Stop Turning Into Your Sister!

Stop Turning Into Your Sister!
Chapter Two

Based on Friendship is Magic, created by Lauren Faust
And My Little Pony, created by Bonnie Zacherle
Render Unto Hasbro That Which Is Hasbro’s...

Starswirl the Bearded glared at the cylinder of gold in front of him. It was one of six cylinders, three of gold, and three of lead. Five minutes ago, all six cylinders had been as identical as he had been able to make them, before he stuck thermometers into all of them and then turned three into gold.

It was a simple spell. An easy spell. A spell a filly of 10 could cast it, if she or he put their minds to it. A spell transcribed in scrolls a thousand years old, and refined and simplified repeatedly down the ages, because summoned-gold had so many uses. For someone like Starswirl it was little more than a cheap trick. And yet it was a cheap trick he kept repeating, over and over again. In Summer. In Winter. On top of mountains and under water. In as many places and under as many conditions as he could think to try. And he had been doing this for over ten years now.

And still after all that time he still didn’t understand why the bloody gold was always slightly warmer afterwards! And it always was! He had controlled for everything else! Room temperature! Pressure! Cylinder size and shape! Insulation! Restive magic! Inductive magic! Sympathetic magic! Capacitive magic! Age and skill of the caster! Even gender!

Nothing! Nothing explained it!

And if that wasn’t enough he was beginning to suspect the cylinders were losing weight every time they were changed. But he couldn’t be sure. The equipment was still too primitive to measure what he suspected were tiny values. And it wasn’t like he could just keep zapping the metals back and forth to magnify the loss. After a few dozen transmutations, contamination started leaking into the cylinder (Somehow! And that was another problem!) and he had to throw them away.

It was infuriating!

But he would solve it! Oh yes, he promised himself as the gold slowly fell back to room temperature. Someday he would solve this irritating little problem. He already knew how to repeat it, and to study it. Now he only needed to explain it, to control it, and then figure out ways to take advantage of it. Then it would be just another chapter of his book. And he could move onto the next great problem of magical study.

The issue of the contamination perhaps...

He was distracted when a little bell began to chime. Then his head jerked around when he realised which mechanism this particular bell was attached to. He swore before opening his mind, and felt the lay-lines in the University started bending. Bending in a very particular way, and towards a very particular focus, that happened to be the middle of his main workshop.

“Oh chaos take you, you awful awful child!”

Starswirl took one last look at his experiment before trudging back the way he had come. Half way there he heard a pop, and a clatter, and the lay lines snapped back into place.

“Starswirl? Master Starswirl? I need your assistance with a matter!”

“GRAND Master!” Starswirl irritably corrected. “Grand Master Starswirl! If you are going to use my formal title you could at least get it right you confounded mare!”

“If you wish to insist on formal titles then it’s Princess Celestia, or ‘Your Highness’. Not ‘confounded mare’!”

“I still prefer Bitch,” said a third voice.

“And you can keep a civil tongue in that muzzle of yours!”

“Or what pointy? You’ll stab me again?”

“Do not tempt me vixen!”

“Who is that you’ve brought with you Celestia?” Starswirl called as he walked towards the arch. “I’ve spoken to you before about bring others to my workshop! Normal ponies simply lack the resilience that we both...”

Starswirl trailed off as he caught sight of the debris littering the floor, some of which, and only some, was recognisable as leaves and branches. The rest obviously looked manufactured, but apart from the saddlebag, he could neither guess at the function they server nor how they were made.

In the very centre stood Celestia. Next to her floated the oddest chimera Starswirl had ever seen. And below it were several spatters of red on the stone floor, which were joined by three others as more drops of blood fell from the chimera’s injury. The talking chimera.

Starswirl’s horn pulsed with purple light and every loose object below ankle height suddenly swept itself into one corner of the room.

“Move it to a table!” He commanded, even as he used more telekinesis to clear a workbench. When that was done, and while Celestia was still moving the chimera, a wave of magical fire burned across the bench, sterilising it.

“Can you understand me?”

“Yes,” the chimera answered after a pause.

“Are you in any pain?”

“No.”

“Can you move your tail or either of the legs next to your tail?”

The limbs moved and flexed slightly. The tail thumbed once. Toes wiggled.

“Will you bite me if I touch your wound?”

“No,” it said, before turning to Starswirl’s pupil. “Can I bite her instead?”

“No!” Celestia insisted.

“Maybe later. At the moment we need to heal your wound, and understand why you cannot feel it. I fear that the fact you cannot do so may not be the blessing your currently think it is.”

“Lack of pain is normal for this kind of injury. Above a certain level of pain it ceases to be useful, and so it is blocked.”

“That is not normally how it works.”

“It is for me.”

Starswirl considered the matter, as a small parcel arrived through an archway and settled on the desk. The purple glow that had been surrounding it shrank to the buckle, as the unicorn opened the parcel up to reveal surgical instruments. The chimera’s head moved to watch, but otherwise it made no objections.

“Did I hear correctly that you were stabbed?”

“Impaled would be more accurate,” Celestia said.

“I have two lateral puncture wounds in both sides of my abdomen, level with my 48th and 49th vertebrae. My small intestines have suffered some bruising, internal bleeding, and rearrangement, but no external perforations. The wound was created by a jagged wooden spike, itself created by the violent structural failure of a tree trunk.”

“Thank you both, but if you don’t mind I believe I have the ranking medical qualifications.” His horn began to glow. “Now let’s check your vitals first. Feel free to watch Celestia. The patient’s heart...” He trailed off, and then tilted his head to the side. “Patient’s hearts are mammalian, and are intact and beating. Chest cavity is intact and appears of mammalian design also, though the lungs inside are avian. The spine is...” A normal spine had bone, cartilage, muscle and nerve. This spine had other materials, but they were so regular they had to be part of the design. “...Longer than usual, but without obvious trauma. The brain... The patient’s brain is...”

“Yeeeeeeeeees, Mr Doctor?” The chimera drawled.

Starswirl frowned, and swapped out the spell on his horn.

“Obviously functional if she can make that kind of joke. Having secured the patient’s vitals we do a quick scan of the circulatory system, starting with the head, to identify the source of the bleeding and check for any additional internal bleeding. Presumably you already did this before pulling the spike out, or she could have bleed out within seconds.” Starswirl paused at the chimera’s forepaws and glanced at Celestia. “You did check that, didn’t you?”

Celestia glared back.

“I checked for bleeding yes. Speaking of which she still is.”

“She has a name by the way.”

“No heckling during a medical exam. And the bleeding is, three, four, five, six locations. Hmm. Odd. Healing seems to have been retarded by low blood pressure. As if something was blocking...”

Starswirl trailed off as he found yet another piece of anatomy he had never seen before.

“Miss... Vixen, is it? Do you have the capacity to restrict blood flow in the event of injury?”

“Yes.”

“Can you turn it off please? I need flowing blood in order to repair the tissue.” The chimera gave him a hard look. “I remind you of your promise not to bite me while I tend your wound.”

“I can. But I shouldn’t while it’s still open. How much time will you need?”

“With flowing blood I can heal both injuries in less than a minute.”

She stared at him hard, before looking away and seeming to concentrate.

“I’ll hold you to that. Just say when.”

Starswirl nodded. He’d been building up his reserves ever since he saw the injuries and realised he might have to fix them. Chimera were blends of creatures, and simple healing didn’t always work on them. The spell tended to guide them back towards natural non-chimera forms. Watching for that, catching it in time, and preventing it was not an easy task. He took a deep breath and centred himself.

“Celestia, please be absolutely silent for this part. Miss Vixen, release your blood please.”

The arch-mage watched as butterfly valves, actual butterfly valves, opened up within the creature’s blood vessels, allowing the veins beyond to swell with life again. Within seconds the flow had reached the sites of injury and he began to work. Plumes of blood were gathered, forced back within the artery, and held there by magical shield. He then reached down into the cellular level and started to stitch the tattered edges of the artery wall together. The task was repeated another five times, then three more as new sites of damage made themselves known.

“You are an exceedingly lucky vixen, Miss Vixen.”

“Tara,” she corrected. “Can you fix my sides the same way?”

“I can, but it would be good practice for Celestia.”

Tara slowly turned to face the alicorn and grinned widely. That is to say her mouth opened slightly and all her teeth became highly visible.

“No,” Starswirl said. “It is not ‘later’ yet.”

“Fine,” Tara said before lying her head down dismissively. “But I want good movement afterwards.”

“You remember how to do this Princess?”

“Yes, I... Yes. It is not something to be rushed.”

“In your own time then.”

Starswirl watched as Celestia removed the fur from the area around the wound, wash it with summoned water, before banishing the water and running a yellow flame back and forth over the wound site. He corrected her once or twice, making sure she didn’t knit muscles together, reminding her to remove dead cells rather than stitch around them, but otherwise she did well. She was no surgeon, and the wound would scar, but nothing that couldn’t be taken care of later.

She did however take a long while over it. So he turned Tara over himself and fixed the same wound on her other side in less than half the time. With that done the chimera was standing in record time and Starswirl could get a proper look at her. Tara was a creature of six limbs, four shoulders & legs, two bodies, but only one head and tail.

Moving forwards from her tail tip, her hind quarters (sixths?) were entirely normal, as was the body between her back and middle limbs. Externally she appeared to be a collie sized dog, with ruddy fur and two bald patches of grey skin. Beyond the middle legs, things turned strange. In place of a dog’s neck, a second body rose almost vertically from just in front of the lower shoulder blades, ending in two dragon-like arms, before something very much like a fox’s head sat atop a small stumpy neck.

He watched as she moved, externally with his eyes, and internally with his dully glowing horn. She moved with the grace of flowing water, and the precision of pegalopolis computer. He couldn’t help but frown slightly. Living creatures shouldn’t move like that. Double jointedness should only go so far, and they shouldn’t act as if they had brass gears and pinions precisely modulating their movement. It was as natural as her solid metal head, and pretty much every other part of her body. It was somewhat unpleasant to watch.

“I trust the work is satisfactory?”

“Good as a cellular lathe. I’m surprised. I didn’t think your culture had it in you.”

Our culture? Hmm. Starswirl filed that away for later thought.

“And I trust, your Majesty, that you do not have another pressed emergency in need of your attention?”

Celestia looked unhappy.

“Not at this precise moment.”

“Then perhaps the two of you can explain exactly how you came to know each other, and became in so pressing need of my services?”

They did. Or as well as they could considering their different points of view. Celestia had cast a Friend In Need spell and, as was her want, had charged it right up into the 9.99999 range. And so she had found Tara, saw that she was in danger, and ‘rescued’ her. Tara declined to go into details, but said she had been in danger, but objected to being ‘saved’, since that usually involved being taken to a place of less danger. The snapdragon came up, along with several other creatures, and finally Celestia, and the Ursa Major.

Celestia confirmed that Tara had faced off from, and seriously injured an Ursa major, and lived to tell about it - and that the Ursa’s appearance might not have been entirely accidental. They told him about the necklace, and the jewel that hung from it. Starswirl actually stepped back when he looked at it closely for the first time and saw the amount of raw power it contained.

Eventually he had heard his fill.

“Celestia, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times! Do not bring release strange new creatures into Equestria without asking someone else about it! They won’t all turn out as well as the cockatrice!”

“I didn’t ‘release’ her!” Celestia protested. “I brought her right here.”

Tara, for her part, was picking over the pile of debris and artifacts shoved into one corner. She ignored them both save for an ear that tracked them back and forth.

“After you lost her for three days after you lost control of the Friend In Need spell. And after you lost control of your temper it appears!”

“I had the situation under control!”

“No. No you did not. This situation went on for three days and this is the first time you mention it? After it had already gone wrong and you can no longer fix or even monitor events? That is not what I’d call control!”

Celestia turned away in disgust and struck sparks from the stone floor with a hoof.

“Oh we are not having that conversation again!”

“Oh yes we are young lady! You let your ambition, anger, and yes, even idle fancy, override your better instincts. Equestria cannot afford for that to happen a second time!”

“You will speak no more of this!”

“Someone has to!”

“Do not...”

“Five words Celestia!”

“Don’t say it!”

“Just five words!”

“You say it and I’ll…”

“Stop turning into your sister!”