//------------------------------//
// Falling Up 
// Story: The Olden World 
// by Czar_Yoshi 
//------------------------------//

A loud rapping came at Shinespark's door, jolting Starlight from what had nearly been a nap. Shinespark's horn lit, her aura opening the door for their visitor. "Hello?" she asked, clearing her nose. "Nngh... come in..."

"Yo." Valey poked her head in, then entered all the way, a noodle-like Amber piled limply on her back. "Hey, Sparky. Hey, Starlight. Smelled you here. I got your friends."

Maple and Willow followed her, standing in the doorway. Willow beamed, Maple waved earnestly, and Starlight noticed White Chocolate standing behind both. Apparently they had decided to invite her too.

"I have a cold," Shinespark warned, looking slightly glum that the sanctuary of her room was suddenly full of ponies. "Be careful."

Amber gave a sympathetic smile. "That stinks. We can leave you alone, if you want. Starlight?" She glanced to the filly. "There's a party downstairs. Wanna get breakfast?"

Starlight gave her a colder look than she had intended. "I already went. It wasn't very fun." Backtracking, she quickly added, "We were going to go to Arambai's house to look for parts to repair the ship's power, but neither of us know the way. Can you come?"

"Do you mind if we get breakfast first?" Maple asked, shuffling her hooves with her eyes shining hopefully. "None of us have eaten yet, and it does smell good downstairs..."

"I ate," Valey belched. "It was pretty great. We should steal some and hoard it for later."

Starlight sighed, looking at Shinespark. "That's fine. I can wait."

"We'll eat quickly," Amber promised as they turned to leave. "Digging through Arambai's stuff sounds like fun. We won't keep you waiting!"

And like that, they were gone, the door clicking closed in their wake.

Starlight stared after them for a minute, then sighed. She just had waited, and wasn't sure she'd be able to pretend to nap again. Maybe she should give the party another chance... or just try to talk more to Shinespark. She wracked her brain for something to ask, and eventually settled on, "What's flying like?"

"Huh?" Shinespark blinked.

"Flying. With your magic," Starlight clarified. "I've ridden on fliers' backs, been lifted in telekinesis and fallen off cliffs before, but what's it like to fly using your cutie mark?"

Shinespark blinked again, as if she hadn't ever expected anyone to be curious about that. "Oh! I'm... still getting used to the fact that I have this, again..." She glanced at her flank. "How come you call them cutie marks instead of brands?"

Starlight shrugged. "Because that's what they called them where I'm from."

"Huh." Shinespark stared at her mark for a moment longer, opening and closing her mouth like she was looking for the right words to say. "It's... When I first got it, I almost fell into the sky, since I had no idea how to control it. It doesn't work like you'd expect flight to. It's not like holding yourself with telekinesis, even though that's how it looks from the outside. It's more like... changing your own gravity. So if I want to go upward, I try to do that, and then I'm falling up. It's disorienting, and took a lot of practice to look remotely graceful."

Starlight's mind flickered back to a scene in Arambai's basement long ago, when Amber was testing a machine that supposedly made her lighter using technologically-generated pegasus magic, and extrapolated from there. "Is that how your airship works? By making itself... lighter?"

"Affected differently by gravity?" Shinespark nodded. "Half of it. This is an oversimplification, but the buoyancy is achieved by negating a lot of its downward pull. It doesn't change the ship's mass, though, so inertia works the same, and there are issues with it trying to raise or sink based on the density of the atmosphere and... lots of things we never thought we'd have to deal with. The propulsion works using similar magical concepts of telekinesis, converting mana to kinetic force... but again, that's the easy way to think of it. Conventional manaengines can already do that, and this ship works nothing like conventional mechanisms." She rubbed the back of her neck, looking away. "I'm bad at explaining this, aren't I...?"

"I sort of get it," Starlight offered, partly because she did but also to make Shinespark feel better. Pegasus magic to fly, unicorn magic to move, and the how didn't matter. Easy enough to understand, right?

Shinespark breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, we started investigating the possibilities of doing this through technology when I got my brand and we could study internal pony magic in a more external way. The way I fly is entirely based on setting forces on myself, though. I don't think it's correct to say I'm changing gravity, but that's what it feels like when I do it. For example, if I try to 'fly' up and hold it that way..." She lifted off the bed, flipped midair, and landed heavily on the ceiling, standing up and taking several steps around. "It's just like changing my point of view. And it works in any direction, at any amount of force..."

As Starlight watched, she approached a room corner, put her forehooves against the wall, and suddenly climbed from the ceiling to it with only a brief stagger, and was then standing on the wall. She kicked off from there, floating slowly across the room, carried by only her own momentum. Starlight saw her horn flash barely-perceptibly brighter, and then she came to a stop... almost. Now that she was watching for it, she could see Shinespark bobbing slowly back and forth, almost like a pegasus beating their wings to get an even hover but actually correcting minutely back and forth to prevent herself from drifting.

Eventually, Shinespark landed, her horn going out and the sapphire aura disappearing from around her body. "Lifting yourself isn't too bad, once you get over the feeling of falling upwards. Moving sideways is easy to start, but needing to consciously stop instead of letting go takes some getting used to. Running up walls and changing my center of gravity as I go..." She shook her head. "I can't do parkour like that. Granted, I never practiced. It sounds useful for combat, until you realize a flying unicorn is already going to have both a surprise and ability edge over any other pony, and that I never expected to have this brand back as my own, let alone fight with it. A lot of things happened that I wasn't expecting..."

Starlight nodded. "A lot of things happened I wasn't hoping for, either."

"Yeah..." Shinespark breathed. Eventually, she tipped her head and said, "I like you, you know? You're good at listening. It feels like you know what I'm talking about. Maybe I'm taking advantage of you, forcing you to listen to me endlessly go on, but... thanks. I need it."

"Forcing me to?" Starlight frowned. "I can teleport, you know. If I didn't want to be here, I'd just leave."

"Heh." Shinespark got to her hooves. "I need to get used to not doing everything myself. Listening is supposed to be my job. Snkkkt..." She rubbed her nose again. "Bleh. Let's go wait for your friends outside. I need to get this ship fixed some day."