Science and Magic
“So,” Twilight asked, “how was the General?”
Sunset leaned back in her chair. “He thanked me for saving your life,” she said. “His gratitude was effusive.”
Twilight looked around from the machine that she had been examining. “Really?”
“No,” Sunset conceded. “But it would have if he weren’t such a block of stone, I’m sure.”
Twilight frowned behind her glasses. “General Ironwood is not a block of stone,” she snapped. “In any sense.”
Sunset’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, Twilight, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Team SAPR’s garage was a little crowded. Each team was assigned a garage to store any vehicles that they might have – Yang’s bike, Flash’s car, Sunset’s motorcycle – and wished to bring onto campus with them. The garages were bare and uninviting things, plain grey breeze block that offered no meaningful heat insulation and were pretty depressing to look at to boot, not to mention not terribly well-lit, but they were a little isolated from the rest of the campus, and they were large enough to accommodate the possibility – rare, admittedly, but still present – of a team having multiple vehicles that they wished to keep in one place. Which meant, since Team SAPR had only Sunset’s idiosyncratic beauty of a bike, there was plenty of space in the quiet, secluded place for Twilight to run her little science experiment.
Sunset, Ruby, and Penny each sat in the garage upon old swivel chairs, worn out and not particularly comfortable, that Sunset had found by the skips at the back of the dorms; someone hadn’t wanted them any more, but they were good for one more use, and that was all – hopefully – that they would need for this.
They were sat around an advanced Atlesian aura monitoring device, a tall, sleek, white machine that looked far too modern and clean to belong in this rather dark and slightly dinghy space, let alone sharing it with Sunset’s hybrid motorcycle. A screen, displaying a lot of data relating to aura, sat above what Sunset thought to be a holoprojector, although it was not currently projecting anything. A series of black cables ran from the machine to the battery pack and to Ruby, Sunset, and Penny, who were all hooked up to the machine via black, plastic feeling monitors wrapped around their uncovered forearms.
Another machine in the same white, pristine, slender Atlesian mode was monitoring their brain activity, with three lines, running horizontally and rippling up and down on the screen. Finer cables led to it from the nodes attached to the sides of the temples of the three huntresses.
A third machine, to which Ruby and Sunset were also hooked up, this time via their other arms, monitored vital signs.
Sunset had to admit, the fact that that was considered necessary was a little concerning.
Jaune stood not too far away from Twilight and her machines, making a light scuffling sound with his feet as he twitched from one foot to the other. He might have a part to play in all of this, if Twilight decided that a stimulus to the aura was just what the scientist ordered. Pyrrha stood still and silent near the garage door, mostly visible for the reflection of the dim garage lights upon her gilded armour. Ciel stood next to Penny, one hand upon her shoulder, her blue eyes darting from Sunset to Ruby and then back again.
The door was shut. They were encased within.
Twilight turned away from Sunset, looking at her aura monitoring device, or seeming to. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… people talk about General Ironwood like… it isn’t fair, the things that they say. But you didn’t mean it, and I shouldn’t have reacted as though you did.”
Sunset snorted. “It’s mutual, then.”
“Hmm?” Twilight asked.
“You care about him,” Sunset explained. “The same way he cares about you.”
“Oh,” Twilight said. “Um, yes, I… of course I do. General Ironwood is… to be honest, I can’t imagine our forces without him. I know, intellectually, that there must have been a time before him – in fact, I can tell you the name of his predecessor – but at the same time, and at the same time as I know that he won’t always be around, that there will be a day when someone else will take his place… I can’t really imagine that day coming.”
“Not even if Rainbow Dash was the one taking his place?” Sunset asked.
Twilight blinked. “That… would require me to be able to imagine what Rainbow Dash will be like when she’s older, and I just… is it weird that I can’t do that? Not just with Rainbow, with anyone really? I can’t imagine us grown up.”
“And yet, it will happen to all of you nonetheless,” Sunset murmured. “Except for you, Penny,” she added, glancing past Ruby to where the newly-revealed robot sat on the far side of the garage. “You’ll… do you have a plan for what you’re going to do about that?”
“Do I need a plan for what I’m going to do about that?” Penny asked.
“Someone should have one,” Sunset replied. “You don’t really look seventeen now; it’ll be really noticeable when everyone else is twenty-one, and you still look about fifteen.”
“Some people stay looking young,” Ruby pointed out. “Dad and Uncle Qrow haven’t aged a day since they were at Beacon.”
“I’m sure that’s what they’d like you to believe.”
“No, it’s really true; I’ve seen pictures,” Ruby insisted. She paused for a moment. “They haven’t changed their clothes since then either.”
“That’s… a choice,” Sunset muttered. “I take it, then, that the answer is that you don’t have a plan for how to fake the appearance of getting older.”
“No,” Twilight said softly. “It… hasn’t come up.”
“Is that because Penny will be able to tell everybody the truth by then?” Ruby suggested.
“Do you think I should?” Penny asked, her tone wavering between eagerness and wariness. “I mean, what if… what if people find out what I really am and… they don’t like me?”
Pyrrha took a step forward, coming a little more into the light than she had been before. “We like you just fine, Penny,” she pointed out. “Finding out your truth didn’t change one bit how we feel about you.”
“You’re not most people,” Sunset said under her breath.
Ciel must have caught her words, because she said, “Indeed, as gratifying as your acceptance of Penny has been… it cannot be counted on to be universally replicated. We must take into account the possibility that there will be adverse reactions to Penny’s nature. Which is why her secret ought not to be shared more widely than it already has been.”
“You don’t trust us to hold our tongues?” Sunset asked.
Ciel sighed. “I wish that nothing had been said to Mister Wukong. There is a certain fecklessness about him that makes him hard to trust.”
“Feckless?” Sunset repeated. “There’s nothing feckless about Sun. Stupid, sure, but not feckless.”
“He has repeatedly abandoned his team-”
“Because they don’t matter to him, and why should they?” Sunset demanded.
“Because they’re his team?” Ruby reminded her.
“And he’s found something that matters to him more than they do: Blake,” Sunset declared.
“Your tone suggests you find virtue in that,” Ciel said. “I confess, I cannot see it.”
“When a man loves a woman,” Sunset said, her voice adopting a certain haughty air, “he puts her at the very centre of his life and world.” She twisted around in her seat to affix Jaune with a piercing look. “Devoting himself to her and sacrificing all his pleasures to her happiness. Otherwise, he is merely playing with her affection, and it is cruel beyond words to use a maiden’s heart so.”
“What are you glaring at me for?” Jaune asked nervously.
“I’m just exercising my neck muscles,” Sunset said casually, looking away from him once she was sure that he had gotten the point. For all his faults, she found that she kind of liked Sun; he wasn’t likely to treat Blake the way that Flash had treated her.
“I’ve never heard anything like that before,” Ruby said.
“Then hearken to my wisdom, Ruby,” Sunset said. “You need someone older and wiser telling you what to do.”
“I like a good singalong more than probably anyone here,” Twilight interjected, “but please tell me you’re not about to start singing ‘Sixteen Going On Seventeen’ from Edelweiss.”
“Of course not,” Sunset snapped. “That guy was a complete jackass.”
“In any case, no offence to Sunset-”
“But you’re about to insult me.”
“-but Ruby, I wouldn’t necessarily take Sunset’s words on the subject of relationships too much to heart.”
“I suppose that she should take your advice instead,” Sunset muttered. Listen to Twilight long enough, Ruby, and she’ll teach you how to get Jaune away from Pyrrha. She could accept the fact that Twilight had not intentionally set out to steal Sunset’s boyfriend, but at the same time, that kind of made it even worse; Twilight hadn’t set out to do it, but nevertheless, she had accomplished precisely that. She didn’t need to try; she was just so pretty, so sweet, so nice that men fell over themselves to ask her out. “How’s Timber Spruce?” She took a slightly wicked glee in the way that Twilight’s face flushed.
“He, um, I mean we, uh… it, uh, didn’t work out,” Twilight muttered. “Long distance, it was fun, but we didn’t really, you know. I mean it’s not like he was a bad guy or anything-”
“Perhaps we should focus on the reason we are here,” Ciel suggested pointedly and with something of a glare in Sunset’s direction. “Then we can all escape this rather dismal place.”
You’re no fun at all, are you?
Twilight, on the other hand, seemed to find Ciel’s intervention rather gratifying. “Thank you, Ciel. That’s an excellent idea.” She coughed into her hand. “Ahem. Thank you… both of you,” she added, in a tone that suggested she was a little less thankful for Sunset’s presence than she might have been, “for coming. And thank you, Penny, for agreeing to be our control.”
“I thought you were in control?” Penny said.
“I did too,” Ruby agreed.
“A control, sometimes known as a control group, is a scientific term,” Twilight explained. “It refers to the… the normal element in an experiment. By looking at Penny’s aura, I can see if there are any abnormalities in yours or Sunset’s auras that might be caused by your magic.”
“But my aura isn’t normal,” Penny pointed out. “Not like yours or Ciel’s.”
“It’s true that your aura is, as yet, unformed,” Twilight conceded, “and in some ways, it might have been better to use Ciel as the control, but… well, to be honest, after I told everyone that I needed this equipment in order to run some checks on you, Penny, it makes me feel a little less dishonest if I run a couple of checks on you.” She laughed nervously.
“'Unformed'?” Ruby murmured. “What do you mean, Penny’s aura is unformed?”
“I mean… it’s probably best if I show you,” Twilight replied. “In fact, I will show you, because this is really cool. At least, I think it is anyway. As you might be able to guess from the presence of this technology and the fact that, well, Penny exists, we in the Defence Advanced Research Commission – pronounced ‘dark’ – have begun investigating aura from a purely scientific standpoint, stripping away the mysticism with which many past generations imbued it.”
“Is that possible?” Pyrrha asked. “We’re talking about the reflections of our souls, Twilight; how can that be stripped of… of reverence? And why would you want to?”
Twilight glanced at her. “I understand that aura is a wonderful thing-”
“Aura is far more than just wonderful,” Pyrrha murmured. “Aura is… aura is a gift; a shield of light to guard us against the darkness and to enable us to fight against them.”
“A gift from whom?” Twilight countered.
Pyrrha was silent for a moment. “That,” she admitted, “I do not know.”
“That ignorance does not disprove her point,” Ciel declared. “The fact remains that aura is our link to the heavenly, to something more than human.”
“Can that really be true, when aura is something that all humans have the potential to access?” Twilight asked.
It was clear from the way that she bit her lip that Ciel was not happy about that answer, yet nevertheless, she did not reply, save only to say, “In any case, please continue.”
“Right,” Twilight said, speaking a little more softly. “Anyway, as I was saying, we at Dark have been researching aura, its applications, its nature, and what we’ve discovered – one of the things that we’ve discovered – is really pretty neat.” She tapped into the keyboard jutting out at a forty-five degree angle from the aura monitor, and the holographic projector burst into life, a light blue glow emitting from it as it began to project into the air in the garage.
What it projected was an amorphous green blob, shapeless yet moving gently as though it were alive, pulsing somewhat in a manner that reminded Sunset of a heart. And yet, in no other way did it resemble a heart at all; it was just a mass of something, resembling nothing.
“What is it?” Sunset asked.
“That is Penny’s aura,” Twilight explained. “It doesn’t look like anything because, well, because – and I have to admit that this is only a theory, but it’s a theory supported by all the present evidence-”
“Get to the point,” Sunset urged.
“The point is that Penny hasn’t finished figuring out who she is as a person yet,” Twilight replied.
She hasn’t found her cutie mark yet, in other words, Sunset thought.
“At least, that is the prevailing view amongst we who’ve been looking at this,” Twilight went on. “It appears that, as a person grows and develops, as they figure out who they are, their aura starts to form into… well, why don’t I show you?” She turned back to the keyboard and began to type away again. “This is… oh.”
Sunset’s eyes widened as the image on the holographic projector changed, the shapeless green mass disappearing to be replaced instead by a red rose.
And it was beautiful.
Sunset was not a great horticultural enthusiast, but she had never seen a flower so perfect as the one that was being projected before her eyes at this moment. Every petal was perfectly shaped, and there were so many petals, they rose in layers to make up the complete flower which blossomed to their view. Surely, no true rose could be so red; surely, no true rose could be shaped so consistently, without any defects of variation; surely, no true rose could hold the eye like this rose did.
“Is that you, Ruby?” Penny asked. “Your aura is… it’s so lovely.”
“And so well-formed,” Twilight murmured. “Usually, at your age – or even at our age – I’d expect much more of a work in progress. You must be astonishingly self-actualised for… not just for your age, but period.”
“Um, thanks?” Ruby muttered. “Uh… can I ask a question?”
“You don’t know what self-actualised means, do you?” Twilight asked.
“Nope.”
“It means you know exactly who you are.”
“Doesn’t everybody know that?”
Sunset laughed. “Far from it, Ruby, although life might be easier if that were true.”
“Hmm,” Twilight murmured.
“Is everything okay?” Ruby asked.
“Fascinating,” Twilight said softly as she leaned forward.
“What is it?” asked Jaune.
“These silver lines on the edges of the rose,” Twilight said, tapping the keyboard without looking at it so as to magnify the view of a single rose petal. Sure enough, the red of the petal was bordered with lines of silver around the edges, as though in adornment to a jewelled rose fashioned for ornament. “They… I’ve never seen anything quite like that before. Everyone’s aura is only ever one colour– red in Ruby’s case – so what is that silver doing there?”
“Silver eyes, silver on her aura?” Sunset suggested.
“As good a working hypothesis as any,” Twilight allowed. “Do you mind if I bring up your aura for a moment?”
“I’d rather you didn’t; it’s likely to be a little embarrassing by comparison,” Sunset remarked.
Twilight looked at her. “Do you mean that, or are you just being you?”
Sunset sighed. “Go on, get on with it.”
As she had expected, the hologram of Sunset’s aura looked rather embarrassing by comparison with Ruby’s. Everyone was too polite to say anything, but nevertheless, Sunset felt her cheeks heating up as she averted her eyes from the child’s sloppy crayon drawing of a sun being projected in front of her.
“Now, this is interesting,” Twilight said. “Your magic is green, isn’t it? That’s the colour of your shields and your energy bursts.”
“That’s right,” Sunset answered, still not looking.
“But I don’t see any green here at all.”
“That’s because my magic isn’t linked to my aura,” Sunset replied. “Just as I told you.”
“But Ruby’s is?” Twilight inquired.
“It’s a different kind of magic; it doesn’t have to obey the same rules.”
“I would have thought there’d be consistent principles behind it,” Twilight mused. “Or at least some shared bedrock. Apparently not.”
Let’s be fair, we are talking about magic from two different worlds, Sunset thought. It would be amazing if there was consistency.
Jaune took a step forward. “Does knowing that Ruby’s magic is connected to her aura in some way help you to… to help Ruby use it?”
“Hmm,” Twilight mused wordlessly. “I, um… Sunset? Do you have any ideas at all? I know that it’s not the same kind of magic, but, well, at least you have magic that you can use, so you’re still the closest thing to an expert that we have.”
“I would be an expert if we were discussing my own magic,” Sunset insisted, “but this… if it’s linked to aura, Ruby, can you focus your aura on your eyes? Maybe it just needs a strong boost, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll get Jaune to stimulate you.”
“I’ll try,” Ruby murmured, “but I’m not that good at concentrating my aura.”
“You can do it,” Pyrrha said softly. “It’s just a question of focus. Remove yourself from your surroundings and focus only upon yourself. Let the wall fall away until you are all that remains.”
“That sounds easier than it is,” Ruby commented plaintively.
“Yes,” Pyrrha admitted, “but even so, I have faith in you.”
“We all do,” Jaune added.
Ruby smiled, if only for a moment, but in that moment, her eyes sparkled in the gloomy garage. But then the smile faded, and she closed her eyes and – judging by the look on her face – tried to concentrate.
It was either that, or something in her stomach disagreed with her, judging by the way that she was starting to scrunch up her face more and more.
Everyone in the garage was silent. Even Penny seemed to understand the importance of concentration for this. They all fell silent, and they all waited for Ruby, to see if anything would come of this.
Sunset herself thought it was not likely; if all it took was a sufficient application of aura, then surely, Ruby would have already had this down by now? If she just didn’t have enough aura, then… what was the point of a power that required her to have Jaune-levels of inhuman aura capacity to actually do anything with it? It would be like most unicorns not being able to do any magic because they lacked the sheer power level required. Of course, it was not so; everypony had as much magic as they needed to follow their path in life as set out by their cutie mark, and Sunset was almost certain that it was the same in this case.
She was almost certain that this was not going to work, both because Ruby ought to have enough aura ordinarily to make use of her silver eyes if aura was required and also because aura wasn’t magic. Magic in Remnant might graft itself onto aura, but aura was not the same as magic; at least, Sunset did not perceive it so.
She had mainly suggested this to buy herself a little time while she thought about other options.
Of course, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t work; if it did, that would be great for Ruby… and Sunset would have a lot to think about in regards to how she saw the powers of the world and their relationship.
Ruby’s eyes snapped open – and she cried out for a moment before shutting her eyes tight shut again.
“Ruby?” Pyrrha asked anxiously, taking a couple of steps forward. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you know that if you concentrate your aura in your eyes, it makes you see better?” Ruby replied, in a pained, wincing tone. “Not a great idea to look into a light when that happens.”
“Oh my,” Pyrrha gasped. “Ruby, I’m sorry. Are you alright?”
“I can see a lot of colours in front of my eyes,” Ruby declared, “but I’ll be okay. Eventually.”
“I’m not detecting any unusual readings from your aura,” Twilight observed. “Or in your brain activity, for that matter. That doesn’t seem to have done anything. Perhaps if Jaune were to-”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Pyrrha said, in a firmer tone that she was often wont to use. “Considering what happened when Ruby focused just her own aura around her eyes, she might permanently damage them if Jaune were to boost her aura in that area.”
“Yeah, I don’t really want to do that,” Jaune added. “Besides, if it’s about aura, then Ruby ought to be able to activate it with her own aura, right?”
“You make a good point,” Sunset murmured, phrasing it as a concession and not something that she had already known before she suggested a pointless exercise to Ruby. “Twilight, how is that machine working out that Ruby’s aura looks like that?”
“It’s very technical.”
“Try me.”
“It’s measuring the responses to multi-spectral animatropic resonance cascades.”
Sunset’s eyebrows rose. “What in the cages of Tartarus are 'multi-spectral animatropic resonance cascades'?”
“I warned you it was very technical,” Twilight replied. “Basically, it’s an ultrasound for the soul.”
Sunset’s eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”
“Yes,” Twilight said. “Of course, it is still a very young science.”
“More like pseudoscience,” Sunset muttered. 'Multi-spectral animatropic resonance,' what kind of word salad is that?
“Sunset, do you have an idea?” Ruby asked.
“I don’t know,” Sunset growled. “I have always known that my magic was there, and so the fact that you can’t just sense it is… frustrating.”
“But not too surprising,” Jaune said. “You might have always been able to sense your magic, but I didn’t know that my aura was there until Pyrrha unlocked it in the forest.”
“But Ruby does know that her aura is there,” Sunset said. “So are you sure that you can’t feel any… growths, for want of a better word, upon it?”
Ruby shook her head. “I can’t feel anything except my aura.” She paused. “So, even when you were starting to learn magic, you never had to work to… to get it out of you?”
“I had to work, but that isn’t the same as not being able to feel it there at all,” Sunset replied. “But… maybe there is something that I can do, but not here. I’d need to… to think about it a little more.” Think about it and consult with Princess Twilight. “Twilight, is there nothing that you can do?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Twilight admitted. “I’ve never seen anything like this before; this is… it’s amazing that we were able to pick this up on Ruby’s aura, but apart from that… I mean, we could try running a charge through Ruby’s eyes and see if that jumpstarts something-”
“I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea,” Pyrrha said firmly.
“No, probably not,” Twilight admitted. She sighed dispiritedly. “I’m sorry, guys; this has been a complete bust. Like everything else lately.”
“'Everything else'?” Penny repeated. “What do you mean, Twilight? Things have been going wonderfully so far, haven’t they?”
“I meant… it doesn’t matter, Penny; you’re absolutely right. I’m sorry, Ruby. I’ll keep studying the data that we’ve collected; maybe I’ll have a brainwave.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruby said. “If you figure something out, then that’s great; if not… my mother managed to figure it out, and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.”
Twilight smiled thinly. “That’s very kind of you, but it doesn’t stop me feeling like I’ve just wasted all of your time.”
“It’s okay,” Ruby insisted. “Even though it didn’t work, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth a shot.”
“Like I said, it’s very kind of you to say so,” Twilight murmured. “Do you need any help getting out of all the equipment?”
“Nah, it’s okay,” Ruby said, pulling off the aura monitor. “Do you need help putting all of this stuff away?”
“No, thank you, I’ll be fine,” Twilight said, and with a little rustling and popping, Ruby, Sunset, and Penny unplugged themselves from all the scientific instruments. Pyrrha put one arm around Ruby’s shoulder as the two of them – and Jaune and Penny – started towards the garage door which opened to admit the light into the dark, enclosed space.
“Sunset?” Ruby asked. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll catch up,” Sunset assured them.
Ciel looked at Sunset for a moment, and something unspoken passed between them; she nodded at Sunset – a curt nod, but at the same time a courteous one – and joined Penny and the others in leaving the garage, leaving Sunset and Twilight alone.
Their footsteps and the sounds of their talk died away.
“I really don’t need help packing up,” Twilight insisted as she knelt down on the ground and began to gather up wires.
“Maybe I just feel helpful,” Sunset replied, using her telekinesis to pick up some cables off the floor and bundled them up in a coil. “So, what’s up?”
“You mean more than my sense of failure?” Twilight asked.
“You aren’t having a sense of failure because this one thing didn’t work out.”
“Aren’t I?” Twilight responded. “I’ve spent half my life searching for magic, and now that I’ve found it, I can’t understand it at all.”
“It’s your first try,” Sunset reminded her. “You think I mastered every spell on my first try? Sometimes, it took until my second try.”
Twilight looked up, a chuckled escaping her lips.
“But seriously,” Sunset said, flopping back down into the old chair, “the study of magic is not something that can be rushed. Amongst my people, some… people spend their whole lives devoted to it.”
“I don’t have the luxury of a whole life to devote to it.”
“You’ve got more than the time we spent here.”
“I know,” Twilight said. “It’s just…”
“It’s just that something else is bothering you,” Sunset said. “Something related to Penny.”
Twilight froze. “What makes you say that?”
“You clammed up when she asked you what was wrong,” Sunset said. “You didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
Twilight rose to her feet. “Penny… can be sensitive,” she confessed. “We never want to upset her.” She sat down in the chair recently vacated by Ruby. “It’s not just Penny,” she clarified. “It’s also the fact that I haven’t been able to trace the source of the video exposing Blake. Whoever they are, the means they undertook to protect themselves are incredibly sophisticated, and I… It just feels like I’m failing at everything that people are counting on me to accomplish.”
“How are you letting down Penny?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe I can help?” Sunset offered.
Twilight frowned. She hesitated for a moment before pulling out her scroll and opening it up. Her fingers, lithe and delicate, flew across the screen to conjure up a holographic sword, a weapon that, at first glance, seemed to be one of Penny’s weapons. With both hands, balancing the scroll upon her lap, Twilight reached for the holographic sword and began to pull it apart, dismantling what would have been the hilt if this had been a normal sword, turning it into its component parts.
“Is it classified?” Sunset asked. “Is that why you can’t say anything?”
Twilight’s hand began to glow with a faint purple light as she levitated a chocolate bar – one of the big, chunky ones that came in detachable blocks – out of her bag and into her waiting hand. She kept her eyes on Sunset as her hands unwrapped the chocolate. “Do you know anything about complex robotics?”
Sunset folded her arms and said nothing while she looked at Twilight’s hologram. She was embarrassed to admit that it took her a moment to realise that it wasn’t actually one of Penny’s swords; the blade was the same, but the rear – the ‘hilt’ and the ‘pommel’ for want of better words – were much larger and bulkier than Penny’s actual blades.
“Let me see,” Sunset said. “You’re not paying any attention to the blade or the laser cannon, but you have got a receiver and a dust battery which Penny doesn’t need right now unless… you want to take her wireless, don’t you?”
Twilight said nothing, but her silence said everything that Sunset needed it to.
Sunset kept her voice reasonably low. “I’m guessing that wireless weapons were always your original goal, but that you couldn’t make it work, and so, you had to go with wire filaments, and now… you haven’t given up hope.”
Twilight frowned and sighed as she pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “It’s not that it didn’t work,” she said. “The wireless system works just fine: a dust battery for independent power and a receiver to pick up the command signals from Penny – she even has the transmitter built in; it’s just a redundant system right now. The swords already have thrusters for guidance and propulsion. The problem is that the power pack and the receiver made the back end of the sword too big to fit inside Penny’s back-pack in the numbers required.” Twilight sighed again. “It’s far from ideal, but the council demanded results. General Ironwood couldn’t stall them any longer. Hence, wires, and Penny will be stuck with wires unless I can figure out some way to miniaturize all this, and I just can’t see it!” She picked up the scroll and threw it away; only Sunset grabbing it in the embrace of her own telekinesis stopped it from clattering onto the garage floor.
“I’m sorry,” Twilight said. “I just… I’ve been working on this for months, and I don’t feel like I’m any closer to getting it now than when I started.”
“You need to have that many swords?” Sunset asked.
Twilight nodded wearily. “The mega-cannon mode requires the power of that many individual lasers in order to achieve the mandated armour penetration; for the same reason, we can’t just reduce the output of the individual lasers in order to get away with a smaller battery, not that the savings in size are anything like commensurate with the reductions in capacity anyway.”
Sunset’s brow furrowed. From an interested lay perspective, she could understand why Twilight was having issues with this. Dust was the most efficient form of energy generation in Remnant, so if a dust power pack was too big, then there didn’t seem to be much hope for anything else.
Assuming that it needs an actual power pack. “Can you not just use a battery, charged from Penny herself when she’s not using the weapons?”
Twilight shook her head. “It would work, but in order to get a battery small enough, you’d have to accept an unacceptably low combat time.”
“What’s unacceptably low?” Sunset said. “Most battles aren’t drawn out.”
“Most individual actions are not drawn out,” Twilight corrected. “Penny can’t just despatch a group of beowolves and call it quits necessarily; she might need to have to respond to situations across a wide area for hours, maybe days without respite.”
“Because now that you have Penny, you’re planning to retire the Atlesian Corps of Specialists,” Sunset replied. “Come on, you know that no flesh and blood huntress would be asked to rush up and down a full-scale battlefield like that; individual teams and units would have their own sectors and only respond to other areas in an emergency.”
“I know,” Twilight said softly, “but we both know that Penny isn’t a flesh and blood huntress. The council expects to be able to push her harder and take greater risks with her, and she needs to be able to handle it. She needs to be able to fight for hours, days, maybe weeks without stopping. And she needs to have all of these stupid wires out of the way.” She took her head in her hands, shaking it despairingly. “There must be an answer to this, right? This isn’t an insurmountable problem.”
“I don’t believe in insurmountable problems,” Sunset said. “Is there any reason you can’t just expand the backpack to make room?”
“She also needs to look appealing to civilians, so that they trust her,” Twilight explained. “Apparently, big, bulky backpacks aren’t cute.”
Sunset whistled. “Whoever set these parameters was doing you no favours.”
“I know,” Twilight groaned. “That’s one of the reasons I was keen to give helping Ruby a shot: I could use a break from pushing this boulder up the hill.”
“You can only bang your head against the wall for so long before it starts to hurt.”
“Tell me about it,” Twilight said. “Sunset, to go back to the topic of Ruby for a second, can I ask you something?”
Sunset plucked Twilight’s chocolate out of her hand. “You can ask me whatever you like,” she said as she broke off a piece of the bar.
Twilight stared at her.
Sunset offered Twilight her own chocolate back, even as she put the stolen piece into her mouth.
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Okay, why not?” she said, a slight trace of a sigh in her voice as she took the sweet back from Sunset. “Do you… is there any way that you could… give me some of your magic?”
Sunset choked on the piece of chocolate making its way down her throat. Her eyes bulged and then began to water as she broke out in a violent coughing fit, her throat straining as she struggled to eject the blockage.
“Sunset?” Twilight. “Sunset, are you okay? Oh, gods, let me help you!” She leapt up and darted around Sunset, hammering her back as hard as she was able to until the offending piece of chocolate flew out of Sunset’s mouth and landed on the floor not far from her bike. “I’m so, so sorry about that. Do you need a drink of water?”
Sunset wiped at her eyes with one hand, regretting the blow to her dignity as she struggled to get her breath back. “No, I don’t need a drink of water,” she said, although her throat did feel very, very sore right now. Every time she swallowed, it was like ripping off a bandage. “I need you to… give you my magic?”
“Not all of it,” Twilight replied, a trifle defensively. “I just… if I can study it in more controlled conditions, then maybe I could actually understand how it works well enough to be some help to Ruby.”
“But it’s my magic,” Sunset said. “Given to me, a part of me.”
“I’m not asking for all of it,” Twilight said. “Just some.”
“Would you ask me for just some of my aura?”
“Um, well, uh… you see… so is it possible?” Twilight asked.
“I… don’t know,” Sunset admitted. Complete transfer was certainly possible, but partial? That was something she was a lot less certain of.
“Would you do it if it was?”
“No,” Sunset said at once. “This is… this is my magic, Twilight. My… my gift. Bestowed on me by… by destiny, that I could make my mark upon the world; if I give this up, if I give it to you or anybody else… without this, I am nothing.”
“You’re being very overdramatic,” Twilight replied. “Even without your magic, you’d still be-”
“Without my magic, I’d be the underperformer I was in Canterlot,” Sunset said sharply, “and don’t deny it.” Compared to Pyrrha or Rainbow or Ruby, I’d be pathetic, a joke. I’d be worth less than Jaune! “I will not suffer that. Not for anyone, and certainly not for the benefit of your understanding.”
Twilight didn’t bother to conceal the disappointment on her face. Her lips crinkled visibly. “If I can’t experience, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to understand,” she said. “And if I can’t understand, I don’t know how I can help.”
“That is a pity,” Sunset said, “but it does not change my answer in the least.”