Two - Commence
“Thank you again for letting us use your house for a sleepover, Pinkie.”
“Aw, don’t worry about it, Twilight! You guys are always welcome in the Pie House! Unless we’re on vacation, because that would be illegal.” Pinkie laughed and then went back to her personal project of attempting to caffeinate cupcakes. Currently, she was dumping an entire bottle of soda into the center of one. Sunset wasn’t entirely sure how, but she knew better than to ask.
Twilight was sitting on Pinkie’s bed, drawing schematics for some device or another. She had already tried to explain it to the group once, but it smoothly cleared everybody else’s heads by a good ten feet. Fluttershy and Rarity were painting each other’s nails off to one side, and were quietly chatting amongst themselves. Finally, Pinkie’s television brightly displayed Sunset and Rainbow’s butts being thoroughly kicked by Applejack.
As a flashy ‘PLAYER 2 WINS!’ once again adorned the screen, Rainbow dropped her controller, leaned back, and groaned.
“No fair! I had that!”
“Don’t blame the player, blame the game.”
“Oh, stop acting so cocky, AJ! Thirty more seconds and you’d have gone down!”
“Sure, Dash. But, hey, at least your doing better than Sunset!”
Rainbow turned to the resident alien. “Yeah, Sunset, you’re really off your game today. I mean, you died in, like, a minute! What gives?”
The girl sighed. “I’m… a bit distracted.”
“The portal?” her friends asked in unison. Sunset only nodded.
“Don’t you worry, sugar. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“And even if it isn’t, you bet your ass we’ll kick it into next week!” Rainbow punched the air in front of her. “Bam, friendship!”
Sunset gave a small smile. She wasn’t very reassured, but she appreciated the sentiment none the less. “Thanks, girls.”
Applejack set down her controller and got up with a grunt, stretching out her legs. “Well, I dunno bout y’all, but I think I’ll go an’ get ready for bed,” she announced, addressing the whole room. The others took one look at the digital clock on Pinkie’s nightstand before mumbling their assent and moving to their bags.
“Oh, horseapples,” Sunset swore under her breath. Just her luck to forget to pack pajamas to a Celestia damned slumber party.
“Whatever is it, darling?” questioned Rarity, the only one close enough to hear her.
“I just forgot my pajamas; it’s nothing.”
Rarity gasped. “Nothing?! Why, Sunset, you can’t simply wear the same clothes into bed, they’d be filthy!”
Sunset elected not to mention that she usually did that anyway, and ended up having to pretend she simply owned multiple copies of the exact same outfit. That was not a conversation she wanted to have with Rarity.
“Well, I don’t really have a choice.”
“Nonsense! I always bring spares in case I want to change things up in the middle of the night.” Sunset raised an eyebrow. “Just borrow one of mine!” Rarity finished, holding them out at arm’s length.
“Are you sure? I know you make them all yourself, I wouldn’t want to get them dirty or anything.”
“I insist! And you know better than to refuse when I insist,” Rarity threatened.
“Alright, alright.” Sunset took the proffered garments. “Thanks, Rarity.”
“Oh, just helping out a friend; think nothing of it.” As soon as the words left her mouth, her body was swathed in light, her hair growing out and her ears becoming decidedly more equine. After she landed back on the ground, Rarity let out a content sigh.
“Oh, I must say, the feeling that comes from all that magic is a great motivator to be a better person.”
“I know, right?” Pinkie popped up between the two girls. “It’s almost as good as those brownies the eco kids brought in that one time!”
“Um,” Fluttershy interjected, “I just want to make it clear that I had nothing to do with what she’s talking about.”
Applejack walked up and admired Rarity’s transformation. “Is it just me, or are these pony-ups becomin’ more an’ more frequent?”
“No, I’ve been noticing that too,” said Twilight, who was already furiously typing on her laptop, no doubt documenting the circumstances of the pony up. Sunset was both awed and somewhat frightened by her dedication. “There’s a direct relationship between the advance of time and the amount of magic surges you all experience, both as a group and as individuals.”
“So It’ll get easier and easier to pony up? Aw, sweet! That’s so awesome!” Rainbow squealed.
Sunset just sighed. “Well, from one perspective, yes. Just… try not to do it in front of, like, a reporter or anything.” The last thing they needed was for the news of magic to spread; that would cause chaos.
Suddenly, a scream shot through the night, and Sunset dashed out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house like it was on fire. As she stepped out onto the street and her eyes adjusted to the night, she spotted a pale faced woman running down the street, arms flailing wildly through her long fuschia hair.
“Ma’am, what’s wrong?”
“There was a m-m-monster!”
Footsteps from behind her (as well as Fluttershy’s muffled ‘Eep!’) told Sunset that her friends had caught up. “A monster? Can you be more specific?”
“I-I didn’t get a good look—it was black, and it’s dark, and I only just saw it before it ran in there,” the lady said, gesturing to an alleyway a block down the road. Sunset wasted no time running where she had pointed, turning swiftly into the alleyway with her fists raised. It was a dead end, the other side separated by an old wooden fence. Besides a few trashcans, the only thing in the alleyway was a large crow on top of a dumpster. It cawed at her once, it’s sickly green eyes biting into Sunset’s, before flapping off through the darkness.
Rainbow ran up to her side, scratching her prismatic head. “Sooo… I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Applejack was wrong about the portal business being ‘nothing’.”
Ever since transferring to Canterlot High, Twilight Sparkle had made it her personal mission to transform an unused office space into her own personal magical research lab, and she was doing a damn good job of it if you asked her. Counters and filing cabinets lined the perimeter of the room, electronics and equipment littered said counters so close together that it was probably a safety hazard, boards hung from the walls (everything from white to bulletin), loose papers depicting formulas and postulates carpeted every surface that wasn’t otherwise occupied, and to top it all off, it was all organized in a way that would make her interdimensional counterpart proud and make everyone else finally understand the practicality of the dewey decimal system.
Twilight sat in the middle of it all, rocking side to side in her favorite swivel chair and poring over a textbook on magic as she explained her newest stumbling block to her dog.
How did she get a textbook on magic, you ask?
She wrote it herself. Twilight had a lot of free time.
“…but that won’t be a problem, because I know I can capture magic using the same tech I used for the locket, and I should be able to control the output with this new arcane focus lens, but Sunset said that in order to change the raw release from a dimensional spell to an evocational one, I need to alter the pattern of the magic, and I’m unsure of the best way to do that.”
Spike opened one eye. “Sorry, what was that? I kinda fell asleep five minutes ago.”
Twilight jolted a bit. “Oh, um, I wasn’t really talking, like, to you to you. I just act like I’m talking to you because it seems slightly less strange to me than talking to myself, and it helps me justify my problem solving strategies. See, it worked really well before you could talk, but now it’s kind of awkward, since I’m not aiming at getting a response from you; rather, I’m simply talking through the current problem to help devise creative solutions, and—and your asleep again. Alright. That’s fine.”
Twilight turned back to her project. Life was much less confusing before the Friendship Games. But also a lot more dull. She supposed it was a trade worth making.
Twilight started fiddling with her pencil. Could magic be woven with material objects, or was it a wave-based force? Could magnetism be useful? She should probably consult Sunset a bit more on the specifics of—
“Yo, Twilight!”
“AAAAH!”
Twilight instinctively whipped around towards the sudden noise, her pencil flying from her grasp and striking Rainbow across the face.
“Ow!”
“S-sorry!”
Rainbow chuckled. “You’re fine. Has anyone ever told you that you scare, like, super easily?”
“Four people, including you.”
“Oh.” Rainbow cleared her throat. “So, uh, whatcha doing?”
Twilight smiled excitedly. “I’m so glad you asked! I’m building what I’m calling a ‘thaumic compressor’, a device that extracts the magic from the air around it, compresses it into a singular mass, and focuses it outward!” Rainbow raised an eyebrow. “It’s a laser gun that runs on magic,” Twilight summarized.
Rainbow grinned broadly and squeed. “Twilight. This is probably the most awesome thing that little egghead of yours ever managed to cough up!”
“Um. Thanks?”
Before she knew it, Rainbow was gripping her by the shoulders and staring intently into her eyes. “Can I use it? Please?” she pleaded, not unlike a child in the candy isle.
Twilight removed Rainbows hands. “Sorry, Rainbow, but it doesn’t work quite yet. Besides, you would have to be ponied up in order for there to be enough magic around to actually produce a powerful beam.” Rainbow deflated. “But I’ll be sure to let you be the first to use it for real when we need it!”
“When we need it? So there is going to be an attack? Because I could use some notice; I like to stretch before extensive time spent ass-kicking.”
“Well, we’re not sure what’s going on exactly, but we don’t think it’s good. Better safe than sorry, you know? We don’t want to be caught off guard.”
Just then, the bell rang, and Rainbow swore her grandmother out of her grave before running off to class. Twilight was about to get back to work when she saw Spike leaving the lab.
“Where are you going, Spike?”
He froze. “Oh, uh, just catching a breath of fresh air. This lab is so stuffy.”
Well, Twilight supposed she couldn’t stop him. It was much harder to exercise control over animals when they were intelligent beings. “Alright. Just don’t take too long, my research period ends in forty-five minutes.”
Twilight worked for a good half hour before Spike returned, looking much less bored than before.
“Sorry I was gone so long, but there was this squirrel, and I could just tell it was looking at me funny.”
Twilight cast her pet a sideways glance. “You didn’t hurt it, did you?”
“No, it escaped up a tree. I barked at it for, like, two hours, but it didn’t come down.” Two hours? He had been gone for thirty minutes! Apparently, not all dogs have as a good an internal clock as research would have you believe. “Did I miss anything while I was gone?”
“No, nothing’s happened since Rainbow left.”
“Rainbow was here?”
Twilight bothered to turn all the way around just to give Spike a disapproving glare. “Okay, I know you sleep a lot, but really? You walked right past her on your way out!”
Spike only shrugged, and Twilight returned to her work with a roll of her eyes.
Lyra and Bon Bon were two fish in the sea of students shuffling out of Canterlot High after another day of learning (or, as most would tell you, ‘suffering’).
“What did you get on the physics test, Bonnie?”
“100.”
Lyra groaned. “Oh, you’re too smart for your own good. That thing was hard! And it sure doesn’t help that Mr. Doodle is so cranky all the time.”
“Maybe you just need to study more, Ly,” Bon Bon replied, playfully bopping Lyra on the nose.
“Only if you help me study…” Lyra draped a green arm around her companion’s shoulders.
Bon Bon giggled. “I don’t think we’d get much studying done.”
“Darn! You uncovered my master plan!”
As they laughed and turned their separate ways, they both looked over their shoulder simultaneously.
“Text you later?”
“Text you later!”
Lyra worked part-time at a chocolate shop downtown; it was one of the ones with overly fancy, horribly overpriced, yet unreasonably delicious desserts that made mouths water and wallets cry.
Let’s just say that she interviewed there for a reason.
As Lyra walked towards another day of monotonous cashiering, a stray dog ran up to her, grabbed her purse in its fangs, and ran into a nearby alleyway.
“Wha—Hey! Give that back!” It was times like these when Lyra wished Bon Bon were with her.
Well, and most other times she wasn’t with Bon Bon.
The girl turned into the small street. “Alright, doggy, if you could just give me my stuff back that’d be real ni—”
Zap!
A flash of sickly green light, and Lyra emerged from the alleyway, carrying a large sack over her shoulders.
“These are some weird memories…”