//------------------------------// // Advancement // Story: The Yellow Apple Blossom of New Texas // by Stainless Steel Fox //------------------------------// Applejack went about her daily chores with a will. The harsh desert around Fort Kerium might have it's own stark beauty, but it certainly made her appreciate the lush farmland of Sweet Apple Acres all the more. The empty dishes had come back with her, and were currently sitting drying on the rack, while the thaumometer was still in her saddlebags, along with the com-link and dataslate, ready to take over to Twilight once her yardwork was done. The rest of her family had noticed how chipper she was, and commented on it over breakfast. "Land sakes, Applejack, you're perkier today than a two-tailed dog at a wagging contest!" Granny Smith exclaimed. "Had some good dreams last night, granny." That was the truth, if not all of it. Big Mackintosh was unusually chatty. "Reckoned you'd have nightmares after all that food you took upstairs with you." "Did that fancy alarm clock Twilight gave you work?" Apple Bloom asked. "As far as I can tell." Applejack replied, then realised that sounded odd. "It was certainly working when I woke up, I mean. Speakin' of which, I've gotta get it back to Twilight after I do my work outside." She had worked through her chores with a will, taking a fresh pleasure in the familiarity of them. With her morning work done and her saddl;ebags in place, she set out for Ponyville and Golden Oaks library in mid-morning. Arriving at the library, she barely had time to knock twice before the door slammed open and she was yanked inside by a purple aura. The door slammed shut behind her as she skidded to a halt, still dizzy from the unexpected trip. "Did it work?! Did you take the thaumometer with you? Did you find any books? What did you see? I want to know everything!!" Twilight Sparkle exclaimed. Applejack shook her head to clear it. "Ohhh! Land sakes Twi, warn a pony before you do that! Yep, your doohicky came along with me..." she scooped the device out of her saddlebags, and it was immediately swept out of her hoof by the purple pony's telekinesis. Twilight immediately started spooling through the paper tape, eagerly absorbing the mystic symbols imprinted on it. "Yes! The thaumic resonance patterns are clear, and show a dimensional component, as well as multiple unfamiliar patterns! Whatever happened to you, it definitely happened, and now we have evidence! Oh, I can't wait to analyse this data, perform some Haymiltonian decompositions to tease out the arithmancy behind it and translate it into usable spell matricies..." "Welp, if that's all you wanted, maybe I should mosey on out..." Applejack said, a bit annoyed at the way Twilight was ignoring her. Twilight must have been paying at least some attention, becuase she suddenly looked up, face flushed with embarrasment. "Oh, I'm sorry, Applejack. It's just such a unique spell effect... But it shouldn't come before our friendship. Are you alright? Come on, sit down and I'll get us tea." "Where's Spike?" asked Applejack, "Doesn't he usually do the tea around here?" Twilight's ears lay flat. "He's in bed, sleeping off a bad case of indigestion... I'm sorry, Applejack, I thought it was secure in my lab, but he found that nugget of crystal you gave me and ate it. Apparently it smelled delicious, and tasted even better." "He ate that whole piece of Kerium? I hope he's okay, I wasn't kidding when I told'ya that stuff was powerful. They use it to power starships! That nugget could probably power all the lights in Canterlot for a month!" "Apart from burping large orange flames, and the indigestion of course, it didn't seem to do him any harm. I monitored him for hours, and whatever the long term effects, if any, the immediate effects have settled down. His bed is down in the lab, surrounded in fireproofing wards, and a monitoring ward in case he has any more erruptions, or other adverse effects, and I've been checking on him regularly. I'm sorry I lost your sample, I hope it won't be too hard for you to get more." "Dunno about that, but I've got another one that will keep my other body running for now." "Oh yes, you said, a partly automaton body, I wish I could see that!" Twilight brightened up. Applejack grinned. "Funny you should ask..." She reached into her saddlebag and pulled out the data slate. In Equestroid form it had seemed about the size of a large hoof mirror, easily held one handed. Now it was closer to the size of a dinner tray, but she managed to place it on the table in the centre of the room, propped up against the pedestal of the horse head statue in it's middle. "What is it?" Twilight asked, looking on curiously. Applejack touched the power button on the edge. "It's called a dataslate, and it's kind of like a library, a camera and a movie theatre all at once. It can even do sums or take dictation like a secretary." The dataslate lit up, it's screen showing the lock screen. It was easier to use with her humanoid version's fingers, but the larger scale meant that a hoof tip was sufficient to draw the unlocking pattern, and open up the main menu. Twilight looked on fascinated, and her horn glowed, a light washing over the device. "Fascinating! That's a sophisticated illusion, an interactive one, but there's no magic involved. But I can detect a pattern of electricity, far more complex than the badge you showed me. Wait, you said it was a library? How many books does it hold?" "Right now, just two, but according to Thirty Thirty, it could store thousands, maybe more. Anyhow, that wasn't what i was going to show you right away." She opened up an imaging program, and started calling up some of the pictures she'd taken. "I figured you might want to see, so I had Thirty Thirty take pictures or me, this one's in my pony-like form, what they call Equestroid, and that's the bipedal form, or humanoid.... Twi, Twi, are you okay?" Twilight's eyes were slightly glazed, and there was a slight trickle of drool on her lips. "Thousands of books... all in one book..." "Snap out of it Twilight!" Applejack called out, giving her a tap on the shoulder. This seemed to bring her out of her biblophilic daze, and she focussed on the dataslate, wiping the drool from her mouth with a slighty embarrassed expression. She focusssed back on the screen. "Definitely equinoid, but very different to ponies, closer to a Saddle Arabian..." Twilight mused, "... and the bipedal form, almost like a minotaur, but with equine rather than bovine features. And the articulation on those limbs, remarkable!" Applejack ran some video footage of her transforming back and forth. "While I prefer walking around in pony-form, I've gotta say, those hands are a lot more convenient than hooves or a mouth for picking things up." "Okay, you can stop recording." The Applejack on screen said, loud enough for them both to hear. "What did you just say?" Twilight asked, ears perking forward. "The you on the screen, I mean." "Telling Thirty Thirty to stop the recording... wait, you didn't understand that?" Applejack asked, looking at her curiously. "No, I couldn't understand the language at all, but it's definitely your voice. You can clearly understand it." "Yup, sound like regular Equestrian to me." Applejack frowned, "Now ain't that odd." "Possibly it's an effect of having travelled there, it wouldn't make much sense for you to go there as the result of a wish for you to enjoy yourself and not understand anything." Twilight pondered for a moment. "Whatever the effect it seems to have stayed with you even after you returned. Clearly your mind is interpreting the sentences as their Equestrian equivalent so effectively, you don't even hear the original sounds, or rather your mind isn't consciously aware of them. "That's some pretty high level translation magic, on top of the travel spell and creating a new body for you at the other end... I really want to study this now. I could try a translation spell of my own, but I'm not sure how it will interact with a recorded voice like that." Applejack shut down the imaging program and pulled up the Encyclopedia from the reader index. "Well, I've got a bunch of things to show you first, though I don't know if one of them will work, now." Tapping out the characters with a hoof tip was harder than with fingers, but she managed, and pulled up the entry for New Texas. Fuzz had shown her some of the functions, so she could expand the text and interactive images that made up the entry. "I'm betting this don't make any sense to ya then?" "The text, yes, but the images..." Twilight was taken with a view of New Texas from space, the rugged orange planet surrounded by a halo of asteroids with the three moons partly obscured by it's curvature. The triple shadow effect on the terminators of the moons, caused by the light of the three suns from behhind the camera viewpoint gave the whole scene an eerie beauty. A small, arrow shaped spacecraft flew into shot, shrinking to a dot as it flew down towards the planet, the glow of it's engines the last thing seen. "It's just as pretty from ground level." Applejack stated. "Folks are friendly too, it's a lot like Appleoosa, only it's all about mining Kerium rather than growing apples. Here, let me show you..." There followed a series of images pulled up from the one's she'd taken, a panoramic view of Fort Kerium from the top of the starship dock, moons just rising, and pictures of Fort Kerium itself, and the many beings who lived there. Finally there was a group shot of Marshall Bravestarr, J.B, Fuzz and Thirty Thirty. "This is just amazing, it's like nothing I ever inagined. Like something out of Shiny's sci-fi pulps, but it's all real!" Twilight was thrilled. "I notice that they're all wearing clothes, is that because of the harsh climate?" "According to Thirty Thirty, it's this whole modesty taboo thing, t'aint just when you're changing, it's all the time. I guess it's why the wish spell put me in my Gala dress when it sent me there, helps me fit in with the locals, I reckon, just like I know the language without learnin' it." "I'll have to remember that... I don't know if my Gala dress would work, yours fits right in, but I may have to ask Rarity to come up with something." "You're figuring on trying to visit yourself, sugarcube?" Applejack asked, shutting down the dataslate and putting it away. "I'd like to, if that's okay, I know this is your dream. With the thaumometer readings you took, I may be able to work out how to tap into the connection when I sleep, and duplicate the effect. It would also mean I would learn that language, maybe even pick up one of those dataslates for myself. Would gold bits work as a medium of exchange? Of course this is all on your say so." "Well shoot, I don't mind, the more the merrier!" Applejack answered, "So far the only other pony they've met is Pinkie Pie, and she was being very... Pinkie Pie at the time." "So you'd like your new friends to meet another sane pony?" Twilight quipped. "Yep, but in a pinch, you'll do, sugarcube." Applejack joked back, making them both chuckle. They moved through to the kitchen area where Twilight made them both a cup of tea, and brought out some biscuits. They shared a few moments of companionable silence as they drank, sat around the kitchen table, until Applejack spoke up. "I'll check on the gold situation when I'm there next. If you were going to get Rarity to make you a new getup to fit in with folks on New Texas, you may have to tell her why, maybe show her the pictures on my dataslate so she has something to work from. You know how Rarity gets about this kind of thing, I'm not casting nasturtiums, but she can gossip like no-pony else. I'd like to keep this on the down low, after all." "I'm sure we can get her to make a Pinkie promise to keep quiet about what's going on. She may gossip, but she's not going to hurt a friend over it. Though I don't know exactly how she'll react when she finds out about where you've been." "Knowing Rares, she'll either freak out and faint at the idea of so much dirt in one place from all the mining, or freak out over the costume designs and want to go with us, for inspiration!" Twilight giggled, picturing Rarity in full drama mode. "If I can work out how to go, I should be able to work out how to take her with us. Though I've got a lot of research to do first, and I haven't even told Princess Celestia yet." "Really? Sounded like that was top of your list, yesterday." "I wanted to do some checking on dream and wish magic first so I'd have some idea what to report, and examine the... Kerium sample? Then Spike ate it, and I spent the rest of the day taking care of him. Even if I wrote a report, with Spike out of action, I had no fast way to send it, so I decided I might as well wait until I got back and analysed the readings from the thaumometer." "I guess that makes sense, but can you ask the Princess not to spread it around?" Applejack gulped down the last of her tea, and toyed with the empty cup. Twilight said with assurance, "I know Princess Celestia will be discrete, especially if I ask her to be. She will probably want to discuss it with Princess Luna, dream magic is more her area of expertise. Who knows, they may already have some knowledge or experience of dimensional magic too." "Ya reckon? I guess they've probably seen pretty much everything." Applejack said. "Okay, if it will help you figure out the hocus pocus. When you do work it out, you're welcome to visit, Rarity too if she wants. Land sakes, I haven't even told my folks yet. I guess I have to, Big Mac at least, maybe Granny too. "It's not like I want to leave Applebloom out, but like I said yesterday, I'm not sure she could keep it secret, from her two friends at least, and if they know about it, the whole town will find out in short order. It's not like I think she'd do it deliberately, not after what happened with Gabby Gums, but all it takes is a slip of the tongue." Twilight sighed. "I've been talking to Cherilee about Gabby Gums, it seems that Diamond Tiara was the one pushing them to write embarrassing stories, even blackmailed them with equally embarrassing pictures." "That filly! Ever since her cutie mark came in, she's been on Applebloom's case! I've been half minded to step in, but Applebloom's been handling it, so I've let her. But since this all happened, I've been thinking, should I be doing more to help her? I'm helping complete strangers in Fort Kerium, but letting my own kin shift for herself. I'm proud of the way she's handled it so far, but that don't mean I can't make sure she knows she doesn't have to. "I swear though, if Tiara doesn't shape up soon, I'm going to be taking steps. I need to talk to Granny and Big Mac and decide exactly what we're going to do about it. The Apples and the Rich family have been business partners and friends since Ponyville was founded, but if Tiara isn't going to honour that, maybe they need a reminder that they aren't the only ponies we could sell to." "I know Princess Celestia loves your Zap Apple jam." Twilight said. "The Palace would probably buy your entire stock the next time you have a harvest, and give you a better price than Filthy Rich. For that matter, Spike knows a number of important business ponies in Canterlot, you could probably sell your regular apples there too." "It's a thought, though right now I wish I could sell some of our apples and some other fresh vegetables in Fort Kerium. From the way the Thirty Thirty and the others acted over my apple pies and salad, I'm pretty sure the stuff they get from that farming world... Missouri Prime, ain't the best quality, so I could get top bit for it over there. Hey, maybe that would work for giving you some money to work with when you get over there. But all I can carry is what's in my saddlebags." "Hmm... I might be able to help there. Give me a few minutes... Help yourself to more tea." Twilight headed off, down into her basement laboratory with the thaumometer. Applejack get a second cup of tea, and pulled out the dataslate, deciding to read up on the Galactic Penal Code. She found she still remembered the pages she'd memorised in Equestroid form perfectly, despite the dry material, and found it easy to memorise more, as if she still had that artificial memory storage in her head. She got so wrapped up in testing the discovery, she barely noticed the time. It was more than a few minutes, but Twilight eventually emerged, clutching something in her hornlight. "I've got an answer!" "Huh! Wassat Twilight?" Applejack looked up. "I examined the readings you took, reverse engineering the spell matricies will be a full project, but I could characterise the magic involved at least. At first I was considering applying a space expansion spell directly to your saddlebags, but the transfer also uses a form of dimensional magic, and mixing them might cause issues. However, this should get around that." She placed the object, a miniature model of a crate no bigger than a jewellery box, on the table. "This is a self expanding crate, one of the ones I used to transport my personal books from Canterlot back when I moved to Ponyville permanently. It's based around a shrinking spell, rather than expanded internal space, so it shouldn't be affected by the dimensional transit. Try it out tonight, see if it works." "That's mighty kind of you sugarcube!" Applejack said. "So how do you use it then?" "You tap your horn..." Twilight frowned as she realised what she'd said, "One moment." She grabbed the box and headed back down to her workshop, coming back several moments later. The only change was a gemstone embedded in the lid. "Okay, you tap the gemstone twice to expand and unlock it, then do the same with the lid closed to cause it to shrink again. I plugged a storage gem into the matrix to replace a horn, it will charge from ambient magic and obviously it discharges when you tap it in the correct pattern. It should be good for a dozen operations before needing to rest and charge up." She placed it on the floor. "Try it." Applejack tapped the gem twice, and the box expanded to a chest big enough to climb into. "Hooeee! That's right impressive, you fixed up that doohickey in just a few minutes?" Twilight blushed. "I just added an on/off switch, using a storage gem I already had lying around. Building one from scratch would take days, and a lot of precision hornwork. Creating a permanent enchantment is not easy." "Still impressive to me, no wonder you're Princess Celestia's student." She tapped the gem again, and picked up the shrunken chest with a hoof, placing it in one of her saddlebags, along with the dataslate. "I know you could probably spend the rest of the day looking at this thing, if I was here to tell you what it's saying... Huh, would that work?" "What?" asked Twilight. "Text to speech!" Applejack said, setting up the dataslate again. "Fuzz showed me how to set this gadget so it reads out the text on screen highlighting each word as it goes. I'm thinking maybe you could do a translation spell on that." "It would still be casting an active spell on the device, rather than the detection spells I used earlier that only scanned it." "Not if you rig up a paper cone as a speaker horn, and cast the spell on that." Applejack said. "That... could work!" Twilight said, getting excited. "It would wear out pretty quickly, but I could recast it as needed, thanks Applejack, that's a really clever idea!" "Shucks Twilight, I was just thinking about how you could use it without me telling you the words, then I remembered it was like a record player as well as a book, and could tell you itself. And like a record player, or a megaphone, you could pass the sound through the horn." Applejack activated the device and gave Twilight some quick instructions on how to access the encyclopedia, and navigate the pages and links. "I'll leave it with you while I get on with my work at Sweet Apple Acres. I'll come by tonight to pick it up. Take care of it please, I don't want to have to tell the Marshall I lost a part of my kit the first day after I got it. And don't let Spike eat it, or other folks see it, please?" Twilight nodded. "I'll take the greatest care with it, thank you Applejack, you don't know what this means to me!" "I've got some idea, you were drooling more over the gadget than Pinkie Pie over an all-you-can-eat desert buffet." That got another chuckle from the unicorn, though a slightly embarrassed one. "I wasn't that bad... was I?" "Don't worry about it sugarcube, just have fun. I'll be back to collect it come sundown, okay?" "Okay!" Twilight nodded. "I'll see you then." Applejack made sure her saddlebags were secure, and left the kitechen heading for the main library, and the front door. &&& Applejack was still thinking about what Twilight had said, and about telling her folks when she headed back to Twilight's place later that afternoon. Trading fresh fruits and vegetables on New Texas would probably give her enough credits to outfit her new place at the McBrides, and buy Twilight some equipment, but she'd need good Equestrian gold bits to buy them, even if she could get some of what she needed from Sweet Apple Acres stores. Those apples were for selling after all. She'd definitely need to talk to Granny Smith and Big Mac soon, if she was going to make it a semi-regular thing. For that matter, was it even right to be making money off of this, especially as she had a job enforcing the law. She had enough bits stowed away to buy some stuff for the test run, but she'd talk to J.B when she was back on New Texas, and if it turned out there was some kind of law against it, she'd just have to use the food herself to make more meals for everyone. The library door was unlocked, and she could hear a voice in the back, '... has no seas, only polar marshlands and wetlands, which are vital to sustaining the planetary biosphere, and as such left untouched. A major secondary industry, centred around the northern settlement of New Cheyenne, is the cultivation of aqua-pods, a succulent-analogue that stores moisture very efficiently for long periods of time. These supply one of the major sources of fresh water to the settlers, with comet mining from the ice cloud of the Omega Trifecta star system as a supplementary source." Twilight was in the kitchen where Applejack had left her, still working away at the dataslate. She had several scrolls and books open around her, and was writing on a scroll. "I wonder if an ever-full waterbottle would be a good idea..." "Hey there Twi! I'm afraid I've got to pick up some stuff and then get back to the farm, so I've gotta collect that dataslate." Twilight started at Applejack's voice and looked up, sighing, and reaching out to tap the dtatslate screen, halting the playback. "I understand... I've learned so much, but I've barely scratched the surface." She her horn lit and a bag twice the size of a hoof was lifted up from under the table. "Also, I wanted you to have this..." Applejack was deactivating the dataslate and putting it away; she heard the familiar clink of bits from the bag as it landed. "Sugarcube, I can't accept that! There must be a couple of hundred bits in there at least!" "It's okay, I get a generous stipend from the Princess. This is from my book fund, it's to partly repay you for the Kerium I lost, even though based on the purchasing power of credits vs bits, it's probably only a fraction of the value. I thought it could help you buy the foodstuffs you wanted to take with you tonight." "I'm havin' second thoughts about that. It seems like I'm taking advantage of Pinkie's gift, trying to sell stuff over there, not to mention I've got a job, and I'm worried this will interfere with it. Plus the money I get is only really good over there." Twilight gave a nod of understanding. "That's between you and your conscience, but I don't think Pinkie would mind. But there's one thing you could bring back that you could get very cheaply in New Texas, that's worth a lot over here, and is fungible enough that you could sell it without raising a fuss, as long as you didn't flood the market." "What's that?" Applejack asked, curiously, meaning both the material and what fungible meant. "Aluminium. It's a rare metal, rarer than gold, even though ores contaIning it are relatively abundant. It is very reactive, and extracting it as a pure metal is a long and complex alchemical process requiring large amounts of magic. It's very light for a metal and strong, as well as polishing up brightly, so the elites of Canterlort and Manehatten use it for jewellery, set with gems and chased or partly plated with gold. "According to the dataslate, societies over there worked out how to make it very cheaply using electrolysis and their abundant sources of electricity. And since from what I can see Fort Kerium and New Texas use metal rather than wood for pretty much everything, there's likely to be a lot of scrap aluminium around. You can probably fill the chest with it for a few dozen bits, which would sell over here for more than your farm makes in a year." "Hooee! Now that is one heck of a temptation. The farm could use that kinda money for all sorts of things. But that would definitely be taking advantage of the situation." "I see what you mean, but at least you know about it if you need it." Twilight gave her a comforting hoof on the shoulder. "I just wanted to pay you back for allowing me to participate in this amazing event. If there's anything further I can do to help, you only need to ask." "Shucks, Twi, it weren't nothin'. I'm glad Pinkie's gift keeps on giving." Applejack tipped her hat to the purple unicorn, and started to move on out. "Well, I've got some groceries to get, and Celestia ain't gonna wait on lowering that sun on my behalf." Twilight giggled. "Actually, you're one of the ponies she might do it for, given a good enough reason. But don't worry, when I write to her about all this, and my new observations, I will request in the strongest terms that she keeps this information between herself and Luna." "Thankee kindly Twilight, and farewell!" With that Applejack left. "Goodbye!" Twilight called out, and sat down at the kitchen table to go through her notes and start drafting a report for Celestia, which Spike would hopefully be well enough to send when she finished it. She'd add the thaumic analysis later once she'd made a proper checklist of what she needed to cover.