> An Equestrian Gentlemare, Stranded Amongst Alien Barbarians, Consoles Herself
>  by Jordan179
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: The Exile
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Sunset Shimmer stepped into her tiny apartment, and closed the door.

She was weary from the day.  Another six hours spent at school, learning facts that -- while inherently interesting, exposing her as they did to an alien culture and a technology in advance of her home world -- would hopefully be mostly useless to her, as she very much meant to return to that home in triumph.  Or, simply, return.  

She had lived now for almost four years, as time passed on this side of the Mirror Portal -- some fourteen back in Equestria, as nearly as she could estimate.  Lived, as best she could, among these belligerent, semi-barbaric ape-creatures, trapped in a brutish apelike analogue of her true form, forced to pretend to be one of them.

Three years.  Three years, isolated from her own kind, from real civilization.  Oh, the ape-things were clever -- bereft of magic, they had instead developed ordinary technologies to high degrees, able to do almost everything with their mundane arts that Equestrians could do with their magical ones, and a few things which Equestrians yet couldn't.  

But -- they were beasts -- cruel and callous and uncaring to one another by Equestrian standards, willing to resort to physical violence at the slightest of causes.  She had perused their histories with mounting horror.  There had been so much death and destruction, so many wars, so much hatred, despite the fact that they were all of the same species, even the same Kind.  

This was clearly a race that knew not the Harmony in their hearts, even though they were groping toward it, had even developed philosophies which anticipated those of Equestria.  Perhaps, centuries from now, they might become civilized; but Sunset Shimmer had to live amongst them now, struggle for survival among creatures that -- she knew well from their own books -- would turn upon her and rend her asunder in an instant if they knew she was an alien.

She always remembered that she had one great advantage over them.  She was an Equestrian Pony, and one of exceptional determination and intelligence.  A gentlemare, born of the ancient and honorable Light clan, possessing a civilized courage that could overcome any barbaric bravado.  A gentlemare of a military family, a family of scholar-soldiers and scholar-mages, skilled at outfighting and outwitting their foes.

She needed money, and was relieved when she realized that some coins and costume jewelry she'd brought along in her saddlebags were immensely-valuable in a culture which seemed not to have developed any analogue of petriculture, but was instead limited to hunting and gathering metals and gems as they occurred naturally in the ground.  She figured out how to trade the gems for local currency, an action not as easy here as it would have been in Equestria, given the aggressiveness and greed of the ape-creatures, which exposed her to a grave risk of robbery; and their drive to dominate, which led their government to meddle in ordinary economic affairs to a degree which would have shocked most Equestrians.

She spent some of the money to acquire several sets of identification, one of which was even under the Human-language equivalent of her real name.  When she had first come here, she had been fifteen years old, and her Human body could pass for anywhere between around fourteen and twenty-two, depending on how she dressed and carried herself.  She saw the advantages of both ends of the age spectrum, and her various identifications listed her as various ages.

She studied the culture -- especially the teen culture -- of the North American Federation.  And she spent some more of the money to look, superficially, like a high-status teenaged girl.  She wanted to look dangerous without seeming evil, exciting without seeming trashy.  She had never been all that fashionable back in Equestria, but she analyzed the problem, treating it as if it were a problem assigned by ... back before her life had gone wrong.

She needed to be at Canterlot High School, because that was where the Mirror Portal was located, and for as long as possible, because she wasn't sure when she could figure out how to get home on favorable terms.  So she enrolled, in her fourteen-year-old identity, as a freshman.  She figured this would give her plenty of time to study the Mirror Portal, 

The Humans were brutal, cruel and treacherous, that was true.  But what they imagined their strength might also be their weakness.  Long, long ago the vanished and legendary North-Realm, a high and noble civilization, had survived surrounded by barbarians -- including Sunset Shimmer's own less-civilized ancestors -- survived by turning the barbarians against each other.

They had even a phrase for it.  Divide et imperio.  Or, in modern Equestrian, Divide and rule.

Sunset Shimmer made this her watchword.

She was skilled in the social arts of a culture far beyond these techno-barbarians in everything but the hard sciences.  She had never been all that sociable, nor did she have much desire to be sociable with these jumped-up animals -- that simply meant it was easier, because it helped her think of them not as people, but rather as resources to be used.  Problems to be solved.

Raised in Canterlot, she had imbibed the arts of intrigue as if by osmosis; studied sociology and history under the tutelage of a multi-millennial super-intelligent immortal demi-goddess, herself the greatest social manipulator ever born to Ponykind.  Compared to her, the students of an elite Human high school were, frankly, just so many foals lost in the woods.

So she turned one barbarian ape-thing against another, tricking them into blaming each other for these ruptures.  At the same time, she established her own status, one display of alliance or victory in confrontation at a time, climbing the ape-thing social ladder, one success at a time.

It never would have worked in Equestria; herds of tight-knit friends would have spotted what she was doing and turned the greater herd against her.  But the Humans were far less social beings than were Ponies.  Her targets were easy to isolate and bring down, one after another.

Sunset had always been rather ruthless by Equestrian standards.  She was certain this had been one of the reasons Princess Celestia had selected her as her special student, had picked her as her possible ... but that still hurt every time that she thought about it.  Whatever Celestia's intentions once had been, surely they were no longer; anything Sunset now won she would have to gain by her own unaided enterprise.

So she stood victorious, atop the social pyramid of the students of Canterlot High School.  The acknowledged Princess of her own little Realm, a mockery of what she had once hoped to achieve.  Dominant ... victorious ... and alone, all the more so when she was surrounded by the apes, for it was only by constant vigilance and willingness to act decisively that she was able to maintain her advantage over them.

She looked around her little apartment.  It was a studio:  essentially a single large room which contained her bed, sofa, television, computer, and bookcases.  Lots of bookcases, full of books, almost all of which she had read.  She was a natural scholar, and she had spent most of the last four years drinking in the lore of this strange new world.  It was the one real consolation of her exile.

Against one wall, near a curtained window, was her small single bed.  It did not to be large:  it was not as if Sunset had, or ever would have, anyone with whom to share it.  She had still been a child when she had become Celestia's student; she had been in mid-adolescence when she had rebelled and fled to the Human world.  As Celestia's student, she had had no time to make friends or fall in love, nor would she have been likely to give herself to a stallion at such a young age.

So she had entered this world virgin, and of course, here there were no Pony stallions whom she might meet.  Human males were ape-things, not Ponies, and most of them repulsive in the shameless aggression of their sexual lusts.  She dated some, to establish her status as a girl who could get dates, and became adept at fending off their clumsy advances.  The thought of actual sexual intimacy with them revolted her.  They were disgusting beasts!

Or ... most of them were.
> Chapter 2:  Flash Sentry
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was one Human boy who almost could have been a young Equestrian stallion.  He was handsome, intelligent, kind and remarkably civilized in his dealings with other Humans, both male and female.  He was able to express his attraction toward girls without descending into the demanding aggression which Sunset found so repulsive.  

She had dated Flash Sentry once, just for the status, and had wound up having a fascinating conversation with him about the asethetics of music and poetry, the similarities and differences between poems and song lyrics, the very philosophy of music and life.  It had been so fascinating that she broke the rules she had laid down for herself, did something she never would have done with any other Human boy.

She agreed to a second date.  And then a third.  Soon, they were going steady.

He respected Sunset, cared about her, treated her not only as a potential mate, but more importantly as a friend.  He did not attempt to overcome her sexual reticence, though he was attentive enough that she knew he was interested, and against her own normal prejudices she gradually permitted him some intimacies she never thought she would desire from any ape-thing, had never permitted any being of either species.

To her shock, she realized that she was starting to fall in love with him.  Sometimes, when she was with him, she forgot her larger purposes, her long-term plans.  There was only him, and the wonderful sensations they shared.  Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could imagine that he was kissing her with an extended muzzle equipped with a long dextrous tongue, rather than a flattened ape-face with absurdly short tongue; caressing her with aura or feathered wing-tips or prehensile mane and tail, rather than ape-hands: that he was, in short, a fellow Pony.

When she was apart from him, she remembered who and what she really was, a being from a civilization more advanced than his own, one which had a greater understanding of the Cosmos, a more enlightened moral philosophy.  She was Pony, and he was a barbarian, even if an exceptionally sweet and considerate and intelligent and loving and entirely dear barbarian.  Moreover, she was a scholar-mage, a gentlemare, a Light.  She had her pride.

Sometimes, she tried to avoid him.  Always, he would contact her -- never angrily, never rudely -- always simply reminding her that he was her friend, that he was there for her if something was wrong.

She would have been prepared to angrily reject him if he had been resentful, been demanding -- as most Human males would have been in that situation.  But he was never like that.  He was kind, and his kindness to her disarmed her, let her forget their differences of species, that he was Human and she Pony.  With him, she didn't have to struggle -- and she was getting so tired of the constant battle that was life in the Human world.

She knew what was happening.  She was going native.  She had been physically Human for so long that she was forgetting what she was in truth.  Her Human body was now almost fully adult; her Human instincts were telling her to find a man -- to mate and produce Human offspring.  She must resist these urges -- if she loved a Human from this world, she knew she would be trapped here forever, and by chains stronger than mere magic.

Besides, he was a distraction.  She knew there was magic in this world -- she could sometimes sense it, even without her horn.  But it was terribly weak, and difficult for her to manipulate without her horn.  She had to figure out how to work it, or the only way she might return to Equestria would be as a helpless supplicant, throwing herself on Celestia's mercy, begging for forgiveness.

That she would never do.  She knew that Celestia had given up on her as a student, that Celestia would never help her Ascend to become an Alicorn.  By now, her favor would have doubtless fallen on somepony else:  no doubt somepony sweeter, more pliable.  Somepony to whom she would be expected to submit, perhaps already an Alicorn Princess.

Sunset Shimmer would bow to no jumped-up rival.  She had her pride.  She would come back with power, plundered with her superior Pony magic from these mage-blind barbarians!  This, she vowed.

But to accomplish this, she needed magic.  Not merely the knowledge of magic, but the power itself.  Without the power, all her knowledge was ultimately useless.

And Flash Sentry had, inadvertently, given her the clue.

One of the many things she liked about him was that he was a musician.  He not only played the guitar -- both acoustic and electric -- he also wrote some of his own songs.  He had the soul of a poet -- even his fellow barbarians noticed and respected him for this -- and he expressed it through his music.

Sunset Shimmer was herself a musician.  Back in Equestria, she had played stringed instruments; her favorite had been the guitar.  Her experience, of course, had been with acoustic guitars -- electric guitars had then been experimental devices, recently developed because legends of the Age of Wonders had hinted to modern designers that such instruments should be possible.

Of course, she had strummed her guitar, a model specifically-designed for Unicorns, with her aura.  Literal "fingerwork" was impossible for a species entirely lacking such appendages:  the Pegasus equivalent was designed to be worked by flight feathers and fields, the Earth Pony version by body-field held mane hair.  She had to relearn a lot, practice diligently, to regain her former levels of skill.

This was no insuperable obstacle to her.  Sunset Shimmer was used to hard work, and very determined to succeed at her self-imposed task..  Even before she began seeing Flash Sentry, she knew she wanted to once again have her music.  Jamming with the other rockers, she could for a time forget her exile, pretend she was back in Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, surrounded by truly civilized beings.  Making music, she for a brief time approached her old forgotten state of contentment, almost happiness.

Then, she discovered that it might be the path to much more.


> Chapter 3:  The Paths To Magic
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Since she had arrived in this world and established her new identity, Sunset had studied the ambient magic, and read the laughably-amateurish, wildly-speculative works that passed among the Humans for thaumaturgical lore.  Most of it seemed nothing but vague fantasies born of pure superstition, and a distressing amount of that which was more specific dealt with invoking a whole bestiary of frankly-terrifying extradimensional beings, many of them explicitly servants of the Morningstar, and possessing extremely-malign natures.

If these entities were imaginary, then the lore regarding them was useless.  If these were not imaginary, then the last thing that Sunset Shimmer wanted to do was attempt to summon them.  These were the sort of creatures that, in Equestria, would have been banished to Tartarus.  It was not generally a good idea to treat with such beings.  No matter what they promised, since in any case most of them were reputed liars.

But amidst the mystic woo-woo and the dire demonologies, Sunset discovered statements here and there that corresponded -- though often in very distorted forms -- to the findings of scientific thaumatology.  When she was neither maneuvering through the social labyrinth of Canterlot High School nor regaining her mastery of music, she built her own little home laboratory -- there it was, sitting well-separated from her bookshelves with cinderblocks to protect her books from any psychokinetic surges -- and undertook occasional field trips, trying to understand how magic worked in this dimension.

It did work, that was one of the first things she ascertained.  In proving this, she achieved something beyond the thaumatology of the whole Human civilization, but it was really not all that surprising.  She had already suspected the truth, because for the portal to operate at all, it was only logical that there had to be a thaumic field on both sides.

Also, she had one huge advantage over the Human wannabe-mages.  They merely aspired to magic, while she was a trained mage, well-versed in magic theory, who merely had to figure out how to adapt that theory to the practice of magic in an alien world and form.  Difficult, but surely not beyond her capabilities, given who and what she was in truth.  When she started her studies, she hoped to work out the answer in a few weeks.

Now, almost four years later, she was frustrated by the difficulty of the task.  She had learned that she could cast certain spells, substituting extensive vocal chanting and complex rituals for the almost-instinctive use of her horn to generate the necessary psycho-kinetic wave forms.  For instance, an incantation lasting merely a minute would let her control a die roll about 40 percent of the time -- a useless cantrip, as no sane gamblers would fail to be suspicious if she did any such thing in front of them in a game.

But it did show that she could telekinese.  Or, possibly, ontokinese.  She wasn't entirely sure which she was actually doing, though telekinesis had been her original aim.

She could also summon fire.  To her fingertips.  Just enough to light tinder, and after a ten-minute long ritual.  She suspected this was only possible because her main magical Talent as a Pony was for pyrokinesis.

Of course, she could do this much faster with a flint-and-steel, let alone a hydrocarbon-based lighter.  Both of which she actually owned.

Sunset Shimmer was starting to understand why the Humans had neglected magic in favor of technology.

There were two fundamental problems.  The first was that the ambient magical field in the Human world was so terribly weak.  A caster normally drew her power from the field, and -- based on one horrible experiment which left her ten pounds lighter, starving, and very glad she'd chosen to do no more than manifest a tiny pyrokinetic spark -- the technique of draining one's own body to power spells would not be even remotely practical here.

This did make obvious to her why some of the nastier Human tomes advocated animal and even Human (preferably virgin, due to less interference in the source's thaumic fields) sacrifice, as that might have gotten her enough energy to achieve more useful effects -- however, her soul was still Equestrian.  Yes, she wanted to force her way back into Celestia's recognition -- but not by doing something such as that, practically the pure definition of the vilest warlockry.  There was only one virgin sacrifice she was in any moral position to make, and that would have been an act she only could have done once -- so, no.

Reading about that sort of thing did help decide her against contacting any Human mages of the diabolic traditions, though.  She did not for a moment trust any being who recommended such procedures, things that she was sure no civilized Equestrians would have countenanced.

It was because she was limited to only a trickle of thaums, though, that her casting times were so impractically-long to achieve even trivial effects.  It was only because of her great skill that she was able to achieve any effects at all, and she could clearly see, from her experiments, why Human scientists had been unable to verify the reality of magic.  An untrained caster would have taken far, far longer than Sunset Shimmer, and probably given up on it as useless long before any noticeable discharge manifested.

The other possibility was improving her focus.  Human mages used manual gestures, which made it obvious that they used their hands as (inferior) analogues of Unicon horns.  Sometimes they employed swords, knives or wands, whose purpose Sunset immediately grasped -- they would crudely channel the caster's psycho-kinetic energy, allowing longer-wave emissions, though limited by the relatively inflexible nature of such a simple prosthetic device, compared to the wondrous pinnacle of evolution that was the horn of a Unicorn.

Sunset Shimmer experimented with wands, but found great difficulty in so directing her magic.  When she tried to use the reflexes she had developed over a lifetime with her Unicorn horn, she inevitably wound up trying to channel the power through her nonexistent Human horn; which accomplished nothing save giving her a headache, if she tried it for too long.  The equivalent in her true form would have been to try to cast spells by waving her hooves around, which wasn't even how the (rare) Earth Pony mages operated -- they meditated, compounded potions and did ritual magic by walking patterns.

Eventually she accepted that -- despite her current Human form -- her magic was tied to her soul, which was Pony.  This meant that she had to work within Pony magical techniques, using her studies of Human magic to adapt them to her new form.

Sunset now had neither horn nor wings -- did that mean that she was an "Earth Human?"  She had already enjoyed some theoretical successes with ritual magic, though power limitations rendered it impractical for any serious work; meditation was absolutely necessary for the slow castings she performed.  Perhaps she might attempt to compound potions?  She didn't have the materials for Equestrian alchemy, but what if she copied Human formulae?

She plunged into the Human tradition of alchemy.  She lacked the funds for a full laboratory, but did what she could with an electric stovetop and makeshift crucibles.

After various failures -- numerous annoying stenches, several hair-singeing flares (which convinced her of the importance of safety goggles) and one outright explosion (fortunately a very minor one) -- she concluded that much of Human alchemy was just poorly-understood basic chemistry, just as her school textbooks told her.  Neither wanting to kill herself in a chemical accident in her very-inadequately-equipped home lab, nor have to explain to Principal Celestia why she was messing around with mercury in the school lab, she eventually abandoned this avenue of research.

Herbal potions were more promising -- and she indeed succeeded in making some effective herbal remedies, by dint of long effort producing compounds which duplicated the effects of medicines she could buy cheaply at any nearby pharmacy.  She could have done the same sort of thing in Equestria, with similar futility.  Eventually she gave up on this approach:  it was gettintg her nowhere closer to true magic.

She did succeed in making several herbal compounds which had strongly psychoactive effects, and which some of the sources claimed would augment her psychic powers and open her perceptions to other worlds.  Sampling the fruits of her labors, she managed more than once to get incredibly inebriated, and on one memorably-frightening occasion suffered horrible hallucinations -- at least she hoped they were hallucinations -- of some of the nastier creatures of Human demonology.

Normally, Sunset didn't even like getting drunk, and she could see that this was not a path to power, but rather to madness.  After she awoke, still shaking in terror, from those visions, she abandoned all further attempts at doing more than making soothing teas to aid her in her meditations.  

Afterward, she judged this a lucky escape -- had she continued this direction of research, she might have hit upon the Human world's equivalent of witchweed, and wound up temporarily boosting her thaumic output at the cost of destroying her sanity.  As it was, she was still occasionally troubled by nightmares; the worst being ones in which yellow-eyed formless black horrors hatefully hissed offers of assistance for some dreadful unspoken price that she knew she could not and must not pay, not if she meant  to remain the mistress of her very soul.

One of the few solid and useful successes of her many attempts had been her construction of a crude and clumsy, but workable thaumometer.  This had enabled her to measure her output, and gain feedback as to what techniques actually generated thaumic effects, as opposed to merely being mystical nonsense, like the majority of Human "magic."  She left that machine -- roughly the size and shape of a small refrigerator, though it required no external electrical source -- set up and running, keeping a continual digital record of the ambient thaumic field in which it sat.

It was due to this machine that she realized when she'd made the breakthrough.
> Chapter 4:  Breakthrough
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was the evening she first let Flash Sentry see her studio.

She'd held back on this step for a while, for a number of reasons.  If this had been Equestria, she wouldn't have thought twice about it, given that he was the closest thing she had to a friend on this side of the Portal, but she knew that Human customs were different.  She knew that many Human males would assume that if she invited him home, she meant to give herself to him, then and there.  Flash seemed different, but she had little trust in general in the barbarians.

Sunset had little fear of him.  She'd analyzed the weak spots of the ape-thing anatomy, and she was fairly certain she could stop him if he tried to force her -- rape was a form of madness to which the male ape-things seemed distressingly-susceptible.  She'd made a point of studying the necessary technique, before she'd dated any of the others.  Sunset had only ever had to hurt any of them a little before they gave up their nefarious designs.

But she didn't want to hurt Flash Sentry.  He was her only friend.  It would be so unbearably sad if he turned out to be just another barbarian, just another ape-thing whom she could not trust, whom she had to buck like any monster coming out of some wilderness.  If she drove him away, she'd be alone -- alone with the ordinary ape-things.  And she was starting to believe that he actually had at least a glimmer of the Harmony.

So she let him know beforehand that she wasn't going to have sex with him.  He had already noticed that she was sexually-prudent by Human standards -- he had said that he respected her all the more for this, but who could trust the word of a barbarian? -- and she decided to take the risk.  It had been so very, very long since she'd been able to just relax at home with another Pony -- well, he wasn't really a Pony, but he acted so very Pony that sometimes she was able to forget that he was really an ape-thing, he was such a sweet ape-thing, maybe if this had been Equestria and he had been Pony, she might have -- she didn't know, but she knew she really liked his company.

She was so very tired of being alone.

So she took him home with her, and they brought their guitars, and they jammed together, and their music seemed to merge into a perfect harmonious whole, each of them anticipating the ideas of the other, two minds and hearts meeting on a plane where there was neither Pony nor Human, civilized nor barbarian, just two beings who were sharing something beautiful and wonderful, two souls touching through the medium of music.  It was like the groupsongs that sometimes spontaneously happened back home, something else she suddenly realized she missed beyond measure, but far more intimate than any she had ever known.  It was magic, in the metaphorical sense the poor mage-blind ape-things often used the term:  it was transcendent.

They played on and on and on together, and then they finished one last song and, without a word, carefully put down their guitars and then fell into each other's arms, meeting in a long and passionate embrace they did not bother to break as they sank down together on her couch, kissing hungrily, as if they meant to drown in each other.  Sunset's soul sang to a different sort of music as she caressed his own hard body, so very wonderfully-different in its maleness from her own athletic but softer female form; and he responded with firm but gentle caresses of his own, his every touch, anywhere upon her, filling her with joy due to his reality, his separateness and yet willing and evident desire to join with her.

She had kissed him before, of course, many times during their dates, and had even previously permitted him access to the oversized teats that Human females bore all the time, even when they were not with foal or suckling, even when they were virgin.  He was the only male she'd ever let touch her like that, a sign of her trust in him.  She had found that curiously pleasurable, strangely both soothing and exciting at one and the same time, loving to hold him in her embrace while he caressed and sucked her in an alien manner, a position which would have been far more difficult for two Ponies with their heads close together.

Now, she abandoned all resistance to his actions.  As he held her, his hands strayed onto her buttocks and thighs, her lower belly, and she did not attempt to check him, either with words or deeds, as she would have any other male who attempted such intimacies.  Instead, she ran her own hands -- such glorious instruments of dexterity and tactile feedback! she thought muzzily -- all over his muscular form, caressing his own flanks and straying behind, breathing hard, and happily noting the effects of her experimentation upon his own breathing rate.

His hands went lower on her belly, higher on her legs.  She parted her thighs slightly, following an instinct that seemed to come with her Human form, and he touched her, first very gently and lightly, on her sex.  At this she gasped and arched her back, pressing her panty-covered crotch into his hand, maximizing the contact, overcome with the sensation of his fingers upon the entrance to her most intimate zone, separated from her only by a thin strip of cotton whose dampness, she realized, must betray to him her lust, if he had somehow missed the evidence of her smell, her cries, her own ardent caresses.  She closed her eyes, overcome by her passion.

She twitched her hips slightly, unconsciously attempting to ensure her nonexistent tail was completely out of the way, the expression of an instinct she had never fully realized her old form had.  Something was still between her and his touch.  She wanted Flash so badly; why was she even wearing this stupid garment about her nethers?  It was the sort of thing that only went with a formal ball gown, and she was alone in her house with her Special Somepony, she wasn't going to a formal dance, she was about to make love with her stallion ...

Suddenly, her mind caught up with the full reality of what she was doing, what she was about to do, a step about to be taken, a boundary to be crossed beyond which there would be no easy return.  She opened her eyes, and she saw Flash looking lustfully, lovingly down at her, caught in the throes of his own need, and she remembered with a shock that he was no Pony, no Equestrian stallion, but an ape-thing male, a barbarian.

Will he rape me? she wondered.  Take me, whether I want it or no?  It seemed a definite possibility at this point, but she could muster no will to strike him, to make use of what she had learned of the vulnerabilities of the Human anatomy.  This was Flash, and if he were an ape-thing barbarian he was a very dear ape-thing barbarian, and she could not bring herself to do him any harm.  Fear and desire briefly warred within her soul ...

... And Flash must have seen this in her eyes, for a communication passed between them in some way that she could not adequately explain, neither then nor after, for his own expression changed, the lust left his face, and he removed his hand from her private parts, releasing her from his embrace.  She clung to him slightly, and they held one another loosely, affectionately.

"I'm sorry," Flash said to her.  "I ... I lost control ... forgive me."

Sunset looked into his blue eyes, his familiar face, and for a moment it meant nothing to her that he was mostly hairless, his face absurdly flat-muzzled, his form anthropoid.  Restraint, she thought with wonder.  He's just shown sexual restraint.  But he's ... a barbarian ...?  A Human male.  How can he have the virtue of an Equestrian stallion?

In that one, glorious moment it seemed as if he were in truth Pony, or she Human, or that perhaps form really did not matter, not compared to their common sapience, the similarities in their souls.  She felt overwhelmed by a sudden deep trust in him, a sense that, on the level that things really mattered, they were the same sort of being, united in Friendship, and Love.

Briefly -- it was just a flash -- she saw an image from her memory.  Or was it a glimpse, somehow vouchsafed by a kindly fate?

It was the Alicorn filly from the mirror, herself, but more herself than she had ever known, spreading her wings in joy, smiling at her in approval, as if she had just done something right.

And that reminded her of her larger purpose, her greater destiny.

If she gave herself to Flash, she would be lost.  She knew that.  If she let herself love him, she would be lost.  Even if no foal came of it, she would not be able to leave this world.  She would, emotionally, forget who and what she really was, and be content to be a Human woman.  Never return to Equestria.  Never Ascend.

She could not let that happen.  She had been chosen to become an Alicorn Princess.  That was what she would become.  Whether Celestia approved of it, or no.  It was what she really was.

She detached herself, gently but firmly, from Flash's embrace.

"I ... I'm sorry too, Flash," she said shakily, smoothing down her skirt. "I was ... the music ..."

"We're really good together," Flash said, reaching out tentatively for her, and Sunset didn't think he was only talking about the music.  "I've never felt ... with anyone else."

She smiled bitterly.  "Me neither, Flash," she said.  "Me neither."  It was nothing but the truth.

"I ... do you want me to go?" he asked her.

Oh, Flash, no, she thought to herself.  You're making this too easy.  You're too nice -- why are you so nice?  You really should have been an Equestrian stallion.  But then, of course, if you were an Equestrian stallion, I fear my answer would be different.

"Yes," she said, meeting his gaze.  "I'm sorry, but right now -- I need to think about this -- I think it would be better if you went ..."

He looked dismayed, and she felt a pang of remorse.  He's such a sweet barbarian!  Almost, she changed her mind.

But the memory of the Alicorn firmed her resolution.

"Yes," she said.  "I need to be alone right now."

He apologized again, gathered his things and stepped over to the door.

At that moment she ran over to him, hugged him fiercely.  "Not forever," she said hoarsely, almost unable to control her own voice.  "Just for now.  I'm afraid ... if we continued ... I couldn't ..."

"I understand," he said, returning the embrace, stroking her hair and shoulders, gently kissing her on the top of her head.  He cupped her face, looked intently into her eyes.  "I ... I care for you, Sunset," he said.  "You're my friend.  I'd never want to hurt you."

"I ... I ... you mean a lot to me too, Flash," she said, and she was telling the complete truth.  "I don't want to hurt you either ... I'm afraid that I just did ... I ... you're special.  You're not like all the others."

"Others?" he asked, a slight edge of stress in his voice.

She saw her mistake, and the mistake that he had made in his interpretation.

"Other guys at school," she said.  "I'd never be with them -- like we were just now -- only with you. They're jerks.  You're not."

"Oh," he said.  "They're not so bad."  He smiled.  "I'll try to keep on being me, then."  He opened the door.  "See you later, then?"  There was uncertainity in his eyes.

She flung herself into his arms, gave him one last passionate kiss.

"Yes, Flash," she eventually said, smiling back at him.  "See you later."

They bid farewell, tenderly stroking each others' cheeks, and when Flash walked down the way from her studio, Sunset was glad to see his step was still jaunty.

He almost makes me wish I could stay here, Sunset reflected.  I know it's the contrast with the other barbarians -- I know his kind aren't that uncommon in Equestria, she told herself, with emphasis.  Still -- he's too good for this cruel culture.  It needs more like him, if it's ever to attain the Harmony.  I wish ... I can't, she concluded sadly.

Depending on what I do when I finally master the magic of this world, I may wind up hurting some of the ape-things, she reflected.  I don't really want to, but in the end they're not Ponies, she reminded herself.  Just ape-things.  Only barbarians.

Still, when she remembered the look of love in Flash's blue eyes ...

I won't hurt him, she promised herself.  Any of the others, but not him.  Never him.

Blinking back what must have been the effects of a stray dust speck in her eyes, she closed the door, and returned to her room ...

... And saw the light blinking on her detector.  It had registered a thaumic event.
> Chapter 5:  Analysis
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

She strongly suspected from the very beginning that it had been caused by something she had done with Flash.  For it to otherwise go off during the first time she had ever had a guest over to her studio, the first time she'd ever ... come close to having sex, with anyone ... would otherwise be an absurd coincidence.  Possible, but not the most probable explanation.

Her first hypothesis was that it had been the sex.  While it was not part of the modern mainstream Equestrian magical tradition, she knew that back in Tri-Tribal times, sexual acts had been used in rituals to focus thaumic energies to achieve large-scale effects.  There had, for instance, been the Sacred Marriage of Earth and Sky between the Earth Ponies and Pegasi, referred to in classic accounts from the itself half-legendary, long-vanished Empire of the North.

They said that, in a time before the Age of Discord, the Commonwealth of the Earth Ponies and the Mandate of the Pegasi had each selected a mare to represent her Kind, and those two sacred mares had made love, an act which renewed the sacred bond and treaties between Earth and Sky, so that the Sky would rain upon the fields of the Earth and those fields nourish both Earth Ponies and Pegasi.  That this act had been the centerpiece of a great Spring Festival, and had been consummated in full public view of the assembled multitiude.

Sunset Shimmer had read this as a shocked, fascinated filly, just turned twelve, and asked Princess Celestia disbelievingly if this was true.  Surely this could not be possible? 

Celestias surprised her.  She told Sunset that it had indeed been the case, though the practice had been discontinued long before even Celestia's own birth, twenty-five centuries ago.

Celestia had even explained to her how it worked.

"Sex," her Former Most Beloved Teacher had explained, "is a very intimate act, one of the most intimate possible between two Ponies.  It temporarily binds together the thaumic fields of the two Ponies involved, and if mingled with Love this binding may last a lifetime, and include their moiric lines as well.  This may be used to enhance magic, both because it increases focus and because it combines power."

"We don't do that anymore, do we?"  little Sunset had asked, rather frightened lest she learn that they still did; that the way she thought society and its rules worked had been simply a lie told to protect a little filly.

"Of course not," Celestia had replied, laughing throatily.  "We're civilized now.  We have much better techniques, which allow us to cast powerful spells without intruding on the private matters between lovers or spouses."

"Good!" said Sunset's filly-self.  "That would be nasty, if I had to ..." at twelve she had neither the courage nor knowledge to go into such matters, especially to her Princess, so she paused for a moment,  "... just to cast a spell," she finished.

Celestia smiled understandingly.  "I would never ask you to do any such thing, dear Faithful Student.  Also, such practices can be dangerous," Celestia added.

"Dangerous?" asked Sunset, mouth agape.  "How, Beloved Teacher?"

"When one gives up something very private and special -- sex, or love, or friendship -- for power, one sacrifices a part of one's very self," Celestia explained.  "One opens oneself to corruption.  It is said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  When one has power, or aspires to power, therefore, one must always take care to avoid corruption.  For corruption can rot one out from within, and what may attain to power in the end may be but a Nightmare peering out from a fair form."

"Were the ancient Tribes corrupt, then?" asked Sunset.

Celestia considered the issue.  "They were barbaric," she said.  "They sought power as best they could, and their lives were brutal and short compared to modern Equestrians, and they saw it as but the way of the world if the Morningstar took the hindmost -- who were often their leaders, for they were most certainly brave.  They took for granted that they must sacrifice their selves for their Ponies and Houses, and they did not see the philosophical contradiction.  They were simple, and mostly good, like most Ponies -- but they were often misguided."

"They didn't have you to guide them, yet," said filly-Sunset, looking up at her Princess with a blind adoration which adult-Sunset now found painful to remember.  How could she have loved Celestia so?  How could Celestia have so betrayed that trust?

"No," said Celestia, warmly smiling down upon her, "they did not.  Yet, mostly they meant well.  Without philosophy, without learning -- without the Harmony -- they formed their morals as best they could, and sometimes practiced ancient customs which were not very consistent with their morals, but were simply their ancient ways, in some cases codifications of old events.  They did not have schools such as my Academy, let alone Canterlot University, and their learning was largely the memorization of compiled traditions.

"The Marriage of Earth and Sky itself began," Celestia explained, "because a Pegasus Commander actually made a strategic marriage with an Earth Pony Chancellor, and they publicly consummated it to assure their peoples that this was not merely a marriage in name only.  And the alliance worked -- it was in fact one of the events which turned the Three Tribes into a confederation rather than a constant Kind- war -- and they decided to do the same thing again and again, because they wanted the alliance to endure.  That's how traditions often get started."

"Oh ..." said Sunset.  "I guess it worked out all right, then."

"Indeed," replied Celestia.  "But I am not sure it was because of the sexual rituals.  Rather, over time, as the Pegasi and Earth Ponies cooperated, and the Unicorns joined their league, Ponies of all the Three Kinds began to meet in friendship, and sometimes in love, and in time many of them understood that the Ponies of the other Kinds were people, just like themselves, though different in form.  

"And when they had friends, and spouses and kin of other Kinds, they no longer had the heart to harm them.  They joined together -- and this is how they survived the Windigoes, and the Great Migration, and carved out a new homeland for themselves here, far to the south of the Old Homelands.  And so, too, they survived the Age of Discord, and emerged even stronger, to become our Realm.

"There are many forms on the Earth, and in the Universe beyond, many different ways in which intelligence can express itself.  But we are all one.  We are Life, and we have the common goal of surviving and thriving in the Cosmos.  This is the purpose and power of Friendship, and the Love of all for all.  Never forget this."

At the time, little Sunset had been so very impressed.  Though now she knew it was nonsense.  She had been rejected because she had, somehow, not striven hard enough, and somepony else had doubtless replaced her, and she would never Ascend, never find her true destiny, if she did not make herself ruthless and hard.

She wondered what she would do if it did turn out to be a flare of sex magic.

Sunset still found the idea of sexual rituals repulsive.  They offended against the morals she had learned as an Equestrian filly, a scion of the scholar-gentry of Canterlot.  Sex was ideally part of Love, or at least one's duty in Marriage.  It was not to be used like that as a tool of spellcraft.  That was barbaric and vile, foul warlockry.

Though ... would it be so bad, if her partner was Flash Sentry?  She had felt so warm, so happy in his embrace.  She really liked him ... if he had only been a Pony, maybe a Unicorn, or even a Pegasus (for some reason she couldn't imagine him an Earth Pony), a stallion of her own true species.  If he had been Pony she would have fallen in love with him.  Been unashamed of him.  Been proud to name him her Special Somepony.

But he wasn't.  She had to deal with the reality of what she was, and what he was.  She was a Unicorn of Equestria, heiress to a proud and ancient civilization, aspirant to Ascension.  And he was a barbarian -- a dear barbarian, to be sure, but still a barbarian, the product of a civilization no more morally advanced than that of the ancient Three Tribes before the Great Migration, who sought battle for plunder and gave their virgin daughters to obscene rituals.  Mere feelings could not hope to bridge such a gulf.

Perhaps she could simply use him for the rituals?  The idea appealed to her, but she feared that she was deluding herself.  She already felt closer to him, warmer toward him, from just the intimacies they had already enjoyed.  If she took him as her lover in truth, regardless of her self-stated motivation, she would be lost.  She knew it.  She would fall in love with him, and no longer really care to return home.

But if it was sex magic, and it worked, dared she ignore the potential of such power?  Why must the path to her true destiny be strewn with such moral conundrums?

Thus it was with trepidation in her heart that Sunset Shimmer consulted the readout from her device to discover the timing and hence deduce the nature of the thaumic sure.

And found, to her great surprise, relief, and ... oddly enough, disappointment? ... that there had been a steady thaumic output during the period that she had been playing the guitar with Flash Sentry.  And a single, anamolous spike toward the end, which may have represented either that really hot and steamy moment before Flash backed off, or possibly her vision of her Alicorn.  She wasn't sure how to interpret that.

Nevertheless, the main conclusion seemed obvious.

It wasn't the sex.

It was the music.
> Chapter 6:  Experimentation
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

It actually made sense.

Magic worked by resonance effects.  The thaumic output generated by a single Pony was limited, and no mage could achieve much trying to bend the Universe to her will by brute force.  Instead, a mage tuned her thaumic output, through the variable emitter of her horn, to resonate with the effect she was attempting to achieve.  This meant that her energy accumulated, pulse after pulse, until it could overcome the opposing magic resistance.  Against an inanimate object, this was simply a matter of finding the right emission frequency; against an actively resisting target, of course, this was more difficult.

For an experienced Unicorn mage, achieving the resonant frequency was fairly automatic.  Not only would she have a good idea of the approximate range in which the frequency lay, as she emitted magic at a target, she would receive feedback regarding her effort in the form of the thaumic return.  The Unicorn horn was basically a magic antenna, with biological structures that aided in pre-processing signals both sent and received, connecting to the appropriate sensory centers in the cerebral cortex.  Tuning was mostly subconscious, though a mage could consciously focus on it to achieve specific efects.

Sunset Shimmer was of course most familiar with Unicorn magic, having been one, but she knew that the other Kinds had analogous structures to achieve their effects.  Pegasi used their flight feathers as emitters and receivers to shape their flight fields and perceive the air currents through which they maneuvered.  Earth Ponies used their hooves and hair to interact with the energies of rock, soil and metabolic processes.

Sunset knew something, from her personal tutelage by Celestia, that most Ponies did not.  There had originally been five, rather than only three, Kinds of Ponies.  In addition to Unicorns, Pegasi and Earth Ponies, there were the Flutter Ponies, whose magic had been mediated through large chitkeratinous wings, and had been tuned to the larger flows of life in the ecosphere.  They had been lost, vanishing long ago -- of the few who even knew they had ever really existed, many assumed that they had long since gone extinct.  Their fate was uncertain.

Then, there were the Sea Ponies.

Their magic had been mediated through their voice boxes -- it was a magic of song.  Of music.

The Sea Ponies were not wholly gone.  Rather, they had long ago fled from contact with the land-based Ponies, split into several distinct sub-races and now interacted with the land only occasionally and under circumstances the Sea Ponies controlled.  They were shy and distrustful, and hence their magic was only poorly understood by Equestrian thaumology.

But they could be very powerful.  They could generate force fields, control the ocean currents, raise or quell great waves.  They could mesmerize with their songs -- there were cases in which they had overcome entire towns of land Ponies in such fashions.  Sirens -- roughly their equivalent of warlocks, though the term did not have the same ethical implications to the Sea Ponies, whose morality could be quite alien to Equestrians, had been known to affect whole cities, even provinces.

Sunset Shimmer did not think that she had been transformed into the Human equivalent of a Sea Pony.  Her current body showed no particular water-adaptations, though the Human were in general at least as good swimmers as were the Three Kinds of Ponies, which was to say fairly good swimmers by the standards of non-aquatic mammals.  Nor had she shown any especial capabilities with sung magic -- though, come to think of it, she'd achieved most of her active magical effects in this world, pitiful as they were, by verbal incantations in the Human traditions.  It hadn't even occurred to her to try to sing the spells.

What a musician did when playing was conceptually complicated.  What if, without realizing it, she'd transferred some of her skills from Unicorn magic over to her guitar?  She knew that she could still sense magic, though only fuzzily without her horn to focus what she felt.  What if she tried to generate magical effects through music, using her guitar to guide her thaumic emissions?

If this worked, she could get back her magic.

She considered the problem for a moment.  She should do some sort of experiment, perform a test.  What should she attempt?

Pyrokinesis, she decided.  That would succeed or fail unequivocally, and it was her special magical talent.  And she had the test apparatus she'd used the last time.  She'd even saved some of the unlit tinder she'd collected from before.

She quickly set up her experiment.  A bronze brazier, filled with torn-up paper and wood chips, set on a cinderblock for safety, on a bare patch of floor, clear both of her books and her chemical supplies.  A small home fire extinguisher -- these Humans were clever artisans! -- by her side, to extinguish any blaze, should she manage to produce one.  She'd long ago disabled her smoke detector, so there should be no distractions.

All was in readiness.  Swallowing nervously, Sunset picked up her guitar.

She quickly improvised a melody to match the lyrics of the pyrokinetic incantation she had adapted from the Human magical tradition.  She had always been a gifted musician, and she soon slid into her sweet spot:  self and song and instrument, music and magic joining to become one.  She attuned with herself, then turned her attention outward, to the target.

She could feel her own thaumic output, sense the return from the target, with a power and precision like nothing she had known since she had stepped through the Mirror Portal into this accursed world.  The clarity was still far, far less than it had been in her memories of Equestria, but it was so much greater than the fuzziness she had felt ever since becoming Human that she might have gasped from the sheer bliss of it, would it not have disrupted her song.

She shifted frequencies, found the resonance.  Something was damping it out, but she locked onto the combination, and then there was no more damping.  At that she increased the intensity of the song, of the spell, pouring all her power down the channel.  She could feel the target's own vibrations in response to her magic, and she pulsed psychic power into it in time with those vibrations.  She could feel the amplitude of the waves peaking higher and higher ... just a little more ...

FWOOMF!  The tinder almost exploded into flame, igniting at several points simultaneously and sending a tongue of fire ascending to the ceiling.  So did a foot-square section of carpet underneath the brazier, which was immediately engulfed in flames from below.

"I did it!" she crowed, jumping up and down like a little filly.  "I have my magic back!"  It was exceedingly weak magic by the standards of an Equestrian mage, but powerful in terms of this magic-impoverished world.  Proof of it was plain in the fire in the brazier, under the brazier, starting to spread outward ...

Her reason caught up with her emotions, and she realized that she had just set fire to her own apartment.

"Yikes!" she shrieked, and leapt for the fire extinguisher.  Her dextrous hands pulled the pin, worked the lever.  Chill chemical fog sprayed forth.

A few moments later, the fire was out, but the room was full of a nauseating combined stench of burnt tinder, burnt carpet, heated bronze and chemical foams.  

I've got to improve my focus, Sunset reflected as she flung open the door, leaned outside coughing, and was very glad that she'd kept that fire extinguisher by her side.  Also, find a better place to do my tests.  I nearly went out in a literal blaze of glory.

She took a breath of the relatively-clean outdoors air -- polluted by the exhaust of countless internal combustion engines, as was the case in all Human cities, but nevertheless purer than the combustion products within her apartment -- and sighed.  Then she grinned.

I'm back in business, she exulted.  Now I can really get to work.

> Chapter 7:  Further Experimentation
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunset Shimmer lay naked in Flash Sentry's embrace.

This is happiness, reflected the young woman.  This is contentment.  I could really get used to this.

It was warm in her studio, but Sunset was cooling off as the air evaporated some of their mingled sweat.  She was atop him on her couch, her cheek resting on the broad, well-muscled surface of his chest, her thighs around his, those parts of him -- and her hands -- sticky with sweat and other fluids.  His arms were around her, nestling him comfortably against himself; she, in turn, had her arms around his middle.

It's so nice being held like this, Sunset thought.  Not exciting and wild like -- what we were doing before.  But really nice.  Especially after -- what we were doing before.  This -- sort of affirms it.  That it was -- closeness, of our hearts and souls.  Not just some kind of stupid animal thing.  

Sunset Shimmer was a voracious reader, and -- while she normally read more serious sorts of books -- she had read steamy romance novels, both back home and in the Human world.  She'd read about it feeling very nice to be held, afterward, by somepony special.  She'd intellectually-grasped why -- sex itself was just a base instinct, but true mating, of the sort Ponies might know, was deeper than that.  Holding somepony after sex, that was an expression of -- really liking.  The kind of liking that could last a lifetime.  Now, for the first time -- she really understood.

She -- technically -- still hadn't actually had sex with Flash.  Yet, she thought, and smiled to herself at the speculations produced by that conditional.  Then she caught herself.  Well, I can't, ever, she reminded herself.  My future lies in Equestria.  His remains here.  He has his own dreams, he has a family here, this is his world, barbaric as it happens to be.  He doesn't know how to be a Pony; he wouldn't be happy in Equestria -- would he?

For a moment, she thought the unthinkable.  That she, a mare of high birth and even higher destiny, might marry an alien barbarian.  Bring him back to Equestria with her.  When she Ascended and was crowned a Princess, install him beside her as her Consort.

The Mirror would change him, she realized.  Just as it changed me.  We'd both be Ponies.  At least she hoped it worked that way.  She'd never actually passed back through the Portal.

Not for the first time, it occurred to her that there might be no reverse transformation; or that the Portal might be keyed to only let Ponies in Human form pass back to Equestria.  In the first case, she could never return; in the second case, she could come back, but he could never join her in civilization.

Right now, lying in Flash's arms, being stuck here forever no longer seemed so terrible.

She pressed her cheek against his chest, felt his warmth, heard his heart beating, drank in the scent of his maleness, mixed as it was with her own bodily fragrances.  This form was nearly nose-blind compared to a Pony, but Sunset had the habit of paying attention to scents, and even her current pathetically-tiny nose could smell Flash in some detail:  his sweat, the male musk from his armpits, the slightly-flowery scent of his soap.  Cutting through all these, Sunset could smell something that brought a happy heat to her cheeks, a tinging to her loins:  the scent of Flash's semen, testament to the truth that she had pleased her stallion -- her man -- every bit as much as he had pleased her.

There was something wonderfully primal about her situation, lying here with Flash, something antecedent to all sexual morality, but not amoral.  Rather, it was at the root of the very concept of sexual morality.  He was her mate, the stallion who would protect her and the foals he would sire upon her from predators; they would watch out for each other, until death claimed them.

She snorted and smiled wryly at her own romanticism.  There would be no foals.  They had not engaged in the specific actions which might produce them.  And if they did, they would be not Pony foals, but rather ape-cubs -- cute little ape-cubs who would come from both of them -- no, long before then she would have returned home.  If Celestia had rejected her before, she'd have even more reason to reject Sunset if she showed up pregnant, unwed and with no fiancee in sight -- or at least no proper Pony fiancee.  

"A penny for your thoughts?" Flash asked her.  His hand gently carressed her back and shoulders.

Sunset sighed, and smiled into Flash's face.  What had once seemed an absurdly flat, anthropoid visage was now beautiful to her because of the warm and caring soul who lived behind it.  No longer monstrous, no longer alien, for this was Flash Sentry:  her dear beloved and friend, who meant only good toward her.

"Just ... thinking," she said noncomittally.

He arched an eyebrow quizzically.

"About you,"  Sunset added.  Her smile broadened.

"Oh?"  He tried to seem entirely nonchalant, but entirely failed.  "Um -- what about me?"

Silly boy, she thought fondly.  I learned to read others at the Court of Canterlot, where Ponies are expert liars.  You're far too honest to bluff me, even if you don't have proper Pony ears to watch.  Besides -- she glanced down his body, to the point where his member grew from a tatch of blue hair, excitingly near the place where her own red-and-yellow pubic hair provided some modesty for her own small Human sex -- you're naked.  I'm not sure why that matters so much with Humans, but it does.  Learned that in the girls' locker room.  She grinned. Though I find looking at your naked body more enjoyable than I did looking at those of the girls.

In her happy, horny enthusiasm for Flash Sentry, Sunset Shimmer did not notice that the thought she had just conceived would have been rather alien to a Pony mare, who was used to seeing both mares and stallions nude on a regular basis.  She was no longer the filly who had stepped through the Mirror Portal.  In more ways than the merely-physical, Sunset Shimmer had long been immersed in the culture of the North Amareican Federation -- and it showed.

She let her eyes rove up and down the form of her lover, grinning in a manner that she considered quite wicked, and replied:  "That you're very handsome."  She half-raised herself on hands and knees and slid herself up his body.  "Inside and out."  The patch of red-and-yellow hair on her delta caught his limp maleness, bent it back, and moved up the underside, producing what for him must have been a delicious friction.

Flash gasped ... a long, shuddering sound.  His maleness became considerably firmer.

"And ... manly," she added.  She moved further up his body.  With this motion, the tip of the external evidence of that manliness slid further down, furthe firming.  She reached down with one hand, lamenting her lack of telekinesis in this form, and literally took the matter in hand, holding his member firmly in her fingers and moving it up and down, in the perfect rhythm that came naturally to a skilled musician.  

She had speculated about a possible connection between music and magic in this world.  This was not the sort of magic she had meant, yet still there seemed something special and wondrous to her in the way her lover gasped, moaned out her name, and became fully erect in her dextrous grasp.

She positioned the head of his organ against her own delicate little nubbin, hissing slightly at the sensation of contact between their intimate flesh.  It's like our little heads are kissing, she thought, and snickered slightly at the concept.

"Sunset ... Sunny ..." said Flash, his voice thick with desire.  "Are you ... do you want to ...?"  His question was incomplete, but the general nature of the missing verb was obvious.

Sunset laughed.  "Something a little different," she said, "at least for now."  At his brief puzzlement, she added "I think you'll like it."

She held his shaft by its upper side, just as the diagram she'd consulted days before had shown her, then wiggled her hips, slightly repositioning herself.  Sunset leaned back, placing her other hand on Flash's arm to steady herself, and pressed her hips forward.  Her nether lips were already very wet with her arousal, and as her hips moved forward, she spread her thighs more widely, slightly parting the outer pair of those labiae.  She let his member settle along that groove.

Flash groaned, and Sunset made a little involuntary gasp of delight at the sensation of his organ right against her own in such a fashion.  They had touched each other there often enough in the last few months, but not with each other's private parts.  They were now very close to actual intercourse, and the awareness excited both of them.

"Do you like that, Flash?"  Sunset crooned teasingly, grinding her hips forward, rubbing her now entirely-exposed sex along the sensitive underside of his shaft.

"Oh, sweet freaking Goodness," replied Flash, using his people's name for the All-Father.

"I'll take that as a yes," Sunset said, herself breathing rather raggedly.  "Hold on, honey -- it gets better."

With that, Sunset moved her his forward, sliding her slit over his shaft and bending it backwards and down against his belly.  The pressure of his own erection pushed his penis up, keeping it in complete contract with her slick vaginal crevice, but in such a position that it could only slip along that crevice, rather than enter deeper within.

She had first encountered the concept of this form of frottage soon after she had turned thirteen, in a pillow book in the Library of the Palace of Canterlot.  Fascinated with the intensity of her own awakening young sexuality, Sunset had devoured that book from cover to cover, even taking detailed notes -- which she then hid carefully, lest they be discovered and shown to Celestia.

Sunset had never gotten to use any of her new knowledge in Equestria:  her breach with her Formerly Beloved Teacher, and subsequent self-exile, had deprived her of the opportunity to find a sufficiently serious lover for it to be even remotely appropriate for her to do anything so intimate with him.  The closest thing she'd ever had to coltfriends had been escorts to formal events, with whom she had traded polite compliments, but with whom there had been no real romantic connections.

Now, in an alien bodily form -- adapting her actions with an understanding of her new anatomy and the Human equivalent of pillow books (which she felt were very dirty) -- she was finally getting to enjoy the fruits of her advanced sexual scholarship, in a form other than provided by her own aura or fingers upon her clitoris, aided by a very capable erotic imagination.  And Flash, of course, was getting to enjoy those fruits as well.  

Flash gasped and moaned at her actions, looked up at her.  His hands gripped her hips; her buttocks.  He looked up at her with a wondering expression of mingled lust and love.  Despite his greater strength, he was completely under her control, yet trusting that she would use him kindly.  He was totally following her lead, showing absolutely no inclination to simply lift her up and plunge her back down to her defloration, as she knew he might easily do from this position -- at least one of the pillow books had warned that this might be a dangerous act for any mare to perform who was trying to prevent her stallion from actually penetrating her.  She knew that most male ape-things would have made the attempt.

Looking down at her lover; feeling the clear evidence of his male arousal pressing along her labiae and against her clitoris; feeling the strength of his hands, yet also aware of his forbearance, even when brought by her to such a pitch of excitement ... her love and respect for Flash grew at this further evidence of his sexual restraint.  Sunset felt an enormous rush of warmth and trust.  My dear barbarian, she thought fondly.  My sweet stallion.  You deserve pleasure.

She knew how to give him some.

Pressing their sexes firmly together, Sunset began to rock her hips back and forth, sliding her sex over his in a rhythmic mutual masturbation.  His shaft was slippery with her juices; she could feel his manhood pushing against the entrance ot her vagina, restrained from penetration primarily by the fact that her pubis was pressing his head back and down into his belly.  

She bit her lip with concentration.  It would be extremely simple to slide a bit further forward, let his head into her slit, then slide back, bringing his organ along -- then impale herself upon him.  The pillow books had explained that this was a natural transition, and a very deep and primal part of her agreed with the books that this was what she should do -- but Sunset knew that this was what she must not do, or she might be able to return home alone, with a clean conscience -- or at least one clean enough for her purposes.

She no longer knew what was clean enough for her purposes.  Was what she was doing right now clean, or dirty?  Love makes clean, the old aphorism said.  Do I love Flash? she wondered.  I can't, she thought despairingly.  My destiny lies in Equestria.  O my darling, my sweet stallion, I'm just using you.  We can never really be.

She should have felt bad about this, but it was impossible to feel bad about anything when she was rubbing herself on Flash's cock (lovely naughty word!) and giving pleasure and getting pleasure and the whole world felt so incredibly awesomely good.  She'd touched herself hundreds of times since coming to this world; Flash and she had touched one another down there a dozen times before, but something about the way they were touching each other now; the fact that they were touching cock to pussy (two lovely naughty words for the price of one, and together in concept as in flesh!):  the knowledge that he was pleasing her and she was pleasing him with the exact same motions was overwhelmingly wonderful.  Sunset knew now why -- even on the purely physical level -- mares would risk much to make love rather than masturbate.

It was impossible to remain intellectual any more:  to think about morality or philosophy.  Her remaining detachment was sweeping away, as a flood of feelings -- everything from raw driving desire to the most amazingly tender emotions regarding the Human stallion who lay and bucked his hips up under her, moving to meet her own motions.  He was gasping and groaning as he thrust beneath her, and she began making involuntary little cries of pleasure.  It was all, alarmingly, now quite beyond her conscious control.

Flash looked up at her in utter rapt adoration as his moans grew in urgency and volume.  "Sunny," he gasped.  "Oh damn, oh Sunny!"  He reached up, cupped her breasts. His fingers found her nipples, carressing and rolling and squeezing them.

At most times, Sunset rather liked it when Flash touched her breasts.  The increased sensitivity of the swollen Human teats was one of the few nice things about being a Human female -- at least when one was with a lover.  Well, that and fingers.  And right now, Flash was demonstrating the proper use of both.  

With what was going on at the same time down below, it felt indescribable.   

Sunset arched her back and neck, to the point that she would have been looking straight up at the ceiling had her eyes not been closed in sheer ecstasy, and began whimpering with her mounting passion.  As she lost all control, she began crying out words and phrases, seemingly wrung out of her soul.  She was scarcely aware of the time of what she was actually saying, though she was to find out later.  Some of it was literally incoherent, and she repeated herself a lot, but much of it might be summarized as:

"Flash!  Ohhh, Flash!  My darling, my dear barbarian.  O my sweet stallion, my sweet stallion!"

Then her exclamations became wholly incoherent -- neither of them was ever able to figure out what she meant to say -- as all awareness was overcome by white-hot pleasure, brighter than the surface of the Sun, her mind's eye shimmering like the Solar disc seen through maximum atmospheric thickness and heat, just before setting.

There was one titanic explosion of passion, like a nova flare, and she was pretty sure that she screamed then, because somepony was screaming, and it sounded too high-pitched to be Flash, though Sunset herself had a rather husky voice.

Then she collapsed onto her lover.  She was half-fainting from the intensity of what had just happened, sweaty skin against skin, and a mingled pool of other fluids on his sac and belly.  They gripped each other tightly, and she was suddenly kissing him in an uncontrollable frenzy of mingled fading lust and swelling love and gratitude.  Her long, red-and-orange hair, wet with her own sweat, trailed around his face, forming a private little space between them within which they expressed their emotions -- within which they, and only they, were real.

Tears welled up and fell from her face onto his.  Tears not of sorrow, but of exultation.

He noticed those tears and misunderstood.  "Don't cry, Sunny," he said softly, and caressed her cheek with a gentle hand.  "I ... I wasn't too rough with you, was I?  I'd never want to hurt you ..."

She laughed, but very affectionately.  "No, you big, silly wonderful stallion, you didn't hurt me," she explained.  "Those were tears of joy.  I've literally never felt anyting so amazing in my entire life.  I didn't even know it was possible to feel anything so amazing.  Oh, sweet freaking Life and Light, Flash --"  and at that moment, it seemed entirely appropriate to invoke Fauna Luster, "-- that was incredible. I --"  she suddenly felt strangely shy, too shy to say what she had first thought.  "-- I really like you, Flash.  Really really very much, like no one I've ever known before, there aren't enough words in your language to tell you how terribly much!"  She was babbling now, and she knew it, and at this special moment in her life -- she did not care.

Flash smiled warmly up at her.  "I really like you too, Sunny.  To put it very mildly."

And Sunset knew what he had just really said, just as much as he obviously knew what she had really said.

He loved her.  And she loved him.  For real, not just as a stupid shallow sex game she was being drawn into by her always-on Human heat.  

Somehow, impossibly, across the gulf of worlds and species, genuine love had bloomed between Flash Sentry and herself.  She wasn't quite sure why -- perhaps it had been because, alone of all the ape-things, she really and truly trusted him -- trusted him not to break her heart, to betray his promises, as had her Formerly-Beloved Teacher.

She closed her eyes, and briefly dreamed a new dream.

She would stay with Flash; stay in this world, return his love wholeheartedly and unstintingly.  She would trust in Flash, and he in her.  They would continue to make glorious wonderful amazing love.  Friendship had become Desire and Desire become Love, in the usual Pony way.  Soon, she would drop her last defenses, and allow him the ultimate consummation.  They would become lovers in full, and continue to be for the rest of their lives.  

They would unite in marriage, produce foals -- babies -- and tend and teach and love them until they grew into fine young men and women themselves.  And their children would find mates of their own, and in turn love and marry and have babies, and she and Flash would grow old together, happy and successful, embraced and surrounded by the love of each other and of their children and grandchildren.

With any other Human, she would have deemed her dream absurd.  They were such amoral, fickle creatures they not uncommonly switched mates like changes of clothes.  But she knew she could trust Flash -- she wasn't sure why, but she could feel his trustworthiness in her metaphorical hooves and mane, horn and wings (wings?  Now that as an odd conceit ...).  If she truly loved Flash -- if she gave him her heart without reservations -- he would not disappoint her.

She could see her choice clearly -- two paths lay before her.  Love Flash -- and give up becoming an Alicorn.  Become the Alicorn -- at the price of giving up the love of Flash.

To keep both -- that would be impossible.
> Chapter 8: Experimental Results
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunset was sorely tempted to ask Flash to stay the night.  She felt such tremendous warm affection for him -- it would be so nice to wake with her lover beside her -- just as if he were her husband.

She decided against this.  She was unsure how long her resolution to refain from the ultimate intimacy would last if she were literally sleeping with him.  She also knew that Flash's family would dispprove of Flash sleeping with her, and would moreover disapprove of her for allowing him to do so.

She very much wanted Flash's family to approve of her, though she wasn't sure just why this was so important to her.  Had Flash been a Pony and this Equestria, of course, the reason would have been obvious:  she would have been hoping that they might, one day, become her family as well.  Their courtship was still several steps from engagement, but she could clearly see the path they were taking.

But Flash was not a Pony; this was not Equestria; and there was no way she could marry an alien barbarian, no matter how sweet and dear he was to her.  His family would never be hers; she had a diferent destiny.

This was sad, but it was also true.  And Sunset Shimmer had always prided herself on her ability to face the truth.

So, she decided, she would enjoy Flash while she could, always aware that she must in the end move beyond him, to rise from his limited barbarian world and return to her land, the land of true civilization, Equestria.  She would never be able to forget her Flash; that already seemed clear.  But no doubt she would in time become philosophical about it, regarding her love affair with a strangely-sweet alien stallion as but a fond beautiful memory, to console her in the more complex world to which he would win.  She had read sentimental books about heroines in such a situation; surely it would be just like that for her?

Perhaps, if Fate was exceptionally kind to her, it might happen that Flash -- against all reasonable probability -- would be able to join her in Equestria in the end.  The portal would admit him; it would turn him into a Pony; he would rejoice at the superiority of Equestrian civilization and wish to remain with her.  She considered for a moment the possibility that Flash really was a Pony, transformed by some strange accident into a Human.  If he really were a Pony, there would be no obstacle to their union.  She'd read books like that as well; she smiled happily at the thought.

But she did not really believe that this would happen.  It would be unlikely for the world, which had so often disappointed her hopes, to be so kind.  The best she might reasonably hope for was to maintain some contact with Flash after her apotheosis; some sort of lasting friendship.  In the moral scheme she had learned in Equestria, Love and Friendship were mutually-supporting rather than antithetical principles.  If Friendship turned to Love it was a happy outcome, but for Love to fade away to Friendship was better by far than for it to turn to Indifference, or actual Hate.

Sunset Shimmer did not see how she might ever feel Hate, nor even Indifference, toward the lover she now claspsed against her bosom.  In her young and innocent heart, such an outcome was inconceivable to her.  Marriage seemed improbable, so by her moral code she could not give herself wholly to him; but their Love was an accomplished fact, and therefore the sexual intimacy they had shared was entirely clean.  And so, thinking such thoughts, and he thinking whatever thoughts may have dwelt in his alien and masculine mind, they fell asleep together holding one another on the couch, a sleep of happy mutual exhaustion.

And when their nap concluded, they awoke.  They cuddled, conversed and caressed together a bit longer.  Then, regretfully, they both dressed -- he, in his street clothes; she simply pulling on a tee shirt against the night's growing cold, for though she had assimilated Human physical modesty, she had none any more where Flash was concerned -- and made ready to part for the night.  Sunset saw him off at the door with one long last passionate kiss, which at points threatened to end with her dragging him back into her studio, for what might have been considered either immoral or supremely moral purposes, depending arguably on one's assumptions regarding their intentions and sentiments.

Finally, Sunset closed the door for the last time, happily hugged herself, and slid down the inside of the door, grinning in sheer and utter bliss.  He loves me, he loves me, he loves me!  And I love him!  I haven't told him yet, because I'm going to have to leave this world, but ... well, maybe when I'm a Princess I can invade this world and carry him off captive to my castle!  She laughed lustily at the thought of a scantily-clad Flash seductively draped in sungold shackles; then thought Or, I could just invite him to spend the summer with me.  That would probably be more civilized.  She was giddy with the possibilities.

Then, reluctantly, she returned to reality.  Ah well, she told herself.  No point counting my cucumbers before they're picked.  Time to do the work of cultivating them.  It's time ... for science!

She got up and padded over to the thaumeter, crouched to examine the display.  Thaumic events!  She was far from surprised at this outcome; of course she had done everything with Flash, both musical and sexual, that had triggered thaumic events on earlier occasions.  The fact that their actions had produced such thaumic emissions (among other sorts of emissions, she thought impishly) was more satisfying (in more than one sense of the word) confirmation of her hypothesis.

This time, however, she had added a new refinement to her apareatus, one which would enable her to make a much more precise analysis of the phenomena.  It was not enough to know that music and making out were enabling her to generate stronger thaumic pulses.  She wanted to discover precisely what she was doing to generate them, and to do this she had to know precisely when these pulses occurred.  By doing so, she could further refine the process, understand not merely the gross effects but the detailed causes.

Sunset Shimmer removed the datastick from her thaumoter.  Then she went to the microphones and videocameras that she had concealed around her studio and removed their datasticks.  She had, of course, not informed Flash Sentry of their presence, because she quite reasonably believed that if he had known what she had done, the knowledge might have affected his behavior in ways which would have rendered the experiment less useful.

All the datasticks collected, she plugged them into her personal computer, one at a time, and downloaded their files to a folder in her hard drive.  She then ran an editing utility that integrated them into a single display, automatically synchronizing their times.

She had not written this utility.





Sunset Shimmer was a truly exceptional Pony, a polymathic supergenius.  Her self-estimation as the smartest Unicorn of her generation was not far off:  Twilight Sparkle was one of the very few to surpass her, and only by a smidgin.  She had a deep, broad and profound understanding of logic, magic and mathematics, and -- to a degree slightly greater than that of the more theoretically-minded Twilight -- had mastered many aspects of Industrial Age technology.  She was, for instance, a skilled engineer, mechanic and electrician.

However -- brilliant as she was -- Sunset Shimmer was the scion of an Industrial Age civilization, while the North Amareican Federation within which she currently lived was an Information Age one.  She had learned some aspects of computer operation -- particularly those which pertrained to searches for knowledge -- but she did not have the visceral understanding of how information technology worked which a girl of equivalent intelligence born in Amareica would have imbibed in her malleable childhood.

So it did not automatically occur to her that, in hiring Script Kiddie to craft this utility for her -- and worse, letting him, a technologically-gfited but socially somewhat backward Humanoid teenage boy, know that she intended to use it to make a video -- she was courting certain dangers.  Not only had Equestria not yet assimilated home movie-making technology, but (in this, Sunset's prejudices were all too correct) Equestrian Ponies were fundamentally more honorable and less dirty-minded than were the Humanoids of North Amareica.

(Though the differences were not that great.  Sunset Shimmer might have been enlightened had she considered filthy post-cards, which were all the rage in certain Equestrian circles, and had been popular in the lower-technology past of the North Amareican Federation).

Most particularly, it did not occur to Sunset Shimmer to be suspicious of messages sent from her personal computer.

Thus, she entirely failed to notice when her computer, during supposedly idle time, made a compressed copy of her integrated file, most especially including the video, and e-mailed it to a blind account -- frm which, by circuitous routes, it would ceventually make its way to Script Kiddie himself.

To, it should be added, both surprise and shock that lad.  While he had of course hoped for precisely just such content as he had received -- we speak here of the video, of course; he had not the slightest notion of what Sunset's thaumic emissions detector was registering -- he had not actually exected anything as explicit as he got; nor with the famously hard-to-get Sunset Shimmer herself as the leading lady.

He could have sold that content for a fair sum:  the obvious innocence of the participants, and their sincerity, as demonstrated by their expressions of transcendant and unfeigned joy at some of the points in the procedings, would have if anything improved the value of the video.  He also could simply have released the contents anonymously for a lark -- and, in the process, badly harmed Sunset Shimmer's reputation, to an audience many of whom had well-founded grudges against her, and would have happily seen her name dragged through the mud.

He could have done either -- or both -- and easily have preserved his anonymity (or so he imagined; he did not even suspect that Sunset Shimmer could have scryed the identity of the one who had copied the information, the more so because he would have been on her short-list of suspects from the start; but then Script Kiddie hadn't considered that).

Yet, he did none of these things.

Why was that?

It may have been that he was afraid of Sunset Shimmer -- and he was fully-cognizant of the fact that those who crossed her often suffered unpleasant consequences.  (Indeed, he had originally assumed that Sunset wanted this computer-controlled video system for extortionate purposes -- and he still was not sure that she didn't, shooting video of herself and her boyfriend might have merely been a pleasant additional diversion).

But the truth was that Script Kiddie was confident -- even over-confident -- regarding his mastery of all things technological, his internet- founded anonymity, and consequently his ability to betray others without them dectecting his treachery.  And his natural instincts were of the sneak and black-mailer.  Indeed, in an earlier day, Script might have crept around, camera in hand, taking compromising photographs of unsuspecting victims:  his favored crimes had simply been rendered more efficient by the march of science.

What stayed Script's hand were two atypical considerations, both of which might have surprised Sunset Shimmer.

The first was that Script knew Flash Sentry, and Flash had been nice to Script on several occasions.  Most notably, when Script's smart mouth had gotten him into direct physical trouble with some of the jocks, Flash had stuck up for him, and saved Script Kiddie from a beating.  That alone might not have sufficed:  the experience had been humiliating for the budding hacker, and ingratitude for aid needed in an embarrassing situation is all too common among both Humanoids and Ponies alike -- were it not for the second reason.

The second reason was that Scrit knew Sunset Shimmer, and -- perhaps surprisingly -- liked her.  Sunset Shimmer was not that well-liked; she was more widely-respected or even feared -- but Script sensed on some visceral level that she was as much, perhaps even more, of an outsider from himself.  And more, she was an outsider whom by dint of drive and courage defied, and even dominated, the normal teenagers who Script so deeply despised.

He knew that Sunset walked a tightrope, and that his video could grease it and bring about her fall.

And he did not want her to fall.

He was, of course, both aroused and jealous when he saw the video.  He was, after all, for all his intelligence and precocious skills, still but a teenaged boy, and one who had long nourished a secret and hopeless crush on Sunset Shimmer.  That was his worst temptation:  there was a dark part of him which wanted to use the video to blackmail Sunset into granting him her favors, or -- given that such a plan would probably fail and fail most disastrously -- use it to destroy her, for the crime of giving herself to another.  To punish Sunset and Flash for their all-too-evident happiness together.

Yet, for all that was base in Script Kiddie's nature, there was also something fine in it, and that smething fine recognized the love he saw in the eyes of the young couple on the video, and knew that it would truly be a foul deed to betray them -- the more so because Sunset Shimmer had actually hired him to write the very same program which he had used to steal that data.  And, for all the petty crimes he had committed, and those he intended to commit in the future -- Script Kiddie was simply not that rotten.

So, in that key moment of his life, when a moral choice, and one whose significance he did not then and never would fully grasp, was presented to him, Script Kiddie -- hacker, data thief, and would-be blackmailer that he was -- chose Good over Evil, and did not betray his friends.  He passed his crucial test; even though he, imagining himself a philosophical sophisticate above such black-and-white value judgements, might well have laughed in your face had you told him this in those terms.

And because Script did not betray her, Sunset in turn was not tempted to even greater evil.  Had Script betrayed her in so personal and humiliating a fashion, the hot-tempered Equestrian expatriate would almost certainly have been impelled to some dreadful vengeance, one which would have put her hooves on a darker path than the one she was to tread, an action that might well have proved unhappy both for Script and for his whole world.

Script knew nothing of this.  He simply acted according to his nature, which was far less vile than Sunset Shimmer might have imagined based on her opinion of his species.  And in so acting, he may have helped to save that species from horrors beyond his imagination.

Script kept his copy of the file, though, and sometimes watched it in private.  Script may not have been all that bad a boy, but he wasn't really all that good, either.

Just good enough, which is all that one ever needs to be to pass a test of survival.





Sunset Shimmer, unaware of the fact that another copy of her file even existed, examined the records she had made with a deep interest mostly scientific in nature.  She was on the trail of magic, whether the magic or music, or of sex, or of something else whose true nature she had only the vaguest speculations.  She suspected that she was on the verge of uncovering some vast and heretofore unsunspected truth about the Universe.

Which was not to say that the young mare in the form of a Humanoid woman was entirely unmoved, whether to love or to lust, by the images flitting across her computer screen.  She was, after all, young -- high-spirited and full of life -- and this whole business of being in love, and of having a lover, was all still quite new to her.  More than once, she smiled in happiness, or flushed in excitement, at what her records revealed.

But for all her youthful passions, she was still a Sun of Clan Light, an Equestrian gentlemare, and a mage who had been the protege of Princess Celestia herself.  She had a brilliant mind and ironclad deterination, and she was focused on her goal of finding the magic that would enable her to return in glory to the land she loved, and return to the favor of the Princess who despite Sunset's own defiance she worshipped, almost as a goddess.

So it was with serious purpose that she spent hours each day, over the next week, poring over her files, playing and replaying the video she had recorded, and trying to match up the patterns of thaumic emissions she saw with the activities on the screen.  She took copious notes and mathematically-analyzed the patterns that emerged; and only at occasional intervals was she impelled to take herself to her bed for what she deemed necessary recreational relief, having been stimulated in less intellectual manners by her recorded actions.

Observing and reviewing the evidence again and again, Sunset Shimmer came to certain conclusions.

FIrstly, the thaumic emissions were very strongly correlated with her actions.  Specifically, to music, sex, and to something else that sometimes seemed to happen during music and during sex, but was not itself directly tied to any particular musical or sexual activity that she could identify.  She labeled these thaumic excursions type M, type S and type X.

Both music and sex, she noted, combine considerable emotional arousal with rhythmic stimulation.  Hypothesis:  the emotional arousal is necessary to overcome a steeper thaumic-inertial barrier in this universe, while the rhythmic stimulation is necessary to allow harmonization and resultant resonance effects.

Secondly, while she could generate type M and type S thaumic excursions through playing her music solo and through masturbating, respectively, she did not seem to be able ot generate type X emissions by either means.  Also solo performances of either kind produced an order of magnitude or so less thaumic emission than did the combined ones in her file.  She verified this through extensive experimentation and the analysis of their records.

Type M and Type S emissions are both an order of magnitude more powerful when performed with a partner.  Type X emissions require a partner to generate, she noted.  I have confirmed that I can generate type X emissions through both M-type and S-type activities with Partner F.  I do not know whether or not I can generate type X emissions with any other partner.

Thirdly, type M thaumic excursions were weaker than type S excursions, and both were far weaker than type X excursions.  

Hypothesis: she wrote.  Type X thaumic emissions are produced by the harmony between two or more living beings who engage in some emotionally-stimulating and rhythmic activity which enables them to overcome the thaumic-intertial barrier.  In a type X event, both production and emission past the thaumic-inertial barrier are much greater.

This suggested that she should be trying to figure out how to produce X-type emissions at will.  The only problem was that she was not sure just what about the times that she had produced type-X emissions with Flash were different than the times she had not.

They did tend to occur at the climax of both kinds of performances.  But not precisely at the climax (in either sense of the word), which was the vital piece of information she'd needed the timed-recording system to determine.  In point of fact, they tended to occur after the climax -- often, she noticed, at a point where they were emotionally-interacting -- exchanging affectionate words or glances.

That, coupled with her knowledge of Equestrian magical theory, suggested some fruitful possibilities, and hence avenues of research.  Love, she thought, or Friendship.  Either would have correctly described our feelings for each other at that point. 

Tentative hypothesis: she wrote.  The M-type or S-type activities harmonize the thaumic emissions of the partners, and then once harmonized, shared Friendship, Love or some other emotional qualia enable an amplification of output.

That sums it up nicely, Sunset Shimmer thought, looking approvingly at the final draft of her research notes summary.  I think Princess Celestia would have given me an 'A' on this work -- if I dared show this to her, given the nature of some of my personal research efforts.  Then she frowned.  Or maybe not, she considered.  I haven't solved the most important problem here -- identifying the actual trigger for X-type emissions.

She wasn't sure where to continue her researches from here.  I can play more music and make love some more to Flash, she thought, and I should for scientific completeness -- she smirked to herself -- and other reasons.  And I can take some more timed video of it and try to narrow down the event window with my thaumic emissions detector.  Yes.  Definitely I should do that.

What else?

Well, I could try to see if I could generate X-type emissions with another partner.  Preferably someone with some magical aptitude -- but how can I test for that?  Oh, right, I can audition them solo with my video and thaumic hookup, see if they produce any emissions and if so how much.  I should also try Flash solo while I'm at it -- see if he has magical aptitude, and how much -- that'll give me baselines for solo thaumic emissions for both of us.

Who would be a mage, though, aside from me, in this Harmony-forsaken world? she wondered.  Well, there's that strange girl who claims to be some sort of illusionist, and always talks about herself in the third person.  Her nose wrinkled.  What's with her, anyway?  Trixie something-or-other, I think she is.

Sunset contemplated how best to approach Trixie, and how to use her in her experiments.  She's pretty amazingly arrogant, thought Sunset.  If I tell her that I could really use her talents to help make a video, maybe bribe her a bit, I think she'll jump at it.  I've seen her play guitar in Music Class, too.  She's actually not bad.

Of course, that only covers M-type emissions.  And maybe X-type, if we try a duet.  S-type, now ...

She had a sudden brief mental image of herself passionately kissing Trixie, and doubled over laughing at the thought.  

Um ... no, she decided.  No S-type testing with her.  No way, no how.  There's a limit to what I'll do for science.

Then she frowned.  

Actually, that prevents me from doing an S-type test with anyone but Flash, she realized.  He's my Special Somepony -- it would be really wrong to make love to anypony else.  Love Makes Clean.  What does scientific utilitarianism make, when applied to lovemaking?  She thought about it.  I'd be a whore.  Just one being paid in the coin of knowledge.  She shuddered at the thought.

Then it struck her.  That's what Celestia meant about sex magic being inherently corrupting.  I didn't see it when I was just a filly, but it's plain now -- any mage who went down that path would be turning her own love life into a quest for power.  I don't think that would turn out very well.  She remembered the stories, not all of them fictional, that she'd read about evil enchantresses and mad warlocks, and saw now one way that such mages might have taken their first steps on their downward paths.

Strange, how it was only now, when she'd finally defied and fled Celestia, that she was starting to see the wisdom in some of the things her Former Beloved Teacher had said.  She wished powerfully, against all reason, that she could somehow go to Celestia now, ask her for advice.  She suppressed the urge as an obvious weakness.

Then she realized that, if her guesses about the nature of X-type excursions were correct, she didn't need to do S-type tests with anyone other than Flash Sentry, anyway.

If an X-type excursion is a manifestation of the Magic of Love, or Friendship, or anything like that, then being sexually-intimate with someone I didn't love probably wouldn't produce it, anyway.  Because I would be revolted by such an act, so I wouldn't be feeling friendly or loving toward my partner!  

She sighed in relief, glad that a source of temptation to do something she really wouldn't have enjoyed doing had thus been removed.  Also, glad that she wouldn't have to kiss Trixie.

In any case, she further realized, while musical magic could be practical -- there's an existence proof for that, in the Sea Ponies -- sex magic would be far more cumbersome.  It only takes a matter of seconds to get into a musical passage -- but lovemaking doesn't work like that.  It could only be used in a protracted ritual -- as it was in the Time of the Three Tribes, in the Marriage of Earth and Sky, by two Kinds who could only cast a spell together by means of ritual magic.  That's one of the reasons why it didn't survive into modern Equestria, above and beyond the obvious moral hazard.

I could only do sex magic with Flash, and Flash is no mage, so he wouldn't know what to do -- about the magic part of it, anyway, she amended to herself.  But I could do music magic by myself, or with anyone.  What's more, I could do music magic in public, without any onlookers thinking that I was doing anything too strange -- but I couldn't do sex magic that way.  Not even solo.  So I need to focus on the music.





That was as far as her researches got, that first week.

Of course, she was doing more than just researching.  School was out for summer, but she was kept busy during the day running her various rackets and deals, maintaing the financial activities that kept her housed and clothed and fed, and the webwork of social control which kept her on top of her little community of savage and cunning killer apes, who would turn on her and tear her to pieces in an instant if she didn't keep on doing this.  

Sunset Shimmer was something of an ascetic -- she didn't really need a lot of luxury in her life, and though she'd enjoyed sharing the hedonism of the Palace at Canterlot with her Formerly Beloved Teacher, that hedonism itself had not been for her the main appeal of such an existence.  Knowledge -- and power -- were the achievements Sunset had craved., and still craved.

Now, of course, she had -- for the first time ever, whether as Pony or Human -- something more tender in her life to which she could look forward.  Flash was busy during that week -- he had a job and chores and responsibilities toward his family and his other friends, and Flash was a very responsible boy.  It was one of the things about him which she admired, the sense of honor which was so civilized -- almost Equestrian.

All that week they had both been busy with their other tasks, so they had not been able to see each other, save for a hasty lunch and a scarcely less hasty dinner together, both short and for practical reasons not resulting in any intimacies beyond conversation, long gazes into each other's eyes, hand-holding and a few kisses and gentle caresses.  Aside from that, they had to be satisfied with phone conversations, and flirtatious texts and e-mails.

But she was looking forward to the weekend.  It was understood between them that he would come over again on Saturday -- they would have lunch together, then come back to her place and make more music -- and love.

Then, on Friday, Flash phoned her.

"Um -- there may be a change of plans on Saturday, if it's okay with you."

"Is everything all right, Flash?"  she asked him.  "Can we still get together?"

"Yes," Flash affirmed.  "But maybe not at your place.  At mine, instead."

"Wait," Sunset asked.  Unlike many of the students at Canterlot High School, who rented rooms near the school during the school season, and sometimes stayed in them year-round, Flash actually lived with his family. "Is your family going somewhere on Satuday."

"No," came the surprising reply.  "They want to invite you to dinner, Saturday evening.  My parents want to get to know you better.  'A nice, long conversation with your girlfriend,' was what my Mom said."

And it was at that moment that Sunset Shimmer discovered that she was not, in fact, entirely fearless.

"Ulp," she said.  "Um, I mean yes!  Of course!"

She would have rather been facing a whole squad of mad warlocks.