Dreamstrider

by OkemosBrony

Chapter 21

I knock a little on Glacial’s door, and almost immediately, it swings open. Instead of seeing her there to greet me however, she’s sitting at the desk on the right side of the room, studying a book very closely.

“Hey Glacial, it’s Aurora. Can I come in?” I ask her.

“Yeah.” Not even looking up from the book, she gestures next to her. I sit down at her desk with her, and I can see that she’s reading a spellbook with a spell that looks a little too advanced for me.

“You study the spell I gave you?”

As I pull the old spellbook titled Advanced Magic, Volume XII with a sticky note marking one of the pages out of my saddlebags, I nod. Almost as soon as it’s in my hooves, she takes the book in her magic and puts it on her desk, then opens it up to the marked section and flips forward a few pages.

“Why did we both need to learn this?” I ask her as she’s scanning the pages in front of her for something. “You’re way better at magic than I am, probably would have been easier for just you to learn it. I might mess something up.”

“I don’t really understand all the detail they go into,” she says as she turns the page again, “but basically our blood is very choosy when it comes to who it wants to react to. Neither of us are good enough to be able to do this to somepony else’s blood, so we both had to learn this.”

“What now, then?”

Faster than I can take everything in, she places a pin in front of me and grabs a box of bandages and a few glass vials on a rack and places them on the desk in front of her.

I prick my hoof, and Glacial starts taking the little bit of blood that comes out in her magic. It hardly hurts, but it stings a tiny bit when she pinches my skin together to get me to bleed more. Once she’s got a little more out of me, she points to the box of bandages. “We should have enough now,” she says, “so you can put the bandage on.”

I grab one of the bandages in my magic and open it up, then apply it to the the tiny wound. Once that’s done, I take my blood from her and start casting the spell while she’s pricking her own hoof. I catch a quick glance of her poking herself, and she looks like she’s in way more pain than I was. Maybe I’m just used to it. Most of the roads in Coltlumbus are just dirt or short grass, so I’ve been getting thorns and splinters in my hooves since I’ve been walking; a tiny little prick is nothing. Glacial, however, has only lived in big cities with stone roads, so it’s probably a new feeling for her. And judging by her face, not a good one.

Eventually, she draws about as much blood as I did and quickly slaps a bandage on her wound before moving on to casting her spell. We sit in silence for a few minutes while we’re both trying to get this to work, and eventually, my blood glows silver like the color of my magic, meaning that it’s done. Making sure not to break my concentration on the blood and drop it all over Glacial’s desk, I grab a tiny vial and open it up before capturing the blood inside. Not long after, her blood glows a pale, icy blue, and she puts it inside a vial as well.

“Now just to calculate,” she beams, grabbing my vial and bringing it over to her.

“How exactly do we calculate the magic in our blood now?”

“Have to measure it,” she replies as she starts looking under her desk for something. A few quick seconds of searching later, she pulls out what looks like a kitchen scale but has an intricately-carved silver bowl on top instead of a flat surface. She takes her blood and pours it in, then writes something down on the paper next to her and levitates all the blood out before passing my vial to me.

“I’ll let you do the honors,” she smiles.

As I start pouring the blood into the bowl, I smile back. This is kind of fun, honestly. I’ve never really done any magical experiments just for fun before, so it’s nice to be able to. Nopony back home, not even my parents or sisters, is really that good at magic, so I wouldn’t have had the ability to when I was little. Unicorns raised around lots of other unicorns don’t know how lucky they have it to be surrounded by so many ponies who understand magic well. They’ll never be surrounded by all their classmates on the playground, begging them to do some crazy spell that probably isn't real they heard about in some fairy tale.

In all my thinking, I didn’t even notice Glacial staring at the reading on the scale as though something’s wrong. “What’s up?”

“Think the scale’s messed up,” she says. “Take your blood out and I’ll reset it, then we’ll try it again.”

I do as she says, and once she gives me the all clear to go again, I put it back in.

“Weird,” she whispers to herself.

“What’s up?”

“Getting a weird number from this.” She inspects the scale a little closer. “Everything looks right, and the number I got from my blood is pretty normal.”

“What number are you getting from my blood?”

“One.”

“One?” I repeat. “That’s not really a weird number.”

She looks at me like I just said something really stupid. “Yeah, it is.”

“Why? So my blood has one of something. One what, by the way?"

“Hundred percent. It says your blood has a magic concentration of one hundred percent.”

“And that means…?”

“It means every part of your blood is as full of magic as it can get while still staying something that isn’t magic. Your red blood cells, your white blood cells, even your plasma and platelets, which usually have very little magic in them, are pumped full of it.”

“What’s yours, then? You’re pretty magical, so yours is probably near that.”

“Nineteen percent,” she replies. “Anything above ten percent is considered above average, and twenty percent is considered very above average. Thirty percent is almost unheard of, so...imagine what that says about a hundred percent.”

“And you’re sure about this?”

“You may have done something wrong on your end.” She puts my blood back into the vial, and with a flick of her hoof, rolls it towards me. “Go to the bathroom down at the end of the hall and clean it out, then we can try again; I’ll walk through all the steps with you this time. I’m going to look over my scale again to make sure it’s not somehow messed up.”

As I take the vial in my magic, I can see Glacial pop a panel off of the scale and grab a screwdriver. There aren’t any signs about where bathrooms are, so I have to wander up and down the hall until I find something that might give me any clue. Finally, at the end of the hall, there’s a door that has an image of both a toilet and a shower head magically burned into the wood. After pushing it open, I can see it branches off into two separate rooms: one with a long row of stalls on one wall and sinks on the other, and a room with what appear to be individual shower stalls on one side and sinks opposite them. I go into the room with the showers, because those sinks look larger which will make cleaning this a lot easier.

While I’m adjusting the central knob on the faucet to get warm water that doesn’t burn me when I try to use it, I take a little look around. There’s ten shower stalls, one of which is in use, and each has a sink right across from it on the other wall, so if all fifteen of the fillies in our year at Princess Celestia’s were living in here, we wouldn’t all be able to shower and get ready at the same time. I imagine that gets frustrating, unless four other fillies also live in Canterlot and they can somehow magically make sure that there’s enough for everypony that’s living here.

One of the shower doors is cracked, and I can see a detachable shower head, a little hole in the stone wall for I assume whatever you need to shower with, and a little bench. What surprises me the most, though, is the doors themselves. Most of them are just glass, but I can hear the shower going behind one of the doors, and I can't see through it; it looks almost like there's magic swirling around on the door. It's a rainbow of colors all mixing and moving and flowing freely. The only thing I've ever seen similar to it is that lava lamp in my room back home that Snowy gave me when she moved away to college, but even then, it's not quite the same.

The water pouring over my hoof steadies itself at a nice, warm temperature good for cleaning things, so I open the vial up and drop my blood into the sink. Instead of all going down in one piece, the bright red blood mixes with the water and goes down the drain like any other liquid would, but the silver magic that I put into it seems to have a mind of its own and exits the sink before just swirling around towards the ceiling and vanishing like smoke from a blown-out candle. Odd.

After cleaning and drying my vial, I exit the bathroom and walk back to Glacial’s room, the only open door on the floor. She’s just sitting there with her scale all ready, so there must not have been that much she needed to do.

“You ready to try this again?” she asks.

I sit down next to her and put my hoof out before grabbing the pin in my magic. “I guess I’m ready to try again.”

The magic surrounding the pin changes color, and I can feel it get pulled from my grasp. “You grab your blood,” she says. “Me taking it from you and holding it while you put a bandage on might have messed it up.”

Guess that makes sense, so I just shrug. “Whatever you think will work. Ready when you are.”

We go through the same process as before, but this time, I just have to hold my blood in my magic while she puts a bandage on my hoof.

“So I’ll walk you through all the steps this time, okay?”

“Okay,” I echo back.

She walks me through everything I need to do step-by-step, going into too much detail sometimes. Guess she’s just being thorough. After much more time than when I did this before, my blood turns silver and I pour it into the now-clean vial before Glacial inspects it and pours it into her scale’s bowl.

A quick “Gah!” from her after a few seconds startles me, causing me to snap my head towards her.

“What? Is everything okay?”

“Still getting the same number,” she sighs. “I’ll put everything we did in the report. Maybe Mister Cosmic will know what we did wrong and be able to help us correct it.”

“What if my magic levels really are that high? You know, just wondering?”

“You’d be a miracle of magic,” she laughs. “Nopony’s magic levels have ever been measured as being anywhere close to a hundred percent. Princess Celestia herself is only around forty percent or so, even.”

A thought passes through my head quickly. “What about Princess Luna?”

“Don’t know,” she shrugs. “I don’t think she’s ever been measured. Why?”

“It could have something to do with being a Dreamstrider,” I suggest. “I already have a lot of magic most ponies don’t have, so it could just be a part of that.”

“I guess so,” she mutters to herself while putting a hoof on her chin. “I’ll put it in the report that we think that could explain it. If Princess Luna’s never been measured, you’d be the first Dreamstrider to be...we wouldn’t have anything to compare you to, so we can’t tell if you’d be normal or not.”

“Is there anything like Dreamstriders out there that we could compare with? Anypony with that kind of magic?”

“You tell me,” she shrugs. “I don’t really know a lot about dream magic, so I don’t know if there’s something out there like it. Dreamstriders are the only ponies I’ve ever heard of that can do magic that nopony else physically can, though. It might be hard to learn any other kind of magic, sure, but it’s not literally impossible. Dream magic, though? Either you can do it or you can’t.”

“Do you think maybe Dreamstriders having that much magic causes our powers? Ponies have been trying to copy our abilities for a while, but maybe the reason none of them have done it is because you need all that magic inside of you. Unless you can increase the amount of magic in your blood, then I don’t see why they wouldn’t try that."

She puts her hoof on her chin and thinks about it for a little bit. “I don’t know, really. I could always research it and put it in the paper, too.”

“When should we meet and work on it?”

“It’s not that much,” she says with a wave of her hoof. “It won’t take long to write all this up and do the reading I talked about. You helped do the hard part of drawing and measuring your blood, so you don’t need to help out on the easy stuff that I can do.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to make you do everything.”

“It’s fine!” she assures me. “I’ve done more work just for things I wanted to learn, so doing this work for extra credit won’t be bad. And besides, you did have to give blood twice. You had to go through that pain more than I did, so I’ll take the little bit of time to do this.”

It didn’t even hurt that much, but it really does sound like there’s not a lot I could do to help. “I guess I’ll see you in class, then?”

“See you there!” With that, she goes to her book almost immediately, which I take as my cue to leave.