• Published 21st Jun 2012
  • 11,496 Views, 471 Comments

Helping...Hands? - RainbowDoubleDash



Trixie recruits Lyra to help her with a spell. The results are...not what she had intended.

  • ...
17
 471
 11,496

4. Insecurities

It was 1:17 PM, and there was a unicorn, something that might have been a naked bear, and a whole lot of panic in the Residency of the Representative of the Night Court of Luna. There was also a hen-turned-rooster, but he seemed tuckered out from his new predicament and so had settled down in a corner of the kitchen in order to go back to sleep.

“What are we gonna do?” Lyra demanded, running her paws through her mane. “If that spell was mislabeled and the original spell was mislabeled, how many others were? And who did the translating?

“I don’t know!” Trixie exclaimed. “But Luna herself gave me the book so I just assumed everything was fine! Wouldn’t you?”

“Not anymore!” Lyra exclaimed, then did the most peculiar thing without thinking about it – placed two of her fingers together, the shortest one and the longest, and flicked them against one another, making a snapping noise. She pointed at Trixie. “Luna!” she exclaimed. “The Princess has more magic in one hoof than every zebra in Zebrica combined! She has to be able to help me! You have to get in contact with her!”

Trixie stared wide-eyed. “I can’t.”

“Trixie, this is not the time for you to be worried about what Luna will think of – ”

“No, Lyra, I mean I literally can’t. Luna isn’t in Canterlot right now, she’s in the Griffin Kingdoms. With Corona back, she’s extending a hoof to all of our neighbors and making sure that if Corona attacks again, they won’t pounce on Equestria or one of her allies while we’re in the middle of fighting – nor support Corona if she does manage to take the throne somehow.”

Lyra was stunned at that statement. “Who would support Corona?”

“Corona isn’t feared outside of Equestria, not as much, anyway. The point is, I can’t get in contact with Luna for the next week. My letter-sending spell? It only teleports things to her office in Canterlot, not to her directly. We…we might have to wait until Luna’s back.”

“Trixie, I can’t wait a week. I have a show tonight. Tonight! My first solo show! I can’t miss it!”

Trixie shook her head. “I don’t think there’s much of a choice…”

Lyra moved up to Trixie, getting down onto her hands and knees so that she could look the unicorn in the eye. “I. Cannot. Miss. This.” she stated in a voice that would brook no argument.

Trixie argued anyway. “It’s not even really your first show,” Trixie pointed out. “Back during the Longest Night you played, remember?”

“I played a single tune for five minutes on a night which nopony is going to remember for the music,” Lyra stated. “This? This is for the incoming students for both the Academy and the Canterlot School of Musical Arts. It’s showing off the dual-study program and the results of it. A lot of very important ponies are going to be expecting me there, important to the music industry and important to me. So I don’t care what it takes. If…if I have to go like this, then I will.”

Trixie blanched. “I…don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“No, Trixie, it’s not, but I'll do it anyway if I have to."

The unicorn looked away from the former unicorn. In the corner, the rooster let out a slight cluck-cluck-cluck noise in its sleep, one wing twitching slightly. “Okay,” Trixie said after a long while, looking to the zebra spellbook and levitating it to her side. “We know that the spells in here work, they’re just mislabeled. But they work. Meaning that the counterspell has to be in here, somewhere.”

“It’d be a lot easier if one of us could read Zebra…”

Trixie grimaced. “But not every spell is mislabeled,” Trixie pointed out. “They can’t have all been mislabeled, nopony is that criminally negligent. So I think what we need to do is take another tack with this. We need to find out what you are.”

Binadamu,” Lyra said.

“Gesundheit.”

Lyra rolled her eyes, taking the spellbook and flipping to the original spell, then holding it open to Trixie. “Wewe ni binadamu. All the transmutation and counter-transmutation spells have wewe ni and then something. I think that it’s basically ‘turn into this thing.’” And the thing I turned into, in Zebra, is called a binadamu.

Trixie read, then smiled brightly. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “That’s perfect! So all we need to do is go through this and find all the spells with the word binadamu in it. One of them has to be the counter-spell!”

Trixie looked to the spellbook, as did Lyra. They considered the thick volume for several minutes.

“One…out of about four hundred spells,” Lyra noted.

---

BonBon looked at the clock on the wall of her candy shop. When twelve-thirty rolled around, and Lyra hadn’t shown up to pick up her things, she had been concerned. When it had been twelve-fifty, too late to consider trying to catch the one o’clock to Canterlot, she had grown to be worried, but she didn’t let that worry overtake her: Lyra was a grown mare and was perfectly capable of looking at a clock and knowing what time it was. She would be aware of missing the one o’clock to Ponyville, knew the risks, was perfectly capable of running her own life. And, somehow, BonBon managed to convince her of the same thing when the clock struck three.

When the clock struck three-thirty, however, BonBon left worry behind and passed into anxiety, enough so that she was fairly certain she had misread a scale and accidentally let a bag of jelly babies go at just over half price. The stallion who had bought them certainly hadn’t minded.

“Where is she?” BonBon demanded.

“Who?” her current customer – an orange earth pony named Rick Shaw – asked, even as he finished giving her bits for the toffee he was buying.

BonBon blinked a few times at the question, then shook her head. “Er – nopony. Sorry, I’m…distracted.”

Rick Shaw let BonBon’s concern go at that, finishing his purchase and leaving. With him gone from her store, it was now empty. Biting her lip, the earth pony trotted over to her store’s door and switched the sign on it from open to closed, locking it, then turned around and headed upstairs. She would grab Lyra’s things, head over to Trixie’s, and no matter what interesting spell they were in the middle of, make sure that Lyra was on the next - and last - train to Canterlot.

---

“Huh, this is interesting,” Trixie noted as she read the spellbook. “Poison joke is an ingredient in this spell…it’s called the truth is a scourge. Some kind of truth serum, except…” Trixie’s eyes scanned the page as she read the description. “Oh…oh, that is so mean! I love it!”

“Will it turn me back into a unicorn?” Lyra asked with forced politeness, as she paged through a different book.

Trixie blushed slightly, glancing up at the former pony. “Er,” she remarked. “Not as such…no.” Lyra glared at her. Trixie quickly turned the page, looking at the next spell, though not before using telekinesis to indent the truth is a scourge. It was – assuming that it had been correctly labeled – more of a potion than a spell, and one that she was going to try out, assuming Lyra didn’t steal the zebra spellbook and burn it to ashes after this whole ordeal was finished.

The two were sitting in Trixie’s office. Given that there was only one book, only one of them could be looking for occurrences of the word binadamu at a time, a task that had fallen to Trixie. Lyra, meanwhile, had been trying something else: using the limited number of books in Trixie’s collection – specifically, a tome on strange and exotic creatures, the Monster Manual – to try and find out just what she had turned into.

So far, neither search had given them results.

“Athatch?” Lyra wondered aloud, before noticing the three arms in the description. She continued flipping through pages “Grimlock? No, they don’t have eyes…troll…ogre, maybe…why isn’t this in here…?”

“Ha! Got one!” Trixie exclaimed suddenly. In less than a second, Lyra had dropped the Monster Manual and was next to Trixie, looking over her shoulder.

Poison of the wind spider,” Lyra read the spell’s name aloud. “I don’t like this spell already, Trixie.”

“It’s mislabeled,” Trixie said with certainty, as she read through the ingredients and ritual. “Nothing about it suggests spiders, or poison, or wind…”

“Oh yeah? And what about silver, quartz, and chicken feathers suggests gender change?”

“Point,” Trixie admitted, before pointing out the magic words with one hoof. “But look here: binadamu. That’s the word we’re looking for, right?”

Lyra thought. “Assuming that the zebra-to-unicorn spell is accurate,” she confirmed after a moment. “I mean…I think. Right? Probably?”

Trixie looked at Lyra. “You’re asking me?”

Lyra sighed, pointing to Trixie’s flank. “Special talent,” she remarked.

Trixie considered. “It’s worth a shot,” she said, standing and stretching as she read the ingredients. “I…okay, from the looks of things, I’m going to have to go out and buy some of these things. I’m out of quartz, for one thing, and I don’t have any linen lying around, either.”

“Bedsheets,” Lyra pointed out.

Trixie opened her mouth to object, but thought better of it a moment later when she saw the look on Lyra’s face. “Well, I don’t have quartz,” she said, looking back to the ingredient list. “Or enough coal dust to make another magic circle. So I have to – ”

There was the sound of a door – the front door – opening. “Hello?” a mare’s voice called from the Residency’s hallway. “Lyra?”

Lyra opened her mouth to respond, and at almost the same time put one paw/hand/whatever to her mouth to stop herself. She tried to scramble backwards and hide behind something even as her muscles locked up at the familiar-sounding voice. For some reason, there was a flash of blue. The net result of all of this was that Lyra found herself on the floor, staring at the entrance to the living room as BonBon came into view, wearing saddlebags. Her eyes glided over Lyra…

…and passed over her…

…and settled on Trixie.

“BonBon!” Trixie exclaimed. “Uh…hi!”

BonBon looked around as if nothing was wrong, as if seeing a giant, naked bear (or whatever) was a normal thing for her. “Hello, Trixie,” she said, her voice lacking most of its usual sweetness as she looked at the unicorn. “Where’s Lyra?”

Lyra blinked a few times, still frozen in place in shock. Couldn’t BonBon see her? Wasn’t she curious about the hideous, giant creature that just happened to have the same eyes and mane colorings as her marefriend?

“Oh…” Trixie responded, waving a hoof. “She’s, um…I don’t know where she is. We wrapped everything up a few minutes ago. Must have just missed her.”

Lyra made to pick herself up – to move into a more comfortable position. BonBon jumped at the sound of the floorboards squeaking – but, oddly, still didn’t look at her. It was only then that Lyra realized that she couldn’t look at herself – she looked to her forelegs, her barrel, her hind legs, but all she saw was the living room – no trace of her.

They were invisible, but Lyra’s brows nevertheless rose as she realized what the blue flash from moments ago must have been. Way to go, Trixie, she thought, impressed. She had known that Trixie knew how to turn herself invisible; she hadn’t known that she knew how to turn other ponies invisible, as well, nor expected her to be able to do such a thing so quickly.

“What was that?” BonBon asked at the sound of the floorboards

“Probably just the house…settling,” Trixie lied. “Houses do that.”

BonBon eyed Trixie. “There’s no need to be condescending.”

Trixie traced a circle in the floor with one hoof. “Right. Sorry.”

BonBon blinked at the apology, and the fact that Trixie wasn’t looking directly at her. “Alright,” she said, stomping forward. “What have you done with Lyra?”

“Nothing!” Trixie continued, moving as though to back away, then realizing that all that would do was push her against Lyra, who couldn’t move without creating more out-of-place noises. She held up her hooves. “She’s not here! She left!”

“Oh really?” BonBon demanded as she got close to Trixie. The unicorn’s eyes wandered everywhere other than meeting the earth pony’s own. “Trixie. Where. Is. Lyra?”

“I don’t know!” Trixie exclaimed.

“Then why are you being so evasive?”

Trixie tapped a hoof on the floor. “I’m – I…I heard you two a few weeks ago and now it’s really awkward!

BonBon blinked. Lyra did too. Trixie, for her part, focused on the floor, her face having begun to turn from blue to a very rosy shade of pink.

“Heard us?” BonBon asked, not understanding.

“Just after Corona…did her thing…” Trixie explained, haltingly. “Um…that night…remember how my house had the consistency of Skyrosland cheese? Well…I was looking for a place to stay, and I went to your place, and…I heard you. And Lyra.” She tapped her front hooves together, blushing furiously at this point. “Together.”

BonBon, by now, had turned a similar shade of pink as Trixie, while Lyra could feel heat on her own face as she looked away, rubbing her left arm with her right in embarrassment. “Oh,” BonBon said.

“Yeah,” Trixie offered.

“I see.”

“I heard. It was really loud. I almost filed a noise complaint – ”

“We weren’t that loud,” Lyra objected, then gasped, then had both her paws covering her mouth in shock of what she said while she contemplated whether or not being turned into a naked bear (or whatever) had somehow affected her judgment and ability to not be a moron.

There was a long pause. BonBon stared hard at Trixie. Trixie turned her head slowly, looking to Lyra, eyes meeting with the former unicorn’s own. “Thank-you," she said through gritted teeth. “And yes you were,” she added quickly, just before BonBon grasped Trixie with her forehooves and turned the unicorn to face her once again, glaring at her.

“Trixie?” she demanded. “Was that Lyra?”

The unicorn’s eyes were wide. “Yes.”

“And why can’t I see her?”

Trixie glanced at Lyra. “She’s invisible,” she said. “Well, not to me, of course not to me – who casts an invisibility spell on somepony if they can’t see through it? That’s just asking for trouble – but to everypony else.”

Lyra stared at Trixie. “Y…yes,” Lyra confirmed.

“I needed help with zebra spells,” Trixie continued. “The Princess asked me to try and understand their magic, and I needed Lyra’s help with that.”

BonBon glared at Trixie.

The Princess,” Trixie repeated, as her horn glowed and she telekinetically brought the zebra spellbook over. “And…and so, I thought I’d cast a spell on Lyra – with her permission – and now we can’t figure out how to cancel it.”

BonBon blinked. “Lyra?” she asked, “is this true?”

“Yeah,” Lyra responded, mostly truthfully. There had been a Zebra spell cast on her, it had been with her permission, and they couldn’t figure out how to counter it. The only untruth was that Trixie’s wording made it sound like it was the invisibility spell that couldn’t be countered. “It’s not Trixie’s fault.”

She did this to you!” BonBon said, releasing Trixie and looking towards Lyra, though her eyes were slightly too far to the right, and a little bit too low. Lyra moved so that she was looking at them. “How is it not her fault?”

“We don’t know much about the Zebra language,” Trixie responded. “A lot of the spells in this book have been…mislabeled. So we can’t find the counter-spell.”

BonBon shook her head. “It’s still your fault!” she said, turning to Trixie again. “You knew she had a show tonight and yet you did this! Why couldn’t this of waited? Why would you risk something happening to her?”

Trixie’s mouth opened and closed a few times, as she looked between BonBon and Lyra. “Lyra!” she exclaimed. “Help!”

Lyra grimaced. “She, uh…BonBon does kind of raise a good point.”

Trixie glared at Lyra. “You consented. It is not my fault and I am trying to fix it!

“I get that!” Lyra said, holding up her hands. Apparently, Trixie could see her, so the gesture wasn’t wasted. “But you shouldn’t have asked me…and I shouldn’t have said yes! There’s a lot of blame to go around!”

Trixie glared at Lyra, before her eyes widened at the sight of BonBon reached a hoof forward, trying to find Lyra. She grasped the earth pony’s hoof with two of her own, letting out a nervous laugh. “Ah,” she said, “er, BonBon, don’t touch Lyra.”

BonBon’s look could have curdled milk. “Trixie, let go of me before I – ”

“N-no!” Lyra said, thinking quickly for the sake of keeping Trixie’s teeth inside of her jaws. If BonBon touched her, she’d notice the changes to Lyra’s body immediately. “No, BonBon, this is…it’s a magic thing. This is a spell gone wrong.”

“Earth pony magic might interact with zebra magic in weird ways,” Trixie added.

“We don’t know what it’d do.”

“Bad things, probably.”

“Terrible things.”

“Unspeakable things.”

“Like…like turn me into some kind of giant naked bear – ”

Unspeakable,” Trixie finished, glaring at Lyra, “things.

Lyra once more found her hands covering her mouth in shock – apparently, she did not handle stress nearly as well as the other unicorn in the room, and Trixie was hardly the most collected of ponies to start with. BonBon, at least, had no idea what Lyra had just let slip, and looked between Trixie and where she thought Lyra was. “I…I don’t believe this!” she shouted.

“Look,” Trixie said, grimacing, “we just need to find the right counter-spell. Here,” she held up the zebra book, holding it out BonBon. “In my office, top drawer, there’s a bag of bits. Grab it, then go out and buy everything on this list of ingredients.”

BonBon stared at the book, then back to Trixie. “And this will work?” she asked.

“Yes,” Trixie lied. Or maybe she was telling the truth. Lyra hoped that circumstances would prove that she was telling the truth after all.

BonBon took the zebra spellbook in her front hooves, looking the ingredient list over. “I can’t remember all of this,” she objected. “I’ll need to – ”

Trixie grimaced closing her eyes and letting her horn glow. There was a pair of blue flashes, from Trixie’s horn and BonBon’s eyes. The earth pony blinked a few times after them, looking to Trixie in confusion. “What was the fourth ingredient?” Trixie asked.

“Apple skin,” BonBon answered, then paused. “All I did was glance at the page! What did you do to me?”

“You’ll perfectly remember that page for about a day, that’s all,” Trixie said, holding up her hooves defensively. “I need to keep the book so I can start memorizing the spell’s words.”

BonBon stepped closer to Trixie. “Don’t cast spells on ponies without their permission!”

“I’m sorry, I assumed that permission was a given since we’re talking about making Lyra visible again for her Canterlot show!”

BonBon opened her mouth to shout something, but then saw the clock on the wall. It was 3:49. There was only one more train leaving Ponyville for Canterlot today, the five o’clock. It would be Lyra’s last chance to reach Canterlot in time for her show. And it was leaving in just over an hour. “Okay,” BonBon said, “okay, I’ll go, I’ll buy the ingredients. But we are going to have words, Trixie, when this is all over!” With that, the earth pony turned around, dashing to Trixie’s office. In another few moments, she was out the door, bag full of bits clasped in her mouth.

Lyra fidgeted, as Trixie turned to glare at her. “What is the point of turning you invisible if you’re going to talk?” she demanded.

“I’m sorry!” Lyra exclaimed. “I wasn’t thinking!” She paused a moment as she looked to her hands, or rather, looked through her hands. “But she’s right. I should never have let you do this to me.”

“But you did, and now we’re here, and we have to deal with it,” Trixie stated. “Passing blame around helps nopony!”

Lyra glared at Trixie. “You’re just saying that because part of the blame goes your way.”

Trixie threw up her hooves. “It wasn’t my fault! You said it wasn’t my fault!”

“Well…like I said, BonBon raised a good point. Getting me stuck like this? No, that’s not your fault…but we never should have tried it today. I shouldn’t of let you talk me into it – ”

“That’s your fault – ”

“ – and you shouldn’t of tried.”

“It is not my fault!” Trixie exclaimed, eyes wide. “You consented, you knew that I was using unfamiliar magic, it is not my fault that this happened to you and I am trying to fix it!”

“I know you are.”

Trixie was silent, shifting around uncomfortably as she regarded Lyra. “I…” she said, looking around, at anything but Lyra, like she had when first trying to admit to Lyra that she had needed her help, “I…okay. Okay. It’s my fault. If you don’t want to…you know, see me ever again after this…don’t want to be my friend…it’s not the first time. I’ll get it.”

Lyra blinked. “Why would I want that?” she asked.

“Because…because look at you! Look at what I did to you! BonBon’s right, I should never of cast the spell, you’re right to take her side – ”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Lyra interrupted, moving forward, “slow down there, Trixie. What do you mean, BonBon’s side? Who said that there were sides to this?”

Trixie blinked. “Why wouldn’t there be?” she asked.

Lyra’s own eyes were wide at that statement. “It’s…wow, Trixie, I thought you were going into politics. Haven’t you ever heard of gray areas?”

“Of course I have,” Trixie stated indignantly. “That’s basic. Sometimes ponies in political positions have to do morally questionable things for the good of – ”

“Stop,” Lyra instructed. “That’s not what I meant. What I mean is, there aren’t sides to this, Trixie. There’s just a whole lot of blame going around to everypony. Mostly you and me, and whoever mislabeled everything in the spellbook.”

Trixie considered that, looking down at her hooves. “Oh,” she said, making a slight face at the concept. “I…I guess that makes sense…”

“Do you really think that I wouldn’t want to still be your friend just because of this?” she waved a hand up and down, indicating her changed body. “It was an accident. You didn’t mean for it to happen. And I know you’re trying to fix it, Trixie, that you’re trying as hard as you can.”

Trixie nodded, and the two were silent for a few moments after that, before Lyra decided to break it. “So…noise complaint?” she asked.

Trixie blinked, then offered a nervous laugh, as she began to turn red again, tapping her hooves together. “I didn’t, though,” she said. “But, um…soundproofing. You should invest in soundproofing, if you’re going to be so…vigorous.

Lyra blushed slightly as well, but was honestly surprised to find how embarrassed Trixie seemed by the whole situation. “I’ll look into it,” she confirmed, picking up the zebra spellbook and holding it out to Trixie. “You should probably get to work on this.”

“R-right,” Trixie said with a blush, holding the book aloft and staring intently at it. Her horn glowed and her eyes flashed. “Okay, memorized. Now I’ll just…um…start looking for other possibilities. Because this one might not work, the last two haven’t, shouldn’t make assumptions. Right?” She glanced at Lyra for a moment, nodded, and got back to the book. “Right.”

Lyra blinked a few times, staring intently at Trixie, until something finally clicked in her head. “Oh, I get it!” she exclaimed. “You’re a – ”

---

Forty minutes later, Lyra sat in the middle of yet another magic circle, holding an ice pack to her head as Trixie circled around her, inspecting the magic circle closely and looking for any problems with it, while BonBon kept a close eye on Trixie, seeing as she still couldn’t see Lyra.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Lyra noted.

“We have to be sure,” Trixie countered. “Don’t want to make any mistakes. I don’t even know what will happen if the circle is wrong.”

“No, I don’t mean the magic circle. I mean there’s nothing wrong with being – ”

La la la nopony can hear Lyra!” Trixie exclaimed as she skipped away from the circle and threw dust at Lyra, as the spell conveniently commanded her to do anyway. Lyra coughed, even as she tossed the ice pack aside, getting ready for the spell.

BonBon looked to Trixie less like she was the pony responsible for turning her marefriend invisible, and more like she was a member of an exceedingly rare and endangered species. Lyra had told BonBon of her suspicions, which Trixie’s vehement avoidance of the issue were all but confirming. “You’re still young,” she noted, “and frankly I think it’s a good thing that you’re waiting until – ”

Nopony can hear BonBon either!” Trixie exclaimed, dumping the remainder of the dust over BonBon’s head. The earth pony sputtered and sneezed a few times, but there wasn’t much dust left.

“We didn’t wait,” Lyra pointed out to her marefriend as she finished sneezing, Trixie scurrying around and sprinkling salted water over Lyra. The unicorn’s face was almost entirely pink.

“Well,” BonBon countered, looking in Lyra’s direction – she was still invisible – as Trixie busied herself with setting up and lighting the candles, “that’s true, but who else would we have been waiting for?”

“Mmn,” Lyra conceded, a warm feeling in her chest at BonBon's declaration of love. Trixie, meanwhile, took off her cape – little wonder given how flustered she seemed to be. “Remember our first time?”

BonBon laughed. “You tried to use honey but it just got stuck and – ”

Right, magic time now! So you two can shut up!” Trixie exclaimed, standing on her hind legs and waving her forelegs around as she chanted.

“Binadamu matatizo kwenda mbali,
“kupata nafasi bora zaidi ya kukaa!
“Mahali ambapo utakuwa na furaha,
“Nitakuwa na furaha,
“na pande zote utakuwa na furaha!
“Mahali nafuu, mahali nzuri,
“Mahali bora zaidi ya kukaa!
“Hivyo muda mrefu kama ni mbali nami na yangu!
“Binadamu matatizo kwenda mbali!”

There was a brilliant flash and a surge of magic across Lyra’s body, then after a moment, it was gone. Lyra looked down at herself, and saw…pale skin, the odd lumps on her barrel, paws, and in all other respects, exactly what she had been turned into. The spell had done nothing…

…wait, wasn’t she supposed to be invisible?

Lyra glanced up to Trixie, who stared back. Both slowly turned their gazes to BonBon, and found the cream-colored earth pony to be staring at Lyra, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, one hoof extended. Occasionally, small sounds would escape her throat, but nothing that suggested that she was capable of any kind of intelligent thought.

At least not until BonBon's neck turned with such force that Lyra was surprised it didn’t snap, as the earth pony began to bear down on Trixie, muscles tenses, nostrils flaring in anger.

“What did you do to my Lyra?”