I was getting worse. It was a simple factual analysis. I couldn't smell anything or stand upright, and now my sense of touch was being affected as well. Anything my hands touched on was a color and a shape, unrelated to the object I was in contact with. I was probably fortunate that I wasn't completely overwhelmed; the part of the brain that filters out ongoing sensations, like the feel of clothing in touch with your skin, was still working. For now.
Twilight would probably not be very happy to hear about this. But she would also be unhappy to find out I hadn't told her. So it wouldn't be kind either way, but it'd be more honest to tell her, and more in line with what she would want. Simple decision, then.
"Twilight?" I told her. "I'm having a new symptom."
She dropped her hooves, and her expression went quickly from glee to worry. And then it went to pain as she dropped onto her rear and put her hooves up to her head and yelped. She still had the horn inhibitor clamped into place. Lero picked her up and hugged her to his chest. However long he'd been in Equestria, the low-tech lifestyle had clearly done well for his physical condition. She took a moment to catch her breath, then pushed herself away, giving him a brief kiss. When her hooves were back on the ground, she walked to me.
"What's wrong now, Gus?" she asked.
I set my hand on the armrest of the too-small wheelchair. "This feels like a purple diamond," I told her. I touched her shoulder. "You feel like a pink star."
Twilight looked at me, then over at Lero. "Lero? You don't feel things in color, do you?"
He shook his head wordlessly. Twilight looked back to me. "Have you been... experiencing other things like this?"
I nodded. Simple body language, easy to use. "Several. I saw red lightning, tasted an orange apple, and I've felt several blue balloons."
She began to pace. "The Elements of Harmony? Why would you be seeing the Elements of Harmony? And how can you feel purple and pink? This doesn't make any sense! And not in the Pinkie Sense sense, that's just impossible, this doesn't make sense just in the words! What does purple feel like?" She turned back to me. "What does purple feel like?"
I tried to find words to explain it. I don't think I did well. "It's purple. Like your coat. When I look at you, I know that you're purple because that's what my senses tell me. When I feel the purple diamonds, I know they're purple because that's what my senses tell me."
Twilight returned to pacing again. "All right. All right. So your senses are... crossed. Spike, I need books on neurology! What do we have?"
The little dragon looked upward for a moment, then scratched his head. "Just Welcome To Your Brain. We ordered all those other ones on inter-library loan, but they haven't arrived yet."
"How can they not have arrived yet?" demanded Twilight. "A pegasus could have visited all those libraries in a day and picked up all the books for us already!"
Spike coughed. "Not every librarian has a number-one assistant, Twilight."
The unicorn groaned. "Right. They probably haven't even got the request forms in yet. And then they won't process them until the end of the day, and some of the books might be out. Okay. Then we can solve this with what we have on hand. Information. I need more information. Without using spells on Gus. Or around Gus. Think, Twilight, Think!"
Lero took a chair. "You know you just frazzle yourself when you pace, Twilight," he told her. "Come over here and sit down with me."
She stamped her hooves. "This is serious, Lero!" she insisted. "Yes, I relax with you, but I need to concentrate!"
"Have you ever heard of the Cardboard Dog Theory, Twilight?" I asked.
"What in Equestria does a cardboard dog have to do with anything?" she snapped. "Are those what you have instead of timberwolves? I don't see how it's relevant!"
"The Cardboard Dog Theory is that when you have a complicated process that you need to review, the best thing you can do is to explain it to someone else. By saying it out loud, you make yourself think through all of the steps. Since the listener doesn't need to provide anything but a target for you to talk to, you can replace a living listener with a cardboard cutout of a dog. The rest of us don't know about neurology, while you know enough to have and operate your own brain scanner. We can be your audience. So. Start with the basic question and define the terms," I explained.
Twilight stared at me, then turned and resumed pacing. "Fine. The basic question is, 'Why is Gus having freaky sense problems that manifest as the Elements of Harmony?' Gus is the human in the wheelchair, freaky sense problems are touching colors, and the Elements of Harmony are ancient and powerful artifacts in the form of five necklaces and a tiara, with gems in the shapes and colors that Gus has been experiencing, that let me and my friends manifest our personal attributes, Honesty, Loyalty, Generousity, Laughter, Kindness, and Magic, as an incredibly powerful magical rainbow beam that undoes evil magic, restores damaged... minds..." She trailed off.
"That does sound useful," Lyra commented.
"Oh, shut up," grumbled Twilight. "It's not that simple! The Elements are kept in a vault in Canterlot to keep them safe, and they're only supposed to be used to protect Equestria from threats. And Gus is already experiencing the Elements as it is, and he's getting worse, not better. Using the Elements of Harmony might kill him outright." Her eyes widened. "And if we killed someone with the Elements of Harmony, we'd be the worst possible ponies to have the Elements of Harmony anymore, and Equestria would be defenseless, and the Diamond Dogs and griffons and dragons and six million kinds of monsters we don't even know about would all attack us at once and Ponyville would be destroyed and OW OW OW OW!"
She dropped on her rear and grabbed at her horn again. "Stupid thing!" She clenched her eyes tightly shut and gritted her teeth.
"Impressive," Lyra mentioned. "I think that's the fastest you've ever stopped spiralling into panic."
"Not. Worth. It," Twilight forced through tight-clenched teeth. Lero came over to rub her neck. They took a few minutes while she calmed down. I waited.
"Okay," she said when she was settled. "So the Elements of Harmony may or may not already be involved in Gus' problem. They may or may not be doing any good, or might even be part of the problem. So... the next thing to do is to investigate. But that means magic around Gus and Princess Celestia said not to do that. So how do we find out whether Gus is being affected by magic without doing any magic?"
"What about your brain scanner?" asked Lero. "You said that didn't do any magic."
"No active magic," Twilight said, shaking her head. "It has magic involved, and Princess Celestia said not to do any magic around Gus. What am I supposed to do?"
"Nothing," said Lyra, sitting herself back onto a seat.
Twilight's eyes lit up. Not literally, this time. Not like the sparkles. "That's it!" she exclaimed. "Perfect! Even if I'm not doing any magic, there's always some magic around Gus, because Equestria has magic everywhere! So to find out whether magic is affecting Gus, I need to do... nothing! No magic at all, and see if there's any change! But to do that without doing magic, I have to..." Her voice accelerated past my ability to understand her. Lero looked to me and shrugged. Lyra had closed her eyes. She was sitting up, so I guessed she was meditating, not sleeping.
Twilight raced to a blackboard and let out a scream. This time it didn't stop her. I watched her and the board dissolve into numbers. I watched two red-hot glowing pieces of metal fly in opposite directions from her horn hard enough to embed themselves into the walls.
Lero gasped. "Twilight! Magic!" he called out.
I held up a hand, watching the probabilities dance against the wall. Not watching. Sensing. There never will be words. "It's all right," I told him. "I'll wait outside."
Lero looked at the blank part of my vision, where decisions were turning into realities and weaving themselves into the world. "If you're sure," he said.
"It'll all work out," I told him. He wheeled me out of the lab.
***
Lero and I spent the next few hours talking about home. He left a few years before I did, or at least before I lost the ability to meaningfully interact with most of the world, so I could tell him about some things he had missed. It was getting late in the afternoon when Lyra came to tell us Twilight was ready.
The blackboards and several walls were covered in writing. Some of it looked like mathematical functions using symbols I couldn't recognize, some of it was writing in such sloppy form I couldn't read it, and a great deal of it reminded me a lot of the numbers and waveforms that replaced the world when magic happened to me. That made sense, if those swirling, waving lines were representations of the same thing. She had a magic horn; of course she would have some experience with magic, even if not expressed the same way I perceived it.
The tables and equipment had all been shoved against the walls. The middle of the room was largely occupied by a circular device laid out on the floor, a ring about fifteen feet in diameter and a foot tall. It had wiring, tubing, copper bars, several large feathers, and a number of pieces I didn't recognize built into it. There was a circle of some white granules around the entire thing, and the floor of the interior of the ring was coated in more. It looked like salt or sugar.
"There!" Twilight said, pointing. "A triple-buffered localized magical exclusion region generator! Nopony ever thought about something like this before!" She was prancing in place. "Just get inside and I'll power it with my horn, and you won't be affected because the exclusion region will insulate you from the M.E.R.G.'s own operation! There's going to be all sorts of uses for this!"
"Is there any point to asking how it works?" asked Lero.
Twilight opened her mouth. Spike spoke first. "It blocks outside magic from getting in and it sucks up all the magic inside to make it into lightning," he said. He must have seen someone look surprised, because he followed up with, "I haven't been Twilight's number one assistant all this time and not learned about magic! I probably know more magic theory than anypony who's not a unicorn."
Twilight had a range of expressions run across her face. Even with my growing familiarity, I didn't get all of them. She settled for hugging the little dragon. "That's my Spike! The best assistant there's ever been. And yes, you could describe it that way. So, Gus, would you step into the ring?"
I tried to make sense of the device. It didn't make an electrical circuit anywhere, some of the tubing was open at both ends, it had crystals of various colors and shapes stuck to it in apparently-random places, and there was an eggbeater poking through a ball of yarn at one spot. That was all the sense I could make of it. I assumed Twilight knew what she was doing. "Lero, could you help?" I asked, since stepping wasn't much of an option for me at the moment.
"Oh. Uh, right. Lero, could you help Gus in?" Twilight added, blushing.
"This is safe, right?" he asked, but he helped me stand, leaning on him long enough for him to put the chair inside and help me sit back down in it. He felt like a swirl of apples, butterflies, and lightning bolts.
"Absolutely! One hundred percent totally safe," declared Twilight. She looked at one of the blackboards, frowned, stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth, erased a spot, then wrote something else in. "Perfectly safe."
Spike and Lyra were underneath one of the lab tables with flak helmets on. They had one waiting for Lero when he joined them.
Twilight turned around, then stuck her tongue out at the others. "It's going to be fine!" she told them. "I checked very carefully. There might be a little noise, but it's not going to hurt anypony."
"How about the lightning?" Lyra asked.
Twilight paused, then trotted over to a cupboard, pulled out a long metal pole in her mouth, and stuck it into a spot on the ground. "Perfectly safe," she said.
Then she aimed her horn at me and fired.
A large bolt of lightning shot out from the eggbeater and hit the long metal pole, which glowed cherry red. A sensation of dropping pressure around me came to me, but my ears didn't pop. For a moment there was a crystalline pattern in the air, and then... nothing. I didn't feel any different.
"Sorry, Twilight," I said. "I don't think it did anything."
She regarded me, purple light still flowing from her horn to the ring, then broke out into a wide smile. "Oh, yes it did! Did you just say you're sorry, Gus? As in, you feel sorry?"
I thought about that for a moment. "It's the polite thing to say," I said. "Conversational habit. I don't actually feel anything."
She was still grinning at me from beneath her magical beam. "But you haven't said you're sorry about anything until now, because you didn't feel sorry. You couldn't. You were being influenced by the Element of Honesty this whole time! How does your chair feel?"
I looked down and ran my hand along the armrest. "I don't feel anything at all," I said. I pressed harder. "No colors or shapes. If I wasn't looking, I wouldn't know I was touching it."
Lero, Spike, and Lyra crawled out from under the lab table. They kept the helmets on, though.
"Can you stand up?" Lyra asked.
I tried. I dropped back into the chair. "Still no sense of balance," I reported. I sniffed, then added, "Or scent."
"So those are actual damage, not magical influences," Twilight said, still projecting her energy at the ring. "But the mixed-up sensory impressions are. Without magic around you, your senses don't report the Elements of Harmony. So the MERG is insulating you from magic!"
"Yay!" said a voice from under the table. Pinkie Pie jumped out, also wearing a flak helmet. She bounced across the room, over the ring, and into the field with me before anyone could react. "Gus is saved!"
Blue balloons.
Everything blue balloons.
Laughter, laughter everywhere, laughter inside me and outside me and everywhere there is.
Happy joy laughter hope delight parties togetherness optimism laughter laughter laughter.
Not being happy. Being made of happy.
I was face-down on the ground. There was salt on my lips. That answered that. Someone was pulling me upright. I looked. Lero. Redheaded, bearded. My head was swimming. I realized I was still laughing and stopped. He said something, but I had trouble making out his words.
Pinkie Pie was holding Lyra in a death grip and sobbing. Lyra was holding her back. Twilight was staring into the ring, projecting her energy into the device she built, but her legs were shaking.
"Say something!" The words came back to me. Lero was talking to me.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Pinkie jumped in with you," Lero told me. "You started laughing like a... hyena."
"Pinkie has the Element of Laughter," Twilight said, but she was starting to breathe hard. "Not the physical one, with her, but that's the Element she wears. When she jumped into the MERG's interior, you were being isolated from all other magic, but Laughter was right there with you."
Pinkie was still sobbing against Lyra's side. Lero's eyes widened. "Twi! If there's no magic inside the field, how did Pinkie keep going?"
"Ponies have their own magic," Twilight said. "The MERG only drains out environmental magic. If Pinkie stayed inside for a long time, it would start to drain her, but it was safe to walk into for a while. I said it's perfectly safe. That's for ponies too. Um... I may have made one teensy little miscalculation, though."
Lero put his arms under mine and started to lift. He wasn't moving toward the chair, but toward the edge of the ring.
"Not about safety!" Twilight insisted. "Just... about how tiring this is. I... think I'm not going to be able to hold it very long."
"How long is 'very long?'" Spike asked.
"Maybe a few more minutes?" she said, and swallowed. "At most?"
Pinkie was still sobbing, but Lyra was paying enough attention to the rest of the room to ask, "Can I help? I'm not remotely in your class, but you know what I can do."
Twilight's beam wavered as she started to shake her head 'no,' then stopped herself. "You'd have to be perfectly synchronized to me, and we're not even sisters, let alone twins," she said. "The odds of any two random other unicorns being perfectly matched up is... carry the... let's just say that there probably haven't been any non-sibling perfect matches, ever."
Lyra nodded and returned to comforting the pink pony.
Spike looked up at the board, then to the lavender unicorn, then back to the board. "So one unicorn has to power the whole machine alone, Twilight's the most powerful unicorn in just about ever, and Twilight's not going to be able to run it for more than a few minutes. That explains why no one's ever tried it before!"
"Very... good... deduction," Twilight said. "I think... it's an accelerating drain... not ... linear..."
She dropped to her side, gasping for breath, and the beam broke. Everything went to pink stars. Since Twilight's mark was the star and one of the Elements was magic, it made sense that a sudden inrush of magic would manifest itself to me as pink stars. It was still disorienting. But friendly.
Lero's grip on me was apples, butterflies, and lightning again. He helped me back into the chair and wiped the salt from my face. "You okay, Gus?" he asked.
"I don't think I'm hurt," I told him. He nodded, then ran to Twilight. She was panting, but she didn't seem to be hurt. He picked her up and held her anyhow.
***
Spike and Twilight spent the next half-hour copying down the notes Twilight had drawn all over the boards and walls. Lyra brought Pinkie over to me, and I hugged her.
"You promised you'd make me smile, Pinkie," I told her. She was still crying. "I smiled. It was a real smile, even. And laughed."
She switched to throwing her hooves around me. "Not like that! I didn't mean it like that! I didn't mean I was going to make you make you smile! Just make you smile!"
"Maybe that was the only way," I told her.
She stopped crying, but she squeezed me hard. "Nopony breaks a Pinkie Promise," she whispered to me.
"I promised too," I told her. She released the hug and stared into my eyes.
"Say it again," she demanded.
"Cross two worlds and all the rest, this'll turn out for the best," I told her.
Pinkie nodded, then beamed at me. "Kay then!" She let go with one hoof, and I felt things starting to vanish on me. She eeped and let go of me entirely. "I stopped! I stopped!"
The door opened. Princess Celestia was standing there, mane already turned pink. Her body was very still as her head moved, looking around the room. Her eyes narrowed. That was a very upset pony. "TWILIGHT SPARKLE!" she bellowed out. "IS THIS YOUR IDEA OF NOT CASTING SPELLS?"
Twilight Sparkle whimpered and shrank against Lero. "... Yes?" she squeaked. "It was keeping magic from getting to him at all, but I couldn't keep it going I'm sorry Princess" and then I lost what she was saying.
Her words apparently did the trick, in any case. Celestia's expression softened, and then she sighed and walked over to nuzzle Twilight's cheek. "Very well, my faithful student," she said. "You never cease to surprise me with your capacity for inventive thinking. But Twilight? When I tell you something is a royal command, I do mean it as a command, and I expect you to honor the spirit of it, not find ways to work around my words."
"Yes, Princess," Twilight said, in a very small voice. "I'm sorry..."
Celestia nuzzled her again, then rose and turned to me. "Gus Wainwright. Were you harmed?"
I shook my head. "No, your highness. We did discover that I am being influenced by the Elements of Harmony."
Pinkie Pie nodded her head very rapidly. "Gus said a lie and then when I jumped in he turned super-laughy and it was totally not how that was going to happen in my head but how it did happen when I tried it and I was super-sad and then Gus told me it's all gonna work out so it's totally okay again!"
Celestia gave Pinkie Pie a smile. I recalled a similar smile from my second-grade teacher when a classmate proudly told her how snakes shed their skin, which was endlessly fascinating to my classmate.
"Thank you, Pinkie," she said graciously, then gestured with a wing. A Day Guard pony pushed a cart in from the hall. It had a wooden box on it. Four other ponies followed. Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Rarity, and that yellow pony. Fluttershy. Twilight, Spike and Pinkie gasped. Lyra and Lero looked at each other and shrugged.
"The Elements of Harmony?" Twilight asked. "But Princess! If the Elements are what's hurting Gus, we need to keep him away from them, not bring them here!" Her eyes widened. "Maybe we shouldn't be around him! If we're the ones who use the Elements, then just being around us might be making his situation worse. We should get Gus on the first train to Appleloosa, or further!"
"Hush, Twilight," Celestia told her gently. "Lero, would you help Gus into Twilight's brain scanning device?"
He nodded stiffly. "Of course, Princess," he told her. She winced slightly, but smiled at him anyhow. Lero's expressions were harder to read than ponies, by now. Their faces were very mobile, to say the least.
"But Princess, the scanner uses magic. You said to not use magic, and it might make him even worse," protested Twilight.
Celestia shook her head. "I have something to show you, Twilight, and Gus as well. I fear I know what is happening."
Lero pushed the brain scanner out from where it had been shoved to the wall, and handed me the colander. I put it on my head, and Twilight activated the machine. I saw the probabilities dancing around the wires, but nothing else. The printer chattered, and Lero pinned the output to the wall.
"It's... almost five percent larger than just this morning," Twilight breathed. "Oh... oh, Gus! I'm so sorry! I'm sorry!"
Another apologetic pony hugged me. Twilight was notably weaker than Pinkie. I hugged her back. "It'll be all right," I reassured her.
"Twilight, if you would scan yourself next?" Celestia asked. I put the colander on Twilight's head. It rested against the horn.
She ran the scan. Her brain was bright glowing shapes of magic all throughout, much more intense than Big Mac's chart. Celestia pointed to one section with her horn.
"Do you know what this is, Twilight?" she asked.
Twilight looked at the indicated part of her own brain. "The annulus thaumatis?" she guessed.
"Exactly," the alicorn said, then gestured to my scan. "And this?"
Twilight stared. "But... Celestia, I don't know the regions of the human brain. Nopony does. How can I tell what that part is?"
Celestia tapped the chart with the tip of her horn. "Don't tell me what you've memorized, Twilight. Tell me what it looks like."
Twilight looked at my chart, then back at her own. Then at mine again. Then at hers. Her eyes went wide. "That... that's an annulus thaumatis. Backward. But..."
She pulled away from me and began to pace, tail twitching, staring forward as she went. Princess Celestia watched her expectantly. Lero, Lyra, and Spike just watched.
"The annulus thaumatis is the region that lets a unicorn regulate her own magical energies as they're supplied into the horn. Gus doesn't have any magical energies, so there's nothing to regulate and no purpose to him having one, and Lero doesn't have one, so this is the problem. But with no magical energies to regulate, it wouldn't do anything, but it's backward, so that would mean..." She slowed in her pacing, then stopped, facing the wall. "That would mean that energies from outside Gus are flowing into him through the annulus thaumatis, pumping more and more magic into him all the time..."
Celestia lowered her head. "I am sorry, Gus."
Twilight whirled. "Princess! You knew about this? You knew this was going to happen? That Gus was going to get worse?"
The princess shook her head quickly. "No, Twilight, never. I did recognize certain aspects of what happened to Gus, but it was not nearly this fully formed. I believed that certain beings had done something cruel to Gus, to make him able to feel magic but never understand it or be able to use it." She lowered her head. "I underestimated the depths of their depravity."
Twilight's hooves dragged across the floor as she stepped forward. "Celestia... What are you saying?"
The white alicorn looked me in the eye. She looked sad. I had an urge to hug her, but I couldn't stand. "Gus did not escape. He was thrown to us to make us watch him die."
The room was very quiet. Then Pinkie Pie said, "So how are we going to fix him?" She bounced over, nosed open the wooden box, and pulled a necklace onto herself. It had a blue balloon on it. I couldn't see her necklace, I could see it only as probabilities, but those probabilities were a blue balloon. It was an identity function. A fundamental lemma of this universe. Laughter is Laughter.
The others, save Twilight, took their necklaces as well. Twilight was breathing heavily, looking up at Celestia.
"Princess," she said. "What are you suggesting?"
Pinkie came over to me. I hugged her. She was a pony who was supposed to be hugged. I felt a blue balloon in my arms. "You know what to do, right?" I asked her.
"This is the best way?" she asked me.
"You'd better believe it," I told her.
She nodded, and rejoined her friends.
"If Gus remains in Equestria as he is, he will die, Twilight," Celestia said. "The only things that can save him are the Elements of Harmony."
"But Princess, the Elements are magic too! They're stronger magic than anything Gus would ever be exposed to just about any other way," Twilight argued. "This might just make his head explode!"
"Twilight," I called to her. She whirled. "I was much more disabled back on my world," I told her. "Coming here and being able to think clearly for even a few days is better than spending the rest of my life like I was. Even without being able to feel. The Elements aren't going to do anything bad. They need help. They need your help."
She stared at me. "Gus. What is it you think the Elements of Harmony are going to do to you? Just regular magic has made your brain worse today alone. That much magic is going to... I don't even know what it's going to do!"
"Neither do I," I admitted. "But it's going to work out."
"How do you know that?" she spluttered. "You keep saying that, but how do you know that?"
I nodded to her. "Because that's what I'm choosing."
Twilight stared at me. I looked back, calmly. I couldn't look back any other way.
Her head dropped. "Gus... You're sure?"
"I'm sure, Twilight," I told her.
Her hooves barely cleared the floor, but she walked over. She picked up the Element of Magic in her hooves and set it atop her head. Lero, Lyra, Spike, the guard, and even Celestia stepped back.
"Formation, girls," Twilight said quietly. Six ponies moved. Only Pinkie was smiling. The rest looked very still and serious.
"Thank you," I said to them all.
I saw the rainbow, and I made my choice.