Twilight turned her Key in the lock of Moon Dancer's side door and opened it into a room made of crystal. "And here we are! The first step into a world of new research!"
Moon Dancer crossed the threshold with a less-than-impressed expression. "Fascinating. Extradimensional space or some kind of portable portal system?"
"Extradimensional, I think," Twilight supplied as she stepped in after her. "Locator spells give invalid or nonsensical results when cast inside the Hub."
"The Hub?"
Twilight gestured around her. "That's what I've been calling this space. Because of all the doors. Each one of my fr-" She cut herself off from saying 'friends' just before it could escape her lips. That word was dangerously exclusionary now, especially when she was already trotting on thin ice. "-my fellow Bearers of Elements of Harmony has a Key of their own that can open their door from any mundane one."
Moon Dancer nodded, her keen gaze zipping across the room, missing no detail. "Distance limitations?"
"None that I've found, with the farthest test being Canterlot to the far edge of Ponyville."
Again, Moon Dancer nodded. She said little as she explored the strange, if somewhat limited space of the Hub and its adjacent rooms.
"Why is this room so different?" she asked as she looked in on the Hunter's Workshop.
"I don't know," Twilight admitted. "It wasn't part of the original Hub."
"Elaborate."
Twilight decided it was as good a time as any to fill her in on the broader details of the situation. Knowing Moondancer's personality, she kept it trimmed down to only the more pertinent information. "I cast a modified version of one of Starswirl's incomplete spells in an attempt to reverse the effects of when I previously cast it unaltered. The result granted me and five others the ability to summon Keys that access this place as well as a new ability each which I initially classified as second Special Talents.
“That theory was quickly invalidated as we just kept getting more. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern as to when— the longest break so far was three days and the shortest barely an hour —but no matter what, new things keep arriving. Sometimes it's a skill, like Applejack suddenly receiving years worth of combat training. Other times a magical artifact, like Pinkie Pie’s bottomless toolbox or the Horadric Cube. And once, so far, a whole new room appeared that wasn't here before, complete with wood paneling and worktables."
"And sometimes,” Moon Dancer continued, “You receive the complete knowledge of a previously unknown application of magic.”
“Exactly.” Twilight felt like grinning, but held the urge in check, respecting Moon Dancer’s wishes to keep things professional. She hoped she could win her back eventually, but for now she strived to keep things professional.
It was a relief to see that the social isolation had done nothing to hinder Moon Dancer’s analytical mind. She’d always been good at making logical connections, if not always social ones.
"Have you attempted to recreate the incident? Cast the spell again?"
Twilight paused. The thought of that actually hadn't crossed her mind at all. But it was too late now. "We can't. The Elements of Harmony were involved and we had to return them to the magical source from which they came."
"Hm. That's annoying. This would be much easier to study with additional test subjects."
“I think you’ll find yourself pretty busy even with just us six.”
“Perhaps.” She tapped a section of the wall between the doors then tried to scrape it with her hoof. “What kind of material is this constructed from?”
“Crystal?” Twilight offered, mildly embarrassed that she didn’t have a better answer ready. But that was why she’d enlisted help, wasn’t it?
“I gathered that much. I meant specifically. The high luster suggests something in the alumina family, but there are many possible exceptions.”
“I don't know. I can't say I've done any tests on the walls themselves.”
“You haven’t done any?” Moon Dancer turned to her, frustration writ large across her face. “You haven't even done a basic component analysis to determine just what it is you're surrounded by? What if it's highly susceptible to acid, or has a dangerously harmonic resonation with certain frequencies?”
Twilight’s voice was tense as she replied. “I wasn't exactly eager to perform destructive testing on a who-know-how-thin barrier that keeps reality in and interdimensional void out.”
“Hmph. A valid concern, but not a valid excuse. What about this table then? What is its purpose?”
“...It's just a table. You put things on it.”
If Moon Dancer could have rolled her eyes and sighed any harder, they were liable to fall out and roll away. “It seems that focusing on improving your friendship skills has caused your deductive reasoning to atrophy. I'll start from the beginning then. Like you should have.”
She spread her forelegs as if to encompass the whole space around them. "What you have here is clearly an artificial structure. There are not just entrances, but doors, constructed to visually recognizable pony standards." She gestured to the warehouse. "You have a dedicated storage area. Nowhere is that written, but it's implicitly understood from the structure of the room and the arrangement of the shelves within. And that much is even before I address the clearly ponymade tools in the other room. Because it was created, we can speculate about its origins and possibly even its creator from every aspect they chose to implement.
“In a natural environment, the inclusion or exclusion of any particular element can be attributed to random chance or the end state of long-running natural systems. But in an artificial environment, every element present exists due to an intentional choice. Every design choice was a decision that must have had reasoning behind it. Why are the walls crystal and not wood, or metal, or brick? Why is the storage area the exact size that it is when only one shelf is occupied? If this room's intended purpose is a hub of transportation, as you claim, then why is there a huge impediment to movement in the center of it?”
As Moon Dancer continued on, Twilight was nearly overcome with a warming feeling of nostalgia. Her speech (which was quickly reaching the emotional requirements to classify as a rant) brought to mind a nearly-forgotten memory from their sixth grade physics class. Specifically, a Monday morning where Moon Dancer let loose a similar tirade against their teacher for not clarifying on their homework sheet that she was supposed to assume a frictionless environment in a vacuum at sea level with the forces involved affecting a perfect cube of neutral matter, rather than her spending all weekend long researching and accounting for every possible force that could be acting on the supposed box.
It wasn’t the extra studying that she’d minded, but that he’d marked her answers wrong.
Twilight allowed herself a small grin. Moon Dancer really hadn’t changed at all, which was exactly why she’d wanted her help. Other ponies would see the obvious effects of the new magics and begin testing those, but Moon Dancer was the kind of unicorn to question their base assumptions about how and why it worked at all.
In short, the perfect pony to help reverse-engineer wholesale magic back to its first principles.
As the rant seemed to be winding down, Twilight took her opportunity to voice her support. “This is why I'm glad you agreed to join the project. I need someone with your ability to break things down.”
Unfortunately, judging by her glare, Moon Dancer didn’t quite take the compliment in the spirit it was given. “Thanks. Glad to know I'm useful to you now.”
Twilight flinched at the barb as Moon Dancer moved past it. “On that note. Now that I'm onboard, I have some questions regarding the details of this research arrangement.”
“Fire away.”
"Will I be compensated for the train fare needed to regularly commute between Canterlot and Ponyville, or do you expect me to move if I intend to continue regular involvement?"
“Aha! I actually have a solution for that. Just one second.” Twilight darted out through the door that led to her library (helpfully left open during her trip with Fluttershy’s Key) and quickly returned lugging a large crystal. It was a beautiful piece of citrine, a pillar as tall as a pony and as wide as her barrel with a swirling white-yellow gradient.
And wrapped around it from top to bottom were long strings of minutely carved runes.
“I’m not nearly as naturally proficient with crystal as I am with wood, but it had to be a higher quality material. Luckily Rarity had some gem carving tools I could borrow. You said you were familiar with my paper on nonegocentric casting?”
Moon Dancer nodded slowly, though her eyes never once left the crystal.
“Well, here it is in physical form. There’s a lot of practical applications that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of, but one of the biggest ones I’ve discovered is that if you keep this relay at home and link your magic both to it and to one here in Ponyville—”
“I see.” Moon Dancer interrupted, not rudely, but with a voice filled with an almost reverent tone. “Teleport beacons. With the crystal acting as a casting focus the distance for any teleport becomes effectively zero. That’s brilliant." She pressed her face so close to the curving runes her glasses nearly scraped them. Then she frowned. "This... is incomplete. These rune strings aren’t finished.”
"That's by design. Normally, you'd never be able to get all the necessary runes for the spell to work inscribed on something this small. It's a magic meant for whole buildings, after all. But, there's a second runic alphabet I learned recently that works on slightly different principles. One of the defining specialties of Necron Runes is attuning magical devices to specific users so—”
"—by combining them you can reduce the overall size of the beacon at the cost of limiting it to a single user."
“Exactly!” A powerful thrill went down Twilight’s spine at the joy of being on the same intellectual page as somepony else so precisely that they could finish each other's sentences. “Let’s get this into your house for now, we can calibrate it later. In the meantime I’d like you to meet the rest of the team.”
Almost instantly Moon Dancer’s frown returned. “Team? You mean there’s more?”
“Yes, but it's all ponies you know. I’m not asking you to be friends with them again,” Twilight said, repeating their earlier agreement. “Though I doubt that’ll stop Minuette from trying to re-befriend you. As much as you say friendship is unnecessary, you have to admit that they are qualified for this kind of research.”
“Fine. But I’m not going to any parties. I’m here to research, not socialize.”
“Understood. Parties aside, how do you feel about brunch?”
Moon Dancer opened her mouth to reply, but her stomach beat her to it with a loud rumble. She blushed and said, “Brunch would be acceptable, so long as it’s short.”
Twilight turned and beckoned her through the door to Golden Oaks. “Come on then, I have a standing reservation at Sugar Cube Corner.”
“How’s their coffee?”
“You’ll have to explicitly order it black, but they do deliver.”
“Excellent.”