“And… check!” Twilight said triumphantly. “That’s the last of the connections on my checklist, and they all check out. We’re ready for ignition!”
Rarity smiled weakly – she’d been the one casting and recasting the weak but complicated test spell over and over and over again as they pieced together the matrix of enchanted gemstones, like the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle. “That’s good to hear, Twilight. Give me a few minutes to catch my breath, and I’ll… oh…” she collapsed into the dirt, closing her eyes as a cloud of dust rose around her.
Twilight smiled, looking fondly at the grey and purple unicorn sprawled out at the base of the crystal pyramid that now towered as high as the farmhouse. “I guess we’d better add ‘wait for Rarity’s magic to recharge’ to the list.”
“Or you could ignite them, dear,” Rarity said. “I haven’t seen you using your magic much, but I have seen you activate the gemstones. Besides, you’re the pony who worked out how to get so many separate enchantments to merge together into a seamless whole – the honor of seeing the first one light should be yours.”
“Eh heh,” Twilight said. “That’s okay. I know how much it means to you to be the one to do this. Besides,” she added, before Rarity could object more. “I’m not really a *magic* unicorn. Every time I try to cast a real spell, I just kind of freeze up. Or… worse.”
“Explode?” Pinkie Pie suggested. She and Fluttershy had come back with the orchard measurements half an hour ago, but Fluttershy was off looking for Rainbow Dash.
“No,” Twilight said, a bit too quickly.
“Reeeeeally?” Pinkie Pie asked, sidling up to Twilight and fluttering her eyelids.
“Well,” Applejack said from the porch, “what do we have here, Miss Sparkle?”
Twilight squeaked and leaped away from Pinkie Pie, standing at attention. “Nothing!”
“You know how I feel about consorting with the enemy,” Applejack said, frowning.
Twilight babbled, “I wasn’t consorting! I don’t even know how to be a consort. I mean, I sort of know the basics, but I’m not the conning sort!”
“And she’s certainly no pro,” Pinkie Pie said. “Are you done being a talky talky mctalkerson?”
“Ayup,” said Big Macintosh, standing beside his sister. “We came to an arrangement. I can’t say I’m happy with it, but she made me an offer I can’t refuse.”
Twilight looked shocked, then narrowed her eyes and stared at Applejack. “Oh, she did, did she.”
It was Applejack’s turn to look nervous.
“Does this offer involve him paying the rates we agreed on?” Twilight asked.
“It involves him paying rates,” Applejack said. “That we agreed on. Me and him.” She grabbed the contract out of her saddlebag, and Twilight levitated it over and looked at the details. They weren’t good. “Come on, Sweetie. You know I don’t like playing hardball with family.”
“I’m not sure this would even qualify as whiffle ball,” Twilight said, trying not to do the math for how long it would take to pay back the partnership’s investment in materials and labor under these terms. Maybe if she assumed a *negative* interest rate… still, Applejack had come through on the important point: Big Mac’s signature was there on the liability waiver. “But we’ve already got everything set up, and I’m pretty sure Rarity would gouge out my eyes with her horn if we told her to start taking it apart. If nothing else it’ll be good advertising.” Big Macintosh was looking *awfully* smug, so she added, “Assuming we don’t blow up the farm or something,” rolling her eyes at the notion of consuming the orchard in a fiery explosion.
Big Mac frowned. “You said this thing was safe.”
“It’s safe!” Twilight said. “I mean, as safe as something like it can be. It needs to project enough energy to replace the sun over your entire orchard, which means a pretty huge vortex of magic channeled through all the crystals. But everything’s designed to shoot the magic up into the sky – we might blow up the moon, but we probably won’t hurt the farm. Unless my math was *really* off.”
“Besides,” Pinkie Pie said, “if it starts going all haywire, you can always just kick it until it stops moving. That what you apple-buckers are best at, isn’t it?”
Rarity opened one eye to see Big Macintosh nod, and say, “Ayup.”
She pulled herself to her feet. “Mister Macintosh. I just spent the last hundred million years piecing together this monstrosity, and the hundred million years before that enchanting the gems for it.” She started walking towards the porch, one step at a time. “I’ll spend the next hundred million years dreaming about gems, which normally I wouldn’t mind, except that thanks to Miss Sparkle, the gems in my dreams are now linked by directed graphs and annotated with differential equations.” She stopped at the base of the porch, looking up at the massive stallion with eyes that could shatter diamonds, and hissed, “If you lay one hoof on my *masterpiece*, I will spend the next hundred million years making you regret it.”
“Okay!” Twilight said, with forced cheer. “Obviously Rarity is *raring to go*. Let’s light this candle and get out of here before somepony does something she’ll regret.”
There was the sound of flapping wings, followed by a little clink, and everyone looked over to see Rainbow Dash perched on top of the crystal pyramid, with Fluttershy hovering at her side. “Did I miss anything?” Rainbow asked.
“I mean,” she added, when she noticed everyone staring at her in horror, “obviously I didn’t miss the main event, since this pyramid here,” she tapped it with a hoof, “is just sitting there and *not* glowing all the colors of the rainbow.
”
“Get. Off.” Rarity said, with murder in her voice.