//------------------------------// // CH. 11 Hamburgers? // Story: Werewolves of Knicknik // by Atuhor Name //------------------------------// Hamburgers? The inside of the restaurant was strange. Everything about it. It felt like one of those “future world’s fair” exhibits, a look into how the future could be forty years from now, if it focused on rats. The name of the restaurant was “ratburger” and it was advertised as “home of the original rat waiting staff!” To wit the pathway around their booth where three rats came and gave them all menus. Electronic menus with screens that you poked at and options popped up. Twilight ended up ordering something called an A26 burger with fries under the assumption it was something like a hayburger. That was the strange thing about the menu, the burgers all had designations like that, A26, A15, A30. Assuming the burger’s price in aci was similar to bits it didn’t seem that expensive for eating out. Twilight made a mental note to ask what aci was and what it was based on. The burger came much faster than anticipated, it seemed like they hardly had time to put down their menus before a line of rats were already bringing it down the walkway on the edge of their booth. The First Administrator got up saying he had to “Talk to the people in the back.” The A26 burger was meat. The burger bun had sesame seeds on it, the fries were made of potatoes instead of hay, there was ketchup, lettuce, and all the condiments Twilight and Naudia recognized from back home. But the burger was made of meat, and it smelled good. Gwynn looked up from taking her first bite at their expressions. “Is there something wrong?” “We’re ponies, this is meat, from some animal.” Unexpectedly that got a rile out of Gwynn. “It does not!” Naudia and Twilight looked back at their burgers, Twilight even lifting up the edge of the bun. “Yeah it’s meat, from an animal, where else would it have come from?” Naudia was exasperated at Gwynn’s naivete not knowing something so obvious. “Are you people so disconnected that you don’t know where meat comes from?” The First Administrator was there at the table then, Twilight couldn’t tell if he was just stealthy or had just appeared, she also realized he hadn’t ordered anything. “I think it’s time I showed you how the hamburger is made. Come into the back, the owner has been most obliging.” After that ominous statement Twilight and Naudia found themselves in what looked like a brewery setup, for compost. There were leather barrels with hoops made of wood, all of them were labeled with the same things as the menus, A26 and so on. There were also enormous baskets of compost, grass, dead leaves, paper plates, banana leaf plates, potato peelings, lots and lots of finely cut potato peelings. The owner was a bright red squirrel-plant thing with a bushy flowering tail, he wore an apron and casual clothes you’d see in places with very warm weather. He gave off the impression of being very nervous at having the First Administrator noticing him unexpectedly. “As you can see these are our meat growth vats, all of our meat is grown on site from all natural compost that has been sourced locally.” He pointed at the barrels and then the baskets of compost. “This one over here was just started yesterday so I can pop open the top and show you the process in action.” He brought over a step stool for them and opened up the top of the barrel, the leather was apparently boiled to harden like metal. The hinge was also strips of leather glued together to make a solid hinge shape like you’d make with metal and even the again very solid rod was still some kind of leather rolled up. Inside the leather barrel which Twilight and Naudia cringed away from was very clearly meat growing on compost. The whole inside of the barrel looked like the meat was some sort of bacteria. “As you can see animals are not involved in the process of making meat, they’re too expensive, too much waste product, and as a bonus bacterially sourced meats are more ethical.” “What kind of meat even is A26 anyway?” “Hamburger.” The owner answered. “No I mean where did… er what was it based off of?” Twilight asked. That got a blank look from everybody in the room except the First Administrator. Nobody seemed to know. There were a couple answers put ahead about it, mosquito, flatworm, and mollusks. It was pretty clear nobody even had so much as a clue as to where to start. “Maybe it was artificial.” The owner said. “I could believe that.” Gwynn replied. “Yeah, it’s too tasty, too easy to make into hamburgers and other stuff, that’s a sure sign that somebody designed it from the ground up.” “And that name too, it’s already named after a popular dish, has to be artificial.” It was evident to Twilight that this wasn’t some grand conspiracy, they didn’t have any idea at all what A26 was based off of. It was pretty clear from what she knew of Gryphon cuisine that they actually wouldn’t even know where to start, the guess of “mosquito” was far too confident. Twilight hadn’t heard anything about flatworms at all from gryphons and it didn’t look like seafood. Now the problem was if it was okay to eat or not. It was then she thought to ask the First Administrator who she again noted hadn’t ordered anything. “Do you know what it’s made out of?” “I’m afraid the invention of bacterially sourced meat was before my time. There likely were people who knew when I started 13 billion years ago but chances are they’ve passed on by now.” There was something on Twilight’s plate, hovering over it, that wasn’t there before. It was some sort of spotlight hanging down from the ceiling really close up to her plate. Naudia looked confused about it as well, but she pushed the button on it and it zipped back up to the ceiling on it’s wire. “It’s a food warming lamp, it’s so that your food doesn’t get cold if you have to walk away for some reason.” Gwynn said. Naudia had very little hesitation about the hamburger and chomped down on hers very quickly. Twilight on the other hoof wasn’t so sure about things, and lifted up the bun to look at the meat underneath. It smelled great, really great, better than a hayburger. The temptation was there to just dig in, but was this some sort of slippery slope for her? Would she start craving some kind of other meat now she was some sort of wolf creature? "Twilight you may be partially wolf now, but you're adapted to eating cooked meat. You're not about to develop some kind of craving for any other kind of meat. Nobody else has and you're not going to be eating any but bacterially sourced meat." Twilight was surprised to hear Gwynn say that. “No seriously, you should try this!” Naudia said with her mouth full. “It’s great!” Twilight reluctantly took a bite of the burger. ------------------- There were two plates in front of Twilight now, two hamburgers had vanished never to be seen again. Twilight noticed however that Naudia was looking at her strangely, probably because Twilight had inhaled two hamburgers right in front of her. “Looks like you really wolfed those down Twilight.” Gwynn snickered. “Honestly, it’s weird to have an argument kicked out from under you like that. I thought I would have more time to adjust.” Twilight said, but something felt off to her about her mouth, like she was forming the words differently than she did before. Twilight noticed what that something was, it effected not only her muzzle but her hooves as well. They were paws with thumbs and her muzzle had a clear wolf-ish look to it. Gwynn cast a spell and a mirror materialized in her hands, she offered it to Twilight who did not take it. Twilight and Naudia could only stare at Gwynn mouths agape, their minds had stopped. “What was that spell?” Twilight asked. “Uhh, that was just a mirror spell, it summons a mirror.” Gwynn said. Twilight took the physical mirror in one of her paw-hands as if it might explode at any moment. “You use a spell to make a physical thing just for that? Just like that?” Twilight was clearly very much more interested in the mirror and mirror spell than seeing what she actually looked like. “Yeah?” Gwynn said as if she didn’t get the magnitude of what she’d just done. “It’ll go away after a while if I stop feeding it magic.” “Oh, so it’s just a conjuration?” Twilight asked. “Something fragile and temporary.” “Temporary, yes, fragile no. Lemme show you.” Gwynn took the mirror back and summoned a little floating plank of wood that stood still in the air and put the mirror on top of it. What happened next was honestly terrifying for Twilight and Naudia. Almost faster than the eye could see Gwynn went into her wolf form and in one brutally fast movement slammed a drinking straw, glowing with magic, into the summoned mirror. The force of that blow was so enormous that Twilight thought if the plank and mirror weren’t floating in the air like that the building would have shaken from the blow. Neither the paper straw nor the summoned mirror were even so much as scratched. “That’s just your standard magmatter shield summon, you can’t break them with conventional matter because it’s many many orders of magnitude stronger.” The First Administrator said with a smug expression, this was a lever he knew would work from the start. “I’m certain you’re already thinking of applications for it.” Gwynn handed Twilight the undamaged mirror and one shock became two as Twilight saw her reflection in the mirror. It was that same purple furred maned wolf(not that her mane wasn’t purple, but she was also a maned wolf as well) from before looking back at her, lanky, tall, almost foxlike, opposable thumbs. She was taken out of her shock by the flash of a camera from Gwynn. “We’re going to print this out to help you with your homework.” “I guess you must really like hamburgers if you didn’t notice turning into a wolf to wolf them down.” Naudia said, noting that down for future reference. “Teach me to change back.” Twilight said to the First Administrator. “That should be easy, I already taught you how, unless you need me to give you a picture of what you already look like. This is the test.” Twilight still flinched at the word “test” but it lacked a lot of the impact it normally did coming from somebody she didn’t respect. It was harder than expected to apply changing from a pony to a slime to changing from a wolf to a pony. The forms were too similar in how they moved and emoted, they were both designed to smile and put their ears down for example. Eventually by keeping an image of herself in her mind Twilight managed to do a slow transformation that worked it’s way down from her head to her hooves. “Good, now practice that on the way to magic practice, if you can’t get it right three times in a row you won’t be allowed to learn any magic until you do.” The First Administrator said. ------------------- That, it turned out was extremely good motivation for Twilight. By the time they were halfway to their destination Twilight could already transform without issue, so the First Administrator started testing her by randomly asking her to transform between pony, wolf, and slime with a timer. The odd thing about this was Twilight was expecting to feel tired after all this, rearranging your body should be more tiring than this she thought, but it wasn’t. Presumably she had gained a lot more stamina as well as strength due to the conversion. The building they arrived at was a gym, kinda, there were the usual treadmills and some kind of tension weightlifting equipment or other things with flywheels or air pressure. But most of it was set up like a martial arts dojo of some kind, and the whole building had been cleared out for just Twilight and Naudia. In the dojo, the only other person besides them was a feathered rat raptor thing with the red and gold silk clothes that Twilight recognized as Kuiguk, the Kopiak from the trip up here with the giant spider. Twilight did not see the giant spider anywhere around, but she was still on the lookout for it. At his feet was presumably Twilight and Naudia’s set of training equipment. “I’m going to teach you how to do magic today, like a yunguaq does.” Kuiguk said. “I don’t know if you remember me from our flight up here but I was one of the guards who was there to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid on the way up.” “And also to illustrate the variety of races we have invented, don’t discount that.” The First Administrator interjected. “Yeah, that too. Anyway, yunguaq magic is a science that we created and the easiest way to learn how to channel magic is to feel magic.” He held out a stick with amber inlaid into it. “Put a hoof on this and feel for when I cast a spell with it, try and remember that feeling of magic flowing.” Twilight wrapped her hoof around one end of the stick and Naudia did so to the other. The spell Kuiguk cast was something that created and dropped some variant of paper cups onto the floor. Twilight could feel the magic with her hoof, it felt like a thin electric pressure passing underneath her hoof, She briefly looked at her hoof to see if it had embossed a pattern onto it somehow. And Twilight utterly failed to learn this new type of magic. Again, and again, and again, Twilight could feel the magic, picture the magic, everything, but it just didn’t connect. There was actually a sizable pile of cups on the floor now and there would be more if some of them hadn’t started disappearing. The galling thing for Twilight was that Naudia had managed to create a wonky, hole filled, malformed cup on her seventh try and by the thirty fifth actually had a cup you could drink out of. Fifty tries in Naudia was good enough that she started to mess with the spell and had added on a handle to make a mug. Twilight at that point had zip, nothing, nada. She could feel the strange electric pressure, she even knew in her minds eye what it should look like but she couldn’t figure out how to use it herself. “ARRRGGGHH!!” Twilight said for the umpteenth time. It was in that moment that Naudia had a flash of inspiration. She walked over to Twilight, put a hoof on the back of her head and shoved Twilight’s head until her horn touched the stick. “He-” Twilight got out before she abruptly got the message. This was when Twilight actually started to make progress for the first time. Although it would be unfair to compare Twilight’s progress to Naudia’s her first cup was a bit more orderly, of course it was a total of seventy tries in. Twilight did perfect the cup and make a mug in good time, before she hit another solid wall of a roadblock. “Now try and cast that spell with your hoof.” Kuiguk said. Twilight was utterly walled once again from casting any magic at all. That was when Naudia’s second epiphany came about, a real stroke of genius on her part. “Twilight,” Naudia said, “I’m going to do something strange. I need you to relax and just kinda go with the flow, I think you’ll get an idea of what I’m going to do pretty quickly but I need you to make sure you stay calm okay?” Naudia held onto Twilight’s hoof and gently began to stroke her hair trying to relax Twilight as much as possible. Then as Twilight began to melt into her slime form Naudia pulled Twilight’s hoof off. “Uhhhhahhh!” Twilight couldn’t quite form rational words at that moment. “Don’t worry I’m going to give it back, just relax, it’ll make total sense in a bit.” Naudia said holding Twilight’s hoof. The hoof moved around as if it was still connected and obviously was still controlled directly by Twilight as it wobbled around as if grasping for something. Oddly enough Twilight could even feel Naudia holding her hoof as well. After Naudia managed to calm down Twilight again she pulled off Twilight’s horn. “Dia you need to tell me what you’re doing before we-” Plop. Naudia plopped Twilight’s disconnected hoof onto her head where her horn was and then slapped her horn on where her hoof used to be. And it worked, both connected, even though they looked very odd where they were at. Twilight’s hoof was even still articulated like normal. Twilight tried to focus her eyes on the hoof sticking out of her forehead. “This can be reversed right?” Twilight asked in a seriously worried voice. “Yeah, it’s a party trick for wereslimes.” Kuiguk said. “You just put the hoof back where it was and things will settle on their own.” Twilight looked down at her horn and wiggled it, then up at Kuiguk. “Which one am I supposed to try first?” “Lets go with your horn-hoof, er, the one on your leg first, and see how that goes.” This turned out to be the key for Twilight to grasp casting this new form of magic from places other than her horn. She was proficient at casting with her horn-hoof inside of ten casts, her hoof horn took a bit longer at 15. But she wasn’t done after switching them back into their proper places, she experimented with casting with her ears, and her other hoof and mastered those as well. Twilight was extremely proud of her pile of cups after all was said and done and experimentally tried to crush one, it would not budge no matter how hard she squeezed on it with both hooves. “That’s magmatter, not gonna crush no matter how hard you push, but I suppose that can move us into the next lesson manipulation, then we’ll move onto other spells.” This time they were learning how to take a cup and manipulate it with magic, the first thing was just to dent it and undent it. Which turned out to be surprisingly easy for both of them. After they had mastered making the plasticy sound of a dented cup they moved on to the real thing they would be learning today. “Now that you’ve got a hang of that I’m going to be teaching you something else, in a different way.” Kuiguk said. “This is going to be the language through which you learn other spells.” Kuiguk unfolded and handed them both a piece of paper that had shapes drawn on it in a sequence. “Now I think you two should collaborate on this one, that seems to get you the best results, and also this is something where you don’t want to take shortcuts. Not because they can’t work, it’s more a ‘show your work so you know where things went wrong’ situation.” The shapes drawn on the paper were abstractions of what Twilight was charging up in her hooves, not exact but close enough that she could work that out pretty quickly. They were laid out like a set of instructions for a building toy Twilight remembered when she was young. This was Twilight’s forte, memorizing from a book, well a sheet of paper. She had it right in three tries and got… a mug. Twilight looked down at it in disappointment. “Oh…” Twilight said when she finally got the spell to work. “Another cup.” “Yeah, we’re not getting into anything dangerous today,” Kuiguk said. “This is the boring foundation for tomorrow and so that you can learn spells you’re interested in on your own.” That made it better for Twilight, she also noticed something else about the whole situation. “That was surprisingly easy to memorize, a lot easier than I expected it would be.” “Yeah,” Naudia said. “That was always my problem before, but this was far easier than any magic training I’ve ever done.” “There is actually a good reason for that, your body was designed to cast spells like this from the very start, and the basis of these spells were designed in tandem with your basic biology as well.” Kuiguk explained. “There was no evolution and thus no local maxima putting a restriction on how compatible you may or may not be with the magic.” “What’s a local maxima?” Naudia asked. “It’s a limit to what random evolution will give you, a local maximum of fitness where on either side things are less efficient and there may or may not be a better solution beyond the valley on either side. For example trees evolve as wood and use chlorophyll to make sugars instead of utilizing metals and photovoltaics to make electricity because the valley between those two local maxima is too deep.” “Changelings were more limited by the magical theory and design principals around the time we were created, some adjustments have been made over time but nothing as drastic as this.” Naudia said. “Anyway, we’ve reached the end of the session today so I’m going to be giving you both a book of other spells to learn, just some day-to-day magic.” Kuiguk pulled two books out of the equipment pile with sterile textbook-like appearances and handed them to Naudia and Twilight. “Buk!” Twilight exclaimed in joy, here in her hooves now was the start of new magic, an entire new world unknown to ponykind, and she and Naudia would be the first ponies ever to see it. You could practically see her vibrate with excitement. “Incidentally I do have a bit of a warning for both of you,” Kuiguk said noticing Twilight’s excitement. “You need to get a full night’s sleep tonight and you’re expected to be here by 8 AM sharp, so if you don’t get to sleep on time for that you will be sedated for your own safety.” That put a damper on Twilight faster than a cold blanket encased in a block of ice. “What!? Why?” “Your body is still adjusting to, well, being a new body, and these new neurons need to set themselves up. If you don’t get to sleep and sleep for a decent amount of time we’ll have to repeat today, but it’ll be even longer.” Kuiguk hadn’t noticed up until this point that Naudia already had her nose in the book and wasn’t actually listening to him at all. “That goes double for you too Naudia Sparkle.” Naudia snapped out of the book which snapped shut like somebody had zapped her with electricity. “What, no I was listening.” “So you’re going to make sure to get to bed on time?” Kuiguk asked. “Yes absolutely.” Naudia tried to stand even more to attention. “Good because I don’t want somebody to have to sedate you.” After Kuiguk explained everything a second time to Naudia who actually hadn’t been paying attention they were shuffled out of the gym and back into the car to go to their accommodations for the night. Naudia and Twilight discussed this new magic all the way back and barely noticed that the First Administrator and Gwynn had left somewhere during their magic lesson and hadn’t come back.