New Magic
Twilight and Naudia just lay there for a while trying to process everything before Twilight remembered the other piece of stability she could latch them onto: New Magic. Twilight was excited because it was a new field of magic, Naudia was excited because she was a lot better at this magic than magic from Equestria. Twilight and Naudia shared intellectual traits but Twilight was more an advanced generalist with a talent for magic. Naudia was more focused into history, politics, and was far more physically adept, the spells she did know were either basic or focused on making her stronger.
The first spell they found in the book was “create cup”.
“Nope.” Naudia said, instantly flipping the page.
The next spell was “step stool” which looked hauntingly similar to “create cup”. This time it was Twilight who decided to flip the page instantly, in fact she turned over quite a few pages of similar spells hoping to find something more interesting. Twilight noted the spell for “fork” which summoned a fork.
“This seems harder than just… keeping a fork around.” Twilight said.
“I guess it could be helpful if you’re stuck out somewhere, but I’d still be looking into making a fork or something.”
She finally found “create glow stick” which sounded useful, it didn’t look too much more complicated than “create cup”.
Less than a minute later they both had glowsticks in the color of their magic, Naudia’s was blue and Twilight’s was a pale purple.
“Is it just me or was I expecting new magic to be… more interesting and a lot harder than this?” Naudia asked. “Like we’d have to have stuff to cast these spells, or draw circles on the ground or something.”
“Come to think of it, did you have any trouble memorizing that create cup spell from yesterday? Or this spell?” Twilight asked.
“No, it was learning how to cast this magic in the first place that was the hard part.”
“I guess this is just another upside from the conversion.” Twilight gasped suddenly in excitement, “Do you think this means we’ll be able to get through this entire book tonight?!”
“I’m certainly willing to give it a try!” Naudia said with enthusiasm, flipping back to the start of the book.
That turned out to be the direction they needed as a bit before dinner was ready there was a pile of summoned objects on the table. They did end making that step stool so they were stacked on top of each other next to the reach extender, and the temporary pillow and blanket, among other similarly banal household objects.
They did however get to the spell that really threw them though, “summon rat”.
“Why is this so early on in the book? We just finished unsummon and temporary blanket. Doesn’t this sound quite a bit more advanced to you Twilight?” Naudia asked.
“Spells like this, for a living thing, this would be pretty advanced stuff for our magic, not to mention hard to cast.” Twilight went from thoughtful to perking up. “Maybe it’s easier for this new magic!”
“Should we be doing this inside though?”
“I have to assume that since they want rats in their walls and cleaning up their house they wouldn’t have a problem with a rat on their coffee table.” Twilight said. “Besides, they gave us this book, I have to assume they want us to use these spells.”
Once again this spell proved easy for the duo and now they had a pair of summoned in rats sitting on the table looking at them expectingly.
“Now what?” Twilight asked.
“How about we take a break just to figure out these rats?” Naudia said putting out a hoof for her rat to hop up onto, which it did without any hesitation at all.
The rats turned out to be… rats, just friendly, domesticated, well socialized, rats. That’s what really got Twilight hung up, because the spell was nowhere near complicated enough to make a rat, and certainly not one that had any kind of inbuilt notions. But there they were, they followed orders, did rat things, the only way to tell that they weren’t “real” rats was that they were made out of magmatter and thus exponentially tougher than anything made out of normal materials.
What got Naudia hung up was that the rats were so lifelike she could completely believe that they were alive. In addition despite being made out of the strongest material she had ever heard of by a wide margin you could still pet and play with them like you would a pet rat. She proved this because she had one on it’s back and was tickling it, the rat squeaking and playing with her hoof.
Clearly there was something else at work here but there were no indications that Twilight or Naudia could see inside of the spell to indicate an intelligence being constructed. Perhaps they were just not knowledgeable about this type of magic to see some kind of underlying pattern, or there was something about their bodies making magic easier that was helping them along. They really just didn’t have enough information to know.
Twilight checked the cover of the book again and sure enough it said “Everyday Spells” and “Government issue”. Certainly summon rat was easy enough to pull off but this just seemed to be a rat, that was summoned that you could command.
“Okay, let’s try something.” Naudia said. “Go get me a snack from the kitchen.”
The rat scurried off not requiring any further instruction as to what that meant, where the kitchen was, or even inquiring as to what Naudia would want as a snack.
“Maybe it can smell the kitchen?” Naudia suggested.
“Okay how about this,” Twilight decided to try with her own summoned rat. “Go get me a pen and paper.”
Again no hesitation from the rat, it climbed up to the rat walkway up near the ceiling and chittered at the other rats for a second and went off on it’s way.
Twilight’s request took longer, Naudia’s rat came back with a baggie of mini pretzels first, which Naudia dug into with gusto.
“Are you sure you should be eating so much before dinner?” Twilight asked.
Naudia looked at her like she didn’t understand what Twilight was trying to say even on a vague level.
“You know, don’t eat before dinner or else you won’t finish dinner?”
Another blank look from Naudia, she couldn’t comprehend what Twilight was getting at in the slightest.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never understood what I meant when I told Spike that when he snacks on gemstones.”
“It doesn’t mean gemstones and daisy sandwiches don’t go well together?”
“No it means you shouldn’t eat before dinner otherwise you’ll be too full to eat dinner.”
“Too… full?” Naudia said puzzled at the concept.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never felt full on emotions.” Twilight said in a distressed voice.
“I’ve been satisfied with how much love I had, in the last year certainly, but you can always feel it ticking downwards. How could you ever… stay full on love long enough for it to matter?”
Naudia didn’t notice Twilight looking at her with an even more distressed look, bordering on horror.
“Any peak of emotion collection is just a temporary thing, a point on a graph that is never peaking high enough, and always divided hundreds if not thousands of times among changelings.”
“What do you mean by that?” Twilight asked puzzled.
“Changeling queens act as distributors of emotions throughout the hive, that’s our primary function on par with creating eggs. So we can tell exactly how much we have left in reserve at all times.”
“That sounds terrible. I… I don’t even know if I could imagine something like that bearing down on you at all times.”
“You can kinda start to understand why I was so happy with this transformation.”
“Yeah ponies feel hungry but you never know exactly how many calories we have left in reserve.” Twilight paused a moment in thought. “Do you think that was part of what drove your mother-”
Twilight stopped because Naudia didn’t look like she wanted to get into this right now.
“How about we get back to the book?” Twilight asked.
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.”
The next page on the book was “summon sewing rat”, some kind of rat that could sew clothing and worked exactly as expected. It was a rat that could produce spider silk for whatever reason and sew with it. Once again the spell was so simple that they couldn’t understand how it could be so simple.
The page after that was “summon sausage maker rat” and after that “summon hermit rat”.
“Something is off here.” Twilight said.
“Maybe we’re just in the rat section of the book.”
Twilight flipped over a couple pages at once and found only rats, she flipped through a couple more closer to the end. It became clear they were only halfway through the book, and the rest of the book was just rats. Rats for every purpose ranging from growing berries to reusing trash.
“What the hay is up with these people and rats?”
“Do they expect these rats to do everything for them?” Twilight asked aloud.
“I think I’m done for today.” Naudia said. “This magic study session was supposed to be grounded from all this insanity, but here it’s just drug us right back into it.”
As Twilight shut the book for the night they noticed they were not alone in the room.
At one of the doors into the room was a nefarious figure wearing robes of darkness etched in an ethereal blue light. The robes were finely detailed with embroidery, the kind of thing you might see at a king’s funeral or inside of a tomb, on a ghastly lich. They had pouches that looked like they were portals into some kind of horrible dimension. Twilight and Naudia could practically feel the evil energy from this figure seeping into the air. In one hand the figure held a book of undoubtedly dark magic and in the other…
A wooden cooking spoon.
That sorta made the whole illusion fall apart, because while it matched the rest of the outfit, it was still very clearly a wooden cooking spoon.
Naudia’s eyes had traced the same route around the figure as Twilight’s had and had arrived at the spoon at roughly the same time. There was an audible sound of the couch moving as they jerked in surprise.
“Dinners ready.” Came Carla Hall’s voice from the presumed necromancer.
Twilight and Naudia could only stare.
“I did tell you guys I was a chefromancer right?”
“What the hay is a chefromancer? Somebody who goes around seducing chefs?”
“No it means I use the dark powers of cooking in battle and as a chef,” Carla’s voice began to rise a bit like she was delivering a speech at the end of an adventure. “To humble my foes and also cook the best damn chili you’ll ever taste.”
Twilight and Naudia could only really sit and stare.
“I see those skeptical looks you’re giving me, but I’ll prove you wrong on this, just you wait.” Carla said with confidence in her voice.
-------------------
Carla proved them wrong, it was the best chili they’d ever had.
Twilight and Naudia were sitting at the dinner table now with a big finished bowl of chili with a side of cornbread with Carla and Gwynn. You could see that this room was a bit of a nexus of rats that lead into the kitchen, as there were multiple runs up near the ceiling.
You could tell how close Carla and Gwynn were because even while they were eating Carla snaked her tail so Gwynn could put her feet on it. And now they were in the sorta after dinner conversation period where Twilight and Naudia had to break the ice.
“So how did you two meet?” Naudia asked.
“I work for the First Administrator.” Carla said. “As a cook for extended missions here on Zaohm, in the dormitory cafeteria.”
“And you use your chefromancer powers there too?” Twilight asked.
“Yep.”
“So it turned out you were a chef romancer as well as a chefromancer!” Twilight joked.
They had a chuckle at that, and Gwynn continued the story from her side of things.
“Back when I was first starting out I ate at the cafeteria a lot more often, it was before I owned a house here. Me and Carla saw each other in the cafeteria every day and it turned out we lived in the same dormitory and eventually we were transferred into the same combat training group. After about a decade of being friends we sorta fell into a relationship.”
Twilight was reminded of the question that was burning in her head this entire time.
“Wait a second, why would a chef working on a cafeteria need combat skills?”
That turned out to be the wrong question to ask, only prompting blank looks, as if to ask why anybody would ask a question like that. It was hard for Twilight to figure out where the disconnect between “lunch lady” and “combat training” was in this conversation.
“Why would any civillian role like that have combat applications?” Naudia asked.
“They just do, always have.” Was all Gwynn could say.
“So wait, you’re telling me that even your janitors can be trained to go into combat with their mops?!” Twilight exclaimed.
“Yeah, dandelion root mops are not to be underestimated. You don’t want to be buried in walking dandelions that will try and suck your shield dry of magic with their roots, and then steal and compost the torn remnants of your shield to power themselves.”
They gave Carla and Gwynn a measuring look for a long moment to see if they’d crack and burst out laughing, they did not.
“Here hold on, I’ll show you,” Gwynn said picking up a remote for the TV. “Carla do you remember which of the fights scheduled for today has a janitor or a chefromancer in it?”
“Should be… 752, that’s the big Togo-Guam Alliance vs. Western Oklahoma exhibition match tonight.”
The TV blinked on and skipped through a couple channels with advertising Twilight didn’t have time to get before settling on a battlefield in a tropical atoll. What they saw through that screen was the most intense depiction of violence and death Twilight and Naudia had ever seen. Nothing could have prepared them for it.
Projectiles were flying everywhere, anything from sling projectiles that whizzed by at astonishing speeds, to ring shaped attacks from what looked like a staff somebody had hooked a book up as a magazine and attached a rifle grip to. In the hellish brawl there was total chaos, somebody riding a turkey with eight extra glowing heads stood off against some kind of a priest with eight glowing wings, creating a dividing line of no man’s land for the fight while melee fighters tried to slip around them. On other side of the battle line the ranged characters threw attacks at one another with wild abandon only to be mostly stopped by the two figures standing in the middle.
Everybody seemed to be encased in some sort of clear plastic that bled blue blood. You could see chunks of the plastic and the faux blood splattered everywhere to be collected up by somebody who looked like they were trying to heal somebody with it. That somebody turned out to be the chefromancer they were looking for who looked to be in pretty bad shape. Their body was entirely untouched but their zoetic shield was deepy scarred and they were covered in head to toe in the faux blood.
Twilight and Naudia were then distracted because one of the melee fighters was trapped by some sort of tentacle.
“What’s happening there?” Naudia asked in a horrified voice.
“Looks like Western Oklahoma has won this one, he’s not getting outta that.”
What followed was the first attack that actually pierced through the zoetic shield. The chefromancer conjured a sandwich from bizarre ingredients and somehow used it to cast a spell that was so powerful it knocked the melee fighter’s head clean off.
Twilight and Naudia could only stare in horror, all of this happened in a matter of seconds but it felt so much longer to them.
“Look at that garbage.” Gwynn said really getting fired up and angry. “That should be a penalty for Togo-Guam, he did that on purpose.”
Twilight and Naudia could only stare at the blatant lack of respect for a life lost.
“Yeah, no way that attack could have gotten through, he let his shield down for that one to try and get a penalty against WO there.” Carla agreed with Gwynn.
There was a whistle blown and a referee came out onto the pitch, they agreed that melee fighter got beheaded on purpose and ruled for a penalty against Togo-Guam.
Twilight and Naudia were utterly shocked, they could not comprehend what was happening around them. Gwynn turned off the TV in disgust, that was when she finally noticed Twilight and Naudia’s reaction.
“What’s up? Is something wrong?” Gwynn asked.
“IS SOMETHING WRONG?!” Twilight shouted. “SOMEBODY JUST DIED.”
“Where? Did you see something I didn’t!?” Gwynn almost turned the TV back on before Twilight could elaborate further.
“That melee person, they got beheaded!”
“Oh that, he’ll have his head re-attached and he’ll be ready for another match in… I’d say a day, maybe a day and a half tops, It’ll be three if he really wants to whine about it.”
“So he’s some kind of slime creature like me?” Twilight asked.
“Nah, if he was they would have his head re-attached already, but he’d likely have to take a couple pain pills.”
“Didn’t the first Administrator tell you about some of this stuff in the medical document?” Carla asked.
“Well yeah, but it’s one thing to be told ‘you can have your head put back on’ and another thing to see somebody intentionally get beheaded for, as best I understand it, some kind of hyper violent sports match.”
“To be honest with you Twilight that shouldn’t have happened in a border mangrove exhibition match like that. They’re supposed to be friendly wars-”
“Friendly WARS?” Naudia interrupted.
“Yeah, somebody has to control the output of those places, and it’s likely to change a lot. It would be stupid if somebody died fighting over a weeks output of a border mangrove, so the rules are set up so that people are vanishingly unlikely to ever die.”
“How unlikely is extremely unlikely and what you define as ‘dying’ when beheading apparently doesn’t count.” Twilight asked trying to get to the heart of the problem as fast as possible.
“I’d say you have a death about once a year from something that’s generally that person’s fault and never in a professional match, and dying would mean you can’t bring them back.”
“Doesn’t that seem a bit high to you?”
“Uhhh, hold on a sec, this is a hard question to answer. Lemme get out my phone so I can be more exact.” Gwynn pulled out a bug and spoke into it. “How many border mangrove habitats are there per solar system?”
She flipped the bug phone around so they could see the answer displayed on there. That was a lot of zeroes, it was no exaggeration to say that was an astronomical amount of habitats at war.
“They generally have about one war a week apiece, there are that many habitats per solar system and there are galaxies of these.”
“How are there galaxies of these? All we can see out there is the Chattler Anomaly, just nothing but endless amounts of distant infrared heat sources.” Twilight added when Gwynn didn’t get what she was talking about.
“Does it look at all like…” Gwynn poked around at her bug phone thing for a bit before showing it’s belly to Twilight again. “This?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Twilight had those infrared pinpricks of light burned into her memory by this point.
“See, you ponies call that the Chattler Anomaly, we call it a map. All of that, that’s us, that’s our civilization.”
The scale of what Gwynn was saying overwhelmed Twilight and Naudia. There were few ponies who could understand the sheer scope of what Gwynn just said, and two of them were Twilight and Naudia.
They were dealing with a civilization on a scale that was unimaginable, incomprehensible in it’s scope. Their minds shrunk away from even brushing against the thought of how utterly outnumbered they were in every possible respect. Outnumbered to the point where every living being who had ever lived on Equestria from the smallest microbe to the largest dragon could have been a rounding error to a civilization like that.
Suffice it to say they decided to go to bed early.
Twilight did not take in the room around her, she merely flopped onto the bed face down next to Naudia who was alreadylying there in a similar state of shock.
“Twilight.”
Twilight grunted in response.
“This is too much.”
Twilight grunted in affirmation.
There was silence.
“Twilight.”
Twilight grunted again.
“I had no idea the depths to which we could be in over our heads.”
Twilight, when she had collected her thoughts more asked the pertinent question.
“Naudia, what the hay does the First Administrator even need us for?”