” said Twilight, not thinking much of it.

This was just what Pinkie hoped for. She promptly joined the other three beside the table.

Doc continued. “This contraption is certainly unlike anything I’ve ever seen! The layout of different diagrams, as well as the geometrical shapes’ placement, seems to suggest that those diagrams are parts of a whole. Even more so, in some places it appears that a diagram includes earlier diagrams, sometimes even multiple copies of diagrams! The sheer complexity of it all is mind-bending. From what I see, it is the most similar to either a pulley system, or an electricity appliance,” announced Dr. Hooves.

Twilight’s face glowed like a lamp. “An electricity appliance! This certainly matches the words of the book! Take a look.” She promptly opened the dictionary, courtesy of Blue Monocle; then swiftly opened the old tome itself at the page 0. Forgetting for a second that her friends did not yet know how the language works, she started reading. “Action many, tool, of know-exist… inverse for, sun… uh-h-h… alive thin.” When she got a puzzled look from her friends, Twilight realized that an explanation of what they just heard was in order.

It took some time, but eventually all five were on the same page, convinced that “sun alive thin” meant active energy of something thin (which meant, of course, electricity).

Twilight suddenly got chills on her mane and said with uneasy agitation, “Wait, I think there are five of us, aren’t there? But I only see me, Pinkie, Maud and Doc. Did I forget that somepony else came here?!” Each pony then heard a voice that appeared to originate not from the outside, but from within their heads. “Perhaps there are indeed five of us, or maybe your mind just got wrapped in a bit of chaos,” it said.

Pinkie started to angrily scold the ancient god. “Discord, stop messing with us! You said you were reformed! You can’t just mess with ponies like that!”

“Oh, come on, what harm is there in a little prank? We are friends after all.” One finger snap later, Discord was now present next to the table, joining the other four. “I just wanted to check on you.”

Twilight, the responsible, answered. “Hello, Discord. Thank you for caring about us, but we are alright.”

“How wonderful! What you don’t know is that you four are about to step on a path of impending disruption. And as you may know, disruption is an older cousin of chaos. You have a very large older cousin I might say.” On the last sentence, Discord’s lips desynced from the sound that he supposedly produced. Maud was the only one who managed to read from his lips: ”The time awaits for the rocks to think.” This sparked Maud’s curiosity, but she did not feel the need to tell the others, since nobody asked her directly. Doctor Hooves merely raised an eyebrow, Twilight and Pinkie didn’t seem to have noticed Discord’s trick at all.

“I wish you great success with this little project of yours; can’t wait for what an amazing result it will produce. But enough of me for now. This is your story, dear ponies.” Discord didn’t feel the need to stay for much longer, for he already influenced the events just enough for them to fall into the desired outcome.

Discord’s image disappeared, in the same way as rubber removes pencil writings from paper. The ponies then got back to analyzing the book, not as much as mentioning Discord. Maybe it was one of his tricks again, or maybe they were just too preoccupied with the book.

Twilight then opened a new topic. “One question remains: what materials are used in this system? The text gave wordy descriptions of some substances, each accompanied with a large symbol. I didn’t see any of these in the dictionary, but they all were present in the schemes. I believe that the ‘substance’ means material. Maud, this is where we need your help. Many descriptions start with words dirt and solid. I think that it means rocks, but I could not understand which rocks the author refers to. Do you think you can help us?”

“Yes.”

Twilight navigated to page 6 and put her hoof next to a piece of text, reading it out-loud: <dirt> <solid> <-of-> <see> <know> <correct> <not>. <-and-> <-of-> <sun> <inside>. <-and-> <-of-> <sun> <alive> <thin> <-inverse-for-> <sun> <outside>.

Dr. Hooves needed to get something out of his barrel. “This sounds impossible to understand! How did you even read the rest of it?”

Twilight was about to say something, but Pinkie Pie was first. “Rock that is hard to tell by eye and shiny on the inside and shines on the outside if activated by electricity.”

Twilight gave Pinkie a blank stare. She only wanted to know one thing. “How…”-ever, before she could formulate it in her head, Pinkie cheerfully continued, jumping a couple of times while talking.

“I love this language! No difficult words and everything is so simple!”

Twilight shook her head a bit, then asked Maud if she could tell what rock it is.

Maud though for a second before replying. “This is sphalerite, one of the main sources of zinc sulfide; a shiny material that glows if electricity is passed through it. Most commonly found in sedimentary environments and hydrothermal veins.”

While the sisters were deciphering the description, Dr. Hooves carefully took the old book with instructions and flipped through some pages. He then announced, “Ahha! This large letter to the left of this description matches the letter inside these boxes on this diagram. On top of that — look! — the boxes seem to be on the output side of the diagram and there are no arrows going away from them.”

Twilight and Doc looked at each other, as if timing their next words. “A display!”

“Great!” continued Twilight. “We now know that this is an electrical device with a display. It is incredible to think that a distant group of ponies living long ago could come up with this design and… also save it in a book! Let’s look at the other descriptions.”

She then read: <dirt> <solid> <-of-> <see> <outside> <tree> <-and-> <blood> <little>. <-and-> <-of-> <sun> <solid> <-and-> <sun> <alive> <substance>.

Pinkie was quick to translate. “A rock that looks brown and a little bit red and that contains electricity material and yellow material.”

Twilight still could not get over how Pinkie managed to translate it so effortlessly; she felt amazing seeing how quickly the pieces of the puzzle fall in place thanks to her friends’ help.

Maud got the clue and named the rock. “This is bornite, a rock with high contents of copper, sulfur and additionally iron. It is commonly found in environments with volcanic activity.”

Twilight could not quite discern the name of the rock. “Bron-yte?”

“No, it’s born-ite.”

“Oh, ok, thanks.”

“It seems that most if not all the wires are derived from this material,” observed Hooves. “They probably want us to make the wires out of copper.”

Pinkie cringed and asked, “Wait, do you actually want to build it? It could be very dangerous! Maybe it will open a portal to Tartarus and suck us in!”

Doc and Twilight looked at her compassionately. “Don’t worry Pinkie Pie, it can do nothing of the sorts. Of course we want to build it,” the engineer claimed enthusiastically, without asking others of their opinion. “Before we do, we can only guess what this machine is capable of!”

Twilight pondered it for a second, but Doc’s enthusiasm was infectious. “This is a great idea, Doctor. Building it would be a great way to honor the Ever-moving unicorns’ legacy. Also, I think some fillies would love to play with this old science device.”

Maud was not particularly enthusiastic at that moment.

The group then continued to decipher the materials. The rest of them took more discussion and time, but eventually they nailed them all. Besides sphalerite and bornite, they also needed quartzite, that should be used in specific places within the wires; ferrite, that should be processed and then arranged in weird circular shapes; and also tree resin, apparently to soak some parts of the device in. On top of that, they deduced that a rock with high contents of silver is necessary to make some weird-looking metal plates.

Twilight finally asked, “Maud, could you please mine the rocks that the book described?”

There really couldn’t have been a different answer, an “ok” as enthusiastic as one could expect from Maud.

“Thank you so much! And for the resin, I am sure Applejack could help us with that.”

Twilight then announced the end of the research session. “I am glad that we made so much progress on understanding this book. Thank you everypony for helping me!”

Twilight gave the old book to Hooves, so he could delve into its intricate schemes. After some rather brief goodbyes, the a-little-bit secret meeting has concluded.

Experimenting

It was a bright and sunny week in Ponyville. All thanks to pegasi, who were working hard on kicking clouds and stopping fast wind currents. The weather was simply irresistible and so Twilight came up with an idea to build the machine outdoors, even though it is usually a good idea to perform an experiment in a controlled environment. She headed to the town square — an especially alluring place that the ponies decided to meet on.

Twilight judged that while the machine had the potential to do something unexpected, with overwhelming probability it won’t be the releasing of some arcane monster or anything like that, she thought. With her, she carried the centerpiece of their research, which was exchanged many times between her and Hooves’ hooves, all leading up to that day.

She also took with her the Blue Monocles’ dictionary and some extra helpful materials that could become handy — just in case. By this point, she was already quite good at remembering the meaning of every word, but Twilight knew that relying too much on memory is one of the easiest ways of making a silly mistake.

At the same time, Maud was hauling a wooden carriage throughout the town. It contained rocks — every type of rock that would be necessary to create the machine. The transportation of seemingly random rocks got some eyebrows from the bystanders, but Maud herself did not think that the rocks or the hauling were anything weird. Especially since she had dug these rocks with her own hooves, to help her friends — they needed these rocks. Maud liked digging rocks: not gem-stones, but noteworthy non-shiny rocks. Other ponies knew that Maud loves rocks, but they rarely had seen her mining rocks — Maud usually mined rocks alone. Her younger sister, the party pony who doesn't mind attention, often joked that Maud loves mining off-camera.

Dr. Hooves, on his part, took some manuals that Twilight asked him to bring. He was still in the dark about some aspects of the material refinement (that they will undoubtedly perform), but he trusted that every single little detail was thoughtfully included in one of the Twilight’s checklists.

Applejack could not skip on helping her friends, and so she too trotted to the town square. In her mouth, she carried a bucket of tree resin that she had collected.

Applejack was so set that she didn’t even stop to engage with a traveling salesman, who just happened to visit Ponyville. She knew the colt: a proud member of the NP (Night Pony) club, a hyper-pony-jovial complexity admirer, who always takes his sweet time to passionately tell in excruciating detail what valuable trinkets he has in his knapsack. Unfortunately, time she did not have.

The air smelled of flowers and anticipation. The world was ready for some science.

The heavy carriage stopped. Stoically, Maud removed the collar from her back. Twilight and Dr. Hooves were standing near her, passionately discussing the possible nature of the device and the details on how to make the blueprint a reality. It took them a couple of seconds to realize that Maud had already arrived.

The duo rotated towards Maud. Doc gave her a warm smile and waved his hoof, while Twilight said, “Maud, I am so happy that you are here! Did you find all the rocks for the machine?”

Of course, Maud did. “Yes. Sphalerite, bornite, quartzite and ferrite were easy to obtain. I dug argentite for silver contents. It took more time. I found a small deposit on a route I rarely travel.”

“Perfect! Now we only need…”

Twilight heard a harsh loud sound behind her. When she rotated to look backwards, she saw Applejack, who had just put a wooden bucket to the ground. “And for the resin, I’ve got ya covered! Took some helpin’, but that’s sure the purest resin a pony could get her hooves on.”

The other ponies smiled (with the exception of Maud) and greeted her. “Thank you, Applejack! This would help us a lot with the insulating.”

“Insulating? What in tarnation are you gonna do with my resin?”

Twilight now realized that she did not really tell Applejack a lot about what they need the resin for. “Well, we want to build this ancient device, according to the schematics in this book. Resin is required to insulate the electronic wires, so that electricity won’t travel in ways it is not meant to.”

Applejack was puzzled. “You-ah told me that you build this metal thing, but how in Equestria will this resin help with the wires? You got one mighty-confusing hassle on your hooves, fellas. For all I know, you’all should just chill and buy some apples.”

Twilight momentarily gave her a disappointed look and then continued to explain. “You see, metals usually are conductive, which means that electrical charge can travel through them relatively uninhibited. Sometimes this is very useful. According to the book, the device uses electricity as a sort of a signaling system, with different signals responsible for different actions. In some places, where the wires meet, we need to use a semi-conductive material, but if two wires would touch where they should not, signals would be routed incorrectly and the machine would malfunction! This is why we need the resin — it has high electrical resistance.”

Twilight ended the phrase, but Applejack’s confusion did not end. Doc felt the need to chip in. “We need to soak electrical wires in resin, or the machine will get confused.” This turned out to be a more effective explanation.

Dr. Hooves then announced, “We’ve got everything we need! Up to the first stage: refinery! Twilight Sparkle, awaiting your instructions!”

Twilight made an expression that seemed to suggest that she will now orchestrate the experiment, ensuring that every aspect of it is conducted in an orderly maner, according to all the plans derived in the lengthy preparation process, with precision matching or even exceeding such required by the long tradition of the scientific endeavor. Something that will make her teacher proud of how far her student has traveled in the infinite sea of knowledge. Instead…

“Absolute chaos!” said Twilight’s voice. All her companions were dumbstruck, except for one. He was not feeling struck, only dumb.

“I can’t believe you got me so easily! What am I to you, a house maid?” Discord was a bit pissed, but he couldn’t really be angry at Twilight. Baiting him to appear was fair game, and this time he had lost.

“Happy to see you too, Discord,” started Applejack. “Twilight, why did we need to summon him?” Discord showed them his trademark judgmental frown.

“Discord, we really hoped that you could help us with building the machine,” said Twilight, giving him an awkward smile.

Discord materialized a 19th-century jacket on himself and uttered, “Do you think that I would spend my time helping you with this stuff?” He then gave his watch a glance… and continued, “Well, you are correct! Seeing you go through so many hoops, I am almost impressed.”

Discord had a horse in this race; Twilight could tell. She was not sure who exactly that horse was, but it was not critical for her plan to work. “You certainly deserve a helping paw. Shall I suppose that you want to transmute these fine rocks?”

Twilight, relieved, answered, “Yes, we need to separate rocks into their comp-”

She was impolitely cut off by Discord. “You want me to create order? Excuse me! My name is Discord, not Harmony.”

Twilight realized her mistake and tried again. “Of course! That would be quite off-key for you. I only would like you to give these rocks a little entropy.” Discord immediately started smiling. Somebody was asking him to use his powers: a rare occurrence. His jacket disappeared and got replaced with a white lab coat and transparent protective goggles. On top of that, he now sported a tall shining-white hat — the type commonly worn by chefs in fancy restaurants. “Oh, you should have said so right away! Let’s cook!”

In a split second, the internal energy of rocks octupled to immodestly high values. Internal structures that lied dormantly solid for millennia were ripped apart like thin dry grass by a string trimmer. The influx of energy was too much for the rocks to contain — they were glowing. The wooden carriage beneath them would have caught on fire from the intense heat, if not for the rapidness with which the rocks were warmed. The wood turned into charcoal almost immediately.

“Here goes the magnetism… Well, nothing I can’t fix…” thought Twilight. She then started applying her magic to the melting materials. This was unusually hard, as the particles of the material chaotically tried to escape her influence; but Twilight is a skillful unicorn, she did not falter. It certainly helped that she could recall dozens of spells that allowed her to trigger necessary chemical processes even in absence of the reducing agents.

Piece by piece, she extracted zinc sulfide, copper, quartz, silver and iron. Her goal was not to extract every last gram of material, but rather to ensure that the material she extracted would be as pure as possible. She also tried to realign particles of iron to restore magnetism, but that was too much — she judged that she would need to do that once the material cooled down a bit.

“Ah, of course! A solution as simple as it is effective!” said Hooves, continuing quietly. “So many times my friends could have helped me with scientific problems, if only I had asked them for help…” Returning to his median volume, Hooves asked, “Where is my help required, Twilight?”

“I don’t remember all the details of the book, especially the meaning of the schemes. Could you please open the right pages and help me decipher them?”

“Let’s do this!”

Hooves and Twilight started to methodically recreate the machine from the schematics, precisely following all the instructions. Doc also peeked into his manuals from time to time, where the Unicorns' science and theirs collided.

Twilight started arranging copper. Just as Doc deduced earlier, a vast number of copies of the components were needed. Instead of forming them one by one, Twilight formed them in parallel. Hooves was astonished. “What a beautiful dance of matter!”

Twilight was a bit flattered, but she knew that her skills were quite limited. He envied Discord a bit, since he could apply basically any linear transformation to matter (not even mentioning the nonlinear ones), whereas she only had access to transformations with determinant 1 — and only a subset of them at that. But thanks to the Maud’s and Applejack’s help with the materials, this was not an issue.

Twilight started connecting the copper components. In parallel with that, she arranged little dots of quartz into the flying monster of copper spaghetti that she was in the process of spawning. The tome repeated three times that the precision here should be meticulous, or the device won’t work.

“Twilight? What-uh you are doing? This thing looks mighty scary with all its sharp edges.” The unicorn at work didn’t have enough mental energy to answer. Applejack then looked at the purple cloud surrounding the fractal-like structures of copper and quartz. She was unsure and suspicious, but decided to trust her friend.

Then, Twilight arranged iron in rings and connected them to the wires. For some time, it looked like nothing was happening. In reality, Twilight was realigning the atoms, fixing the magnetism that Discord messed up.

The next step was silver. “Doctor, could you please open the page one hundred?”

“Sure, but what purpose do these pages have?”

Twilight had a vague idea, but right now she just focused on building the machine. She hoped that they would know for sure soon enough. “The patterns from the gray boxes should be engraved into plates of silver and resin, which should be connected to the wires.” No one understood what Twilight was trying to achieve, except Discord.

He knew that what’s on the plates will soon spread across Equestria like a virus, with ponies willingly being not only the carriers, but active participants in creating new versions of it.

Twilight solidified the information from the boxes into the silver and resin.

“Last, but not least,” she said, “the display. I need to organize the zinc sulfide into a rectangular grid of seventy-eight times sixty dots and put it onto the wires.”

Hearing that, Discord got moved. “Oh how orderly! Not a single bit of chaos. This is just disappointing.”

Twilight and Doc then proceeded to double-check every single minute detail of the contraption. They knew that even a single mistake could render it non-functional. When that was done, they coated the entire thing with a generous layer of resin, save for the components responsible for the input and the output.

“A-a-and… That’s it! The machine is now fully built according to the schematics,” cheerfully uttered Twilight, carefully lowering it to the ground.

“Well, that took you some time, Twilly. Are ya sure it was worth it?”

“Well, let’s find out.”

The machine needed electricity to function. The ponies could have used a steam engine, but the minimal energy the device supposedly needed to function was small enough for Twilight to power it from magic. Not a convenient solution, but it will work for now. She lit the point of the wires’ origin…

What Twilight then saw made tears of joy form in her eyes. The machine’s display showed Takapony text. Twilight did not need to consult the dictionary to know what the text meant.

Her most wild guess about the purpose of the device turned out to be true. The secret of the book was solved.

“What does it mean, Twilight? Why does this thing glow?” said Applejack, pointing her hoof to the display.

“This is a sentence, Applejack. It says: general-purpose computation device, please enter commands.” The emotions from within her were too much. She lost composure and started shedding tears.

Applejack hugged and comforted her.

Maud was not exactly sure what made Twilight feel sad, but she was sure it was not her or anyone present, so no action was necessary, aside from telling Twilight, “I hope it will be fine.”

Hooves went ecstatic. “General-purpose?! Can it actually compute any function?! I can’t believe it! This opens an entire new field of science! I think I should put aside my endeavors of time travel for a period of time and focus my efforts on this, instead.”

Discord was calmly lying on air above the ponies, grinning at them with satisfaction; It was a job well-done for everypony and everydraconequus involved. The disruption was inevitable.

Epilogue

Sixteen years had passed.

Twilight was standing in the middle of her observatory, looking at the sky with an enormously large, several meters long telescope. That night she was particularly interested in a comet named 1337 Largeheap.

“Down to a minute! Both time and angle. This is incredible.” She then dropped a glance at the scientific appliance that allowed her to predict the comet’s trajectory with such a good accuracy. It was a modestly-sized box, hooked up to an electricity source. An upgraded version of the general-purpose computation device. For some time now the boxes like this significantly affected all the scientific endeavors in Equestria. They even started to find their way into other aspects of ponies’ lives. It was not yet clear how pervasive they will end up being, but the idea that the genie is out of the bottle had already filled the air above Ponyville.

Many ponies, who did not care at first, now spent a significant share of their free time next to boxes like this one. Rainbow Dash could not stop using a real-time interactive computational routine, created by Scootaloo. It involved some moving squares. After accessing it for the first time, Rainbow was all set. “I will not give up until I totally beat this game!”

Some ponies used the computational device to plan their bit spending. On the other hoof, a growing number of ponies spent so much time with the boxes that it started eroding their friendships — a frightening, quickly escalating trend that nopony knew how to reverse.

Apple Bloom stormed into the observatory, screaming. “We cracked it! Twilight, we broke the code!”

Alicorn gasped with amusement. She kind of expected the Cutie Mark Crusaders to solve the riddle eventually, but in the moment, she still could not contain her surprise. “I am so proud of you guys. What did it say?”

“Just as we thought, it leads to a large library of Ever-moving unicorns. At least we can’t imagine it being anything else. It also seems to congratulate us on cracking the code… Which is very odd. It’s like they wanted us to break it.”

Blue Monocle’s echo spoke to Twilight’s ear: ”The path will the bright ponies find, with the power of friendship”.

“And how did you break it?” wondered Twilight.

“They used a sort of a Fillystel cipher, but the first half of the secret key was set to zero. And also they used only six rounds of mixing. If they had used more rounds or a stronger secret, the chances of us breaking it in our lifetimes would have been negligible. But they didn’t do that, and that was such an obvious thing to do! It took our computation device a couple of days of brute-forcing different combinations, but we got the result.”

“I am glad you solved it,” said Twilight, patting Apple Bloom on the head. “I am so proud of you.” That second, the alicorn thought of many things, but one was clear to her: soon the Canterlot library will probably need to grow an extra wing. All thanks to her friends, her students, and an electronic device, resurrected from the pages of an arcane manual: the computer.

Author's Note

I am so happy that you read my nerd-fic! I would love if you'd write a comment about what you liked and didn't like about it.

I'd like to thank Martin04ka, Lyra, Anton S., Ян-Мартин, Алексей and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct for their feedback.

Writing this fic was a fun experiment for me - I have never written any fiction before. Dear reader, try writing something yourself too! Before you do, we can only guess what wonders you are capable of!