Chapter 8 (FLEIJA)
~Tests and Knowledge~
|This is some pretty heavy hitting news, things would change across Equestria if we found that T/5.| Blazing walked out of Pentium Hall and let out a rather exasperated sigh. She looked out into the darkness of the night from the door of the Hall. With her eyes used to the bright light crystals inside, all she could make out in the dark was the cities lone moonlight tower. |What power could they hold now if all we have from them is well over 1000 years old?| She sat on the steps for a few minutes, deep in thought. Her eyes adjusted to the night and wandered around until they found her research lab in the distance.
|I’ve some research to attend to now that I am going on the next mission.| Blazing took to the air and headed for her lab. |So much to do if I want results before my departure.| Her antennae glowed as she rejuvenated the lights by the door. But right before she was going to touchdown she remembered something. “oh how foolish of me!” She needed to gather some information both for her new trip and for the tests here.
She headed to the library and again renewed the lights. |Ksintel! These large public crystals take much energy to rekindle…| She wearily made her way to the central room to start the server. |Somepony here should invest time in a way to make magic as humans did with electricity.| She walked over to a stack of plastic cards and sorted through them, looking for the ones she wanted. |ok, let’s see here, references, cookbooks, math. and uh...Here it is!| She pulled out a card the size of her head with a missing corner. The card fit perfectly in the slot on the table sized server. Blazing put her tiny hoof on a square button and held it down until the edges blinked with blue light.
Then she walked over to the next room that held the main computer. It was the size of a wall, she hovered by one side and woke the device up. It flashed some words and did a small animation before the loading circle appeared. |This thing is so much slower than what it replaced| She sat down and yawned, awaiting the home screen to appear. And appear it did, “Finally,”
Touch this, tap that, input search word here. “T|5, aaand, enter” The machine immediately returned a list of results. |No, not a bacteriophage, not the fifth Terminator movie, wow there’s a lot of model numbers. Hmmm| After much scrolling she found what she was looking for, a PDA.
And there it was, the etching on the sapphire tablet was dead on. There wasn't all that much information for this T|5. It all could be summed up in little more than a page of words. The only things that were talked about were the specifications and it was used for. “...powered by Palm OS 6.2, released in 2005 by Palm Inc.” |Oh well, almost nothing is known about it, the usual| She let out a slightly exasperated sigh and went back to the card room.
She turned off the server and placed the plastic card where it belonged. She was getting tired. Blazing blinked her eyes, warding off the sleep, and went over to some filing cabinets. *Yawn* |I suppose I cannot complain too much, we still have a wealth of information to sift through, but it could’ve been much faster if so much information wasn’t corrupted by the passing of time| The filing cabinet held much smaller and thinner cards; it didn’t take long before her research card was found. She signed some papers letting the library know that she had the card and walked next door to the research facility..
Not surprisingly to Blazing, the place wasn’t empty even in the dead of night. |Good to know I’m not alone…| Looking around real quick, she saw only two others were still there. |Shiyuel Shield and Exel are here so at least they can revitalize the lights| Walking with purpose, Blazing got to her lab, The Studies of Lotekken.
Her area of expertise being light, Blazing’s lab had tons of light bearing apparatus. Her prized discoveries were inspired by human design as well as magic practices. She also owned every laser the flutterponies unearthed. She flew over to her own device, much smaller and older than the one that resided in the library and turned it on. The small card went into a bigger one and then clicked in her device. Immediately the device showed a list of Doc and Excel files from her previous work. Blazing started humming a tune while selecting the information she needed.
Functional Light Enhancing InJection of Aura, just what she was looking for. The burning desire to know flared up inside and gave her the energy she wanted Permission was needed in order to perform the test sooner, but she figured that wouldn’t be of much concern. Instead she started preparing to do the test later on that day.
The hours seemed to blend together, Blazing hardly felt them pass at all. Before she knew it, morning had come. |That’s the trouble with working at night, never can get good sleep in the day,| The morning sunlight was flooding in through a window giving everything in the room a slight yellow tint. |Oh well, it’ll be worth it to see some of this data before leaving|
Since it was morning, the rest of her colleagues began to show up soon after. Blazing politely told each of them when they came in to wait for everyone to get there so she could tell everypony something. it was almost 11am when the last pony flew in.
“May I have you attention please, As you are hopefully aware of, last night the mayor showed the city what the latest expedition found. It is quite the revelation to know Humans may yet exist on some other world. And the tablet gave us hope to solving their mysterious disappearance in an as of yet undetermined period of time between 2043 and now. What you aren’t aware of is that I must go on the next expedition.” The small crowd murmured at this new information. “Hold fast, it was not my idea, I know many projects are coming to a close very soon and you’ll need my help. It’d be a lie to say I wasn’t excited to go. The Council personally asked me to go and I could not refuse. For I alone know the operating system of the device with which we seek.”
Blazing walked over to her desk with a big smile. “Because I must leave by week’s end, I’ve moved our first live test of my arrays to today! I worked furiously in the night to accomplish this. I’ve everything set up on my end, I trust you all know what to do. Now then, Everypony to their posts!” All the flutterponies listening to her scrambled to their positions, they had after all, been preparing for this test for at least two months. Because of Blazing doing the calculations and information set up, only the pieces of equipment needed to be moved.
The fires of curiosity burned within Blazing as she saw everything being set up. She herself made her way to her device, connected to her most powerful laser, and executed a program. “Attention everypony, we have a 25 seconds before our first control test!” She flew up and out to see what would happen. On top of the research building was a hoofmade turret aimed at a distant tree stump. |Any second now…| A quiet beep could be heard from the device as the countdown hit 0. The laser activated and a beam of violet light shot out and, being directed via mirrors by the turret, hit the stump. There was a brilliant bright purple spot on the stump and some white smoke started to drift up. Within seconds the stump caught aflame and the bright almost white spot of purple vanished.
“Wooo! Good job everypony, take a break and reset everything while the laser recharges!” Blazing flew over to the turret and hovered, inspecting it one more time before disappearing below. On her device she saw the laser was at 30% charge and tapped the onscreen button to begin charging the supercapacitor again for another firing. “Hmmm, I may have time yet to record the first test whilst this recharges.” Her eyes looked to the supercapacitor’s charging bar, 20%. |Yeah, I’ll have time| She quickly opened pocket Word and made a new file.
‘... closing, the Spyder VII 12 watt violet laser performed as expected. Nest test will include an experimental magical sigil array.’ After writing a page or so of notes on the experiment, Blazing saved and exited back to the laser’s program, 93%. |It should hardly take another minute| She set the countdown to a minute and thirty seconds from then. A huge grin appeared on her face as she grabbed her template and headed to the turret.
|Concentrate,| She closed her eyes and focussed on her diagram of circles, geometric shapes and Ancient. Blazing calmed her mind and circulated her internal energy within herself and directed it to her antennae and her outstretched hoof. Her eyes opened one last time to get the design just right. |Frenel Lernasenent Entekken, Iizegeneto Jayen Admenit entesnel!!| Her antennae glowed their signature dark aqua color and encircled the template. Slowly the magic focussed on the drawn lines, a small beeping is heard. The circle of magic lifts off the drawn template and hangs in the air where the beam will be. “Frenel Lernasenent Entekken, Iizegeneto Jayen Admenit entesnel!!”
The laser beam shot forth once again, hit all the mirrors like last time and with the same intensity. Except now it collected for a split second into the sigil array. The light and magic merged and became a bright sky blue with a dark blue edge and shot out of the array to the same stump at the speed of light. The sky blue laser penetrated the stump and kept going through other trees behind it, the dark blue encapsulation surrounded the stump almost instantly and it exploded!
The explosion made Blazing lose focus, her sigil dissolved away leaving only the normal violet laser, which promptly shut off after the allotted time. She opened her eyes and looked out at the result. The stump was completely gone, a small crater took its place. The tree behind the stump were on fire with holes right through them. That was a miscalculation, she never thought the power would be this great. The power, when scaled up in terms of the lasers’ energy and magical complexity seemed not to be linear, but exponential.