//------------------------------// // Chapter 12 // Story: Twilight Holmes: The Mystery of Basil Bones // by bats //------------------------------// “It’s quite a remarkable spell, in truth,” Basil said. He flanked Twilight’s left, a few feet away and behind her, squinting over his glasses into the distance as Twilight led them down the road out of the town center. “It appears to operate something akin to a dowsing rod, with the unicorn’s horn standing in as the rod, of course. I would imagine the practical operation would take some time to master, but the theory is based in thaumaturgical fundamentals. My calling in life did not bring me into the fold of upper magical academia, but it would likely be a boon for me on future cases to add that spell to my repertoire, were it possible. The spells I do use with regularity are often essential.” Twilight smirked, shook her head, and decided to ignore the fact that Basil had just asked for a favor without actually asking. “I can walk you through the execution later, if you’d like. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to cast or maintain, just a lot of concentration.” Rainbow, taking up the same position as Basil on Twilight’s right, asked, “What sorta spells do you use a lot? I’ve only seen you floating stuff around.” Twilight heard Rainbow shift and talk directly at her. “And I know that’s just ‘cause you unicorns can’t use your hooves to do squat.” Twilight chuckled and shook her head, keeping her eyes trained on the magic around her horn. “There is only one spell I use with any true regularity, and I’m afraid it’s a tool of the trade, it would be unprofessional of me to reveal its nature.” “That’s a load of bull, just tell me.” “I would not be opposed to confirming any hypotheses you wish to put forth, madam.” “Wha?” Rainbow’s voice shifted back towards Twilight. “A hypothesithesis is a science thing, right?” Grinning, Twilight glanced back, catching a glimpse of Rainbow and the color around her horn fading to blue. “He asked you to guess.” “Guess? Ah, c’mon, what is this, kindergarten?” She laughed again. “You don’t have to. He uses a sense augmentation spell.” “Ah.” Basil sounded disappointed. “You have guessed correctly.” Rainbow sped up to walk alongside Twilight. “Huh?” “He uses a spell to strengthen his senses beyond what a pony can normally see or feel. That’s how he’s been able to smell things that were far enough away we thought he was being creepy and smelling us when we weren’t looking.” “Creepy?” he scoffed. “Ohhh, that makes sense. Yeah, I get how that’d be really good for looking for clues and junk, you’d be able to see stuff way better, or whatever. Or hear stuff way better, too! Like, you could tell a pony’s lying if their heartbeat sped up.” She jumped off the ground and flew a few feet up as her tone grew faster and more excited. “And you could probably do some crazy stuff with your sense of touch, like figure out if something’s a fake just by holding it!” She landed right next to Twilight with a grin on her face. Basil lengthened his strides and moved to Twilight’s other side, cramming the three of them close together despite the road widening and growing uneven underhoof as they moved into the less cultivated outskirts of Ponyville. “In truth, its use is reserved almost exclusively for my olfactory capabilities. The spell is of little consequence to wield, but after I’ve cast it, there is a period of weakness in the affected sense for a few minutes. Having a blunted sense of smell for a brief window of time is not terribly debilitating, while blurry vision or partial deafness are a major handicap while attempting to work.” Rainbow nodded. “Yeah, that’d suck. Still, the touching thing’s gotta be worth it still.” “In the case of touch, the resulting weakness is not a state of numbness,” he answered, his tone dark. “There have been a few occasions where I was left with no recourse but to utilize it, and it has not been worth it in any of those situations. It is very painful.” “Oh, you’re probably just a wimp,” Rainbow grinned. “Hmph.” Basil straightened his glasses and looked forward. “I had arrived at the conclusion that these interpersonal differences had been set behind us.” Twilight smiled wryly. “They have been, if Rainbow’s started teasing you. She only does that with ponies she gets along with.” Rainbow sighed and looked away, “Yeah, I guess you’re not too bad. You’ve at least said you’re sorry about stuff, and stopped being such a jackass.” Basil’s face colored and he busied himself with relighting his pipe. There was a pause of silence as they entered the outskirts of the Whitetail Woods, Twilight’s horn flashing with a growing pace. Rainbow looked back across Twilight’s shoulder. “You ever use that spell on your sense of taste?” Basil smirked. “Once. It ruined my ability to smoke for an hour and drove me close to madness, but it was worth it for that cake.” Rainbow snickered. Twilight stopped short in the path, the other two faltering and jumping in surprise before looking around in confusion. They stood at a small clearing of grass in front of an enormous oak tree. The path forked away in either direction, winding back into the woods, as if to avoid running into the giant tree. Most of the plants in the Whitetail Woods were smaller, a mixture of young oaks and maple trees with trunks not much bigger around than the body of a pony, while the one just ahead was barely smaller than the Golden Oak Library. Its gnarled bark sloughed off in patches and its foliage hung sparsely around its stooped branches. A large knot halfway up the trunk had rotted out, leaving a dark cavity behind. “Wow,” Rainbow said. “If it was night, that’d be really spooky-looking.” Basil rubbed his chin. “It certainly is odd-looking, given its placement. All the surrounding vegetation appears to be twenty to thirty years old, while I would estimate this specimen at one to three hundred years, at least without obtaining a cross-section.” He circled around the tree as he spoke. “It isn’t necessarily unusual for a wide margin of variation inside a forest, but it’s quite unexpected for such a stark contrast without a catalyst. Perhaps it—ah, I see,” he said from around the other side of the tree. “This tree appears to have survived a forest fire a few decades ago. It must have been the only survivor in this part of the woods.” He returned to the group. Rainbow knit her brow. “Does knowing stuff about trees really help with solving mysteries?” “I am permitted to have hobbies.” Twilight shushed them both, crossing her eyes while looking at her horn. “I stopped because we’re here, you know.” Glowing a bright green, it flashed like a racing pulse. If she took two more steps it would flicker fast enough to hurt her eyes. Basil lifted his brows and snapped his mouth shut around his pipe. He looked at the tree, and then at Twilight and Rainbow, lowering his voice to a rough whisper. “Here?” “Yes, here. Probably in the tree.” Basil frowned and glared at it critically. “There is no possible method with which a pony could hide inside that tree, even if it happened to be entirely hollow; there’s no entrance other than that knot hole.” Rainbow rolled her eyes. “That just means Diamond Acorn isn’t here.” Twilight nodded. “This wouldn’t be the first time he left his displays for us inside of a tree.” “Hmn.” Basil let out a long breath through his snout. “I was so sure he would have kept the paper with him.” His expression grew sterner. “I suppose he would be aware of that, that I would be convinced of it and understand how dangerous it would be to hold onto the evidence, in case I—or more appropriately, you—could find a way to track its location.” Twilight moved her head from side to side and watched the shift in color until she felt totally confident in the paper’s location and dropped the spell. She shook her head to clear it and stepped forward. “Well, it’s definitely there, inside the knot hole. Rainbow, you’re the one with the wings.” Chuckling, she lifted off the ground. Basil cleared his throat sharply. “Hold on, Miss Rainbow.” She stopped and looked back at him with irritation. “There’s something off about this. This situation feels different to me than a normal staging of stolen goods. I am aware you are a quite capable mare, but I advise you, be on the lookout for a possible trap.” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure, whatever.” She flew over to the tree and squinted at the knot hole. Twilight craned her neck, but couldn’t see past Rainbow’s mane. “Do you see anything?” “Nah, it’s just dark.” She rose up a few inches and brought her hoof to the hole. “I say,” Basil snapped. “I do not believe that shoving one’s entire leg inside a dark crevice could be considered a form of being mindful of traps.” “Ugh, fine,” Rainbow groaned. “Twi, you’ve got a flashlight attached to your head, come here.” She darted down and scooped Twilight around the middle and hefted her over to the tree. “Geeze, a little bit of warning first,” she grumbled, wriggling in Rainbow’s grasp. She slipped down until she was held across the chest, just under her forelegs, with her hooves pressed against the tree on either side of the knot hole. “Okay, now just hold me steady.” She lit her horn and pointed it inside the tree. “Do you see anything?” Rainbow asked. Twilight’s throat ran dry. The wrinkled newspaper sat propped up at the end of the tree’s cavity, straight back from the opening, framed to be the first thing anypony would see when looking inside. Its position was held up by a jumble of acorns and markers the same size and shape as the lone yellow one they still had from the crusaders’ set. But Twilight’s attention was drawn away to everything else in the tree. The cavity extended back four feet and both widened and went up higher from the knot hole, leaving a sort of cave the perfect size for some sort of woodland critter to make a home. If she was looking at a critter’s home, Twilight reasoned, it was critter that was a hoarder. Stretching away from the clear path back to the newspaper was a tremendous collection of junk. Food wrappers, marbles, pieces of hard candy, candles, quills, eye-liner brushes, tea cups, jacks, playing cards, rubber bands, and countless other things, more things than Twilight could process at once, filled the recess completely. Twilight cleared her throat and swallowed. “…Well, there isn’t a trap, but it wouldn’t have been pleasant to try and stick your hoof in here. You’d probably have hit that pin-cushion.” “Eh?” Rainbow sagged her grip, then straightened back out. “There is … just … a lot …” She took a steadying breath and shook her head. “I don’t know where to start.” Rainbow grunted. “Start by telling us what the heck is going on. We can’t see anything, remember?” “Yes, sorry. The newspaper is here, and was definitely left for us to find, along with the markers. Diamond Acorn probably put them both together so whatever path we took to try and find one, we’d end up finding the other. There are also … just … so many other things in here.” She pushed away from the tree a little, and Rainbow started to take her down. “No, no—I just need some space, just hold me up about a foot away from the tree, okay?” With her horn still shining light on the hole, she started grabbing things and floating them down to the ground. It took long enough to empty out the recess that Rainbow started grumbling and adjusting her grip. Twilight couldn’t believe how much stuff had been shoved into the tree, and how much of the stuff was unequivocally garbage. Broken hearth’s warming baubles, spent matches, empty liquor bottles, things that nopony in their right mind would even notice had gone missing. She puzzled over a cracked set of plastic sunglasses that had been lined with rhinestones, half of which had fallen out, and frowned at a ratty old teddy mare missing an eye, a hoof, and most of its yarn mane in chunks. Without even meaning to, she set everything out along the ground in ordered rows. It filled up all of the patch of grass and spilled out onto the forked pathways. “This is …” Basil blinked slowly at the growing catalogue of trash, a thread of wonder in his voice. “This must be everything Diamond Acorn has stolen from Ponyville which went unnoticed. He couldn’t stage such unloved objects for me to find, if nopony brought their absence to my attention …” He stepped back from a sky-blue tea saucer with a fracture spiderwebbing through the center that Twilight set down in front of him. “… This isn’t the manifestation of a master criminal. This a work of madness. The result of an insatiable compulsion to steal …” He took another step back and sat down hard, eyes roving over the growing spread of junk. “It must just be a game to him,” Twilight muttered as she worked. “He probably took everything here out from under somepony’s snout, and the goal wasn’t to have whatever it was, just to take it, and not be noticed …” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t think he even cared that nopony realized these things were gone and that he couldn’t hide them for you, he just steals to steal, and the fact that you’ve noticed and are chasing him is something else unrelated. Something extra.” Rainbow fidgeted and repositioned them both in the air. “I’m kinda with Basil here, Twi, this dude sounds freaking nuts.” “Oh, I’m not disagreeing with either of you. This is definitely the work of a crazy pony.” She cleared out the last of the trash, dropping a rusty bottle opener on the ground, and grasped the markers and newspaper in her magic. They floated out and Rainbow brought them down to the path. Twilight set the markers down and straightened them in a nice row. “We’re still missing the case. Wait …” She squinted and looked over the array of garbage, smiled, and picked out the case from between a rusty weed hook and a box of cotton swabs. “I thought I saw it in there.” She slid the markers into place one by one, in order by color. Basil cleared his throat. “I think the newspaper is the more pressing order of business, Miss Twilight.” Rainbow snickered. “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” she snapped. “And these markers belong to the cutie mark crusaders, I’d like to return them in good shape when we see them.” “Regardless,” he said, and hefted the paper. “They are clearly the red herring of this puzzle, while this is the central piece. We must try and gain something useful from it.” He sighed through his snout. “I wish to the stars that I could say that I have the utmost certainty that somewhere within this lies a key piece of evidence for us, but I fear we are simply fumbling through the next phase of Diamond Acorn’s game. I had hoped we’d found a chink within his armor in tracing this back, yet it was left for us to find, and any sort of advantage was merely an illusion.” Twilight closed the filled marker case and set it on the ground. “I’m inclined to agree with you. Though this all has gotten more and more out of hoof, and there’s the chance that he’s getting sloppy.” She saw two points of color rise up on Basil’s cheeks as he stared at the cover page. “What?” He grunted and pressed his mouth thin, then turned the paper so she could see it. The old photo of Basil in the author portrait of the column was no longer black and white. A scratchy application of markers had filled in his coat and pipe with color, though Twilight couldn’t exactly call them the right colors. The pipe was close, but Basil’s coat had been colored in pink, with a forest green around the contours and darker shadows, turning his portrait into a garish Hearth’s Warming card. “… Interesting.” Rainbow glanced over Twilight’s shoulder, snorted, and covered her mouth. Basil rolled his eyes. “I suppose it fits quite succinctly with your statements yesterday over judging ponies too harshly. Prodigious skill at theft and stealth does not guarantee a sophisticated sense of humor.” “Aw, c’mon, that’s funny. You’d be less sour about it if somepony stuffed you with candy and hung you by the fireplace,” Rainbow said. Twilight sighed and grabbed the paper. “I’m sure we could spend all day trying to figure out whatever the heck that is supposed to mean,” she thumped the picture for emphasis, “but let’s see if there’s anything less bizarre first.” She unfolded the paper and spread it on the ground, smoothing out the creases as best as she could. Rainbow tilted her head sideways and pressed up against Twilight’s cheek to get the same view. “See anything? ‘Cause I don’t.” “No,” she grumbled, and pushed Rainbow away a little with her face. “Give me a chance to actually read it, please.” “Ugh, c’mon, flip ahead a little and look for something. The article jumps around a bunch.” She flipped a few pages over Twilight’s protests, then stopped and said, “See? What’s that?” pointing at two blotches of pink on the page. Twilight lowered her head. Words in the article had been highlighted with a marker. “Seek, and me.” “Eh?” “Diamond Acorn highlighted those two words in a sentence. Seek and me.” “Hmn,” Basil grunted. “It seems rather, as they say, on the snout, but perhaps we’re missing something. What’s the context in which those words appear?” Twilight cleared her throat. “Speaking charitably, they seek either resolution to that which plagues them, or to if nothing else provide me enough rope with which to hang myself.” “Mm, yes, unlikely a connection there, it must simply be a message spelled out using words from the article. Make sure it was the first—” Twilight had a marker out of the case and an old receipt from the collection of stolen trash floating next to her as she flipped through the pages of the newspaper. “Way ahead of you.” She scribbled down notes on the back of the receipt until she got to the end of the article, her mouth a thin line as she read the last two words Basil had written, both of them highlighted. Rainbow craned around to look at the receipt. “What’s it say?” Twilight looked at her note and read it out. “Seek me. I shall reveal the location, if you stay vigilant.” She turned the note and newspaper around to show Basil, and flipped through the pages. “That’s what was highlighted, in the order it appeared in the article.” She stopped on a page with a long smear of pink. “Most of the message is from this sentence, ‘I shall reveal the location of the missing griffin, as indeed the griffin is within this very room,’ with the rest taken in individual words. Except for your, uh, sign off.” Basil’s eyes widened and a ghost of a smile crossed his face. “…This might be it, madams. We might be narrowing in on him, right now, as we speak.” Rainbow shifted from side to side with nervous energy. “Yeah, he’s totally calling you out. What’s it mean, though? He’ll tell you where to go, but only if you are paying really close attention? Attention to what?” “Hmn.” Basil frowned and took the newspaper in his own magic to turn back and forth through the article. “This and the markers were the only items kept separate from the rest of this refuse, correct?” “There were also some acorns.” She let out a long sigh. “I would have taken one to cast the tracking spell on, but I’d bet you anything that it and all of the other acorns we’ve seen were taken from this exact tree.” Basil glanced back at the foliage of the tree and nodded. “I suspect you’re correct. Well, if no other stolen items were present, I shall then assume that the answers lie within the paper itself, buried deeper than a highlighted message, and that I am to use my usual methods to uncover it.” His frown deepened to one of distaste. “Which, I must suppose, starts with reading the article carefully. Although I quite hate rereading former works of mine. I do believe sacrifices must sometimes be made.” “Wait, hold on,” Rainbow cut in. “You said your usual methods, right? Try your sense spell thingie!” Basil’s brows went up again and he smiled. “That is an excellently reasoned suggestion, Miss Rainbow. And even if it were not, I welcome any excuse not to reread my past work.” His horn brightened and his nostrils flared. “Anything?” Twilight and Rainbow asked at the same time. “… Lemon juice.” His eyes widened and his smile grew larger. “Lemon juice! It smells of lemon juice!” Twilight and Rainbow exchanged a look, then watched Basil ransack through the pages of the paper while sniffing with excitement. Rainbow scratched her neck. “… Um …” “It’s the primary ingredient in vanishing ink! There is an additional encoded message to be read, invisible to the naked eye, but present for those who remain vigilant!” He slapped the newspaper shut, gave it one last sniff, and held it mostly upside down over his head. “And it is here on the front page.” He puffed his pipe back to smoldering life, then floated the bowl close to the page, bathing it with heat. A line of the article flushed yellow and faded to brown as the pipe floated past. They all shouted at once in victory. “What’s it say? What’s it say?” Rainbow bounced on her hooves and lunged at the paper, catching it out of the air and slapping it flat to the ground. She looked down, and got buffeted one way, then the other by Twilight and Basil crowding around. The line of invisible ink marked off a phrase of a sentence, one of the opening lines of the article. They all read it out loud at once. “The setting of my arrival.” Basil stepped back and paled. “Diamond Acorn’s arrival?” he mused. “I first took notice of his existence in a small hamlet, far to the northwest of here, a journey requiring a minimum of two days, and that would be if we set off now with zero preparation. What was the name of that hamlet again?” He drew his brow together and frowned in thought. “I believe it was called Bridleshire. He had stolen a bag of diamond dust from the local wizard, hence his name, and—” “It wouldn’t be that arrival,” Twilight said over Basil, making him clack his teeth together, then grumble under his breath. “Remember, he’s been including us, me and Rainbow, which is something new. It would be in Ponyville.” Rainbow rubbed her chin. “So the fountain? That’s where all this started, right?” Basil nodded. “Well reasoned. It was indeed where I made my presence in Ponyville first known, and the site of the staging for the first theft here, the inciting incident, as it were. I believe that is a fine conclusion. Well, madams, shall we proceed?” He smiled with relief clear on his face. “I believe this journey is nearing its conclusion.” “No.” Twilight said. The other two stopped and looked at her in confusion, then preoccupation at the sight of her face. Twilight darted her eyes back and forth and chewed her lip in worry. “Basil’s arrival in Ponyville was at the fountain, but Diamond Acorn got here earlier than that. His arrival was somewhere else.” Her eyes widened. She jumped in place, then turned and slammed her hooves into the ground, running with all her might. She heard yelps of surprise, then then clatter of hooves following after her. “Miss Twilight!” Basil called between already struggling breaths. “Wait! Where are we going?” “I’m so stupid!” Twilight shouted. “Why did I tell her it was safe? Why did I say she didn’t have to worry anymore, and she could put it all behind her? It made her an easy target!” “Twi, what’re you talking about?” Rainbow said as she caught up and matched pace alongside Twilight. “Diamond Acorn has Fluttershy!”