Chapter One
You Reek-A!
Twilight awoke to an incredibly potent stench. It slithered in through the window and up her nose, where it triggered her to wake up to put a stop to the disgusting smell. She threw the covers off herself and bounded out of bed. The smell was almost palpable. She, still being half-asleep, tried to blink her eyes awake. She saw Spike sitting up in his bed. He was awoken by the stench as well. Twilight stumbled around, searching for the source of the odor, when she heard a loud tapping against her window.
She whisked around to find herself looking at Rainbow Dash, her rainbow-colored pegasus friend, staring at her through the window. Rainbow Dash was carrying a large bag filled with something moist and dirty. As she neared towards the window, the smell hit her harder than before. Through slight tears, she opened the window and let the pegasus inside along with the bag. Rainbow Dash stopped right before the staircase leading down the stairs. She dropped the bag on the floor, and turned around to face Twilight.
"Rainbow Dash, what is that smell?" Twilight asked while trying to cover her snout with her hoof.
"Sorry Twilight, that's what I came to talk to you about." Rainbow motioned towards the bag, the origin of the foul odor. The pegasus bent over the bag and opened it up wide enough so Twilight could see the contents.
Inside was a rainbow-colored pile of poop, to put it bluntly. The light hit the feces at just the right angle so that its polychromatic essence reflected across the entire room, spilling rainbows on everything. The light died down, and the rainbows returned to the stool. It was a big pile of rainbow poop in a bag. The stench became stronger, but there was something else in the smell: spiciness. There was a distinct aroma of spiciness emanating from the fecal matter. Twilight immediately concluded that, thanks to Pinkie's demonstration of the spiciness of rainbows earlier that month, this was genuine rainbow poop.
Twilight, still dumbfounded that rainbow poop even existed, asked, "Is this some sort of prank, Rainbow Dash? YOu do know that I don't like those sort of jokes."
Rainbow Dash was defensive. "No, it's not a prank, Twilight! This is genuine! I was there, sitting on my toilet at home, pooping. When I got up to flush, boom, there was rainbow-colored poop in my toilet water. I freaked out. I thought you might be able to tell me how it happened."
Twilight thought long and hard about this predicament. She thought back to all of her research on stool and how its color changes. Sadly, she had not done any significant research on the subject, as it made her a little disgusted and queasy. She responded, "I'm not sure how it happened, Rainbow Dash. All I know about the coloration of stool is that red coloration is caused by hematochezia, hemorrhoids, beets, or tomatoes. Green is caused by lots of leafy stuff like vegetables. Orange stool is caused by foods high in beta-carotene. Most of the time, however, the main culprit is bilirubin, which comes from the liver after hemoglobin has passed through certain chemical changes that are too complicated to get into right now. Then the bilirubin travels and gets caught in packets of bile, which depending on the concentration of bilirubin, can vary from a yellow to a dark brown in color. Then, depending on how quickly the bile can travel through the intestines and how many additional changes it goes through can vary the color from green to brown."
Rainbow Dash looked at the unicorn with an extreme look of confusion on her face. “Can you say that again in English, Twilight?”
“To put it bluntly, Rainbow, I have no idea how this is possible. In actuality, this isn’t possible. This shouldn’t be possible. But yet, here it is. A big pile of multi-hued droppings. I am utterly baffled.” Twilight looked at the pile of fertilizer with more confusion than Rainbow did about all of Twilight's confusingly technical words.
“Well, can’t you run tests on it or something?” Rainbow held up the bag for Twilight to take.
“Yeah, I guess I could. This is actually pretty exciting, investigating something that isn't possible, or it would be if it didn’t smell so horribly.” She snatched it out of Rainbow Dash’s mouth with a simple levitation spell and held it a very large distance away from her face. She trotted briskly down the stairs and into her laboratory basement.
In the lab rested large computers, scanners of every shape and size, and several monitors for monitoring stuff. Rainbow didn’t understand much of it, but that isn’t what mattered. What mattered is that they were going to find out what made her polychromatic defecation polychromatic. Twilight rested the sample on a large silver dish. She trotted over to what looked like a large satellite dish towards the stool.
“Okay, let’s see what kind of electromagnetic waves this thing emits for starters.” Rainbow stood there in even more confusion than when she had originally come down as Twilight powered up one of the monitors. She threw a large switch on the wall of the laboratory and waited for the figurative sparks to fly. Nothing happened. She turned the switch back down and walked over to the monitor she had turned on. The screen remained black.
“This doesn’t make sense. It should be showing up some sort of radiation of a sort. This is supposed to monitor ultraviolet waves, but nothing’s showing up. That’s really strange. Something should be showing up, but it's blank. It's not emitting any form of ultraviolet wave, which would probably rule out anything above UV rays. But, why isn’t anything showing up?” After a few moments of pondering, Twilight suggested to herself, “Maybe I should try infrared and below.” She walked over to another switch and threw it.
The monitor cackled to life. It showed a very grainy image of the stool with brightly colored spots that represented the infrared waves. The image was dim, but Rainbow could still make out the sample on the dish. The monitor suddenly blackened. Twilight didn't move, so Rainbow assumed more was to come. The monitor brightened once again, this time a lot brighter. The scanner was humming loudly.
"This time it's monitoring microwaves." Twilight barely was heard over the large noise emanating from the scanner that was pointed at the droppings.
"Like the ones you cook with?"
"No, well, sort of. I guess."
They continued to watch the monitor. The sample was much easier to make out. It glowed brightly in the dimmed light of the laboratory. The monitor dimmed once more all of a sudden. Rainbow Dash thought the show was over, but Twilight motioned for her to stay. The monitor buzzed to life once more, brighter than ever before. The scanner made any other form of sound inaudible. The humming was ubiquitous. Rainbow tried to block the noise out of her ears with her hooves. The image on the monitor was immensely bright.
"This time it's radio waves! This is strange though, I've never seen it get this much readings before!" Twilight tried to scream over the loud humming of the scanner.
"What'd you say?"
"I'm going to see how the larger the wavelength the scanner looks for influences the amount of waves it picks up." She trotted over to one of the computers that was running the scanner. She tapped a few keys on the keyboard and looked up at the monitor. It glowed even brighter along with the loudness of the scanner's humming.
"I wonder how low it goes!" Twilight wondered aloud. Rainbow didn't even notice that she was talking, the noise was omnipresent. She pressed a few more keys. With each keystroke the monitor grew brighter and the humming grew louder. Rainbow thought her ears were bleeding. She pressed a key one final time and looked up. The monitor couldn't take the brightness it was demanded to project. It's individual pixels burst, sending sparks everywhere. The scanner itself caught on fire, which Twilight quickly put out with a nearby fire extinguisher. The humming finally went away, leaving behind a loud popping noise from the resulting explosion. All was quiet once again. Twilight and Rainbow Dash just stood there, standing at the polychromatic defecation.
“That was, surprising. There was so much activity on the lower end of the spectrum, it blew up my favorite scanner.” She studied the stool with more intensity. “But when it got past radio waves it sh-” She stopped abruptly. A wave of realization washed over her. “No, it can’t be. It’s only theoretical. It hasn’t been proven yet.”
“What hasn’t been proven?”
“Mira unda.”
“English please, Twilight,” Rainbow Dash said, sighing exasperatedly.
“Sorry, that was Latin. Mira unda, or literally ‘miraculous wave’, is something that if it theoretically existed would be below all other electromagnetic waves. Just below radio waves was speculated to be mira unda.”
“What’s so special about mira und whatever?”
“It is theoretically said to be able to be used as a source of extremely efficient energy. If you were to be able to harness it, just a small amount would power a whole city for several days.” Twilight looked over at Rainbow Dash, who was staring at her own stool uncomfortably. “Just imagine the economic benefits of this much energy!”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re going to need you to poop, Rainbow Dash. All of Equestria will survive on your poop.”