4.4
4.4
Sleep laid on Twilight like Pinkie would lay upon a warm and fluffy waterbed; rolling atop her consciousness and seemingly delighting in keeping her down. She didn’t want to wake up and depart from the enchanting slumber as she rolled over and further tightened her blankets around herself. The lightest tickle of a feather against her nose continued to disturb her back to wakefulness, brushing her sleep away much as Rarity would dust her home. Wait—it did feel like Rarity’s patterns of dusting going after her n-n-ninth!
“Aaah-aaah-achoo!”
Twilight blinked back to wakefulness, shaking her head to clear the drowsiness as she poked her head out of the blankets she had somehow wrapped herself in. Every ache and soreness in her body that she had developed since childhood had vanished from her while she had been asleep, leaving her feeling better than she ever had before. Mmm, waking up felt so good this time; the tender relief from her chest to the tip of her tail made her wish every wakeup could feel so good. Wait, wasn’t she supposed to be running tests? She wasn’t supposed to- “Yaaaaaah! Wokenupnow!”
Standing aside with a magnificent sky-blue feather borrowed from Rainbow Dash, Rarity smirked as she looked back to Berry, Sunbeam, and the Crusaders who had all gathered around Dash’s still snoring form. The Pegasus was still out cold, drooling into the blanket she had wrapped around a hoof and pressed up against her face. “See, I told you, I knew exactly how to get her up.”
Twilight pressed her blanketed hoof up against her head, steading herself against the weakness of her decaffeinated state. She needed sweet, sweet stimulants giving her her buzz. Where was Spike, she needed him to go find the pot of tea that had her name written all over it downstairs. Sniff. Sniff. Mmmm, chai tea called to her.
“Hey, guys. Is Twilight up yet? I got her tea ready, but it’s only going to last a few minutes before it gets cold. I made her favorite Neighpon Chai, and Twilight hates it when it goes cold.” Spike cheerfully narrated his doom as he backed into the room and pushed the light crystal door open, having waddled back from the kitchen with the giant mug and tea pitcher Twilight had come to favor since she had moved to Ponyville. Before he could say any more, she teleported him to her side and gripped the whole set in her magic, pouring a full mug to greedily slake her nearly insatiable thirst for caffeine. “Ah! Guys, help! She’s got me! Twi-pire!”
A melodious chorus of laughs greeted his misfortune lightly as Twilight downed the first mugful of tea in a few seconds before pouring a second helping as fast as she could to wake up from her unscheduled nap. Her grip held his paws to the serving tray, leaving him kicking his stubby legs helplessly in the air as he tried to free himself. Despite the noise, Dash remained asleep and still, murmuring beneath the blanket of commotion. Twilight’s gulps continued, swallowing down the rest of her second mug of tea at a more sedate pace; tilting her head back she sucked every last drop of tea from the metal interior and vacuum sealed it to her muzzle.
“Guys, c’mon, get me down! I’m getting dizzy!” Spike clamored as Twilight sleepily bobbed her head trying to get and tea residue out of the mug and unintentionally swung him about.
Sunbeam sat on her haunches and warded off the idea with her waving hooves. “Oh, no. Never come between a grumpy, sleepy Twilight and her tea.” Berry took notes.
With a sigh of relief, Twilight set Spike and his precious cargo still clutched tenderly in his grip safely back on the ground as she flopped backwards. Her sigh broke the vacuum seal on her muzzle, letting the wood and pewter mug drop to the floor beside her as she rubbed the sides of her head to reawaken her sleep-addled mental processes. A few last licks of her lips wiped the tea staining her muzzle and nose away so she looked a little presentable as she peered across the crystal floors of her laboratory. Odd, they hadn’t gotten any scans done, why were there five rolled up test runs of her thaumatoscope wrapped up for future analysis?
“Unf, have you guys been experimenting without me?” She sleepily complained as she rolled back to her belly and shakily stood up.
Applebloom tilted her head, bouncing her bow lightly as she plaintively shot a look of begging forgiveness. “Only a little. Ya’ve been asleep for a while, so Sunbeam got started without you so ya could look later.” Her lip quivered lightly as she saw Twilight’s brow furrow lightly. “Please don’t get mad at us. Ah know ya like to do all yer testing yerself, but we just wanted to give ya a ‘Sorry fer putting ya to sleep’ present.”
Twilight shook her head, holding up a hoof to rub her brow as she did. “Not mad. No accents, please. All fuzzy still.” She got to her hooves, wondering why her lab floor was made of slick crystal instead of nice non-slip mats. “Spike, note. For the next magic-induced fugue state, get some lab mats for the floors so I don’t plant my face like a Pinkie gag.”
“Fugue? Oh, you mean the next magic hangover!” Spike tried to clarify, shutting up as Twilight lightly glared at him. “Sorry.”
Shaking her head, Twilight tottered over towards the thaumatoscope to look at the test scrolls. The light shining through the crystal walls was driving her crazy as she teeter-trotted unsteadily from the magic sleep spell. “Not hangover. Mind all fuzzy from magic spell still. Think it wears off slower on some ponies. Need to do experiments. Later. No accents, please.” Her body felt so good, but her mind wanted to go back to bed.
Berry smirked, finding Twilight’s state hilarious. He trotted over to join her, stepping over the test leads still attached to Rainbow Dash dutifully recording the pulses of magic running through her wings. “Ooch, what’s wrong with accents? They add charm to a pony. Aye, Ah’d bet ye would do well to pick up the local one, it might endear ye to the-hurk!” Berry’s voice disappeared for a moment as Twilight tilted her head absentmindedly and fired a dusky beam of magic into his mouth and down his throat in a perfect shot.
“No accent.” Twilight commanded quietly, admiring her skills. The target practice with Dash and Rarity had paid off pretty nicely. Berry’s squeak of terror as he clutched his throat was pretty funny. Mean, and she needed to fix it later, but still pretty funny.
When Berry talked again, his eyes bulged lightly in horror as he heard the pompous tones of an upper noble blanking out his adopted Trottingham accent. “My voice! You can do that? Why didn’t any pony tell me that she could make ponies sound like Prince Blueblood?” He pouted, sitting down and curling his tail around him to warm his fore-hooves. “You’re mean.”
Sunbeam, who had been trotting up behind them tried to hide her laughter as Twilight ignored Berry in favor of looking at the test scrolls. As she drew up beside Berry, she got a good look at the sad pout of disappointment on his face and finally lost it, falling over as she burst into silent hysterical laughter. Her wing flattened the poor sea pony, pinning him to the floor as she squirmed on her back, feeling like she was going to die as she wheezed and tried to keep from laughing up her lungs. The old pegasus’s hind-legs pedaled in the air as her forelegs clutched her heaving barrel for mercy. “Berry! Proper! Too good! Why? I should have thought about! That!” She wheezed between giggle fits as Berry pouted beneath her wing.
“I’m not supposed to be proper. I’m a rogue, and a gentlemen of colorful nature.” He whined, rubbing his throat.
Sunbeam giggled again, pleading quietly for him to stop as Rarity and Spike watched her worriedly.
“Ya sound good.” Applebloom said cautiously, hiding behind Sunbeam’s bulk. “Why’d ya want to talk like that?” She nudged her head under the tip of Sunbeam’s oddly massive wing, helping Berry hold it up so he could escape as Sunbeam slowly slipped out of her giggle fits.
“It made ponies pay more attention to my voice than the fact that I was a sea pony.”
“Oh.”
“Ngh. It should stop in an hour or two.” Twilight groaned as she sat back down, rolling back until her spine could rub against the cold metal housing of her thaumatoscope. She held up all of the tightly rolled test results, examining them each in turn before setting them beside Spike as he waddled up. “Okay, Sweetie Belle and Spike I understand, but why did you guys record Sunbeam, Berry, and you Rarity?” Twilight picked one scroll back up, taking a second look at the elegant rendition of Sunbeam’s smiling face in the corner of it.
Rarity brushed off Berry’s fur for him, taking a glance at his dress uniform hanging up in the corner. “Well, Captain Bubbles decided to be quite the gentle pony and assisted us by providing a sample of his rather meager song-spell talents to compare Sweetie Belle to.” She smiled to him in thanks, and he awkwardly returned the smile, rubbing a hoof against his curly mane and straightening up.
Shaking her head, Rarity brushed past him and picked Sunbeam up in her telekinetic aura, marveling again at how her magic strength had increased. “Sunbeam and I were… controls, I believe the term is? While your talents are considerable, they are not quite the norm to compare my sister to, are they? And goodness forbid trying to compare Scootaloo to Rainbow Dash.” She looked back to the pair of foals, who had been secretively drawing things on a sheet of paper again before they sheepishly stopped under her gaze.
Sunbeam shook her head as Rarity set her back on her hooves again; the rapid twirl that Rarity had inflicted on her was a little dizzying. “Right. Applebloom actually was the one who suggested it, as a way of filling out the data set.”
Twilight frowned for a second, lowering the scroll detailing Sunbeam’s magic to look over it at the apple filly. “Really? That was pretty smart of you. Thanks, I hadn’t thought of doing that.”
“T’was just common sense. Nuthin’ special about it.” Applebloom cast her gaze down, scuffing a hoof against the floor.
“It’s less common than you would think, Applebloom. I wouldn’t have thought of that.” Twilight pulled the scroll back close to her face, taking another look at the lines. The rhythms in the data looked odd to her eyes, familiar almost. She could have sworn to herself that she had seen the data before, data she knew didn’t make much sense since Sunbeam couldn’t possibly have unicorn magi-
With an ill-timed ding, the thaumatoscope completed the scan cycle for Rainbow Dash, automatically cutting off the end of the rolling sheet of data with a shearing system. Twilight snatched the roll up as it was bundled tightly and taped shut, pulling it off of the drum so she could examine the lines closely. “Wow, the readings are so clear!”
“Oh, I might have had some help from Berry. He’s made it a mission in life to understand machinery and technology.” Sunbeam absentmindedly said as she rubbed the top of the still pouting sea pony’s head. “He does so well.” Giving him a light hug, she smiled and tried to raise the corners of his mouth with her hoof.
Berry scrunched his mouth shut, unwilling to say much more. Hearing Blueblood’s accent come out of his mouth sent the worst kinds of willies down his spine. “Are we not going to get started on Twilight?”
Twilight looked around at the light shining through the crystal walls, scratching the back of her head. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to know how much time it would have taken to get Dash hooked up, let alone the rest of you. I can’t keep you guys cooped up in my lab all day, ponies might start thinking I’m some sort of mad scientist or something.” Twilight’s wings flared as she mentioned the possibility, betraying her still lingering fears about rejection from the townsfolk of Ponyville.
Spike answered her worries as he shoved the tray of tea onto the counter on the hall side, slumping down the cabinet face as he lost what was propping him up. “Nah. It’s only noonish. We got done a lot faster than you think.”
“Bwuah?”
Rarity smirked to her little sister, who shared their evil gaze of smugness. “Oh, Sweetie Belle. Would you kindly show Twilight that she’s not the ONLY talented mage around here anymore oh pretty please?” She sing-songed, grinning all the while as Twilight arched an eyebrow in confusion.
Sweetie nodded eagerly and shut her eyes for her song. Taking a deep series of warmup breaths, she started humming as she inched up on tippy-hooves with the rising cadence of the song on her breath. Life glimmered almost invisibly in the air as she left the fading beat of Berry’s heart roar again in her ears and directed it to the test leads. Green aurora-fire danced along their lengths as they came to life again and started moving, popping free of Dash one by one. They slithered; Twilight not at all missing the movement.
Twilight fluffed up as she saw their snakey slithers, fluffing up and floating up on frantic movements of her wings as she instinctively sought the highest point she could hide upon as the sensors coiled themselves up into neat piles waiting for their master to give them direction. “S-s-ssna-“She stammered as she watched with horror from her perch and trembled. Sweetie looked up to her innocently as one came up and circled around the filly’s leg, crawling up it in coils to loop over Sweetie’s back and nuzzle her in the cheek.
“What? Was it something I said? He-he! Stop it; that tickles!” Sweetie complained as her still flickering companion nuzzled her curiously again.
Rarity and Sunbeam looked from Twilight to the coils of shifting sensors—never did two hooves meet two faces so quickly in annoyance as they came to the same conclusion simultaneously. Rarity rubbed the bridge of her muzzle as she remembered Twilight’s many issues with snakes and snake-like objects, something that Dash and Pinkie had exploited more than once and likely made worse by accident. A final sigh of resignation escaped her as she opened her eyes again and focused on Twilight. “Darling, they’re harmless! It’s just the form the life Sweetie put into them took. Oh, think of them as extra-long ferrets if it helps!”
Twilight still trembled there. “It didn’t help, did it?” Twilight shook her head. “Oh fiddlesticks and split ends!”
Sunbeam looked around the room, mentally accounting for what she had to work with. Berry wasn’t likely to be of use, the sensors would retain their life so long as Sweetie remained in the area, Rarity to could Twilight but any data so long as the sensors acted like snakes would be hard to get and garbled from Twilight’s panic state in her phobia. Unless… “Sweetie Belle, you can let the song-spell go.”
“I can?”
“She can?” Scootaloo and Applebloom asked suspiciously in unison.
Sunbeam nodded, smiling a smile better suited for Discord as her wing scooped in behind Berry and she swiveled around to put him in front of the crusaders. “Oh, yes. Unfortunately, I am trying to get rid of you three, but as long as Twilight sees the sensors like they are, they’ll continue to set off her phobia.” She vaguely nodded her head to Twilight, who still shivered in place.
“I messed up again, didn’t I?” Sweetie despondently asked.
Shaking her head hard enough to dizzy herself, Sunbeam cut off the self-pity. “No, no! My fault again. I forgot that Twilight has a snake phobia.” She smirked, looking to Rarity who caught on at last and smirked evilly back as she noticed the rather blank area on Berry’s flank. “Besides, Twilight is right, we’ve kept you three cooped up in here all day when you should be trying to earn your cutie marks!” If she could have a medal every time she made a perfect move, she’d be able to rebuild Mt. Canter in precious metal.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders flipped from slightly depressed and worried to beaming in glee in a second, beaming with disturbingly wide smiles and gleaming eyes as they clustered together. Twilight’s teacher was going to help them, they’d get their marks this time for sure! She was, after all, secretly Princess C-
“In fact, here!” Sunbeam shoved Berry forward, letting him get slid along atop a conveyor belt of Rarity’s magic as the fashionata and the secret alicorn gained their safe vengeance upon the sea pony at once. “Despite all his efforts, Captain Bubbles here has never gained his cutie mark! Why, I’m sure he’ll be of great help crusading with you to find his special talent!” Vengeance was best served in foal-sized packages indeed.
Berry flipped around, trying to gallop back to Sunbeam without making any headway as Rarity cranked up her magic conveyor belt to keep him from escaping. “Wait! You know why I can’t get a cutie mark!” He could feel himself slowly slipping backwards as the three fillies gasped with horror as they saw his blank flanks and grabbed his tail.
“Scootaloo! This is wrong!” Sweetie Belle said as she willed the sensor that was being cozy with her to rejoin its friends with a burst of humming.
“You’re right, no-pony should be forced to go their life without a cutie mark!” The little pegasus said with youthful conviction.
“Quick, we’ve gotta get him to our clubhouse!” Applebloom declared as she yanked with her hooves and helped balance Berry like a turtle on their backs.
“CUTIE MARK CRUSADER NEW MEMBER INDUCTORS!” They shouted in unison as they carted Berry away to save him from dying from a lack of cutie mark.
Spike had backed into the corner as Sunbeam and Rarity had removed the hypotenuse of the trouble triangle with surprise, fear, and ruthless efficiency. As he calmed his rapidly beating heart, he raised a trembling claw to comment on the matter. “You guys are scary! They’re going to scar him for life!” He ducked down as they turned to him, still sporting their smiles.
“But of course, Spikey-Wikey.”
“He was being rather obnoxious. And since Sweetie Belle is leaving her likely limited range of effect, the spells should die right about now.” Sunbeam continued for Rarity, pointing to the test leads right as the green life-fire died from them and left them still. Still had it. She just wished she could remember to apply it more often. “There we go. Now then, let’s get Twilight calmed down.”
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Nice shot.
So using that one.
Also, Poor Berry...
Well, that explains her love life.
Sweetie Belle certainly learned control over her magical art quickly...
move down a line.
_______________
They have to conspire with Berry to uncover Celestia to Twilight. After all as Celestia said, Vengnce is a dish best served foal-sized.
Ah, Twilight's ophiophobia. We never really see much of it after season 1, but it never stopped being a thing.
Also, Sunbeam really didn't think through her being a control. Not unless she plans on destroying her readings. After all, it's hard to blame the equipment when it churned out several accurate readings before and after her own.
Also, there's something beautifully ironic about Apple Bloom having an uncommon amount of common sense. I guess she's been saving it.
Looking forward to more.
*reads that and gives a WolfishLOL* if twilight is that scared of snakes what is she gonna do when she has a coltfriend or gives birth???? I mean the umbical cord looks like a snake!!!!
5371553
A thousand tiny voices cackled in mad glee, and the grumbles of a big tummy hungry for cake were suddenly silenced.
I feel something hilarious has happened.
5376973
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Cake? Scootaloo is hungry for justice. And yes, I can't wait to see the hilarity.
Might want to clarify this part a little
5370948
Yeah she did because she was given the tools needed to use it properly. the intent is pretty much all that matters in this case. 'Sunbeam' even said Sweetie belle was like Twilight, if not much stronger, in the case of what she could do/accomplish. all she needed was a lesson or two to be able to learn how use the most basic of song spells.
my honest critic so far is that i hate Berry as a character. every time he says or does something it makes me enjoy the story less.
also Twilight is a total bitch. every interaction she's had with spike has involved her being controlling, ungrateful, hypocritical, short tempered and rude. if you want to turn spike into a punching bag for comedic relief, then that's your decision, but know that you are coloring everyone else involved in it in an ugly light. honestly i'm beginning to hate your twilight.
keep in mind that i make these criticisms because you have written a story well enough that i feel invested in continuing to read and actually want to know what happens next. how you described the CMC having grown up a few years is pretty good. still children but more mature. i like your princess luna as a more responsible princess and i like how your writing has good spacing and flow.
And fanatical devotion to the pope, I'm sure.