“So,” said Fast Hooves once they returned to their room, “what is it? What’s down there?”
“Some kind of TC built on top of a channeling circle. She says she needs to cast this one spell, and needs my help to do it. I supply power through the circle, and she casts.” Light Bloom replied, sitting down at her desk to take notes of the evening. “It seems like she might be trying to create a body for herself, but she says she can’t remember anything. Total amnesia except for general background knowledge and this one spell. Well, general background knowledge for a pony going to Celestia’s School that is. She seemed to know a lot about magical theory.”
“So, what, she’s trying to break free of the basement? Seems fishy. Especially since she just wants your power.” Fast Hooves was always the more practical of the two, and her wariness was coming through in this instance. “I mean, there might be a reason she was locked in there in the first place. You had to go to an awful lot of trouble to find her.”
“What are you proposing, a malicious TC? That’s the stuff of sci-fi novels, not modern magic. Although…”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know, it’s just… She seemed familiar somehow. Like I’d heard her voice before. Or, not her voice, but you know what I mean.”
“Where in Equestria would you have heard the voice of a TC trapped in the basement of the Experimental Division except in the basement of the Experimental Division?”
“I dunno. It sounded familiar though. She sounds kind of like - you know, this is crazy to bring up, but she sounds kind of like a guest speaker I had in freshman year.” Light Bloom sighed, and put down her quill. “Enough for tonight. Tomorrow I need to figure out how all those runes ended up on the floor of the basement.”
The library was always comforting to Light Bloom, and today was no exception. Especially since she wouldn’t be getting those weird headaches from Failsafe’s attempts at communication. I really should have mentioned that doing that doesn’t work. She thought, pulling down from the shelf A Complete and Unabridged Account of the History of Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns, Volume the Twenty-Second, which was nearly as grandiose as its name.
Let’s see… Experimental… Ea, Ed, Ex, here we are, Experimental Division. What have we got… Founding, page 112, I suppose that would be useful. Hm, most of the rest of these entries seem to just be various innovations, not that much that would help. Ah, the rebuilding, page 436, that’s probably got what I’m looking for.
Her investigative ventures took up nearly the whole morning, but after quite a lot of reading and cross-referencing and frustrated mane-pulling, she thought she finally had a grasp on what had happened in the basement of the ED.
“Fast, you’ll never believe this -” said Light Bloom, bursting back into her room with a stack of books in her telekinetic grip - “remember the ED explosion a while back? I think Failsafe was involved in some way.”
Fast Hooves, a piece of self-toasting bread halfway to her mouth, stopped abruptly. “What? What makes you say that?”
“Apparently,” - Light Bloom dropped the books near her desk and pulled one out to show Fast Hooves its contents - “The only thing that survived the explosion was the basement floor, which was incorporated into the new building. And,” - here she pulled yet another book from the pile - “There was a channeling circle already on the basement floor as part of the original experiment. After the explosion, the school paper did an article with a picture of the crater, and if you look closely you can just barely see the same pattern as the one I saw down there last night. Whatever Failsafe is, she was there on the day of the explosion.”
“Wow, nice job convincing me she’s definitely not some crazy TC bent on destroying the world.” Fast Hooves snarked before returning to her lunch.
“I will admit this is spooky, but… I don’t know, when I was talking to her, it felt like she was meant to fix something. Maybe I’m just sentimental-”
“You can say that again.” Fast Hooves said around a mouthful of toast.
“But, I think it’s worth helping her out. If something happens she at least doesn’t know about you, so I guess tell someone if I go missing.”
“Wow, fatalistic much? Maybe we put together some precautions before you get kidnapped or killed or whatever. You said this thing seemed sluggish, right? She probably won’t notice some sort of distress enchantment until it gets activated. I could throw something together and put it on your saddlebags.”
“I always forget you’re competent. Sure, I guess.” Light Bloom said, flopping onto her bed. “I’ve already put in materials requests for the raw elements under fake reasons, so that should be done in under a week. It’s power that’s gonna be the real problem.”
Fast Hooves, lunch forgotten as she started drawing spellforms in the air, said jokingly, “I mean, she clearly didn’t have a problem with power back with the whole bucking building blew up, why didn’t she do it then?”
Light Bloom huffed. “Because it wasn’t focused, obviously, but… actually, wasn’t the experiment that went wrong about producing thaumic energy? They must have had a way to store it. I wonder…” She shuffled through some stray papers among her pile of research. “Energy is then drawn out through a lower channeling circle - I’m pretty sure that’s the same one that Failsafe’s built on, by the way - and stored in racks of thaumacoils? How would that work?”
“Hmm, perhaps it’s to do with the flow rate? You might be able to do something if you had the right stabilization. Do they mention anything on that?”
“Well they did invent a lot of stabilizing spells trying to keep their reaction in check.” Light Bloom stared at the ceiling, picturing the various spellforms in her mind, trying to see how they might interact.
“Yeah, and look at how well that turned out.” Fast Hooves snarked, collapsing the spread out spell matrices in front of her. “There, that should work, just give me your bags for a sec.”
Getting her hooves on several dozen thaumacoils without anyone taking note, Light Bloom soon realized, was going to be a little harder than a jaunt to the equipment locker. She had searched the open storage areas in various academic buildings, but none had anything proper - mostly just tiny example versions of real devices. I guess if I was willing to up my required number from a couple dozen to about a hundred, I could use these, Light bloom thought sarcastically as she put the fifth demonstration coil she had found back on the shelf. At that point it would probably be easier to just make some myself.
The solution to her little problem came during a late-night trip to the ED basement to drop off another batch of material components.
What in Equestria would you need thaumacoils for? Failsafe asked when Light Bloom idly commented on her troubles.
“You don’t seriously expect me to just have enough power for that spell in me right now? I’m pretty sure only the princesses could manage that beast off their innate mana reserves.”
You know, I think whoever made me didn’t consider that might be a problem.
“Well, anyways, I read up on the subject and apparently you can repurpose thaumacoils for energy storage almost indefinitely with the right stabilization. Still not sure how, but I’m working on that.”
I think there might be coils down here - whenever I send out thaumic pings to get an idea of my surroundings some of them come back a little wonky, like the passed through an inductor. What’s the spell they were using?
“I’m pretty sure it was a variation on this one,” Light Bloom said, conjuring up some spellforms and holding them for Failsafe to inspect.
Have you tried changing the a-curve to an s-curve in this upper layer? That should hold things until resonance gets inverted.
“Oh! Of course! How did you see that so quick?”
I… I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m not even certain I can explain why it would work. There’s a lot of things about my mind I can’t explain.
Light Bloom looked sympathetically at the runes on the floor, for lack of anything better to look at sympathetically. “Don’t worry, I’ll do my best to help. Trust me.”
Thanks, Light.
There were, in fact, a lot of thaumacoils in the basement, a few even with the wisps of the stabilization enchantment on them - Light Bloom suspected they may have been left over from the fission researchers, relegated to the basement out of shame. Soon they were set up and ready to receive power.
After a week of slowly acquiring the necessary materials and Light Bloom filling coils with mana from her own reserve, she and Failsafe finally agreed that it was time to try a casting.
It failed rather spectacularly.
Fortunately none of the materials were lost, but a few coils had blown their stabilization enchantments and a few more were drained of power.
I admit that was probably on me, I’m not quite used to pulling power like this yet.
“In retrospect, it might have been a good idea to try out some simpler spells before throwing you into the deep end there. How about we take a few days while I fix these coils up and you try just levitating some things - actually, are there any spells you know other than ‘the big one’?”
I told you, sometimes information just comes to me, but it’s not there for long. The edits on the TC spell must have messed up my memory cycles pretty badly. I’m pretty sure I could manage a levitation spell, though.
And so the next night they took to practicing.
“Alright, I’m gonna channel some power manually, I don’t want to mess up the coils on this one. Ready?”
As I’ll ever be.
“Alright, let’s start with…” - Light Bloom rummaged through a nearby box - “Ah! Textbooks, always a good source of weight. Try this one.”
The two took to their respective tasks, and a purple glow formed around The Hierarchy of the Insect Kingdom. Slowly, it rose from the floor.
Ha! Yes! It’s -
The textbook went pinging off into a dark corner of the basement.
Well. Maybe not.
“It’s okay, you just need practice. I can’t imagine anypony has ever had to cast like this. We’ll just keep trying until you get the hang of it.”
The Hierarchy of the Insect Kingdom, 12th Edition gently lowered onto the floor, to the delight of both present.
Yes!
“I think we’re ready to try again, yeah?”
I think so. Coils full?
“Yeah, we’re good to go. Whenever you’re ready.”
Alright, here goes nothing…
The basement began to hum with energy, a static charge that put the hairs of Light Bloom’s coat on end. She watched the coils carefully, trying to keep an eye on them for any issues, but the crackling of the spell kept drawing her attention. The material components, sitting out of the way during their practice, were drawn up from their containers and into a slowly growing mass, suspended a few feet above the floor at the center of the channeling circle. Strange arcs of purple not-quite-lightning jumped between the runes that made up both Failsafe and the circle, some even breaking off to hit the cluster of material that was slowly forming itself into the shape of a pony.
I think it’s working! It’s working! Ha ha ha!
Then, suddenly, runes all over the basement floor, ones that Light Bloom had missed because of the darkness and their inactivity, flared to life. They, too, released bolts of energy, lancing straight toward the head of the pony form, now growing a mane and taking on a distinct coloration. All at once they struck, and soon Failsafe too had energy pulling out from her to join the others in the pony’s head.
Ha ha ha “ha ha! I’ve done it!”
Suddenly, Light Bloom realized that Failsafe’s voice was no longer in her head, and rather coming from the body before her, who had very clearly taken on the form of…
“I BEAT DEATH! I DID IT! I DID IT BECAUSE I AM TWILIGHT! BUCKING! SPARK-”
And then she vanished in a flash of light, leaving only a star shaped scorch mark on the floor.
“So,” A rather shaken Light Bloom said to Fast Hooves as she stepped out of the basement, “I have news.”