“You really should be working,” Evenstar grumbled as he begrudgingly began to take a drink of the soup levitating before him. He grimaced as he propped himself up.
“Too hot?” Amethyst asked as she absentmindedly swung the kettle further from the fire.
“No just… sore,” He sighed as he let his head rest back on the pillow of his makeshift bed. “I’m not hungry anyway, go do your research.”
“We aren’t working until you eat,” Amethyst said as she let the bowl drift to the table.
“If I ate every portion you required of me I’d be fatter than a pig,” Evenstar quipped as he propped himself up on the table once more. “Give it here.” He took the bowl in his trembling hoof.
“I can help,” Amethyst offered as she let her aura engulf the bowl.
“No, no…” Evenstar said as he pulled the steaming soup toward his mouth. “I’ve got to get back to work soon.” As it reached his lips, the foreleg that he had been using to prop himself up gave way. A cacophony of sound and soup filled the room as Evenstar’s breakfast spilled across his bed. This was the third time in the past two days this had happened.
“Evenstar,” I said as I approached the bed. “You really need to relax. Your leg won’t heal any faster if you keep pushing yourself like this.” Evenstar glared at me as Amethyst quickly tended to the mess he had made. A fire burned in his eyes, one of anger and determination, and yet, it was dwindling ever so slowly.
“I will not rest. Not until my research is complete.”
Amethyst shot me a glance to keep me from arguing, for there was no use. Despite being bedridden for nearly a week, he still complained daily about our help. I don’t think he realized how much he need, and keeping him in something so confining was difficult to say the least.
When we weren’t tending to Evenstar’s, Amethyst and I tried desperately to keep working on the minor breakthroughs we had made on the shell. We both felt like something was there, something important, but without Evenstar everything just felt… meaningless.
An hour later, and Evenstar had been fed. After which he promptly fell asleep. It was growing difficult to work without him, but we tried our best to plod along and continue with our research.
“So, where were we?” Amethyst asked as she let out a sigh.
“Uhh… The summation?”
“Right,” she said with a nod as she walked back to the board and drew the parabola once more. “So what is this area?
The question lingered in the air as she drew out the complicated formula. Every iteration brought an increase in resolution, but much more time was spent working out the answer. When she reached the end, we exchanged glances before she let out an exhausted sigh. “Now what?”
I scrutinized the math as I let my mind scramble together any modicum of direction. I was running out of sensible ideas, and I knew she was picking up on my lack of understanding. “Can we set the resolution to infinity?”
Amethyst’s jaw dropped open. “Uhhh… no,” She said bitingly. “Do you have some method for doing that?
“Well th-the limit might work.” I quickly tried to retract my stupidity, but Amethyst had grabbed it.
“And how do you expect to do that?!”
“I… I don’t know…”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Amethyst shouted as she tried to coax any sensible idea from my mind.
“I just don’t know!” I shouted as I stomped the ground. “None of this makes any sense anymore!”
Amethyst looked to the ceiling and let out a frustrated sigh. “Starswirl, come on!”
“Look, I’m sorry,” I shouted as I stared wide-eyed at her. “I was just throwing around ideas, but everything has started making less and less sense. We’re dealing with 3D functions now, 3D functions! We’ve got scraps of the most advanced mathematical system lying around this chalk board, but I can’t give you all of the answers!” As I cooled off I looked to Evenstar. The stallion who had brought us to this point lay asleep in his makeshift bed.
Amethyst let out a sigh. “I’m sorry,” she said softly as she stepped to the chalkboard and erased our most recent scribblings. “I just feel like we’re so close to a breakthrough.”
“And what will that breakthrough grant us?” I asked as I stepped to the chalkboard and tapped the first half of the analog equations. “Another door to be unlocked?” I looked to her and frowned. “Without Evenstar... I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Starswirl,” she started.
“I’m sorry, Amethyst. Without Evenstar, I can’t do much here,” I said as tears welled up in my eyes. “I don’t think I’m the genius you think I am.” I looked to my mentor as he lay peacefully on his side. There was nothing I could do to help him, and likewise myself. He had been my support, but now, when the curtain had been pulled back and the truth revealed, I wasn’t who they thought I was.
I turned and trotted to the windows, not sure what I would find in that endless expanse of cloud and sky. As I passed the tables, I could hear Amethyst start to call my name, but I couldn’t care. All I could think about was how everything had fallen apart so suddenly. There was a role that I thought I was supposed to fill, but now more than ever it was clear that I simply could not rise to the challenge.
You’re just an earth pony, I thought as I looked across the clouds below. There’s nothing here for you. The quiet rustling of paper beckoned for me to look behind me, but all I could do was let my mind wander from cloud top to cloud top in search anything to distract my mind from its own self destruction.
I don’t know how long I sat like that, but I do remember Amethyst’s voice interrupting the silence. She spoke a phrase that had some distant familiarity to it. Like I had only heard it in a dream long ago.
“Answer isn’t… number?”
My mind latched onto that phrase, desperately trying to understand why it was so familiar. Then, as if a light suddenly turned on in the darkness of my mind, I remembered that night as I stumbled to the desk and wrote those words. It was my small revelation in the middle of the night.
“Where did you find that?” I asked as I looked back at her.
“It was on the table. I was looking for one of our old graphs. Why? What does it mean?”
I stepped to her side and read the page once more. “It means… It means we’ve done it.” I said as a small smile spread across my lips. “Amethyst, the shell… the answer isn’t a number that we’re looking for. This isn’t an equality, it’s a…” I hesitated as I looked at the chalkboard where the first half of the analog equation was written. It stood as a warning to us that when one door was opened, another would always arrive once more. Our discoveries were not answers, they were progress.
“It’s a system.”