Ace of Fates

by Awkward Elipsis


Chapter 2

              So, still in a cage, not much has changed. We've started travelling after Trixie woke up. A side note, do you know how much your body aches from sleeping in a metal cage that's too small for you? Very, and I wasn't even able to stretch that day. The only upside is that the shaking from Trixie's 'house', knocked a few books my way. Lucky break huh? Time-wise, it's been about two days since I had first met Trixie. Since then she and I have gotten, 'acquainted'. No not in that way, yesterday she tried to train me.

              "You should be grateful that Trixie is allowing you this time outside." Trixie sat down right outside the carriage. Which I cannot understand how it looks so small from the outside, and how big it was inside.

              "Honestly I am thankful," I took the time to stretch, "getting out and stretching feels so good." I felt the satisfying pops of my aching joints. "So what's the catch for letting me out?"

              "You are going to show me what you can do, so Trixie can see how you compare to Sparkle's human." She floated a bunch of juggling balls out of the carriage.

              "Well, I'll be inhibited with this," I waved my right hand, "on." Trixie's reaction to this was to throw the balls in my direction. I managed to catch one both another flew off to the right and another hit my shoulder.

              "Trixie is not an idiot. She knows you humans can use magic through both of your front hooves."

              "Arms, they're called arms. Please tell me there aren't only ponies here."

              "Of course not." She stated, "now you can at least use telekinesis?." I gave her a deadpan look as I floated the ball that hit me in the shoulder and tossed the one I caught to my left side and made them orbit each other. Honestly telekinesis was not the first magic I learned. Though it was the easiest to learn. All it took was channeling the magic through my hands and envisioning hands on the object. "Good enough for basic telekinesis." Trixie said looking unimpressed. An idea popped in my head. I imagined a third hand near Trixie's ear and moved it ever so close just enough for it to irritate her. Her ears flicked at the hand, but I quickly moved the hand away so she wouldn't hit it. She looked around to see what it was that touched her then proceeded to rub her ear with her front hoof. "Can you do anything else?"

              "Maybe." I continued to spin the balls in the air.

              "Care, to show?"

              "Maybe." Messing with people is fun. Wait I wonder how Elise is doing? Hold on, how will they react to me falling off? Out the corner of my eye I saw a light and moved out of the way of a magic beam. However dodging it meant falling backwards on my ass. "Hey!"

              "You were slow. I thought you needed some incentive." Her horn's glow stopping from firing the beam. "So far your performance has been lackluster compared to Twilight's human. Ouch, now that's an attack against my pride. Fine let's see.

              "I hope these balls aren't your only ones." Keeping the two balls spinning I sped them up and called a little more magic through my left arm. Imagining the balls igniting. The balls in turned ignited and created a ring of fire.

              "Fire magic. Adequate, at most." I pouted, disappointed at her reaction. She is pushing buttons here. I envisioned a burst of smoke and it happened. Rather immediately and violently. Causing it to cover both of us in smoke. "Smokescreen, "Trixie coughed, "good, you know magic she does not." Recognition finally. "You will need to learn the magic that the other human knows to however, or else she'll out shine you. And I- Trixie!" She messed up. So the third-person speak is not her usual speak? "Trixie can't have Twilight's human be better than you. You'll need to read and learn from chapters one through three." She tossed me a rather heavy book titled 'An Introduction to Magic. 14th Ed.' Below the title written in smaller font, 'Manehatten adaptation for non-ponies. "Make sure you practice those and I'll see your progress tomorrow."

              "You aren't going to help?" I raised an eyebrow.

              "I am busy and must go over my next performance. I learned by myself."

              "Thanks Teach." Well, not like this is different from before. I had taught myself how to channel that feeling, which I found out was magic, out across my entire body and even use it to cast magic. I walked inside the carriage. Upon walking inside I was lifted and put into the cage before I could react. "Come on, I promise not to use fire inside."

              "Ah, thanks for reminding me." A bubble popped into existence around the cage. “Wouldn't want to buy another carriage.” She closed the carriage door as she left. I sighed and opened to book to the first chapter. I muttered the words as I read through.

              I found that the first chapter did really apply to me as it was all about the principles of magic and how unicorn horns are able to channel magic. Seeing as I know nothing about magic before this. This could actually answer a few questions I had about magic.

             

Magic, it is everywhere and flows in everything. Plants, animals, rocks, and ponies. Magic has been here from the very beginning and will be here when we aren’t. All three races of ponies have magic that run through them. However magic affects the three in different ways.

              Man, feels like I'm in high school science class again.

             

While earth ponies may not seem to have magic, they in fact do. While earth ponies do not have wings like pegasi or horns like unicorns. Magic instead spreads through their body causing earth ponies to have higher strength, endurance, stamina, and tenacity. This also causes earth ponies to have a higher affinity to the growth of plants and care taking of animals. Overall, magic allows earth ponies to be excellent farmers and jobs involving manual labor.

              Pegasus ponies are more visually affected by magic in their bodies. Magic causes pegasi to have more light, agile, and faster bodies which allow for easy flight. The additional affect along with flight allows for pegasi to control and predict the weather and the side effect to walk and touch clouds. Whereas it takes a magic spell from a unicorn to allow an earth pony or unicorn to touch clouds.

              The third and final race of ponies are unicorns. Physically unicorns are similar to pegasi, usually have small builds but are not as fast. The lack in physical ability, unicorns have a higher affinity to the use of magic. This is possible due to the horn located slightly above a pony's forehead. This horn is made up of a form of sturdy cartilage. Through the use of spells, unicorns are able to share and learn different forms of magic.

              Magic spells come in an assortment of levels and forms as well of different fields. This book however will only cover the basic spells that are expected of an adult unicorn. Keep in mind that the stereotypes mentioned in the passages before are not always true and that there are unicorn ponies that can have high physical capabilities and skinny earth ponies.

Wow that is an informative book, this is meant for young unicorns? Education here is so different.

              A large bump caused me to jump and hit my head on the top of the cage. "Ow." It seems as though Trixie had started pulling the carriage while I was focused on reading. Welp back to reading. I flipped the page which just happened to be a table of contents. Chapter 1: Simple Telekinesis, Chapter 2: Barrier Projection. "Don't know how to do that, why not?" I continued reading.

             

Barriers are an essential skill for every magic user. They serve as the first and final defense against a magic assault and even physical. Barriers are one of the very few forms of magic that do not require any cast runes to use. While there are specialties to barriers to counter different attacks, this chapter will go over the basic method to form and stabilize a standard barrier.

              The forming a standard barrier requires little amount of concentration. In order to form a barrier, channel the magic through your horn, concentrate and condense the magic in a dome. Once the magic has started forming use Star Swirl's Magic condensation method to harden the barrier. Depending on the quality of work done during your use of Star Swirl's method will determine the strength of the barrier. The next step is maintaining and strengthening the barrier after its formation. Once the barrier is set, channel a constant stream of magic into the barrier. This should cause the barrier to visibly condense and its transparency should decrease. Later in this book we will be going over how to create different types and shapes of barriers.

              Uh, what is the Star Swirl method? Is that some sort of formula like science? It refers to it like it’s common sense. I don’t know it but it won’t be a problem right?

              I faced my left hand palm side up. I started channeling magic to my palm and imagined a dome on the palm of my hand. Sure enough a miniature silver dome manifested on my palm with ease. "Wh- That was easy!" I imagined the dome floating up and forming into a sphere, and it did just that. I reached out my right hand and touched it. It felt hard and cold, like a metal plate. That's... disappointing? I was expecting it to- As the thought crossed my mind the dome warmed up, visibly brighten, and sent a fuzzy feeling through my hand. It changes properties according to what I think. Is it really that easy? I flipped down until I found a passage about how to make a specialized barrier.

             

The next step to barriers is adjusting its properties. This can make your barrier more resistant to different elements or physical attacks. In order to do this you must understand the different attribute spell runes from chapter 10. Using the right runes in conjunction with the method to form a barrier will cause the barrier to gain resistance to the attribute you cast upon it.

              That sounds a lot more difficult than what I just did. I decided to test out if I actually did create a ‘specialized barrier’. I created a basic barrier on the bottom of the cage and imagined a small beam of fire shooting at it. A tendril of fire sprouted from my finger and hit the barrier. It lasted a few seconds then the barrier popped and the fire beam hit the bottom of the cage. Five seconds. I then formed another barrier while thinking that it would be fire resistant. Another barrier reappeared on the bottom of the cage. Like the one before this barrier was brighter than an ordinary barrier. I repeated and after ten seconds the barrier popped. So it can last about double the amount of time compared to a basic barrier.

              This is interesting and all, but where’s the juicy magics? I flipped through the book seeing only the basics, beam magic, shielding, etc. I wanna shoot ice shards or a fireball. Closing the book I looked over to the assortment of other books in Trixie’s collection. From what I saw they were mainly only about showmanship and enhancing the visual quality of spells. There looked to only be two books that showed any promised on advanced magic, one titled “Magic Algorithms: Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns Edition 24.” And the other was “An In-depth Study on the Properties of Unicorn Magic.” Both were out of reach. Fine, I could try coming up with my own advanced magic. It’s not that hard right? Brainstorming time go!

              I had thought about a fireball and ice shards before, but when visualizing a ball of fire coming out of my hand the feeling didn’t flow outwards. Confused I tried imagining the fire beam again and the same laser came out perfectly fine. Testing out other things showed progress as I made a beam of magic, a beam of ice, and a beam of electricity. But no matter how I imagined it I couldn’t form a ball of fire. It had worked when I lit the balls on fire, but I can’t make a ball of fire from nothing? Do I have to light something on fire first? Instead of running my head into a wall, I decided to sharpen the one magic I couldn’t perfect before. Matter acceleration.

              Now it sounds plain and simple. Basically it’s just using telekinesis to speed up an already moving object. But that much concentration actually required a lot of my own magic to use. I couldn’t use it before in my shows cause of how exhausted it would leave me afterwards. That sucked too, my plan was to use it on cards and slice things using cards like Gambit. Cool and another magic trick to freshen up my act. But now that I was in this world, I haven’t been as magically exhausted as I usually would. Even after using all that magic. Maybe this world is just more magic-filled than Earth? So I decided to practice this.

I levitated a pack of cards that Trixie had laying around inside the carriage and inspected the cards. Fanning the cards out, I could see that they all shared a common pearl white with gold borders theme. The King was a white pony with multi-colored hair, interestingly enough she adorns a very long horn and a set of what looks to be bird wings. The Queen looked to be another pony with a horn and wings, but this time it was pink with a purple, pink, and cream hair color. Next the Jack seemed to be different. This pony had a horn too, but also a stockier build than the others and was wearing a red cadet uniform. It had shades of blue in its hair and was white-bodied. Flipping through the rest of the cards, cards 10 through 2, and they were just a series of ponies in gold armor with blue mohawks. However, the Ace of this deck was actually a set of six ponies of varying colors with that human girl. All of them were huddled together for what looks to be a group photo. Now that I think about it, they looked to be the same group from the polaroid photo on Trixie’s map. Are they important or something? Maybe they worship those with both attributes? I left the topic for another time, I could just ask Trixie.

Time to get to business. First was the control. I grabbed a random card and flicked it out of the cage. The card glanced off the ground and slid to a halt. Next was a card enhanced with matter acceleration. I picked another card and imagined it speeding up. Flicking the card afterwards, it flew faster and ricocheted off the ground and onto Trixie’s desk. It wasn’t that much faster than before. Let test something else.

For the next hour I experimented with different ways of speeding up the card. What I found out was fascinating about the way magic works. When I had just pictured in my head that the card ‘speeds up’ the card indeed would speed up. However if I gave a more specific instruction then the effect could be changed. I imagined the card going about 30 miles per hour(48 kilometers per hour) and the effect was staggering. The card flew out fast enough to dent the card. Not to mention getting it to fling off into a random direction. Hope Trixie won’t miss that. Then I tried something more complex. I thought about the card leaving my hand and instantly stopping in midair. Then I pictured it shooting upwards at about 10 miles an hour. When I flicked the card, it did just as I had imagined. I would have liked to test more things out but when I heard a sound coming from outside the carriage door I had to get the cards back into her chest. The moment I thought that the remaining cards in my hand and the cards laying about the inside of the carriage sparkled blue and popped out of existence. The next thing I knew another spark soon followed by Trixie’s chest of props and the pack of cards, back inside their box, plopped back to where I had got them.

“Alright, Trixie has procured enough supplies to last the three days we need to arrive in Ponyville.” She walked inside with bags of bread, fruit, and vegetables. She slid out a cooler and organized her groceries. “We will be leaving now. The sooner we arrive at Ponyville the better.”

“You really have a vendetta against that purple pony huh?” Trixie was silent for a moment before muttering something under her breath. “What was that?”

“Nothing.” She closed the cooler harder than it needed to be. She stared at me. ”Want out of that cage?” I was taken back by this question. Why the sudden change of wanting to keep me in the cage? I was skeptic, but that wasn’t going to keep me from getting out of this cramped box.

“Hell yeah.”