//------------------------------//
// XIII. Magic Barriers 
// Story: Memoirs of a Magic Earth Pony 
// by The Lunar Samurai 
//------------------------------//

	Pain. That was the first thing I noticed as my mind emerged from its mental fog. It felt as though an intense amount of pressure had been applied to my forehead. It was excruciating and the injury demanded that I remain still, but my curiosity beckoned me to open my eyes and survey my surroundings. As I let my eyes adjust to the room, I noticed everything was masked in a soft yellow light that wavered ever so slightly. That was when I noticed the pale walls. They were marble. I let my eyes close as I uttered a low moan. I wanted to drift back into painless unconsciousness, but fate had another plan.
“Starswirl?” Amethyst gently asked.
My eyes shot open as I turned my head in the direction of the voice, but they immediately shut once more when my forehead protested with a powerful stabbing pain.
“Careful, I don’t know how well that bandage will hold.”
“Bandage?” I muttered as I lifted my hoof to my forehead. That’s when I felt the small strip of fabric that rested atop my wound.
“The bleeding stopped a few hours ago,” she said as she placed a cold damp cloth on my cheek. I flinched at the sensation, causing her to recoil a bit. “Oh sorry,” she whimpered. “There’s still some… some blood on your cheek.”
At the mention of blood the scenes of the incident came back to my mind. I had been struck by a book, thrown by Amethyst, because I was looking at her… well, her posterior. Immediately I began to feel uncomfortable once more as an all too familiar heat rose to my cheeks. Amethyst quickly noticed.
“Hey, uh… I’m sorry about what happened,” she said as she brought the damp cloth to my face once more. “I guess I just… I’m sorry” She couldn’t put her remorse into words, but I could tell by the way she said it that she was truly apologetic for flaring up.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about… well…” Wording how I was going to apologize at looking at her hindquarters was difficult to do with full consciousness, now it was virtually impossible. I wanted to let her know the complexity of the thoughts I had while caught in my stare. I figured that I would somehow make the entire incident seem less like I had performed the action intentionally if I could just explain myself accurately. I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t that kind of stallion.
We sat in silence as she dipped the cloth into the bowl of water and brought it to my cheek once more. The gentle scrubbing on my face was a welcomed sensation from the constant throbbing in my skull. I could tell she wanted to make amends for her mistake, and her solution was to remain silent and continue cleaning the blood.
“It’s nighttime, by the way,” she said in a feeble voice. “You’ve been out for a few hours.” She was worried, that much was obvious, but her words also carried a sense of relief.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“The sun just set about an hour ago.”
I groaned in disappointment at the revelation. “I need to go back to my dorm,” I muttered as I gently rocked my head. It was excruciating to consider moving, but I couldn’t let myself go without sleep before going before the Council.
“Uhhh…” Amethyst started as I rolled to my side and winced. “I don’t think you’re well enough to move.”
“But I have to,” I muttered as I let one of my legs slide off of the bed. “I’m going before the assembly tomorrow and I need to be rested.” Most of my words were slurred, but they sounded enounced well enough to my foggy mind. I suppose they also made sense then, but now I can see how delirious I was. Amethyst was right, I was in no condition to walk, let alone go back to my own dorm, but I was determined. And when had determination ever led me astray?
As soon as I slid from the bed and placed my full weight on my legs, my knees buckled and I fell into a pile of books. It hurt, the small spike in my blood pressure made my head wound scream in pain.
“Oh, careful…” Amethyst said as she stepped to my side. She stood there for quite some time, trying to keep herself from violating my personal space. It wasn’t until I specifically requested her assistance that she helped me too my hooves and back into the bed.
“Oh, why does this have to happen now!” I growled as my head hit the pillow. My mind was growing sharper, and with it my anger began to rise. “Tomorrow is the biggest day of my life!” I wasn’t talking to anpony in particular. In fact, I believe it was a specific corner in the room that was intended to bear my wrath. However, that isn’t what Amethyst heard.
I didn’t know what I was hearing at first, it sounded like something was lightly scraping the window. However, as I turned my head toward Amethyst, I discovered that her hoof was pressed up against her muzzle.
Now it was my turn to explain my words. “Wait, no… I mean, I wasn’t expecting something like this to happen.”
She looked away and squeezed the tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just overreacted.”
It was obvious there was nothing I could say to cheer her up so I just stopped talking. I don’t truly know what I could have said, but anything at that point was likely to do more harm than good. I let my head rest back onto the pillow and I took a deep breath. Now I had to figure out what to do for the rest of the night. It looked like going back to my dorm was out of the question for now, but the last thing I wanted was to let myself idle.
“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered, breaking the silence I wasn’t aware of.
“Hmm?”
“I just… I can’t do anything right now, like at all. I just have to sit in this bed.”
I could almost hear her thinking. “Well, I still have that homework for Evenstar,” she offered. The mention of our professor brought a glimmer of hope back to my mind. It was something to grasp and I wasn’t going to let it go.
“Hey wait, can you show me your current spell?” I asked as I let my head roll in Amethyst’s direction.
“You mean my force field?”
“Yeah, I never got to see it happen in class.”
Amethyst let out a sigh. “Yeah, nobody ever gets to see any magic in class with his rule.” I could tell by her tone that she wasn’t happy about Evenstar’s no magic policy.
“Why does he do that?”
“I think he’s got it  inside of his head that we will work together outside of class, but we only end up doing personal projects. Some of the other ponies in the class think he’s trying to force us to use mental magic.”
I stopped the conversation there. I could sense a degree of animosity in her voice, and I didn’t want to push her past her tipping point once more.
“Alright,” Amethyst said as she hurriedly pushed her books from the desk. I could tell from her energy that she was growing excited. “So my spell is starting to work really well. After Evenstar recommended that 4th dimensional slice, I’ve been able to use it in practice without destroying my desk.”
She looked at me with a wry smile. “Want to see it in action?”
“Would I!?” I shouted. My injury quickly reminded me that enthusiastic comments tend to lift your eyebrows. I quickly grimaced as my pain flared once more.
“Maybe you should just relax.”
“Yeah,” I said as I laid my head back on the pillow and let my eyes drift close. “I probably should.” I wanted to watch her work, but my body would only allow me to watch the insides of my eyelids.
That’s when I heard it, a light tap pierced the silence. It was the same tap that the rest of the class had used when they built their mental worlds. “Amethyst?”
I heard her let out a disgruntled sigh. “What?”
“Sorry for interrupting, but could you… Could you describe your process? I did come here to get caught up with the rest of you guys.”
“Oh… uhh… I’m not very good at describing how I do it, but I can give it a try.”
The chair creaked as she set herself down once more and began to build her world. “So… I start with making sure my working dimension is isolated. Any defect in the matrix would render my spells inaccurate.
“I’ll be working with a section that is about the size of my desk for this mental experiment. The larger it is, the more likely I’ll mess something up in its development. So, as always, I’ll create a point.”
I did the best I could to follow in her hoofsteps. A small white dot appeared in the blackness of my eyelids.
“Okay, now that the zero point has been established, I need to construct the first dimension. Since we’re working with the table I’ll set that distance equal to its width.”
This one I had trouble with. I didn’t know what to do since I didn’t have a ruler to measure either the desk or my mental world. I now know that the measurements were arbitrary, but then I believed that they were required to exact.
Before I could construct that first line, Amethyst continued on. “Alright, so I have one line of 10 points that is roughly equal the width of the desk, so I’ll go ahead and construct another line perpendicular to that one with 10 points again to create a square. Now that I have my 2 dimensional grid I can expand it into the third dimension. I’d like some extra space to work, but the more volume it occupies, the more calculations I have to perform. I’ll bring it 5 points high, bringing my total point count to 500. Now, because of Evenstar’s recommendation, I’m going to have to build into the 4th dimension. Luckily I only need one parallel, but that will double my point count.”
Amethyst let out a sigh. “That’s going to take a lot of number crunching,” she muttered as she tapped the desk. “Alright, let’s start with the easy stuff… All points, all values, are zero.”
By now, as you can probably assume, my mind was acutely focused on her words. For some reason I couldn’t get enough of her voice as she called out the various tasks she had to perform to create her force field. I was broken free of my trance as I heard the shuffling of paper from her desk. I struggled to roll my head in her direction and as I did, I realized her frantic work. Floating before her were four large pages with four quills simultaneously striking down information in sloppy characters.
“All points zero… four dimensions…” she whispered as she stared at the four pages before her. It was quite the spectacle, seeing her so intently focused on her work.
“Alright!” she declared as she let the quills fall to their respective reservoirs. “Now that the points are all grounded, let’s begin the fun part.” I could sense a bit of sarcasm in her voice.
“So, we have a grid with an origin at the center of the x and y plane and at the bottom of the matrix. To make my force field, I need to figure out the magical densities at every single one of those points. Before I can do that, I need to figure out how large my field is going to be.
“I’ll start with the exclusion zone. It needs to be 2 units less than that of the main radius, otherwise the force field will have holes in it. By starting with the exclusion zone, I won’t destroy the object I’m trying to protect. I’ll go ahead and define my radius as 3, that way a radius of 5 will be usable for the shell.”
Another flurry of papers signaled her continued work in the realm of reality. This time, she only lifted one page and quickly drew a grid onto its surface. “Alright, starting with a radius of 5, I need to figure out which points will actually have the solid in them. The radius of my inner circle is three and the outer is five…” Her voice trailed off as she began tracing the two circles and circling the dots between them. It was obviously a painstaking process, but the reward was well worth the work.
Now, I will have to show some restraint, but instead of droning on about how she found each individual point I will provide a brief summary. She found the points between the circles and gave them a value of 1 MMU to construct what is known as a magic barrier. (Without going into too much detail here, this is a magic mass unit. It’s the same thing you commonly use when constructing solids out of magic. This, however, was still highly developmental at the time and its similarities to the modern aMMU are outweighed by its differences.) Regardless, she continued with this system, filling several pages worth of notes in order to create the shell. It took nearly 2 hours for her complete the indescribably arduous process and we were both exhausted by the time she finished.
“Finally!” she roared as she rose from her desk. “All of these equations are correct and I can actually cast the spell.”
Needless to say, I was extremely excited. The hours of preparation and the countless weeks she had spent honing her process were about to come to fruition right before my eyes.
Without a word, Amethyst let her eyes close as her horn began to glow. A faint purple light muted the yellow and began to fill the room as she let herself flow into her work. Her mouth moved ever so slightly as she began to recite the incantation to summon the complex equations to reality.
It was beautiful to me, watching magic unfolding in such a natural way. Amethyst was completely focused on her work, that much was obvious, but what I didn’t know was the complexity of her thoughts at that time. As I know now, her tranquil exterior belied the chaotic thoughts and processes firing away in her mind. It took little concentration to cast a simple spell, but the incantation she was creating wasn’t optimized. While most unicorns could easily perform much more complex tasks, she hadn’t yet spent the time to write the complicated spell down and instead spent most of her time working through equations to cast it. This was magic in the raw, and it was my first experience with such a world.
It took several minutes for the shell to form on the desk. As the first few segments were laid out on the wooden surface, I began to realize that my assumptions about magic in general were grossly fanciful. Instead of a uniform shell, the spell was creating blocks. Each one was placed according to the mathematics behind each of those point definitions she had slaved over.
As you can imagine, I was quite upset at the realization that the product wasn’t perfect, but when Amethyst spoke up once more, I was forced to suppress that thought as much as I could.
“Well?” she asked as she opened her eyes once more and looked to me. “What do you think?”
I’m not sure how I suppressed my disappointment, but somehow I managed to say, “That’s really impressive.” My traitorous tone belied my words.
“Isn’t it!” She exclaimed. “I’ve been working on this spell for about 6 months now. Hopefully I’ll be able to fill in those gaps before the end of the semester.”
I looked at the unsightly pixelated blob on her desk. It was obviously well constructed, but I could not bring myself to get over the massive limitations of her incantation. “How long will that take?”
“Fixing it will mean I have to close myself in my room for an entire day to crunch numbers. It should take a couple days to complete, but I think I may be able to skip class in a few days to start.”
It was obvious she was focused on the mindset of constructing with cubes. I just wanted to give her a different option, a new way she could approach her work. So I opened my mouth once more, just one time more than I should have. “What about trying something different than cubes?” I asked as I looked at the glowing purple shell.
I saw it waver once.
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I started as I looked to her, “What if you made it out of triangles or something?” I immediately realized I had made a horrible mistake.
“Starswirl, now you’re not a unicorn so I can’t expect you to know this…”
I’m not going to lie, that statement was pretty scathing.
“but I’m using magic barriers in my mathematics. Magic barriers must be created using unit lengths that are normal to each other. There is no possible way to make a slanted line, it just doesn’t work.” Her tone was matter of fact, and I should have accepted her words as such, but something inside of me wasn’t going to settle for that explanation.
I should have stopped, I shouldn’t have pried further, but I wanted to be right. I wanted to make a difference and fix a problem that was so blatantly obvious to me. “Why though? Why can’t you just make some lines slanted? I don’t see that being too much of a challenge.”
I’m not sure if her eye twitched, or the disappearance of her shell cast a deceptive shadow across her face. All I knew was that a fear washed over me as she spoke once more. “Do you really want to know the reason why I have to work with magic barriers?” She asked, her voice was more pointed than a sword. I knew this wasn’t going to end well.
My response was only silence.
“The magic barrier unit was developed a decade ago and it revolutionized magic as we know it. The day after it was published in the Journal of Magic, it was on the front page of every news outlet in Equestria. It brought a revolution in magic that completely changed our perspective on what we accomplish. New laws restricting its use were created to keep its power in check and to further the use of magic. The magic barrier unit is, and will always be, the most important development in the history of magic. That is why I use it.”
Needless to say, I was shocked. I could tell she wasn’t pleased with my questioning, and luckily I decided to stop there. “Well,” I started with a yawn, “I should probably head back to my dorm. I need a chance to rest before tomorrow.”
The fire in her eyes dwindled to an ember as she looked at the bandage on my head. “Can you walk?”
I swung my legs from the bed and, once more, let my hooves take my weight. Now, I’m fairly certain I could have walked back to my dorm, but there was something inside of me that didn’t want to go. Despite our differences there was something comforting about the fact that I had someone to talk to. I wanted to spend time with somepony that was kind enough to keep me company. That was the main reason I pathetically stumbled to the ground when I stepped onto the book covered floor.
“Apparently not,” she said as she helped me back into her bed. “I guess you’re spending the night here.”
“You sure that’s okay?”
“It isn’t” amethyst responded without turning to me. “There’s a strict policy against bringing anyone to spend the night in our dorms.” She looked at me and frowned. It wasn’t an angry frown, but rather one that sang of deep thought.
“Oh…” I started as I shifted my weight off of the bed once more. “I should probably leave then.”
I could feel the conflict in her mind as she tried to piece together the words to express herself. I could tell she wanted to tell me something, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do so. So, I did the only thing that came to my mind: I asked a question. “Is something wrong?”