Ch. 5 - Eris-totelian Mechanics
Chapter 5 - Eris-totelian Mechanics
* * * *
Applejack and Discord followed Twilight as she trotted merrily through town. It was a bit early, but she had told them she’d been too anxious to sleep last night, putting her several hours ahead of schedule. Now that her two primary sources of concern had returned with both themselves and Ponyville intact and she was faced with the immediate prospect of putting chaos itself under the scientific lens, even the induction of one of Equestria’s greatest villains as an Element of Harmony couldn’t keep her spirits down for more than a few minutes.
“…and that would finally confirm the relationship between L.B. particles and amniomorphic fields!” She had been talking nonstop since they’d left Sugarcube Corner. “Ponies have suspected that amniomorphic fields would have an effect on the motion of L.B. particles passing through them for thousands of years dating back to when Star Swirl the Bearded was writing about them thinking they were composed of two particles, one with positive mass and one with negative mass—which is irreconcilable with modern theories of magic and spacetime, making the L.B. particle, because of its masslessness, the only one we know for certain is not composite—but it would require energy on the scale of exawatts to conjure an amniomorphic field in the presence of a strong emitter of L.B. particles, and since L.B. particles behave exponentially more like massless Ur particles, which are not affected by amniomorphic fields, as they increase in distance from one another, there’s no way we could obtain statistically significant results on the subject with a weaker emitter. The wonderful thing about this approach, however, is that we don’t have to bank on your chaos magic being powerful enough to actually conjure an amniomorphic field and bombard it with L.B. particles! Can you guess why?” Twilight suddenly spun around, grinning widely. Applejack and Discord stopped short.
“Uh… No, I can’t say I could. Sorry, Twi, but this is way over my head.”
Twilight’s smile faded. “Right. No, I guess you haven’t spent years studying theoretical physics, so of course none of this would make sense to you. You’re right.” She sighed. “Discord? Did you get what I was saying? Any of it?”
“Who, me?” He scoffed. “Please, Twilight. I’m Discord! I’ve been around since the dawn of time! I understood what you were saying better than you did.”
Twilight looked at him thoughtfully. “Hmm… Did you really? If that’s true, then maybe…”
Discord waved a hoof dismissively. “Of course it’s true. I’m the Element of Honesty, who else are you going to trust?”
Twilight gave him a rather un-trusting look. “Riiiight.”
“But it’s not as if I’m going to give all the secrets of the cosmos away just like that,” he continued blithely. “Say, weren’t we going somewhere? Why did we stop?”
The three of them begin to walk in the direction of the library again, and Discord went on. “Obviously, I would never give out information for free like that, not when it’s so much more fun to watch you stumble around blindly trying to figure it all out.” He chuckled. “But aside from that, as much as I’ve always tried to be a free spirit, one can’t help but end up with some long-standing… contracts, and obligations, you know, after living for a few thousands of thousands of thousands of years. I happen to know the lady in charge of those things you call ‘L.B. particles’, for instance. A real charmer she is, gives all of them cute little names, but she made me swear to secrecy the first time she let me into her workshop. I’d be in big trouble if I told you how they work. I’m sure you understand.” Discord nodded to himself, seemingly pleased with his explanation.
They walked in silence for a moment.
“You could’ve just told me you don’t know anything about physics,” Twilight muttered. Then, before he could respond, she threw open the door to the library. “Here we are. Spike!” she called.
Spike poked his head out from behind the staircase as the three of them walked in. “Heya, Twilight. Hey, Applejack. And…” He stared blankly at Discord for a moment, then snapped his claws. “Ha ha, Discord?” He trotted over for a closer look. “Wow, I can’t believe I recognized you now that you aren’t a hideous ten-foot-tall snake monster anymore.”
Discord snorted. “Spike, is it? My, my, I can’t believe I recognized you now that you’re not a hideous one-foot-tall snake monster anymore.” He slapped his cheek in mock surprise. “Oh, wait!”
Spike rolled his eyes. “I’m not that short.” He climbed onto Applejack’s back. “So, Applejack, you’ve really got all of his powers now? What kind of stuff can you do?”
“More than I know how to handle,” Applejack confessed. “It’s been pretty overwhelming, and I don’t have any idea what kinda limits these chaos magic powers o’ mine have. But that’s what we’re here to find out, ain’t it, Twilight?”
“That’s right,” said Twilight. “The laboratory’s in the basement. Spike and I have made sure everything we’ll need today is there and all of the instruments are calibrated, so we can start right now.” She beckoned. “Follow me.”
She led them around the staircase to the alcove where Spike had been when they’d entered, revealing a door Applejack hadn’t seen before. “What I don’t understand is why you don’t just ask me about all this,” said Discord as she opened the door and began to descend the narrow, wooden staircase. “I’ve been—or, at any rate, I had been doing this since the dawn of time, and I mean that literally. If you want to know, say, the number of positrons that would come out of my ears when I summoned a glass of water, I could tell you. I’ll even give you a hint: it’s zero.”
“Come on, Discord. We’re scientists,” said Spike proudly. “That means we trust the evidence of our eyes and our ears. And our machines. And reliable sources.” He crossed his arms. “Look, the point is, last time I checked, you weren’t a very reliable source at all.”
“For your information, Spike, you are looking at the Element of Honesty himself.”
“Ha! Yeah, right. That’s definitely a lie.”
“Actually, that one’s true,” said Twilight. “Something about Applejack losing control of her powers?”
Spike leaned against Applejack’s mane as he stared back at Discord, who grinned. “What.”
“We can talk about it later. For now, we have research to do.” Twilight opened another door. “Applejack, Discord, welcome to the lab.”
Applejack looked around at the room spread out below her, the basement floor still one more flight of stairs away. The space was oddly shaped—round and as tall is it was wide, roomy but somehow having the cozy, economical feeling of a shed or closet. There was wooden flooring, but it was otherwise carved directly from the packed subterranean earth, giving it the same uneven, organic aesthetic as the library’s upper floors. Thick, dry roots extended from the ceiling, snaking down the walls and curling around the strikingly large metal contraptions and glass tanks that lined them, connected by tubes and pipes. Even this area wasn’t free from a few bookshelves, though beakers, microscopes, and labelled bottles filled with chemicals and potions were more prevalent, arranged neatly on tables, cabinets, and shelves of their own. Shallow alcoves carved into the wall housed even more books and supplies, and lanterns that hung in them filled the room with a soft, muted orange light.
Off to one side of the room was what looked like their work area for the day. There was a tall metal box with a control panel, lots of unlit indicator lights, and a reel-to-reel tape drive—a mainframe, by the looks of it. Some supplies were arranged on a counter next to the mainframe, including books, bins, various instruments, and a teletype that seemed to be set up to deposit its output into a slot in the countertop.
“Hello? Earth to Applejack!”
Applejack became aware of Spike’s hand waving in her face. Twilight had reached the bottom of the stairs and was looking up at her, and Discord seemed to be looking for a way around her on the narrow staircase.
“Yes, Earth to Applejack, come in, please,” he said irritably. “I’m sure the view up there is excellent, but you seem to have left your body behind. Request that you move it before I move it myself.”
“Right, right, sorry. I’m movin’.” She resumed her descent. “This room’s a lot to take in.”
Discord shook his head. “Tut-tut. Sounds like a certain unimaginative pony hasn’t been exercising her mind’s eye. That’s how you see things now, correct?” He grinned smugly. “You know, I haven’t even mentioned yet just how convenient it is to have working real eyes. I don’t even have to think about something to see it anymore! Everything is just there. Hard to believe.”
“Alright, Discord.” Twilight was operating the mainframe’s controls. “If you’re done br” WHUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Vibrations shook the whole basement for several moments as an exasperated Twilight flipped a few more switches and pounded a green button with her hoof, filling the room with silence once more. “If you’re done bragging about how great it is to not have immense cosmic power,” she continued, “we can do what we came here to do. Applejack, sit on this cushion, please.” She gestured towards a pillow lying on the floor across from the counter and pulled out a bulky metal helmet, tethered to the mainframe by a bundle of cables. “And take off your hat.”
Applejack did as she was told, and Twilight levitated the helmet over her head, letting it fit itself tightly to her skull with a pneumatic PHNK.
“Spike, could you get a second cushion for Discord?”
“Now, hold on one—” PHNK. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be studying chaos magic, yes? Have we forgotten who the chaos magician is here?”
“You may not have your powers anymore, Discord, but we can’t just ignore your history. I wasn’t sure I’d have the opportunity to experiment on you earlier, but your body is very interesting to me.”
Spike set a second pillow down beside Applejack, and Discord grudgingly sat down on it. “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to get used to mares telling me that.”
Twilight snorted. “I’m mean I’m interested in where it came from. My hypothesis was that you were a pony before you became master of chaos, like Applejack, and the Elements reverted you to your true form. But if you’re as old as you say you are, then that’s impossible. I have no idea how the fully functioning pony in front of me was made.” She turned to the teletype, which was rapidly tiktiktiktiktiktiktik-ing out information with little regard for its presumably limited paper supply. “Hmm… Spike, take note,” she said.
He pulled out a notebook and pencil and looked up expectantly.
“Discord’s brain shows normal resting state activity. On the other hand, Applejack has no brain activity. She… Wait, what the…” She squinted up at Applejack, checking the indicator lights on her helmet. “The EEG output just went crazy, like it doesn’t know what it’s… Are you doing this, Applejack?”
“Uh… Yeah, probably. I guess I forgot to… have brain waves until you mentioned ’em.”
“Interesting. Spike, take note of that. But, um, Applejack… there isn’t really any point in having brain waves if you’re just making them up. You can, uh… turn them off now?”
With a slightly uncomfortable nod, Applejack complied.
“This means you might not have a normal brain, or if you do, you might not be using it. Hmm… Question: How does Applejack think? If her brain is gone, how did her memories and personality transfer to the new medium? For that matter, how did Discord’s new brain get programmed with his memories and personality?”
“Hmm, yes, of course, of course, well, scientifically speaking,” said Discord with mock pretension, “she is now a figment of her own imagination. Where would she even keep a brain?”
Twilight levitated a metal wand from the counter and waved it slowly around Applejack. “We’ll see.”
“What, are you going to scan her for a brain? Again? It would be much easier to just take my word for it, you know. I’m the Element of Honesty, after all. Who else are you going to trust?”
“My instruments,” said Twilight confidently. She checked the teletype. “According to this readout, there’s a naked singularity inside of… um… me.” She gave the wand a funny look. “Applejack, are you messing with my measurements again? You don’t even know what this does.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to. It seems like it oughta be pickin’ somethin’ up, but I don’t know what to tell it.”
“Hmm…” Twilight sighed. “This is going to be difficult.” She began to wave the wand around Discord.
“Hey!” he said indignantly. “Is this really necessary? I am fairly certain that I have a brain.”
“Yes,” said Twilight, turning to the teletype. “And it looks like it’s right where it belongs, inside your head. That’s good. You also have a heart, two lungs, a liver… You seem to be pretty normal both inside and out.”
“Oh, what a relief.”
“Aside from that, though…” She furrowed her brow at the flood of data spewing from the machine. “You’re emitting a magical signature I don’t recognize. What’s even stranger is that normally only extremely high-level magical artifacts even have magical signatures, which would make you… an artifact?” She scratched her head. “The signature’s transcription would be R-O-Y-G-B-I-V.”
“Huh!” Spike looked up from his notes. “Like the colors of the rainbow.”
“Please, Spike. Indigo is a tertiary color. It’s not in the rainbow.”
He crossed his arms indignantly. “Hey, just because it isn’t like its six awesome friends doesn’t mean it can’t be a real color of the rainbow. Who else is going to keep violet company all the way at the bottom?”
Twilight looked at him for a moment, then chuckled. “Alright, alright. It doesn’t really matter anyway. You got that down, right? Let’s move on to the DNA test.” She levitated a pair of scissors from a bin and cut off a lock of Applejack’s mane that stuck out from under the helmet. She then placed it into a slot in a small device resting on the counter. The mainframe’s indicator lights began blinking, and the tape drive came to life with a loudly voiced whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r.
“It’s working. That’s interesting,” said Twilight.
“Should it not be?” asked Applejack.
The sound of the tape drive died down. “No,” said Twilight. “Cut hair doesn’t have any DNA in it.” She turned to the teletype, which was now typing at a much lessened but still fairly quick rate. “Your genome doesn’t have any significant matches with anything in my database. It’s pretty weird-looking, too. ‘agcgagacta, gaactgactc, something, something, alright, twilight, cut, it, out, this, takes, way, too, much, concentration…’”
She flipped a switch. The teletype stopped, and Applejack let out a sigh of relief.
“Most of those aren’t even nucleotides.” She studied the teletype’s output. “This can’t be what’s saved to the tape… Did you get all this down, Spike?”
“Yup!”
She pressed a button on the mainframe, and teletype resumed typing at its previous frenetic rate. “Also…” She turned back to Applejack. “You spelled ‘all right’ wrong. It’s two words: ‘all’ and ‘right’.”
Applejack shrugged. “Alright.”
“Your turn, Discord.” Twilight turned to the mini DNA sequencer.
“Does this mean you need some of my—YEEE!!” he shrieked as Twilight, without turning around, yanked a cluster of hairs from his mane. “YOW! OW! Ouch! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Owie! Ahuh!” he whimpered as she inserted the sample into the machine. “Pain! Pain hurts! Oh, goodness, it reminds me of when Princess… but it’s so… ah!” He gritted his teeth. “Why? Why hasn’t it stopped yet? Twilight, make the pain stop! Now!”
Twilight rolled her eyes, watching the blinking lights on the mainframe. “Don’t be such a baby. The pain will subside in a few minutes.”
“A few minutes? That’s hundreds of seconds! I’ll never make it!” He slumped melodramatically to the floor, clutching his mane. “How could you do this to me? I thought we were comrades in harmony! I’ve been betrayed!”
Tak tak tak tak tak tak tak… “Your genome seems to match that of an ordinary pony perfectly. ‘ggcagcggcg, gcagcctaag, cagcagccgc, cctcgcagca…’ Hmm. You should have red eyes, and you do… You should be a unicorn, and you are… Yes, as far as I can tell, your genes match your body. Can you roll your tongue?”
“Impossible.”
“Really? You should be able…”
“I am in far too much pain,” he moaned, rolling over. “Oh, look at what you’ve done to me, Twilight Sparkle. Are you proud of yourself?”
“Knock it off.” She looked down at him. “I wonder what genes are responsible for your blue horn. I’ve never heard of a unicorn with a horn colored differently from their coat before.”
“Oh, those would be my… blue genes. Ha!” He clapped his hooves together and grinned up at the three of them. “Get it? Anyone? Anyone?”
Applejack sighed. “Sit up straight, Discord.”
He sighed. “I’ll do my best.” Slowly and laboriously, he began to push his trembling body upwards with his forelegs, only for them to give out and send him sprawling on the floor again. Then, in what he seemed to hope looked like a Herculean feat of determination, he began to push himself up once more, finally reaching a sitting position after a full ten seconds of grunting and groaning.
Spike clapped slowly. “Hooray for Discord. We knew you could do it.”
Discord gave him a dour look. “Don’t mock me, little dragon. You can’t even comprehend the sensation of having not one, but several hairs forcibly removed from your head at once.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Discord. Ever lost a scale? Now that hurts.”
Discord shuddered. “Yikes. Touché.”
“Alright, you two, let’s get back on topic.” Twilight took a hoof glove from one of the bins on the counter and pulled it over her right foreleg. “There’s one more passive property of yours I’d like to test today, Applejack. After this, we’ll start looking into what you’re capable of.” Applejack nodded, and Twilight raised her gloved hoof. “This glove allows my hoof to pass through solid matter, like so.” She waved it through the surface of the counter a few times. “It should also be able to pass through living flesh.” She swung at Discord, who flinched but, as promised, was unharmed. She nodded in satisfaction and removed the glove, placing it back in the bin.
Applejack watched confusedly for a moment, then smacked her forehead with her hoof. “Aw, shucks… That was just a normal glove, wasn’t it?”
Twilight tried visibly to suppress a grin. “Yes, it was.”
“What?” hissed Discord. “You could have hit me! I thought we’d established that I’m not a big fan of pain?”
Smiling covertly as she turned back to the counter, Twilight retrieved a pen and paper from the bin. Tilting the paper down so that Applejack could see it, she began to write…
And stopped. The pen wasn’t working. “Very interesting…” she mused.
Applejack blinked. “Uh, was that supposed to work? Did you make me break the pen somehow?”
“No. It’s out of ink. But you expected it to work, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“So there are situations where your expectations come true and situations where they don’t. The question is, where do you draw the line?”
“Nowhere with that pen,” muttered Discord as she put the pen and paper back in the bin.
Twilight cleared her throat. “Ahem. I’d say that if it’s somewhere between those two experiments, we must be in for something interesting. We’ll look into that later, though. Today we’re just getting a basic overview of how your chaos magic works.” She picked up a book from a stack on the counter and began to flip through it. “Before we move on, though, I told you I would learn a spell to help suppress your imagination for safety reasons, since you say that’s how you control your powers.”
“Did you?” Applejack furrowed her brow. “Oh, yeah… That was before you went and… bought that bucket o’ paint for me, wasn’t it? Huh… Almost feels like a year ago now.”
“Yeah, I can see what you mean.” Twilight yawned, looking tired for the first time that day. “We were both up all night. Alright, here’s the spell. This could actually qualify as another experiment, since I don’t know if mind-altering magic will even work on you.”
“I know you’re not going to listen to me,” said Discord, “but I’d just like to tell you in advance that it will not.”
Twilight shook her head. “Don’t listen to him, Applejack. We don’t know if your expectations can affect my spells.”
“Got it. If he’s wrong and you can turn off my powers just like that, then… shucks, that’s most o’ my problems solved right there.” She nodded. “Go ahead.”
The purple aura around Twilight’s horn grew brighter as she scanned the pages of the book. After a few moments, she set it down and shut her eyes, aiming her horn downwards at Applejack and gritting her teeth in concentration as the light grew brighter and brighter and whiter and whiter until…
CRACK. For a split second, a blinding flash lit up the room.
Twilight let out a deep sigh. “That spell’s… kind of crude. It could definitely stand… to be a bit less complicated.” She looked up. “I targeted teapots, just as a test. You shouldn’t be able to envision a teapot any…”
There was a full tea set on the counter.
Slowly, she nodded. “Okay, Discord. You were right. Now, who wants to break for tea before we move on to the active tests?”
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This:
was absolutely delightful.
Twilight pranking Applejack. I never thought it possible.
Not a year anniversary until tomorrow. Please don't make us wait that long for another five chapters.
6989746
That was a placebo test. Twilight Sparkle does not prank.
Naw, that counts.
Twilight Sparkle does not intentionally prank.
Another excellent chapter, as usual.:D
Hair has DNA whether it's cut or not. Was that another placebo test or was Twilight just wrong?
Fun little aside to that: one thing I think stories here really don't acknowledge enough is the difference between being honest and being truthful. Being honest does not necessarily mean the same as saying the truth. It doesn't even necessarily mean the same as not actively lying. It means not intending to deceive. Discord here doesn't intend to deceive. He may or may not be lying his ass off, but he also expects them to not believe him. In that way, he's being perfectly honest, because he's not really trying to mislead them in any way, just to deflect the question.
On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to deceive someone while not saying a single untrue word. What truth you tell them, how you tell it and even who it comes from will make people come to their own conclusions about what to do about it, which will often enough not actually be the right one. The truth you tell doesn't necessarily have to be the truth they hear. In a lot of ways, it's easier to lie to people with the truth. It's harder to get the fine details wrong when you don't have to make them up out of whole cloth.
6992819
I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Hair is entirely made of keratin and an entirely dead object. The DNA is in the follicles, which are only attached to hair if it has naturally fallen out or was torn out by force. Cut hair shouldn't have it.
6989622
It really was.
6989622 7007483 Thanks! That was my favorite part.
I guess I just haven't really cared enough about... anything... for the past eleven months or so to really put that talent to use. Oh, well. That's the crux of the problem I'm trying to fix anyway. Thanks for the insightful comment!
6989746 I'll try! I'm not the type to roll over and allow myself to be terrible forever, you know.
6990990 Science is a prank we play on the universe. Or is it a prank it plays on us? I guess it doesn't really matter as long as someone's laughing.
6991183 Good to hear. When I can't achieve consistent quantity, consistency of quality is kind of all I have left.
6992819 Sorry, but I'm going to have to trust Google on this one. Because if I can't trust Google, then I'm back in the stone age when the average citizen of a developed nation didn't even have the majority of human knowledge at their fingertips.
6998333 Yeah, I view honesty as one way of respecting other people's right to choose. A choice made based on a false version of reality isn't much of a choice at all, whether you're deciding what to do or just how to feel. Deceit in any form is manipulation.
I'm actually rather shocked that I hadn't thought about Discord's role as Element of Honesty that way before, since thinking very, very deeply on things I care about is what I'm best at.
7010296
No pressure.
7010296 First, you can get a DNA sample from a finger or toenail clipping, and those are made in much the same way as hair. Second, police can get DNA from a hair sample that was found at a crime scene. Not pulled, just fallen out. Third, everything in the body is made of cells, and with the exception of red blood cells (which undergo a special process in mammals, but not birds), every single one of them has DNA. Even then, blood has white blood cells and other things floating around in it that do contain DNA, so I find the idea that hair doesn't quite suspicious.
7010887 Ehh... I'm not too sure about this argumentative format, and I really didn't look into this so deeply when I wrote the chapter seeing as it is, after all, a fictional universe where the entire pony genome can be sequenced in seconds by a desktop gadget, but further research (mainly this article) does seem to corroborate my initial impression. First, yes, it seems that keratinous tissue does contain traces of nuclear DNA, since the cornification process isn't completed on every cell. However, these cells are rare, and the nDNA they contain is still severely degraded. According to this article, nails are a better source of nDNA than I would have expected, but results are still sketchy, and nail clippings do have a lot more mass than hairs. Second, as the first article mentions, the police try to get DNA from fallen-out hair, but that doesn't mean they have a good chance of success. The best they can hope for is to find mtDNA and a few pieces of highly fragmented nDNA. Third, the substance that composes a strand of hair is made up originally of cells which do contain full nDNA, but they are made into keratin by the cornification process I mentioned earlier, which destroys the nucleus completely in almost all cases.
Okay, that's all. Sorry. As an INTP, I'm incapable of ignoring an oportunity to argue a point.
7012599 Same here, and given that I plan to make a career around messing with the stuff, that's a pretty important detail to get right.
Applejack gives zero fucks.
What you did there... I see it. fc04.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/363/f/6/clapping_pony_icon___pinkie_pie_by_taritoons-d5pkuzy.gif
6989746
Oh, she can prank. If it's for the sake of science.
Where did his body come from? Easy: Applejack's
She doesn't have one any more, and that's half her problem. Nopony realizes this because she's imagining she still does.
Someone needs to help Applejack so bad. That sounds like the most horrible torture. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, being right there by the people you care about, and all you can do is imagine that they're here with you. Like she's watching a show about the ponies she wishes were real.
Twilight really needs to look into the mysterious new limits on Applejack's imagination. Unable to imagine her own family? If there's anything that can curb Chaos, the answer will be in that.
Twi also really needs to take a more critical study of the EoH. They stopped time, just because they were feeling pissy about something? They sided with Discord? I'll eat my hat if it was chaos magic that caused that particular passing of the torch.
I'm honestly way more scared of those things than Applejack right now.
7293861 Sharp as a tack, aren't you?
There are certainly quite a few factors in play here. We'll see what's up with... well, all of them. In due time.
Looking forward to the next chapter whenever you can manage it.
Kallisti! Yeah, I just figured out the joke in the story title.
Is this being imagined anymore?