• Published 21st Jun 2012
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Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me - DataPacRat



Not every human in equestria gets turned into a pony.

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A Little Push

"Why, exactly, am I proctoring you through an IQ test?" Micro seemed a little aggrieved.

"Because," I said, while drinking from a bowl of water, pretty much for no other reason than because I could, "I don't know what I'm using to think with, right now - my teeny bird brain, or my cow-brain, or some magical copy of one of those, or what. And whatever I'm thinking with, I want to see if it's any better at any particular mental tasks than my usual hardware. If there's any difference at all, either positive or negative, that's something I really want to know about - either to take advantage of or to avoid." I lifted my beak from the bowl to look at her. "Maybe, as a bird, I'm better with spatial relationships than usual - that might mean that if I deal with math as graphs instead of equations, I might be able to notice a pattern I usually wouldn't, and get an insight I otherwise wouldn't have... or at least would have taken longer to get."

"I don't see what the fuss is. I use a smaller brain to think with every time I use my magic on myself."

"Well... I've got a theory about that."

"And you're just getting around to telling me now?"

"I've had a lot on my mind - I only came up with it after I started thinking about how I think as a bird. Simply put - I'm not sure that your magic does what you think it does; I've got a suspicion that when you think you shrink something, that something isn't actually getting shrunk."

"Could have fooled me - especially those times I wandered through mouseholes."

"Bear with me on this for a second. Hm... actually, maybe we can try a quick test of something. Here, bring that light over here, while I spread my wing. Lovely feathers, aren't they?"

"Are you getting vain about your appearance, now?"

"... Maybe. But look at that iridescence - what color would you call that? Blue? Purple?"

"Indigo."

"Good, good. Now - it also occurs to me that we should know whether a magic spell cast on me gives any extra magical power to the cloak. So we shall - ahem - kill a couple of birds with a single stone. Let's give the Captain a quick warning, and then I'd like you to shrink me - oh, somewhere under half size, but still big enough to see my feathers."

"Is this one of those plans I'm going to start regretting within five minutes?"

"Mm... I don't think so. But if I'm wrong, wouldn't it be better to find out now, while we're in nice, calm, peaceful, controlled conditions, instead of making stuff up on the fly in the middle of an emergency?"

Messages went back and forth through the speaking tubes; preparations were made in case one thing or another did go wrong. And then:

"Okay, hit me."

Micro's horn glowed, and the cargo bay, which was already enormous to me, became much more so. Micro loomed over me like that giant we'd flown over. "Hiya!" I waved my wing up at her. "How's my voice? Higher pitched?"

"Nope," she rumbled in what now sounded to me like a bass. "Same as before. Must be because it's made by magic, instead of your vocal cords."

"Well, let's see if that gave the cloak any extra magic... nope, still stuck as a bird. Okay - now take a look at my wing. At the iridescence. What color is it?"

She leaned down, her breath almost knocking me over as she squinted. "Same as before. Purply-blue."

"Good. Perfect. Okay, you can let me back up."

"Mm... seems like you'd cause me much less trouble that way - but I suppose I couldn't keep you shrunk forever." In a moment, I was back to my normal - if that could possibly be said to apply - raveny size. "So what was the point of all that?"

"There's a fascinating thing about feathers - in a lot of 'em, the colors you see aren't the colors of the pigments. Feathers have micro-structure, teensy little bumps and ridges, and some of them are just the right size to interfere with visible light, and make a brown feather look green - or a black one look indigo. But that effect depends very precisely on the size of those features. Make 'em smaller, and they should affect light very differently - maybe the effect completely disappearing from the visible spectrum. So that's a strong piece of evidence that while I may have looked smaller, I was actually still exactly the same size as when I started."

"There's some stronger evidence that when I shrank you, you shrank - namely, that you shrank."

"I know, I know - but looks can be deceiving. Here, hoof that paper, pen, and scissors over here, and I'll try to show you what I think is going on. Okay, here's a stick-figure of you - don't judge me, you try drawing using your back hooves. And here's a stick-figure of a cow, around the same size. Now, I'm going to try to cut that out - ooh, poor cow. Um, would you mind?"

"What - you want a paper doll?"

"Something like that." I drew a fresh, un-beheaded bovine; she grabbed the scissors with a hoof, and quickly snipped it out. "Thank you. Now - when you cast what you think of as your shrinking magic, what I think happens is that your target stays the same size; but, in a sense, it pops out of the normal framework. From the target's perspective, everything about itself stays the same size. From the rest of the universe's perspective, everything outside the target stays the same size. What changes... is something along the boundary between the two. From the outside perspective, I think what your magic does is make the surface-area of that boundary smaller, without changing the volume of the contents. Like, say, taking a flat cloth, putting a stone on it, and pulling the cloth around it to make a bag - there's a narrow neck, but the bottom of the cloth is still the same size."

"Hunh."

"If - and, I say, if - this is anything at all like how your magic works... then it solves a bunch of problematic issues. Like how a shrunken person manages to breathe oxygen molecules that are ten times their normal size, from their point of view. The complexities that would be involved in removing bunches of atoms without disrupting cells, or bunches of cells without disrupting organ function; or the problems with quantum mechanics if you're simply reducing the mass of individual atoms and distance between them; and so on. Of course, this also means that when I deduced FTL signalling from your power, I was completely mistaken in that conclusion - or, at best, making a fortuitous guess not actually supported by the evidence I had available to me at the time."

"And I suppose that you've come up with some astonishingly useful plan to use based on my magic being based on this principle?"

"Well - actually, no, not yet. We'd need to find out more about the boundary-layer effects, such as why voices still sound like they shift in pitch, and how much air a shrunken person draws in as they breathe, and so on. Maybe your magical spell has a few secondary effects - safety features, and the-"

I stopped talking, to pay attention to a rather important interruption: the engines had stopped turning. Given that we were flying at altitude and at cruising speed, the constant subtle background vibration was a constant reminder that all was well with the ship and we weren't about to plunge into freefall followed by a fiery crash. Recalling how badly I'd handled freefall before, my eyes widened; while we'd had drills, we hadn't actually ever turned the engines off in mid-air before, due to the risk of not being able to get it back on in time. I started spreading my wings, a useless gesture since I had yet to manage a glide longer than four feet...

... when there was a pop, and a shudder, and that never-noticed background vibration came back again.

Red's voice came over the speaking tube, "We're landing, now, and doing a full engine inspection."


"Well, there's your problem."

Stoke Red was pointing to a rather obvious crack in the main pipes running between the core of the ship's engine, and the actual propeller nacelles. He continued, "Liquid gem mixture got out, and air got in. When a bubble got to the props, the come-to-life spell lost its power for a moment - but inertia would have kept it going until it got fluid again. But when a big bubble got to the pump itself, well, it's designed to work with fluid, not air, so probably raced, overheated, jammed, cooled, until the pressure from the fluid kicked it free again."

Red asked, "Any permanent harm?"

"Mm," he mused, "maybe a bit more pitting than usual - we may have used up a few extra days before we need a major overhaul. Give me a few hours, and I can make sure all the air is burped out, and replace it with some of our spare fluid matrix - but we lost some of the powdered gemstone it carries, so we can only use, oh, eighty or ninety percent of the usual power, until we get some replacements. Better than food-grade gems; that'd give us maybe a five percent improvement, but then start gumming up the works with the impurities. We could really use some finely-ground fire opals, to get us back to peak condition, but any good gems would do."

From my perch between Red's ears, I asked, "I have a collection of lab-sample gems - how many do you need?"

"More than you've got."

Red nodded, almost sending me tumbling. She said, "Do what you need to, to get us back in the air, and then make a list of what would work."


Some time later, after a shopping trip at the next port, I was in the engine room under the bridge with Stoke, watching as he primed the various pipes, pumps, and power-lines. When he finally seemed satisfied, he flipped open the speaking tube going up to the bridge, and reported, "Alright - I've injected some heavy-gem-dust fluid in one part of the piping, while drawing off some of our current light-dust fluid from another. Run the engines at idle for ten minutes, and it should be thoroughly mixed, and we should be good to go."

"Roger that," Red said, through the speaking tube. "Opening main valves to idle." Her voice faded as she spoke to Blanche, up there with her, piloting. Presumably the appropriate levers were pulled, for the pumps started pumping, fluid started flowing, gauges' needles rose, and to port and starboard, the main props started slowly turning.

"Sounds good," Stoke said, listening to the fluid-flow. Outside, the prop-noise got louder. "Getting some good thrust. You can throttle back down."

There was some conversation, then Red's voice came down, "Please repeat? We're at minimal throttle - idling only." The prop noise got louder as they continued speeding up.

"Cut power - I repeat, cut power!" Stoke shouted. The Mikoyan was starting to slide forward in the water.

Red's voice came down. "Valves are jammed open! Shut it down in ten seconds, or I'm going to have to take us airborne!" Stoke galloped to one knob after another, pressing his weight against them, without success. He started reaching for a fire-axe when Red said, "No good - water's choppy - gotta go up!"

The vibrations lessened as the side-props lifted us out of the waves... but the sounds from the nacelles kept rising, as the main props spun faster and faster. Stoke was muttering something about not knowing what was going on, but this seemed time for me to hop up the stairs to the bridge. Red saw me, and grimaced. "Any ideas?"

"Depending on how much magic was in those gems... I think I'm going to have to use magic to reinforce those props to keep 'em from flying apart from the stress. I'll need to be a cow for that - lemme drain your wands, so I can go get my main supplies." Red and Blanche tossed their wands at me, I was suddenly a cow wearing a cape and brooch again, and I galloped down to my lab. "Oh," I called over my shoulder, "and give a red and pink alert."


We were going so fast, the wind would have blown away anyone setting a foot on deck; so I had to work from the bridge, which had the best view of the nacelles. Much like the medical emergency, I had all three of our unicorns charging up gems, while I used 'em as fast as they charged 'em, using every Latin-esque term I could think of for "don't fall apart". Red had made a rather sensible choice to err on the side of higher altitudes rather than lower, and we approached the Mikoyan's official altitude ceiling - and kept going up. I made some further suggestions, and the whole crew gathered together in the bridge or engine room right below, and I spent some of my magical energies on that fresh-air spell I'd come up with inside the dragon.

Speculation was that our gems had been spiked with something like starbeast bones - and though our primitive instruments were wholly inadequate to the task, the consensus was that we were now traveling somewhere around half the speed of sound, with no way to slow down until the overcharge in the gem-fluid was used up. Which might take hours.


It took hours.

Even though I'd taken off the cloak and kept it as far away from the gems I was using as possible, it still sucked in enough magic to push 'spring' at everyone - so much so that I suggested everyone not involved in keeping us from crashing get sleep-zapped... so much so that the very wooden planks of the ship started sprouting flowers.

Early on, Red and I consulted a bit... and decided that, while we could could certainly nudge the Mikoyan to curve around in some giant circles, and stay in the same region; there didn't seem any reason not to continue our generally easterly course. At least as long as we remained in the vicinity of the northern continent - if we came up near the east coast, we'd probably want to reconsider. But we hadn't gotten anywhere near that far when the props finally started slowing down to their more usual spin rate, and then down to the idle they were supposedly set at. We landed in the first thing resembling a bay we saw, and were starting to back to our normal routine as Stoke started testing our gem-fluid materials, getting ready to do a full purge...

... when Armina, up on watch, called out a warning, barely in time for everyone to draw their wands as a bat-winged, scorpion-tailed giant lion-like thing landed on the very tip of our bow.

"Oh, hey," he rumbled. "Very steampunk. I like."

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