Vinyl moved her hooves as if manipulating a turntable that wasn't there. Despite that, music played with a lively tempo and her glowing horn. The instruments of the song she was creating were unusual, with clanks and ticks brought together in a strange melody that she was bobbing her head along to.
Kyle stood beside her, hands resting in his pockets as he watched her work, a half eaten burrito in one hand and a Gatorade in the other. "It sounds kinda like the inside of a clock factory during the lunch rush."
"Better!" Vinyl grinned widely enough her cheeks squeaked. "I remixed the MRI into something great! Oh, wow, thanks for getting me this music program. Playing with it, wow, I feel like I'm alive again!"
“Heh, yeah loop mixing is great.” Kile chuckled to himself. “You can just math out whatever sound you can get samples of. I can’t believe they signed off on it.”
“We’re not the fun police, Kyle,” Dr. Chang shot back playfully. “And actually the incident with the gummies provided invaluable data with the MRI. It turns out our little pony reacted to your dubious candy treats as one would expect a human to react.”
“Honestly, somepony could have told me they were magic gummies, I would have stopped at like two!” Vinyl protested in her own defense.
“Stopped at two without asking?” Kyle raised a skeptical eyebrow,
“Hey, I know what’s up!” Vinyl waved her hooves with sudden animation. “The Pair o’ docs are your bosses. If I’d have asked, you would have said no because you like your job.”
Chang shook her head at that, fighting the urge to giggle at the little unicorn's antics. "Vinyl, do you need a demonstration on how to follow rules, even when the odds of getting caught aren't so high? Not that we would be so unprofessional as to abuse the situation."
"No." Vinyl wrinkled her nose. "I know how that goes. I didn't break a rule. I just followed your instructions."
Chang considered Vinyl carefully, aware of Herrington's careful watch on the monitor, the same as hers. "Which instruction did we make that led to you eating those candies?"
Vinyl tossed up a hoof. "You told Kyle about them in front of me. You obviously wanted to see if I'd go for it, how I'd go for it, and what I thought of them, but didn't want to just come out and ask, duh. You're welcome, by the way." With her horn shimmering, she moved to the next track of her MRI hit-list. "That came out really good."
“I’m less mad, and more impressed. But seriously, ask first, I only buy so many of those gummies at a time. And that could have gone badly, my gummies may be legal, but my snacking on the job is tolerated, at most. Also I don’t get research grants. Those come out of my paycheck.” Kyle grumbled.
“I’ll reimburse you the twenty dollars for your assistance.” Doctor Chang rolled her eyes. “You don’t have any idea what we just tapped into. This is huge.”
"You've never seen a magic using unicorn before? Wow." Vinyl put a hoof to her chest. "And you're keeping me around because I'm cute, right?"
Chang waved Vinyl closer to ruffle the unicorn between the ears. "Your being adorable is a positive, but no, we have not seen 'magic' in any form. What you call magic is just science we haven't finished figuring out. Speaking of that."
As if prompted, Herrington entered the room at a firm pace. "We have the funding, the grant is in. It's time to get to work, real work." He folded his arms. "And expect a lot less sleep. They'll want results, and soon, not 'eventually'. I sent them the videos of Vinyl and they went crazy."
“Sure, but I’m putting a cot in the breakroom.” Kyle shrugged. “Or you could give me a desk to sleep at in the lab like Doctor Chang.”
“On an unrelated note, I need a can of shaving cream and a comically large feather… for science.” Vinyl giggled.
“This is serious. The investors want to know just what we did. And right now we don’t know.” Harington asserted perhaps more forcefully than necessary. “They're asking if we can do it again and we still don’t even know what we did!”
“I never really knew what you did.” Kyle laughed.
“I apparently just got here, so why are even you asking me?” Vinyl chimed in, hoof bumping Kyle.
Chang was looking at Herrington. "You didn't just come in here to tell us that, good news as it mostly is. What do you have in mind? It's obviously something you think is a big deal."
Herrington lifted a few folders to a table, each showing the same thing, but in a different way, a pie chart, bar graphs, a spreadsheet of numbers. "I've compared what we know and what we don't know. As usual, the don't know side is significantly larger." He pointed to a chart where the 'know' was a tiny slice of the pie. The rest, 'don't know.' "But, of that, the priority is there." He snapped down the sheet and drew out a pointer.
In the unfolding motion to get it to extend, he tapped Vinyl on the horn. "You can exert pressure from a distance, without magnets or any other known force."
“Huh?” Kyle quietly huffed. “Telekinesis is the groundbreaking part of this? That’s why I get paid by the hour, I guess. I’m going to the cafeteria to get frozen yogurt while I hang out with a unicorn. Anybody need anything?”
Chang kept her attention on Vinyl, ruffling the cheeks of the pony gently. "Don't mind him. Science has a few very specific rules, and you break them. You exert a pressure without an equal and opposite reaction, to start. We should test that, to be sure."
"Excellent idea!" Herrington slapped one hand against the other, turning in place. "I'll get a chair ready. This will be easy for you, Vinyl."
Vinyl tilted her head, eyeing the two scientists with a quizzical stare as they started bustling about the room, shifting items about in preparation for the testing they had planned. By the time Herrington got back, she had cleared a wide space for him. "Ta da!" She waved at her work as he arrived. "Space for your test."
Chang examined the area with an appraising eye, before nodding her approval. "Yes, this is an excellent space to test your telekinetic abilities in.
Herrington set down a heavy looking chair. "This is no simple chair. It can measure forces and the directions of them, even minute ones. We want to know what pushes you and from where as you work. All you have to do is move what we point at, where we say to move it to. Understand?"
“Okay, I got Doctor Chang chocolate with chocolate shell topping and whipped cream!” Kyle proclaimed cheerfully, as he re-entered the room. “I got Vinyl, a raspberry chocolate swirl with strawberry syrup. And I got Doctor Herington a plain vanilla cone, because he deserves a plain vanilla cone.”
“We are trying to perform serious research, here,” Herrington snapped testilly at the janitor.
“Fine if no one wants frozen yogurt…” Kyle groused as he began to exit the room again with the frozen treats
“Not so fast!” Vinyl snatched her own bowl up with her telekinetic aura. “He doesn’t speak for me!”
Kyle winked and plopped a cherry on top of Vinyl's dessert and used the spoon to arrange the fruit, adding chocolate sprinkles and a nice dollop of whipped topping, which he added another few cherries on top of, finishing with a final flourish of the canned whipped topping.
Herrington shook his head, but didn't argue it further. "Let's start with this." He put down a simple looking metal slab. "It is exactly one kilogram in weight. Pick it up."
Vinyl grabbed it with her magic, lifting it easily. "Ha, that's barely anything."
"Very good, very good." Herrington was watching the sensor readings from the chair. "Push the metal away. Let's see if you get pushed in the other direction."
“Huh, she can do it and eat her frozen yogurt sundae at the same time.” Kyle pointed out. While shoveling down spoonfuls of coconut frozen yogurt sloppily mixed with butterfinger bits. “That’s gotta be interesting, because one of things she's doing is pushing food into herself, that’s gotta be like, some kinda kinetic feedback, right?”
“Wait, do you know what any of that is?” Chang raised an eyebrow as she enjoyed her own double chocolate snack.
“I know what most of the words mean, more or less.” Kyle replied with an only slightly insulted shrug.
“He’s not wrong Dr. Chang, look at the data feed. No matter how many objects she manipulates, only one is creating push back!” Herrington laughed merrily. “The spoon when she eats the ice cream. Only the object she actually pushes herself with.”
“Technically, it’s frozen yogurt!” Vinyl replied with a laugh as she took another bite.
“Legally it’s Fro-Yo, and I wouldn’t place bets on it being a dairy product.” Kyle pitched in. “I try not to think about it.”
Chang waved that away. "You're all getting distracted." She stood from her chair and went to the floating metal ingot. She grabbed it firmly in one hand and pushed it towards Vinyl, the unicorn's horn glowing in a struggle to keep pace with the force. "Anything?"
"No," barely whispered out Harrington, eyes locked on the readings. "It's as if her magic was entirely divorced from her body. If it's not coming from her, where is it coming from? What are you pushing against?"
"My face?" Vinyl answered innocently, before catching on to his meaning. "Oh, you mean magic, right. Um, I don't know, actually. I can feel it in my head, but not as if it's touching stuff?" She took another bite of her frozen treat. "Mmmm."
Herrington's eyes jumped. "There. Your magic pushes against you, or, more specifically, the spoon and its contents make contact and their motion transfers into you. This is just—" He slumped a bit against the monitor, struggling for words.
“I always knew Fro-Yo was gonna break the universe.” Kyle nodded sagely. “Too many flavor choices. Doc H is a wise man to stick with vanilla.”
“Wait, according to this data, she can, in theory, stand on a spoon and lift herself off the ground…” Doctor Chang comes back to Herrington's side so she can watch the data feed with interest.
“Yeah, I can definitely not lift a whole pony!” Vinyl laughed between spoonfuls. “Especially not me after eating this!”
Chang frowned at that, muttering more to herself than the others, "If your magic is pushing your head from above, but no, that isn't happening." She reached out and gently pinched the end of Vinyl's horn.
The contact was enough to throw Vinyl off. The weight slapped to the ground, as did her spoon, sending frozen goodness everywhere as it bounced. "Hey!" Vinyl's hooves wiggled in the air for a moment as her head spun, the connection cut and she tumbled backwards, right onto Kyle.
"Oh hey there filly!" He helped her get back upright with a chuckle. "No grabbing the test pony without asking. Almost as rude as stealing candies."
"I said I was sorry!" Vinyl pouted at Kyle.
"And you didn't mean it." Kyle picked up the dropped spoon, chuckling.
“Kyle! You don’t make the rules in this lab!” Herrington snapped, as the data feed flatlined as Vinyl left the chair.
“Dude, calm down, this is actually in one of those policy videos ya’ll make me watch every year.” Kyle grumbled. “You can’t just grab people by the face. It freaks them out. Honestly up till now I thought that was an extreme exaggeration of what to expect in the workplace!”
Chang closed her eyes as she sighed softly, folding her hands together in front of herself as she spoke, "Kyle, please let me explain why the rules exist the way they do, to save both you and my patience."
As they went over that, Herrington dropped down closer to Vinyl's level. "Thank you. Even if this is perplexing, you've done what we asked entirely. More study is required. I apologize if that contact caused any discomfort."
Vinyl waved it away. "You just surprised me. But you do owe me a new spoon."
"You're not even supposed to be eating that." Harrington rose to his feet. "Let's see how you handle what you've already had before we rush for more."