//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7 
// Story: Watching the Watchers 
// by Ryvaken 
//------------------------------//

Celestia, if given opportunity, could wax poetic for hours on the march of civilization and bemoan the endless trail of paper left in its wake. In good times and bad, simple or complicated alike, season after season, there would be reports to read, forms to sign, and memos to draft. 

Rainbow Dash let her quill fall from her hoof and groaned. "Ugh. Sooo boooring," she whined. True to form, Rainbow had finished with the weather in 83% of the time a less cool pony could have. Of course, no pony would ever hear about this burst of awesomeness, as it was the boring ink on paper kind of weather work. Rainbow filled out the entire month's schedule in one go. That way it was done and ready for anypony to look at and she wouldn't have to worry about it for another month. It was, in her estimation, a perfect system.

The other weatherponies had a different opinion, which largely revolved around the fact that the schedule was never posted more than five hours before the month started.

Rainbow looked over the schedule one more time. She herself was scheduled for the first of the month, just like always. Then the month's rotation picked up on the second, starting with pairs decided by throwing darts at an employee roster and then rotating so everypony had a chance with everypony else, except storm days which called for extra hooves. Not too many this month, except Sweet Apple Acres was still due one big storm that hadn't been in last month's budget. Rainbow scowled and added in a new storm for the weekend, and extra cloud wrangling the day before. There, perfect.

Now she just needed to file a copy, post a copy, and hoof one over to the mayor. Maybe she could get Twilight to cast a duplicating spell on it?

"Oh yeah," Rainbow muttered. "Mayor Mare quit. I need to take this to Twilight anyway!" She grinned. That was a perfect excuse to get Twilight to save her poor hooves from more writing!




One of the peculiarities groundbound ponies learned about their feathered peers was that, to a pegasus, "door" and "window" were the same thing. An open window was an invitation to visitors, pure and simple. And a balcony was just another way for friends to enter.

The Royal Guard took a rather dim view of that attitude. Even pegasi guards. They had this crazy idea that a secure building needed to be...secure. And that the easiest way to secure Twilight's castle was for everypony to go through the big front doors. And while it was true that the Council of Harmony was well-recognized and allowed to pass through without more than a glance, high speed blurs of rainbow colors were far harder to identify.

Convincing Rainbow of that simple logic had been easy. Convincing her that entering the castle at Rainboom speeds was an inadequate substitute for personal identification had taken longer. But it had sunk in, eventually, and Rainbow landed a short walk from the open, inviting door and nodded respectfully to the two slightly less inviting guards flanking it. With quiet dignity she entered the building on hoof, as opposed to her own personal idiom.

As soon as Rainbow entered the foyer the castle burst into sound. Her ears swiveled to take it in. Twilight was yelling, and probably had for some time. "Wow, I didn't know the Egghead could get that mad," Rainbow said to herself. She grinned and followed the yelling up a staircase. Twilight had been even more boring than usual ever since she got back from that spy mission. Rainbow cared deeply for all her friends, but Twilight was facing a severe deficit in her radical rating. Seriously, what kind of pony becomes boring after a spy mission in a secret alien base? They should have lasers and rocket ships and hunky green marstallions. Instead, Twilight was just doing egghead stuff with Doc Whooves.

Rainbow had stopped paying attention to what, exactly, the egghead stuff was when it was clear that no, lasers were not involved. Or rockets. Or marstallions.

Rainbow figured she was on the right floor when she could make out some words. "Impossible," "magic," "laws," "melt," and "fire." Rainbow's eyes widened and she grinned. Melting magic fire could be awesome. "Who knew you could get coolness from cracking an egghead?" she chuckled.

"...no matter how much you reinforce it. It's going to go BWWwwwoooOOF! and turn into a pile of plastic goo," Twilight snapped.

"It won't melt if we keep the power down. There simply is no way to build a probe fine enough to observe the storage medium. Unidirectional photonic bombardment is the only option." That was Doc Whooves's voice. Rainbow had never heard the strange stallion upset, although he sounded more frustrated than angry.

"You're talking about a laser!" Twilight shrieked.

Rainbow's eyes opened wide. Fillies and gentlecolts, we have awesome, she thought. She hoofed the door open quietly and looked inside the lab.

The Castle had provided Twilight with an abundance of rooms, far more than two residents and five frequent guests could ever find a use for. Rarity had long extolled the virtues of a princess having an abundance of meeting rooms, each appointed differently, for the many affairs of state that such a position would engender. Rainbow didn't see the point, and it seemed neither did Twilight, as half of the rooms had been taken over by laboratory equipment of some kind or another. As best Rainbow could tell, Twilight gave each project its own room for as long as the experiments went on. Looking into this laboratory, Rainbow didn't bother trying to understand what she was looking at. All the chalkboards filled with eggheadese made her eyes hurt if she looked at them too long. Twilight and Whooves were standing on opposite sides of a long, narrow table, each with a chalkboard behind them, with a plastic alien gizmo thing between them. Rainbow could taste the chalk dust in the air. Twilight levitated a fresh piece to her board and furiously underlined a particularly dense bunch of scribbles. "Look! A class three gem focusing a light spell into a coherent beam has a minimum power output defined by Muler's Law. That output is enough to obliterate the artifact."

Whooves picked up his own piece of chalk in his mouth, which Rainbow noted had a hefty chalk-white coating. "But if we use a class two crystal," he mumbled around the chalk.

"Then the crystal will shatter under magical strain," Twilight interrupted. "It's impossible to channel that much magical power through anything less than a class five crystal, and that has an even higher minimum light output than the gem!"

Whooves spat out the chalk. "What? No! No no no, great whickering stallions, no. We focus the laser from the gem through the crystal in a magic-null function," he explained. "Neighton's work on optics clearly shows how you can split light through a medium. A properly grown class two crystal can refocus the laser into a weaker beam and then it's allonsy all the way to Prance."

Twilight blinked and lowered her own chalk. "You use the crystal without an attached spell?" she asked. She tilted her head. "But with the interfering crystal, how do you measure the result? The sympathy light has with the anchoring gem is too weak to survive the refocusing."

It was Whooves's turn to frown. "I should have considered that," he admitted. "Could the crystal anchor a new sympathy?"

Twilight looked over Whooves's work. "I don't think so," she said slowly. "A class two crystal is pretty inefficient. If we put that much magic into it, we could change how the light scatters."

"And we have no way of measuring that effect," Whooves finished, hanging his head. "Brilliant."

"We should copy down the design, though," Twilight said. "I haven't seen anypony develop a viable laser before, even in theory. We could get published!"

Whooves smiled and raised his head. "Well, at least it wasn't for nothing then. Back to the drawing board!" He pulled in a clean chalkboard as Twilight pushed the ones they had used aside.

Rainbow rolled her eyes. "So much for awesome," she said. Giving up on lasers so easily? Boring!

Twilight turned towards the door. "Hello? Rainbow! What are you doing up here?"

Rainbow hoofed the door fully open. "Uh, hey Twi. I was just in the neighborhood, y'know, and I heard shouting. So I thought I'd just, um,"

"Come up and watch the fireworks?" Twilight asked flatly. She gave Rainbow a Look Maud would have been proud of. Maybe. It was hard to tell with Maud.

Rainbow's ears sagged. "Er, yeah. That. Sorry. But hey, you said there wouldn't be any lasers involved, and I find you talking about lasers!"

Twilight facehoofed. "Tiny lasers, Rainbow. Less than an inch long and so weak it couldn't even warm your muzzle."

Rainbow's jaw dropped. "Seriously? Lame. What could such a wimpy laser do anyway? Shoot down gnats?"

Twilight groaned and pointed a wing at the Federation device. Her hooves were still occupied with her snout. "That thing has really tiny stuff written on it. A narrow laser would be small enough to read it."

Rainbow tilted her head. "Can't you just make the writing bigger?"

"That was my thought," Whooves interjected, raising his hoof. "But it turns out that somepony named Haycartes proved that magical enlargement had a minimum resolution above the necessary threshold."

Twilight hid a smirk at Rainbow's blank expression. "Remember when Daring Do had to figure out a ruin where the carved letters had been blurred by erosion? It would sort of be like that, but worse."

Rainbow winced. Half of that volume had been Daring recovering from a trap that the lost carving would have warned her about. "Why would anypony write so small?" she asked instead.

"The smaller you write, the more you can fit on the page."

Rainbow snorted. "Yeah, but it's no use to anypony if it's too small to read."

"They have machines that do that for them," Twilight explained with a sigh. "Honestly figuring out how to read it ourselves is the problem we're trying to solve. Anyway, did you need something?"

Rainbow blinked. "Oh yeah. I just finished the weather schedule for next month and was hoping you could magic up a couple copies."

Twilight blinked. "You came here because you forgot to use carbon paper?"

Rainbow tilted her head to one side. "What's carbon paper?"

Twilight hung her head. "It's a special paper used with typewriters to make a copy of what you're writing as you write it."

Rainbow gaped. "That exists? Why hasn't anypony told me about that! I've been hoofwriting this thing in triplicate for years!"

"Because nopony knows you do paperwork," Twilight told her flatly. She looked up and frowned. "Why do you need three copies?"

Rainbow pointed a hoof back to town hall. "One for the files, one to post," she swung her hoof to Twilight, "one for you."

"Me?"

"Well, the mayor," Rainbow explained. She put her hoof down and pulled the schedule out of her saddlebag. "She always insisted on getting a personal copy."

Twilight frowned more heavily. Offhoof, she couldn't think of a need to have a personal copy of the schedule when there was one on file in the weather office and another posted where anyony who wanted could see it, but Mayor Mare had had a lot more experience running a town than she had. "Okay, well I guess we'll keep with that system for now," she said, half to herself. Her horn glowed and the paper in Rainbow's mouth tripled. Twilight took one copy and set it aside."There. Thanks, Rainbow."

Rainbow stuffed the other copies back in her bag quickly. "No problem, Twi! You just saved me a couple hours of boredom." She gave Twilight a quick hug and flew out the door. "I gotta get this posted. See ya later!"

"Bye Dash!" Twilight yelled after the already vanished pegasus. She turned to see Whooves staring at the Federation chip with an intense expression. "What is it, Doc?"

"I believe Rainbow has hit upon a brilliant idea," Whooves said slowly. "Also, it may be that we are just thick. It's so obvious. We've been looking at how the information is stored."

"Yes?" Twilight asked.

"We should have been looking at how it is read. Look here." Whooves took the chip in one hoof. "See here, this is where this chip attaches to the rest of the device. These contacts must be where it gets requests for information and sends that information."

"Yes?" Twilight asked again. "But we don't know how the retrieval works."

"We don't need to," Whooves countered. "As your friend said, information is useless if it cannot be read. The chip can read its own information. We only need to figure out how to ask it."

"And how to listen to the answer," Twilight realized. She smiled slowly. "Then all we need is somepony to make our own copy, one we can read." Her face fell. "But there's no way we can store all that information. It would fill up the castle with scrolls."

"Unfortunately true," Whooves agreed. "We either need some magical means of storing the information, or we need a retrieval system that can search the device's own storage in real time. Either way, I believe the task calls for a full mana-consciousness. We'll need some master-quality gem work to pull that off."

Twilight offered Whooves a small smirk. The earth pony hesitated. "Ah. You can take care of that yourself, I suppose?"

Twilight's smirk grew. "Well, not me."



Rarity blinked blankly. "I'm sorry, darling, I must have been distracted for a moment there. I thought you said you wanted me to build you a magic brain." She lowered her teacup so she could laugh politely into one dainty hoof.

Twilight nodded, beaming. "That's pretty much exactly what I need," she agreed. She took a sip from her own tea, peacefully oblivious to the statue-like demeanor her friend had adopted.

Rarity slowly lowered her hoof and tried to hide her wince behind a weak smile. It wasn't working. "Twilight. Dear. Princess. After your need for reams of canvas last month, I had wondered if it had escaped your notice, but I am a dressmaker." She threw out a hoof to encompass the ponyquins, suits, dresses, and accessories surrounding them. "Not a supplier of magical minutiae."

Twilight blinked. "But you make enchanted dresses for sale in Canterlot," she objected.

Rarity frowned. "Well, yes, I do have some experience with this kind of work," she admitted, "but cleanliness and sturdiness enchantments are relatively simple. A glamour or two to accentuate the color scheme takes more work, but still."

Now it was Twilight's turn to frown. "But what about arcanothaumic assistants?"

"Gesundhoof?" Rarity offered.

"Everypony at Celestia's Gifted Unicorns had one," Twilight exclaimed. She flung her hooves wide. "It's the only way to keep up with the intense course load. The professors would have one with a larger gem as the focus, worked into a broach or a necklace or such."

"And these were, what exactly?" Rarity asked.

"Arcanothaumic assistants," Twilight repeated.

Rarity merely sipped her tea and arched an eyebrow.

Twilight's ears fell. "You've never heard of arcanothaumic assistants?"

"I'm afraid not, dear," Rarity admitted.

"Oh," Twilight muttered. "Um, they're enchanted tools that store notes, lectures, pretty much anything spoken that somepony didn't want to bother writing down. The bigger ones could even replicate simple spell patterns. They, um, they aren't everywhere?"

Rarity smiled and placed a hoof on Twilight's withers. "Twilight, you are a dear friend, but you must learn that there is a difference between collegiate Canterlot and political Canterlot. I dare say your life as a Princess will get quite a bit easier once you do."

Twilight doodled circles with a hoof. "Oh," she said again. "Um, well, I guess I should get a book on making them."

"Two, darling," Rarity said.

Twilight cocked her head to the side. "Two?"

Rarity smiled coyly. "My dear Twilight, I am trying to open a boutique in Canterlot. There is an open lot on Sundawn Avenue for far less than I would pay elsewhere in Upper Canterlot."

"But Sundawn is on the edge of CGU," Twilight objected.

"And on the edge of the palace," Rarity pointed out.

"Well yeah, it's the border between school grounds and palace grounds...oh," Twilight's ears perked up. "So you're thinking you can sell to both sides of the street? Is that doable?"

Rarity gave Twilight a flat look. "Darling, when next you return to your alma mater, I suggest you stroll Sundawn and look carefully at the establishments. I assure you Barns and Nobles is not a typical bookstore."

Twilight tapped a hoof to her muzzle. "I did think it off that Marevelli's The Princess wasn't a biography. Or that The Art of Friendship wasn't about magic."

Rarity rolled her eyes. "In any case, with Ponyville now subject to your tender care, I have no doubt that investing in scholarly clientele is just good business sense."

Twilight frowned. "It is?"

Rarity laughed lightly. "Darling, you have free reign over how much land? Five years from now, when Princess Twilight Sparkle's Research Center for Magic, Friendship, and Books brings in the brightest and boldest minds in Equestria, the successful businesspony will be she who is ready to cater to them. I intend to be that pony."

Twilight blinked twice. "Princess Who's What Center for What Now?" she squeaked.

Rarity glanced at Twilight's cup. "Drink your tea, darling."

Staring straight ahead, Twilight levitated her cup, downed her tea in a single swig, and gently placed the cup back to rest on the table. Then the cup exploded into powder. Twilight didn't so much as twitch.

Rarity glanced at the tea saucer filled with porcelain powder. "I'll just get you a fresh cup, shall I?"




Two days later, Twilight found herself in her private study with Rarity and Whooves. Twilight had a stack of journals on magical research, while Rarity and Whooves studied brand new copies of Arcano Assistants for Apprentices.

There were many advantages to learning a new, complex, esoteric form of magic. Twilight would know, she had those advantages on an itemized checklist. "Distraction from anxiety" was already on there (Shining Armor moving out had not been easy on his LSBFF) but now she had "Distraction from anxiety caused by world shaping power and no I'm not kidding" as an addendum. Studying this year's second issue of Modern Magical Masterpieces for an article in arcanothaumic anchoring was much safer than considering her ability to reshape the academic landscape of Equestria in her own image. "There's a New Horshire professor that thinks electrum would outperform pure gold for a decision making enchantment," she commented.

Rarity looked up from her own reading. The usually pristine mare had bags under her eyes and a limpness to her coiffure. "Beg pardon? I thought we were studying gemwork."

"Well, yes, but we can choose to set the gem into something that helps the enchantment. Pure metals channel magic well." Twilight glanced up from her journal. "Isn't that why you use gold or platinum settings?"

Rarity frowned. "Typically I choose a gem's setting on aesthetic principles over arcane ones," she said sourly. "I've never noticed a problem."

"You wouldn't," Twilight agreed. "If you haven't been using pure metal, it won't react with an enchantment on the gems."

"Pardon the foolish earth pony," Whooves drawled, "but wouldn't an impure metal react negatively?"

Twilight held up a hoof and waggled it uncertainly. "Complexity, anchoring, sympathetic resonance, bottom line is unless the enchantment is finicky an impure setting has a neutral impact. Only pure metals are magically reactive enough to effect a spell."

Whooves scratched his hoof over his mane. "Then why over-complicate things? All we need, for a proof of concept, is something that can read from the device on demand."

"But we'll need to interface the translation spell," Twilight protested. "It took me most of a day to work out the Federals' language. The gem will need to-"

Whooves cut her off. "That would be an elegant solution," he agreed. "But we don't need elegant." Rarity gasped. Whooves ignored her. "We need functional. From what I've read, the basic enchantment on these gems is something a student can pull off, much less a master craftspony like Miss Rarity."

Rarity blinked and sat up a bit straighter. "Yes, well, I must say the task is within my considerable abilities," she offered, "but I don't quite see what your point is."

"We don't need just one gem," Whooves said. "We have a single task to perform, but we can break that task into smaller tasks. Each one gets a dedicated gem, passing information down the line from one to the next."

Twilight tapped a hoof to her muzzle. "Break the task down. It's not a bad idea, but we would need some way to," she waved her hoof vaguely, "to store the information. To pass it from one enchantment to the next."

"Darling, that is just the work of another enchantment," Rarity said excitedly. "If we set all the gems in the same piece, we can treat them as a single enchantment."

Twilight blinked and smiled. "You know what, Rarity? That might just be an idea."





Three days later, the three ponies were gathered around a plate of pale yellow metal in what Rainbow had declared The Laserless Lab of Lame.

Which was why Rainbow had not been invited. Twilight instead turned to her number one assistant. "Spike? Final pre-experiment preliminary checklist, please."

Spike rolled his eyes and unrolled a scroll. He cleared his throat. "One. Check integrity of each gem's enchantment. Subpoints A through F."

Twilight and Rarity probed the plate gently with their magic. Six gemstones were arranged in a circle around its edge; a diamond, ruby, star sapphire, emerald, and two amethyst. The unicorns checked each gem in turn, announcing that the enchantments were stable.

Spike checked off the subpoints. "Two. Integrity of the crystal."

A large shard of Imperial crystal made up the center of the disk. "The enchantment is very faint," Twilight reported.

"I can't sense it at all," Rarity complained.

"It's there," Twilight assured her. "Exactly as planned."

"Check," Spike said. "Three. Interface."

Whooves held up a thin wire that ended in a gold alligator clip with a topaz chip embedded in it. "We got a definitive reaction in yesterday's dry test and the mechanical components are in good order."

"Check," Spike marked off the item. "Four and final, recording."

Twilight levitated a stack of papers next to the disk and placed a quill on top of them. The quill had a short, pure silver rod embedded deep in the quill's calamus. The nearest amethyst glowed a faint lavender and the quill twitched. "Ready," Twilight announced.

"That's it," Spike said. "Preparation checklist next, Twilight?"

"I think so," Twilight said. "Rarity? Doctor?"

"By all means, darling," Rarity said.

"No time like the present," Whooves agreed. "What's first?"

Spike unfurled his scroll a bit further. "Review each gem enchantment by function."

Whooves nodded and set down his clip. "Very well. The topaz translates the electronic signals the alien machine uses into magical pulses."

"The amethyst repeats these pulses to the crystal," Twilight added. "The crystal records the pulses inside itself."

"The ruby uses your translation spell to turn the pulses into, well, meaning," Rarity continued. "And the crystal updates itself?"

"Then the diamond tries to fit the information into a meaningful order," Whooves said doubtfully. "I'm still not sure how that works."

"It has to do with the Smelly Hoof Principle of Context," Twilight explained. "Then the star sapphire uses the translation spell again to turn the structured information into Equestrian language."

"The emerald checks the result and reverts the translation to await more information if it is incomplete," Whooves said.

"And finally the amethyst takes the enchanted pen to write the result," Rarity squealed. "I must say, this is more exciting than I expected magical research to be."

"Oh, this is nothing," Spike said casually. "We're always making weird gizmos around here. Why just the other day I built a-"

"What's next on the list, Spike?" Twilight asked eagerly.

Spike shot his big sister/mother/it's complicated a dirty look and glanced at the scroll. "Attach the interface to the amethyst. Do not use magic."

Whooves picked up one end of the wire in his teeth and pushed it inside a notch carved for it in the amethyst's setting. "Allonsy."

"Clip the interface to the device," Spike read off. "This will begin the experiment."

Twilight picked up the clip in her magic and breathed slowly. "This is it, ponies," she said. "I am attaching the clip to the probable connector on the alien device." Twilight carefully positioned the clip inside the casing of the connector of the alien chip. She released the clamp slowly and let the bare metal teeth touch the metal of the chip.

Almost instantly the disk glowed with a white aura. It was dim, indistinct, growing out of the central crystal. It grew slowly, creeping out from the center to cover the whole of the enchanted plate in a hazy, ovoid mist of power, white as fresh snow.

Whooves and Rarity stepped back, but Twilight tip-hooved up and peered carefully at the aura. "Is that all?" she muttered.

Color flickered over the aura, gone almost too fast to be seen. Then came another pulse, and another. Blue, orange, teal, umber, red, orange again, chartreuse, periwinkle. They came from different directions and fled over the white, seeming to gain in speed. The aura grew in intensity, still white but resembling a kaleidoscope with the frequency of flashes within the haze.

"Astonishing," Rarity whispered. "If I could capture this in a fabric..."

"Brilliant," Whooves marveled. "note how complex the resulting pattern is? Theoretically the functioning of the device maps directly to the meaning of the message in its original encoding, but I confess I can't see any intellect being able to process this quickly."

"Prismatic excitement was always a possibility," Twilight muttered. "I am worried that it hasn't grabbed the quill yet."

"Maybe it hasn't found anything meaningful, dear," Rarity offered gently. "For all we know, that little piece of plastic could be blank."

"Impossible," Twilight said with certainty. "Spike and I both saw it. It had a full report on pegasus flight. We should get that, if nothing else."

Moments later the enchanted quill sprung into action. Gripped by the pale lavender magic of the device's amethyst it flew over the paper, scribbling out the first translation.

Twilight stared eagerly and read aloud. "'Error, access to central repository/command structure absent.' That sounds like the last screen Spike and I got out of the alien device. 'Check functioning of communication component using the following methodology. If no improvement is evident, contact technology support services.'" Twilight's voice trailed to a mumble and an uncontrollable smile spread over her muzzle. "It even had pictures its drawing," she squealed. She clapped her forehooves together. "Oh the research!"

"Care to share, darling?" Rarity asked.

Twilight beamed. "We just translated the operating instructions for a device that pulls information from the Federals' central archive. It uses the same kind of interface this chip does. In a few days, maybe a week, we could know everything!"