“I'm sorry this happened to you," Twilight told me.
"I accepted your apology when I gave up my claim to vengeance against you. You're helping fix your mistake, think nothing of it."
"Is there anything you'd like to say to me now?" She asked with a hint of curiosity.
“Thank you for the hospitality?”
“What kind of pony would I be if I didn’t offer? That’s not what I meant though. There’s something else on your mind.”
“What makes you say that?”
“When you put the last ‘question’ you asked Princess Celestia together with that icy display of yours, it’s incredibly obvious.”
“What makes you take the ice into account?”
“It’s the same thing that happened to me a few times, except it was fire instead of ice. When unicorns get mad enough, their magic sometimes goes into a feedback loop that starts affecting them in an elemental form. When it happens to an inexperienced caster, the surrounding environment usually gets caught in the effect too. You had no idea what was happening and no idea how to bring yourself out of it, so I interrupted it. It's pretty much the last resort way of stopping those.”
Translation: She gave me the get a hold of yourself slap from Airplane.
“So how do I stop a loop once it starts?”
“The last time it happened to me, I was able to redirect the energy that was making the flames into harmless sound effects, so that’s one way to do it.”
“The most important part of stopping a feedback loop though is stretching it out. Make every cycle of energy go longer, spread it out to where any point of energy, anywhere, has next to no effect on the surrounding environment. If you have a connection to the ground, it’s possible to redirect the energy there too, and it's simpler than what I was talking about, but stretching the feedback loop out works anywhere. One more thing, if you’ve gotten mad enough to cause a feedback loop, you’ve gone beyond breathing exercises. It might not make much sense to you now, but it’ll probably make more sense when you get the hang of telekinesis. So, is there anything you want to talk about?”
To obtain, something of equal value must be lost, the alchemists say. A body for a body makes sense. Even the loss of my skills makes sense, because magic is just as much an instrument of combat as it is a study. When you take into account that the dimension change throws my knowledge of the laws of nature into question too, it ceases to be equivalent exchange. The opportunity to be a spellcaster is awesome, but I still would have liked an opportunity to decline a transaction this unbalanced.
There is no emotion Garrett, there is peace. Become ice internally, lest you freeze things externally. Also, I really need to find a replacement for that kata.
“I wasn’t going to say it, but since you asked…”
“I am fully aware you are not entirely the reason I’m stuck here, and that the targeting of that spell is random. I am fully aware that I have already accepted your apology. If I said I wasn’t angry at you right now anyway, I would be lying. Your fishing trip cost me my life. Even if I were to return to my world, I would have been missing for much longer than a week, costing me my academic future. If I returned to my world, I could never tell the truth about where I was, and I wouldn’t have the resources to fabricate a story, either. I would be institutionalized if I tried to tell the truth about what happened to me. In your quest to preserve your academic standing, you destroyed mine.”
Her Google or Wolfram Alpha was to try making a Faustian bargain. Given the ways I’ve used those search engines sometimes, how much better than her am I really? Was this the epiphany I was supposed to reach here? No? Darn. Well, I needed to reach an understanding with my host eventually.
“Even with that, I have little right to be mad. I may have used ‘lateral thinking’ on some of my assignments in the past, though what I did never harmed anyone else. What you did demonstrated the idea behind what I was doing, but taken to its full conclusion.”
“Until I found out you had asked Princess Celestia about letting me use your storage room, and that the targeting of your spell was entirely random, I believed I had every right of vengeance against you, that it was the only thing left to me. The very fact that you gave me an alternative made Princess Celestia’s terms unnecessary. I know revenge stories seldom end well for the people involved, and have no desire to become a character in one if it can be avoided. Even with my knowledge of the situation, I’m still angry, but it will eventually pass.”
“Wow. This leaves me with a lot of questions, and I’m sure you have a lot of questions too, but I think we both need sleep right now. Follow me upstairs, I’ll show you where the storage room is.”
I got up and awkwardly followed her up the stairs. After the first minute, she gave up and used telekinesis to help me get upstairs faster. When she opened the door on the top of the overlook that really needed a railing, I saw a tiny, purple, bipedal dragon standing in front of her library, which for some reason looked like the inside of a tree. Was this dragon her familiar? This world apparently didn’t operate on the chromatic and metallic system of classification I was familiar with, so what kinds of dragons are there here?
“Spike, this is Garrett, it turns out he will be staying with us. Garrett, this is Spike, my number one assistant.”
“Implying there are others?”
“If you see an owl in the library, that’s Owlowiscious, who helps me when Spike is asleep and I’m still up studying. The storage room is connected to that alcove over there, and there’s a bathroom right across from it. I'm sorry about the hot air balloon, but I was in a bit of a hurry when I set this up. Good night.”
After Spike made his way to wherever it was he slept and Twilight went upstairs, I checked out the alcove. Luckily, the door to the storage room was already slightly ajar. I shoulder checked it open enough to make my way in because I didn’t want to get stuck in anything, finding an inflatable mattress, a pillow, and some sheets, a dim lantern hanging from the wall, and the deflated hot air balloon she was talking about. There wasn’t much room for anything else with the hot air balloon in here, but given the circumstances, this works. I actually like sleeping at low altitudes, the primary reason I even had box springs on my bed is because it would've looked weird if I didn't.
After I finally made my way under the sheets, I realized before I fell asleep that in terms of research material, I hit the jackpot.