//------------------------------//
// 5 - Working with Evidence 
// Story: Sunburst to the Rescue 
// by David Silver 
//------------------------------//

Trixie threw a leg over Starlight's shoulders, drawing the mare closer. "This is an intervention."

Starlight looked around the dim room as other faces began to emerge. Maud, Spike, Pinkie, and Rarity emerged one by one into the small circle of light on her. Pinkie waved a hoof right where light met shadow. "This is moody and all, but we're here to fix that, right? Is 'moody' the theme we're going for?"

Trixie rolled her eyes. "Go ahead, party pony."

Pinkie seemed to take no objection to the title. With a pull of a switch that wasn't there a moment ago, the lights in the room came to life, revealing a party waiting to be happening. "Happy 'It's so awkward my friend is spending time with my mentor' party!"

Rarity set a hoof on Starlight's shoulder, just beside where Trixie's arm was wrapped. "Darling, honestly, we understand. I went to pieces when Fluttershy seemed to be moving past me."

Trixie gave a little scoff. "While I have never personally had to worry about this." She rose up to two legs, releasing Starlight. "Trixie is here for you."





Sunburst rubbed his head with fading memory of the last experiment. "Let's see what we have."

Twilight was seated across from him at the dining room table, nodding. "While you were recovering, I had started looking them over. The difference is striking."

He took the hoof from his head and leveled it at Twilight instead. "Two isn't a large sample size. We won't know--"

"--Which is why I got Rarity and Trixie to kindly donate their time to have their horns mapped. That gives us three unimpeded horns, and yours." She leaned over the table as Sunburst wilted. "Great minds, as they say. I just wasn't nursing an allergic reaction... that I brought on. Sorry again."

Sunburst quirked a little smile as he sat up. "No no, I mean, if you hadn't been aware of it, there was no reason to suspect it. The reservoir seems entirely harmless until its owner is on the floor."

Twilight cringed softly with a nervous laugh. "Yeah, that's... one way to find out. Shame about that. If the trouble was there, diagnosing it would be... problematic. On the bright side, I mapped mine."

Sunburst blinked with obvious surprise. "You mapped your own horn? That... is quite the feat."

Twilight beamed with pride. "Focusing my magic that specifically and internally was a challenge, but I considered it the least I could do for what, you know, happened. At least now I feel fairly confident that that is not your problem."

Sunburst coughed into a hoof as if to clear his throat. "Well, now that we're past that, let's see them."

With a glowing horn, Twilight arrayed three diagrams of horns on the table between them. Rarity's horn was slender and long, but not as long as Twilight or Sunburst, or as pointed as Twilight. The internal view showed an anatomy that clearly came from the same basic design, but the helix-like structure dominated most of it.

Trixie's horn seemed to lean towards the spirals, with several interconnected from one to the next. She was a touch shorter still.

Lastly was Twilight's, balanced between the two, longest and sharpest with her princess-enhanced alicorn. Sunburst reached out and tapped at all three in turn. "Where's mine?"

With a spot of hesitation, Twilight squirmed and looked up and away.

Sunburst's brows fell with a little snort. "Twilight, we are both aware of what we're dealing with." He spied a slip of paper just under her and reached with his magic to grab it. "Let's get it over--"

Twilight suddenly grabbed the paper in her own magic and pulled it back. "No!"

"Twilight!" He stepped up onto the table to get closer to her and the paper. "You're not sparing my feelings."

"I know that, but--"

"--But nothing!" He gave one more great pull, but she was stronger than he. He ended up tugging himself, falling over onto her with a great crashing of bodies. The contested paper gently landed on their collided heads.

She smiled broadly, giving a quiet sheepish laugh. "I... suppose I am being a little silly." She sat up, causing Sunburst to slide down her front, his snout pressing to her hooves.

With a growing blush, he scrambled upright and sat beside her. "Y-yes. Let's try to remain impartial. This isn't just about me."

"Right..." She gently set the paper down and released it from her arcane grip. "Here it is."

There was Sunburst's horn. Its exterior was nothing remarkable, well within the standards set by the others. The interior, on the other hoof, was  markedly different even at a glance. While he had the helical structure and two spirals, there were fine bone protrusions that ran through the patterns. It was as if his horn had tried to close itself off at some point, a spider's web of interruptions in each pattern, ruining what should have been controlling structures. "Oh..." He sighed gently. "That is... ugly."

Twilight reached up a hoof and tapped at the base of the horn. "I detected minute differences here as well. The alicorn minoris muscle group was also being impeded by calcium deposits, much like the rest." She ran the hoof in a wide circle around the horn. "It's a little miracle you can cast magic as well as you do."

Sunburst let his head sink against a waiting hoof. "I'm literally a bonehead..." 

Twilight wobbled a hoof in the air. "You're 'literally' very dedicated. You must have worked three times as hard as anypony else at the school."

"And I still failed!" snapped Sunburst in a sudden rush of emotions. "I'm... sorry." He sank, shrinking in place.

Twilight looked around the room in awkward quiet, no sound but their shared breathing before she dared to tap at the paper. "These are the twigs." She ran her hoof along one of the tiny boney spurs. "These are what can be, in theory, washed away with the right water, but what also stops the water from flowing."

Sunburst's ears perked as he sat up, looking over the image, his eyes darting to the three other, healthy, horns without such deformations. "I... wonder how..."

Twilight tapped at the reservoir, reminder of the pain she had caused. "If it's of any comfort, yours appears to be fairly identical to mine, if a little smaller, which could be accounted for entirely by our relative difference in overall size." She pulled closer the diagram of her own horn with her magic. "See?"

He looked back and forth between the two. Hers was larger, that made sense enough. But... no spurs. His reservoir was nice and clean and... "So that's why you were so amazed, when you were looking."

Twilight's ears flipped backwards. "I couldn't be certain. That's why I rushed to get a few other horns to compare to. As you can see." She waved over the collection with a hoof. "There is variation from horn to horn, helping to determine the color of our magic as well as determining part of our 'style' of magic." She rest a hoof on Trixie's. "This was the most amazing to me. It's little wonder her magic is so bombastic and flows the way it does. Rarity's is clearly in favor of precision over raw power, as fits her profession." She hiked a brow. "It makes me wonder how much of this is developed during the maturation process."

Sunburst waved at the diagram of his horn. "Are you saying I did this, to myself, somehow?"

Twilight was quick to raise her hooves even as her magic grabbed a teacup only half-filled with amber fluid to sip from. "No no no, of course not. Your magic use may have helped determine the structures, is all. These bony protrusions were likely going to happen no matter what you did."

"But that's just a theory," he sighed out, reaching to grab a cookie from a brightly-colored plate and chew it sullenly a moment. "Let's refocus. This isn't a pity party."

Twilight's lips quirked upwards. "Pinkie would be upset if she wasn't invited."

They shared a soft laugh at that, some of the tension easing in the room. He chomped down the last of the cookie, speaking around the crumbs that escaped his snout. "Alright, enough of that. We have the problem." He gestured at his diagram as he swallowed. "Let's keep going until we can make this--" He tapped at his diagram. "--into this." He tapped at Twilight's diagram.

Twilight smiled suddenly. "I had no idea you wanted to be a princess, Sunburst. That's very ambitious of you."

Sunburst went redder than the stripes on the plate he had gotten the cookie from. "N-no! That isn't what I meant!"

"I'm just teasing." She nudged him with the flat of a hoof. "You're just fine as you are. Let's continue the research."

"Right." They settled in side-by-side, the massive tome raised in Twilight's magic and thumping despite her care. It flipped itself open to the last page they left off on and Sunburst slid in a support to hold the open page without  breaking the spine. "I'd make a fine princess though."

Twilight smirked at that. "I'm sure you would."

Things lightened as they got to reading, discussing, and working through the book. They had the pattern down, finding it easy for each of them to take up the debating side of their half of the book by the way they sat and arguing the points back and forth as vigorously as they could. Sometimes Sunburst won, other times Twilight had the last say. Either way, they took notes and pushed on, trying to get to the wisdom hidden in the book, a little more revealed with each flip of the page.

Sunburst tapped at a particular line. "The current must flow both ways, in to out surrounded by out to in."

Twilight returned the gesture at her own sentence. "The margin of error is too small."

He ran his hoof along the words carefully. "But there are precious few other options. The current must move with trust, or--"

"--or," cut in Twilight. "Or, we accept it as it is, and be thankful that it isn't worse."

Sunburst frowned a little. "That doesn't sound like the Twilight I know."

Twilight suddenly let out a nervous little laugh, reaching for her cup, but it was empty. "Sp--" The call died as she remembered. "Ah, yes, he's out... As I was saying, you're making some large assumptions there. Not wanting to disturb the status quo is... one of my things." She was turning red as she admitted it. "Seriously, what if we break something and you go from hampered magic to no magic at all? An earth pony that knows what it's like to be a unicorn." She shuddered softly. "I don't envy the idea."

Sunburst quirked an ear back at that. "If Applejack heard you say that--"

"--She would chastise me on even comparing you to a proper earth pony, since you don't qualify. Fluttershy has more earth pony in her." She could see Sunburst withering under the counter attack. "I mean, you're a unicorn, and a perfectly good one! Let's keep that... I don't want to hurt you, Sunburst."

"Thank you for your concern." He sat up tall and tapped at his side of the book. "But, I didn't come here to back down, Twilight. I say we read on, she may have found other ways forward, but 'let's give up' is not an answer I will accept."

Twilight nodded slowly, her eyes on him intently. "You're a brave pony." Her gaze returned to the book. "Thank you for reminding me to be one too. Yes, let's put aside thoughts of giving up. We didn't come this far just to throw up our hooves and surrender."

Sunburst's lips lifted into a smile. He had won that debate! More importantly, he had convinced Twilight of something beyond the measure of the words. He was a bra-- "I am?" he whispered to himself before refocusing on the page. He hadn't even considered himself particularly brave. The word jiggled around inside him. He didn't mind the heft of it.