Chapter 2
“SPIKE!”, came the voice from the balcony. For the third time in the past five minutes, Twilight Sparkle was demanding his presence on the balcony.
“JUST A SECOND!”, the young dragon bellowed back with all the air that his young lungs could manage to carry. He was busy – the six books that he had wrestled down from their various library shelves weren’t light, after all. Twilight, naturally, needed every single one of them immediately. She would, of course, forget to put them away – the best he could really hope for is that she would at least bring them with her when she finally staggered inside to go to sleep.
He juggled the books he was carrying again, trying to find the best way to carry a pile of books taller than he was. After a nervous moment of nearly falling flat on his back, he managed to find an arrangement that would at least allow him to move. Grumbling about his certain future of back problems, he staggered his way out the door to the balcony.
“Here you go, Twilight, I found them all – even the new edition of the Astronomical Astronomer’s Almanac to All Things Astronomy that got here last week from Canterlot… Uh.. Twilight?”, he asked as he dropped the books into a stacked pile next to the table that Twilight had brought out earlier.
The lavender unicorn looked up from where she was slowly clasping her telescope into a new mount, far different from the mount she usually used. Instead of being a simple swivel, the mount looked almost like a V, turned upside down and with the point over one of the legs and pointing down the angle of it. One leg of the V seemed to end in a dial with small, neatly printed white lettering around the rim of it. The other leg was a small metal rod, with two cylinders slipped over it and clamped into place with knobs. The telescope itself was mounted parallel to the leg that had the dial at the end. There was another dial around the place where the telescope was mounted.
The entire assembly glowed with a faint purple aura. Even as he wondered what in the world Twilight had done to her telescope, Spike couldn’t help but be impressed as she used her magic to make tiny, precise changes to the dials. Most unicorns could levitate objects and adjust them - pretty much every special talent required the ability to manipulate something, after all. The number who could manipulate the telescope like Twilight was doing was much, much smaller – especially when, at the same time, she was calling for her number one assistant to get his dragon tail outside with her books.
And, of course, if I point out how amazing what she’s doing is, she’ll insist that any Unicorn could do the same thing, Spike thought to himself, with a smile. Twilight Sparkle would be Twilight Sparkle – and that was why Spike loved being her number one assistant, back pain or none.
“Yes, Spike?”, Twilight asked, even as she levitated the top book from the stack and opened it to a particular page. She read off a pair of numbers from the book, and started moving the telescope even more carefully.
“What did you do to your telescope?”
“What..? Oh, you mean the mount! Do you remember when I stopped off at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns on the way back from Canterlot last week?” she asked.
He nodded to her, and she continued, “This was a birthday present to me from my old Astronomy professor. They call it an equatorial mount – it lets me point the telescope at a very exact point in the sky. And then I can use just a little bit of magic, and the mount will move the telescope along the track of a particular object in the sky, all night long! Isn’t it amazing?”
“Uh… yes?” he replied, trying for the answer that would satisfy her, without betraying the fact he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. “So.. you can look at the same thing all night long? That sounds.. fun?”
His sarcasm was absolutely lost on her, “I know! And that’s not all! I can hook the camera we bought last year to the telescope, and get very long exposures. It’ll let me take pictures of things I couldn’t ever get a good picture of before! I’ve got it pointed at a nebula right now – I’ll be able to get a shot clear enough to let me count the number of stars in it! That’ll be just what I need for my report on nebulae that’s due next week – I’ll be sure to impress the Princess with it!”
Spike decided that it probably wasn’t the best time to point out that, after having saved Equestria twice, she could probably write “Stars are bright” on a report and Princess Celestia would still be impressed. Worried about her best student, but impressed nonetheless. This would be about as effective as it had been the last time he had pointed it out. At least this time she wasn’t likely to cause a riot. “That’s great!” he said, instead, “So how can I help?”
She smiled at him. “Well, I need someone I can trust to watch this telescope while I go to the basement and get the camera. Someone who can make sure this telescope doesn’t move a single inch. I think it’s a job for my Number One Assistant, in fact – what do you think?”
He grinned back. All her eccentricities aside, Twilight Sparkle was the closest thing he had to a sister. She was his sister, for all intents and purposes. There were very few things he wanted more than to be there for her and to be as valuable to her as he could be. “You know it!” he replied back, giving her a thumbs up.
And, with that, she was gone back into the library. Spike leaned back against the low railing of the balcony as he watched the telescope. Occasionally, he glanced up into the sky. Both because the view was amazing, and because he was waiting to save the telescope from the only thing he figured could possibly happen. Crash landing pegasi had, after all, been nearly a daily occurrence since the two of them had moved to Ponyville.
Pegasi, though, were not in the forecast for the evening. Instead, he was treated to the most beautiful grunts he had ever heard. His gaze trailed downwards from the balcony to the graceful figure of a white unicorn struggling forward as she tried to move a cart filled with the supplies of her trade through a road still muddy from the afternoon’s rain. “Rarity?”, he called, “What are you doing out so late?”
The unicorn jumped, as if surprised. The motion sent one of her hooves slipping in the mud, which led to her stumbling and ended with a sizable splash of mud against her coat. “Oh, Spike! I didn’t expect you to be up this late, is Twilight doing another all-nighter?”, she asked, only after spending a moment forcing down the unladylike squeal of panic that had been building in her throat. This was, after all, hardly the grade of mud that she would ever let linger on her coat.
“Yeah, she’s got some sort of.. uhm.. thing”, Spike replied, trying and failing to remember what in the world the mount was called, “She’ll be out here all night, probably. What about you, what are you doing out so late?”
Rarity hmphed, “I get back home after going all the way across Ponyville to pick up Sweetie Belle from Applejack’s farm, only to find out that that dreadful post-pony had left another yellow slip on my door. I had to go pick up my delivery of supplies from Canterlot tonight, or they were going to send them back! Can you imagine, they were just going to send them back! It would have been the worst possible thing, I would never have gotten my new orders done on time if I had had to wait for more supplies to get here. I just forgot how terrible this path gets when it rains. And, really, Rainbow Dash went overboard this time with that storm! Oh and now I’m stuck! Whatever shall I do?!”
In the back of Spike’s mind, a small voice reminded him that he was supposed to watch this telescope for Twilight. That voice, however, was vastly and totally overwhelmed by the joy the thought of being helpful for his crush was bringing him. “Well..”, he said, “I could help you get your cart home. You know.. if you needed the help..?”
The unicorn practically squealed with delight, “Oh, Spikey-wikey! Would you really do that for me? I know you must be tired, it is awfully late after all.”
“No problem at all, my sweet Rarity”, he called back, “I’ll be right down!”
He didn’t wait for her response, having already turned to rush back into the library. In his rush to get downstairs, he also didn’t pay close enough attention to where his tail was. If he had, he would have noticed it nudge one of the legs of the telescope just enough to shift it six inches. Instead of where Twilight Sparkle had spent three hours pointing it, it was now pointed at an empty, innocuous piece of sky. Spike didn’t realize it then, and he didn’t realize it three hours later when he finally arrived home, to find that Twilight was still outside on the balcony. He didn’t think anything of it, too exhausted at that point to do anything but fall into his bed with his apple blanket and fall fast asleep.
“Are you sure that Twilight won’t mind us dropping in?”, asked the shy, bright yellow pegasus pony as she and Rarity made their way through the center of Ponyville towards the library.
“Oh, darling, of course not! Why would she possibly object to an offer to go out to the spa with us? She seemed to have so much fun the last time she went with us, after all!”, replied Rarity, for a moment looking utterly confused as to why anyone would not want to spend as much time as they possibly could at the spa.
“Uhm, well, she might be busy with her studies for the Princess?”, replied Fluttershy. She came close to pointing out that the last time they had been there with Twilight the two of them had driven her nearly insane with the need to keep their secrets. For some reason that Fluttershy had never quite figured out, Twilight had never looked at a mirror the same way after that mess.
“Oh, Fluttershy! That’s simply too much! You know her studies for the Princess are the study of friendship, after all. What could be more... friendshippy than three young mares heading out to the spa to ensure that they look fabulous?”
Fortunately, the need for Fluttershy to reply to her friend was obviated by the fact they had arrived at the front door of the library. The closed front door of the library, where all the curtains were also drawn. Fluttershy was about to suggest that Twilight was still asleep and they should move on, before Rarity had reared up on her hind hooves and began knocking on the library door. “Twilight!”, she called, “Twilight, are you in there?”
There was a long enough pause before the library door was finally flung open. Instead of a purple bookworm, though, Spike stood in front of the door, clearly wiping sleep out of his eyes. “Oh, hey there Fluttershy. Hi, Rarity”, he said, suppressing a yawn, “Sorry - Twilight didn’t get me up this morning, and I slept in. What brings you here?”
“Oh well, Spike”, replied Rarity, “I know that I stole Twilight’s number one assistant last night, and I was just feeling awful about it - I mean, I imagine that she was planning on a busy night of stargazing and that you would have just been indispensable for it. And then Fluttershy came around the Boutique for our weekly spa day, and it hit me - I should invite Twilight along! Oh, and you of course - I know you don’t like the spa very much, but we could always pick you up some gemstones for a snack. What do you say?”
Spike glanced back inside the library for a moment and then shook his head, “Gosh, I’m sure Twilight would love to, but I’m not entirely sure what she’s doing. She wasn’t in bed when I came home last night, and when I woke up this morning she was down in the dark room in the basement. I knocked a couple of times, but she told me to go away and come back later. She sounded really frazzled too.”
Fluttershy frowned at this, lifting off the ground so that she could glance over Spike’s shoulder. “Oh my”, she replied, “You don’t think its something like the last time, do you? She isn’t late on something for the Princess, is she?”
Spike shook his head, “No, I don’t think its that. I’ve known Twilight a long time - this doesn’t feel like she’s over-stressing about something. It feels more like she’s found something intellectual to puzzle through. Occasionally, she’ll find something like that and then she’ll be out of it for days. It hasn’t happened at all since she came to Ponyville, though.” He neglected to mention that this was mostly because in Ponyville, unlike Canterlot, Twilight Sparkle had friends who would distract her from such.
“Hmm. Well if this is something to do with her studies, then perhaps we should leave her to it. Come along, Fluttershy, we’ll stop by - “, Rarity started. It was a sentence she never had a chance to finish, however, as at that moment the basement door was flung open.
Twilight Sparkle rushed up the stairs into the main room. It was immediately evident that she hadn’t slept the night before. Her mane was ragged, her eyes a bit bloodshot, her smile just the wrong side of frantic. “There you are Spike! I have a letter I need you to send to the Princess right away - its very important that she reads it just as soon as she can”, she said, heedless of her friends standing in the doorway.
Friends who, a moment later, were not in the doorway but were instead in the library. “Twilight?” asked Fluttershy, “Is everything okay? You don’t look so good.”
Twilight, who had been making a dash towards where she saw Spike, her horn aglow as it levitated a single page and what looked like several photographs, turned at the voice. “Oh, Fluttershy, Rarity! Hello there, I didn’t hear you come in. Yes, everything is fine. I found something amazing last night with my telescope, though, and I think the Princess is going to want to see this right away!”
“Your telescope?”, asked Rarity, “Oh then you had a good night, even though I made off with Spike? I’m so glad to hear that!”
“Yes - when I came up and Spike was gone, I figured he had gone to sleep. But then I noticed that my telescope was a good six inches off of where I had pointed it”, Twilight said, sparing a moment to give Spike a glare that turned the young dragon’s cheeks red as he suddenly recalled his tail brushing against something in his rush to meet with Rarity. “But it turned out alright - what I found was something even better than a nebula. You have to see this, girls!”
And with that her magic took the photos, separating them from the letter and holding them up for inspection. Neither Rarity, nor Fluttershy were in any way knowledgeable about astronomy, except for the fact that shooting stars were quite pretty. It was immediately evident, however, that something was strange in this photo.Drifting in front of the stars in the sky, was something most certainly not a star. It was fuzzy, but evident, that there were two shapes, attached to each other in some manner that neither of them could make out - a disk of some sort attached to what looked like an oval that had been flattened on two sides. This was, in turn, attached to two long, narrow objects on either side, that extended about half the length of the entire thing.
“Wh-what is it?”, asked Fluttershy, still hovering closer to get a good look.
“I don’t know!”, replied Twilight, getting more excited as she shared her discovery with her friend, “What I do know is that it has to be very, very close to Equestria - possibly even orbiting the planet! Once I saw it the first time, I moved my telescope to two different points in town and used its shift in position to get a rough triangulation as to its distance away from us. It is, at most, the distance of the moon!”
“The moon?”, asked Rarity, “Could it be.. some sort of asteroid?”
“No”, Twilight replied again, shaking her head, “I know you can’t see it in this photo, but I saw lights on it. Blinking lights, going in a pattern. And the shape of it is too regular to be some sort of natural object. No.. I think this is some sort of ship! Flying out much, much higher than any pegasus could ever hope to go! That’s why I need to get this letter to the Princess right away - she has to know about this!”
“Oh.. my”, was the only reply that Fluttershy could give to this.
The letter itself was quickly bundled up, tied with a small cord, and dispatched to Canterlot in a flash of green, magic dragon-fire. While they waited, Spike brewed a pot of coffee for Twilight, commenting on just how much coffee she had drank the previous night. The pot didn’t get a chance to finish brewing before, with a loud belch, Princess Celestia’s reply came back.
My faithful student,
This discovery is amazing. I need you to come to Canterlot immediately so that we can discuss it. Please bring any other pictures that you may have taken with you. You may, of course, bring your friends. For the sake of preventing a panic, however, I must ask that you tell no one else besides myself, Princess Luna, Spike, or your friends of your discovery until we have a chance to meet.
Sincerely,
Princess Celestia
“Do you know what this means?”, asked Twilight, looking up, her face a little pale at this point.
“Why, of course I know what it means!”, replies Rarity, “We’re going to Canterlot!”