“You became a goddess?” Celestia asked, tilting her head. “How does one do that?”
Hailey shrugged her wings. She had accepted Celestia’s offer of dinner- but also told her that it might be convenient to have the other Princesses present, so they had waited. Now, Celestia, Luna, Cadence, Twilight, Pinkie, and Hailey were all seated around the circular dining table in Canterlot Castle’s private dining room, and she had just informed them what had happened during her three day disappearance… and her best guess as to what the results were.
“I think,” she answered simply. “And to answer your question, by breaking the laws of magic so far that reality falls apart.” She paused for a second, then continued. “Over a thousand years ago, the four British gods created Hogwarts- and with it, the Room of Requirement. One of the Room’s intended functions was to birth a new god or goddess, by overwhelming the spacetime continuum with sheer thaumic density. As you no doubt know, long before you manage that with simply compressing thaumic energy, you’ll split the Thaum and start releasing the magic back to the Magic Elemental Plane. They actually found a way around that- and a pretty clever one, too. If that magic is serving a purpose, and actively working as part of a spell, it won’t split the Thaum and won’t vent to the MEP, so they created the Full Castle Record to overwhelm it with thaumic information density.”
“But a standing information storage spell would have a gradually decaying energy content,” Twilight observed, “until it broke down, wouldn’t it?”
She nodded. “Their solution to that was brilliant. They stored the information with as much power as possible, so it would take a very long time to fade and break down- about fifteen hundred years, actually. They overcame the difficulty in powering such a hungry ambient spell by placing it in the heart of an artificial ley line, and feeding that line directly from their own powers by keeping at least one of them in the castle at all times ever since. And of course, they pushed the limit as far as they could by making it aggressively store anything and everything it could possibly store, important or not.
“Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough- they miscalculated the limits of reality by quite a few orders of magnitude. Before Lyra opened the portal, before I did my Goddess of Reports thing, and before I messed with it, it was set to reach equilibrium in another four hundred and fifty years or so, at less than a grain of sand on the beach compared to how much they actually needed.
“But then, Lyra opened the portal, and I did my Goddess of Reports thing- but even if I did that every week for fifteen hundred years, it still would have reached equilibrium far, far short of the energy needed.” She sighed.
“But you messed with it,” Twilight observed.
She nodded. “I did. One of the things about the Thaumion Flow is that manipulating it will allow just about anyone to rather casually violate a number of laws of magic… Well, if they’re able to manipulate it safely.” She glanced around the table, and smiled at the confused and curious looks she got back. “I discovered the Thaumion Flow myself, about a year after the Goddess of Reports, while I was experimenting with some extremely dangerous multiverse traversal magics. Most of them would’ve killed me if my Cutie Mark talent didn’t force my failsafes to be truly fail safe, so I didn’t teach it to anyone. Even once I worked out my access methods…” She sighed. “They’re deadly without my Talent, so I never passed them on either. But anyways, it let me break the laws of magic really as much as I liked.” She chuckled. “All that happened within a couple months after my ascension, but I didn’t really count it as an increase in power, since it was merely a technique- not unlike Hermione’s new principles.
“So when I messed with the Full Castle Record…” She sighed. “I made it self-powered directly from the Thaumion Flow. I increased the storage energy by about twelve orders of magnitude.” She chuckled. “Still wouldn’t have worked, except I expanded its information source to the Thaumion Flow as well, so it would record information from across the Multiverse.
“It took about eight months to overload. Naturally, since my own magic reserves were the same size as about two hours worth of that level of record-keeping, the chances were fairly low… Yet, last week, I walked into the Full Castle Record right about in the middle of that two hour window- and my reserves pushed it over the threshold. Had I not done that, we probably would have birthed a new, extremely powerful baby that could easily have destroyed half the multiverse by crying for mommy, or perhaps simply caused this entire universe to pop like the soap bubble it resembles from outside. But I did, and breaking the spacetime continuum like that conveniently bypassed my Cutie Mark, so…” She sighed. “I accidentally rewrote my entire magical core to run on thaumions instead of thaumic energy. That means I’m really not constrained by the laws of magic anymore, even without reaching for the Flow… but I have yet to learn to control it without going through regular magic to do so.”
“You haven’t?” Twilight asked. “But- but then how are you still discharging all of your duties? There’s no way you have enough time in a day!”
She shrugged. “Because I can still use magic… in a bit of a demented way, but I’ve been making it work.”
“Ahh,” Twilight muttered. “What’s a thaumion?”
“A Thaumion… is the twelve-dimensional version of the Thaum, found in the Void between the universes,” she answered. “It’s possible to travel in twelve dimensions with the Thaum- I did for quite a while before I discovered the Flow, after all- but the Thaumion…” She paused. “The Thaumion is to magic as magic is to electricity, you know? The Flow is what enabled me to make quick, accurate interdimensional jumps without any sort of device to steer them- even when I was controlling it with the Thaum. Interestingly enough, most Void civilizations get away with just using electricity, or sometimes other energy sources, to do the same thing- basically none of them have even heard of the Thaumion. I wonder why?”
“What about divine energy?” Celestia asked, after a pause.
“Divine energy, yeah,” Hailey sighed. “It’s four-dimensional- which incidentally makes it impossible to control with three-dimensional thaumic energy, but the unholy offspring of the Misty Step and the spell the Time Turners in the Ministry of Magic use will rather easily push it around and protect you from it, though it does require alicorn power levels, even for me.” She leaned back in her chair. “Meanwhile, it’s easy for higher-dimensional energy to manipulate lower-dimensional energy even with a multiplicative mismatch like that, so a universal God or Goddess, possessing divine energy, can easily control thaumic energy. And theoretically, I should be able to easily control both of the above, but…” She sighed.
“How would three-dimensional magic control thaumions?” Twilight asked.
Hailey smiled. “I’m not sure that it would be a good idea to tell you the details, or anyone for that matter- but if you twist four Thaum streams apart from one another in twelve-dimensional space and quantum-lock them to one another, such that none of them are positioned in the same three dimensions as any of the others, you can create a Thaum-based twelve-dimensional construct that can be used to manipulate the Flow. However, since the Flow is many times more powerful than the magic you use to control it… You’re still limited to the information you can pass into it through just one Thaum stream, which slows things down quite a bit, but you can still use it.
“Yes, it’s theoretically possible for the Thaum to control a Thaumion that is controlling some Divine Energy, but I never managed to do anything like that- the feedback from touching the Divine Energy always knocked the Thaumion out of my thaumic grip- and that ‘thaum stack’ simply doesn’t synchronize with Divine Energy like it does the Thaumion, making its direct iteration with Divine Energy unpredictable and so unexploitable.” She glanced at Twilight. “Who knows, you might be the one that discovers a safe way to make a thaum stack for thaumion control!”
Fleur shuddered.
She was absolutely terrified of what she was about to do.
She took a deep breath, and let it out. She had to do it. There simply was no other way.
She glared at the mirror in front of her, breathing firmly. She had to. She could only deny it for so long before it came back to bite her.
She glanced to the side, just to be sure. Yes, the door was locked- and besides, the rest of the family was occupied. Her father had gone to work, her mother was teaching the middle three magic, and Gabrielle was paging through Ancient Runes Made Easy in a doomed effort to understand how Fleur had made pancakes.
This was the only mirror in the house: The bathroom mirror. And it wasn’t one of those marginally-more-expensive ones that talked to you; no, her family had been able to afford very little that didn’t come from muggle second-hand shops.
She knew it wasn’t as big of a deal as she was making it out to be- but she had to know. Yet, she was afraid of what she knew it would be.
She knew already that she was even less human- or veela- than she had been before. A thought that hadn’t bothered her during the Tournament, where she’d just wanted to survive, no matter what she ended up doing to herself.
She took a deep breath… and finally swept off her shirt, watching the mirror.
The first thing she saw was that her muscles hadn’t changed at all. That was a relief, considering what she had expected to find.
So, she turned her back to the mirror. She knew something had changed on her back- she could feel it, after all.
She paused, took a second deep breath, and looked over her shoulder at the mirror.
She stared in disbelief.
Her back didn’t look all that different… except for the pair of textured mirrors covering most of it.
She slowly turned back around, simultaneously unfolding one of them so she could stare at it properly.
It… It was a wing, as she had expected.
She had not expected her feathers to be mirror-reflective and look like they were made of liquid silver.
She surprised herself with a sudden chuckle. “Must be my Veela heritage again,” she muttered.
She tried extending it fully- but no matter how she placed herself, her wing was just too big to fully extend in the bathroom, despite folding up nice and small against her back… But, she didn’t need it to extend fully.
Even though she’d just gotten them… Her feathers weren’t all properly aligned. Was it because she had leaned against them when she had leaned back in her chair during breakfast?
It was a good thing she was used to taking care of the family’s aging owl. Because of that, cleaning up and straightening her own wings was a matter of muscle memory.
It took her several minutes to finish, mostly due to the size of her wings, during which one singular feather had come out. It was one of her primaries- and when she checked the spot it had come from, and the stem of the feather, it looked like it had actually been ready to come out- like it was an old wing she’d had all her life.
Yet, she hadn’t even had it for two hours yet.
She sighed, and folded her now pristine wings, before slipping her clothes back on.
She couldn’t hide in the bathroom for too long- it was the only bathroom, after all.
So she picked up her shed primary feather, slipped it into an inside pocket, checked the mirror to be sure she looked entirely normal aside from her even shinier hair, and left the room.
Perhaps… Yes. Perhaps she could make a quill out of her feather? Though, it was a foot and a half long, so it’d have to be a very large quill.
Which reminded her. When she had found one of Ginny’s secondary feathers, Hailey had told her that they were extremely powerfully magical, and would make great quills… or possibly even wand cores.
She had to wonder exactly how long-lasting a quill she was about to make- and, if it was instead used as the core of a wand, what attributes a Veela-Pegasus feather would give it.
Speaking of quills… She could give it to her father, she decided. He was a stenographer, so he tended to go through them quite quickly; the five galleons a week were after he spent a sizable chunk of his paycheck on enough quills to last the next week. Perhaps he could come back with more each week, in exchange for the feather? She hoped he wouldn’t break it too quickly- she wasn’t going to pluck her wings to make quills, only collect the castoffs.
She could say… Yes. She could say that she’d found it. It was true enough.
Then she’d have to find some time to sneak off to Equestria with that teleportation spell Hailey had taught her and learn to fly.
Scootaloo sighed as she wandered slowly along the narrow cliffside path. She wasn’t entirely sure if she was ever going to go back to Ponyville. Silverspoon- whose parents had not allowed her to go to Hogwarts- had stayed behind and become an even nastier bully than Diamond Tiara had ever been, and was right. Ever since her return from Hogwarts this year, rather than simply being a pegasus with small wings, she looked like an earth pony with small wings clipped on, not even a real pegasus.
“Look out below!”
She jumped at the sudden scream, straight into the rock face, while she looked up in time to see something silver flash past, landing where she had been standing moments before and vanishing tracelessly into the path.
Then she blinked, and looked around. She was standing… behind the rock face? She seemed to be floating in place, almost like she was flying, rather than standing.
She looked down, at where the silver thing was decelerating some distance below her. “What the hay?” she muttered.
The silver thing quickly resolved itself into a mirror-reflective silver pegasus, which shook itself out. “Well that didn’t work,” it muttered, sounding female, and looked up.
There was a pause, in which they looked at one another… and Scootaloo realized the silver mare was actually an alicorn.
“Well hello,” the alicorn muttered, before flipping herself right-side-up and floating up next to Scootaloo. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“Uh… Hi,” Scootaloo muttered, backstepping slightly. “Who are you?”
“I’m Fleur,” the mare told her. “Fleur Delacour.” She glanced down at her. “You don’t happen to be an Earth elemental as well, do you?”
She blinked. “F-Fleur?” she asked. “The Beauxbatons champion in that-?”
Fleur nodded. “Yeah, that’s me. Wasn’t a very good idea in the end, but…” She shrugged her wings. “What’s done is done, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk.” She sighed. “Anyways, are you also an earth elemental?”
She tilted her head. “What’s an earth elemental?”
She shrugged her wings again. “I’d like to know that myself, actually. All I know is that I am one… and that’s what lets me swim through stone.”
She blinked. “Swim through stone? Nopony can do that.”
“We’re both doing it right now,” Fleur informed her matter-of-factly, before stepping through the rock face onto the path.
Scootaloo took a deep breath and followed, testing the edge first. Finally, she was back standing on the path. “Weird,” she muttered.
Wham!
Scootaloo flinched, but recognized the sound of Rainbow’s favorite way to land, so mostly she ducked.
Fleur wasn’t nearly so lucky- she leaped backwards in fright, then ducked underneath the prismatic shockwave. “Eeek! What was that?” She rose again, while Scootaloo turned around.
It was Rainbow Dash, alright. She had that fire of excitement in her eyes that she had every time she landed during a Rainboom like that.
“Hey, Squirt,” Rainbow greeted her, raising a hoof to ruffle her mane. “Whatcha doing out here?” Then she looked up at Fleur. “And I don’t think I’ve seen you around, Princess…?”
Fleur baulked. “P-Princess?” she gasped. “I’m not- I’m not a Princess-!”
“That’s Fleur Delacour, Rainbow. She’s British. Or… French, technically, but she doesn’t have Equestrian citizenship, so she’s not a princess.” It was a dark, almost-black alicorn about Scootaloo’s age with a wavy black mane, trotting up next to Rainbow. “Though on that thought, Fleur, you’ll probably want to know that by Equestrian law, all alicorns are automatically princesses. It only applies to Equestrian citizens, so it doesn’t actually apply to you, but most ponies will think it does. That’s why I wear a cloak everywhere on this side.”
Rainbow glanced sideways at her and grinned. “Even though it does apply to you.”
She sighed, and nodded. “Yes. Even though I do have Equestrian citizenship, which also makes me the youngest royal princess of Equestria.”
“You’re… Not wearing a cloak right now?” Fleur observed.
The princess shrugged her wings. “We were teaching Padma here to fly.” She gestured to the alicorn standing next to her, royal blue with a mane that looked like a waterfall. “It’s kinda hard to demonstrate flying techniques when wearing a cloak.” She grinned. “Not that we don’t also have my teacher here too,” she bumped Rainbow’s side with a wing, “but still.” She chuckled softly.
“Interesting,” Padma muttered, staring at Scootaloo.
The princess glanced at her, then at Scootaloo, and back. “May I ask what’s so interesting about Scootaloo?”
Padma nodded. “You may, Hailey. As I’m sure you did, I noticed that her wings are, ahh…” She paused when Scootaloo flinched away from her, shifting as if to hide her wings. “Well, I wondered if there was a magical reason for that, and there is: She’s an Earth elemental. And what’s interesting is that simply being an Earth elemental seems to interfere with the translation of ambient magic into flight magic- though judging by Fleur’s flying a minute ago, it’s not interfering with that sourced from the wellspring.”
“Flying?” Fleur asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’d rather call it ‘guided falling’.”
Padma shrugged her wings. “Better than I can do right now.”
Hailey rubbed her chin with a hoof. “Hmm. Do you think… Yeah. Do you think that an elemental embedded in their element would be able to handle the accelerated Papa Tango, regardless of pain tolerance?”
Scootaloo glanced at Rainbow for an explanation, but Rainbow was watching them with a look of confusion as well.
“Oh yes,” Padma agreed. “An Elemental has a direct connection to their Plane when immersed in their Element, and each of the Planes have far higher power levels than the Papa Tango- unless you were to accelerate it to a couple nanoseconds or something. It’d probably even accelerate it for us, right up to the limit of what it could attenuate.”
“Interesting,” Hailey mused, then looked at Scootaloo. “Hey, Scoots? Would you mind diving underground again for a few seconds?”
Scootaloo looked at the ground, and back up at her. “... Diving underground,” she repeated. “How?”
“Just think of it as if you’re diving into a lake,” Fleur told her. “It’s natural.”
“Same way I walk on water,” Padma chuckled.
Scootaloo took a deep breath, and tried it-
Then, sure enough, she found herself underneath the pathway.
There was a sudden flash of blue light and it felt like she’d just been hit by a bolt of lightning.
She shivered, and tried swimming back up to the surface.
It worked. Within seconds, she was standing on the path again. “Okay,” she muttered. “What was that light…?”
“Your wings grew,” Rainbow observed.
She blinked… then, slowly, turned to look at her own side. Then she extended her wing… Her normal-sized wing. Which made her look like a muscled pegasus rather than an earth pony just pretending.
“Yup, that did it. She should now be able to fly.”
She looked up at Padma’s words. “Y-You mean-!”
“How about we make this a triple flying lesson, then?” Hailey suggested, glancing sideways at Rainbow with an interesting gleam in her eyes.