//------------------------------// // Yes, I'm basically the guy that inherited the fortune of a rich uncle he didn't know he had. But that uncle had a sense of humor... // Story: Aether, Heir of Chaos // by Arcane Anonymity //------------------------------// So! I discovered that Celestia cries like a baby (and makes us all cry as a result), I can put my body on autopilot, and my piano likes giving concerts to royalty. The last piece? Every pony acknowledged the might of the human hand. The piano... kind of has some sort of will or awareness - only a tiny bit, enough to pick a melody that fits the mood, and to tell when the guests are important. And, in Equestria, music can be turned into magic quite easily, so it can power itself. Music can be used for a variety of purposes; it was the reason for all of the special effects during songs. And Octavia learned how to manipulate it more... consciously. It's the main component of her little Orchestra of Mirrors. Tootsie was overjoyed when she got front-row seats to see Celestia and Luna bring about the dawn, one next to the other. I gave her an origami rose, after twisting the little magic inside of it and adding some of my own; it became prismatic, changing colors more or less at random, or if you shake it, touch it, sing... Before we split each on our own ways, though, I poked and prodded at my own magic. See, Discord had a... peculiar way to leave information for his replacement. He obviously didn't want me to get overwhelmed, but neither did he want to leave me without the more interesting of the... knowledge. Imagine this: You inherit a house, fully furnished, and it's a huge mansion with more secret passages than you can shake a stick at. Everything is in the guise of something else, and you can't know what anything does until you've given it a once over; the statue might be a lathe, the mirror is the secret of self-duplication, and the blender makes his special recipe of chocolate milk only if you put it upside-down and tap the rubber pads in a sequence. Many can be brute-forced or deducted easily, like making cotton candy clouds, and refining the process myself only makes it even easier. I am- wait a sec... ... Yeah, he's still out. Anyways, don't let him know I'm giving him praise, or else he's going to be insufferable. Discord may be mad, and a troll at times, but he is a genius. If you ever hear someone speak of 'ancient, incomprehensible magics' give the idiot a smack on the head for me, alright? Because, unless you are actually dealing with ultra-advanced science-like magic from a lost era that does require an instruction manual just to get the lights on, older magic leans much more heavily on intention, understanding, spirituality, philosophy, and will; if you willingly put it out of your reach with phrases like that, guess what? It will be beyond you! However, if you slowly delve into the roots of the magic itself... you'll gain wings. Discord wasn't content with making a house float about in total defiance of gravity with a snap of his fingers... no, he had to have a town! He did so by understanding things, and how they worked, so that he'd know what to twist with his entertainment-seeking spirit. There were some monsters, in other worlds, that were seeped into the wild magics of - for example - the planet's core; the inhabitants... alright, those things overpowered them severely, and that was the greatest portion of the problem, but! Where they saw 'unstoppable and uncontrollable', we saw 'easily stolen/returned from whence they came'. The less intellect and will behind the magic, the easier it is to direct (so long as you don't do something stupid like trying to outright control something too large for you, be it physically or metaphorically). It's why Discord can turn nature upside-down so easily as compared to Twilight or Celestia. He takes the smallest possible portion of power, gives it a shape, and uses it to conduct the energies of nature in ways that amuse him. Like a crazy straw; he just pulls a little, and things are forced to go where he wants them to. He left me bits of that. Any regular unicorn magic I was going to have to hammer out on my own, conjure, or 'reverse-engineer' from a chaos magic trick, however. Anyways, he also stole magic from... pretty much everything. Only a little, though - like sneaking off with a few drops of blood, something so small that it's recovered overnight. Those pieces are just like blood - they contain a part of your Essence, and can be used to make virtually any piece of the whole. With some chaos magic to provide the bulk, and the 'sliver' as the foundation and the information, it resonates with the spell I am casting, working as a precedent. Once you do something once, it's easier to do again; I had a library of sensations and styles and intents! Not to mention the literal library in the castle. Anyways, I was poking and prodding at the pony magics, trying to see if I could balance them out better - to be more like the princesses rather than a powered-up changeling. I could send the girls back from where they came easily enough, and transporting them in bulk to a single destination (town square) was much easier than one by one. Celestia left to do some paperwork, particularly that of her school. Since I am not the protagonist of a rom-com, sit-com, or cartoon, I managed to notice that all of the little signs from the day before, plus the ones of that very morning, pointed to one thing. Cinnamon and Dusty had a crush on me. Now, as a human, I merely found ponies cute, maybe even pretty, and that was that. Thanks to Zero, though, my human form wasn't in use. And it didn't help that... well, if you know some trivia related to Sparta... add Cinnamon. Yeah. Cough! I don't know how they did it so fast, but Luna had a little circlet for me. When my mane went black, it was silvery, when it went white, it became black - like her regalia. It has a little sapphire in the center, too. The justification being that Discord had that throne thing, or something; my badge of office, too, or something. She took me to the guards' training area, more specifically, the wide, wide courtyard where the guards trained in their flying. Lavender Glade has a dark grey/purplish coat, really dark, almost black mane, and emerald green eyes. And bat wings and cutesy little fangs. Her cutie mark is a couple of lavender flowers over a crescent moon. Firstly, she was all business. She had never had to train a pony that hadn't been graduated with an above-average mark on flight school, much less one that had never flown at all. She had an idea, though; after a small amount of tests, to check for reflexes and overall health, we found out that, indeed, my body and wings worked just like any other's. There were special training harnesses, designed for one pony to carry another - for team training, mostly, although some also used it for strength training. There are instincts, you see, that are ingrained on the body itself... I had to be made aware of them first, though. That's what our talk consisted of, for the time being. I expressed a lot of interest in flight, and thanked her for her time. I was measured, and lunchtime came. "Topsy told me what you did for her." She said, smiling, as we made our way through the mess hall. "Thank you." "I couldn't let her stay like that." I said. "But, what happened to her? Why is she so afraid of Discord? I understand that she didn't like what he did, but that reaction?" "I spoke to princess Luna about that." She said, ears down. "The Elements take their power from the forces behind them, and... they show you. They show you where and when you went wrong as they work their magic. Discord... well, all of this was just speculation from part of the princesses, but - think - what if he turned himself to stone as a reaction? To avoid seeing everything he had done that hurt somepony? And the Elements, as punishment, made him so that he couldn't get out of the stone?" I was... well, I had to admit that that made sense. Celestia and Luna, as much as they wanted him stopped, wanted just that, for him to be stopped - his accusation about the whole stone thing was rather hollow, because it wasn't exactly their choice. It's also the reason why he couldn't get out just like that, but Luna and Nightmare Moon had a set time limit. It wasn't an incontrovertible contract. Celestia didn't want to hurt her sister, but wanted Nightmare gone; Celly was hurt, confused, alone, and very, very desperate (no shape to do magic in that scale); Luna was scared, fighting from the inside, and in a lot of emotional pain (trying to cleanse her like that would have had terrible consequences)... the solution? Individual bearers. Celestia found that Twilight made an even better Element of Magic than herself. Oh, and the Moon and the Stars wouldn't act against their mistress, but neither did they want for her to get her hooves bloodied by a possession. They would hold her, but only for so long. "Crud, and the magical shockwave made her feel some of the consequences of Discord's actions?" I asked, and let out a huff as Lavender nodded. "Dang... and I heard from Luna that her powers are acting oddly, do you think it's related?" "Perhaps." She said, dejected. She could help some - lots, actually - but she couldn't stay with her all the time. Topsy wouldn't let her. A little light bulb appeared, turned on, then disappeared with a poof. "It's the strength." I said. "Discord just gave her power to do as she pleased, but she doesn't know how to use it properly because it's too much too fast!" "Yeah, we figured that, too." She said. "What's your point?" "It's... it's like piling coins." I said, making a bunch of coins that had the size of pennies, but had my marks on the sides. "Babies have surges because they don't get lost in the magic - they are too uncaring of such things." The coins swirled and rolled about the table; Lavender, predictably, tried to follow them with her eyes, either each coin individually, or a small group. She got a headache. "But then the pony grows up, and doesn't feel content with semi-random bursts of power and sheer will - it's too draining for a developed mind, and they can do even greater things." I picked one pseudo-penny with my hoof (I simply do it as if I still had fingers), then placed it in front of me, then a second, and a third, and so on, with care so as to not bump them or place them off-center. "You need to concentrate, though, and work hard. This tower might look impressive, considering I used my own two hooves to make it... yet, for its height, it is barely enough to get me a chocolate bar, much less something I actually need." I picked the next one, only to notice that it had a feather and the symbol for female on one side, with a could with rain on the other. "Huh... but it brings me to my next point." I used magic to make a pile of my size, and placed the coin on the very top. "Discord just gave her a column of coins he piled himself so that she'd go do anything she wanted, and cause chaos right away." I began, then made many more pennies appear. "Ponies like Twilight already have many coins, and just need to learn to stack them and use them without bring it down or pulling others they don't need to use." I made a stack and moved it in front of her, predictably pushing some pennies off the table, and making a mound of them that'd make it impossible for her to pick it up from the base without taking some additional ones. "I, for my part, was given many of them, and in stacks, too." I arranged the pennies in columns of anywhere between a hundred or two hundred, all over the table. "But, to build up, I need to go find those stacks, and carefully move them to some place I can access them." Ponies like Vinyl had a really small amount of pennies, and difficulty in earning more; after stacking them, they'd need to use coupons and take advantage of sales. "She needs to find a way to make the stack hers; she needs to get a feel for her magic on her own, to free it from Discord's influence. And to wash away whatever guilt she might feel; magic, our magic, reacts even faster than normal pony magic to emotions. She was, literally, less than a day old, with the only knowledge of things being what Discord gave her; with about as much influence over him as you have over the Griffon king." Funny story; after three weeks, one 'getting caught with the pants down' moment, and me meeting the king... Moving on! Magic is hard, and as valid a method of doing things as any. If you ever hear someone say 'it's like cheating', then give the idiot a smack in the head for me, alright? Hell, Applejack would ask for you to hold the moron still so that she could aim her buck properly. Even she wouldn't mind magic in the farm - the issue is not 'an honest's day work', rather, that food picked by magic not cast the right way tastes funny. Magic IS an honest day's work, and AJ is all for making things easier for herself so long as it's done properly. Slapping the Alicorn Amulet on your neck is not proper. (Even though it is more of a talisman than an amulet.) Now, managing to gain an understanding of the dark powers enough to keep your moral alignment (and your sanity) untouched? That kind of mastery deserves to be able to wear the thing. (I mean, seriously? Wheels?) Any one, pony or not, saying that magic feels like cheating, or is not honest, or whatever, must remember something. Everything, anything, done by ponies is magic by default. Things crafted by ponies are like, either perfect for enchanting, or lightly enchanted from the get-go. Everything. Magic. No exceptions. Even making something devoid of magic would require magic for the preparation steps, so there. What, do you think those apple trees are so robust and healthy merely because they got lucky? Or that mere strength is enough to dislodge the fruits from their resting place? Or that six ponies, ponies without hands, can raise a barn in about four or five hours (six tops) if there wasn't something magical going on? Taking ponies and the weird world they live in out of the equation. Take Harry Potter, for example; let's say that someone complains of using magic to raise a really tall house like the Weasleys and says that it's cheating, or that traveling by broom is cheating, or tilling the field with magic is cheating... then, is it not cheating to use cranes to lift the incredibly heavy metal beams for skyscrapers? Or travelling by car when you have legs that can walk? Or using a tractor instead of a hoe? Work smarter, people, not harder (if you don't need to). If there is a better method, one that results in getting the work done faster, cheaper, larger, and/or without wasting as much energy, take it. The whole Winter Wrap-Up situation was because they were NOT smart, making the choice to do things the hard way because the settlers had no choice but the hard way. See? Not smart. Seriously, they never had a WWU done in time because they had like... three weather pegasi (that didn't even live there - they were assigned from Cloudsdale) and no unicorns, forcing everypony to do things by hoof, including the dangerous bits like climbing to the roofs to clear the snow - even if it was a really small settlement compared with the present. There was only so much the pegasi would do, what with the pay they were getting, you see; they weren't greedy, but neither would they get too involved with a town that wasn't even theirs, for free, at least. After pegasi actually moved there to make their homes, it became a different story. And, guess what? Moving the clouds, and flying? MAGIC. I can't move too much right now, but picture me doing the whole 'rainbow over my head'/'IMAGINATION' gesture with my arms/forelegs. Anyways, our little chat made us the center of attention, what with me magicking pieces of copper and making me-sized columns of them in the middle of the whole place. Apparently, I could make a lecture that was actually interesting.