Twilight Gets a Puppy
Season 3
By TDR
Keep Calm and Frigoris On, Part 4
["This is supposed to be my triumphant return? Where the heck am I?”]
Rahs lay stretched out near the edge of the containment building on top of a pile of unused lumber, half in a doze. This whole situation had been a complete mess and he really had no clue what the heck was going on at this point.
His sister was running some test or another and wanted him out of the way to avoid any sort of magic draw he might cause so he had come outside and found a spot to stretch out. The crystal spire was keeping the snow away, but this far from it, it wasn't keeping out the cold, so Rahs was quite content to be bundled up in his coat with a nice warm ray of sunshine beaming down on him.
Changeling invasions, empires returning from nothing, Luna's son showing up and being a dick, and now this stupid shit with the timber wolves and whatever happened to Applejack. This had been a rather insane year, and Hearths Warming hadn't even happened yet.
Still... Rahs couldn't argue that Applejack didn't look and smell good while changed, and as a pony her scent had changed as well. She also seemed a bit too affectionate when transformed and he had no idea what was up with that. Not sure he minded so much, but she denied everything when she was back to normal so who knew what was going on.
Not like he needed to worry about it, Twilight was already super worried enough for everyone and he already had three other females to consider, he didn't want to think what would happen if this was a serious attachment and not some stupid crap from the witch wolf infection.
That was still a weird thing to think on.
Rahs might have continued his rambling thoughts for a while longer, though they were interrupted as something got in the way of his sunshine.
Opening one amber eye Rahs looked up into the red face of Big Mac, the large stallion had what looked like a iron rail road rail sitting on his shoulder. Granny Smith stood next to him with a slight grin on her green muzzle and a bundled up package that was probably lunch.
“Howdy Rahs.” Granny smirked as the moon dog sat up, his ears perking as he turned his attention to her, it would be a bit rude just to keep laying there while she spoke. He offered a yawn and a small wave in return.
“Everything going well?” Granny asked her smirk not getting any smaller. For some reason that unnerved Rahs. “So, Applebloom has been telling us what's been going on out here.....”
The screech of metal drew Rahs' attention to Big Mac, who was casually bending the rail road track over his shoulder like it was taffy. Rahs blinked a little as Big Mac stared down at him before it all clicked.
Rahs flattened his ears and slapped a paw to his face.
Granny cackled at the expression before she started walking towards the building.
“Jus be sure tah have some of that poison joke around, ah want great grand foals not great grand pups.”
Big Mac simply dropped the now pretzel shaped iron rail on the ground before the moon dog before grinning and walking off with a last gesture of pointing his hoof to his eyes then to Rahs before following Granny.
Rahs just let out an embarrassed and annoyed growl.
Twilight dropped back into a chair with an exasperated sigh.
She had no idea what this was. None of the tests helped. She had hit countless dead ends and had even entertained a few of Pinkie Pies stranger ideas to no avail.
She had looked into the necromancy that Sombra had pointed out , but unfortunately neither she nor the former king had enough knowledge about it to do more than detect traces of it in both Applejack and the timber wolf. Princess Celestia knew very little and even Princess Luna was clueless about it. It seemed the the rest of the gods were not sure either. Imperial taint as it was called was not a widely practiced art. It generally wound up being worse for the caster than the targets so dark and shadow magic were much better options for the same level of power. There was a known practitioner in the past, but the Ram god was killed when the last tribe of his race was wiped out by dreadnoughts.
Twilight was pretty much back where she started no closer to curing her friend than anything else. The only thing she had noted was that if Rahs drained the excess magic from her, the necromantic taint got smaller. She had set up several sessions only to find that the taint hit a certain point and wouldn't drain any lower.
Trying to drain Applejack while she was a pony only increased the draw of magic she was absorbing and it wound up that she would actually pull on some of Rahs' magic through the link to keep herself stable.
Rahs was also starting to get sick of apples.
Twilight had even secreted in a couple of lab mice to see if she could duplicate the transference to find out what it was. The lab mice were injected with blood, drool and magic drawn from both forms of Applejack.
Neither of the mice changed in the slightest, though one kept making plans to take over the world.
They also showed no sign of the necromantic taint.
She let Rahs eat the magic of the timber wolf and watched the scan on it finding that Rahs devoured all of it with no trace of the magic of any kind remaining.
She was stumped.
Applejack was starting to go stir crazy, the others were worried, and she had made no new progress for days.
Ascepius, Twilight shuddered, had come by and done her thing as well and found nothing of note. Bleu knew nothing. The books she had been given from Rhino had nothing, Iinii knew nothing, Kaz and Lockheed knew nothing. None of the books that Moon Dancer and Sunburst had found were not any help, even Solomon's journal had nothing. White might know something but it was universally agreed he would show up after everything was done and over with. Even Angel Bunny said that his grandfather had a thing for being late.
Twilight had even raided the restricted wing of the library to look over the necromantic tomes there. There were only three of them on file. One was bound in pony skin and spoke of some distant land called Tamberlane and it's King, Bray, but had nothing on spells.
The second one required a magic phrase to be said correctly, evidently the last time the book was read some one got it wrong, there was an army of undead and some poor stallion had his foreleg replaced with a chainsaw before it was all over.
The final book was just a bunch of necromancer jokes and puns, like 'It's not hard to raise a family, if their buried close enough together'. Twilight almost suggested burning that one by the end of it.
In the end none of them told her anything.
It was stupid, she knew there was some connection right there but she couldn't put her hoof on it. It didn't make sense, it was driving her mad that she couldn't figure out the chaotic mix of spells and conflicting information, it...
...It was time for plan D.
[“FINALY!”]