NanoCrystal

by Battlecrank

Chapter 1: Origins

“All right, that adjustment to the spell should do it,” said the Mentor to his Student

“Are you sure? The last time you said that, you earned the title ‘The Bearded’.”

The Student batted at her Mentor’s beard to emphasize the point. The elder proceeded to glare at his student, who merely giggled in response. The Mentor sighed and shifted his position, eliciting the sound of bells from his cloak. Returning his attention to the enchanting table in front of him, he continued.

“My past shortcomings aside, let us begin the experiment again.”

“Omni-Form Multi-Micro-Crystal Enchantment, attempt 435,” said the student, before continuing with a sarcastic tone. “I bet this will work WAY better than the previous 434 experiments, not counting that one time you accidentally ate the-“

“CLOVER!” The Student went quiet as her mentor gave her the glare to end all glares. “We agreed to NEVER AGAIN mention the cupcake incident!”

Clover sighed and poured some powdered diamond into the center of the fractal decagram inscribed in the center of the enchanting table. “You didn’t even explain how it happened! One moment it was ‘Clover, bring me some lunch and the powdered diamond!’, and the next it was ‘Clover, I appear to have accede-“

Clover caught a glance of her mentor. His expression, while blank, had an icy feel that even Windigos would consider chilly. Her ears drooped, and she quickly cleared her throat with a cough to cover for her sudden bout of awkward nervousness. The silence that followed was only broken by the occasional sound from the two preforming the final steps to set up the experiment.

“You still have yet to give the end product a proper name, you know,” Clover said in an attempt to break the silence.

“I’ll name it when the spell to make it works. Now get the bucket of water, we don’t want a repeat of casting attempt 371.”

Clover sighed at her mentor’s icy demeanor, and left to retrieve the requested item. When she re-entered the room a few minutes later, she looked around the cluttered workshop, and once again felt proud to be the student of the Great and Powerful Starswirl the Bearded. As she approached the table, she decided to try and strike up another conversation with her mentor despite his current ire.

“So Starswirl, are you ever going to take Princess Platinum up on her offer to be her advisor? She is kind of expecting you to accept it. Besides, she trusts you.”

Clover set the bucket down between herself and Starswirl as she stood next to the table. Starswirl’s horn lit up as he prepared to cast a spell on the powdered diamond. He glanced over at clover and sighed.

“Her trust is easily gained and I have no interest in such a position.”

“You really shouldn’t talk about her like that,” Clover said as she glared at her mentor. “She considers you her friend after all, and you know how that old saying goes. ‘Losing a friend’s trust is the fastest way to lose a friend-‘”

“FOREVER!” Screamed a pink earth pony that popped out of the water bucket between the two.

“BY FAUST’S QUILL!” Yelled the startled Stariswirl.

Starswirl’s control over the spell he was preparing to cast was quickly ripped away from him as his attention was suddenly focused on the very pink surprise next to him. The spell, no longer maintained by his masterful control, shot towards the enchanting table in a blast of multicolored magic. The table, crafted years before, and enchanted by the greatest unicorns of its time, quickly exploded when exposed to the prematurely casted spell, destroying a significant amount of Starswirl’s workshop with the resulting explosion. Clover, being the clever unicorn that she was, saw the release of the spell in time to put up a shield around the trio of ponies.

When the debris stopped falling, Clover carefully lowered the shield. Starswirl just looked around himself with what could at best be described as shock, occasionally muttering incomprehensibly to himself, before returning his gaze to the pink pony, who still resided in the bucket of water. Clover, who had opted to stare at the pink pony rather than look around the workshop, finally asked the one question that wholly consumed her current mindset.

“Why?!”

“HE DID IT!” Blurted the pink pony while pointing at Starswirl, before quickly ducking back into the bucket.

Silence reigned for a few moments, with both mentor and student staring at the bucket. Ever so slowly, Starswirl started moving his hoof towards the bucket. When it was finally within his reach, he quickly tipped the bucket over. After the water had completely drained out, he carefully picked it up, and looked inside.

“…It’s gone…”

“But how-?” Clover started to ask.

“Wait, what’s that?”

Clover looked at Starswirl, who was pointing at something. In the center of the blackened ruins of what used to be a rather well made enchanting table, there was a shiny transparent cube.

“Is that-?” Clover started to ask.

“I believe so, yes,” Starswirl said simply.

Clover carefully picked up the cube with her magic. She held it so they both could inspect the cube with what little light was available in the destroyed workshop. Starswirl looked at it for a brief amount of time, before stating a simple set of commands.

“Shape, sphere. Color, red.”

In response, the cube slowly changed its shape and color. When it completed, Clover looked at Starswirl with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Sir, you’ve done it!” She danced around a bit, still holding the sphere with her magic. “Do you have any idea what this will do to our current understanding of magic?! We could create structures that build and change themselves! Tools that you only need one of! Maybe we could even individually enchant the crystals, allowing for the creation of complex self-governing machines which we could use to communicate over long distances! We could even-”

“No,” Starswirl said in response to his student’s excited babbling, causing her to stop. “While this discovery could changes things for the better, it has the capability of doing far worse in the wrong hooves.”

“How so?” Clover asked curiously.

“Simple. Shape, sword.”

Clover, who now had a look of horror upon her face, quickly turned to the sphere. Or rather, what used to be a sphere. It now had the vague shape of a sword used by the unicorn elite guard, and was growing sharper and more defined by the second. When it finished, she found herself in possession of a ruby colored sword that any guardspony would be happy to have in their possession.

“You see,” continued Starswirl, “while it could be used to build houses, it could also be used to build military structures. It could be a weapon that changes while you use it. As for your idea of ‘self-governance’, I shudder at the idea of weapons that can think for themselves. So, while it could create a utopia, it could also create untold pain and suffering for all of ponydom.”

“Then why would you create something like this in the first place?”

“Because, Clover, I am not the only one working towards the goal of advancing our knowledge of magic. Even now, my competitors Neighcola Tesla and Thomas Edifoal are pushing the boundaries, with little or no respect for what they find. Tesla created his earthquake generator, and Edifoal has his lightning launcher. Both of those creations, believe it or not, started with mundane intentions! The generator started as a way to see through the ground, and the rod as a way to collect the lightning during storms for later use with those glow-stones that have become so popular. So you see, I too must push the boundaries of magic, if only to come up with ways to prevent death, or if necessary, rebuild lives after it has struck.”

Starswirl laughed humorlessly, before continuing. “With this, I have created both the ultimate weapon of destruction, and the salvation of all of ponydom. I only hope that the pink one that was here earlier did not see how we did it, so we can keep this to ourselves.”

Clover remained quiet a few minutes, continuing to stare at the sword while thinking about what Starswirl said. She eventually sighed and set it down next to her. Looking back at her mentor, who had begun to clean up the mess, she asked a question.

“Where do you think that pink pony went, anyway?”

Starswirl paused in thought before resuming his work. “Where ever they went to, it hopefully was not to their own lab to replicate our success. The last thing we need is a pony that can seemingly defy reality, with a weapon of ultimate destructive potential in their possession.”

-(◊)-

“Hi Doctor,” said a certain pink pony as they, or rather, she, popped up behind a brown stallion who was working in front of a device shaped like a large pillar. “Thanks again for letting me tag along! It was really fun, especially when I got to jump out at ponies and yell ‘FOREVER’ whenever they started saying that saying that I say whenever I’m talking about trust, because that’s the type of saying a friend should say to a friend whenever their friend is about to break another friends trust, even if it would totally solve all of that other friend’s problems with ANOTHER friend they both had, who had problems with the second friend who said that the third friend said that the second friend said tha-MMPH!“

“Pinkie!” Shouted the Doctor as he placed his hoof over Pinkie’s mouth. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a billion times! Stop breaking into my Tardis! I almost didn’t even notice you did it this time, and you might have been left there if it wasn’t for the odd string of records I found showing a Pink Demon running around in the Pre-Classical Era! Do you have any idea the amount of damage you could have done to the timeline?!”

Pinkie gave the doctor a look that clearly stated ‘I’d tell you, but your hoof is on my mouth’. The Doctor, in response, groaned and removed his hoof before continuing, regardless of the previously expected response from Pinkie.

“You know what, I’m just going to take you home. When did you break in from this time? And no tricking me into revealing the future again! You really need to stop trying to convince your friends you can see the future!”

“But my Pinkie Sense really can-,“ started Pinkie.

“No! None of that. Now, when did you come from?”

Pinkie groaned, before continuing. “Fiiine. I came from temporal coordinate 05-31/11-11-05.”

“Good. Now tell me, how in blue blazes you keep getting in here?!”

-(◊)-

Many years after the Hearth Warming’s Eve event, and even more since Starswirl’s disappearance, Clover the Clever sat alone in her workshop. She stared at a recent archeological discovery that Princess Platinum had asked her to study. The result of said study on them, which had taken all day, was what her current problem was. If her data was to be believed, these six simple gems would have the potential of changing the world many times over. She didn’t know who or what made them, how they worked, or even what their limits were. She was quite sure of one thing, though. They were incredibly powerful forces of potential change.

The memory of a ‘chat’ she had long ago with her mentor drifted through her head as she stared at the gems. She smiled at the memory of working with her mentor, before sighing in remembrance of the warning he had given her. Eventually, she returned to the problem at hoof.

'I need some way of preventing these from falling into the wrong hooves', she thought to herself. 'A failsafe of sorts, as it were. I won’t be around forever, and I really don’t have the patience to foalsit for that long anyway. Princess Platinum will probably want them back soon, and if she can figure out how to get them to work…'

Clover shivered at the thought of a possible return to the three bickering tribes, or worse. She couldn’t let that happen, but she again fell upon the problem of her mortality. If only she could create something to guard them…

Her eyes fell upon a large red workbench in the corner of her lab where the shadows of dusk were just starting to obscure it. A smile formed upon her face as she quickly looked around in the dimming light, to see if anypony else was around. When she was satisfied that nopony was watching, she quickly cleared off the workbench, and moved it to the center of her workshop where the light was better.

“Shape, Cube. Color, Clear.”

At her commands, the red workbench began to slowly shift into a transparent cube that was almost as large as she was. A smile once again graced her with its presence, relief that the NanoCrystal Swarm, as Starswirl had eventually come to call it, still worked. Of course, she was also thankful that she had managed to keep some of it, rather than just destroying it outright as Starswirl had originally planned.

When Starswirl and Clover had attempted to replicate their success those many years ago, they had found that they were unable to. Even with exhaustive testing, their attempts numbering well into the thousands, they were never able to create any more of the NanoCrystal. While baffling, it re-assured Starswirl that there was no chance of anypony else creating it.

Of course, Starswirl wanted to destroy it once the testing was done, to ensure that it didn’t fall into the wrong hooves. Clover, however, had done the brunt of the hooves on experimenting, and knew a few things about it that she had kept from her mentor. She couldn’t get over its potential for magical knowledge advancement, and possibility for do-gooding. So, she broke off a small part of it, to see if she could create more of it with the sample. It wasn’t until years later that she figured a way to get it to consume gems, to increase its mass.

However, none of those discoveries solved her current problem. Commanding it to guard the gems would work, but only for a finite time with any effectiveness. Later on, it would probably have to make judgment calls that she wouldn’t be able to predict with its initial orders. If only there was some way she could-

A phrase from her recent memory flashback ran through her head. With it, came a thought. An idea that seemed to satisfy all the requirements she placed upon the problem in her mind.

'A self-governing machine', she thought. 'One made out of a NanoCrystal swarm, and capable of self-thought.' She smiled to herself, before quickly frowning. 'Then again, that’s like calling a sword the perfect shield. But at the same time, to gain knowledge of self-governing enchantments…'

Clover stared tiredly at the cube for a while longer, before coming to a decision. As her horn lit up, she smiled at the possibility of newfound knowledge. She only hoped it didn’t take as long to modify the swarm as it did to create it in the first place. She didn’t think she could pull that many nights up in a row.

-(◊)-

Many hours later, Clover sat back and admired her work. It was almost dawn, and she was completely exhausted. Of course, she had expected this latest ‘project’ to have taken far longer to complete than a single all-nighter.

With a tired sigh from having stayed up for a full day, Clover went and curled up on a cot she had in the corner of her workshop. It had been a while since she had pulled an all-nighter after a hard day’s work, and she wasn’t as young as she used to be. Plus, the cot was comfortable, and who could turn down a quick powernap?

'Maybe I should get out more', she thought to herself. 'Get some exercise. It would probably help if I saw Smart Cookie more often. She usually has good advice on staying young and energetic.' Clover hugged herself up against the pillow on her cot. 'I wonder what she would say about my current project.'

She paused for a few moments before placing her prediction. 'She would probably say I was marrying the ultimate weapon of destruction with the ultimate weapon of change, to create one big happy family of Chaos. I guess I can ask her when she shows up for our day at the spa today.'

Clover suddenly sat up on her cot as her last thought really sunk in.

“I just married the ultimate weapon of destruction to the ultimate weapon of change, and Smart Cookie is probably going to show up any minute now! What was I thinking?!”

Quickly getting up, Clover darted around her workshop, looking for someplace she could hide her latest ‘project’ where no one could see. As she did so, she failed to notice it watching her as she darted around her workshop. If she had known, she probably would have been slightly more alarmed, but she had other things on her mind.

“Ohhh, if she tells Princess Platinum, I’ll be in so much trouble! Now, I just need to hide it before-“

After a quick knocking on the door, a voice called out. “Clover, are you in there? I’m here for our spa day, and last time you skipped you promised you would come with this time.”

“Uh, be right there, Cookie!”

Clover desperately looked around her workshop, before finally settling on a large iron cauldron with a lid. She had used it previously for an experiment in alchemy, but she had a MUCH better use for it now!

With a quick flick of her magic, the cauldron landed next to the NanoCrystal swarm. She removed the lid, and with a quick command, told it to enter. It hesitated slightly, but did as she bid. She was quick to blame its hesitancy on its new enchantments, and not her mind rushing faster than a speeding lama.

Once the swarm was fully inside the cauldron, she put the lid back on, and stood atop the entire assembly in time for Cookie to open the door.

“Clover, are you coming or not? We may have all day, but that’s no reason to-… Why are you standing on a pot?”

“I’m not standing on a pot,” Clover quickly said. “You’re seeing things. Besides, this is obviously a cauldron.”

Cookie stared at Clover with a flat look, before sighing.

“You created an abomination of magic again, didn’t you?”

Clover’s ears fell, as a weak grin appeared on her face.

“Stars and Moon, Clover, you promised you wouldn’t after the last time!” Cookie glared at Clover with an annoyed expression. “You remember when you tried to prove the existence of the flutter ponies?”

“Hey! That wasn’t my-“

“Or the time you tried to prove the planet revolves around the sun?”

“But that would have worked if-“

“Or should I remind you about the time you tried to summon a human?”

“But he didn’t blame me for-“

“Or, Faust forbid, the time you tried to re-create the Smooze?”

“But it was only bubblegum!“

“Of course, there was always the time you went on that date with Commander Hurricane.”

“What? That didn’t end with an abomination!”

“You sure looked like one when he was through with you.”

“Wha?! But I- Wha?” Squeaked Clover.

Cookie grinned at the blush that was rapidly consuming Clover’s face. When Clover eventually regained her composure, Cookie continued.

“So, do you need help hiding it or not?

“W-what makes you think I-“ Clover started before another flat stare from Cookie ended it. “Ok! Fine! Will you?”

Cookie smiled and said, “It’s a good thing that someone is building a castle nearby.”

“What does that have anything to do with-“

“Just bring the pot with your coltfriend in it, and let’s go.”

Clover started blushing again, and sent a hard glare at Cookie, who was laughing at Clover’s reaction. After a moment, Clover sighed.

“Just let me give it some orders first, and then we can seal it away. You know, so it doesn't freak out and go on a rampage or anything.”

Cookie sighed, but indicated Clover should make it quick. Clover lifted the lid and stuck her head inside the cauldron, whispered for a few moments, then closed and sealed the cauldron with magic. When she was done, she returned her attention to Cookie and asked a question.

“So, whose castle are we hiding this in?”

“It’s Princess Platinum’s. You can tell her all about your new friend while we’re there.”

By the time night fell that day, Clover felt she had lost three years off of her life.

Author's Note:

Not totally happy with it, but I want to move on to the next chapter.
Again, criticism welcome.

Comments

[JDLENL]

Quite hilarious! Keep writing this, please.

[LonesomeWanderer]

Not totally happy with it, but I want to move on to the next chapter.
Again criticism welcome.

I didn't spot many mistakes in there.
All in all though, this story is going to be fun!