I decided I was going to summon up some minor spirits to help me in the eyes and ears department.
I walked around the circle, inspecting it for the third time. If you were going to summon something from the spirit realm and try to compel it to do your bidding, then you wanted your circle to be foolproof, regardless of how innocuous or nonthreatening the being you were calling up was.
A summoning circle didn’t have to be a literal circle in the geometric sense. It had to at least resemble a circle superficially, and the more circular and exact the physical shape was, the more efficient it was going to be to infuse the circle with your will and “close it”, which was a term for the mystical motion of formally erecting a barrier of focused willpower around the perimeter. You could do this with any closed curve — one that looks simple enough I suppose— but again, super inefficient unless the curve is approximately a circle.
Mine was carefully woven into the dark blue floor rug with some very thick bright green thread. The circle itself was fairly large, enough that I could comfortably stand inside if I ever wanted to (or if I ever needed to for that matter) and the interior of the circle had a green five-pointed star touching the boundary. The whole diagram was one of the symbols of Magic. The five pointed star represented the five classical elements: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Spirit, which was sometimes called Aether. The circle enclosing it represented Will, so six elements in total.
If you ask a random pony what the most magical number is, they will often tell you that it’s seven, or thirteen, or three, or hand you some random gibberish number. Though all of those numbers are somewhat magical (depending on the context) very rarely will anypony look at you confidently and say “six”. A hexagon, a six-sided regular solid shape, is one of the only regular shapes capable of tiling the plane in such a way that you optimize for volume covered with respect to the shape's center — this is why honeycomb is hexagonal and grocery stores stack oranges the way they do. There are six queens of Faerie. My cutie mark is a six-pointed magenta star, another symbol of Magic, surrounded by smaller stars. This is not a coincidence.
Technically speaking, some would call the whole thing a pentacle, and the star inside a pentagram, but I’ve never been able to find a solid source that could state that with authority one way or another. My teacher just referred to it as a circle, so I did the same. The sweet joy of being technically correct (not just technically correct, esoterically technically correct!) was sacrificed at the altar of clear communication long ago, while the remains were buried somewhere in the graveyard of shared lexicon.
I walked around the summoning circle, placing an object that served to represent one of the elements at each point of the star. For Water, I placed down the half-full pitcher of water that I had been drinking from. For Air, I’d constructed a shoddy wind chime out of various bits of cutlery, some string, and a box of rubber bands. I’d be spending some amount of time later tonight trying to engrave some spells into that “wind chime” as well as do the same with a few others, but at the moment it was more than adequate for what I needed. For Earth, I gently put down one of the chunks of quartz that I kept in reserve at the top of the pantry, just in case Spike was getting particularly ravenous. For Fire, I used the heat sink disc from my thaumaturgical fridge experiment. It wasn’t burning hot by any stretch of the imagination, but it was comfortably warm, and that would have to do. For Spirit, I reverently placed my copy of Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone, the first book in the Daring Do series, one of my favorites. Daring had tons of Spirit.
Last, but not least, in the center of the five-pointed star, I placed a single cookie, and not a crumb more. I gave the whole setup another once-over, before backing up and standing a few paces away. The being I was attempting to call up wasn’t particularly dangerous — so long as I was careful, of course— and probably didn’t merit so many degrees of caution, but that was no reason to get sloppy.
I readied my will, and I imagined a barrier forming along the boundaries of the circle, taking that mental image and suffusing it with all of the determination I could muster. My horn started giving off a gentle glow during the process.
I whispered the Name of the being I was trying to summon, gently.
Names are very important. They can grab your attention even though your mind is worlds away. They can be used to emphasize something in a way that couldn’t be otherwise. They’re very intimate parts of ourselves, from both magical and non-magical perspectives. If somepony (or some thing) gets your Name, the whole thing, from your own lips, then they will have some measure of power over you, magic or no magic. The magic just makes for a better lever.
I said the Name of the being I was trying to summon, as if to grab its attention from across a crowded room.
I felt a twinge of resistance. This entity probably didn’t want to be interrupted from whatever it was doing and dumped into my office. It wasn’t much resistance, actually, and it would take a token effort to surmount it. I had gently called it up a few times before, back in my studies, but this was the first time I was doing this sort of summoning with the intention of making a bargain with a creature. I figured some melodrama was required — I have to at least pay lip service to the whole wizardly mystique thing — so I stomped my right hoof down and brought the entirety of my stubborn personality to bear.
I shouted the Name of the being I was trying to summon, as if the syllables themselves would rip open a hole in reality. I felt the small ounce of resistance shatter, and then the entity appeared.
It was a blue ball of fuzz maybe two inches in diameter, and that was being generous. It had large, almost insectoid eyes, four tiny feet, and a pair of large dragonfly-esque wings that were beating at a furious pace. The entity, a small denizen of Fairie known as a parasprite, seemed confused for a moment. It attempted to leave the circle once or twice, bouncing into the barrier of solid will (which to the little fairy was about as impenetrable as a two-foot wall of concrete) before it realized that it was trapped. It looked up at me with a furious expression— the sort somepony gets when they’re really about to give you a piece of their mind, but in miniature — but its eyes darted over to the Oreo in the center and lit up.
The little fairy’s body seemed to stretch as an almost comically large maw (for its size, anyway) opened up and swallowed the cookie whole, creamy filling and all.
“Hello, Nom,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “I’d like to make a deal with you.”
The parasprite looked up at me again, a little puzzled, as if noticing the cookie had completely derailed its mental task list. Which it probably did, since fairies of this size tended to have some pretty short attention spans.
“Hello!” Nom the parasprite exclaimed. “I remember you! You’re the pony that gave me the chocolate chip cookies!”
Parasprites loved eating mortal food. It was like their equivalent of drugs, only much more addicting, as far as I could tell — and I ran the experiments of course. Most entities loved eating in general, that's a universal fact. Whether they’re a mortal, a fairy, a Dragon, a vampire or some sort of weird unstoppable demon monster, everypony has to eat something. The real monsters just tended to have an appetite for the blood of the innocent or the souls of crying little fillies.
“Yes,” I responded solemnly. “I was the one who gave you the chocolate chip cookies. Did you like the cookie you just ate?”
Nom made a sort of… satisfied ringing noise, a series of musical notes that sounded like a cluster of teeny-tiny bells being rung.
“Yes! More! More!”
Excellent. I figured I could bribe the little guy with sugary baked goods to give me some tactical backup. I had to be a little careful about that — dealing with fairies of any sort can be tricky, and it was very, very super-dee-duper ultra-mega important(!) that I did not feed the parasprite too much while it was still in the mortal world. With enough fuel, they multiply like bacteria, and I wasn’t necessarily sure that any bindings I put on this one would extend to any of its metaphysical children.
“I shall give you more cookies,” I entoned, as ominously as I could manage. “If in return you serve me dutifully for the next three sunsets, doing any task I ask of you, and only those tasks, without partaking in any mortal food that I do not explicitly direct you towards.”
Nom paused, considering this. “How many cookies are we talking here?”
“If you accept this bargain, then you shall have…” I levitated the half-finished box of Oreos up. “... the rest of the box! After three days are up, of course.”
“Hmmm.” Nom said, “Any task?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, “I’ll give you the rest of this box and another full box when you’re done. Final offer.”
“Deal!” The parasprite shuddered and buzzed around the confines of the circle.
(In anticipation, I think. Or joy. Or maybe it was just trying to work off the first cookie to make room for more. I’m not the biggest expert on pony body language, so the best I had to work from with respect to the tiny floating cotton ball was a handful of past interactions and some context.)
I nodded. “Excellent, the pact is sealed. Now, get out of that circle and fly around my house for the rest of the evening— out of sight of anypony, please — and let me know if it looks like anyone is trying to get inside.”
I relaxed the mental vice grip of will that was invested in the circle boundary, and the little creature shot off into the distance with a soft whirring noise and a small puff of sparkles.
“Okay,” I muttered, “Now to work on the burglar alarm.”
I collected the items from the pentagram and set them aside, barring the cutlery, which I put back on my desk next to two other makeshift wind chimes. I muttered a word and floated my set of jeweler’s tools and a magnifying glass out from the drawer they were kept in. With a few hours of work I’d be able to link the makeshift chimes together, and weave in some sort of alarm spell that would go off if anyone but Spike and I entered the house. This sort of enchanting work wouldn’t last, they’d probably wear off in a few days to a week, but they would be good enough for now.
I really needed to set up some proper wards now that I was finished moving in.
“Note to future Twilight,” I muttered, adjusting an engraving tool slightly against the blade of a butter knife. “Install wards to home as part of the moving-in process, and not after the fact when you’ve run into a scenario that actually needs them to be there.”
I worked uninterrupted throughout the night, finishing by about sunrise.