"This is amazing!" Twilight gushed as she flicked through the folders of the first filing cabinet like a granny searching for a lost recipe card.
"Astounding!" Moondancer echoed as she perused the offerings of the third cabinet out of ten that had taken up residence in the corner of the Hunter's Workshop. The folders bulged with tens, dozens, hundreds of blueprints for strange and fantastical devices the mere names of which sent thrills down the spines of the two unicorns.
"Quinjet Engine VTOL Mounting Gimbal Mark Six!
"Palm Repulsor Version 2.0.3!"
"AI Natural Voice Synthesizer!"
"Augmented Reality Visual Interface Lenses!"
"Iron Man Armor Arctic Variant Mark 7"
"Machete Self-Guided Missile Detonator!"
"I have no idea what that means!"
"Me neither!"
A moment of awkward silence filled the room as they both stopped, hovering blueprints freezing in the air.
"You don't understand these diagrams?" Twilight asked, holding up Jet Boot Mark 5 Fuel Consumption Modulator Circuit. "I thought these might be some kind of obscure spell matrix."
"Not that I've ever seen. Most of these terms are unknown to me. Three point three V could be a measurement of vis, but it's an antiquated standard for measuring magical power. I can scarcely speculate what ten thousand Omegas might represent. Necrotic magic?" She shook her head. "I presumed you had been granted knowledge along with the documents and would instruct me how to interpret it, similar to your 'wizard tower' rune language."
"Not this time. I'll ask the girls, see if any of them were granted understanding, but this is beyond me." Twilight slid the blueprint back into its folder before selecting one at random from another drawer. The blocky white text of the header declared it to be the design for a JARVIS Neural Net V0.1 and the thick stack of papers accordioned out into a single massively long page. "This one looks more like a verbal spell but it's all written in some incomprehensible shorthoof with a totally alien grammar!"
Moondancer picked up the dropped portion and read a few meters ahead. "Or maybe it's just a foreign poem. That makes about as much sense as filing cabinets filled with blueprints appearing out of thin air."
"The Cube appeared out of thin air," Twilight reminded her. "As does the originite."
"And I find those mysteries just as frustrating." She straightened the pages and slipped them back into the cabinet before closing the drawer. "At least these use standard Equestrian numerals. I can't imagine how much harder deciphering them would be if I had to account for a new base system and symbology as well." A fierce grin split her face. "This just makes it a challenge instead of totally incomprehensible. When-"
She was interrupted by the chime of a wind-up alarm clock. "Ah. Unfortunate. Time for my rest cycle. You'll get started and I'll return in twenty minutes?"
Twilight shook her head. "I would, but I have plans today. I promised Applejack a few weeks ago I'd make her a bat'leth but I kept putting it off and getting distracted with new research."
Moondancer yawned. Already her eyes seemed to struggle to stay open. "I... see." She nodded and stumbled towards the corner of the room that she and Spike had remodeled into a livable space. "Good... night, Twilight."
"It's ten in the morning."
"The term is... still socially applicable even- even if tempora...lly inaccurate..." Her words trailed off between jaw-cracking yawns and she was out like a light the moment she collapsed atop her bed.
Twilight left the room discreetly, a few blueprints clutched in her magic to ask her other friends about.