//------------------------------// // Chapter 22: Learning a Few Things // Story: Through the Aurora // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Theo followed the pony at an arm’s reach, unable to suppress her constant, background fear at being around someone so important. For all the time she’d been in Equestria, she knew almost nothing about its royalty. Should she have refused the request? For all her panic, her companion didn’t seem to be having the same concerns. She glanced at the symbols scribbled on the edge of various shelves, reading some meaning from them that Theo herself couldn’t. Some pony equivalent of the Dewey Decimal System, perhaps? “Let’s see, you said… electrical engineering?” Sharp Edge hadn’t even known the term, but this Alicorn said it perfectly. Or at least the translation made it seem like she had. “What are you trying to do exactly, Ms. Summer? That should make it easier to find the right level of reference. Curious about pony science, or…” “I’m trying to build a rectifier-transformer to take the output of a variable-speed combustion motor into five volts of direct current. Ideally at least one amp, but half of that should still be enough for what I need.” The pony stopped dead, looking over her shoulder at her. Whatever fog of curious academia she’d been living in dissolved like the dew of a summer morning, and her violet eyes were suddenly keen. “You’re not the diplomat from Mt. Aris,” she said again, raising an eyebrow. “But you must know more about electricity than I do. Your requirements are remarkably, uh… specific. I assume all that must mean something.” Theo nodded hastily, looking away. “I’m so sorry, uh… Princess? I think you must be here, the… Twilight Sparkle that oversees Ponyville? Princess Twilight Sparkle, I mean.” Now there was recognition in her eyes. Theo’s wings bristled as her instincts told her to flee, that she’d made herself far too noticeable now. Was this what it took to get her false invocation of Celestia’s name punished? “Applejack mentioned you a week or so ago, I think. You were helping with the harvest. She didn’t think you’d worked a day in your life, but she just didn’t appreciate what work.” Twilight hurried forward to another shelf, which looked to hold all manner of practical books. Like college textbooks, except they were for real subjects and had barely been read. Twilight gestured at a lower section of shelf, which was almost entirely empty. “This is everything we have on what you called ‘electrical engineering.’” Her horn glowed, and suddenly the four books took to the air, spreading before Theo until they were like ghosts, flanking her. “I really should return to my inventory—this whole library thing is more incidental than it used to be. But you must have some sympathy for curiosity, right? Hippogriffs are… at least a little bit feline. I hope that’s not offensive. Is that offensive?” “No,” Theo said, waving one wing dismissively. Of all the books, it was plain only two of them had even a slight chance of having what she needed. One was a work of fiction about making weather in the sky, while another was written for children, with huge letters and oversized illustrations. But there were two others, two chances that she might find what she was after.  She reached for them, then hesitated, looking away awkwardly. Taking something out of the air was probably offensive. For all she knew, even going near the glowing outlines in the air might be an insult. She hadn’t traveled with any unicorns yet.  But she didn’t get a chance to get even a single word in edgewise, because the pony princess just blazed right ahead. “Oh good! I know you aren’t griffons, or as proud as yaks, but you spend as much time as I have as princess, and you never know what somepony is going to get mad about.” She sat back, glancing between the two books. “Is it alright if I ask how you know pony science so well? Last I checked, Mt. Aris was still using magical light above and below the water. I can see why you never went that way, what with building underwater since the Storm King. But Spike said you weren’t actually from there.”  Because I’m an idiot and I talked to a lizard. That was probably a fitting punishment, somehow. Maybe I could use this? Twilight is important. She might be able to get Sharp and I to Mt. Aris without going through diplomatic channels. Either that, or her being a princess would make her even more beholden to abstract rules. After all, the authority of one nation interfering with another could easily be taken as an act of war, on either side of the Doorway.  “I just haven’t been home in a long time,” she said lamely, in the most disinterested tone she could manage. Hopefully bored enough that Twilight would forget about it. “Thank you so much for helping me find those books, Princess. I’ll… make sure to put them back where I got them.” “No need to reshelf anything,” Twilight said by rote, pointing at a sign on the wall. “Just put them on the ‘Finished’ shelf. I could probably work out a way to check them out to you, if you’re staying…” Her frown deepened. She clearly hadn’t been fooled by the obvious change of subject but wasn’t sure if she was willing to just call Theo out on it. Eventually she pushed the books towards a nearby table for Theo. “What do you need… five volts one amps… for, anyway?” She smiled sheepishly. “Call it a… science project, I guess. Just wanted to see if I could make something.” Because my whole life is stored in that tablet and I’d rather like to have it back. The pony princess nodded reluctantly, just a drop of annoyance on her face. But she apparently resisted the urge, giving one last polite nod before returning to her work. Theo took her books to the furthest end of the library she possibly could, hiding behind a pillar so the princess wouldn’t be able to see her while she read, and be reminded of the mysteries she’d (accidentally) presented to her. The news was both fantastically good, and fantastically bad. First, she read the older book, where Theo saw in exacting detail just how backward the conceptions of pony electricity were. A quick flip through the book told her they had no alternating current, which explained why parts of their world could be fully wired while others were still in darkness just a little further away. Even Ponyville had a hydroelectric plant, yet the farms that surrounded it still burned candles. They’d apparently never discovered batteries either, or transistors, though they at least had capacitors and resistors. To read the first textbook, it was no wonder why Twilight Sparkle hadn’t understood her. Pony conception of voltage and amperage was measured in something called ‘Lightning Fractions’, and in those units, she wasn’t sure the tiny amounts of energy Theo needed could even be easily quantified, much less built for. But then she opened the second book. This was much newer and wasn’t really a textbook at all. It was a repair-guide, with the word “UNOFFICIAL” stamped right under a familiar Feather logo. “Don’t take it to the Brilliant Bar—Fix It Yourself!” the bottom of the book proclaimed. She turned it over and found a similar message on the back. “Feather products might seem amazing—we love them too—but don’t be intimidated by what they tell you at the shop. Feather buys their parts same as anypony else, and you can buy them too. Fix what you bought to work a lifetime, don’t just buy a new one every time they make it smaller!” Theo flipped through, and saw many etched-style drawings, the sort she would’ve found in books published before the turn of the century. Despite the crudity of the illustrations, what they depicted was obvious. The internals of various Feather devices, along with common problems, and ways to fix them. Looking in here was taking everything that had been known at the time of the first book’s publication and throwing it in the garbage. This was familiar to Theo, even if it had been ages since she’d worked with stuff like this. There were breadboards here, familiar wiring principles. Here was unmistakably a Feather battery charger, which was apparently made to be operated by wind or pedal power rather than plugging into the pony grid.  She flipped from one design to the next. Though they’d been depicted by alien eyes, she stared down in fascination at products any high schooler might’ve made for an electronics project. Most Feather products seemed to amount to a breadboard with an attractive metal case around it. The designs were plainly ingenious—they used the same dozen or so components, using ten capacitors in parallel when two far larger ones in series might’ve done instead.  They had semiconductors. Nothing crazy—diodes mostly, like the Zener diode they’d paired with resistors in their battery charger. Someone is bootstrapping this civilization right into the information age, and none of them even realize it. Theo didn’t need to dust off any of her college-neglected electrical engineering, because Feather had done it for her. Here in black and white was circuitry that ponies obviously found incomprehensible. But the intrepid pioneer hadn’t been trying for subtlety. Unless Theo was misreading, they were even labeling the transistors the same way. Theo had prepared for the hopeful event that she might find something useful here, and she had a roll of paper with her. She sketched out the circuitry diagrams in the traditional, abstracted forms, with notations about where she suspected she would need to make alterations, then compiled a parts list. What the book suggested might be done to repair Feather electronics could easily be taken a step further—Theo would make her own. Of course, she did have some advantages. She could ease up from a lower voltage without causing harm to the machines she was trying to charge. If she was cautious, she could eventually arrive at the safe voltage she was looking for without risk, even if she lacked anything like objective instruments. She left the library when Twilight’s back was turned, dodging behind pillars and skipping down the stairs. Maybe there was something impolite about that, but nopony came hunting her down. She went straight for Barnyard Bargains. Of course, the owner didn’t have parts in stock for electronics that weren’t even sold in Ponyville. But he could order them, and even had a catalogue gathering dust on a bookshelf she could look through. Theo made her order—frustrating the owner with how small it was—then went back to the Apple farm as though nothing had happened. She found Emerald waiting for her practically at the gates, watching with an expression of desperation. “Summer, I need your help.” “Uh… sure.” She stopped, grinning weakly at her. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be. You’re better at pony things than I am.” “Nothing like that.” She waved a dismissive wing. “I think word is getting around that we’re staying here. They want me to go to school.” Theo stopped sitting back on her haunches and looking thoughtful. “And you… don’t want to go, I’m guessing.” “Obviously! There’s nothing they can teach me I need. I’ve already got a personal tutor in my real job! What’s the point of learning the history of silly equestrian holidays and math I mastered years ago?” “I’m not sure how I can help you,” Theo said. “I’m cooperative, believe me. But what do you want me to… do? I don’t think I can tell them to stop.” “Easy.” She grinned, gliding up to perch on the edge of the fence. It was precarious even for her, but she managed. “I said that I couldn’t go today, because I was going to be teaching flying lessons. You do need flying lessons, so as long as we’re doing that…” That’s what you meant by having me help, instead of Sharp. “Doesn’t Sharp still need you?” She shook her head. “Not for the delicate stuff. We’re already done making everything, it’s just about putting it together. He says that explaining how it all works enough for me to help would just make it take longer.” There was clear resentment in her tone, and obvious calling back to the bleak, depressed version of herself she had become after the death of her mother. “Okay Emerald, I’ll help. But you don’t think this will work every day, do you? You can’t give them the same excuse over and over and expect them to just believe it.” “I…” She hesitated. “Let’s just worry about today. I can figure out tomorrow when we get there.” Theo returned her belongings to the barn, then set off beside Emerald down one of the trails leading further away from town. “I’m a little worried about where we’re going to practice this. The last time I went gliding, I glided straight down and faceplanted a cloud. Without a cloud, I’ll be…” “Oh, easy.” Emerald grinned, though her smile was a little tempered now. “There’s a pond not far from here. Or a ‘watering hole.’” She shook her head, expression darkening to show exactly what she thought of that idiom. “I can fly up, bring you a cloud, then you get on and I push it up high. You can glide down to land next to the pond. Or you fail, and you get wet. Even if you can’t fly, we know you inherited hippogriff swimming.” “I didn’t inherit swimming. I learned how to swim. I just had to… adapt it a little, is all.” But Theo didn’t complain, not during the whole trip up. Emerald’s plan sounded terrifying—she was still jumping without a parachute from a high place—but most of the hard work was Emerald’s own. It didn’t seem like some forced way to escape from school. Was that even true, or were you just finding a way to get me to say yes? Regardless of the answer, they soon arrived at the location, and “watering hole” seemed a far more accurate description. Far from the pristine pond they’d crashed into, this place was all muddy banks and hundreds of hoofprints, with murky water and only a few lily pads stubbornly clinging to life off in one corner. “You found me good motivation to fly,” Theo said. “I think I’d rather smack into the ground than land in there.” Emerald glared down at her but didn’t argue. She took almost ten minutes to make it up to the clouds and back, which still seemed incredibly short to Theo. Summer approached the edge of one with nervous shuffling, poking the edge with one disbelieving claw. “This looks… even sillier when you bring it down this far. Are you sure this is supposed to even… work?” “Get on,” Emerald exclaimed, out of breath. “You can complain when you’re pushing me around.” Theo climbed on. Her claws sunk into the cloud a few inches, but the same way they would’ve into a snowdrift, not what should’ve been slightly denser air. Emerald pushed, her little wings flapping desperately, and the cloud started to rise. Was she just trying to seem as tiny and pathetic as possible, so Theo would try harder? If so, the plan was working. Despite the incredible substance of their platform, it still took Emerald five minutes to get them to a height she was satisfied with. As they started to rise, Theo raised her voice just a little. “Y-you know they say that… falling onto water from high up is supposed to be worse than hitting the ground. It feels like we’re getting close to that high really quickly here…” “You need space to slow from a fall,” Emerald answered, as though that were enough reason to justify the insanity of their situation. “Don’t worry, birds fall soft. You’ll see. But I don’t think you will fall. You messed it up the first time, but that was your first time. You’ll get it this time, won’t you?” Theo didn’t want to think about how much she might hurt this child if she said no. I don’t know why you care so much about this. I’m not here to stay, what does it matter if I learn how to fly? There were other parts of her that did want to learn, the parts that still had nightmares about the Horizon’s terrible fall. If she had known how to fly properly, she probably could’ve carried Sharp to safety. Eventually Emerald did stop them, so high up that the pond was barely more than a distant outline for her to target. Theo edged her way to the side of the cloud, wings spreading on either side of her entirely by instinct. Being a hippogriff had done nothing to make the drop to her death less terrifying. “That’s, uh… woah. You spoiled me with the clouds last time.” “You’ll do fine.” Emerald climbed up onto the edge of the cloud, panting with effort. “It’s not… as hard as you think. Griffons just push their chicks right out of the nest, and they fly. All you have to do is keep your wings out and catch the air. It’s easy.” “Easy for someone who grew up doing this.” Theo turned away from her, on the pretense of looking back at Ponyville. This high up, they were probably visible to half the town, though far enough out that she didn’t expect too much in the way of interruption. There was no sign of any pegasus ponies flying out here to rescue her, anyway. I shouldn’t have said yes. Finally, she spun back around, lowering her head pensively. “So tell me how I don’t die doing this?” Emerald perked up at the question, walking up beside her. “Easy. Spread your wings all the way—when you first jump, you’re gonna get hit with a wave of air. That’s what you’re fighting. Keep your wings out. You adjust your feathers to change direction when you’re gliding, but they’re subtle. If you tilt one wing more than the other you’ll go into a spin, and that’s hard to recover from for a new flyer. Just try and… keep them as flat as possible. That will take you forward in a straight line. If we jump off facing the farm, you should glide almost all the way back.” “What if…” Theo’s whole body was shaking now. Emerald wasn’t the only one with a little bird heart, because hers was beating desperately now. “What if I start gliding for a while, until I’m not over the water, then I stop, and I start falling?” “Don’t,” Emerald said simply. “I’ll be with you the whole way, but don’t do that. You were heavy enough getting up here the first time.” Thanks. Really reassuring. She looked down one last time, at a drop that every monkey instinct left in her brain screamed would be fatal. There was no call of the void, no desire to see what happened. Only stark terror, and near-certain death. “Do I have to, Emerald? I mean… I’m not really a bird under all this. I’m not supposed to have wings. I’m supposed to have two legs. I’m supposed to sit in front of computers and make them do things. I’m supposed to watch Netflix on my tablet at night and try to play Overwatch but get kicked for my latency. I’m supposed to be—” Emerald pushed her mouth closed gently with one wing. “I don’t know what most of that means, but… is that really what you want to be? Don’t you like it in Equestria?” Despite everything. Theo sat back, trying to look away from the child’s insistent stare. But either Emerald knew how intense she could be, or she was just naturally trying to be so overwhelming that Theo had no choice. “It’s not as bad as you think. You saved us from an airship crash, didn’t you? Compared to that, this is easy! Even foals can usually glide in their first few weeks.” Theo swallowed, spreading her wings with rictus rigidity. “Okay, Emerald. I want you to, uh… I want you to break the cloud. Don’t give me a choice. Because I can tell you right now my legs are not going to let me jump.” “Oh, sure!” Emerald jumped off the side, spinning around it once. “One, two…” “Wait!” she squealed, eyes wide with desperate fear. “I change my mind, I—” “Three!” Emerald bucked out with her back legs. The effect was immediate—the cloud that had felt completely solid and real beneath her puffed away as though it really was just a loose bundle of moisture, dumping Theo out into the air. She passed briefly through a numb fugue of fear, knowing that she would certainly die and that there was nothing she could do about it. Theo learned in that instant that the stories were true—you did see memories flash in front of you right before you died. Except then she opened her eyes, and saw she wasn’t falling. The air was rushing past her, forward instead of up from below. She looked, and realized her wings were both rigid, bent just slightly in the middle in a way that seemed entirely natural. She had already left the pond behind and glided forward like a skier’s first time on a bunny slope, with legs spread wide in a constant breaking maneuver. It felt like that, and she knew she must look terribly childish.  But compared to falling to her death, Theo could do a little childish. “I’m… flying?” she asked, almost not believing it. Now she knew why almost all the muscles of a wing were in the back—it felt like the air was trying to rip hers right off. But she held—with the adrenaline of terror, she held. “Sort of!” Emerald zipped around her, like a child who’d been skiing her whole life. But there was no judgement in her expression, just her warm smile. “You’re gliding! Keep looking forward—you’ll probably fly towards what you’re looking at. That’s how the instinct works. Feel those… little adjustments your wings are making? I told you you could fly!” Theo could still barely believe it. It felt as though at any second she might stop whatever she was doing correctly and drop from the sky like a sack of rocks. But the farmhouse kept getting closer, and she was barely losing altitude. “How?” she finally asked. “We’re so… heavy… compared to how big these wings are. I shouldn’t be flying. You shouldn’t be flying…” She whimpered, but the tears streaming down her face weren’t anger or disappointment. She was just happy to be alive.