"This is amazing!" Twilight gushed as she flicked through the folders of the first filing cabinet like a granny searching for a lost recipe card.
"Astounding!" Moondancer echoed as she perused the offerings of the third cabinet out of ten that had taken up residence in the corner of the Hunter's Workshop. The folders bulged with tens, dozens, hundreds of blueprints for strange and fantastical devices the mere names of which sent thrills down the spines of the two unicorns.
"Quinjet Engine VTOL Mounting Gimbal Mark Six!
"Palm Repulsor Version 2.0.3!"
"AI Natural Voice Synthesizer!"
"Augmented Reality Visual Interface Lenses!"
"Iron Man Armor Arctic Variant Mark 7"
"Machete Self-Guided Missile Detonator!"
"I have no idea what that means!"
"Me neither!"
A moment of awkward silence filled the room as they both stopped, hovering blueprints freezing in the air.
"You don't understand these diagrams?" Twilight asked, holding up Jet Boot Mark 5 Fuel Consumption Modulator Circuit. "I thought these might be some kind of obscure spell matrix."
"Not that I've ever seen. Most of these terms are unknown to me. Three point three V could be a measurement of vis, but it's an antiquated standard for measuring magical power. I can scarcely speculate what ten thousand Omegas might represent. Necrotic magic?" She shook her head. "I presumed you had been granted knowledge along with the documents and would instruct me how to interpret it, similar to your 'wizard tower' rune language."
"Not this time. I'll ask the girls, see if any of them were granted understanding, but this is beyond me." Twilight slid the blueprint back into its folder before selecting one at random from another drawer. The blocky white text of the header declared it to be the design for a JARVIS Neural Net V0.1 and the thick stack of papers accordioned out into a single massively long page. "This one looks more like a verbal spell but it's all written in some incomprehensible shorthoof with a totally alien grammar!"
Moondancer picked up the dropped portion and read a few meters ahead. "Or maybe it's just a foreign poem. That makes about as much sense as filing cabinets filled with blueprints appearing out of thin air."
"The Cube appeared out of thin air," Twilight reminded her. "As does the originite."
"And I find those mysteries just as frustrating." She straightened the pages and slipped them back into the cabinet before closing the drawer. "At least these use standard Equestrian numerals. I can't imagine how much harder deciphering them would be if I had to account for a new base system and symbology as well." A fierce grin split her face. "This just makes it a challenge instead of totally incomprehensible. When-"
She was interrupted by the chime of a wind-up alarm clock. "Ah. Unfortunate. Time for my rest cycle. You'll get started and I'll return in twenty minutes?"
Twilight shook her head. "I would, but I have plans today. I promised Applejack a few weeks ago I'd make her a bat'leth but I kept putting it off and getting distracted with new research."
Moondancer yawned. Already her eyes seemed to struggle to stay open. "I... see." She nodded and stumbled towards the corner of the room that she and Spike had remodeled into a livable space. "Good... night, Twilight."
"It's ten in the morning."
"The term is... still socially applicable even- even if tempora...lly inaccurate..." Her words trailed off between jaw-cracking yawns and she was out like a light the moment she collapsed atop her bed.
Twilight left the room discreetly, a few blueprints clutched in her magic to ask her other friends about.
Boooo lol
I do feel even ignoring the complexity of the plans there will be significant leaps based off of ancillary bits, ie Quinjets use advanced jet engine tech. Sure they can't build one, but it may lead to the first Jet Engine being developed (the first being planned in the 30s iirc) and so on.
Maybe they should let Pinkie take a look at them, since she has the broadest scientific knowledge base of the cast, by a lot. Equestria is still a great deal less advanced than the Marvel universe, but if anyone will be able to figure it out, Pinkie would have the best chance right now, considering one of her perks is basically tailored for it.
I think that these blueprints will soon be made real.
Combining Pinkie Pie's knowledge with Twilight's thirst for knowledge and other abilities/ perks it is only a matter of time before world jumping and invincibility.
And let's be real Twilight wouldn't rest until she has it decoded.
Once again, thanks very much for getting this next chapter up. Definitely appreciate the work that went into the characterizations, dialogue and future chapter set-up. And, given the points you made in the author's notes, it makes sense that Twilight and Moondancer can't figure the plans out yet (and, even if Pinkie could figure it out [and she has the best chance of doing so], it will still be a while before she can rig it all up from scratch - she's fast, but not THAT fast even if she is resourceful enough to have a decent chance of getting it done bits at a time).
REALLY looking forward to more of this.
Yes?
Yes!
Wha?
Really?
...Oh well.
No worries. It’s good to see characters need to figure things out. Them slowly putting together half a working Stark invention based on what they can sus out and filling in the rest with what they are familiar with will lead to something unique. A full knowledge transplant and ignoring infrastructure issues would just spit out carbon copy inventions from marvel canon.
11422142
Excellent . But could you put the link in the last position of the author's notes or at least make more of text clickabe? It's really very easy to miss because of the coloring of the notes.
11420813
And again, you can absolutely substitute magic for anything you don't understand. All of Victor von Doom's problems as the Infamous Iron Man are external.
Interesting, I can't remember if the girls have had any knowledge perks granted them, most Forge fics would have a few by now.
Maybe you could have a chapter dedicated to what perks they have and edit that on occasion? How easily are chapters edited here?
11424247
There's a link to a gdoc in the Author's Note of the Prologue, but perhaps it's a bit too easily missed.
That ending was really frustrating and made the perk and the whole chapter feel pointless. Shouldn't Pinkie understand it considering her retroactive knowledge power? You just outright admit how mundane and kind of boring most of the perks have been, but when we finally get an interesting perk 29 chapters into the story you go and make arbitrarily make it useless despite no other perk so far having that drawback. It honestly feels like you didn't want to put focus into the massive societal and setting changes all that technology would bring.
I'm still really enjoying this, but it's starting to fall into the same pit like every other CF fic in that the pacing just grinds to a halt and we get tens of thousands of superfluous words without anything really changing. I mean so far the episodes have concluded in a way so similar to canon that I might as well have just watched the actual show. It's just a bit frustrating to finally see a major perk only for this to happen. At this point I just hope we see characters from other settings to show up so we get some culture clash that way.