5-Suspicion
“And that’s that, Sunbeam. We’re done.” Twilight finished with a flourish of her pen, marking the last name block with an exaggerated period at the end of a long, long form. The small library table was flanked by her, and a sentient mass of paperwork lying flat on the ground that had once been known as Sunbeam, who sighed beneath her fibrous tomb of ink and paper, snorting. Really rather over-dramatic, it was only a couple of hours of paperwork, just because it had collapsed on her was no reason to make a scene. “See, that wasn’t so bad. It only took us five hours to complete, not counting your little break with Princess Luna.”
“My paper cuts have paper cuts.” Complained the sentient pile of paperwork as the mare within it pretended to be eaten by the drudgery.
Twilight smiled, cheerfully beaming at her assistant despite the mare’s Rarity-like hysterics. She had only been sliced a few dozen times, and not even that badly! Twilight could still recall the times she had gotten paper cuts on her eyes, nose, and lips when a loose leaf stack had fallen over on her. “I would have thought the aloe-lined band-aids would have helped.” Twilight pointed out helpfully, earning a tired groan from her trapped companion.
She started humming to herself, a variation of the infamous ‘winter-wrap-up’ song that always got stuck in her head when cleaning up after paperwork. For that matter, she usually got it stuck in every-pony else’s heads as well, and they would complain about for a week afterwards every time, which was silly—it was a great song. Sunbeam groaned once more, twitching her mummified hooves as she was slowly freed from her self-made disaster by Twilight as the young princess sorted out the paperwork. It was only a few dozen paper cuts! She didn’t need so many band-aids.
Instead of being relieved at the reprieve of her fate, Sunbeam just forlornly sighed and let her chin flop down with the rest of her head to lie between her forelegs. Twilight bumped her on the shoulder, feeling awkward from the sad look on her face. “Everything will be fine! I’m sure it was more about how you might react to certain things than some kind of inquisition.” She felt like she should watch for Pinkie for a moment. “It was probably just a secret test of character, I think.” It would explain some of the odder questions.
Sunbeam moaned again, fluttering her wings by her sides. “Did it have to be so thorough?” Why did she sound so sad? They mostly cared about completion, rather than any specific results.
“Well, I suppose so. Ponyvile has a pretty good track record, so they were probably just making sure you’re not a threat to the foals.” Twilight suggested as she sorted through the paperwork further and put it swiftly into the properly itemized triplicate order. It had been a hard-won completion of paperwork. Given the trouble Sunbeam had gone through when answering questions about her foal-hood, and the oddly sad and distant looks she had through most of that section, it had probably just dredged up old memories of loss.
Why did she have such troubles with answering questions about her foal-hood, anyway? All her answers were so evasive, so hesitant, so much less boisterous than her normal personality. Sunbeam’s issues almost reminded Twilight of the difficulty Applejack had in describing her own parents. Sure, the tragedy around her sister Moonstar was rather sad, but—No. No, no. It couldn’t be-
A repeated insistence on the part of the Crusaders vaguely drifted to the surface of her thoughts. Talk of a sisterly bond with Luna, even though she couldn’t ever remember Luna mentioning Sunbeam before her mentor had come down to Ponyvile. She was pretty sure Sunbeam wasn’t the type somepony just forgot to mention. The name, and the cutie mark, the alleged sister she was sure Sunbeam had never mentioned before, her spell-song abilities, the way Berry looked at her a few times like a pony who had been slapped with a fish by a griffon.
Twilight snapped out of her sudden introspection as Sunbeam poked her in the side. She blinked as she realized she had been sorting the papers over and over again, achieving a mathematical perfection of stacking that had the papers tightly enough stacked to look like a giant solid paper-block monolith. Right, distraction. “Say, why don’t you go out and get something to eat? We’re done here, and I can send this stuff on tomorrow, and I have my appointment with—“
“-Date With-“
“—Date with Luna.” Twilight corrected herself, blushing as she realized again what she had agreed to. Shake-shake-shake! No, it was a serious scientific expedition, survey, and further exploration of the stars, with food! And a bigger alicorn who represented her love of the stars in physical form and her love of magic who was smartly dressed and in—Wow, when she internally monologue’d, it sounded like one great big denial. Which was silly, because she was in a crush. “I need to go and get cleaned up for the d—I need to clean up the tree, wait, fortress. So that it’s presentable for Princess Luna’s inspection.”
“Uh, huuuh.” Sunbeam winked as she stood up. Small hisses escaped the pegasus as she danced on her paper-lacerated hooves. “Say no more. I’ll get out of you two lovebird’s mane’s.” Sunbeam suggested, flicking her tail lightly as she did, making her ex-student splutter. “Tell me how it goes, have fun, kissy-kissy lots.”
Twilight spluttered to herself as Sunbeam sauntered out at a brisk trot while shutting the door to the small library behind her. She was not some love-struck foal who was freaking out over some silly crush dating her like a super-mare! She could prove it by thinking of Luna in an entirely unromantic way! Just because she was a tall alicorn who was wearing a suit so dark that it glittered like the depths of space, representing her character with neatness and precision that culminated in a straight-cut mane with neat little trimmed bangs pinned in place by a set of glasses which were probably enchanted with ways of letting her look at all her paperwork at once so as—why were her cheeks so hot? Had she been drinking hot sauce aga- oh, no. She was going full Spike. She was never supposed to go full Spike, it was a very silly condition.
No, stop! Considerations of romantic conditions were supposed to come after practical affairs were taken care of! The silly, stupid idea that Sunbeam might be her mentor was going to eat her mind up with paranoid plots until she knew one way or another, and there was no way to tell for sure whether it was true or not! It wasn’t as if she could somehow examine Sunbeam and prove she was Celestia! Any spell would have to be nearly physically perfect, with some way of making morphological changes while somehow projecting a Celestia to avoid detection! The only way to tell would be to-
She already had the results, didn’t she? The recording charts from the thaumatoscope, and comparison tapes of Rainbow Dash, herself, and Rarity. Alicorns were a completely different race, their biological thaumic patterns would show distinct tell-tale signs! Twilight carefully scooted away from the perfectly stacked paperwork, focusing inwards as she wondered if maybe she didn’t want to know. No, stop! She had to! Locking out her doubts and potential romantic feelings which were most certainly not romantic feelings, and some niggling words from Luna, she teleported out of the small side-library to her barren and yet to be furnished office.
Popping back into the universe from her teleport, she looked around the room for the tubes holding the records from the earlier recording sessions. Her office was deep in the interior of the tree, windowless but spacious enough for a great deal of furnishings. Not that she had any yet, save for her desk, because she was too busy being busy with Ponyvile, and she needed to stick to her plan one day so she could fix it up. But that was okay, as it left plenty of room for her to store the records from her thaumatoscope. And the giant pile of paperwork that the nobles wanted her to sign, but they could all go screw themselves until she talked with Luna.
Twilight smiled as she spotted the eight tubes and hopped over her low desk to them, snapping the first one’s seals with an eager twist of magic applied to the end. She had some force-pins to stick them magically to the wall, where were they? Oh, right, her desk! In the Golden Oaks, which was now ashes and splinters. Just mem-
No, she couldn’t handle that yet, it was still too soon. With a sweep of her wing, she cleared the non-existent dust from her desk and laid the first records out flat. Oh hey, Berry’s! Wow, it was so strange, so alien! Where a normal pony would have synchronized rhythms of magic pulses, Berry’s was so noisy and scattered as to nearly drown out any signs of a pattern. And even if it was there, it seemed so alien to her; a gnarled sorting of peaks and waves that she found hard-pressed to pick discernable activity out of. There was one fairly clear pattern out of all of the mess, the line that measured the brain’s interaction with the body’s biologically generated magic fields. Where a normal pony’s reading would be a slow and steady harmonic sine wave with varying amounts of noise; Berry’s was strange, a pattern that was modulated into lingering noisy peaks before suddenly cutting down to bare minimum in a single second to bumble along at the bottom of her thaumatoscope’s sensor range.
No, no, Berry was interesting, but she needed to find two in particular! She wrapped Berry’s scan-sheet back up and stuck it back in its tube for later inspection, then pulled the next out of the neat stack. Whipping the record out, she checked the label and felt a little drop of disappointment in her heart. Drat, Rarity's. Interesting, though. It had a similar peculiar set of patterns to ones she had seen on her own records as a foal. Most of the scans were at a lower pattern and pulse than hers had ever been, but the lines that recorded the activity in the fine motor-control of magic auras and a few others related to it were raised higher than her own and pulsed more rapidly. Fair enough, pretty standard.
No. Interesting, but no. She needed to stop distracting herself with irrelevant data. Popping the next seal after storing Rarity’s graphs, she groaned aloud as she found Dash’s readout. An alien spray of squiggles, but there was a reason to the madness. It was strong overall, with several rapid-fire cadences of beats within the readings. The pattern that showed the biological production of magic in particular had a strong and clear rhythm of beats, an almost watch-like churning that made sense given the need of pegasi to produce magic constantly to maintain altitude on long flights. Unicorns produced magic at a rate slower and less steady, but stored more in several specialized organs given the race’s predilection for instantaneous feats instead of feats over time.
Snorting in frustration for a second, Twilight wondered if Sunbeam had already stolen away her records. No, she hadn’t shown any signs of that. Well, seeing a pegasus’s pattern was useful for being able to further differentiate an alicorn’s. Not all wasted.
Twilight checked the next one, and carefully withdrew her own records. There was a bit of noise in the beginning and the ends of the graphs, caused by her fight-or-flight reflexes spiking her magic usage, but enough of it was clear to get a good feel for an alicorn’s beats. There, emblazoned for all the world to see, were the strong spikes of energy from her youth, the nearly perfect and noiseless patterns of the harmonic brain/magic correlator, the perfect timing matches from her biological rhythms. Not even Dash’s rhythms had been so well matched. But, wait—she thought back to Dash's, and realized in a moment that what she had once thought to be noise upon her old graphs might not have been at all. They were tiny spikes of Pegasus and what she presumed to be earth pony magic.
With her ascension, those old squiggles had transformed from tiny squiggles interrupting the clear harmonics into full-fledged secondary patterns that were carefully and clearly aligned into a set of resonating frequencies, all reverberating and pulsing together. Rapid-fire pulses of energy all coalescing together into resonant patterns of magic that all supported and probably strengthened one another. It was strange, her internal production resembled Dash’s, her capacity and the output pathways looked strange as well, not even counting the completely alien scribbles from her wings that her poor instruments didn’t even know what to do with. There was a deep and powerful pulse beneath her tickovers, maybe earth pony magic resonations? She could see a clear set of peaks after her standard unicorn magic signatures, which was probably the earth pony high magic component; but there was an overall pattern of energy pulsing, almost indiscernible, that rose and fell several times over the course of her recordings, faint, but pulling all the energies up before slowly departing again and repeating. Almost resembling the faster perfect harmonic sine pulse from her mind/magic transfer.
She pulled her friend’s charts back out to compare them. The slow pulse was far weaker in both of their charts, but was still faintly there. Stranger still was the slight noise for both of them, fainter than her own childhood ‘noise’ rhythms, but still there—out of sync. Theirs didn’t resonate, instead clashing and driving up the noise ratio, their strange outliers only becoming properly visible as miniscule peaks in the troughs of their low-power states. Similarities, similarities with her old lines. Thinking back, she recalled ever so slightly that her own ‘noise’ had always been resonating well with her magic. Could it have been precursor patterns, maybe magic transmitted back from her current state, or a hint that she could have gone alicorn? No-wait…
She set all the records aside and grabbed the three sets bundled together. They had to be the crusaders. A little delay couldn’t hurt, not if her new suspicions were correct. She had a few minutes still. She popped the seals on the trio’s records and laid them out carefully in comparison to her own on the floor. But—the records couldn’t be right, could it be contami-no, residual localized leakage required them to be hugging each other. But the noise, the resonances, they so resembled her old—
Twilight’s eyes widened as her breath hitched ever so slightly. No, but yes. Outside of the strong peaks of their racial lines—Applebloom’s confirming her suspicions on the earth pony waveform—there were clear lesser, somewhat resonant peaks. Faint, hidden among the odd general clutter of their readings, but the peaks were there, almost in the same resonance as her current ones. The racial patterns were all clear when she knew what to look for.
No, no! She couldn’t tell them! They’d try to figure out the spell, and either kill themselves, go mad, or if Discord was willing—actually succeed. Then all Tartarus would break loose. If the nobles found out, they’d be all over the poor fillies in a heartbeat. She couldn’t tell any-pony—not their sisters or would-be family, especially not them, and maybe not even Luna. No, they’d talk, they’d know, they’d—she had to hide the evidence.
But—if they had such strong patterns, how could they not have their cutie marks yet from something, anything? She had her cutie mark at their age. Was it, no, maybe Dash’s first Rainboom acted as a carrier wave to make it easier for her. That had to be it, their resonance simply made it harder for her. The odd modulation in their mind/magic line was just a side-effect of not having their cutie marks yet. They’d still get them, and then everything would be fine when they were settled down with something unambitious and not world changing so they wouldn’t become mad alicorns of chaos.
--Somewhere else, Applebloom wondered why she sneezed so suddenly. She was wearing proper protection from the fumes that the welder she was helping Scootaloo operate, so what gave? Scootaloo just thumped her for a little more energy from the magic potion tank to keep welding the structural frame.—
Twilight looked around, a paranoid corner of her mind thinking that she might already be under watch. No, no more speculation, she needed to hide the evidence where she could look at it later. Stuffing the records roughly—for her—back into their tubes, she teleported them up to a secret compartment in her room; she needed to spend tomorrow night looking at them. No need for any noble, or Sunbeamy-lestia, or Luna, or ugh, Rarity to find out. No need at all, nope. That only left the last one. Did she dare open it? Dare to know, and find out if her mentor was lying to her like she clearly wouldn’t? Or did she dare to destroy it? Luna’s words about Celestia’s mental state whispered sillibantly in her mind, worming like a serpent into her mind to plant a seed of doubt. Wreck, nervous break, overworked, like me before my nightmare, not quite right in the head.
It was like the Crystal Box, only there was no castle special prize inside. So be it. The seal popped off, and she let gravity start to do the work, no need for her to sully her hooves with the knowledge. But she stopped with the results less than a third of the way out of the tube, her hoof holding it from passing any further. She could see the firm presses of the recording needles where they nearly ripped through the sheet; presses bouncing off the upper bounds of every visible category like a seismograph reading in the middle of a cataclysmic earthquake.
Paper slid back into its tubular home again, then fell into darkness as the cap was sealed tight and magically fused shut and warded against opening, then found itself lost in the secret armory of the old Everfree Castle.
She was too afraid to know.
I'll put 10 quatloos on 'Mad Alicorns of Chaos'.
Twilight, PATHETIC does NOT even come close to describing your litle B*&^%#SS right now ADMIT that the CMC are proto-Alicorns and Sunny is tia
I approve of this foreshadowing!
Interesting turn of events. I predict three little alicorns at the end of this fic.
Paper cuts on the eyes!? Oh dear God, that's horrifying.
"Moonstar"? Really? Celestia is very lucky that Twilight has an enormous her-shaped blind spot.
Some things pony was not meant to know. Some pony doesn't want to know. Thus we have the truth about the Crusaders and Sunbeam's true nature. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and Twilight has enough upsetting her at the moment.
(Also, bear in mind that possessives aren't the same thing as plurals. That should be "Rarity's" and "Dash's".)
5781107
Well, considering that's what set her off, I don't think Twilight had a large enough blindspot. Ah, well, LUNA FOR COMFORTING MENTAL GYMNASTICS! *applies a Moon-Moon directly to the Twi-Twi. Boops may ensue*
Dash's.
Well, this was nerve wracking for Twilight, wait, the CMC have the potential to become alicorns? Oh dear.
5780911
I'll see your 10 quatloos, and raise you 5 bars of gold-pressed latinum.
... Wow ...
This sounds like the beginning of an XK-Class End-of-the-World Scenario.
Rarities
--Rarity's.
And holy hell, papercuts on her eyes? How is she not blind by now?
5781735
"WHY IS MY SUFFERING MADE OF FRACTAL SUFFERING!" -story of Celestia's life.
5781107
..... I can see Discords Metaphorical hard on from here with that very scary idea... and I can see Diamond Tiara's actual mental breakdown if/when the ascension happens.
5781812
*Cackles evilly.* I have PLANS for that little troll. Mwu-hah-hah, AH-hah-hah, AAAAAHHHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!
Hah/
So many Good Things coming Twilight's way...
Ah well. Better Full Spike than Full Shane. You never go Full Shane. EV-ER!
5780911 But are they three mad alicorns, or do they need to master fusion and combine into one mad alicorn?
Not to disparage upon Twilight's scientific reasoning, but did she check any other thaumatoscope readings for those secondary patterns? For all we know, everypony could have trace amounts of that harmonic triple-wavelength thing.
5782323 no, you see, Sweetie's Spell singing warps the fusion and they end up as a Draconequus.
I wanna see at LEAST Sweetie Belle turn Alicorn
You know, I think CMC alicorns would probably end up opening more possibilities for development; with Twilight's ascension, you really need to only look at her and see that she'll just grow into it. With the CMC however, you have so much more to look at, seeing as they're still fillies that will likely need to be conditioned into actually caring more about Equestria than themselves.
5783649
fc00.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/346/e/3/it__s_spike_by_unknownhedgehog-d4ivzsg.jpg
It's almost as if there might be an eeeevvviiiil noble out there looking for three pawns through which to eternally impose his will upon the land and reshape it according to his design.
5783822
...Or some diabolical fiend who wants to rip open the multiversal rift and lay a foundation to take over this world and that of the Scootaverse!
Huh. Just imagine Celestia & Sunbeam standing right next to each other, Twilight and the CMC looking between the two of them. If this actually happened before Celestia's ID was discovered, it'd be one heck of a plot twist as long as Princess Scoots didn't get in the way.
Can we please skim through this odious TwiLuna subplot, resolve it with a modicum of awkwardness all around, and move on?
To quote Sweetie Belle, "Oh, come on!"
I was a little disappointed when Twilight decided to hide that the CMC were special/weird, but chickening out partway through opening Sunbeam's and chucking it into a forgotten corner of Everfree Castle? Why would she choose to ignore the one thing that would put her mind at ease, especially after all that build-up? She could have just not told Sunbeam what was odd about her results...
I'll admit cute TwiLuna was cute, but this chapter's buildup to no payoff was greatly disappointing.
5785098
Well, what would you do if you were presented with evidence that everything you knew about your mentor might be a lie? She's freaking the hell out and going full Gollum again.
5785850
I realize the scene was a great way to highlight how special the CMC are and how they might have the potential to become alicorns. Studying the printouts also gave you a great chance to talk about how magic worked for the different tribes of pony. It just didn't feel right to me, though, to have possibly exposing Celestia be the excuse Twilight took to show the reader this and then to have her chicken out at the last instant. Twilight could have used some other excuse to look at the results of the magic scans, and most of the same goals would have been accomplished. She could even decide not to look at Sunbeam's readout in a fit of paranoia that doing so might confirm her fear that Celestia was Sunbeam and had been lying to her for a long time. The difference would be that it wouldn't be the focus of the scene.
I don't expect you to change anything, I just wanted to explain what was on my mind. My disappointment with one chapter won't keep me from continuing to read.
Or perhaps the trace other-tribe magic comes of being mixed-race? Anypony without an incredibly racist family probably has at least a little blood from another tribe, which could be affecting their magic. Twilight could -- and this has never happened before -- be panicking over nothing.
So she wants to live in lie?
5788842
If ONLY there was a pony that specialized in instantly ferreting out such subconscious desires and dealing with them. If ONLY that pony already had an appointment with her for other, coincidental reasons and who knew exactly what/who Sunbeam is. If ONLY that pony was a mischievous jerk who knew just what buttons to push in most cases to help a distraught mare/stallion work through their issues to come to a healthier state of mind.
Oh, wait.
5791654
And some ponies are extra-especially attuned to doing it, like Cadance, or that nice Sweetie fillie who can sing beautifully enough to convince the universe to make two and two equal fish.
5789875
Don't hype the next chapter that much.
Wait, who I'm kidding? HYPE TRAIN!
5781385
Come, come, play Dabo with me
5781558
GOD GAME POLKADOT identified, declaring CASE POLYUNSATURATED PLAID in three… two… one…
5796152 5792218
I'll see those 10 quatloos, 5 bars of gold-pressed latinum, and 4 fish, and raise 3 cubits, 14 obols, half a fennik, 2 unopened bottles of vintage Jolt™ Cola ("All the sugar and twice the caffeine!"), and a Norwegian Blue parrot ("He's just restin'").
Yeah, I thought that they were proto-alicorns. Twilight is fooling only herself if she thinks that finding their True Talents would in any way prevent their ascension. After all, finding their talents set both her and Cadence firmly on the path to theirs!
I presume that the welding moment was the Crusaders finishing off the hull of their airship.
I'm praying to all the deities of the Ponyverse that their cross-dimensional inspiration did not have the hull number SDF-1.
5801061 The last thing they need is 50 foot aliens looking for protoculture to show up. (but ponies got the whole magic song power thing so they would be fine)
The three alicorns of the Acutilypse!