Starlight was still writing stuff down when Derpy walked into the living room. Without looking up, she said, “I love you forever.”
“Sorry,” said Derpy. “I’m taken.”
That didn’t matter to Starlight, and not in any sense related to polyamory. It was a miracle, all the information she’d managed to wring out of Derpy. Actually, that she’d managed to wring out of Derpy’s responses to the locomotive driver (engineer?). Those responses were far from comprehensive, and yet she felt like she’d managed to fill a book with the information in them. (A small book, to be frank, a short novella at best, but a book nonetheless.) And how much more had Derpy herself heard?
“I’ll stay out of your way, then,” said Starlight. She looked up, grinning from ear to ear. “Thank you so much for getting that information. I don’t know where you get you ideas, but they’re good ones.”
Gilda wasn’t as happy. She didn’t have the benefit of a nonphysical appendage to write with and her claws looked like they were cramping something fierce as she nursed them. “Uh-huh, sure,” she muttered as she clenched and unclenched her fingers for the tenth time that minute. “And I’m the one that spends hours recording everything, and…” Her voice trailed off into angry mutters.
“Don’t mind her,” said Starlight. “She’s just a bit angry. So…” She fanned out the papers in front of her, pulled up a fresh sheet, and re-inked her quill. “I recorded what I could from your responses, but I don’t think I got everything. Could you elaborate?”
“Sure!” Derpy retrieved a muffin from the kitchen, cut the top off, and thought as she buttered both halves. “You heard they’re owned by the police but were a gift from Goumada, right?”
“Not directly,” said Starlight, “but I gathered that.” Still, confirmation was nice.
“Well, they came with all sorts of conditions.” Derpy nibbled a crumb off her muffin and continued, “If something happens at the casino, the police are supposed to prioritize that, rather than anything else.”
“And the cops are okay with that?”
“Most of them actually aren’t, or so I heard.” Munch. “The patrols those locomotives allow do cause some deterrence, which means less overall crime, but a lot of cops still don’t like Goumada. And they don’t even know she’s an artifact smuggler; they just think she’s slimy.”
“Well, she is. But they still have to go to any crimes in progress at the casino.”
“Yep.” Munch.
“Super,” moaned Gilda. “So we can’t even cause a distraction to keep the cops away while we’re heisting, ’cause they’ll drop everything to get to us if we’re spotted.”
“And tell me, Gilda,” said Starlight, “what would we do for that distraction?”
“Dunno. Blow something up? …Don’t give me that look, I ain’t much of a planner! I bet one of you ponies could come up with a better distraction if you tried!”
“Uh-huh,” said Starlight. But she didn’t stop staring at Gilda. “Anything else, Derpy?”
Munch. “They’re mostly magic-powered, with these big gems in the back for batteries. Apparently, they could run for days without running out of energy, but they’re supposed to be brought in at the end of every shift for recharging, just in case.”
“Right.” Not that surprising. “All at the police station, right?”
“Well, there’s also one or two at the casino. You know…” Derpy made a face and rolled her eyes. “If something comes up. At the casino. Just the casino. They’re not even trying to hide it, are they?”
“Why did this have to happen in Equestria?” mumbled Gilda to herself. “Of all the places for the dark magic artifact to get stolen, it had to be in the sunshiniest, ranbowiest place in the world.”
“Well, sunshine and rainbows come from magic,” said Starlight, “so Equestria being the sunshiniest and rainbowiest place in the world would also mean it’s the magicest place in the world, making it the most likely place to have dark magic artifacts to be stolen in the first place.”
“I mean, that’s just common sense,” snorted Derpy.
“Besides, what’s so bad about sunshine and rainbows?”
As she thought, Gilda twisted one of her headfeathers back and forth. “I don’t know,” she grumbled. “It’s just- Hooray for Pax Equestriana and all or whatever it’s called, but I think it’s left you dweebs more than a little clueless about things that don’t have to do with singing, friendship and singing about friendship. I mean, you two are talking about our target bribing the police force like it’s nothing!”
Starlight and Derpy looked at each other. Derpy shrugged. “Yeah. So?”
“Weh- You- She-” Gilda took several long, deep breaths. “Look,” she said in a low voice as she rubbed her temples, “does- Do you two, like, get what we’re doing? Gouda Feta’s two steps away from having the police force in her pocket, and we’re still thinking of robbing her? Screw any criminal connections she has, one wrong move and she’ll have us legally arrested!”
“Which is why we’re being careful about it,” said Derpy. “I mean, duh?”
“She still has the Alicorn Amulet,” said Starlight. “We can’t let her sell it to… to anypony. She knows what it’s like and anypony she sells it to either won’t know or won’t care about its side effects. Either way, it’s bad news once they put it on.”
Gilda flared her wings in frustration. “Why even keep something like that around?” she screeched. “You should’ve just smashed the dang thing to pieces and gotten rid of it completely! If there’s one thing in Griffonstone that I do like, it’s that if you don’t like something, you hit it with a hammer until it’s gone.”
“Including griffons?” asked Derpy, frowning.
“Sometimes, yeah! Dash is writing letters to me, and I swear, it’s like every other week, these goons are coming back from the distant past to make your life miserable. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you’d hit him with a hammer until he stopped moving in the first place!”
“Equestria doesn’t work that way,” said Starlight. “We don’t… kill somepony just because we don’t like them.” If we did, I’d be dead. “Those’re just the worst of the worst. All the others throughout history got reformed. The ones we remember are the ones who repeatedly turned down the chance to turn away from evil and accept friendship. If that never happened, Equestria would be a lot worse off.”
“Fine.” Gilda didn’t look very convinced, but she had apparently decided to not press the issue at the risk of getting a long-winded friendship speech. “But the Amulet?”
“Taking a hammer to it would release all the dark magic inside it, and-”
Gilda didn’t twitch, but her pupils shrank. “Never mind. I got it. Stupid magic frgrfr…”
“Of course, even that might not work,” said Derpy. “Nightmare Moon tried destroying the Elements of Harmony, and they got fixed in like two seconds. I wouldn’t be surprised if somepony’s tried to destroy the Alicorn Amulet and it repaired itself. Or maybe it’s indestructible. Powerful evil things like that are usually indestructible.”
“Have a lot of experience with that, do you?” said Gilda.
“Well, kinda. This one time-”
“I’m sorry, what?” gawped Starlight.
“-Twilight had me take this cursed music box — why do ponies even make music boxes anymore? They’re just going to get cursed or possessed or something! — take the box to Canterlot for the princesses to secure.”
“When did this happen?”
“I dunno, a year ago? Before you came. I was taking the box to Canterlot and I ran into this really bad storm. Turns out, it was scheduled and I just forgot about it. Anyway, I lost control and crashed in a forest. I landed on my bag and should’ve crushed the music box, but nope! I spun the drum around and it played just fine. I stayed under shelter until the storm passed, and-”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Starlight was surprised at how easy it was to get lost in such a simple story. “You listen to it? When it was cursed?” Even Gilda, as unknowledgeable in magic as she was, looked a bit freaked out at that.
“Yep!”
“That’s how music box curses usually manifest!” said Starlight. “Didn’t it offer you power or something? Or even just try to keep you playing it forever?”
Derpy shrugged. “Well, it tried the second one. But the box didn’t play synthwave, so I didn’t see the point. Why do you think Twilight had me take it?”
“…Maybe you should’ve been the guardian of the Amulet.”
“Maybe.” Derpy nodded sagely. “Maybe.”
Gilda coughed. “Hey, um, change of subject, but didn’t whatsherface, Lyra, have a key gem thing for getting into certain back rooms? Have we done anything with that?”
Starlight smiled and raised a hoof. “Actually, we…” Her smile turned into a frown. “…haven’t… done… anything. Huh.” Hadn’t they? No. “Guess we should.” Lyra had her gem at the moment, but there were still some leftover gems from the arcanoscope lying about that they could use for testing.
“You should. I’d help, but…” Gilda wiggled her claws. “No magic. It’s not like we can just make a wax casting of it.”
“Buuuuut…” Starlight’s smile was back. “If we take the principles of the arcanoscope to make wax hold the frame of a spell within it, we can use that to reverse-engineer the spell! So if we can get our hooves on another gem in the future, even if only for a minute, we can figure out how to make a copy of that based on its residual thaumatic aura!”
“I’ll pretend I know what you’re talking about and nod,” said Gilda, nodding. “Want me to get some candles to melt?”
Lyra appeared to be having fun. Rainbow Dash couldn’t care less. The rehearsal was making her so freaking bored. She knew the timing. She had the song memorized. (Enough.) She would totally know when to rainboom. She bailed halfway through, when the conductor was talking to the clarinets(?) about something called a “suspended chord” or whatever.
She quickly swooped above the casino, looking behind her for any tails. Nope. None. Thank goodness. She wanted to see if she could find Bon Bon or Thorax or anypony else who’d been in the casino, but she didn’t want to push her luck and risk having a guard see her talking with one of the other heist members. It was unlikely they’d put two and two together, but you never knew.
Rainbow settled for some long, lazy loops. Anything to get her wings moving; she’d been sitting still for far too long (a whole thirty minutes! How was that possible?). Heists were a strange kind of adventure, when you thought about it. The books never talked about how much waiting a pony had to do. Oh, sure, the main character got to run around accomplishing this or that, but what about all the side characters who were super good at one thing (cough flying cough) but couldn’t, say, cast magic? They had to sit around in the background doing nothing while the main characters did their thing and couldn’t even enjoy the spotlight on them.
The pumping of her heart felt nice. Rainbow did a few laps of Trotter Gorge.
Come to think of it, what sort of stuff like that did Daring Do run into? The book might say something like “hours passed” when Daring was captured, but ye princesses would that be boring. She’d always managed to get involved with Daring at or near the climax, so she never experience the horrible, horrible waiting. Daring was even more of a hero than Rainbow had thought, if she had to suffer through that.
Her need for speed temporarily quenched, Rainbow swooped lazily down over the casino and examined the surrounding streets, not looking for anything in particular. There were still guards hanging about, as always, doing that guarding thing. No more or less than the last time she’d seen them.
Rainbow idly wondered just how long she would last if she walked in and punched the first guard she saw. She was under no delusions that she’d hold out against the guards forever — even she wasn’t that awesome — but she’d last a while, right? Long enough to make an impression, definitely.
And attract Goumada’s attention, scoring herself a mind control spell in the face. Or worse. And probably get her friends captured. Or worse. Again.
Yeah, no. Another glanced around to be sure she wasn’t being followed, and Rainbow peeled away from the casino, aiming for the villa.
Just in case, Bon Bon and Sunburst had left the casino at different times and going in different directions than Thorax and the Doctor. Several “casual” looks confirmed they weren’t being followed, and the two groups met back up about halfway to the villa. They still stuck to side roads.
“So, ah,” said the Doctor, “I presume everything went well, judging by the lack of guard escort on your part. What did you two find?”
“They’ve actually got a, a fiber arcanics network up and running!” Considering he was talking about the security system they had to tackle, Sunburst sounded far too gleeful. “It’s, it’s all run through a centralized hub, but, but preliminary scans say it covers the whole building!”
“I say! Really? Quite fascinating. And you don’t sound too put out by it, so-”
“Put out? Me? By that? Ha!” Sunburst smirked and stroked his goatee. “I’m actually coming up with a way too…”
Bon Bon let the geeks geek out. All she needed to know at the moment was that they could get in, if they had a key. Just in case. It was a learned skill, knowing only what you needed to know and nothing more. Otherwise, your head would just get stuffed full of all sorts of useless knowledge. (Bon Bon never, ever, ever stood a chance in Trivia Trot.)
Next to her, Thorax (still in pony shape) coughed. “Bon Bon? If you can, I, I’d like you to teach me how to… act like a pony.”
Amid the slew of obvious questions to that, one possible answer pulled its way to the front of Bon Bon’s mind. “Like a pony?” she asked. “Or like a different pony?”
“The second one.” Thorax looked away and ran his tongue over his teeth. Bon Bon wondered if he was trying to feel his fangs that weren’t there at the moment. When he turned back, he said, “I… I’ve said this before, but I’m not a very good changeling. And… um, yesterday, when I was playing poker, I… Somepony accused me of cheating, one thing led to another, and we had to talk to Goumada. I-”
“What?” Bon Bon whisper-screamed, whirling on Thorax. “Thorax, why didn’t you say something? What happened? Did-”
“Let me talk!” squeaked Thorax. “Nothing happened! The other pony got thrown out and I didn’t tell Goumada anything about us and she didn’t even suspect anything! If it’d been bad, I would’ve told you!”
“Right.” Deep breath in, deep breath out. Bon Bon’s reflexes were still screaming, but, well, Thorax was right. He wasn’t a good changeling, but he wasn’t stupid. “Sorry. So what does that have to do with… this?”
“I want to learn how to act,” said Thorax. “I want to be able to talk my way out of a situation. If something goes wrong, I don’t want to fumble my way through it. I- I want some control. And if we ever, um, wind up needing me to pose as somepony important, then…” He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
“You’re sure?” asked Bon Bon. “You probably won’t need it.”
Thorax’s voice was determined, with not a hint of hesitation. “I know. But I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
More caution than most ponies showed. Including the ones in their team, probably. Definitely including some of the ones she’d worked with. Was this Thorax learning the ropes or some long-dormant changeling instinct? Either way, Bon Bon thought it was a good idea. “Okay, but why me?”
Thorax still looked like a pony, but Bon Bon couldn’t help but wonder what his eyes would’ve looked like if he was still a changeling, he looked so shocked. “Why you? Bon Bon, have you seen yourself? You’ve been on top of things this whole time! You’ve been making half the plans, you broke into a building on the first night, you just walked into the main security room and left without anyone noticing anything! You’re great! If anypony can teach me how to act, it’s you!” Thorax looked at her with wide, expectant eyes.
Part of Bon Bon was surprised she hadn’t been found out before now. The rest of her reminded that part that she was working with people whose idea of “espionage” boiled down to “Pinkie sneaking an early look at Mrs. Cake’s latest flan recipe”. She still wasn’t sure she should just go out and say, “FYI, I am a spy”, but what was the point in hiding it? Half- No, two-thirds of the party lived in Ponyville, a place where the meekest pony could turn a manticore to purring putty in seconds and had a princess to smack down anyone who didn’t fall for the former’s charms. Honestly, telling everypony would probably just result in a game of whack-a-vengeance-seeking-beast for a few weeks. Nothing Twilight couldn’t handle.
But what about the trust issues? That was one of the times where Bon Bon had appreciated Lyra’s total nonchalance towards… darn near everything. Lies that could’ve caused a rift in their relationship had been smoothed over in about twenty minutes, thanks to that. It was at least evidence that just one lie wouldn’t cause ponies to turn away from you.
Bon Bon managed to compromise. “No promises,” she said, “but I’ll try my best.”
Thorax smiled, just a little. “Thanks.”
“Mmhmm.”
Peace and quiet. Starlight had been wanting those two things for a while, ever since running around and planning a heist meant they were routinely denied. But now, she could just let her mind drift, do magic in the best way she could think of, and not have to worry about much. Besides the impending shadow of the upcoming and yet-unplanned heist looming over her, slowly and inexorably growing ever closer with each passing day. But that was a small thing. (Really.)
The arcanoscope was nice, but it wasn’t very precise. It could only give basic spell designs and mana concentrations; anything more sophisticated (that might be needed in, say, magical keys for magical locks) would just appear as a multicolored smear. It was surprisingly pretty, but not very useful.
But part of the reason for the arcanoscope’s blunt visualization was that it was dynamic and real-time. You could only get so detailed when you might want to change the view at any second. On the other hoof, having a static imprint of an enchantment held in time? You could get ludicrously detailed with that, if you knew how to do it. Luckily, Twilight, being the blanket jill-of-all-trades teacher she was (and master of more than quite a few), had insisted Starlight learn enchantment-reading spells of just this type.
So with a little melted candle wax and the right spells, Starlight could hopefully be able to detect, hold, and reverse-engineer the spells in the key gems for their own use. Not unlike casting a physical key from a mold, really. Wax even worked well, due to its high thaumatic viscosity when properly charmed (laymare’s terms: magic fields in treated wax didn’t change at all over short periods of time). They only had a few gems left; maybe Thorax would need to swing by the poker tables again and win them some more money.
The first tests on the gems Starlight semi-randomly charged went smoothly. The wax held the magic field lines strongly enough, but she needed someone to cast spells without her knowing which ones they were to really test them. She settled for waiting to see how long the field lines stuck around; they needed to be coherent long enough to at least be recorded. And the only way to record that was wait.
Meaning relaxing on the heavenly couch really was the best thing she could be doing right now. Seriously.
Sweet mother of Celestia, was this couch so fickin’ soft.
Starlight deigned to raise her head when she heard Gilda walk in. The latter was squinting at a still-steaming muffin like it was either about to eat her or tell her the meaning of life. Possibly both. She took a small bite. She chewed, then took a larger bite. “That pony sure does love muffins,” she said.
“That she does,” said Starlight. She managed to pull herself into a sitting position and glanced at the clock. An hour and a half since the wax imprinting. She ran a scan on the makeshift mold sitting on a side table. The magic was still holding strong. Perfect.
“So, uh…” Gilda coughed and sidled up to Starlight in that incredibly forced way that meant she was trying to look nonchalant. Sitting on the sofa, she took a nibble of her muffin and asked, “What does it feel like… up here?” She pointed at her forehead. “When you’re casting magic.”
“Well, it’s…” Starlight frowned. She’d never had to talk about magic like this before. She knew how magic felt. Every unicorn knew how magic felt. But how could she explain it in non-magical terms? It was probably like Rainbow Dash trying to explain the feeling of wings to her: how could you explain something when the other person just didn’t have the ability to feel it at all? “It’s… uh…”
Gilda raised an eyebrow. “Yeeee-esss?”
“…kinda… tingly?” Starlight grinned nervously. “I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do. It’s… not something I really think of. The same you don’t really think of what flying feels like.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“The same way you don’t really think of the up-and-down motion of-”
“Yeah, I do, you dweeb.” Gilda was looking increasingly concerned.
“…The… same way you don’t really think of what flying would feel like if you didn’t have wings?”
“…Oh.” Gilda looked over her shoulder and flared one of her wings. She flexed it, rolled it, rubbed it. “Okay. That I get.”
“It’s, um… It’s kind of an… awareness, I guess?… of the… mana around me. And I can, uh… feel it — not tactile-feel it, more like, um, mystical-feel it — I can sorta feel it when I push it around, and… um…” Considering about a third of the population could use magic, Ponish was remarkably crap at describing the way magic felt. Or maybe that was just Starlight’s own lack of skill at wordsmithing. “Okay, it’s… Sorry, it’s just really hard to describe magic when you don’t have a point of reference-”
“Then forget it.” Gilda settled back on the couch. “It sounds like you’re going into a bunch of mystic malarkey and I like things I can see or touch, thanks.”
“Alright.” Starlight had wondered, more than a few times, what it would be like to have no unicorn magic — not in the sense of losing it, but having never had it in the first place. Being able to loosely sense magic was something so second-nature to her that she’d never really considered it, like being able to touch things. But earth ponies and pegasi had their own magic; did they sense things in the same way? Unless Twilight had access to some kind of body-swap spell (which, admittedly, wasn’t too much of a stretch), she’d never know. And being without magic was so second-nature to Gilda that she was in the exact same situation in reverse.
Of course, now that they had exhausted that line of conversation, an awkward silence fell between them. Gilda’s beak twitched, like she almost said something but decided not to. Starlight coughed. Nothing came to mind, but she still said, “So… uh…”
Derpy attempted to buck the door open. Considering the doorway didn’t have an actual door to buck, that proved less than dramatic. “Stop!” she yelled, and dropped a baking tray on the table. “Muffin time.”
Gilda swiped one of the middle ones, daintily holding it with the tips of her claws to keep from being burned. “So how do you get these so dang fluffy?” she asked after taking a nibble. “I make griffonscones, and they’re too chunky.”
Starlight grabbed a muffin of her own. Yes, that was quite fluffy.
“It’s a bit of an art,” Derpy said vaguely, waving her hoof in a circular motion, “but it mostly involves watching the muffins as they’re baking. Once they start rising, you need to…”