She Changed How Math Works · 10:14pm Feb 24th, 2015
Forty-three point four six isotopic density times three, considering the mass of the specimen. Add one-forty-four, plus the product of my experimental equation... I punched the numbers.
43.46 x 3 + 144 + 81.562
Multiply that by 57. Add 9,289... Double the sum... Subtract 58287.8571, and I got...
Fifty-five.
Impossible. I ran the numbers through the calculator again, making painstaking effort to ensure all decimal points were in their proper places.
Fifty-five.
There's no way. The calculator had to be broken. I swept it off the desk and yanked another off the shelf. Grasping my pencil firmly in tooth, I typed the numbers again.
Fifty-Mother-of-Solstice-Five.
"What is going on here!" I shouted.
"Oh, that," Beat said, covering her mouth with one hoof, "That's my fault."
I blinked, slowly turning my head towards her, making sure to sew on a look of sardonic displeasure, "Go on."
"I changed the way math works."
I blinked again. "What do you mean, the way math works?"
"Yeah. I changed the essential rules of how numbers and values relate."
"How... how can you do that?" I asked, my mouth now falling open.
"Duh. Magic." she said, tapping her horn.
"N.. no way." I rifled through five or six more calculators, each giving the same sum. I tried different equations. Sparkle's Equation. Moondancer's Entropy Formula. I even ran Pipsqueak's Elliptic Function on the circumference of the room. They were all wrong. "Hey, D!"
"What?" Double Down called, annoyed, from the other room.
I conjured up an equation even he could do. "What's one-hundred plus one-hundred?" I shouted back.
"Seventeen."
I did it on my calculator. Seventeen.
"That's... Sirocco!"
"Uh, yeah?" he peeped from somewhere behind the sofa.
"Ten plus ten."
"Ummm... thirty one?"
"Wrong!" I cried, triumphantly, until I put it into the calculator and saw he was right. Grrrr! I was going to make math behave itself if it was the last thing I did. I hurdled to the nearest terminal and used the calculator function. Thirty one! Fifty five! Could she really be that powerful?
"Yeah," she said casually, "One of the spells I learned from that book."
"Can you... change it back?" I whispered, turning slowly. I slipped a hoof over my muzzle. My eyes must have been huge, liquid saucers. I could see everything.
"Meh. I like new math."
I whimpered, barely containing my forlorn rage at the death of my beloved calculations, "But old math made sense."
"You'll just have to re-learn math," she shrugged.
"Change it back!"
"No!"
I hunkered down and lowered my head, tying to look as "I'm about to charge you" as possible. I even flared my nostrils, which, according to my Etiquette Manual, is very unladylike and will not get you dates. I roared at the top of my lungs, "Change it back right now!"
"Nope," she said, and stuck her tongue out.
That was it! Nopony alters math and gives me the raspberry! I charged at her. She tried to cut the corner into the hallway but I was too fast. I threw my fore-hooves over her and bore down. We fell into a pile up against the wall and I would be damned if a unicorn beat an earth pony in some old-fashioned wrasslin' (even if the Manual advised against such uncouth behavior). I was on top and giving quite the intimidating stare. "Change. It..."
Then she started laughing. I could hear Sirocco and Double Down laughing, too.
I nickered. "Did you... really change math?"
She wiped a tear from her eye. "No. I just enchanted all of your calculators, dinkus," she said, guffawing and gesturing, "but I did write gullible over there in the corner of the ceiling."
I looked up into the corner, taking a good fifteen seconds (which is seven plus eight or five times three) to see if she had.
She hadn't.
Too bad you can't give a "thumbs up" to blog posts... that was great.
2827906
It'll be in a future chapter.
So I stumbled my way here somehow. After reading that, I'm glad I did,
...This was terrific.
I ship these two.