//------------------------------// // SIGAWESOME's (and Stanisław Lem's) Cross-Product Lovers (Georg's "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Coltfriend... Literally") // Story: Never the Final Word (Vol. 2) // by FanOfMostEverything //------------------------------// Slipstick stared into Twilight's eyes from across the dinner table at The Sunflower Grove; an establishment so exclusive that royalty was put on a 4 week waiting list; Cadance had pulled a few strings and called in some favours to secure Twilight a reservation for her very first date. Most ponies never associated love with tensor algebra, but Slipstick was an accomplished disciple of the Masters and knew the classics by heart. He recited a sonnet in his velvet tenor that was sure to impress his date: "Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain! "Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. "In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. "I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. "For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? "Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. "Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. "I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a2 cos(2) φ !" Twlight's cheeks flushed as she fanned herself with her hoof. "Is that The Perfumed Garden of Linear Algebra I hear? Why Mr. Slipstick, are you trying to seduce your Princess?" Slipstick stared back with a sultry smirk and a smouldering, hooded gaze more commonly associated with top-shelf romance novel covers. But this was so achingly, longingly real and not an idle fantasy. "Do you feel seduced, my Princess?" "Oh ho~! What say we go back to my castle for a Study Session?" "Study session?" "Mmhmm~ I have the complete unabridged collection of Sutra Mathematica" "The Perfumed Garden of Linear Algebra?" asked Slipstick, hardly believing his ears. Twilight nodded. "A first edition printing. I also have Bound and Derived: Sensuously Steamy Set Studies, Ergodic Confessions of Riemannian Manifolds. I even," Twilight dropped her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper, "have The Joys of Tantric Differential Analysis. The one with all the lemmas~" she added with a wink. Slipstick's eyes nearly bugged out of his head in disbelieving shock. No mare, especially one of Twilight's intelligence, stature, and stature, had ever been interested in him and shared his passions. He squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, struggling to remain decent. Twilight say his reaction and decided to go for the kill. She leaned across the table and whispered huskily into Slipstick's ear, her warm breath causing his ear to twitch. "I even have the fifth volume we could read together. The full, unedited version with Haversine's Last Theorem~" Slipstick closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip in an effort to suppress a groan. He almost lost control and started enumerating Galois fields of prime order at the dinner table. In public! "Wow! Just...wow." He took a few calming breaths to regain his composure. "Wait..." Slipstick cocked his head to the side. "I thought the fifth volume was forbidden?" Twilight giggled behind her hoof and ruffled her wings. "Princess, remember? I have access to all sorts of things~! So how about it? Interested in doing some research?" The corporation of Slipstick held an emergency quorum. Hormones did not even review the proposal before hastily voting "yay" on general principle. Brain gave it a cursory, perfunctory glance, tossed it aside and whole-heartedly supported Hormones' motion in a rare show of consensus. Verdict reached and motion unanimously passed, Slipstick blinked and rapidly nodded his head "yes" as he doofily grinned like a teen-aged colt at the end of prom. "Oh yes! Very much yes! I haven't been this excited since I was invited a keynote speaker to the Truth of Tau: Purging Pi's Patriarchal Past conference." "What." "Yeah! Tau. I seek to free my fellow ponies from the old, outdated notions of Pi and show them the one true freedom in Tau!" Twilight flashed a searing, actinic white in rage as her mane and tail erupted in flame. "GET. OUT."