“Feeling better?” Lucidity asked once her conscious counterpart had finally stirred from her pseudo-slumber.
“A little,” she admitted. “I didn’t really get any sleep though. At least my horn doesn’t feel like it’s trying to stab my brain anymore.”
“Well that’s an improvement,” Lucidity said good-humoredly. “Still, you should probably try to take it easy on complex magic-casting for a while, just to be safe.”
“Oh yeah,” the other equine agreed emphatically. “No more giant magic shields for me. That thing required way too much energy to make.”
“Do you think that’s what that weird steel dome thing was when we first arrived in Dream Limbo?”
“I doubt it. That one wasn’t all clear like mine was, and besides, I’m still pretty sure it was made from some sort of metal, not magic.”
“Well—”
“Where art thee, Lucidity?” a voice inquired cuttingly, its words easily carrying across the wide-open plane of Dream Limbo and startling the pair of grey unicorns currently inhabiting its vast, white emptiness.
“What was that?” Lucidity asked fearfully, looking up in the direction she thought the sound had come from.
“It’s just Luna trying to psych us out again,” her subconscious replied. “We better get moving though; we don’t want her to catch up to us.”
Lucidity nodded in silent agreement, taking the lead from her doppelgänger as they quickly cantered away from the sounds of Luna’s relentless goading.
“Cease thy incessant cowering and face us like a mare,” the disembodied voice continued.
“Just keep going,” Lucidity whispered softly to the grey equine running alongside her. “If we don’t respond, she might not be able to track us.”
“Hiding shalt only delay the inevitable, Lucidity. Appear before us now so that we may be finished with this petty foalishness.”
“Argh! Isn’t there any way we can lose her?” the target of the lunar princess’ threats lamented.
“Not unless you somehow mastered teleportation at some point in the last thirty seconds,” her subconscious dryly remarked.
“Do you think that I could?” Lucidity pondered seriously.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if my magic is stronger in here than it is out in the real world—”
“Just try it!” the subconscious equine interrupted, worried that Luna would appear at any moment.
Lucidity charged up her horn—slowly at first in case not enough recuperation time had passed since the dome incident—and began to prepare an advanced spell that she had never cast before and knew almost nothing about. She started by collecting a large bundle of magic in her horn. Once the concentration had gotten high enough, she readied the spell to release it all in one burst. In a flash, she had opened the floodgates, allowing the torrent of magic to encapsulate her and Lucidity and, hopefully, transport all of their respective particles to a different position while retaining their original orientations.
Slightly disoriented, the two relatively unharmed unicorns looked around their new surroundings, relieved to find Dream Limbo to be as blank and, thankfully, silent as ever.
“Well,” Lucidity began, trying to catch her breath as her body adjusted to the effects of losing the energy that had been drained away by all of her strenuous spellcasting. “I think that actually worked.”
“Thank Celestia,” her subconscious commented in response. “That was a little too close for comfort. But I think we learned something important from that little encounter.”
“Oh? And what would that be?”
“That if we want to have a chance against Luna and win this magic duel of yours, then we’re still hopelessly underprepared and outmatched.”
“Well, in all honesty, I’d still like to try and find a way out of here that doesn’t involve me having to be in a fight against Luna to the last mare standing.”
“I’m not so sure there is another way out of here, Lucy. In any case, we still have a lot of work to do on your spellcasting before Luna shows up again. Now, in a fair fight, she would be able to take us both on without breaking a sweat.”
“Obviously,” Lucidity returned without much enthusiasm. “Are you saying that we should find a way to cheat?”
“No, I’m saying that we should find a way to artificially increase your magic’s potency.”
“Sounds like cheating to me.”
”Yeah, well, all’s fair in love and war,” Lucidity fired back. “So anyway, I think that the first thing we need to do is work on strengthening your defensive magic.”
“Yeah, I’ve never been very good at that sort of thing,” the grey unicorn admitted. “And that shield I made earlier takes way too much time and energy to be of any use during a fight.”
“True, but what if you tried creating one on a smaller scale?”
“I think that even that small, mobile shield would be too difficult for me to cast on such short notice.”
“Well practicing the smaller one once couldn’t hurt, right? If you think you’re up to it, that is.”
Lucidity tapped her horn once experimentally and then gave a small, curt nod. “Yeah, my horn should be fine for a little while longer at least. I guess I can give it a go.” She planted all four hooves firmly on the ground, preparing to go about the process of compressing her magic to the point where it would be solid enough to bear the weight of several powerful spells hitting it at once without shattering into a million pieces.
Lucidity watched herself work at a distance, silently observing the shield’s construction and noting how the unicorn making it was faring throughout the entire process. As she looked at the dome just beginning to form—its light-bluish color coming and going in patches all across its exterior—an idea suddenly came to her. “Hey, Lucidity! Instead of making a giant sphere around your whole body, why not just place a small wall directly in front of you instead? I mean, Luna will most likely only attack you from one side at a time anyway, so why waste the extra energy, you know?”
Lucidity, red in the face from the effort she was putting into her spellcasting, responded in clipped, rasping pants, “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll try that.” She willed even more of her magic forth, the increased flow of energy causing her horn to grow brighter and her creation to follow suit until they were both pulsating with her azure aura. With a steady output of magic now in place, Lucidity turned her attention to reconfiguring the thaumaturgic fields in order to keep them confined to their new shape.
Once she had finished tinkering with the design, Lucidity opened her eyes, delighted to find a glittering, blue wall of energy waiting in front of her, ready to shield her from any and all frontal assaults that might arise. “Well, that wasn’t nearly as bad as last time,” she joked, smiling weakly as she marveled at what she had managed to build.
“Try moving it around,” the other mare suggested. “See if you can place it behind and above you.”
Lucidity quickly complied with her subconscious’ commands, finding the creation to be cumbersome to pivot around herself at first, but able to rotate much more easily once she had gotten the hang of it. After playing around with the magical barrier for a little longer, Lucidity began undoing a couple of the key connections, careful not to set off the same chain reaction as last time. As the structural integrity of the wall was weakened further, however, she began to find it harder and harder to keep its combustion levels in check.
Desperate not to have another external outburst of energy, Lucidity soon found herself taking in more magic than she could safely manage. Before long, her horn’s natural resistances had become overloaded and all of her connections with the wall were cut simultaneously, completely severing off any control that she had had over its release of energy. Seeking out some sort of magical conduit to absorb its excess aura, Lucidity’s shield soon settled for her own horn, bombarding it with magical energy.
It was all over in a single, painful instant, and Lucidity, vision swimming, dizzily tried to stand back up but found her body to be uncooperative.
“Lucidity! Lucidity! Are you okay?” her subconscious shouted as she ran over to help her fallen companion get back onto her hooves.
“Huh?” was all the grey mare managed to murmur in response to the sudden commotion, her mind still fuzzy from everything that had just happened.
Waiting until the dazed pony’s head was clearer, Lucidity tried asking again, “How do you feel?”
“I-I feel… good. Great, actually.” A sudden change overtook the blue-eyed unicorn, her horn glowing brightly of its own accord as she shouted, “Quick, give me a spell to cast!”
“Oh, um, okay,” Lucidity said confusedly, puzzled by her conscious self’s sudden enthusiasm. “I guess you could try practicing some more teleportation?”
“Great idea!” she announced unnecessarily loudly, quickly bathing herself in a bright, blue glow as she prepared the spell. In a flash of light, she was gone, reappearing just behind her blond-maned doppelgänger. A moment later, she had vanished again, this time teleporting to Lucidity’s right. Another disappearance, and then she was popping up right back in front of the other mare. “I feel like a million bits!” she exclaimed joyously, a smile wide enough to rival a certain pink baker’s shining up on her face. “I’m on a magic high and it feels wonderful!”
“You’re just lucky all that magic didn’t kill you. In fact, it’s amazing that you’re still able to stand, much less do anything else,” Lucidity said half-seriously, half-smiling, as she struggled to suppress the happiness her consciousness’ excitement was starting to cause her to feel in turn.
“We should go confront Luna right now,” Lucidity said in a tone that didn’t lend itself to kidders.
“What?” the other unicorn asked disbelievingly, hoping that her double was somehow joking.
“Yeah, it’ll be great! I’ll be all zap, zap! And then Luna will be all like, ‘Oh no, I’m dying!’ It’ll be great! She won’t stand a chance!” Lucidity babbled excitedly, wildly teleporting all across her subconscious’ field of vision as she demonstrated her idea with exaggerated pantomiming.
“Lucidity, I don’t think—” Before she could articulate another word of protest, however, the half-crazed unicorn had already charged up her horn to maximum power as she prepared a teleport for two.