//------------------------------// // Chapter 5: Lesson One // Story: My Little Apprentice // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Chapter 5: Lesson One The next day brought much of what was expected. Snow for a start, right down to the centimeter of what had been scheduled. Evidently the front door couldn’t even be opened, technically trapping the library’s three residents inside for the day barring some emergency. This was not what had Chance so excited, as much as she had expected it all. Rather, it was the promise of her first lessons in magic. Twilight seemed to share her excitement, though she had a strange way of showing it in the filly’s eyes. “Alright you two.” She said, herding Chance and Spike up the stairs and back into the bedroom. “I am going to get ready for Chance’s first lesson downstairs. I want everything to be perfect. It might take a little while, so…” She paused, and her horn seemed to shimmer. Along with half the books on the shelves all around them, which abruptly pulled themselves into the air and surrounded the filly and the dragon. Twilight brought them down with a crash, easily over either of their head-levels. “Here’s some reading material to get you started. Just a few of my favorite titles on magic. Under no circumstances should you come downstairs. I’ll come and get you when everything is ready.” Twilight didn’t even give her time to protest that she couldn’t read the language the Equestrian books were written in. She collapsed back onto her haunches, looking around the both of them and sighing. “The pillow fort was more fun.” She muttered, mostly to herself. Spike nodded in agreement. She felt him sit down opposite from her, looking the other way in the massive barricade. “You got that right.” He agreed, folding his arms. “She should’ve let me help set up! It’s not like I’m the one having magic lessons.” He lowered his voice, speaking more darkly. “Number one assistant my tail.” Chance remained quiet until the sound of Twilight’s hooves had faded completely, and other fainter sounds had taken their place. “Hey Spike?” The dragon sat up from where he rested against her side, looking a little more attentive. “Yeah, Chance?” “Can I ask you… I mean, can I ask you a few questions?” She reached out, pulling a book off the top of the stack in her teeth and letting it fall to the ground in front of her. It felt very childish to be using her mouth to manipulate objects like this, as though she was a baby again. Still, it wasn’t as though she could use her hooves. Well, maybe real ponies could. Rarity had done some amazing things with her hooves yesterday, but Chance was not Rarity. The filly took a moment to lean forward and inspect the cover. The volume was quite thick, a dull brown that looked like leather but didn’t smell anything like it. There were markings all over the cover, but she could make nothing of them. This seemed very strange to her, considering she seemed to be able to speak the Equestrian language just fine. Heck, even some of the markings looked familiar to her! But some of them didn’t, strange pictographic stars and horseshoes and similar things. “Course you can.” She could practically hear the glower in his voice. “It’s not like I’ve got much else to do up here.” Chance spun around then, so fast the dragon had to pull away or else be knocked over. “Okay Spike.” She narrowed her eyes. “Twilight has asked me all sorts of things about my world, and I don’t remember very much right now. But she barely gave me any time to ask about Equestria!” She looked around her, then propped her forehooves up on the nearest stack of volumes, causing it to sway dangerously before toppling over. She ignored Spike’s wince as the books scattered, in a way probably not healthy for their spines. “I’m starting to feel really silly, not knowing about basic stuff. BUT.” She walked past him, then turned to face him again, as though she were about to charge. The body-language matched, anyway. “No laughing at me. It’s not fair. I’m from far away, so of course I don’t know anything Equestrian.” She wanted to fold her arms across her chest, but of course she didn’t have any of those, and the thought nearly made her fall over. She settled for as serious a glare as she could give. She wasn’t going to be made fun of again. “Okay, okay, gosh!” Spike put his arms up, defensively. “I won’t laugh. And anyway, I would rather think about your questions than why Twilight won’t let me help.” Chance nodded, then relaxed, sitting down on her haunches again. It would have been a very strange position to her before, but it was clear her spine was shaped differently now. Did that bother her? “Okay, first question.” She wished she had an easy way to take notes, but at least all the memories she had made since coming to Equestria seemed to be sticking around, so she wasn’t too worried about forgetting. “What’s a cutie mark? Sweetie Belle seemed to think they were really important, but I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t wanna tell her.” Spike nodded soberly, without a trace of a smile. “Everypony gets a cutie mark. It’s part of growing up…” He struggled for words, then just walked over and patted her rump. “On either side. Twilight has the starbursts. Rarity has her jewels. All the adult ponies have them. They show you what you’re good at. Your special talent. Of course, as a dragon, I don’t need a cutie mark to tell me that I’m talented.” Chance nodded. “So ponies aren’t named after them? Cuz’ Sweetie Belle doesn’t have hers yet. It could end up being anything, right?” Spike shrugged. “You’re asking the wrong dragon. That’s about all I know about cutie marks, to be honest. You’ll have better luck asking a pony about that sort of thing.” She nodded, finding that response perfectly reasonable. As much as she had all sorts of other questions about cutie marks, it made sense not to ask someone who didn’t actually have one for information. Maybe if she was careful about how she phrased it, she could ask Sweetie Belle how she could get one of her own. “Okay. Next question… is Equestria a Monarchy? Because I keep hearing about a Princess, and I don’t really know what anypony means by it.” “Princess Celestia.” Spike offered. He wasn’t laughing, but he did sound a little surprised. “Are you sure you haven’t heard of her? Maybe they just call her something else where you’re from. I mean, she raises the sun every day. That makes her a pretty important pony. Even as a dragon, she’s something special.” It was Chance’s turn to look disbelieving. “She raises the… sun?” She repeated, her voice very quiet and eyes distant, as though she were reading a book that Spike could not see, suspended in the air. “Yeah.” He answered, completely misinterpreting her response. “She’s an Alicorn, the most powerful being in all of Equestria… no, the whole world!” “Impossible.” Chance argued, her tone flat. “The star Sol has a mass of 1.9891 × 10^30 kilograms. The force required to influence its orbital vector by even a fraction of a percent is on the order of 3.975641 x 10^32 newtons. No artificial energy source can-” The dragon, who seemed to have been staring blankly at her, shook his head as though dislodging something from in his ears. “Hang on Chance, you started to sound like Twilight for a second.” He gestured to the window. “If it sounds crazy to you, you could just ask Twilight to take you to Canterlot. Anypony can watch, it’s a public ceremony. Actually Twilight and I used to watch it several times a week back when we lived in Canterlot.” He shook his head. “Before dawn that often? Forget it. Magic is less impressive than getting a good night’s sleep.” Chance felt momentarily confused, trying to recall where those numbers had come from, or attach meaning to words like “newtons.” She failed, but not without making some other logical conclusions. 1. She trusted Spike. 2. Spike said he had personally witnessed Celestia raising the sun. 3. Via modus ponens, she was forced to conclude that Celestia indeed could raise the sun. Whatever a modus was. Chance had no desire to be in the presence of a being that could perform feats like that. Twilight had been frightening enough at first, until Chance had determined beyond reasonable doubt that the purple alicorn didn’t actually have much of an idea of her true potential. No unearthly might had been brought against her. Twilight hadn’t even asked her why her mind and body were separate. Which was good, because Chance didn’t remember. “So…” She replied after some time, still sorting out that last piece of information. “If Celestia can raise the sun, that would make her a…” She struggled for the word for a moment. Eventually it came, though it seemed a little strange on her Equestrian tongue. Like a word not in common usage, perhaps. “...goddess? Someone who can defy natural laws like that would have to be.” Spike shrugged. “She just goes by Princess, and she’s actually really nice. Not scary or anything, like most ponies expect.” He rolled his eyes. “You ought to see the way everypony stresses whenever she comes around to visit. They’re shaking in their hooves! Twilight used to be that way, but… studying with Princess Celestia all those years, we learned that she wasn’t all that different from other ponies, in lots of ways. Even if she has ruled for thousands of years.” He trailed off, as though the question had become so mundane as to no longer be worth his interest. “Okay.” Chance couldn’t think of anything else to say to that. It sounded incredibly strange to her… something told her that no organic form could last for that long, but that seemed far less impossible then repositioning a star and thus not worth bringing up. Maybe she would ask Twilight about the technical side of that one day. She glanced down the stairs, wondering how much longer Twilight would take preparing for this lesson. It wasn’t at all the way she expected a first lesson to be, in any case. Wasn’t a first lesson supposed to be so basic that there wasn’t really any real risk involved? A memory abruptly came to mind, a memory in which she was on two legs and not four. It was winter, just like it was in Ponyville, but she was out in the mountains and not safely indoors. Her family was visiting a ski resort, and she was small, perhaps not much older than she was now. Her legs wobbled on the training skis they put her in, despite the plastic connector going between them. At the end of her lesson, she had been taken on her first ride on a lift, and set on the most sedentary bunny slope the mountain had to offer, where she had glided fearfully all the way back to base camp. She hadn’t fallen once, which had been a subject of great pride to her at the time. At least, not until she tried on her own later that day, going down the same slope with the rest of her family. She had been so eager to impress that everything she’d learned was forgotten and she zipped almost straight down, smacked into a tree, and broke her nose. As she relived the memory, Chance sat still exactly as she had been, mouth partially agape and drooling a little. The filly became conscious of Spike’s claw waving in front of her eyes. “Hello? Anyone in there, Chance?” She blinked, pulling away from his claw which felt way too close to her eyes for comfort. “Good.” He tugged on one of her forlegs with sudden energy. “Twilight’s calling us! She’s finally done!” Chance remained still despite the dragon’s tugging, sitting still for several long moments. “I remember what I looked like.” She muttered quietly. Of all the statements that might have got Spike’s attention when he was so eager to get away from the bedroom, she seemed to have stumbled into one. “Really?” His eyes got wide. “You mean, you didn’t just look like a pony?” She shook her head in exasperation as she moved past him. Now it felt like he was tugging her to stay, but she was far too intent on the magic to be distracted and couldn’t be slowed now that Spike wanted her to. “Would I be tripping over myself all the time if I had been a pony?” Even as she said it, the act of moving down stairs with a dragon so closely at her heels was nearly too much for her strained sense of balance. She recovered by bracing her back briefly against the wall, which steadied her shaking limbs enough to prevent her from sliding down the stairs. “Oooh… were you a dragon? Or maybe, since you have such trouble with legs, you were something that doesn’t use their legs much! Like a… phoenix! Or sea serpent, or…” He went on listing off things that registered only dimly in her mind as they rounded the corner of the stairs that would give them a clear look at the ground floor. The library had been transformed. The ground had been cleared of the furniture, and most of the shelves covered with dark cloth so that the books were protected. Twilight had done some amazing work on the floor, writing all over it with some thick black lines she could only guess were charcoal. The diagram was unlike anything she had ever seen. Indeed, Chance had nothing in her memory even roughly comparable to the interlocking shapes that Twilight had formed, or the elegant script that surrounded everything. Only the central shape she recognized, namely the five-pointed pentagram. The points of its star featured prominently into the design, which sloped and flowed to encompass each of the points. “Prepare yourself, Second Chance, to learn magic as no pony has ever learned it before.” She walked carefully along the edges of the star, stepping over the little objects that were resting at each point. She was grinning more widely than Chance had ever seen her. Indeed, it didn’t matter that she was a newcomer to Equestria. She could see just how incredibly proud the princess was of her work. And why shouldn’t she be? It was clearly very impressive. She stopped at the edge of the stairs, feeling suddenly fearful. This “magic” was an unknown quantity. Perhaps it was dangerous. Spike seemed to share some of her uneasiness. “Ritual magic, Twi?” He stopped just beside Chance, not willing to step down the stairs onto the floor. Judging on the way he held himself, there was some genuine fear to his posture. “Why bother? I thought you were advanced enough to handle just about any spell you wanted without all the foci and stuff you used to need back when you were a filly.” He gestured at the complicated diagrams. “What’s with all the hocus pocus?” She looked indignant. “Maybe for most spells, Spike.” Twilight stopped a few feet from them, facing Chance. “But not for one that’s brand new like this. It’s much safer to test new magic without any shortcuts. At least, that’s what Starswirls’s ‘Creative Thamucology’ suggested.” She looked away from the dragon, her eagerness apparent. “Come on Chance, follow me into the center. But don’t step on anything! Not the marks, or the objects… just the blank floor, okay?” The filly nodded, though she was growing more hesitant with each step. Not only was she in a world of unknowns, but Twilight was apparently in unfamiliar territory as well. “Are you… sure this is safe?” She stammered, following Twilight very carefully into the center of the room. “I thought you said magic was all about studying and books and stuff?” Her companion kept pace with her exactly, watching her every step to be sure that neither set of legs so much as scuffed the marks she had made. “Absolutely.” She confirmed. “But I was thinking about my own studies, about all those months before I finally got anything. I’m sure part of it was how much younger I was, with the body just not being ready yet. But plenty more is that I didn’t know what magic felt like. Like…” She paused to think for just a moment. It was clear this was not an unexpected conversation for her. Perhaps she had planned the entire explanation down to the word. “Like magic is a limb you’ve never used before. You just don’t know where to start. Which is what got me thinking.” She nodded at the different parts of her spell in turn. “What if there was someone who knew all about what it felt? What if you could share that feeling, instead of having to grasp at nothing until you stumbled into it by accident?” Chance might not be any surer of all these diagrams, but she did know what it felt like not to be able to control her own body. Maybe her magic wasn’t all that different. “So this is like… skipping the basics? You show me how you do it, and I’ll just get right to the intermediates.” “In theory.” Twilight confirmed. “Of course, I’ve never heard of anypony trying anything like this, not even Celestia.” She shrugged. “It’s not really as crazy as all these diagrams and stuff make it out to be, Chance. All that’s going to happen is I’ll let you feel what I’m feeling while I’m doing some simple magic. You’ll have some good memories of how to imitate me after that. Pretty simple.” “It doesn’t look simple.” The dragon muttered. Spike had taken a seat on one of the lower stairs, watching nervously. “That’s what she always says before something goes horribly wrong.” “Spike!” She called harshly, glaring briefly at him. “What happened last week was completely not my fault! You were the one who interrupted my concentration!” “Whatever.” Spike grinned. “This ought to be interesting, Chance. You never know what could happen when Twilight’s learning a new spell. Oooh! Do you think you could make this spell make Chance look the way she did before, Twilight? She said she remembers now, and I want to see! I wanna see what alien ponies look like!” “Really.” Twilight looked momentarily at the filly in the star with her, though not nearly so forceful as Spike seemed to be. “Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk about that later. For now, though… are you ready to experience your first spell as an Equestrian?” She turned away from the dragon, shutting him out completely as she focused on Chance. She nodded, afraid that if she didn’t agree soon she might have second thoughts and try to run away or something. Not as though she would get very far with the doors snowed shut, but still! “Could you… talk me through it as you go?” She looked around at the diagram. “I want to be able to do magic like this someday. Everything you can tell me should help me understand how it works, right?” The unicorn seemed taken aback by this remark, though her surprise was quickly replaced by a small smile. “Sure, Chance. Most ponies aren’t really interested in any of the details, so it’s nice to see my new apprentice has a healthy interest in the process.” She took a deep breath, and began to speak very rapidly and energetically. “See, there’s a focus at each point of the star for each of the five senses! Candle is for sight, sage is for smell, daisy for taste, tuning fork for hearing, and feathers for touch. Each point also corresponds with one of the Elements of Harmony, mostly to give the spell stability and help me focus. This is the functional part of the spell, which describes…” Chance couldn’t say how long Twilight went on about her spell, except to say that she did her very best to watch. It was hard to stay focused on a language and system that she did not understand, though. It was as though she was a child lifted from her class in basic arithmetic into a college calculus course and expected to sit through a lecture. Twilight hardly noticed as her attention faded, going on and on about “ethical subcontext” and “entropic revitrification” with the passion of someone describing a treasured night with their lover. Eventually, to her relief and Spike’s both, Twilight eventually finished with “...and that’s how it all works! Pretty elegant solution, right? Much more conservative with its coefficients than you might expect, but you can’t be too careful where mind-magic is concerned.” Chance nodded vigorously, thinking of what she might say to get Twilight to stop explaining and start spellcasting. Her legs already felt sore from standing in place for so long, and she was fidgeting like crazy. “It’s pretty amazing, Twilight! But we better try it soon, or else… you might forget some of it, and it won’t work as good…” Even to herself that sounded pretty weak, but Twilight was too absorbed in her excitement to notice and merely nodded. “You’re right. We better start.” She gestured to the exact center of the diagram, where there were four little marks spaced about where her hooves might be. “Stand there and don’t move until I say so, okay?” Chance obeyed, positioning herself exactly where Twilight had indicated. This hardly did anything to comfort her in the face of her fear, but she had a feeling nothing would. When she had agreed to learn magic, she had crossed some invisible line in Twilight’s mind, and probably had been moving imperceptibly toward this point ever after. It would do her no good to act like a foal and run away, nor would it help her master magic. She did want to learn that telekinesis stuff Twilight did, after all! If this way presented a rapid method to master it, then so much the better! “You better start, before I change my mind.” She gulped, gritting her teeth together in anticipation for the pain she thought was sure to come. Twilight Sparkle nodded wordlessly, her horn beginning to glow as she scanned the markings with her eyes. As she did so, the words and symbols began to lift clean off the ground, twisting through the air like living things. The light from outside began to dim, and the whole world seemed to grow quiet as Twilight muttered something, though Chance couldn’t make out the words. The black markings began to take on different colors, melting between shades of purple and violet as they warped around her. Chance watched transfixed, reminded of the time she had seen a virtual demonstration of what it might look like to turn a sphere inside out. Was Twilight bending space somehow? That would be much easier to accept than so-called “magic”. Despite her belief (or lack thereof) Twilight’s spell continued unimpeded, her horn glowing brighter and brighter, so bright that the filly had to close her eyes and look away. She wanted to cower, to flee from what she felt and saw, but didn’t dare move from the spot she had been told to stand lest some awful fate befall her. There was a feeling of energy and tension in the air, an uneasy pressure that Chance began to recognize. Time briefly slowed, as that memory came rushing back to her. Unlike the fond images of skiing she had treasured earlier, this recollection was torture to her, and she fought it with every ounce of her mental energy. As a result, it was fragmented and choppy, and she was spared the full experience. She was naked, strapped to something metal and ice-cold. None of her limbs would move, and there were tubes running into her body at various points. Cold fire poured into her veins, and she spasmed and screamed as the nano-solution reached saturation. It was bright, so bright she couldn’t see anything else, but she could hear cold voices talking to one another nearby over the loud rumble of machinery. “Relax! You won’t survive disassociation long enough to remain coherent without the reconstruction solution at complete saturation.” “She won’t survive regardless.” “Prep another oxycodone injection, she’s going into shock!” The pain lit up her whole body now, consuming her. She could barely hear the voices over the spasms in her chest. “She’s going into cardiac arrest! Cortical stimulators!” There was a faint buzzing sound somewhere nearby. “Charged!” Brief pause. “Clear!” The voices were gone, replaced with searing heat from all around her. Burning energy, scorching her, charring her. She wanted to scream, but inhaling only brought fire to her lungs, and the sound died. She was being twisted, torn, pulled up and up and up… She was standing in the library, bright light glowing in her eyes uncomfortable but not burning her. Then Twilight met her eyes, and released the spell straight at her. There was no pain. There were no words in any language she knew to describe the sensation of a spell, at least none that represented feelings she had felt previously in her life. It was a feeling of probability, where the impossible might just become a reality. As a matter of fact, there was no chance that it wouldn’t. Twilight relaxed visibly, leaning against a shelf to keep herself upright, obviously panting with exhaustion from the effort of the spell. “It… It… worked…” She managed to say, looking tired but immensely proud. “I’ve got the connection.” She reached up, as if to wipe the sweat from her brow. Could ponies even sweat? Spike approached the older Unicorn, looking unimpressed for all the lightshow, and with how suddenly drained both of the ponies appeared. “Are you sure? It didn’t look like anything actually happened.” Twilight sighed. “Of course it didn’t look like anything, Spike. It’s mind magic. What did you expect to see, a bunch of floating brains?” “That would be pretty cool…” “Spiiiiike.” She sighed, shaking her head. It was amazing to Chance just how fast Twilight Sparkle seemed to be able to recover from the enormous effort she had just expended. She was already breathing better, even if she still looked tired and frayed along the edges. “That’s not the point! That would be silly anyway.” She turned back to the filly, her face softening. “Can you feel the spell?” She nodded, a little hesitantly. “I think so. It’s like…” She struggled for words, then said the first thing that came to mind. “I’m in signal wait mode. Connection established, no input. Does that make sense?” Her answer seemed to confound Twilight more than clarify anything, but she smiled as though she understood. “There’s no magic for you to feel yet. I guess I better get started… it won’t last for long.” She looked around, selected a target, and lifted it slowly into the air. The still-lit candle was surrounded with the usual lavender glow as it moved towards Chance, then held still in the air in front of her. “What’s that feel like?” Chance’s eyes had gone so wide there was little but black as she watched. Her body was frozen, unable to move under the assault of strange feelings. “Waveform suspended.” She choked, watching the candle with fixed attention. “You aren’t generating force.” She sounded awed. “It’s… it’s…” She reached vainly for a satisfactory explanation, and eventually settled for something completely unsatisfactory. “Selective probability suspension. Likelihood that the candle spontaneously holds itself in defiance of gravity approaches 1 on non-infinite bounded time.” Lifting the candle took almost nothing out of Twilight, but the filly’s answers caused such surprise that the candle nearly fell out of the air. Chance couldn’t make sense of her expression, mostly because all of her own attention was fixed on the candle and the strange feelings she was getting from Twilight. This was what magic felt like. She felt the energy coursing through Twilight’s horn, an impressive reservoir of non-probabilistic… Particles? Waves? It was hard to tell which when it felt so much like both. Eventually Twilight took up several more objects. Several books joined the candle in the air, orbiting each other in a spherical pattern like one of Bohr’s atoms. Chance felt each orbit and rotation, and traced the probabilistic curves of each wave function, invisible graphs dancing before her eyes without the need of a quantum computational mainframe. “I think I understand how your magic works.” ********* Twilight was alone again when darkness came, grateful that Spike and the filly seemed to tire easily. That gave her more time to think, and more time to decide what she was going to do about the things she had learned today. She was in the basement again, alone save for the company of her trusty owl. Her copy of “Scientific History of Equestria” was open nearby, along with all four volumes of “Illustrated Thamatilogical Mechanics” and a half-written letter to Celestia and some simple sketched circuits. There were so many priorities on Twilight’s mind that she couldn’t do just one. Frowning, she returned her quill to the letter. “Without instruction Second Chance seemed to understand the high-level theoretical basis for the magic I demonstrated to her. It may be that her world isn’t non-magical, as we first thought. Perhaps magic is simply called something else. I’m quite sure Second Chance was not a filly in her own world. Her explanations afterwards were sophisticated and mathematically complex. Some of the things she said went over my head. Perhaps someone at the Academy has heard of a ‘Integral’ or a ‘Matrix’, but I couldn’t find anything about them in any of the math books here in the library. Am I in over my head? I don’t like it when other ponies know so much about things I don’t. For all she described the theoretical side of magic, she still can’t perform simple levitation yet. Maybe I’m worrying over nothing. Spike sure thinks I do that often enough. Ever Your Faithful Student, Princess Twilight Sparkle Twilight frowned as she rolled the scroll up for sending tomorrow, then turned her attention back to her ideas for getting power to the Jebr stone. She already had some ideas of how she could hook up a generator, assuming she could get her hooves on one. This would be so much easier if she lived somewhere like Manehattan, where there was already a power grid to hook into. Still, maybe that was for the better. There was no telling what the stone would be able to do if she plugged it into that many electrical systems. Blow out all the lights in the city, probably. “I think this is enough for tonight.” She muttered, mostly to herself. She closed the books one after another, replaced the cloth over the stone, and headed upstairs. Tomorrow the storm would be over. Maybe if the earth-ponies got started clearing the town early enough, she would be able to put in an order for a generator. Should she tell Chance about the stone? If she could get the filly to concentrate on what she was being told long enough, she might be able to help designing a system to power it. Maybe she knew as much about electricity as she did about numbers.