She couldn't sleep and, in dealing with the demise of true renewal, had told herself that she could at least try to scavenge something from the corpse.
Twilight had wanted to sleep. Longed for it, after a full day of trying to traverse a foreign jungle and feeling as if very little progress had been made. The terrain was slowing them down, the weather wasn't exactly helping, and giving Fluttershy more chances to assist in the search for the missing had meant stopping over and over.
The majority of the caretaker's natural magic had gone into her talent: give her enough time in the presence of a new animal, and she would figure out how to speak with it -- but the process wasn't always instant. And there were species within the rain forest which were, to some degree, mirrored in Equestria. But travel far enough from home, and you wouldn't know if the distortions had arisen in the reflection or what you had once assumed to be the original. Fluttershy was trying to work out fresh quirks of vocalization, posture, ear twitches and tail lashes to go along with too many open displays of fangs.
She had to approach carefully. She had to find a way to make the new arrival see her as a friend. And the whole time, the hybrid would be using magic. Something which always took a little energy, burned a few calories as her talent did its best to adapt. Except that now Fluttershy was using that talent almost constantly: not just in trying to recruit fresh scouts, but while listening to everything going on around them. Some of that came from her attempts to track the gossip, in the hopes that a few animals might be trying to pass the word about something unusual moving beneath the canopy. The majority stemmed from a continual need to locate threats, and some of those came from unusual places.
(Applejack's attention had been enthralled by the bright blue frog which had been calmly watching them from a low tree limb, and Fluttershy had managed to get in the way just before the farmer would have gotten close enough to potentially touch moist, slick, poison-secreting skin.)
There were still times when Fluttershy didn't talk much, even when among friends. Trying to communicate with strangers could require a visible act of willpower: something which drew upon one kind of surprising strength. But using magic burned calories, and existing in a location where she was effectively surrounded by several taxonomy guides of unfamiliar species meant it was now possible for the caretaker to talk herself into unconsciousness. Twilight had called a halt to the day's forced march for several reasons, and seeing the yellow body starting to sway back and forth had not been the least of them.
They'd set up the tent. Gathered some food from the area, added in a portion of their rations. And then Twilight, who had longed for sleep, had found the insomnia closing in.
She understood why it was happening. Because sleep could be viewed as a sort of little death: the state in which consciousness winked out and thought just stopped for a while. And as such, Twilight had occasionally thought of it as a place of respite: the one condition under which she could essentially force her own mind to leave her alone.
She'd wanted to sleep because she'd needed to escape from herself. And the stress had laughed at her.
She'd taken first watch.
It had allowed Twilight to briefly pretend there was a benefit to her failure. And now she was falsely sheltered beneath the front extension of their shelter, surrounded by night and duplicated notes while two dreambound mares restlessly shifted within the fabric dome and awaited their turn.
Sun had been lowered, and the shadows were clustering around the tent. The canopy was too thick for any glimpse of Moon, with sighting on the stars effectively impossible. And there was something in Twilight which wanted to test her wings, get above the greenery so she could look upon truly distant fires, a view which so few Equestrians had ever gained...
...but she was on watch. Any attempt to gain altitude meant leaving her friends. They would reach a break in the canopy eventually, and the stars would still be there.
If I went up, I could try to look for other things. A hint of glow under leaves. A plume of rising smoke...
Except that... why would the other group see any need to start a fire? It was summer here, and the heat of the day was just barely starting to fade. The previous night hadn't seen any real degree of thermal plummet: just enough of a change for the pony mind to hope that comfort might be drifting in on a soft breeze -- and then Sun had been raised again.
Cooking food?
Maybe. Rarity took her share of fruits and vegetables from any raw bar, but the designer also enjoyed a good sear on a pepper. Spike certainly had no objections to anything being served at a high temperature, and a life mostly spent on the road meant Trixie mostly ate whatever she could get --
-- she didn't ask for this.
I don't think she's ever gone this far. She's written about traveling outside Equestria, but... this is the southern hemisphere. Hardly anypony ever --
--this is my fault...
-- maybe if I called on Rainbow?
It wouldn't have just been for ease of ascent. Asking the weather coordinator's shadow to come forward allowed Twilight to temporarily gain pegasus sight. A fire could be too far below the canopy to let any light through and a smoke plume might become lost in the dark, but...
She still couldn't retain any memories for the hues of heat and cold. Twilight was certain of her ability to keep a jaw grip on direction. She didn't need light or smoke if she could just jab a forehoof towards a hot rising current.
Which is still abandoning my post. And we're moving along different facings of the mountain. Even if they had started a fire, there's a lot of rock in the way.
Being on watch also meant paying close attention to the sounds of the forest. One of those sounds was repeatedly sounding off as Weheee, weheeeya! and doing so with a rather impressive decibel production for what Fluttershy had told her was actually a fairly small bird. The source had been designated as a Screaming Piha, and that was what had allowed Twilight to learn that an entire species could exist as an understatement. And then there were the parrots. She'd managed to pick out the parrots on her own, and had just barely resisted the urge to ask the caretaker if they were that annoying everywhere.
...at least if the stupid parrots had been duplicating pony sounds, she would have known a little more about --
I wish I could sleep.
It was a desire which had to be put on hold for a few hours, and there was no guarantee that the insomnia would be willing to let her go.
Note to self: consider calling on Rainbow in order to sleep.
She didn't smile.
Sleep could allow some degree of recovery to take place -- or, rather more often for Twilight, enabled the sort of false mental reset which allowed her to pretend that matters had improved: this typically lasted until the moment she truly began to think again. But internal darkness had always allowed her some degree of escape, the chance to get away from herself --
-- until the dreams began.
She had very little control over her nightscape. Twilight had once spent half a moon in studying lucid dreaming, and most of what it had let her discover was that she was no good at it. The little mare considered herself to be having an exceptionally good night if she recognized that a dream was taking place: trying to seize reins on the results typically wound up with her being dragged along behind a caravan of runaway fears.
There was an exception, of course. Something which allowed anypony (and possibly even anyone) to recognize that they were in the nightscape. But it didn't allow control, because to simply have the condition occur meant that particular jurisdiction was currently being pressed between silver-clad hooves --
-- and Twilight had almost immediately recognized the possibilities.
She'd eagerly told Applejack and Fluttershy during the previous night, asked them to fall asleep with a single thought foremost on their minds. Three mares dreaming as deeply as they could, calling out from the heart of their nightscapes, and the one who was surely searching for them would home in on those beacons. Locate one group, then the other. And then they would have two-way communication, with the dark alicorn conveying messages between dreamers who were guaranteed to remember everything when they awoke...
Twilight had never really considered the full potential implications of Luna's magic before.
For the same reason, she'd failed to ask herself if it had a range.
There had been no longed-for presence in their nightscapes. No welcoming words from that powerful, controlled voice. No contact.
Perhaps Luna was searching for them, and simply needed more time to gallop across a dreamwalk of such length. Or... she simply couldn't come this far. Ever.
Twilight listened to the forest. Something growled. Something else died. She waited until the half-liquid sounds of eating had moved away.
Practice.
She was pretending to be a pegasus, and there was only so much magic she could use without overwhelming the illusion's ability to conceal her corona. But Twilight was capable of hiding her field, creating workings which operated without glow or sparkle. It was just that... doing so warped the magic, and that was true for just about every caster who was capable of attempting the feat. If you practiced a single spell over and over, it was possible to understand that magic's exact distortion and find a way to get around it -- but to push power through the deliberately invisible was to chance having it go out of control, and that chance was close to one hundred percent. Most of what the majority of unicorns got to do was predict the exact method of failure, along with whether it would be partial or total. 'Total' was the rough majority, while partial got most of the comedy.
Twilight had once tried to pretend that the only thing exerting force during her first Winter Wrap-Up was her own body, and the hidden magic being used on the runaway snowplow had changed so much as to render the little unicorn incapable of countering herself. And when she'd tried to move Fluttershy's body during the ill-fated modeling session...
She wasn't good with a hidden corona. Just about nopony was, and the exceptions tended to operate within extremely narrowed, hard-won parameters. So Twilight was practicing. She'd brought the palace's copies of the note fragments out of the tent, and was trying to move the pages of that thin book without relying on the concealing illusion at all. Small, careful applications of her field to fragile paper, and it still felt as if she was constantly on the verge of rending the tiny spine. It was all trying to get away from her --
-- careful.
Slowly.
Just... push.
The exposed page fluttered. One corner crinkled.
...it's just a copy. My copy and it isn't a real book. I don't have to feel bad about that --
-- careful...
The paper swayed. Flipped, and Twilight found herself staring at a new word. Something else to ruminate over, and her mind insisted on that being the correct term. Everything she tried to mentally digest did its best to make her sick.
sourced
It was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when there was no picture on the box. Also no box. And ninety percent of the pieces were missing, while the majority of the remainder had picked up bloodstains. All she could do was try to find connections, sketching in whatever might have been within the vacuum, and she was all too aware that the most likely result was to get it horribly wrong.
Sourced.
The writing is a little jagged there. There's a tremble in the letters. Like he didn't have full control of his mouth. Did this upset him?
Sourced...
She turned the word over in her mind, examined it from all angles. No secrets were revealed.
Maybe if I talked it out.
Not aloud, not to herself. Twilight was far too aware of her tendency to live in her own head, because that was where it was safe.
...safer.
Relatively.
Somewhat overcrowded, but --
-- and one of the ways to get out was through offering her thoughts to somepony else. And it couldn't be an echo chamber, because trying to communicate with those who'd been told to agree with you about everything just found a lot of nauseating agreement bouncing back. Fortunately, her friends were often predisposed to debate --
-- argue --
-- 'Y'do know you're kinda the world's brightest idiot' was also an option --
-- and testing the force of the wave through sending it against intellectual breakwaters could be of benefit. But it also had a chance to wreck everything, because her friends had their own points of view and in any given situation, it was possible for none of them to know what they were talking about. Herself very much included.
Twilight was still trying to work out how leadership operated. Some of it was clearly grounded in the ability to admit when she was wrong. But far too much was tied up in figuring out which of her friends was right. (She had to hope there was at least one.) And then she had to make the choice. To proceed through the thoughts of another, rely on her own, or -- hope to discover some degree of balance.
If she made the wrong choice --
I thought I could bring us all here.
-- the last choice...
She wrenched her attention back to the page.
sourced
I don't understand.
I don't have enough to even try and understand.
What were you trying to tell us? What does any of it mean?
I wish I could ask Spike. It's easy to talk it out with Spike. Easier. Sometimes he can help me find what I missed. Or identify something really stupid -- she almost smiled -- because if my little brother can think of it and I didn't, then it just about has to be stu --
-- no.
Sometimes a child's thoughts are the most perceptive. The least distorted by what everypony gets taught to think.
Even when they come from a child who's... been through a lot.
Too much.
Some of that was me --
-- my little brother is lost and I'm the one who...
If she hadn't tried to redirect the teleport, to get them out -- then maybe the natural arrival point would have fallen short of the lockdown. It was possible that the ruby had simply been too far ahead. They could have all come in together --
-- no. I couldn't take that chance.
Part of her knew that.
She almost wondered whose part it was.
I wish I could talk to somepony.
Bring them all out. Make a circle of sorts. Let the words move across the gaps.
It would be like when we were talking about Tish, in the wild zone near the natural apple grove. Before she had a name, when she was just -- somepony we were trying to help. Before they found out I couldn't fly, and... everything else.
But they needed sleep. And the circle was brok --
Maybe if I tried to talk to...
...their aspects.
The fragments I'm carrying with me. Always. For the rest of my life.
The shadows.
She looked up at the canopy. No Moon. No stars and, for the moment, no rain.
It was a thought Twilight had considered before. Trying to fully communicate with the collection of essence bound to her soul. But... she wasn't sure whether the fragments were truly aware of anything. And for a mare who already knew that she spent too much time living in her head, the prospect of actually talking to essence felt as if it would be going far too deep.
I need them. Here and alive, intact, unhurt. So they'll be safe, and I'll know I didn't --
-- I have to find them...
The false pegasus stared out into the unforgiving night.
There were lessons which effectively occupied a series of scrolls, because simply acknowledging something as a lesson didn't mean you were going to fully take it in on the first go. And high on that retroactively-depressing list of serial sendings was talk to each other. Say what's on your mind. Get another perspective. Understand that friends (and siblings) get to tell you when you're being stupid, and they may even be right.
Twilight had been considering a theory.
She needed to find them. And in theory, all she had to do was... teleport.
Without a destination.
If you teleported without an arrival point in mind... then wouldn't you just wind up in the between? And distances there had some correlation to those in the world. So she would have to arrive in the rough vicinity of the lockdown effect, correct? She hadn't moved far enough to be away from it and she hadn't picked up on the feel of magic in the air, so she wasn't exactly on top of the real thing. In the between, the crackling blaze of death would be within sight -- but nowhere near close enough to touch.
So she would be in the between.
And then she would be searching for a magical signature. Her own, since she was the one who'd tried to abort the journey. Maybe there was even another kind of sign for where somepony had exited: something visual. A given degree of intensity might even tell her how recently that had happened. And come to think of it, if you could find departure and arrival points that way, and they came with signatures, then all she had to do was hunt for a few more and it might just tell her how many of those teleportation devices had been in local play. It might even be possible to pick up on some of that through the lockdown --
-- but that would be a secondary goal. Find her own signature, at two distinct points. One of them would obviously lead to where a trio had initially fallen back into the world. By process of elimination, the second had to place her at the arrival point for five. And once she'd done that...
Execute a teleport without a destination, under the assumption that it would be possible to leave again. Then search for signatures which might not be present (or faded in seconds, or were somehow permanent) in a place which operated under its own rules, or just hope for another kind of indicator that might not have a reason to exist.
Simple.
In theory.
As a potential research subject went, it was rather exciting. However, when viewed as a means of suicide, it struck Twilight as being a little too convoluted.
...I'm being stupid.
(She didn't always need somepony to tell her that. Not any more.)
(She carried them with her. Always.)
...and even if it worked, it would just put me at where they first arrived. Then there would have to be enough of a trail to follow, and they probably didn't blaze anything.
We can't even tell them to blaze their trail, because someone else might track it.
We can't tell them anything.
Applejack snored. She heard Fluttershy's feathers rustle. Birds screamed within the dark.
Just watch over them.
sourced
She tried to focus. The page turned on the third attempt.
fungible
Fungible: a condition under which something can be replaced by an identical, interchangeable item, with no effect on results. Possibly without the change even being noticed.
Watch over them.
Watch over the ones who are left, so I don't lose anypony else.
The unicorn was too busy to sleep.
Sleep often managed to annoy her. She only had so long in which to live (although she was working on that) and she was expected to spend a significant amount of that limited time in doing nothing more than being unconscious? Because when you took all of the lost hours and added them up into moons and years and decades during which she would have been incapable of doing anything or thinking...
Biology was a wondrous subject. It was fully worthy of study, and the mare indulged whenever she could. (It was possible that the ultimate core of the problem was biological in nature, but she couldn't allow herself to consider it as the solitary option.) However, close study revealed that the results produced from biology came with a number of inherent flaws. The unicorn was fully capable of admitting that on the biological level, sleep was necessary. She had simply decided that said necessity clearly indicated an issue which needed to be corrected.
So she'd experimented. Gone through a few trials. And as the pony who would most clearly and immediately benefit from the results...
There were spells which postponed sleep and after the unicorn had been at work for a while, there were rather more of them. She'd managed to build on earlier efforts, made them more efficient -- and had found herself unable to get rid of the core inadequacy: that if she spent six days awake, then there was going to be a followup period in which she would only be able to stagger away from her resting space for just long enough to eat and relieve herself before lapsing into the near-coma again. Something which would last for a period equal to six days' worth of lost sleep.
Botany studies had allowed her to discover a number of stimulants. They were all more effective than wake-up juice, and every last one of them would eventually wear off.
Limits. Too many of them, because magic was often no more than a means of telling physics what to do and science tried to find ways of limiting what spells could accomplish. Both states were irritating. Fortunately, the mare knew a solution. When you were forced to operate within unfair rules, you simply did your best to write new ones. But that took time, some of which she kept losing to sleep.
And it wasn't just that. There were dreams to consider or rather, to consider halting. Forever. Because the nightscape was where things happened, and they often did so without logic, consistency, or any true regard for the basics of cause and effect. They weren't controlled.
The night variety of dream annoyed the unicorn, because even lucidity studies didn't seem to offer full sovereignty. So she'd done some studying, and biology had almost immediately offered up another flaw: namely, that those who didn't dream had a distinct and unstoppable tendency to go mad. It was a risk which the only sane pony in the world clearly couldn't afford to take.
She had yet to defeat her body's need for sleep. But when it came to dreams... she'd won. That time was no longer being wasted. Her nightscape was perfectly orderly and, once she'd learned about the other one, perfectly isolated.
However, the mare's mastered dreams had several factors in common with the reasons she was too busy to sleep in the first place. For starters, there was a significant amount of preparatory work involved, and she had to do all of it alone.
This, too, was annoying. But it was also necessary, because the experiment was still in a trial phase. The most advanced trial of its kind, but...
The unicorn had found that it was considerably easier to deal with those who were somehow considered to be sapient beings after they'd learned how to think. Typically, this came about after they'd taken some of her thoughts for their own and thus learned how to think properly -- but that was usually the result of an educational process. To find somepony who would reach her conclusions independently...
...that was another kind of dream and if she hadn't been willing to indulge in those, the experiment would have never come so far. There was a way in which the mare truly believed in dreams, at least when it came to the waking variety. She just also happened to know that making them come true required a lot of work.
You could teach somepony how to think. You could also find those who would pave the path towards thought. The ones who could be trusted. But even then... it seldom felt like true sapience. More toward something -- imposed. There were ways in which it could be argued as artificial sanity, and when it failed...
Failure irritated the unicorn, especially when she couldn't track down exactly where and how thought had broken, sending a former member of the community crashing back into madness again. It could bring her to a state in which she needed time to herself.
Most of the community was sleeping. (There were scheduled hours for that, although she had wisely put in some variation for those who were trying out certain assigned professions.) She could freely move through empty streets under Moon and not encounter a single carefully-gathered traveler along her slow path towards perfection. And that was for the best, because the fact that they could at least temporarily think properly didn't always give them the capacity to act. She had to prepare, and she needed to do so alone.
The unicorn was preparing for visitors.
...possible visitors. That qualifier still needed to be added, because there was a chance that they would never actually find the community. But she knew they were probably close --
-- no. 'They' was an assumption. She didn't have a count. She also didn't have a corpse or rather, she didn't have a fresh one. Plurals were equally elusive. Both helped to indicate that nothing formerly living had breached the lockdown. And without a number of rather specialized devices reporting in, she was still lacking in true information regarding those who might have survived the travel attempt --
-- she had to be careful about plurals, because she didn't know. (The mare could usually admit when she didn't know something, and would then try to educate herself.) But she had to prepare, because it was likely that there was at least one, somewhere in the forest. Most likely a pony, although she wasn't quite ready to exclude the other possibilities. They weren't quite on her doorstep, because the devices hadn't triggered. But they might be on the way.
Or it could be no one at all. (Nopony.) But when it came to the more likely result...
She was moving through empty streets. One of the potentially vital spells was checked, and she replenished its charge level herself. It was usually just her for providing power, because you had to keep an eye on platinum. A self-charging device could be convenient, but it lacked one basic utility: she couldn't tell it when to run out.
The shield was examined. A few subtle alterations were made.
Then she went to her workshop.
(The unicorn was still trying to figure out how Gez had gotten in. None of the security spells appeared to have failed, and she hadn't found any weaknesses within the workings themselves. It was a mystery she needed to solve, because perfection wasn't supposed to fail. But until she worked it out... a few effects had been recast, while others had been layered. It was enough for now.)
It helped, to be within the workshop. Her space. Something she could truly control.
She usually didn't bring in visitors. Or rather, she did: it was just that virtually everypony who ever came into her private space wasn't capable of appreciating it. Or anything else. Because the mare was the heart of her community or, as she preferred to think of it, the mind. (The process of quantifying 'soul' was taking a while, and involved a lot of dismantling as a means of determining both form and function.) But she still needed time to herself, even when surrounded by those whom she'd taught to think.
And it could truly help her to be among those for whom all thought had stopped.
The workshop has multiple sections. This one is dedicated to biology.
Pure biology.
The community doesn't have a graveyard, because the unicorn didn't see the need. It was an obvious waste of space, along with creating an unnecessary gap in the advancement of knowledge through cutting off supplies.
Look around the workshop. This section demonstrates how the mare proved that as a non-science, phrenology doesn't deserve its terminal syllables. Skull bumps can't teach you about a pony's bloodline, personality, or potential: at most, you can learn about who suffered from a few minor bone diseases and whether anypony was abused as a foal.
Foals...
She smoothly postpones the thought.
(It's the difference between curing and prevention. The current priority is cure.)
...anyway, phrenology. It doesn't work. She has the studies which prove it. Take the bound lies which claim that certain bumps lead to a given personality trait, then look along her racks of skulls until you find the one with the right pattern and she will prove that it's a junk science. She wrote down the calculations for that stallion's personality in her notebook. 'Inquisitive' wasn't getting anywhere near the list.
Also, as long as you're getting skulls, you can study the subtle differences between the species. Earth ponies have a little more bone density, and isn't that interesting? But unicorns -- here's the horn. A lot of horns, most of which are still attached. They're supposed to be unbreakable. The mare views that as a challenge.
Of course, there's more to a skeleton than the skull. (Pegasus wing attachment joints are fascinating.) And once she was in a place where she didn't have to get rid of bodies any more...
Bone can be turned into utensils. She's managed some rather fine needles, and anypony who wants to investigate music will find an ample supply of flutes. The unicorn is confident that the mane combs will eventually catch on. Some extra rounds of polish might help.
Hooves? It turns out that if you break them up into small pieces, boil them for a long time, and then add just the right acid, you get a workable glue. Those who are no longer part of the experiment are still holding a portion of the community together.
What can be done with skin? What can't be done? It's not as if the previous owner needs it any more and as long as you're looking at the acids for the glue, you only need to move a little to the left in order to discover the assortment which gets used in tanning. The unicorn doesn't have any personal need for leatherwork, but you don't waste a resource. And to simply ignore an opportunity to study...
She's made a few advances in optics. The best which most ponies can do with a microscope is to get a decent look at an egg cell. The unicorn's figured out how to focus a little more finely than that, and suspects there's a lot of additional refinement possible if she can just work out what the lenses are supposed to look like. Maybe the secret to the cure lies in the nucleus and if not, then it's still worth a look. And she can compare the cells from different organs because she's got a lot of those. Some of them have been preserved. The place where she officially studied the opposite is quite some distance out, because air purification spells don't do well with natural odors and few things are more natural than decay.
She's learned that electricity makes dead muscles contract. This doesn't currently help anything, but it's knowledge nonetheless.
And if she dissects enough brains, there's a chance that she can find where the personality is stored. Or better yet, the exact process by which thoughts are generated. Both offer the dream of being able to teach ponies from the inside.
Everypony serves the community. Even after they leave it. (It's another reason to be irritated with Gez. She knows what a death produced by her lockdown spell looks like, and still didn't get the chance to examine him for variables. Or for biological factors which might have led to renewed madness.) A corpse is a learning opportunity. Take the liver, and she's taken a few. It's a chemical factory. So how does it function? As much to the point: how can you make something else perform those functions? And yes, studying it in a living specimen is a problem she hasn't been able to solve, especially if said specimen is supposed to keep living. (Those attempts are made on animals. The community is its own experiment, and pulling a pony out of one phase in favor of something else entirely is bad science.) Which means the next question is to find out if you can keep a liver going after the subject is dead. Another question which probably has to wait until after the cure, but... the mare can at least be content in knowing that she'll never run out of things to study.
She's working on the lifespan problem for the same reason she's trying to solve the sleep issue, only on a larger scale.
(The dissections might help there too.)
There should always be enough time to learn.
This part of the workshop was for biology. But she had properly educated herself, and that meant acquiring some grounding in multiple sciences.
For example, the unicorn considered herself to have some understanding of probability. It was a good way to recognize luck didn't actually exist, and it also made her somewhat less likely to play the long odds.
The scientific method? That had been mastered. There were experiments. Trial phases. And in order to make it all work, you needed a controlled setting. That was what allowed the exclusion of variables.
Or rather, you tried to exclude variables. And studying probability had allowed her to assess the chance that someday, those variables would come to her.
The prophets of disease...
...no. That was unlikely. Not impossible, because the unicorn considered very few things to be truly impossible when approached by a sane and determined mind -- but nearly so. But still... variables. Something she had anticipated as potentially happening someday. A possibility she would have preferred to avoid until the full solution was being implemented (which presumed she didn't find something which could cure everyone at once), but -- in a way, the potential approach of those variables could be seen as something inevitable. And once you recognized that, you could prepare.
There were ways in which the unicorn had been preparing for a very long time.
Variables. Those who hadn't been carefully screened and gifted with the beginnings of education before entering the community. They would hardly be perfect subjects.
(How many were on the way?)
(What was their nature?)
(She'd had to prepare for one specific possibility. And then two, and then three.)
But there were times when a researcher simply had to take what they could get. Or whatever was about to deliver itself.
Annoying. Inconvenient. Two words which potentially described the best case, and the unicorn had to be ready for the worst. Even the ideal would cut into time she needed for other things. For starters, she'd been working on storage. She had a decent amount of it. She also didn't have enough, and was still searching for a means by which the community could operate without a need for it. Something which might require destruction, and that was very much its own problem. The unicorn had found a means of destruction, and to enact it en masse would mean losing the community.
She didn't know what might arrive. But... the way to learn how an experiment would turn out was to run through it. Again and again.
What was coming next... there had always been the chance for this to happen, and that was why she'd planned. (Practically speaking, it wasn't as if she could have scheduled a convenient time.) Because you advanced through trials, and that word had more than a single meaning. Too many of them did, and that was another reason why it could take so much explaining before anypony knew what you'd actually meant. The unicorn had considered the creation of a new language, but -- that was also something which likely had to wait until after the world had been saved. Even so, it wouldn't take much study to come up with a result which functioned perfectly well without the abomination of semicolons.
But for now...
She would protect the experiment. The community, because for now, they were the same thing. A community which still needed her voice, so they would remember how to think. A construct made of hooves constantly pushing against each other with equal force, so that nothing would overbalance.
The possibility of multiple outside, unprepared voices, arriving all at once...
There would be fresh subjects, those who hadn't been prepared, and... perhaps they could be taught to think.
(There was a dream beyond that, and she allowed herself a single second in which to indulge it. This was one second more than a typical encounter with the insane allowed it to last.)
And if that didn't happen -- should madness persist, and she had to deal with it in a way which, ideally, would not lead to any need for abrupt relocation...
...she was a student of many things. Biology was among her favorite subjects, because there was just so much which needed fixing there. The unicorn felt herself to have learned a lot.
There were at least a hundred and one uses for a dead pony.