Twilight's Research

I'd asked myself a lot of questions in the past. I'd hunted down a lot of answers. And I was still finding more mysteries to solve, to sate my curiosity when it came to Equestria. Its history is long and filled with interesting facts, like the Age of Chaos, where Discord actually ruled for two hundred ninety six years, until the Royal Sisters, Princesses Luna and Celestia, overthrew him in a rebellion that lasted two years. The land taken during that war was actually three times larger than Equestria, but some of the landmass had been sheared off during the final conflict between Celestia and Discord, creating the Dragon Nest Isles East of Equestria. Not many ponies know about that, but it definitely scares me with just how powerful the Princesses are.

Oh, and during the Beginning Age, when Princesses Celestia and Luna began their rule! How Starswirl the Bearded actually discovered time travel through a misplaced cup of tea in the path of a high-intensity beam of energy. He'd managed to throw his cup of tea thirty seconds into the future, and through the deconstruction of what was flowing through the beam between two crystals, and a certain ingredient that made his spiced tea taste just right, he found that the ingredient could amplify magic's volatile properties near-twenty fold! In fact, the time travel scroll I used to travel back in time was made from parchment laced with that ingredient!

Or in the Banishment Age, when Luna was trapped in the Moon, how Clover the Clever single-hoofedly discovered the cure to Calestrova Demiscus, or 'Horn Catalyst Disease'! Pretty weird recipe involving tree bark and Poison Joke... more on that later.

Equestria's magic is a whole other kettle of fish... that's the term, isn't it? Anyway, the magic of Equestria; in unicorns, in the air, in the ground... how everything reacted with one another in a constant state of harmony. How this environmental magic could be affected by Discord, and thrown into Chaos, or how it could be controlled by Earth ponies... oh, now I'm rambling.

Anyway, I'd discovered a lot of things about Equestria and its ponies, but there was always one thing that had me stumped. It wasn't really things I'd thought, or experienced, or even done on instinct... but, actually, how I felt. I couldn't explain it, even if I'd wanted to... which I didn't, really. But haven't you ever had some weird twinge in your gut area when you walked past somepony? Kinda like guilt, but not guilt... but it was kind of guilt, but not the kind of guilt you felt when you'd done something bad, but rather when you'd missed out on something good, but you didn't quite understand what that good was until... never mind. I've never had this kind of trouble before, and it's freaking me out! There's only one thing that can trump a smart pony, that one little grain of sand in somepony's shoe that just annoys them to no end!

A question without an answer! I need that answer! So, well, um... how can I find an answer to a question I can't even explain? Where does a pony even start?

Well. There's always been one solid starting place for a mare like me! And that is...

Books!