//------------------------------// // 5.Suspicions // Story: How Hard Could it Be? // by Richardson //------------------------------// 5-Suspicion “And that’s that, Sunbeam. We’re done.” Twilight finished with a flourish of her pen, marking the last name block with an exaggerated period at the end of a long, long form. The small library table was flanked by her, and a sentient mass of paperwork lying flat on the ground that had once been known as Sunbeam, who sighed beneath her fibrous tomb of ink and paper, snorting. Really rather over-dramatic, it was only a couple of hours of paperwork, just because it had collapsed on her was no reason to make a scene. “See, that wasn’t so bad. It only took us five hours to complete, not counting your little break with Princess Luna.” “My paper cuts have paper cuts.” Complained the sentient pile of paperwork as the mare within it pretended to be eaten by the drudgery. Twilight smiled, cheerfully beaming at her assistant despite the mare’s Rarity-like hysterics. She had only been sliced a few dozen times, and not even that badly! Twilight could still recall the times she had gotten paper cuts on her eyes, nose, and lips when a loose leaf stack had fallen over on her. “I would have thought the aloe-lined band-aids would have helped.” Twilight pointed out helpfully, earning a tired groan from her trapped companion. She started humming to herself, a variation of the infamous ‘winter-wrap-up’ song that always got stuck in her head when cleaning up after paperwork. For that matter, she usually got it stuck in every-pony else’s heads as well, and they would complain about for a week afterwards every time, which was silly—it was a great song. Sunbeam groaned once more, twitching her mummified hooves as she was slowly freed from her self-made disaster by Twilight as the young princess sorted out the paperwork. It was only a few dozen paper cuts! She didn’t need so many band-aids. Instead of being relieved at the reprieve of her fate, Sunbeam just forlornly sighed and let her chin flop down with the rest of her head to lie between her forelegs. Twilight bumped her on the shoulder, feeling awkward from the sad look on her face. “Everything will be fine! I’m sure it was more about how you might react to certain things than some kind of inquisition.” She felt like she should watch for Pinkie for a moment. “It was probably just a secret test of character, I think.” It would explain some of the odder questions. Sunbeam moaned again, fluttering her wings by her sides. “Did it have to be so thorough?” Why did she sound so sad? They mostly cared about completion, rather than any specific results. “Well, I suppose so. Ponyvile has a pretty good track record, so they were probably just making sure you’re not a threat to the foals.” Twilight suggested as she sorted through the paperwork further and put it swiftly into the properly itemized triplicate order. It had been a hard-won completion of paperwork. Given the trouble Sunbeam had gone through when answering questions about her foal-hood, and the oddly sad and distant looks she had through most of that section, it had probably just dredged up old memories of loss. Why did she have such troubles with answering questions about her foal-hood, anyway? All her answers were so evasive, so hesitant, so much less boisterous than her normal personality. Sunbeam’s issues almost reminded Twilight of the difficulty Applejack had in describing her own parents. Sure, the tragedy around her sister Moonstar was rather sad, but—No. No, no. It couldn’t be- A repeated insistence on the part of the Crusaders vaguely drifted to the surface of her thoughts. Talk of a sisterly bond with Luna, even though she couldn’t ever remember Luna mentioning Sunbeam before her mentor had come down to Ponyvile. She was pretty sure Sunbeam wasn’t the type somepony just forgot to mention. The name, and the cutie mark, the alleged sister she was sure Sunbeam had never mentioned before, her spell-song abilities, the way Berry looked at her a few times like a pony who had been slapped with a fish by a griffon. Twilight snapped out of her sudden introspection as Sunbeam poked her in the side. She blinked as she realized she had been sorting the papers over and over again, achieving a mathematical perfection of stacking that had the papers tightly enough stacked to look like a giant solid paper-block monolith. Right, distraction. “Say, why don’t you go out and get something to eat? We’re done here, and I can send this stuff on tomorrow, and I have my appointment with—“ “-Date With-“ “—Date with Luna.” Twilight corrected herself, blushing as she realized again what she had agreed to. Shake-shake-shake! No, it was a serious scientific expedition, survey, and further exploration of the stars, with food! And a bigger alicorn who represented her love of the stars in physical form and her love of magic who was smartly dressed and in—Wow, when she internally monologue’d, it sounded like one great big denial. Which was silly, because she was in a crush. “I need to go and get cleaned up for the d—I need to clean up the tree, wait, fortress. So that it’s presentable for Princess Luna’s inspection.” “Uh, huuuh.” Sunbeam winked as she stood up. Small hisses escaped the pegasus as she danced on her paper-lacerated hooves. “Say no more. I’ll get out of you two lovebird’s mane’s.” Sunbeam suggested, flicking her tail lightly as she did, making her ex-student splutter. “Tell me how it goes, have fun, kissy-kissy lots.” Twilight spluttered to herself as Sunbeam sauntered out at a brisk trot while shutting the door to the small library behind her. She was not some love-struck foal who was freaking out over some silly crush dating her like a super-mare! She could prove it by thinking of Luna in an entirely unromantic way! Just because she was a tall alicorn who was wearing a suit so dark that it glittered like the depths of space, representing her character with neatness and precision that culminated in a straight-cut mane with neat little trimmed bangs pinned in place by a set of glasses which were probably enchanted with ways of letting her look at all her paperwork at once so as—why were her cheeks so hot? Had she been drinking hot sauce aga- oh, no. She was going full Spike. She was never supposed to go full Spike, it was a very silly condition. No, stop! Considerations of romantic conditions were supposed to come after practical affairs were taken care of! The silly, stupid idea that Sunbeam might be her mentor was going to eat her mind up with paranoid plots until she knew one way or another, and there was no way to tell for sure whether it was true or not! It wasn’t as if she could somehow examine Sunbeam and prove she was Celestia! Any spell would have to be nearly physically perfect, with some way of making morphological changes while somehow projecting a Celestia to avoid detection! The only way to tell would be to- She already had the results, didn’t she? The recording charts from the thaumatoscope, and comparison tapes of Rainbow Dash, herself, and Rarity. Alicorns were a completely different race, their biological thaumic patterns would show distinct tell-tale signs! Twilight carefully scooted away from the perfectly stacked paperwork, focusing inwards as she wondered if maybe she didn’t want to know. No, stop! She had to! Locking out her doubts and potential romantic feelings which were most certainly not romantic feelings, and some niggling words from Luna, she teleported out of the small side-library to her barren and yet to be furnished office. Popping back into the universe from her teleport, she looked around the room for the tubes holding the records from the earlier recording sessions. Her office was deep in the interior of the tree, windowless but spacious enough for a great deal of furnishings. Not that she had any yet, save for her desk, because she was too busy being busy with Ponyvile, and she needed to stick to her plan one day so she could fix it up. But that was okay, as it left plenty of room for her to store the records from her thaumatoscope. And the giant pile of paperwork that the nobles wanted her to sign, but they could all go screw themselves until she talked with Luna. Twilight smiled as she spotted the eight tubes and hopped over her low desk to them, snapping the first one’s seals with an eager twist of magic applied to the end. She had some force-pins to stick them magically to the wall, where were they? Oh, right, her desk! In the Golden Oaks, which was now ashes and splinters. Just mem- No, she couldn’t handle that yet, it was still too soon. With a sweep of her wing, she cleared the non-existent dust from her desk and laid the first records out flat. Oh hey, Berry’s! Wow, it was so strange, so alien! Where a normal pony would have synchronized rhythms of magic pulses, Berry’s was so noisy and scattered as to nearly drown out any signs of a pattern. And even if it was there, it seemed so alien to her; a gnarled sorting of peaks and waves that she found hard-pressed to pick discernable activity out of. There was one fairly clear pattern out of all of the mess, the line that measured the brain’s interaction with the body’s biologically generated magic fields. Where a normal pony’s reading would be a slow and steady harmonic sine wave with varying amounts of noise; Berry’s was strange, a pattern that was modulated into lingering noisy peaks before suddenly cutting down to bare minimum in a single second to bumble along at the bottom of her thaumatoscope’s sensor range. No, no, Berry was interesting, but she needed to find two in particular! She wrapped Berry’s scan-sheet back up and stuck it back in its tube for later inspection, then pulled the next out of the neat stack. Whipping the record out, she checked the label and felt a little drop of disappointment in her heart. Drat, Rarity's. Interesting, though. It had a similar peculiar set of patterns to ones she had seen on her own records as a foal. Most of the scans were at a lower pattern and pulse than hers had ever been, but the lines that recorded the activity in the fine motor-control of magic auras and a few others related to it were raised higher than her own and pulsed more rapidly. Fair enough, pretty standard. No. Interesting, but no. She needed to stop distracting herself with irrelevant data. Popping the next seal after storing Rarity’s graphs, she groaned aloud as she found Dash’s readout. An alien spray of squiggles, but there was a reason to the madness. It was strong overall, with several rapid-fire cadences of beats within the readings. The pattern that showed the biological production of magic in particular had a strong and clear rhythm of beats, an almost watch-like churning that made sense given the need of pegasi to produce magic constantly to maintain altitude on long flights. Unicorns produced magic at a rate slower and less steady, but stored more in several specialized organs given the race’s predilection for instantaneous feats instead of feats over time. Snorting in frustration for a second, Twilight wondered if Sunbeam had already stolen away her records. No, she hadn’t shown any signs of that. Well, seeing a pegasus’s pattern was useful for being able to further differentiate an alicorn’s. Not all wasted. Twilight checked the next one, and carefully withdrew her own records. There was a bit of noise in the beginning and the ends of the graphs, caused by her fight-or-flight reflexes spiking her magic usage, but enough of it was clear to get a good feel for an alicorn’s beats. There, emblazoned for all the world to see, were the strong spikes of energy from her youth, the nearly perfect and noiseless patterns of the harmonic brain/magic correlator, the perfect timing matches from her biological rhythms. Not even Dash’s rhythms had been so well matched. But, wait—she thought back to Dash's, and realized in a moment that what she had once thought to be noise upon her old graphs might not have been at all. They were tiny spikes of Pegasus and what she presumed to be earth pony magic. With her ascension, those old squiggles had transformed from tiny squiggles interrupting the clear harmonics into full-fledged secondary patterns that were carefully and clearly aligned into a set of resonating frequencies, all reverberating and pulsing together. Rapid-fire pulses of energy all coalescing together into resonant patterns of magic that all supported and probably strengthened one another. It was strange, her internal production resembled Dash’s, her capacity and the output pathways looked strange as well, not even counting the completely alien scribbles from her wings that her poor instruments didn’t even know what to do with. There was a deep and powerful pulse beneath her tickovers, maybe earth pony magic resonations? She could see a clear set of peaks after her standard unicorn magic signatures, which was probably the earth pony high magic component; but there was an overall pattern of energy pulsing, almost indiscernible, that rose and fell several times over the course of her recordings, faint, but pulling all the energies up before slowly departing again and repeating. Almost resembling the faster perfect harmonic sine pulse from her mind/magic transfer. She pulled her friend’s charts back out to compare them. The slow pulse was far weaker in both of their charts, but was still faintly there. Stranger still was the slight noise for both of them, fainter than her own childhood ‘noise’ rhythms, but still there—out of sync. Theirs didn’t resonate, instead clashing and driving up the noise ratio, their strange outliers only becoming properly visible as miniscule peaks in the troughs of their low-power states. Similarities, similarities with her old lines. Thinking back, she recalled ever so slightly that her own ‘noise’ had always been resonating well with her magic. Could it have been precursor patterns, maybe magic transmitted back from her current state, or a hint that she could have gone alicorn? No-wait… She set all the records aside and grabbed the three sets bundled together. They had to be the crusaders. A little delay couldn’t hurt, not if her new suspicions were correct. She had a few minutes still. She popped the seals on the trio’s records and laid them out carefully in comparison to her own on the floor. But—the records couldn’t be right, could it be contami-no, residual localized leakage required them to be hugging each other. But the noise, the resonances, they so resembled her old— Twilight’s eyes widened as her breath hitched ever so slightly. No, but yes. Outside of the strong peaks of their racial lines—Applebloom’s confirming her suspicions on the earth pony waveform—there were clear lesser, somewhat resonant peaks. Faint, hidden among the odd general clutter of their readings, but the peaks were there, almost in the same resonance as her current ones. The racial patterns were all clear when she knew what to look for. No, no! She couldn’t tell them! They’d try to figure out the spell, and either kill themselves, go mad, or if Discord was willing—actually succeed. Then all Tartarus would break loose. If the nobles found out, they’d be all over the poor fillies in a heartbeat. She couldn’t tell any-pony—not their sisters or would-be family, especially not them, and maybe not even Luna. No, they’d talk, they’d know, they’d—she had to hide the evidence. But—if they had such strong patterns, how could they not have their cutie marks yet from something, anything? She had her cutie mark at their age. Was it, no, maybe Dash’s first Rainboom acted as a carrier wave to make it easier for her. That had to be it, their resonance simply made it harder for her. The odd modulation in their mind/magic line was just a side-effect of not having their cutie marks yet. They’d still get them, and then everything would be fine when they were settled down with something unambitious and not world changing so they wouldn’t become mad alicorns of chaos. --Somewhere else, Applebloom wondered why she sneezed so suddenly. She was wearing proper protection from the fumes that the welder she was helping Scootaloo operate, so what gave? Scootaloo just thumped her for a little more energy from the magic potion tank to keep welding the structural frame.— Twilight looked around, a paranoid corner of her mind thinking that she might already be under watch. No, no more speculation, she needed to hide the evidence where she could look at it later. Stuffing the records roughly—for her—back into their tubes, she teleported them up to a secret compartment in her room; she needed to spend tomorrow night looking at them. No need for any noble, or Sunbeamy-lestia, or Luna, or ugh, Rarity to find out. No need at all, nope. That only left the last one. Did she dare open it? Dare to know, and find out if her mentor was lying to her like she clearly wouldn’t? Or did she dare to destroy it? Luna’s words about Celestia’s mental state whispered sillibantly in her mind, worming like a serpent into her mind to plant a seed of doubt. Wreck, nervous break, overworked, like me before my nightmare, not quite right in the head. It was like the Crystal Box, only there was no castle special prize inside. So be it. The seal popped off, and she let gravity start to do the work, no need for her to sully her hooves with the knowledge. But she stopped with the results less than a third of the way out of the tube, her hoof holding it from passing any further. She could see the firm presses of the recording needles where they nearly ripped through the sheet; presses bouncing off the upper bounds of every visible category like a seismograph reading in the middle of a cataclysmic earthquake. Paper slid back into its tubular home again, then fell into darkness as the cap was sealed tight and magically fused shut and warded against opening, then found itself lost in the secret armory of the old Everfree Castle. She was too afraid to know.