//------------------------------// // The First Clue // Story: Becoming Daring Do // by ThunderChaserCreate //------------------------------// The parchment was crackled and old, and I feared I would break it somehow if I unrolled it. Silly, I know, but I wasn't exactly known for being gentle. Instead, I pushed it towards Soarin. He reached for it, but I smacked his hoof away. "Use your magic," I told him. "B-but... I don't know--" "Well, you gotta figure it out. Just... think about what you want to do, and it should... happen. That was how Twilight explained it to me," I suggested. "Well... I don't really need to know how to--" "I think you do. If I know Discord, he's going to make sure that this is as difficult as possible. He'll probably create at least a few puzzles that require you to use magic, since he knows you aren't familiar with it. So do it," I pushed the paper a little closer. Soarin bit his lip, looking at me rather pathetically. I raised my eyebrows and nodded at the paper. Soarin squeezed his eyes shut, biting down even harder on his lip. Small sparks of light-blue energy flew off the tip of his horn, each one fizzling out of existence as soon as it hit the ground. Soarin bent his knees, one eye opening the tiniest bit to stare at the scroll. slowly but surely, the sparks from his horn grew larger, and lasted longer. Actually, the word 'spark' is too small, they were more like blobs. They floated upward a bit, before falling toward the ground. His horn started to glow, as did the paper, Soarin grinned with pride as he, shakily, lifted the paper up to his eye level. Then, gently and slowly, he pulled it open, the dried paper making loud snapping sounds. His concentration broke as he analyzed the contents, and the paper fell back to the grass. It was so old that it stayed open, and Scooaloo leaned over to look at it, "Huh?" I picked it up, looking at the odd design on the paper. It was a swirl, coming from the center where the shapes were small and spiraling out to the edges. Each shape appeared to be an animal, but very crudely drawn with not much detail. In fact, they were so generic, there wasn't much to go on in order to determine what animals they were. The only distinguishing features for each animal were number of limbs. Also, randomly chosen animals were only outlines, instead of the cave drawing-like stick figures. The order was something like this, with A's being stick figures and B's being outlines: BABABAAABAABABBBBAABBBBABAAABBBBABBBBBBAABBBBABAABAABBBAAABAAAB... "What the hoof is this?" I complained. "It's a code, probably," Scootaloo said, turning the page to face her, "I bet it has something to do with the types of animals. I mean, they fall into three basic categories: land, water, and air. Or you could go by the number of legs..." she sat down hard, rubbing her head with her hoof. She looked up at me, then giggled a bit. "What?" I asked. "It's just-- you look exactly like Daring. I think it's kinda funny, it's like I'm actually with her." I smiled down at her, the scooped her up. She laughed again, hugging me tight. "Well, Daring would be lucky to have a friend like you," I ruffled her hair bit. She beamed, resting her head on my chest. I set her down lightly and picked up the paper. "Gosh. This is weird. I wish Twilight were here. She'd figure this out in a snap." I sighed, laying down in the grass. Soarin let himself down beside me, and I leaned against him. Scootaloo rolled over in the grass, laying belly-up in an odd pose for a pony. "Maybe the swirl has something to do with it," Soarin suggested. "I'm pretty sure everything has something to do with it," I exclaimed, waving my hooves in the air in exasperation. I groaned, letting my hooves fall back to the ground. "Well... you always told me to keep trying and not get frustrated," Scootaloo reminded me. I stuck out my bottom lip a tiny bit. "Well..." "'Well,' nothing! Keep trying! We aren't giving up just yet!" Scootaloo jumped up, grabbing the page and bringing it over to us. "Rainbow, we are going to solve this. We may not be too good at this type of stuff, but that's no reason to stop trying. If we wanna beat Discord, we gotta stick together." I smiled, proud of the spirit in this kid. She had rare ambition, especially for a pegasus who couldn't fly. "Okay, then. Let's pull out the elements of it, huh?" "Okay," Soarn agreed. The three of us leaned closer over the page. "The swirl." "The animals!" I added. "The colors!" Scootaloo suggested, "And the legs." Soarin smacked his forehead against the ground. "Well, I don't know if this helps, but Discord loves red herrings," I told my friends. "Huh?" Scootaloo looked terribly confused. "It means a false clue. Discord's thing is chaos. He loves to crowd things that make sense with meaningless junk. My guess is he's trying to make this as entertaining as possible, without over-working his MINUSCULE BRAIN!" I screamed the last words up at the sky, knowing that Discord was watching this, somehow. "So... you're saying it's probably something simple, and he just threw in a bunch of extra crap to get some cheap laughs?" Soarin asked me. "Hey, it's the kind of thing he'd do." I truned the page to face me, looking over the information. "You know, Twilight used to tell me that, if you wanted to get the really important stuff out of a long bit of writing, you could do this trick with your eyes. It would make only the long words stand out, or recognizable words. That way, you could skim some writing and be sure you were getting out the necessary parts. So, if we hold it away..." I lifted the page out at leg's-length, and crossed my eyes the tiniest bit, blurring my vision. The only thing I could make out now was the color of the shapes: some were the yellowed color of the parchment, and others were black. "Well? What does it look like?" Scootaloo fluttered her wings, hovering to try and get a look at the paper. "Mmm... just colors." I told her. "Well, let's write down the colors in a straight line. It might make more sense," Scootaloo suggested. "Umm... you got paper, Rainbow? And something to write with?" "No," I told her. "Well, check your bag. You've got a saddle bag, you know." Soarin walked around behind me, lifting something off my back. He brought it in front of me, letting me see that it was a safari-like saddle bag, riddled with pockets and splatters of mud. He dumped it in front of us, rooting through the various supplies until he found a pen and paper. "Thanks!" Scootaloo snatched them from him. "Okay... let's use zeros for the empty ones, and ones for the stick figures." She drew one of each on the page, then stated to copy the pattern. There were a lot of animals, but she eventually came up with this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he sighed, her lips sputtering as she rocked back onto her haunches. She twirled her ankle joint, trying to work out a cramp. "Umm..." I looked at the numbers, rubbing the back of my head with my hoof. "I don't know about you guys, but that didn't help me at all." "Yeah... not so much," Soarin agreed. "Maybe not... wait!" Scootaloo looked excited. "It's binary!" "What is-- How do you know that?" I asked her. "Well, we tried to get our cutie marks in spy work once! I remember this code!" She grabbed the pencil again. "M'kay, so lowercase letters always start with 0100, and uppercase start with 0101. Then, you give each letter a numerical value, so--" "Scoots!" I interrupted, "Just do it. We're most likely not going to follow you." Soarin nodded in agreement. Scootaloo chuckled awkwardly, "Heh... okay." Working carefully, Scootaloo divided the numbers into groups of eight, then counted out loud as she figured out each letter's placement. We helped as much as we could, but it was kind of sad how utterly clueless we were compared to the little kid. "Okay! I'm done!" Scootaloo passed us the paper, and I read out the clue: What always runs but never walks, often murmurs, never talks, has a bed but never sleeps, has a mouth but never eats? "What the buck?" I muttered "It's a riddle." I was told. "I know it's a--!" I cut myself off, taking a deep breath. "Yes. It's a riddle. Thank you. I meant what the buck does it mean?" I explained calmly. Soarin sighed. "I don't know. But we should try to figure it out, I suppose." "Eugh," was the response from Scootaloo.