David couldn’t help but facepalm.
He groaned in frustration, letting the pen in his right hand drop to a clatter on the desk top and bringing the appendage over his keyboard, right on top of the enter button. Rubbing his forehead, he blinked several times while staring at the glowing computer screen, trying to get the sensation of dryness out of his increasingly sore eyes. Even through the orange tint of his glasses he felt the glare of the only source of light in the room right on the surface of his irises. His finger slapped the enter button, shuffling through several dozen copies of error messages his computer had outputted, going through each and every one. His left hand ran over his face from high to low, dragging the skin along his fingertips, his youth pulling the stretched flesh back to their proper position in no time.
He heard Twilight let out a moan of soreness from the other side of the illuminated glass. “How’re you holding up on your end?”
“This magic’s not getting any easier to do,” Twilight complained. “No matter how many times I try to understand it, every time I try to cast a spell there’s some kind of energy feedback that creates a conducted pulse around the vicinity.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a tiny explosion occurs right in my face.”
David’s eyebrows rose. “Why didn’t you tell me that seventeen spells ago?”
“Oh, they’re not that bad. They’re not really true explosions, they’re just sudden blasts of hot air and smoke materializing two inches away from my muzzle. It’s not any worse than what I deal with from one of my friends, Pinkie Pie, and her Party Cannon, and I’ve handled worse in my own experiments too.”
The last of the message boxes were dismissed from David’s screen. He placed his cheek on his balled fist, leaned his elbow against the table and sighed. Looking down, he briefly went over the three pages of notes that he had scribbled over the course of time that he couldn’t exactly keep track of. Recordings of causes, effects, hypothesise and details about the several experiments and tests they held made the blunt of the content in his writings. He didn’t consider it to be very much, and was hoping that they would have a little bit more to go off of after all of the so-called “progress” that they were supposed to be making.
His memory flashed back to various moments of high school. There was a reason why he was an English major and not something of a scientific background.
“Ok, before we go any further, let’s review the key facts that we know for certain about you inside my computer,” David decided, lifting his head and grabbing the pen with his right hand, tapping the end of it on the words of the parchment.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Twilight agreed, her voice a bit woozy.
“We know that your ‘magic’ has an effect on my computer,” David began, starting at the top of the list, reading at points where the cursive was either legible or not crossed out. “We know that depending on the ‘magic’ you try to do, you will cause several different effects on my computer.”
His head thought about a brief moment of fright a mere ten minutes ago where Twilight almost crashed the entire system by opening up multiple copies of The Elder Scrolls VIII by accident as a result of her special “Mustache-ify” spell. He shuddered.
He continued. “We know that your normal means of casting magic doesn’t work inside my computer, and instead of producing the intended effect that the original ‘spell’ was supposed to have, it instead does something screwy with my software, and in some extreme cases my hardware.”
There was a brand new burn on David’s left leg that perfectly complimented the one right above it that he got the previous day. He rubbed his feet together anxiously against the blue, prickly carpet beneath him.
“We know that the ‘magic’ that you can normally sense around you has severely changed, and the ‘laws of magic’ as you have called it are completely swapped for a new set of rules that we don’t know yet. And finally,” David transitioned, letting go of the pen once more to look up at the computer monitor again, eyeballing Task Manager. “We definitely know that you can feel things while you’re in cyberspace.”
“Cyberspace?” Twilight asked.
“Yeah, Cyberspace. I can’t just keep calling where you exist ‘my computer’ all the time, can I? I have to give it a cool, new name that fits its importance.”
“Is there any specific meaning to the word ‘Cyberspace’? Where did you get it from?”
“Well, Cyberspace is a bit of an older term,” David explained, resting his left wrist on the desk while the other rose up in the air, gesturing to the wide monitor as he went. “But it basically means the whole of a network of computers. Of course, I’m not connected to any kind of network at the moment, but the word still fits the situation. You’re in a space that is very, very cyber.”
“What’s a cyber?”
“I have no idea,” David admitted, throwing his hands over his shoulder, shrugging while rolling his eyes.
“Argh,” Twilight enunciated, the sound of her hoof rubbing the back of her head barely getting through David’s headphones. “This would be so much easier if I could practice this in a controlled environment. The fact that I end up missing most of the results of each test because I don’t get to observe most of the effects put a real detriment in our potential progress!”
“Isn’t the ‘magic’ a real pain in the behind too?” David asked.
“Yes, it’s a part of my troubles, but only a part,” Twilight said. “All magic must rely on a base set of rules, no matter how nonsensical it may be. Even though there is only one common set of laws that all Unicorns use, Gryphons have documented the same laws from a different point of view, adding new lines and equations to things ponykind hadn’t the ability to explain before! The same thing happened with Minotaurs too, where they had a different view on what happened while observing magic, as well as Zebras. There's an entire equation proving the existence of logic in every single instance of magic. Therefore, if it is magic, then it must have rules!”
Twilight yelped as her last statement forced a bit of static to shoot out of her horn without her control, somehow causing a trace amount of electricity to bounce from the computer case over to the side of David’s foot. He jumped in his seat.
“But what if there isn’t any magic in my computer? You know, you're not exactly in Equestria anymore, so what if the magic that you're familiar with actually just doesn't exist and you're dealing with something completely different that you think is magic but isn't?” David followed, hissing as he held his affected foot in his two hands, his knee pulled up to his chest.
Twilight sighed wearily. “Yeah, and I remember you said before that magic doesn’t exactly exist on your world, does it?”
“Nope.”
Twilight growled, stomping her hoof into the invisible floor that she claimed to be on. Then, she took a moment and deeply inhaled through her nose, breathing back out in a slow, calming fashion. This repeated several times, all in which David took the time to slowly put his foot back down and lean forward in his chair with one ear towards the monitor, listening intently. Her sudden change in demeanor was soothing his anger for some odd reason. He was trying to figure out what she was doing, but shook his head once he realized how stupid he must have looked, trying to listen in on something with his headset firmly wrapped around his head.
“I’m way too tired for this crap,” he thought to himself. “At least we’ve begun to make a list of what spell does what.”
“Yep!” Twilight piped up, suddenly sounding more joyful than ever. “I've got it! Spi—David, could you take a note?”
“Uhh,” David uttered, scrambling to get a relatively fresh piece of paper and grab his pen. “Yeah, sure. I’m ready.”
“Title: Effects of Arcane Sciences in computers, observation one. The effects of altered magic in the confined area of a computer are puzzling. However, when considering Metal Alchemy’s three laws of conversional mass, we can conclude that existing Mana in the environment when channeled through a traditional cast is not translated into an auric form, but instead translates as some sort of electricity-based form. The evidence is shown through the reactions of the computer, through which according to my fellow, er, researcher David, reports to me that there is a clear cause and effect from the use of conventional spells such as levitation, barriers, focused pressure, applied pressure, sub-casted auto-genius animation—”
“Whoa whoa whoa, hang on Twilight,” David stopped, taking the moment of her pause to shake out his wrist. “You’re going too fast!”
“I am?” Twilight guessed. “Sorry. I’m normally used to having somedragon write my scientific observations for me during my experiments.”
“Some dragon?”
“Yeah. His name’s Spike, and he’s the best little assistant a pony could have. I-I’ve known him since he was first hatched, and I hatched him with a spell for an entrance exam to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns—”
“Twilight, I’m really, really sorry,” David interrupted again. “But you’re getting off topic. Do you think you could tell me about ‘Spike’ later, after you’ve finished your thought so we don’t lose it?”
“O-oh,” Twilight stuttered. “Ok. Alright. I mean, you’re right, of course. We need to keep on topic anyways. Ahem, as I was saying…”
The following minutes were lost to David as his hand rapidly drew strokes against the paper pinned by his opposite palm. Twilight continued to dictate her thoughts through the connection they were given, David’s thoughts in the back of his mind still percolating about theories on how pony.exe tied to everything. A slight breeze started to pick up outside and drift into the house, mixing the scent of oak seeds and wet mildew into David’s darkened room from the second floor. His low bed sat with its red blankets somewhat fitted onto the rectangular frame on the top face, although not tucked in properly to the sides with a multitude of pillows near the head. The mattress laid rest in the one corner, with the door from his room right beside it and the window near the feet. Across from his beds horizontal sat light wooden drawers holding every single piece of clothing he ever owned inside, stuffed in haphazardly by their owner as he tried to make some sort of effort into organizing his wearable belongings. Strewn across the wall above the drawers were several video game posters consisting of characters slaying dragons over a burned landscape, a singular man dressed completely in metal stalking down an ominous, futuristic corridor, an elf with green attire striking a pose while surrounded by menacing lizard-men and many others.
David posted the final period of the analysis with a single dramatic dot, and he blinked when it occurred to him that Twilight had stopped talking. He looked up from his screen, expecting to meet eye-to-eye with his speaker. He felt emptiness in his chest when the gentle glow of his computer monitor was brought to his vision instead. His pen dipped towards the desk as he loosened his grip on it and he straightened his back.
“Is that all?” he asked, stretching his arms high over his head and letting out a deep yawn.
“Yep,” Twilight responded. “That’s pretty much it.”
“Ok, so we definitely have a few more spells to go through from what I can tell of your extensive knowledge of magic, so—”
David stopped in an instant. His eyes grazed over the time at the bottom right corner of the screen, widening.
“David, what’s wrong?” Twilight queried after sensing his worry from his sudden halt in words.
“Oh crap,” he said, reading over the numbers for the fourth time. “I lost track of time. It’s really, really late, and I need to be up for classes tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Twilight stated.
“I’m real sorry Twilight, but I’m going to have to cut off our study session here. I need to get to bed, and if I’m lucky I’ll fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillows,” David prattled, closing useless windows that were sitting around as the results of some of the activities that Twilight had been acting in.
“Oh, ok,” Twilight said weakly.
“I’m going to need to put the computer asleep, so get ready—”
Twilight didn’t say anything as David stopped. His mind was restless, racing as he put two and two together.
“Oh my goodness,” David began, running his hand through his hair, taking off his glasses and letting them fall onto the desk. He could taste his dehydration between his lips, a disgusting sourness on the top of his tongue. “I completely forgot about you explaining Spike! Oh god, I’m sorry Twilight, I really am. I can listen to you all you want tomorrow once I get back from work, alright?”
“Ok,” Twilight responded quietly. “That sounds good.”
He frowned. “Twilight…”
“No! It’s fine!” she suddenly shouted, pushing through her point. “It’s fine, really. I’m ok with it. And I’ll be happy to talk to you tomorrow, David.”
“Ok,” David said, getting up from his chair. “See you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow.”
As David clicked the sleep button, Twilight tried to smile into the empty darkness as it closed in on her.