//------------------------------// // 593 - No Uncommon Sense // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// “Wait wait wait, so you saw Adagio?” asked Sonata, her eyes wide. “And she was okay?” “Forget okay,” scoffed Aria. “I wanna know how she turned herself back into a human.” The pair’s reactions made Lex clench his jaw, still furious about what had happened. “That’s not the point!” It had been a little over an hour since the ritual he’d been performing had been interrupted by the Siren sisters. While technically that had been Aria’s fault, he blamed Sonata almost as much, since she’d apparently been responsible for egging Aria on. In the aftermath of the backlash – or at least, in the aftermath of Lex’s initial estimates of how bad the repercussions of the miscast ritual had been – it had only been because he was still keenly aware of the blunders he’d made the last time his emotions had clouded his judgment, first sending Sonata and Aria away when he’d met with the Las Pegasus ponies back in Vanhoover and then flying into a rage a short while later when he’d heard Sonata moaning, that he’d been able to master his rage long enough to demand an explanation from the two of them. Even then, he’d come very close to cursing the both of them on the spot for just how badly their reckless actions had cost him. That urge had only grown more powerful when, in the course of explaining themselves, the two of them had rediscovered their indignation over how he’d been treating them ever since they’d left Vanhoover. As though he was to blame for their stupidity! The only thing that had kept him from acting on that impulse was the knowledge that he couldn’t afford to impair either of them now. Not after what the miscast ritual had done to him. As it was, the only thing that had let him stay in control of himself then was by making it clear to the two of them that he’d had very good reasons for treating them the way he had. That had led to his outlining everything that had happened since before they’d left, ranging from his scrying on Adagio to the subsequent scrying that he’d been periodically subjected to since to the ritual he’d designed in response. While it had given him some measure of satisfaction – bitter though it was – to put the two of them in their place, Lex hadn’t been able to ignore the reality of what his explaining himself signified, which was just how bad things had become now that his ritual had failed. After all, he’d kept them in the dark because he hadn’t wanted whoever was spying on him to know that he knew what they were doing while he designed a countermeasure. Now that it had failed so spectacularly, there was no reason not to alert Sonata and Aria to what was going on. Except, of course, they were still more concerned over the news of their missing sister than with the more salient ramifications of what had just happened. “I dunno,” mused Sonata, examining her forelegs. “I kinda regretted not having fingers at first, but these hooves can actually do a lot more than I thought.” “Forget fingers,” snorted Aria, putting her hooves to her chest and making a hefting motion. “I miss the twins. They were all kinds of fun-” “Will you two shut up and focus?!” seethed Lex, barely keeping his temper in check as he noticed black crystals beginning form around him. It was all he could do to block out the mocking words of his tulpa, again taunting him about how this entire situation could have been avoidable if he’d simply handled it better. “We’re under periodic surveillance by an unknown entity, with unknown goals, and now, thanks to the two of you, my one effort to put an end to that has not only come to naught, but actually made things worse!” Sonata cringed, her ears folding back. “So…it’s really that bad?” “Of course it’s ‘really that bad!’” snarled Lex. “I’m blind!” Aria rolled her eyes. “Oh, you are not.” Picking up a pillow from the couch she was reclining on, she lazily tossed it at him, smirking as she saw him track the incoming object with his eyes and swat it out of the air. “Case closed. You can see just fine.” “You know full well that I meant magically blind!” hissed Lex. “That’s just as bad! No, even worse!” That wasn’t hyperbole on his part. Had his eyes merely been damaged as a result of the failed ritual, he would have been able to repair them in short order. After all, one of the divine spells that the Night Mare gave him was designed to do exactly that. But there was no curative magic that he was aware of that could restore his ability to detect magical energies. Had the ritual worked as intended, nothing so dramatic would have happened. Instead, he would have created a stabilized disruption in the flow of ambient magical energy in his immediate vicinity. One calibrated with such a high degree of precision, and introduced an interruption of such mild proportions, that the only gradation of magic it would have affected was the highly specialized construction that went into scrying sensors. The effect was similar to digging a small distributary into the bank of a river, one designed to such exacting specifications that it would only admit leaves floating on the surface of the water, separating them from the main flow and carrying them away to be deposited elsewhere. In the same manner, the disruption that Lex had wanted to create around himself would have gently pulled any scrying sensor that came into his immediate vicinity away from him, preventing such spells from being able to focus on him. Designed to be robust and long-lasting, it would have kept him safe from being remotely monitored with magic for some time, potentially weeks. But thanks to Aria’s interruption, things had gone badly awry. Instead of creating a stabilized eddy that would only have altered a small degree of ambient magic around him in a precise manner, the entire thing had come crashing down onto him. Without any of the delicate assemblage that he’d been intending to build, it had affected all forms of magically-augmented sensory input, rather than the specialized construction of a scrying sensor. Rather than deftly redirecting the flow of magic around himself, the entirety of the power he’d been manipulating had hit him all at once. The result was that, the same way an extremely bright flash at close range could burn out one’s eyes, or being very close to an incredibly loud noise could blow out one’s ears, the sudden cascade of magical energy had completely extinguished his ability to detect said energy. It was a condition that Lex found distressing in the extreme. Although his ability to sense magical operations via tactile sensation was far from acute, he still relied on it a great deal when attempting to interface with any sort of external magical effects. At the most basic level, if someone used magic in his immediate proximity, he’d usually be able to know that something was happening, even if he wasn’t otherwise aware of the details. Worse, his ability to perform rituals was dependent on his magical sense. While designing them relied on a combination of calculations and experimentation, the actual utilization relied on his ability to feel how he was altering the flow of magical energy around him. No matter that the words and gestured had been worked out ahead of time; attempting to manipulate something without direct sensory feedback was like trying to clearly recite a lengthy speech while deaf, or legibly write an entire book while blind. Given that rituals were already delicate in their utilization, performing one now would all but guarantee failure, calling down even greater disasters. Nor was that the sum total of what Lex had lost. Beyond his intuitive sense for magical activity, some brief checking had revealed an even more devastating conclusion: he couldn’t use magic to augment his normal senses either. It was an affliction of such severity that it bordered on unbearable. Ever since Lex had learned how to use the dark magic of his horn to become a shadow, he’d been keenly aware of the secondary effects of the transformation; namely, that it was artificially recreating his senses, since in that state he had no body, and as such no sensory organs to perceive the world around him. It had taken only mild experimenting to figure out how to take advantage of that while remaining corporeal, increasing his visual, audial, and other senses with little effort, to the point of being able to see in the dark or feel even faint vibrations in the ground if he’d wished. No longer. He could still turn into a shadow now, but doing so deprived him of all sensation, leaving him with no way to so much as measure his own movement, let alone know what was happening around him. Nor could he use his circlet’s ability to peer into the magical spectrum. Or, for that matter, use his whisper spell to communicate with nearby ponies. He could still send messages to others with that spell, but he wouldn’t hear any replies that were sent his way. It was frustrating beyond measure. The worst part of it all was that he had no way of judging whether his condition was temporary or permanent. Not without throwing himself back into the medical textbooks he’d borrowed from House Call in order to see if anything like this had been catalogued by Equestria’s medical profession. Even then, he had little hope of finding any answers there; most of what he’d read so far was thoroughly biological in coverage, with only basic levels of physiomagical interaction, and nothing remotely like what he was experiencing now. All told, it was one of the single greatest setbacks he’d experienced since returning to Equestria, second only to being unable to replenish his strongest magic after he’d directed the Night Mare to take Severance back. And even that had been a voluntary tradeoff on his part, accepting the loss of power as a necessary sacrifice in order to protect the ponies of Equestria. This had no upside. Sonata, however, didn’t seem to agree. “Aw, you’ll be fine,” she grinned, getting up and coming over to nuzzle him, an act which comforted Lex not at all. “You’ve been, like, totes hurt in all sorts of ways before and you always got better. Like that time you were almost melted by that dragon’s acid breath. Or when you got stabbed by that freaky fish guy Aria was hanging out with. Or when you almost fried yourself trying to make all that food for everyone. Or that time-” “To put it another way,” broke in Aria, rolling her eyes as she sat up, “you’ve come back from worse than this, so quit with the melodrama.” But rather than calm Lex down, the dismissive advice only enraged him further. “Need I remind you whose fault this is?!” he growled. Completely unintimidated, Aria scowled at him as she crossed her forelegs over her chest. “Yeah. Yours.” “Aria-” “She’s kind of got a point, Lex,” noted Sonata with a shrug. “I mean, we totes wouldn’t have interrupted what you were doing if you’d just told us what was going on.” His hackles rising, Lex stood up, moving so he had both of them in his field of view. “Do I need to explain the chain of causality to the two of you again?! You were the ones who deliberately came in here even after being told that I wasn’t to be disturbed! Your motivations in doing so are in no way relevant! If you-” “That’s not the point!” Standing up, Aria marched right up to him. “The point is that you didn’t confide in us! All we knew was that all of a sudden you didn’t want to talk to us, didn’t want to touch us, and didn’t want to be around us! Do you have any idea how that felt?!” The look on her face was one of anger, but there were tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, the sight throwing Lex off-balance. His hesitation gave Sonata enough time to jump in. “It felt like Nosey all over again,” she murmured, a pained note filling her voice as she looked down. “You were still here, but you might as well have gone away for how closed off you were.” The accusation made Lex recoil, the mention of Nosey bringing a wave of anguish that had diminished not at all in the weeks since she’d left. “That wasn’t…my withholding information was entirely appropriate for the situation. You were the ones who misconstrued the nature of my actions.” “Didn’t you just get through saying that you didn’t tell us what was going on because you wanted to make sure whoever was watching didn’t know what you were doing?” asked Aria bitterly. “Well guess what? You did such a great job of it that we didn’t know what you were doing either, and now you’re going to blame us for ‘misconstruing your actions’?” Sonata got to her hooves also, but unlike Aria she didn’t approach him, instead fixing him with a pleading look. “Look, we get that we screwed up. For realsies. But do you get that we missed you? That we still miss you? Even if you don’t want to get it on because someone stranger’s peeping on us – and I agree, that’s totes a turn-off – you can at least talk to us. Even if you can’t tell us what’s happening, you can at least tell us something!” That last part ended with a catch in her voice that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and Aria wasn’t in much better shape when she spoke up a second later. “Maybe we screwed things up when we interrupted that ritual of yours, but if that’s what it took for you to talk to us again, then I don’t regret it!” Lex didn’t have an answer to that, silently looking back and forth between the two of them, watching as their composure broke down and wondering how it had come to this. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t done anything wrong; he had been reacting in the best way that he could to the circumstances that he had been presented with. So why had things turned out this way? He could feel frustration bubbling up inside him, the same frustration that he’d felt his entire life at how inscrutable everyone around him was, knowing that it was his fault that he couldn’t understand them. It was such a horrible feeling that he wanted to push it away with everything he had, to scream at them and insist that they were the ones who were wrong, that his reasoning was impeccably cogent and that it was their lack of understanding that was to blame, rather than his own. But he couldn’t find it within himself to do so. Not when Sonata and Aria were struggling to hold back tears right in front of him. Not when they’d just told him that he’d hurt them as badly as Nosey had hurt him. Not when they’d just said that even his anger was better than his indifference. Instead, he took a deep breath and tried with everything he had to make himself understood. “It was never my intention,” he began slowly, “to hurt the two of you. I regret-” That was all he got out before he was tackled by two crying mares, holding him tightly as they sobbed into his chest.