//------------------------------// // Chapter 7 // Story: Borrowed Time // by Gambit Prawn //------------------------------// I can’t believe I’m doing this, I thought My pony hosts were friendly—overly so in fact, so I couldn’t believe I was volunteering to spend extra time with them. It was highly pertinent to me though, so I thought it might be worth sitting through the purple one’s boundless enthusiasm. To be fair, her energy aside, I had liked her well enough. Besides, I found myself with exactly nothing to do otherwise. I found the designated room quickly. It was a fairly open space to accommodate the slightly larger crowd. It was largely unfurnished and gave the impression of being rarely used. The three fillies from before were shuffling their feet restlessly, while an older-looking unicorn mare was talking with the three princesses. “Aron! I didn’t think you were going to come!” Twilight said. I could practically feel the questions about to stampede towards me. “Am I interrupting?” I asked, trying to read the room. “Nay, we have yet to start,” said Luna. “Then can we hurry up now that he’s here? All that education gave me a headache.” “Scootaloo, don’t be rude,” Twilight scolded. Celestia laughed slightly. “It’s more than all right, Twilight. We have no need to cling to formality here.” “Yes,” Luna agreed, “‘Tis refreshing when the young ones say what the adults dare not speak aloud.” “Very well,” the older mare said, eyeing me with interest. “Let us begin.” “Right!” Twilight said. “Now Discord, our favorite work-in-progress, overheard the Cutie Mark Crusaders arguing and thought it would be “enlightening” for them to walk a mile in each others’ horseshoes.” “We weren’t even arguin’ all that much,” Applebloom interrupted. “I got a teensy bit upset, but I knew Sweetie Belle didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” Sweetie Belle slumped a little. “I still feel bad, though. Nobody ever told me that earth ponies had to practice their abilities the same as the other tribes.” “What bothers me is that Discord thought we needed to learn to respect the other tribes. Our performance at the Equestria Games was all about earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi living in harmony, for ponies sake,” Scootaloo groused. Celestia didn’t seem surprised.“This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.. Ever since I made him his redemption punch-card, he’s been surprisingly.... eager,” she said, amused despite herself. “Yes, eager to a fault. It took me almost a week to re-file everything after our embodiment of chaos itself deigned to try his paw at organizing...” Luna said, reminiscing. “The filing system he employed apparently works well with tropical birds, but not much else.” Twilight’s whole body straightened and her whole being seemed to snap back to focus. “In any case,” Twilight continued, “instead of having him undo their flip-flopped tribes, we decided to observe the girls as Discord’s magic wears off naturally. Alicorns and Draconequi are opposites in more than just the symbolic sense; our magic is in many ways a mirror image of Discord’s. To model Equestria’s restoration of their normal selves Professor Withers and I measured tribe specific traits, including their wings, horn, and in Sweetie Belle’s case, the gaean duct. To our surprise we found the regression of these traits to be discrete events falling into a Poisson distribution. Experimentally determined lambda was found to be around 4.3 in a day. For chaos magic, it was rather well behaved mathematically speaking. This is at odds with the results published in Withers, Beaker and Rat, wherein the model functions all had in common repeated eigenvalues...” Oh boy, this is going to be a long night. The princess continued to prattle on in a language I barely understood. I looked to the rest of her audience and found that besides the professor, everyone was just as lost as I was. The other princesses, though, were doing much better at feigning interest and attention than the children were. “Uh, guys...” “Shhh. Not now, Scootaloo,” Sweetie Belle whispered. Suddenly a purple aura started to coalesce around Scootaloo’s horn. It’s brightness and size doubled just as fast and, with no additional warning, jumped from her horn and surged towards me. A half formed concept flashed through my head and before my brain caught up, my arm shot up in front of me, using the crystal strapped to my wrist as a shield. The crystal lit up and sparks scattered in every direction. Twilight was quick to react and erected a glowing magical shield around the fillies, while the royal sisters shielded themselves with their wings. “I’m sorry, Air-un! I didn’t mean to. Honest!” Scootaloo said, looking guilty. Twilight lowered the shield. “Don’t feel bad, Scootaloo. Most young unicorns experience magical surges from time to time. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m sorry, Aron. Few young unicorns can control magical surges, let alone one who’s not used to even having a horn. Are you all right?” I lowered my hand slowly. “Yes… I’m fine.” I had to leave my comments there, as I was starting to have doubts about the supposed magical mastery of these unicorns. Really?! Twice in one day! “Do you need a moment to recover?” Celestia asked politely. “No,” I answered, immediately cursing myself for missing the perfect excuse to retreat. Returning to her lecture, Twilight smiled happily at me. “Now, to show our work, we’d like to walk everypony through it step by step.” With a poof, an easel and a large piece of paper appeared. Twilight unrolled it to reveal a confusing series of colored lines. Strange symbols appeared to label the charts. My mathematics training lacking, it was no surprise I couldn’t make sense of the confusing markings. It goes without saying that her explanation of them clarified exactly nothing. A quick glance at the rest of the audience confirmed that yes, this was still nothing anyone else understood or cared about. Through Celestia’s eyes I could almost make out a message: “I’m sorry, but this means a lot to her. Please bear with it.” “Furthermore if we adjust for the discretization—” “Twilight,” Celestia whispered at a volume audible to everyone in the room. “We can convert functions 17a and 16c into second order difference equations.” “Twilight!” she whispered a second time. The purple pony snapped out of her single-minded trancelike concentration and looked towards the larger alicorn. “I’m sorry. Did you have a question?” In response, Celestia pointed to the three sleeping fillies sprawled out on top of each other. Luna smiled warmly at them. “I’d wish them sweet dreams, but ‘tis hardly more prudent to wish when we can actualize.” Her horn glowed briefly. “They had a full day today. I suppose all that learning really did tire them out,” Celestia said. ”That’s strange. I need Spike to remind me to go to bed once every couple days when I’m busy learning.” Twilight looked genuinely confused, which sharply contrasted with her normal aura of knowledgeability. “Should we pause and put them to bed?” “I think their purpose as visual aids has been well served,” Celestia said. The old professor nodded her head and looked at the fillies fondly. Twilight once more became excited. “I’ve been working on a more efficient way to teleport others. It combines automatic collision detection with conceptual visualization. Look, Professor!” Twilight’s horn glowed with magenta light and I heard a loud pop. Once more, thaumaturgical danger was speeding directly at my head. This time, I knew exactly what to do as I raised the crystal to intercept it. The crystal slowly started to take the magic in and I felt the enormous pressure. I flexed every muscle in my arm, but still couldn’t stop my body from shaking. It felt like trying to brace myself against an onslaught of crashing waves. The crystal glowed more brightly than I had ever seen it, and I heard a pop. A beam of light erupted from the crystal and directly hit the sleeping fillies.   My heart stopped. I…. did I kill them? No... “Girls! Oh my gosh! Are you okay!?” Twilight shouted, galloping towards them. Luna glared at me intensely, but her anger fell limp as soon as she took a look at the “victims” of the misfired spell. “What the hay’s all the commotion about,” Applebloom groaned. “If I can’t sleep through class, at least let me have this,” Scootaloo grumbled. “Hey, girls, look!” Sweetie Belle said, pointing at her friends and then herself. The other fillies quickly examined each other and then perked up in realization. “We’re back to normal! YAY!”” They danced in place excitedly and pumped their front hooves. Twilight’s eyes fell to the ground. She looked shell-shocked. “I don’t understand… I haven’t lost control of my magic like that in forty years—not since I was a young filly of twenty-three” “I see…” the professor said as she examined the little girls. “You can be at ease, Princess. If my theory is correct, you were no more responsible for the misfire than young Scootaloo was for hers.” “What do you mean?” Twilight asked, curiosity steadily overcoming her guilty complexion. “First of all, Aron, are you aware that you didn’t fully block the spell?” My blood felt cold for a moment. I felt up every inch of my body from bottom to top. At the end of my search it hit me: my formerly light blond hair was now an ostentatious azure. I felt it carefully, noting the subtly changed texture, even pulling a hair loose and dangling it in front of my face. I sniffed it and turned it in place to examine it from every angle, disbelieving. “Indeed. I believe we’ve just witnessed the meeting of two harmonic correction events,” the professor began to lecture. “Conventional understanding is that intermediates between the tribes cannot stably exist. The most obvious evidence for this can be plainly seen whenever ponies of different tribes mate. Despite possessing DNA from both parents, only the traits from one tribe are expressed. Here, as the traits from one tribe receded, the fillies were moving closer and closer to having no tribal alignment. Such a state is even more unstable than their flip-flopped states, so the force of Harmony was motivated to spark a reaction to change them back instantly. In other words, as the fillies got closer and closer to being neutral ponies of no tribe, the probability of a reaction such as this approaches one. Normally it would wait until a point where ambient magic could get the job done, but it seized the opportunity a spell as powerful as teleportation offered. Aron’s state of incongruence with his magical signature served as a further catalyst, and well, it was an opportunity Equestria couldn’t pass up.” Twilight seemed to have recovered and was enthralled with the explanation. “I see! That’s good news then. This shouldn’t be a problem for Aron as he’s no sort of pony yet. Short of sprouting a tail, he won’t be read as a tribeless pony.” “Maybe...” the old mare said She slowly approached me, and without asking for permission in the slightest started feeling me up. She started with my back and had to start standing on her hind legs as she worked her hooves up to my shoulder blades. I couldn’t tell if this was a further manifestation of the ponies’ appalling lack of personal space, or if this mare was too old and tired to bother with common courtesy. I felt numb, an empty shell, as she levitated a stool in front of me and set it down with her magic. I had lost something I had taken for granted. Something I had rarely thought twice about, though it still hurt to lose it—the very color of my hair. Giants’ Withers knew exactly what she was looking for as she softly tapped the bony protrusion on my forehead. A weird sensation, like a miniature psychic headache, briefly pulsed through my scalp. Exposed, I looked to the princesses for help instinctively. With the further stress of the breaching of my secret, I didn’t know how to handle it. “Aron, is that…” Celestia gasped. “A horn?” Luna finished. Mercy! How could I have been so blind. I thought. After acknowledging the elephant in the room, I felt as if the denial dam burst as clarity dawned on me. In truth, I had known all along. “Aron. Aron!” I saw the sister princesses mouthing words at me, but I was occupied in scanning their faces, desperate to see, through their expressive eyes, if the way they looked on me had changed. “Aron, we need to know! When did you get that? Why didn’t you tell us?” Celestia asked with increased urgency.. “Oh, uhh… I thought it was a minor injury, just a bump” I said, feeling somehow guilty. “Ooh, this is bad!” Twilight said, starting to hyperventilate slightly. “Tell me everything you can remember about it.” I put my face into my hands and started to speak, as if confessing. “I got into a fight with the bull at the restaurant. Sudden movements felt difficult and I couldn’t fight properly. He knocked me onto a table and I fell onto some cream. It was for a filly with a broken horn, I think?” “I see,” Giants’ Withers said. “As you do not possess magic native to this world, your very movements were resisted by ambient magical pressure. Although… that alone shouldn’t have altered the probability of you coming into contact with the medicinal cream; impulse-based reactions need a significantly strong driving imbalance.” I sighed through my hands. Since I’m telling them everything else, I may as well…. “I tried to use my geomancy, but it felt wrong. The power of the planet felt completely different, and I couldn’t use it to augment my strength.” Celestia’s stoic mask crumbled and a look of shame emerged. “I see,” the professor said. “Equestria doesn’t usually mesh well with non-native magic...” She then paused to look genuinely sorry for me. “It’s like earth pony magic…” Celestia said, shaking her head. “Here I was taking precautions against analogs to unicorn magic, as if that was the only form that mattered. Have I learned nothing these thousands of years?” Giants’ Withers seemed deeply moved by her ruler’s sudden show of emotion. The situation left her clueless about what to do. However, in a show of determination, she channeled the demeanor of a crime scene investigator and a desire to strike while the iron was hot. “Have you felt the slowness of movement since?” “No.” “Then, the harmonic core is probably already formed,” Twilight inferred. “It is important to all life in Equestria, but it is especially important and stronger in alicorns. Unfortunately, this means that Equestria will now see you as an incomplete unicorn.” “Wh—what do I do?” I asked. I felt like a child depending on her for help like this. I had no way of handling this on my own and was at her mercy. Part of me sincerely believed she could and would help me. “Well, to start you should avoid young unicorn foals. Adults should be fine as long as they don’t use magic stronger than levitation around you.” “We put him on the right floor then,” Luna said, desperately trying to inject some optimism. “It’s full of earth ponies who prefer keeping their feet closer to the ground.” Palpable silence hung on the air for what felt for two minutes. I wearily scanned the room and noticed that at some point the Cutie Mark Crusaders had slipped out of the room. “So… what do we do.” Twilight looked like she was struggling to keep her sympathetic mask as she eased her way towards a bookshelf. Nevertheless, her tail started to wag as she pulled a book from the shelf. “To the secret lab!” Twilight said, enthusiasm coming through. I felt a sinking feeling under me as the floor slid out from underneath me. I registered the room’s furnishings clinging to the walls as if suddenly magnetized; then, I started to fall. At the time, my mood was such that a giant slide down what felt like multiple floors, was met with only dull surprise. In a daze, I let the ponies lead me towards a variety of various apparatuses as I underwent a gauntlet of scans, tests and measurements that I couldn’t begin to identify. Nervous conversation surrounded me, but their words stopped registering fairly quickly. All my focus was on the implications rushing through my head. Further fear gripped me with each moment. I was here alone with something overtaking me that I barely understood. I had lost a part of me. My hair color, which had formerly been uniform and orthodox, was now indulgently bright and gaudy. I would be a laughingstock.  A soldier couldn’t have hair like this. “Would you like to go back to your room?” Celestia asked.  I couldn’t tell if fifteen minutes or an hour had passed. I gave a weak nod in response. I felt too weak to stand and started to stagger. She smiled at me and extended her otherworldly mane towards me. I took it in hand and marveled at its wondrous texture. I didn’t have the words to describe it—it felt like safety, like everything right in the world. We exited through what appeared to be a solid wall on the outside, which sealed behind us as we stepped out. I would have normally complained about the needless slide experience when there was another perfectly good entrance, but I had bigger concerns on my mind. “Will… will I ever be able to go back?” I asked, slightly tightening my grip on her mane as she guided me. She smiled serenely. “It’s okay. You’ll be fine I promise. There are spells to change your hair back. And if you’re outside of Equestria, the spell will never wear off. I apologize. We had foreseen this possibility and determined it easily resolvable, but we had forgot to fill you in.” I nodded in acknowledgement. It was truly good news, but I wasn’t much in the mood to appreciate a windfall of optimism. “That secret lab slide is pretty fun, isn’t it?” Celestia asked, cautiously cheerful. I weakly nodded. “Twilight’s been meaning to convert it into a roller coaster for some time now. Won’t that be fun?” What the heck is a roller coaster? I thought. I let the conversation die there, and before long, she guided me into my room. Strangely enough, my first impression was how clean the room was. “Do you need me for anything?” Celestia asked. I shook my head. She gave me a look that spoke of sympathy and moved to leave. However, she paused at the door and turned back. “I think I have something to make you feel better,” Celestia said. She stepped out of the room and closed the door. A moment later she returned holding what appeared to be a small hand mirror. “Would you like to see your world again?”