//------------------------------// // Princess Celestia's Good Advice That Twilight Doesn't Take // Story: Signal to Noise // by alarajrogers //------------------------------// "Dear Twilight, I can certainly understand your feelings – the destruction of a book is a sad thing indeed, and even damage is painful. I am sure the disappearance of over three hundred books has upset you greatly. But in the end, do remember that they are just books, not living ponies. They cannot feel pain. Please remain calm and do not do anything rash. Once you identify who is taking the books, I can send the Royal Guard to apprehend them and return your books to you, but do not try to confront this book thief yourself. Sincerely, Princess Celestia." Spike finished reading the letter triumphantly. "Don't confront the book thief myself? She can't mean that! I'm the Ponyville librarian! I have to get those books back no matter what!" Twilight scrunched her mane in frustration. Surely her mentor hadn't meant for her to just stand by and let the Royal Guard gallop in and deal with this book thief? From Shining Armor's letters to her, she knew that most of the Guard didn't even read – Shining was one of the most intellectual ponies in the Guard, or had been before he moved to the Crystal Empire. Would they take proper care of her books? Would they even care that books were missing? "Maybe she means we should do it for you!" Rainbow Dash said. "I could go kick their flank for you, Twilight! Soon as you find out who it is, I could charge right in there and pow!" "I really appreciate the offer," Twilight said. "Especially since I know you don't care so much about books." "Yeah, well, nerds have to have something to do on the weekends too, right? Besides, you said the thief took copies of all the Daring Do books!" "We've got three copies of each and he or she didn't take the autographed ones, so at least there's that, but yes, there's one copy missing of each book in the series." "Then there you go! Plus, they messed with my friend! Most books might be totally lame, but you like them and wanna protect them, so that means that messing with the books is messing with you, and nopony messes with Rainbow Dash's friends!" "Still, I do think this situation might call for some diplomacy," Rarity said. "Anypony with the ability to take so many books directly under Twilight's nose... well, darling, perhaps we should be grateful that this thief only took books." "Only took books?" Twilight was outraged. "Only? How could this possibly be any worse?" "They could be an evil pony bent on world domination," Rarity pointed out. "If they're so powerful and so cunning as to take so many books from you, when you're one of Equestria's most powerful unicorns, perhaps the most powerful unicorn... well, I shudder to think who you might be up against. What if the miscreant is in essence another Sombra? Except with less dark magic and crystals, and more stealing books." "I suppose..." Twilight mumbled. "Who cares? Once I punch 'em in the face it doesn't matter who they are, they'll be out like a light! And then Twilight can get her books back!" Rainbow said enthusiastically. "Rainbow, we're not punching anypony in the face! And anyway if anypony gets to punch somepony in the face for stealing books, it's going to be me," Twilight said. "You told me you weren't going to punch anypony in the face!" Spike wailed. "Well, I don't think so, but if it's some evil unicorn using dark magic to steal books I might have to." "Why would an evil unicorn use dark magic to steal books?" Applejack asked. "You gotta be reasonable here, sugarcube. Your books are great, ain't knockin' them, but I can't see them bein' so great that somepony's gotta use dark magic to steal 'em. This is a library. Why didn't they just come check the books out?" "That's what I want to know! Although if they were going to be such a slob and ruin the books they took out I would never have let them take out three hundred." "Who even has time to read three hundred books?" Pinkie said. "I read super duper fast but even I couldn't read three hundred books in a few weeks, so I would only take out a few at a time! That's mean to everypony who wants to use the library to take them all out at once! Then nopony else can read them!" "Doesn't make them an evil unicorn, though," Applejack said. "Just an inconsiderate jerk." "Speaking of inconsiderate jerks, didja think maybe Discord did it?" Rainbow asked. Twilight sighed. Fluttershy wasn't here, so she could speak frankly. "I thought about it, but this isn't his MO for a prank. If he was taking out the books to ruin my day he'd do it in front of my face so I'd know about it, and taking out a lot of books doesn't seem like much of a secret nefarious plan to spread chaos." "But what if he just wanted to read them?" Pinkie asked. Twilight gave Pinkie a look. "Knowing Discord, do you seriously think he'd like to sit still and read?" she asked. "Sometimes I sit still and read! It's hard to read when you're bouncing because then your eyeballs go up and down, up and down, and you can't keep your place on the page, so you have to sit still when you read!" "Yeah, well, the total lack of consideration for other ponies would be something I'd expect from Discord, but I just can't imagine him wanting to read. I mean, he eats books. How could you be a pony who likes to read if you're willing to ruin books?" "Technically speaking he only ate individual pages," Rarity pointed out. "Though it was still a terrible thing to do to the books, I would imagine." "Exactly. Ponies who like to read show books some respect. Even this jerk who's a book thief hasn't ripped any pages out. They're just a total slob." "You think we should ask him anyway?" Rainbow Dash asked. "It ain't like he'd tell the truth," Applejack said. "Anyway, if Twilight doesn't think it's Discord then we shouldn't be standing around blamin' him. That's not gonna get her books back." "What if Princess Celestia herself took them as a test, Twilight?" Rarity asked. "But... Princess Celestia would never ruin books!" "But think. She instructed you to fight King Sombra without the Elements or our assistance. Had you failed that test, darling, the Crystal Ponies would be enslaved and you might be... well, considerably worse off than being a librarian facing the loss of three hundred books. So few of the books have been returned damaged, perhaps this is a test of your temperament. She advised you to remain calm and to direct the Royal Guard to the culprit once you find them. Could this be a test to see if you can remain calm in the face of such a dire provocation?" Twilight considered. It was true that Princess Celestia had set her a very, very difficult test earlier this year. It was also true that Twilight's early lessons with Princess Celestia had focused heavily on self-control and reigning in negative emotions. And it was true that Princess Celestia's magic was very likely up to the task of stealing that many books. But she just couldn't believe her mentor would do this to her, knowing how much she loved books. "Princess Celestia didn't do this. I feel certain of it." "Well, then I'm quite puzzled," Rarity said. "We don't need to be solvin' this for Twilight, though. I think the plan to stake out the books with your magic is a good one, Twi. Just... listen to what the Princess said, and don't do anything rash once you find out who it is." Twilight laughed. "Don't be silly! Of course I'll listen to the Princess, I always listen to the Princess! I won't do anything crazy." "That's good." Once her friends had gone, Twilight went about the library reinforcing the locator spells on the books. Spike appeared to be nervous for some reason. "You're really going to do what the Princess said and not go running off to catch this book thief when you find them, right?" "Don't be silly, Spike, when have I ever not done what the Princess asked me to do?" Spike was too young to notice that Twilight hadn't answered the question... just as she'd planned. She hadn't wanted to lie to her little assistant. He grinned, obviously reassured, and went to bed, leaving Twilight to finish her work. Anypony powerful enough to take this many books right out from under her nose was way above the level the Royal Guard could deal with. She hadn't lied to Applejack... she wouldn't do anything rash or crazy. She would just find the book thief and force them to return the books, no problem. If they were weak enough that the Royal Guard could deal with them, then Twilight should be able to handle getting her books back with no trouble at all, and afterward she'd direct the Royal Guard to arrest them... once the books were safe. If they weren't... then no Guardsponies would get injured taking on a threat too big for them. If this was a test, Twilight intended to pass it. And if it wasn't... well, she was still going to get her books back, by hook or by crook. For two days there was nothing. On the third day Spike found more returned books, under the bed in the guest bedroom. The original three hundred twenty-seven missing had been knocked down to three hundred fourteen. Not that this would in any way spare the book thief from Twilight's righteous wrath, once she caught him or her. Two of the newly returned books were still in mint condition, and two of them had nothing wrong but a broken spine... but one of them was suffering from severe water damage, and the last had globs of peanut butter on the inside front cover. Four days into Bookwatch, Twilight was up late reading when she sensed something. A faint thread of power, of some kind. She followed it carefully, feeling for it, tracking it into a dim shadow. It was a cat's eyeball with wings. Twilight's own eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she saw the flying cat's eyeball, its tiny, leathery, bat-like wings flapping, roaming across her bookshelves, looking at the spines of the books. Reading them... maybe. Hard to tell with a disembodied eyeball. She reached out to examine the eyeball with her own magic, and also to catch it, but the moment her power touched it, it... popped. Like a balloon. Except that balloons would leave behind broken bits of balloon material, whereas there was no evidence whatsoever that the eyeball had ever been there after it popped. "I am not going crazy," she mumbled to herself. "That was magic. Somepony... put... wings... on an eyeball..." Now that she was spelling it out to herself, it sounded even more absurd. She'd had some magical mishaps of her own in her time – oranges turned to frogs, parasprites eating buildings, turning her parents into potted plants – but this was almost deliberately absurd. Who would send an eyeball roaming the stacks of the library? Who would put wings on one? Well, she knew of one potential culprit – Discord. It had been just over a month since Princess Celestia had asked Fluttershy to reform the Spirit of Chaos, and while Discord had willingly admitted that "friendship is magic", and had told Princess Celestia that he would use his magic for good instead of evil (most of the time), Twilight still didn't trust him as far as she could throw him, and he looked pretty heavy at his size. However, stealing books stealthily and then returning them dirty or water-damaged still didn't seem like a Discord-level nefarious plot. If Discord wanted to steal her books, she would have imagined he'd break into the library with a kazoo and play on it like a demented Pied Piper, leading the books to dance and skip on their own out of their shelves and off with him. Or he'd gloat. Or he'd show up to make snide remarks about the missing books. The fact that the books had been missing for some time suggested that it couldn't be Discord playing a prank on her, because he was about as subtle as the Friendship Express. Who else could it be, though? Princess Celestia and Princess Luna would have this level of power, but wouldn't harm books... unless this was a test, as Rarity had suggested. Sombra was dead and anyway this kind of thing, as horrifying as it was to Twilight personally, seemed petty for an evil overlord who'd enslaved and terrorized an entire nation. Could the flying eyeball be a changeling in disguise? No, a changeling wouldn't have popped like that. Maybe it was somepony Twilight had never heard of. For example, maybe Princess Celestia had had another student before her who had gone mad with power and been rejected as a result and was now in exile plotting to steal things from Twilight so she could regain her former abilities and attack Equestria, or something. No. That was positively ridiculous. On the fifth day, Twilight was up late again – the truth was, she hadn't really slept much since discovering the missing books – when she felt her spell trigger. Gotcha! She tracked the thread of magic she'd attached to all of the books, following it, and teleported after it. It felt, at first, as if she were headed toward Canterlot – which would be problematic, because Twilight couldn't teleport that far. She pushed more energy into it – and then lost the thread. Panicking, because she was between and if she didn't know where she was going and she didn't have an anchor to attach herself to, she could theoretically be lost forever, Twilight summoned everything she had and flailed outward, trying to grab onto her book-tracking spell. And found it. Relieved, Twilight homed in on the spell, materialized – and found herself standing on a pile of books. Twilight picked up the first book near her hooves telekinetically, and examined it. This one was from the Canterlot library – the main library, not the archives, the Library of Magic or Princess Celestia's private reserves, but the main Canterlot lending library. It was How To Win Friends and Influence Ponies, a book Twilight had read herself and rejected as being entirely too manipulative. Friends should be friends, not stepping stones to wealth or power. The next book she picked up was also from the Canterlot library, and was an absolutely ancient record of an archeological dig down in Mexicavallo. The next was a collection of comic books about an earth pony stung by a manticore who, instead of dying or being eaten by the manticore, somehow gained manticore magic, dubbed herself the Magnificent Manti-Mare and began fighting crime. That one was from Ponyville. The book pile was huge, much too large for Twilight to avoid stepping on books. She couldn't even see the floor under it. Wobbling in her effort to avoid crushing books with her hooves, and apologizing to the books she stepped on, Twilight made her way down to the bottom of the pile, picking up books and stacking them as she went so they would at least not be in a big random pile that ponies could step on. Focused as she was on the books under her hooves, Twilight didn't even notice she had reached the end of the pile until she took a step onto empty air. Twilight flailed wildly, trying to use her magic to push herself back onto the book pile. She succeeded, landing on it rump down. This caused the hoofful of books she was sitting on to detach from the rest of the pile... and float, a short distance away. For the first time, Twilight took stock of her actual surroundings, rather than the pile of books under her, and gulped. She was floating in nothingness. The nothing had an orange cast to it, rather than the blue of sky or the black of night, but other than that its only distinguishing feature from the pictures of upper atmosphere that pegasi had taken was the lack of either sun or moon up above. There was light, diffuse and orange, even and mild enough not to hurt her eyes while bright enough to read easily. But there was no source of light – it just seemed to be everywhere – and as a result neither Twilight nor anything else had shadows. Carefully Twilight probed with her magic. There was no enchantment on the book pile. She had no idea how it was floating. The small piece that had broken off drifted a short distance away from the rest of the pile. There was nothing to explain why it didn't fall to pieces under Twilight's flanks and leave her to plunge to her death, or something. It was very responsive to telekinesis, though. A tiny nudge, and the small book pile easily floated back to join the larger one. Twilight climbed backward up the pile, trying to put a safe distance between herself and the nothingness all around. She felt very light, almost as if she might float away herself, but when she experimentally tried jumping, she didn't get much of anywhere. The book pile somehow had gravity and was holding her in place. Luna had told her that on the moon there was very little gravity and ponies could leap enormous distances, and pegasus flight was potentially dangerous because a pegasus could actually end up in airless space outside the moon's thaumic field if they tried to fly too quickly. That didn't appear to be the case here. On the other hand, she found that she was able to levitate herself with ease. On Earth, unicorns couldn't self-levitate because there was no ground under their feet to push against; lifting an object with magic required that the opposite reaction, the weight of the object, be channeled back through the unicorn into the ground. Unicorns with extraordinary amounts of power could do it in theory, and she herself had levitated more than once while wielding the Elements of Harmony, but this felt so simple and easy a foal could do it. It did, however, unnerve her greatly, given that there wasn't actually any ground anywhere and she feared losing the security of the book pile, so she stopped quickly. At least, she thought, if she fell off the books, she could catch herself. This suggested that she could safely explore to the edge and see if anything was visible underneath this thing, holding it up. Carefully Twilight edged out onto the book pile, lying herself flat on the books when she got close to the boundary with the nothingness, and craned her head over. Nothing. She leaned a bit further. Still more nothing. But there had to be something holding this pile of books up! This simply wasn't possible! Gritting her teeth with aggravation, Twilight tried leaning further out. The books she was lying on gave. For a horrible moment she was falling. And then she was on her back, on the book pile, except it looked somewhat different. Twilight picked up a few books and looked at their covers to confirm her theory. She had just fallen onto the other side of the book pile... which was also a book pile, and had the same properties as the side she'd been on first, namely that it had gravity. Twilight's eyes began to twitch violently. Something that had gravity on both sides was, for all intents and purposes, a cosmic object, such as the moon or the earth itself. Cosmic objects were huge, that was where their gravity came from. No raggedy book pile could have gravity on both sides. None of this made any sense. She took a deep breath. "So I guess I was wrong about it being Discord," she muttered. She couldn't teleport home from here; there was nothing to let her get her bearings and figure out where "here" was in relation to home. She certainly couldn't teleport home with all these books, under any circumstances. There were plainly more than three hundred here; he'd been raiding the Canterlot library as well. Why? What kind of evil plan involved stealing books and getting soap on them? All of these books were in fairly pristine condition, if you didn't count her hoofprints on the more fragile ones. This wasn't an elaborate prank on her if he'd been taking books from Canterlot as well. A horrible thought occurred to her. Was this his pantry? Was he going to eat all these books? Had the few that had been returned with food stains proven to be unpalatable for some reason? If so, Twilight Sparkle, Element of Magic and Ponyville Librarian, was not going to stand for it. It was high time she found the master of this weird... place, or whatever it was... and gave him a piece of her mind. And possibly, if necessary, a punch in the face. With some trial and error she found she could move a group of books away from the larger pile and use them as a sort of magic carpet. After rearranging her transport so it was a neatly laid out flooring with books overlapping other books in a structurally sound way rather than a totally random pile, she was able to sit down on it and direct it forward with her telekinesis. This space couldn't be endless. Sooner or later, she had to run into Discord. Right?