Silver and Night walked side-by-side. Being in the glittering hallways of the castle, no leash was tethered to the troublesome human-pony, who let his eyes wander about as he went. "Have you noticed anything?"
"Should I?" Night twitched her tufted ears upwards. "Your new marefriend is coming this way, does that count?"
“... and I still think that a train right to the mine would-” Penny was poking a piece of paper and talking to Stick when she noticed Night and Silver. “Hay there!”
Stick smiled to the pair as well, folding back up the pages she and Penny had been arguing over.
Silver turned an ear towards their pages. "Good to see you both. What are you working on? Any luck getting the ponies of the city working together?"
The changeling sighed. “Getting them working together is easier said than done, getting them working with ponies of other cities is, we think, the key. The railway sews all of Equestria and the Crystal Empire together, we should look at extending its stitches and purpose.”
Penny giggled at this metaphor. “It would solve a lot of problems if we could just get ponies to think the train is good for more than just mail and getting ponies from A to B.”
Silver nodded at that. "Have you tried rallying to a bit of good old nationalism? They want to do good because the Crystal Empire isn't the bottom and isn't meant to be." He glanced left and right. "I know that's tricky, neither of you being a crystal pony yourself."
Night suddenly stepped forward, nose dancing, then looking back to Silver. "That didn't take long. May as well take her somewhere private if you plan to do it."
Penny froze up, suddenly looking more than a little scared.
“Yeah, there is a problem there.” Stick gave a bit of chitter in her voice as she stepped in closer to Penny and pressed close. “I don’t think this is going to work with her, we… we tried to experiment.” The changeling blushed but lowered her head.
Silver frowned sharply. "Look, I'm not here to push you around, Penny. This is your chance for a new life as much as it has been for me." He sat down. "Tell it to me straight. Do you want this?" He turned to Night. "Do you? I don't think you do."
The soft sob from the lunar unicorn seemed loud in the hall. “I… I want to help but, the thought of it, even when I knew it was Stick…” She was trembling a little, reliving a private fear.
Silver extended a hoof, but never came close to actually touching his friend. "Oh… sorry, really, look." He glanced around at others that were peering at them. "Consider it dropped. I'll cope." He licked over his snout. "I have to accept… the consequences of my actions, and this is just another of them." He rose to his hooves. "I'm sorry, I really should speak with my wife, who I owe an apology to I think."
Stick was pressed, from shoulder to flank, against Penny. She looked from Silver to Night.
It was Penny who managed a reply first. “It was all really sudden and I wanted to help and I still want to help Luna but…” It was a big but, it seemed. “I don’t think I am ready for that. I only just found out what it means to really love…” She reached up and nibbled at one of Stick’s ears, the changeling going a little stiff.
Night leaned in close to Silver. "Are you seeing what could have been?" Silver stiffened, but she continued, "It's alright, this time I understand. Do you know how many friends of mine went off and found special someponies? Some of them I still thought I could have had a chance with, but off they went. I didn't even think to tell them until they were already gone." She nuzzled gently into Silver, and the gentle brushing was returned as they sagged into one another, understanding seemingly met between them.
“But,” Penny began, standing a little straighter and using her magic to try and brush her cheeks dry, “this doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be friends and get this empire back on it’s hooves.”
Stick drew back just a bit, still touching Penny with her flank but letting the mare have a bit of space back.
Silver nodded, a stiff and jerky motion. "Of course!" He stepped forward. "Really, I hope we can become even better friends, that stuff completely to the side. Besides, we have magic lessons to go over." A bright smile split his snout, even with a few tears in his eyes. "Let's focus more on that today. Since you're such an advanced student, how about we get you a spell today, and a book to store it in."
Penny brightened immediately with the topic shift.
“Oh Celestia.” Stick shook her head. “If you need me, I am going to court. I sent out a bit of a challenge yesterday and need to get a feel for how it is taking.” She leaned in to Penny and whispered something very softly in the mare’s ear. It didn’t pull a blush from her, but she did brush up against the changeling once more.
Night hesitated a moment, then approached Stick. "I'll go with you." She glanced to the other two. "They need a moment, and I really should keep up."
Stick beamed at this. “Oh, you should have seen it, we… oh, the charade.” Penny lifted a hoof and pressed it to her head. Stick lowered her voice. “Okay, so we have made it known that Penny is my assistant and that I am a business pony from Canterlot, brought in as a consultant by the Ambassador of Celestia’s. I have gotten support openly from Cadance and now have asked other ponies of the court to consider supporting us with bits, goods or services.” She paused as other ponies in the hall got near, continuing right away again, eventually spinning the ruse she had concocted to make sure ponies approached her as an equal.
Night went off with Stick, nodding at her. "It sounds like you're off to the right hoof handling this problem." She smiled. "Silver made the right choice in picking you two for the task. What are the big problems you're running into?" She gently pried as they made their way towards the court.
Left behind, Silver waved for Penny to follow. "So, uh, Damaged, I hope you don't think I was trying to push you around or anything. Let's get you a notebook and get to more fun work than that."
Stick’s reply to Night was unheard by the two once-humans.
“Please, just call me Penny. It was never you pushing, I was pushing myself.” Penny turned her full attention to Silver, one of her ears twitching a few times. “I got another two of those symbols memorized.” She sounded quite excited now, it seems magic really was something that could grab her attention.
Silver clopped his forehooves before leading the way back towards his room. "Which symbols do you have down? Don't tell me, just play them for me. I'll find a spell that makes use of them to be your first."
She grinned and focused. They were faint, but clear, the first two symbols cycled on her horn, then one new one, then another. “That’s what I got. I don’t even know what they do…”
Silver frowned with thought. "I'm sure we can find one with those, sure…" He sounded as if he was already thinking of something too clever for him. He pushed open the door and went inside, fetching a book quickly. "This will be yours. Keep it close." He hovered it towards Penny. "Now let's see." He began fishing through magic books, flipping through them manically.
Catching the book, flipping the blank pages with her magic, Penny blinked at Silver. “Why don’t you just make one?” She said it as if it were such a simple thing.
Silver sat up. "Well, I… It's not that easy. I can mix and merge, but not just write from nothing at all." He rolled a hoof slowly. "When I have two working spells, how to put them together feels natural. Trying to do it from scratch? I make dozens of dead combinations that go nowhere." He tapped at a page. "How's this look? It does have one symbol you haven't gotten yet, but you'll want to learn it anyway. It looks useful too. Trixie would strongly approve."
He floated the book with the spell in it over to be inspected, describing a basic firework spell that would make a monochrome but brilliant display overhead.
Penny looked at the description of the spell, pointing to symbols around the patterns she had learned. “Okay, are these important? Timing?” She got to the actual spell symbol she hadn’t learned, starting slow but forming it from the copy in the book.
He nodded. "If you get the symbol wrong, or too strong or light, it could explode right in your face, but since it's just light and noise, it shouldn't hurt you or anypony else. Unicorn magic, who needs gunpowder?" He chuckled softly, smiling at his would-be student. "Sound fun to try?"
Penny looked at the page, back a little bit, finding a guide to the timing and strength notes. “Okay, now you're talking of gunpowder… bah, let’s do this.” And she started. Channeling her magic, she formed the patterns slowly, increasing or decreasing as noted… nothing happened. “Too slow?”
Silver bobbed his head quickly. "Think of them as different syllables to the same word. They have to flow organically from one to the next, or you're not really saying the word in a way the universe itself can understand." He peeked at the book a moment, then played it over his own horn, slowly one by one in crisp lettering born of years, some sleeping, of practice. "Until they're together, no spell."
She refocused on the book, reading it, paying special attention to how the notes seemed to pull the spell symbols into distinct groupings. She started to perform the spell, her horn forming the symbols and this time she seemed to get them into those ‘words’.
When the last part of the 'word' played, magic poured in a sudden draw through that inexperienced horn, sparking where it went down the wrong pipe, but emerging all the same in a messy but vibrant display of violet explosions all around them, sending Silver into gales of good-natured laughter. "You did it!"
Penny bounced in place. Her horn felt a bit odd for the effort she had to put into the spell and she rubbed it with a hoof. “Ooo, that felt strange…” She pulled back her hoof from her horn quickly.
Silver reached out, tapping that horn gently. "It really does. If someone touches it while you're casting or upkeeping it, it'll probably knock the spell right out. It's like an antenna in a lot of ways, and it's wired right into our brains." He let out a little snort. "Not sure if that's comforting or not."
“It’s exciting. So, all I need to do is learn all these symbols, work out the word-timing system… it is like trying to say words in a foreign language without understanding what they are or how they are made.” Penny looked ahead in the book, starting to flip the next page over.
Silver put a hoof down on the book. "Easy there. My own teacher didn't let me learn a single spell until I had the whole alphabet down… Though that did drive me crazy, which is why I wanted to teach you one actual spell, to practice with and get a feel for what it's like to have magic flowing through and out of you besides light or grabbing things."
“Ugh, isn’t there a man page for this stuff?” Penny giggled as she let her focus be returned to the spell. “It felt odd with my… my problem, seemed to set it off. I might try to see if I can hold it back a little more.” She made to start intoning the spell again.
Silver perked an ear. "Then this might be just the right spell. Even if you foul it up, it won't do more than annoy someone, rather than set something on fire or anything. You have it copied down right?" He leaned as if to get a peek at the new book of spells.
This made her freeze in her intoning, although thankfully she was only two symbols in and it seemed to do nothing for the failure. “Oh, I best do that.” A quill and ink pot came floating from her bag, wrapped in her soft red magic. She copied the first half of the spell without glancing at the book but as she got to the newer symbol she glanced back and forth. “It just feels so odd, if this is a language, who or what is really understanding it?”
Silver shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe you'll find that out." He smiled. "I rescued a changeling hive, your turn to shake up the world, hmm? After you've got the alphabet down at least."
Penny finished transposing the spell and even wrote a few notes under it for the timing. “Ugh, I guess I have to, I can’t just ask ‘hay what does this mean?’ like I would when programming.” She smiled despite the thought. “So now I have that, I keep working on my symbols, get channeling down… where to from there?”
Silver perked his ears. "Well, this is what happens when you are the compiler. You don't get to just consult the manual while casting." He didn't mention that he had done just that, but it wasn't a good idea, and he felt no urge to encourage that bad way. "You're making great progress. I mean, seriously, you blew me out of the water."
The mare tilted her head a little at his reply. “What, really? I just… I guess I took to it well, programming languages were always fun to learn. This is really fun, I mean, a computer can still only do so much, is there a limit on what we can do with magic?”
He raised a brow. "Of course there are. Hell, I cast this one spell and it just knocks me out basically instantly with how much energy it draws, and it's just idling! I shudder to think what it'd feel like if it was actually triggered before I finished konking out."
“So spells can have triggers? Did you make, like, an idle loop that checked for events? That is messy programming.” She sounded a little upset with him for such a design. “But I guess that is what you said, you are limited in what you can do by what spells you have access to, to take apart and rebuild. You need to get them all in a nice database.”
Silver nodded. "That's a start. Besides that, well, look at me." Silver put up his forehooves. "I'm not the biggest pony around, or have the longest horn or anything. Besides my talent, I'm not that special. I can make a lot of spells that I would not be smart trying to cast."
“Look at me, I’m not special except for the most unique talent ever.” Penny’s droll execution of the phrase was a stiff reminder of her former, frequent use of sarcasm. “Silver, we are ponies, we all are special and unique.” She sighed and started on the spell again, getting through it with much less fizz escaping into her emotions.
Silver watched her working the spell. "I know you haven't found yours yet, but don't stress it if you are. When you hit the right trigger, you'll fall right into it, and stressing over it won't help a damn thing. Don't be the CMC." He rolled his eyes, then froze suddenly. "Shit. You…. saw the future didn't you?"
Penny blushed. “That… maybe. I am not sure where Equestria is up to. I mean, Twilight has her castle but I couldn’t see the map in it. And yet she has been to Canterlot to see Moon Dancer…”
"Who?" Silver tilted his head then frowned, thinking ahead. "Did… the Crusaders get their marks yet?"
Penny shook her head. “Nope, still as blank as me. Oh, Moon Dancer is one of Twilight’s old friends from before she went to Ponyville. Kinda stood her up at a party, left Moon a little bit of a recluse because of it.”
Silver tapped his hooves together. "Ahead of where I was, but I'm not sure by how much… It's alright." He took a soft breath. "We should try to let the future be what it should be. We don't need to interfere with the show at all. We have a whole world to see."
Penny eventually left with her new book, her first spell within. This left Silver to sit back and let out a slow sigh. "Not every rainbow is meant to be. It's not worth hurting two ponies." He looked into the mirror beside him. "What are even the odds?" A rueful snort escaped him. "I was chasing the impossible. Just let it go." He rose to his hooves and trotted from his room, bound for his wife.