//------------------------------//
// On the Shoulders of Ancient Giants 
// Story: The Most Dangerous Game 
// by uberPhoenix 
//------------------------------//

Your name is TWILIGHT SPARKLE. You are a bit of a MAGICAL PRODIGY.  You are also a bit of an egghead.

Your intense focus on your studies have earned a reputation for BEING A HUGE NERD.  You weren't strong, and you didn't have BEWITCHING GOOD LOOKS, so you took pride in your intellect.  Your new friends have come to appreciate that side of you too, and you consider yourself AWFULLY LUCKY to have friends like them.

Since foalhood, MAGIC has always come easily to you, but you have many other interests as well.

Such as...

Such as...

Well, you're open to TRYING NEW THINGS. That COUNTS AS AN INTEREST, right? Alas, you fear that it DOES NOT.

You like making schedules!  And doing research!  You don't care what anypony else says, nothing beats the excitement of DUSTING OFF AN OLD BOOK, grabbing a nice steamy mug of HOT CHOCOLATE, and curling up with your number one assistant to read.

What will you do?

You will clarify some things said by your page.  After all, you feel you have a lot of explaining to do.

[nebularOedipus created journal entry “On The Shoulders of Ancient Giants”]

I want to get this out in the open before you jump to any conclusions.

I didn't mean to leave Rainbow Dash hanging for a month.  I was going to talk to her the next day and explain myself, but something unexpected happened.

My Pestertome went missing.  I could only conclude that I had misplaced it someplace, which surprised me.  I usually keep excellent track of my belongings.  For weeks I tried to find it, but it never turned up again.

I would later acquire another tome, albeit with a different handle.  But for the time being, I was cut off from communication with my friends.  I know I could have sent a letter by mail, if only to keep my promise to Rainbow Dash and explain my lack of promptness, but a nagging sensation kept me from it.  After all, what if the tome turned up the next day?  I didn't want to embarrass myself.  Rainbow would never let me live it down.

In the meantime, my research with the princess continued.

I should explain.  I didn't want to leave my friends behind for this project.  They had become very close to me during my stay in Ponyville.  But some offers are simply to good to pass up, some mysteries too intriguing to ignore.

The Frog Temple definitely counted as intriguing.

According to the princess, a small team of archaeologists had been investigating what they had initially believed to a temple built by one of the very early griffin tribes.  However, the architecture didn't match anything they had ever seen before, and when the building's walls were analyzed, the team discovered an abundance of multiple rare elements that didn't turn up anywhere else in at least hundreds of miles.  The only sensible conclusion the archaeologists came to was that the temple had, somehow, been transplanted, moved across the country from its original location.

But griffins had never had access to magic or technology that was capable enough to perform such a task.  And when the preserved remains of an equine creature where discovered deep within the complex, the final nail was driven into the coffin.  The bones were dated back hundreds of millions of years, back before any civilization capable of building such a temple should have existed.

The word the report had chosen to describe the events was “impossible.”

As a scientist, this choice of wording bothered me.  If the discovery was impossible, the team would not have discovered it.  The ruins had most definitely been discovered.  Ergo, this was not impossible.

But it was still something I had to see for myself.  The princess, the oldest living thing in Equestria, had been asked for her input on the matter, and I had been invited to go with her.

As the chariot carried the two of us toward our destination through the arid northern sky, I resisted the urge to solve the puzzle of the ruins.  The ruins could wait; it wasn't as if they would vanish overnight.  For a couple of hours, I was alone with princess, and I wanted to make the most of it.

In many ways Princess Celestia is like a mother to me.  Nearly all of the important lessons I had learned before Ponyville I had learned from her.  But I couldn't help but feel that our relationship had become at least slightly strained during my years away from Canterlot, and it felt good to be able to catch up, in person.

The three hours in the air weren't nearly enough.  And in the last couple minutes of our journey, as we approached our destination, all conversation ceased, and I got my first real look at what we were dealing with.

The structure was massive, and incredibly well preserved for something that was ostensibly millions of years old.  In the center was a obelisk, towering stories above us.  Looking at the shape atop the tower, I discovered why it had been called “The Frog Temple.”  A single massive statue of a frog sat on top, and I swore it was looking at me.  The building was ringed by a circle of eight smaller pillars, each a couple of feet in diameter and crested with a perfect stone sphere.

I would come to spend much of my time over the next couple months investigating these ruins.  As it turned out, something that had only briefly been mentioned in the paper the princess had received, the interior of the ruins was filled with symbols drawn in a language neither the princess nor I had even seen before in any of our studies.  Not only did it not bear resemblance to any known languages, it didn't appear to follow any patterns associated with language, either.  It seemed random and meaningless, and for the most part only consisted of the same four symbols, repeated over and over.  Without some sort of key, I didn't think we would be able to translate it.

We finally found the key a week later.  In an attempt to map the layout of the ruin's interior, we discovered a sealed room in the basement.  Removing part of the wall, much to the horror of one of the archaeologists, we discovered the biggest piece of the puzzle yet.

The room was octagonal, and each wall except for the two a quarter turn from me, in addition to more of the strange symbols, contained a a single large image.  I looked at each of them in turn, and I felt an increasing sense of dread.  I had seen these before.  I knew them intimately.  Counting off the five pictures on five of the seven other walls, I braced myself before turning over the section we had cut out, hoping I was wrong but knowing I wasn't.  The final symbol revealed itself.

A six pointed star, surrounded by five smaller stars.  My cutie mark.

If your kind doesn't have them, then in brief, a cutie mark is a special marking that appears on every pony when they discover their special talent.  Now, seeing my mark appear on something older than I was isn't that shocking.  Marks do repeat themselves, after all, even if mine was one of the rarer ones.  But the coincidence of the other pictures on the other walls was too much for me to take.

A cloud with a lightning bolt attached.  Three balloons.  Three diamonds.  Three apples.  Butterflies.  The marks of my best friends.

I didn't know how to react to this.  But Celestia did.  She called over the captain of the excavation team and asked her a very unusual request.  It was a hunch, she said, but she wanted them to check it out anyways.

As it turned out, her hunch was completely correct.  Some of the surrounding rock the structure stood upon was metamorphic, severely warped by heat.  And it contained trace amounts of minerals that weren't even found on the planet.

In other words, the area surrounding the Frog Temple was completely consistent with the conditions of a meteor crash site.  Except, of course, that someone had built some ruins on top of it.

Or maybe not.  Further analysis revealed that the surrounding stone pillars were slightly warped as well, which didn't make much sense.

I finally asked the princess how she knew about the meteor.  Her answer surprised me.

Many years ago, a meteor struck the Canterlot Palace, landing in the gardens.  When the guards inspected it, they found a foal inside, who had miraculously survived the descent.  That pony was me.  Celestia, realizing that a tiny pony was certain to raise questions, gave me up to my parents, who agreed to raise me as their own until it seemed appropriate for Celestia to take me back.

I tried to think about what this meant.  Did my other friends fall from the sky too?  I knew that Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash grew up in an orphanage together.  But what about Applejack?  She lived with her family on the farm.  She had her Granny Smith, and Apple Bloom and Big MacIntosh.

But no parents.

Assuming this was all true, I asked Celestia what it meant.

“What it means,” she said to me,  “is that these ruins aren't from Equestria.  And neither are you.  You both came from someplace else.”

I asked her where, and she didn't have the faintest idea.  But she did know something else that chilled me.

Whatever event brought the Temple to Equestria, and later had brought me, was happening again.  There had been half a dozen meteor strikes in Equestria in the past year, far more than were statistically likely.  And they were clustered; the rate at which they fell accelerated toward the end of the year, indicating that, for all we knew, more meteors were on their way and would arrive in the near future.  What had been even stranger about them, though, was the fact that none of them had been spotted more than a day before they touched down, even though, based on their trajectories, they should have been seen coming for months.  It was almost as if the meteors had just materialized a day's journey from the planet.

At first thought, this seemed plainly impossible.  But after everything else I had seen that day, impossible was quickly becoming nothing more than a word.  I was getting ready to accept just about anything.

But the hidden room, as much as it unsettled me, also gave me the key I needed to crack the puzzle.  In the center of the room was a platform with what looked like a flowering bud on it, except the bud appeared to be made of jade.  Printed on the pedestal (and here I hesitate out of fear you won't believe me, for I barely believe it myself,) I found a digital countdown.

One month.  The wait was aggravating, and as if to prove Celestia's point, three more meteors fell during that time, one of them far too close to Canterlot for my comfort.  None of them had anything inside them.  (We checked.)  In the meantime I tried my best to decode the language on the wall, but to no avail.  I began to suspect that, if they meant anything, it wasn't a normal written language, but something else entirely.  Besides, I don't think I was really able to focus on it.  We were all much too curious about the timer.  One of the archaeologists was worried we were dealing with a bomb and should get as far away as possible, while another was concerned that if we weren't present at the moment the countdown hit zero, we would miss whatever it was counting down to.  The decision was made that the princess and I would stay behind, after we both promised to teleport out the moment anything started to go wrong.  The princess believed that, should worst come to worst, she would be able to protect me.

In the meantime, I had a lot to keep me occupied.  I had been working on a pet project of mine, a tool that would allow me to keep in touch with my friends, no matter how separated we were.  If it worked, it could revolutionize communication across Equestria.  I managed to build six prototypes, one for me and each of my friends.  The idea was that each device, which took the form of a small book, was capable of synchronizing its contents with another book, allowing the owners to write in them and have the other see what was written.  Each book required a different two-letter signature so that they could detect and distinguish each other.  For ease of use, I gave each book a different name based on the signature and the pony meant to receive it.

Rather than sending instructions, I opted to send the tomes by themselves, allowing my friends to figure out how they functioned on their own.  I admit, I was a bit curious to see which of them would figure it out first and talk to me.

As it turned out, the first pony to reach me was Rainbow Dash.  She has already included a transcript of the conversation in our first entry, but I have decided to include it again here.  If you are already familiar with it, feel free to skip ahead.  Since this is meant to be an encyclopedia, however, I have decided to err on the side of over-saturating the message.  It is better to have this log run long than short.

obstinateNarcoleptic [ON] began nickering precociousPerfectionist [PP]

ON:  twilight
ON:  is that you
ON:  ?
PP:  Rainbow Dash?
PP:  Huh.  I didn't think you would be the first to figure out how to work this thing.
PP:  No offense.
PP:  You're not offended, are you?
ON:  hays yeah
ON:  you implying i cant figure out a silly magic book
ON:  ?
ON:  thing was a piece of cake
ON:  sliced and served with a side of buck you
ON:  im not stupid
PP:  I'm so sorry, Rainbow Dash!
PP:  I didn't mean to imply that you were.
PP:  I suppose I should be more careful about how I word things.
ON:  nah
ON:  its cool
PP:  Pardon?
ON:  youre right
ON:  i didnt know what i was doing until pinkie gave me some help
PP:  Pinkie Pie is with you?
ON:  what
ON:  no
ON:  i just got done talking to her with the book
PP:  Pestertomes.
ON:  what
PP:  The books are called Pestertomes.
PP:  And Pinkie has hers already?  According to my tome, she hasn't opened hers yet.
PP:  Her friendhandle is still greyed out.
ON:  odd
ON:  we just chatted i swear
PP:  I guess my tome isn't picking up the signal from hers.
PP:  Can't imagine why, though.
PP:  How is Pinkie Pie doing, anyway?
PP:  Seeing how apparently I can't talk to her.
ON:  shes just being pinkie pie
ON:  she left ponyville because of some dream where she saw a volcano
ON:  so she left to find one
ON:  do you think its possible that pinkie pie is seeing the future in her dreams like she told me
ON:  like a weird extension of her pinkie sense
ON:  i mean the volcanos a sign right
PP:  Not necessarily.
PP:  She left because she wanted to find the volcano in her dream.
PP:  She actively worked to make her vision come true.
PP:  Because she had the vision, it ended up becoming a reality.
PP:  Here in Canterlot, we call that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
PP:  It doesn't mean anything unless Pinkie Pie sees something that she had no way of controlling and no way of knowing about ahead of time.
PP:  That would prove it, I think.
PP:  But until then, she's just a mare with strange dreams.
ON:  so pinkie pie being pinkie pie
PP:  Pretty much.
PP:  I'm more surprised she was able to get to a volcano in a day.
ON:  twilight
ON:  pinkie pie left a week or two ago
PP:  But you told me you were just talking to her.
ON:  yes
ON:  over your silly book
PP:  Pestertome.
ON:  whatever
ON:  over perstertome
ON:  i thought we'd already been over that
ON:  pay attention
PP:  But I just mailed her tome to Sugar Cube Corner.
PP:  If she left a week ago, how did she get her hands on a tome that arrived in Ponyville today?
ON:  its a mystery
ON:  and speaking of mysteries
ON:  where have you been
ON:  whats been keeping you so busy you cant talk to your best friend in equestria
ON:  thats me by the way
PP:  I'm really sorry, Rainbow Dash.
PP:  I've been working on some very urgent things with the princess.
PP:  I promise I'll explain eventually.
ON:  eventually
ON:  as in not now
ON:  or anytime in the foreseeable future
PP:  You have to understand, Rainbow, that there's a lot more at stake here then you know.
PP:  I don't want to speak too soon, but I think that I may have been tasked with saving all of Equestria.
PP:  And I may need your help to do it.
PP:  When the time comes, the six of us need to be prepared.
PP:  I'm just doing my best to ensure our chances of success.
ON:  fine
ON:  im not saying you have to spill all your state secrets
ON:  just try to keep in touch next time
ON:  do you really not have time to write to us
ON:  ?
PP:  Sorry.
PP:  That's one of the reasons I made these Pestertomes.
PP:  It will let you talk to me any time I'm not busy, without the delays of the mail system.
PP:  As an added bonus, I imagine it would help you guys talk to each other too.
ON:  fine
ON:  just promise me you wont wait months to talk to us again
PP:  I promise.
PP:  I have to go now.  The princess wants to talk to me.
ON:  okay
ON:  talk to you later
PP:  Agreed.
ON:  wait
ON:  one more thing
ON:  howd you know it was me
ON:  we all have these strange names
PP:  I chose the names when I made the books.  Do you like them?
ON:  what the hay is an obstinate anyway
PP:  It means you aren't stopped easily.
ON:  good
ON:  for a second i thought you were trying to make fun of me
ON:  by giving me a name that meant something stupid
ON:  id walk around and all the eggheads would laugh at me
PP:  Nopony would laugh at you, Rainbow Dash.
PP:  I promise.


obstinateNarcoleptic [ON] ceased nickering precociousPerfectionist [PP]


I double checked Pinkie Pie's status again, just in case.  She was still disconnected.  How Rainbow Dash had managed to talk to her, I had no idea.

That was the first of a number of questions I would later have involving Pinkie Pie.  As it turned out, she may have had a leg up on us this whole time.

I was unable to pursue the matter further, as Celestia and I had work to do.  The timer in the ruins had reached its last day.  When the time came, the princess and I stood before the device, both of us visibly shaking with nervous anticipation.  As it turned out, the actual effect was incredibly underwhelming.  When the timer expired, the bud on the pedestal opened, as if it were an actual flower.  Hesitantly, I tiptoed forward to get a look at the contents.

A scroll.  As soon as I removed it, the flower closed with the sound of grinding stone, and the timer lit up again, this time displaying a thousand years.

I didn't find it as odd at the time as I do now, that we had discovered the ruins just in time to witness the flower open for the only time in the next thousand years.  Now that I look back on this story, I realize that it is filled with coincidences.  Events with infinitesimal odds that, through Fate or Destiny, somehow all managed to occur, as if there were an invisible architect manipulating our adventure.  Whether the odds had decided to be merciful to us, or whether they had willed the cruelest fate to befall us, I am not certain.  Nor do I believe I will ever be certain, so long as I continue to ponder what might have been.

Unfurling the scroll, I read what I realized was the blueprint of a spell.  It was a modified version of a fairly basic spell, one that all students at the Canterlot School for Gifted Unicorns had been taught.  The spell was an Emulator, a magical container of sorts that stored the information needed to use other magic with a great degree of finesse.  It was, in more simple terms, a spell that could cast other spells.

I was trying to figure out why this would be here, of all things, when I saw the symbols on the wall, and everything clicked into place.

The symbols didn't resemble any language because it wasn't language, but an algorithm.  The runes were a set of instructions for casting a specific spell, and the spell had been encoded into the walls of the temple itself.

Four different letters.  What other well-known code came in fours?  I was looking at a genetic sequence.  Magic came from living creatures, so although I had never heard of a spell encoded in DNA before, I didn't want to rule it out as an impossibility.  All I had to do was translate each genetic triad into its corresponding instruction and see how they interacted...

Which was precisely why I had been given the Emulator.  I was beginning to suspect that it was no coincidence that I had been given the exact tools I needed to succeed.  Someone or something either wanted to help me succeed, or wanted to see if I was capable of solving the problems presented to me.  It was almost like a test, or a game.

What would have happened if we had been too late?  I never would have read the scroll and learned how to translate the symbols in the ruins.  I never would have built the Genetic Emulator.  We would never have caused the events that predicated our own birth, or the launching of the meteors.

Equestria would not have been reduced to rubble.  Of course, I had no knowledge of this at the time.  All I knew was that I had finally figured out how to solve a puzzle that had been taunting me for a month.  There was no chance I was going to give up now, and so I set to work decoding the sequence.

And now we reach the embarrassing part of the story, but the part I was hasty to mention before.  I lost my Pestertome.  When I had time, I searched everywhere for it, in the ruins and in the castle, but it was gone.  But those moments were few and far between.  Now that I thought I knew how to translate the symbols, I spent most of my time making a record of the entire sequence within the temple.  As it turned out, there were two separate spells written into the temple walls.  One of them was simple, and I understood it almost completely just by analyzing it.  The spell created a beacon, which the second more difficult spell would track.

To uncover the purpose of the second spell, however, I saw only one conceivable choice.  I needed to test it out for myself.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, the spells didn't function properly, or at all, when the sources were too close to one another.  The signals were interfering.  I was going to need an assistant to help me.  For that, I was going to need to contact a friend.

And for that I was going to need to bite the bullet and obtain a replacement Pestertome.

I crafted a new one and proceeded to name it by writing my friendhandle onto the front cover:


precociousPerfectionist


To my surprise, the ink faded as the tome rejected the name it had been given, displaying a message:


Error 12: Namespace Conflict


This was reasonable.  The tome must be detecting my old copy and refusing the accept a duplicate name.  I groaned as I realized that while that protection seemed like a good idea at the time, I was going to have to abide by my own rules, inconvenient as they were.

I was trying to conceive a new friendhandle to use when the princess's sister, Luna, found me.  While not involved in the research we were doing, she had been watching with keen interest.  We had no secrets to hide from her.  She watched as I tried again, using a modified version of my old name.


precociouslyPerfectionistic


That name was rejected too.  I realized that since the tomes recognized each other based on the acronym, not the name itself, I couldn't reuse PP.

At this point, Luna decided to lend a hoof.  “May I?” she asked, and I passed her the quill.  She pulled the tome out of sight and scrawled something.  When she turned around to return the tome to me, she was smiling mischievously.  I glanced down at the name she had given it, which had been accepted.


nebularOedipus


My jaw dropped.  I might have begun to stutter.  I don't really remember.  All I do know is that my reaction made Luna burst into laughter.  She frequently liked to joke about my closeness with her sister, often insinuating that which was rather unsavory, but this was taking things a step too far.

Unfortunately, the tome chimed as it accepted the name and locked NO in as its signature.  If I wanted to change it now, I was going to need a different phrase with the same acronym.  I think I swore Luna off at this point, but it only made her laugh harder.

“It's okay,” she teased.  “I'm won't stand in your way.  I think your fillyhood crush is cute.”

If I wasn't about to use the book, I would have thrown it at her.

As it was, however, I had plans to make.  I opened the tome to contact Rainbow Dash, but I made a discovery first.

There were six other names, as expected.  But my old handle, precociousPerfectionist, was gone.  In its place was a new one, a name I had no explanation for:


precognitivePrognostic


The hay?  The handle color was pink, the same shade of pink yeastedOatmeal would have been if it wasn't still grayed out.  Curious, I tapped it and began writing.

Rainbow Dash: Check Mail