32 - Living in a Rut
Life settled into a new, if pleasant enough, rut. Five days out of the week, Silver and Celine went to school. He practiced his patterns, and failed to convince Trixie to let him look ahead at the actual spells. Night Watch followed after them, at school, at home, over the weekends. Now that she had been spotted, she just made herself a casual part of their lives, only leaving them alone when they retired to bed.
Tumble never returned to school, but the school year went on unimpeded. Lily Jump said something about having to go to Ponyville, and gave no real explanations. Silver approached Meadow one Friday a few weeks later.
"I had an idea," announced Silver, Celine following after him.
Meadow Leaper perked an ear at Silver, "Your ideas are dangerous, but sometimes amazing. What's your idea?"
"It involves your long-term job," said Silver with a smile.
"You have my attention," said Meadow, kicking the ball he had towards Silver lightly.
Silver gently nudged the ball towards Celine, who kicked it back to Meadow, "You like jumping, but you like moving in general, right?"
Meadow bobbed his head, "Love it! Running, jumping, playing hoofball or loopty hoops. I'm happiest when I'm moving."
Silver pointed a hoof at Meadow, "So maybe you're thinking too narrow. Why don't you share your love of moving?"
Meadow tilted his head, "I'm interested... but I don't get it. How do I share that?"
Silver sat on his rump, "You can start with me. I'm not the most graceful pony."
Meadow gave a soft pfft, "You're the clumsiest colt I ever saw, no offense."
"None taken," said Silver, "If you opened a gym or something, you could show people how to work out, how to play games, keep in shape, all that! You'd be sharing your talent with everypony, and they'd pay you for it."
Night Watch dropped from a tree branch, hanging from her hind legs in a fashion that looked simply impossible to Silver. "Did you read that somewhere?"
Silver peered at the dangling Night, "Uh, no. I was just thinking about Meadow."
Meadow tapped the ground a little, "I... like the sound of that. I could show everypony how fun it is to move! I could even help ponies that are hurt that need help moving."
Celine tilted her head, "That takes a lot of patience and care."
Meadow waved a hoof, "If it means somepony can move again, that sounds worth it." He jumped forward, putting forehooves on Silver's shoulders, "You, my friend, are a genius. I know what I'm doing after the Equestria Games now."
It was the last day anyone saw Meadow at school. Silver's clique had shrunk considerably to just Celine, with Night Watch always close by, but not attending classes.
It wasn't that Silver was disliking his lot in life, but he wanted... "Celine?"
She tilted her head at him, seated beside him in the living room, "Yes?"
"I think I'm wasting my new life," said Silver.
Celine flicked her ears at the unsatisfied sound in his voice, "Why do you say that? You're doing well in school, and you've helped your friends move on to great things."
Silver waved a hoof, "Yeah, sure, but where am I going? I need a spell book."
Night Watch joined the conversation suddenly, "Oh? Is that all?"
Silver blinked, "Is that all? I've been trying for months!"
Night Watch shook her head slowly, "You're smart about some things and dumb as a brick about others. Where do they keep a lot of books, genius?"
Silver frowned a moment, then it hit him and he thumped the ground with a hoof, "You are kidding me."
Night Watch rolled her eyes, "So, we're going to the library today or what?"
No further words were needed. They were off at a brisk trot towards the Canterlot Archives. "Will they let me browse whatever magic I want?" asked Silver along the way.
Celine shook her head, "There are several restricted wings that only royalty and high-level wizards are allowed, like the Starswirl the Bearded wing."
Night Watch asked, "If the humans use so many firearms, why don't they get any bonuses to them in Humanway?"
Silver blinked, "Have you been playing Fallout?"
"Oh yeah," said Night, "Very educational, if violent. I never saw a game with so much blood, gore, and..." She tilted her head, "How much did you pay for that? It's beyond any other game I ever played, beyond even the cutting edge things."
Silver glanced around, "Uh, it was a lot..."
"You're lying," said Night flatly. "I don't appreciate that."
Celine shook her head, "It was a gift from Princess Luna. He is probably trying to protect her."
Night flashed her sharp teeth, "You're better at lying than he is, but you're still hiding something."
"Here we are," said Silver, pointing at the library they had just reached, "Do you know your way around, Celine, Night?"
Night gave a soft huff, "I'm not forgetting this conversation, but follow me."
Night Watch led the way through the marble tile floors of the library to the foal's section, which turned to soft carpeting. She pointed, "Here." She had brought them to a section of foal's introduction to their horn, and magic in general.
Silver walked up and started looking over the books. 'Mommy What's This Thing on my Head?' 'The Tingle Means it's Working', and other titles promised some faint shreds of information. He stopped when he found 'A Dozen Simple Spells to Impress your Friends'. "Yes!" He grabbed the book with a silver hand and set it on the ground, flipping it open and flopping in front of it. With great hunger he searched for the first spell. The spell apparently punched a small hole in a glass, so somepony drinking from it would end up dribbling all over themselves. "That's a stupid prank," said Silver, but he read on anyway.
The symbols were listed to fire the spell, but no explanation was given for why these symbols, and why in that order. Out of curiosity, he looked around and focused on a bookshelf. His horn glowed soft silver as he went through the symbols quickly. A new tingle ran through him as real magic fired, and a tiny divot appeared in the wood. "Huh..." He pushed up to his hooves, "I need something a little more advanced than this. Somepony has to explain why they pick the symbols they do."
The search was on! Silver began to wander from book to book, looking up a variety of spells of increasing complexity, but it seemed none of them offered even the start of an explanation for why the spell was the way it was. "Ok, seriously, this is stupid." He stomped a hoof and looked to Celine, "You're a unicorn, sort of. Tell me, why aren't there any explanations? The alphabet clearly has a meaning, they even say as much, but nopony shares the meaning with their spell. The meanings aren't so simple that it would be obvious to a random unicorn, would it? Or why would there be any spells at all?"
Celine shook her head, "I was never a scholar of magic. I mostly used spells that others shared with me, and you are correct, they never said why, just gave me the pattern and what it should do, as a whole."
Silver sank to the floor with a deep frown, "They can't be... guessing it all, can they? No wonder new spells are so valuable! If you want a fire ball, you need some heat, and some pressure, and some speed, but how much of each? How much does each symbol give specifically? No one bothered to figure this out or keep track of how they interact, in general? This is crazy!"
Night Watch raised a brow, "I'm not a unicorn, but for a blank flank colt, you're talking like you know something. If you think that should all be written down, why don't you write it down?"
Silver huffed and kicked his hind legs across the floor, wriggling in building frustration, "Maybe I'll do just that!" His magic grabbed his notebook free of his saddlebag and he threw open the closest spellbook. "Here, it creates water. It only uses three symbols." He went through the symbols quickly, "Now what happens if we add an extra of the first one?"
Silver began to scribble notes. They were chicken scratch, but they were notes, and that was good enough for him. He tinkered through the day, abandoning memorizing the symbols, abandoning memorizing spells, and instead recklessly adding and dropping symbols from existing spells and writing down the effects and trying to figure out the system behind it all.
The sun had long since set, and the library was quiet save for Silver's incessant quill scratches. Celine leaned against a bookshelf, her eyes mostly shut. Across from her, Night Watch also looked drowsy, yawning widely as he worked.
"I have it!" cried Silver, startling them both to wakefulness, "If this works, it should make a fire ball. A real fire ball."
Celine blinked softly, "Why is your first spell a ball of flame?"
Silver blinked back at her, looking lost, "Uh, seemed as good as any. It's a classic wizard spell." He trotted quickly away with his notes, soon leaving the library entirely with his two female friends close behind. "Let's try it!" He focused his horn and ran through the symbols he theorized should work. Fire sprayed out of his horn in an intense but brief burst, arcing into the sky before vanishing. "Uh... No, not enough pressure holding it together."
He tried again, adding another of one of the symbols. Instead of a cone, it came out as a straight line, firing up into the night sky. "Closer!" Again and again he tinkered with the recipe, made notes, and tried again. Finally, he flashed through the symbols and a perfectly round orb of fire drifted up into the sky. He started to giggle manically, watching it, "It's perfect, perfect!" He turned his horn left, and it followed. He turned it right and it kept moving along with it. "Better than I dreamed!"
Night Watch shook her head, "That's nice and all, but what are you going to do with it?"
Silver brought his silvery hand, and the ball in its palm, down into the stone plaza violently. It exploded just the way he wanted it to, flame escaping in all directions until the energy was expended. He clopped his hooves in triumph, "And, best of all, I know why!"
Celine nudged Silver in the flank lightly, "You know more than that."
Silver peeked down at his back end to see his flank was now adorned with a section of the mad scribbles he had made. He burst into giggles at the sight of it, pride swelling through him. He felt... completed for lack of better word. He also felt tired. All the energy used in the experiments caught up to him and he staggered drunkenly, "I'm... so happy..." He hit the ground with a thud.
Celine gently lifted him in her own magic, tucking his notes away in his saddlebag.
Night bobbed her head, "I have to report that. Orders." She spread her wings and took off into the night, soon lost to Celine's vision.
Celine trotted for home, carrying her exhausted stallion with her. She walked with a renewed pride. Their herd was true now, for no colt led it, but a proper stallion, with a cutie mark to display his talent.
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Oh boy, this is sure to get the attention of a certain alicorn princess. From how it sounds he's either discovered something only upper level unicorns learn or he just started a magical revolution.
5731459 Like father, like son. Rough Draft's mark is a sprawling unfinished manuscript. Silver Lining has a big mess of spell notation. They look even more related now.
5730400 As a tiny fluffy friend to hug? No. To have as a 'girlfriend'? Yes.
OMG so much yes. There was sex, there was gaming, there was "magical programming". Reminds me of certain series of books about IMBA programmer how suddenly other world where he quickly became an ubermage.
I also wonder how will Night react to Silver actually being David the ex-human.
God, that sounds like ex-convict or something bad.
And short sex time gave me the idea if I'll ever will get to writing my own story.
not the reason behind the cutie mark the beginning of the chapter I figured it would be helping pony's find there life goals.
but his talent being new spells will be supper good.
or should I word that the meaning behind the spells or how the spells work, this is really going to open up the story.
as you are starting a new sequel I think you need to go back the other story's now and add one word to all of them as you now will have a series going congratulations for a job well dune.
wow this is one hacek of a bare you are setting for righters.
you rock
now stop and think about this.
as of the time of this post ten days and 72,746 words total totally amazing.
I seem to remember that game was called "loopty hoops" before. Also, I can't remember if you took my suggestion to hyphenate the name or not.
The wizards are "high-level."
The name of the game is "Humanway."
The floors are "marble-tiled." (Though if you got rid of the "d" on "tiled," you wouldn't need the hyphen.)
"Where she had directed was..." is a very awkward sentence. I'd change that to "She had brought them to..."
I think you mean "...looking over them." That said, I'd change that to "...looking over the books" or something similar, since you haven't specified what the "them" are.
The titles are hysterical.
That said, every word in a title (except possibly the articles) should be capitalized.
I was initially worried that this chapter was moving things forward without a clear purpose in doing so, but my fears were very quickly allayed. Instead, things came to a conclusion that was not only very well-executed, but felt organic as well. Silver's helping Meadow Leaper transition his gifts into a job was a scene that not only worked very well to wrap up the last of Silver's current social relationships, but also served to underscore that all of the tertiary members of the cast have moved on, helping to clear the way for the main and supporting cast members to do the same. This was an excellent method for tidying things up before advancing the story.
Even better was that then, the story did advance, and kept the narrative flow smooth and steady while doing so. Silver's study of magic was an issue that had been building for some time, so it was good to see it finally come to a head. Him researching how spells worked and getting his cutie mark felt like a well-earned payoff for his hard work and dedication, and helped to create a natural transition point in his life, since getting that is the rite of passage into adulthood.
Equally amusing was Celine's pride over their "herd" having a proper stallion. Since that term seems to apply specifically to polygamous relationships, it was a very off-the-cuff method of letting us know that she hasn't given up on the idea of finding more mares for Silver. I also enjoyed the less-obvious but eminently believable idea that Trixie's method of teaching magic was entirely wrong for Silver's method of learning. This felt highly realistic, because styles of learning aren't something that are intuitive to most people (or ponies). It's more natural to presume that there's a "right way" to do it, which is usually whatever your own way is (the episode "Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3" dealt with this in a surprisingly head-on manner). Moreover, new parents tend to have a hard time learning this lesson with their first child - it will be a hard pill for Trixie to swallow that, for all her good intentions, she was inadvertently holding Silver back.
Insofar as Silver learning magic, he was correct that it made no sense that ponies were putting the magical alphabet together to form spells without studying the underlying meaning behind said alphabet. That's almost hard to believe, but there's another way of looking about it that I suspect is how most pony wizards view the process - as a recipe, rather than an alphabet. Considering the process the way you would a recipe makes it easier to understand why most ponies don't tinker with the process. When baking a cake, do you ask "Why only one cup of flour? Why not two cups, or three or four cups? What would happen if I baked it that way instead?" Or even ask why the ingredients interact the way they do, e.g. "Why does stirring it make it solidify?" In that regard, it becomes more understandable that nopony has really delved into the "why" of spellcasting, choosing instead to focus on what ingredients turn out a workable end-product.
5732460 Thank you for doing your part to combat the typo menace. It is only through the due diligence of readers like you that we have a chance.
Your intuitions strike close to the mark! I assume the ponies find 'what works' and then share it, and that was that. As Twilight demonstrates, the scientific method is... lacking... in Equestria. Controls, who needs those? So, like the bakers in your own example, they experiment a little if they are extremely confident or in a very safe place, then get really happy when they find one that works, rather than knowing Pattern A causes so much X, and you'll probably want 2 of it, and it has to come after pattern Z because of the interaction between the two, and more than 3 Zs causes this other effect, watch out, and so on and so on. It's quite possible that an individual unicorn might have noticed some of this while doing their own work, but that wasn't shared or cared about much, the end recipe was, and they were celebrated, stored, and catalogued.
It amused me to give Rough Draft and Silver Lining related marks. They're both creators of unfinished things, and proudly wear writing on their flank.
Rewinding a bit, I had a good idea of where Meadow Leaper was going a day or two before this chapter. The idea hit me and stayed after he was playing hoops with the others, likely a game that he suggested to them and was showing them how to do. He even had Tumble playing along quite well. His friends are all grown up in their own ways, but they could appear later as supporting characters. Going back to Meadow Leaper, he will have Silver as a first client, showing him how to gallop, jump, climb, and generally be comfortable in his pony body.
Phew, thanks for reading all this, and see you in the sequel I hope!
5731718 Fixed!
I shall fave the sequel if you decide to post one.
5732831 It's already in the queue for approval!
5734034 I'm cereal about not seeing bisexuals anywhere. The only time I ever recall seeing one was the girl in Dodgeball.
5738151 I much prefer plot twists, plot development, and character development, than 'romance' and the ilk. It's much more fun.
NOW HE MUST BECOME A NECROMANCER!
api.ning.com/files/I0fvYV0V5N5xQvjRvTm9qnFtc*QLhrlN7*pYsLm7-sKrHLC5lkcT1yQLheLQzlASrwrqQDqbOaNRhJ6oSVtVqpAAuHpyxb*1/NecromancerCover_Springborg.jpg
Reading this immediately following the previous chapter, I groaned so hard at the pun. Intentional?
5896999 Maybe...
This story is excellent! I find your characterizations well done and thought out. The story flows very smoothly and your use of details is top notch. all an all a well done story so far. I do look forward to the next chapter to the story. I wood love to see Lunas and Celestia Point of view as they learns of his special potential in making new spells. Now that he has his cutie mark in this filled. His importance to the Princesses has multiply a lot. Is this something they wood try to keep to themselves? A lot of ponys wood like to know how Magic works.
Keep up the good work you are doing.
Dragonfox
5911135 Thanks! Do read on, this rabbit hole goes far deeper.
5911225
Yes, I did find that out. I am enjoying this story vary much.
Keep up the good work you are doing.
Dragonfox
I finally finished this story! On to the next!
5928602 You win!!
On to the next story.
I seem to be a very active commenter on this series.
5930305 As if there was something wrong with that.
I love your interpretation of magic.
5936897 I have fun with it.
5936951
I was hoping for the story to continue, and then I came across your sequal! Awesome.
My gosh, did he discover the language behind the bytecode? That is something to be proud of!
I'm finally caught up. I love this story so freggin much.
6135752 Thanks for reading! There's more to see.
6136292 since silver is considered an adult now, will he start working for the princesses more, or does he have much to learn?
6136709 The hijinks have only just begun.
6191619 I know groups, but I only know how to submit my own stuff. But I will say that a lot of groups seem to have lax standards on their themes, so you could probably send this out to more groups than you'd think.
6192748 Click on the icon on the main story page with the three people standing in a group.
6195238 I'm going to just assume several years have passed, and he's, like, 15 or something xD Thanks for clearing that up though.
A most satisfying end to this part of the story. On to the next one!
6213761 Glad you're enjoying the ride!
6278175 suck....really suck for you....
6513673 I saw more than one episode, so it's not like I had a choice.
6600129
Well, if you're still actually connected to the Internet, Steam does connect to the servers and verify DRM. Very few games can run without an Internet connection. Solar 2, City Skylines, and a few others. Mostly smaller titles and indie titles. EUIV used to operate without Internet, but not since the New World dlc.
The 'Offline Mode' you might be experiencing is just playing online, but have your status set to 'offline' so no one can bug you. The store portion is turned off for you when playing this way.
6600827 Let me experiment!
Ok, snip connection, steam barely reacts, lets me keep playing. Borderlands 2, check, skyrim, check.
Alright, restart steam while still offline. Steam complains, but offers to start in 'offline mode', works.
Games still work. Nothing appears broken.
6600861
I guess older titles have had their drm unlocked as well. And most of the moddable ones.
6600874 Is there a specific one you want to try? Fallout 4s not out yet.
6600884
I don't know. I don't have any new AAA titles. Too expensive for me.
6606250
When I mean 'offline,' I mean not connected at all to the Internet. Thanks for taking your time to explain.
6612161
Nope?
6612180 She is not Luna.
6678181 I gotta catch up too, I think my next chap is "Welcome to". I did read that false ending tho :D
6679614 What false ending? You're crazy.