//------------------------------//
// Scene 17 - The deGrange household 
// Story: Beyond the Bounds of Universes 
// by CTVulpin 
//------------------------------//

Carmilla parked her car in front of a house on the outside of the outermost hexagonal ring, on an oddly shaped block as the town’s streets transitioned suddenly from the concentric hexagons of its heart to a more conventional grid.  The house was a spacious two-story structure with a gabled roof and was, in Twilight’s opinion, excessively green.  The walls, the front door, the corner trim, the fake shutters framing the second-floor windows, and even the roof were all different shades of green.  The color certainly made the house stand out from its similarly shaped but more humbly colored neighbors, but it also somehow reminded Twilight of the Smooze, and she had to fight down a shudder as she followed Carmilla’s lead in exiting the car.

“What’s this place?” Spike asked as he hopped out of the back seat.

“Home,” Carmilla said with pride.

“Ok,” Spike said.  “Why’s it so green?”

Carmilla spread her hands in a hopeless gesture.  “My dad has this… thing with repainting the house a new color every couple of months,” she said.  “Typically, that means whenever he and Mom get back from their latest culture tour or cruise.”

“So that’s why you’re so confident in offering to put the portal here,” Ash said.  “No awkward questions from the parental units until long after the deed’s done.  Assuming they’re ever around to catch on.”

Carmilla shot Ash a withering glance over her shoulder as she opened the front door.  “Unlike you, Ash,” she said, “I’m not in the habit of keeping big secrets from my loved ones.  My parents won’t mind, especially since I didn’t have any part of the house itself in mind.  Still,” she added after a second, looking around warily as she and the group stepped into the foyer, “we should probably try to avoid attracting-”

“Hey, you’re home early, Milla,” came a voice from down the hall.  The speaker was a young woman dressed in shorts and a t-shirt.  She had the same brown eyes and hair as Carmilla, but where Carmilla’s hair was barely tamed, the newcomer’s was worn in a neat braid.  She stepped into the foyer with an intrigued look in her eyes.  “And what’s this?” she asked, looking at Ash, “Captain Creep-eye, in my house?”

“What’s this?  You’ve emerged from your cyber cave of your own will, mini-Milla?” Ash retorted with a playful smirk.

“A girl’s gotta eat,” the young woman said with a dismissive wave at Ash.  “Seriously, though, what’s going down?  Ms. Smith’s here, I don’t know the girl with the dyed hair, and… is that a midget dragon of some sort?”

“I’m not a midget!” Spike protested.  “I’m a b- a kid, is all.”

Carmilla sighed and rubbed her forehead with a finger.  “So much for that,” she muttered.  “Twilight, Spike, this is my kid sister, Sharon deGrange.  Shara, meet Twilight Sparkle and Spike the Dragon, from Equestria.  Ash is trying to help them create a direct link between our two universes, and I figured they could use the garden shed to hold the portal.”

Shara nodded.  “I see,” she said.  “So… That means I get to use the portal when it’s ready then, right?”  Carmilla sighed again, but eventually nodded.  Shara’s eyes lit up, and she grinned in a disturbingly gleeful manner.

“Why do I feel worried all of sudden?” Twilight whispered to Ash.

“I wouldn’t be,” Ash whispered back.  “Shara’s too devoted to her computer science to find much appeal in Equestria.  Not at the current tech level at least.  Now,” he raised his volume and addressed Carmilla, “you were saying we could set the portal on the side of your shed?”  Carmilla nodded, and Ash held up the spell notes he’d been studying.  “Well, I still need to finish going over the spell, so you can go make sure the space is clear of debris while I work on that.”

“All right,” Carmilla said.  “Are you going to need any material components?”

Ash looked at the notes and frowned.  “Well,” he said, “there’s a full page here dedicated to building a framing array out of gems and gold wire…”

“Don’t worry about that part,” Twilight said quickly.  “That’s on Equestria’s end; the portal doesn’t even need to have any identifying marks on this side, so long as it’s anchored in something solid.”

Ash continued to frown in thought.  “No,” he said, “if we’re casting the spell from this end, we’ll need something to make Weave symbols with so the magic doesn’t unravel once we take our focus off it.  Some kind of paint would do the trick.”

“Oh, we’ve got paint to spare,” Shara said.

“Good,” Ash said distractedly, focusing his attention squarely on the spell notes as he wandered off down the hall.  “Whatever you have that’ll stand out against the shed’s color.  Twilight, if you’d come with me please; I’d like to be sure we both know what we’re going to be doing.”

“Right,” Twilight said confidently.






As Twilight and Ash walked out into the back yard several minutes later, she was feeling much less sure of herself.  “Maybe I should spend more time learning Weave Magic before we do this,” she said.  “This is an extremely complex and risky spell, after all, and I still can’t sense the magic around me like you can, Ash.”

Ash put a gentle hand on her shoulder and guided her over to the wooden garden shed in the corner of the yard, where everyone was waiting for them.  “Don’t worry, Twi,” Ash said, “I designed the patterns we’re each going to make according to our abilities.  I’ll mostly be doing the ‘heavy lifting,’ gathering the magic threads together and cracking the dimensional boundaries.  Your part will be to guide the spell toward Equestria and tie it to the anchor point.  I can’t do that because I don’t know what to aim for, but you do.”  He produced a fresh set of papers with intricate diagrams and put them in Twilight’s hands.  “Just follow the pattern and focus your will on your goal, and everything will fall into place.”

Twilight did her breathing exercise a couple of times, expelling her nervousness and letting Ash’s confidence bolster her own.  The pair reached wall of the shed, where a can of black paint and two paintbrushes waited for them, and Twilight knelt down, spread the diagrams out on the ground, and took the smaller of the two brushes.  “Ok,” she said, “let’s do this.”

Ash nodded and took the other, broader brush.  “Keep clear, everyone,” he said, looking at Spike in particular.  “This probably won’t be flashy until the last moment, but you never know with new magic.”  He dipped the brush in the paint, closed his eyes in a moment of focus, and then started painting.

Per the plans, Twilight waited until Ash had finished a few glyphs before starting to paint her own set next to his.  The glyphs would ultimately form a two-layered arch, with Twilight’s finer glyphs as the inner layer.  As Twilight painted the fourth symbol, she started to worry again, as she couldn’t feel anything she recognized as magic occurring.  After she dipped the brush and started on the fifth symbol, however, she felt it: a gentle pressure swirling about on all sides and growing stronger as it moved down her arm and around the fingers that gripped the brush.  Twilight began painting faster, her strokes becoming more confident as she moved up the wall.  Her vision began to narrow, and as her line of glyphs started curving to the right to follow Ash’s line, the wall of the shed seemed to start bending inward.  She became aware of the dark nothingness of the void between universes, and Twilight hesitated.

“Steady,” Ash said gently, moving to the other side of Twilight so he could keep working without reaching around her. “You feel the void now, don’t you?”  Twilight nodded, pausing again as her hand started to shake.  Ash took her free hand in his and said, “You’re still here, you’re just sensing how the spell is starting to reach out.  Stay focused on where it needs to go, not where it is now.”

Right, Twilight thought, raising her paintbrush again.  Equestria.  The new mirror.  I hope it’s ready to go.  She double-checked the diagrams, and resumed painting.

As Twilight and Ash finished the top of the arch and began working their way down the other side, Twilight’s sense of the void faded into a sensation of light, and then a mental image of Equestria seen from high above.  With each new glyph she painted, Twilight’s view zoomed rapidly closer to the ground, and soon she could see her castle, then the work room where the mirror stood.  She saw Starlight Glimmer affixing a gem into the array on the mirror’s frame, and the glass flickered and Twilight saw herself, her normal alicorn self, reflected in the mirror.

With a final twist of her wrist, Twilight painted the last line of the final glyph, and the mental images vanished.  She stepped back from the shed, looking over the arch she and Ash had painted.  “Did it work?” she asked.

Ash looked over the arch with a critical eye.  “The Weaves are holding,” he said, “and every line is clear and proper.  All that remains is to activate it.”

“Activate it?” Samantha asked.

Ash nodded.  “I built an activation phrase into the spell, so nothing will pass through the portal accidentally.  Should help with regulating who has access, too.”  He glanced at Twilight.  “Well, shall we test it?”

“Yes,” Twilight said emphatically.  She stepped up to the wall again and placed her hand on it inside the arch.  Ash did likewise, and at his nod the pair both spoke the key phrase: “Destulf Equestria, Transport!”