//------------------------------//
// Technology, Redux 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

The conference room lights flickered as the door swung open yet again, this time admitting Braen's golden visage to the table. Wet but not muddy, the metal mare stood respectfully, not taking a seat.

"Oh! You're back!" Shinespark looked up from where she was still toweling herself down, trying unsuccessfully to remove the mud from her fur. "Waiting for me to go check out that dam business?"

Maple glowered, covering Starlight's ears. "Really? There are fillies present..."

Shinespark flinched. "No, I...! Dam, as in the Water District..."

Wordlessly, Braen nodded.

"Well." Shinespark gave up on her towel, shaking her spiky mane once again and settling into a protected chair. "I take it we don't need to do any introductions? Everyone knows each other? Because now that we're all here, I'm kind of eager to get started..."

Maple's brow furrowed. "Get started on what, exactly? And I still don't think we know who Braen is."

"She's the commander of the Spirit," Shinespark answered, waving a hoof. "And an ally. But we'll get to that. First off... Starlight."

"Huh?" Starlight sat up, rubbing her eyes until she was fully alert.

Shinespark nodded. "When you were in Riverfall, my dad - Arambai - lent you a book to read, giving a vague overview of his research. Did you read it?"

"A little," Starlight truthfully admitted. "I don't really remember it. It was a while ago."

"It's been a while since I read it, too," Shinespark said, ignoring her mane even as it threatened to get in her eyes. "I don't know how up-to-date he keeps it. But it has a very important chapter regarding the classification of brands. There are two categories almost all brands fall into: active and passive. Passive brands are unconsciously used, always doing whatever they do. A brand that makes you smarter, or stronger, or have an aptitude for a particular kind of work. Active brands you consciously use, and they have specific, observable effects that aren't always on. Maple's, for example. I have an old friend called Elise with a particularly powerful active. Does any of this sound familiar?"

"Maybe." Starlight swallowed.

Shinespark folded her hooves. "Well, that's fine too. Now, as to how brands actually work... he showed you the projects he was working on, I know. The ones that are powered by brands."

Starlight nodded.

"Right. The way those work..." Shinespark looked up, thinking. "There's a... thing in the world, and it's called harmony. We don't understand very much about it, including whether it's a substance or a force, and if it obeys various other scientific laws like conservation. You know... like how if you use a summoning spell, the longer you try to keep it active, the harder it becomes to maintain?"

"And the more it hurts your horn afterward," Starlight grumbled.

Shinespark smiled apologetically. "In your case, that too. We'll see if we can do something about that, though. Anyway... the two things we do know about harmony is where to find it and what it does. It appears inside ponies; every kind of pony, from infant to elder. In ponies with brands, it's always most concentrated there. In ponies without, it's spread evenly throughout their bodies... though since we started trying to learn about this, we have noticed a few exceptions in particularly young foals. But that's not important. What is important is that it's deeply involved in how pony magic works; things we can't even begin to approximate with mana-based technology like unicorn horns and pegasus flight. It's how my dad's machines work. We've been studying it, along with brands, as hard as we could for the past seven years."

"But even with his big machine, it barely did anything to how much Amber weighed," Starlight protested, skeptical. "Aren't you a million years from doing anything with that?"

"...Yes and no."  Shinespark fidgeted, turning over in her chair. "We've lowered the impedance on our harmony extractors as much as possible, and are still working on it. But our progress deteriorates with time, and at this point spending an extra ten years would probably yield performance increases of around two percent, or maybe ten if we switched our material to pony bones which shouldn't even be a consideration for obvious reasons. It's like a mana circuit; we don't pull it out so much as let it out... like removing a plug. Empty obsidian can drain it forcibly, but that destroys the obsidian in the process which is completely impractical." Her brow furrowed. "How did you know about obsidian, anyway?"

"Moon glass?" Maple blinked. "Valey told us this afternoon."

"Oh." Shinespark slumped. "Figures. I wish I didn't have to deal with her. Oh well. That saves me the trouble of explaining it myself. Where was I going with this?"

"You were telling us something where you didn't want to tell us what it was about until you were done," Starlight offered.

"...Thanks," Shinespark deadpanned. "I was... right. The limitations in our machines. There are two ways we've found to get around them. The first is to connect a sufficient number of brands in series. Initially, we thought that would never work, since it would lead to a higher harmonic density in the extractor than the ponies connected to it and cause it to simply stop working, but it turns out brands connected like that somehow resonate and increase their own power. Unfortunately, that state is very volatile and tends to either break the machine or explode after a certain amount of time, so it's a dead end anyway. We just can't get anything stable enough to work, and even using obsidian and our considerable funding explosions will eventually attract attention."

"Even using obsidian?" Maple squinted. "What does that have to do with this?"

Shinespark nodded. "Right. It turns out concentrations of harmony aren't actually exclusive to ponies: disembodied brands work just as well. We don't know exactly what the things inside obsidian are, but they're similar enough to real brands to produce identical results by hooking them up instead of real ponies. There were a few issues safely getting them out of their containers to use - it turns out obsidian has disharmonic properties, which are something yak mythology says exists, but we never observed before in practice - and those bind it to things that are excessively harmonic, which is why they stick together. We found a way to partially unbind them and let out the power while keeping the brands in their containers, though, so that's already solved."

Starlight shivered, recalling how violently Arambai's machine had reacted to her... and how White Chocolate's empty moon glass had clung to her, draining her ability to see colors and not wanting to let her go. There couldn't be a relation... could there?

"The other thing we've found," Shinespark said, instantly confirming her fear, "that the machines react to... is single things with naturally high concentrations of harmony."

"You're talking about me, aren't you?" Starlight gulped. "When I was at Arambai's house, and got connected to his machine, it exploded. And then it exploded again."

"Well..." Shinespark closed her eyes. "Eventually. Actually, I was talking about a certain brand."

"Huh?" Starlight squinted in remembrance... and then blinked. "That was in his book! Wasn't it? He said something about finding a single cutie mark that was way more powerful than anything he had ever seen?"

Shinespark whistled. "So you did read it. Good job! Also, cutie mark? That's pretty cute. I like it!"

"Hold on," Maple interrupted, setting Starlight down, pupils small. "I just realized something. A particularly powerful mark..." She looked sideways at Braen, then Shinespark. "You make it sound like you started whatever research you're doing fairly abruptly. It wasn't whenever you found this mark, was it?"

Shinespark smirked. "It was, and you might be onto something. Go on."

"It's her cutie mark, isn't it?" Maple stood, pointing at Braen. "That's how her magic works, and why it isn't normal. She's not a unicorn, she's... using the wrong species magic..."

"Go on..." Shinespark prodded.

"Do something with magic," Maple commanded, still pointing.

Braen's horn lit sapphire blue. Starlight squinted. Honestly, she had no idea what Maple suspected... but came to the sudden realization that the shade of Braen's aura was an identical match to that of Shinespark's eyes.

"And... do something with your wings," Maple continued.

Shiny, gold-plated wings rose, displaying expertly-crafted feathers, and slowly but deliberately swished, showing off their range of movement. It wasn't perfect, and Starlight could see the joints where the plates interlocked, but if someone had told her there were real wings inside, she wouldn't instantly blow them off.

"You're... no..." Maple paled, taking a step back.

"Yes?" Shinespark nodded eagerly.

"Forty years ago," Maple whispered. "There was a civil war in Yakyakistan. Everyone knows the stories, even in Riverfall. It was so fierce, it threatened to spill out to the entire continent... but was ended by a pegasus hero named Blazing Rain, who fought for peace and had magical powers." She turned to Shinespark, eyes unfocused. "That's who Braen is named after. You told me yourself, on the cart ride into Ironridge. Didn't you?"

Shinespark shrugged. "I... might have. It's certainly true. Ironridge is right next to Yakyakistan. Foals are raised on stories about her. I know I was."

"And then she disappeared," Maple continued, voice soft and gaze distant. "Nobody ever knew what happened to her, after the war, but they always believed she was still out there, watching over Yakyakistan and the towns and cities near it. But..."

Starlight felt her own eyes widen, and she stared at Braen's metal form again. Maple couldn't be going where she thought she was... could she?

"It's been forty years..." Maple stepped closer to the golden monolith. "She'd have to be in her sixties, at least, by now. But ponies live to be that old all the time..." Her eyes focused. "You're not just named after her. You are her. Even after all this time, when Sosa fell from power and Ironridge was taken over by the economic council and yak influence... You thought the yaks were trying to re-form an empire. You came back to help. That cutie mark of power Shinespark was talking about is yours, isn't it... Blazing Rain?"

Shinespark stretched in her chair, showing off her bare, orange flank. "Wow." She blinked. "That would actually be really cool, and would make me feel like the world's biggest fraud. But actually, the brand I was talking about was my own."