The Equestria Diaries

by Istaran

Chapter 5: Reconsidering and reloading

It was great to finally get outside. Rarity had done a great job with my new clothes. They felt like silk against my skin, and the scarf did a great job hiding my most recent injury. It was also really great at billowing dramatically in the wind. It kind of felt like it had a way of summoning extra wind just to billow in. But that was probably just my imagination.

I was suprised Rarity hadn't lost any time working on my wardrobe. Apparently she had spent some time working under the assumption it was to be my funeral attire. A bit morbidly, I thought that might still be the case when it was all said and done. Fortunately, the scarf was simple to make from a bolt of cloth she had already, so the outfit was complete in no time.

Fluttershy was quite glad I had miraculously recovered, but she was still more than a little shellshocked from the whole thing. I didn't know what to say to help her out of her funk, but I did make one request of her before I left her home. "Forgive him. For me."

I decided to make my way to the Ponyville library, where Frank had first appeared. He had chosen such an unimpressive item, I figured his starting location was the most favorable there was. So it was definitely worth checking out. Along the way I took some time to sync up with Deus.

[<Do you still have contact with the spider in Frank's possession? For that matter, is it still in his possession?>]

[<Yes. He still has that piece of me. Connection over this distance is low bandwidth and prone to lost data. What would you like me to do with it?>]

I thought long and hard before answering. [<Tell that piece to follower Frank's orders as long as he starts them with 'Deus', and they can be done solely by thinking and moving your limbs. No multiplying, or molecular manipulation or anything fancy like that. Just a boring, mechanical, robot. And no talking. Gesture all you like, draw pictures if it feels like the right thing to do. Let him think he got my item and can use it. Within those limits, do what you can to keep him safe, but don't hurt anyone.>]

Deus took a while to respond, the relative silence making the wind blowing my scarf around seem deafening. [<It is done. You are too soft. It will cost you the game, and your life.>]

[<I don't need to be in a hurry to kill Frank, especially with you keeping tabs on him.>]

Before Deus could respond, an orange-coated mare siddled up to me. "Howdy. You seem to be doing remarkably well today. Considering." Her countenance grew dark with the last word.

"It's this scarf Rarity made for me. Really does wonders. Did you know Frank?"

"I thought I did. Seemed like a right nice feller until.. tell me, honestly, what do you intend to do about him?"

"You mean to him? .. Let me ask you this first. What would you do if you and some other ponies.. let's say ones you hadn't met before, were put in an unfamiliar place and told you had to play in a 'survival game'? What would that mean to you?"

"That's a right odd question.. well, a 'survival game' is the sort of thing Discord or the like might force somepony to play. So we'd have to team up right quick and find the way to win before somepony got hurt! Why do you ask?"

I stopped in my tracks. I had meant the question rhetorically, but that wasn't the answer I had expected. "So in a 'survival game', you work together to survive.. that's what the term means in Equestria.. the place where the game is taking place.." I said, half to myself.

"That's right. You still haven't said why? Or answered my original question."

"Where Frank and I come from, the term means something very different. It means only one of the participants can 'win'. Only one will survive."

"Oh." She said before things really sunk in. "Oh, my!"

"I don't blame Frank. He was only thinking about getting home to his family. And now, thanks to you, I at least have hope that we can both win at the end of this. I'd like to help him get home to his wife and son if I can. That said.. I have no intention of dying. If you can find it in your hearts to forgive him.. he's on the road heading south out of town. I think it would be better if you can convince him to return and stay here in Ponyville. I won't be here that much longer."

She placed a hoof on my forearm. "You're a very kind pony. I hope you find a way to both win too." With that we parted ways.

---

"Aaaaah!" a pink pony with balloons tattooed on her flank screamed at me unexpectedly.

"Aaaaah!?" I responded, startled.

"Aaaaarghh!" She expressed in frustration, while drawing out a ridiculously oversized bazooka from somewhere. Hammerspace?

"Aaaaaah!" I exclaimed in fright, not at all confident of my ability to regenerate from such heavy ordinance.

"Ah!" She answered, aiming a bit high before pulling the trigger. Black and grey streamers and balloons floated down at me, as several black-clothed tables fell all around me, bearing tasteful miniature sandwiches.

"Aaah hah hah!?" I reacted, in utter incomprehension.

"Time to reload! And this time you better stay non-dead!" The pink pony demanded before running off.

"Time to run away!" I said to no one in particular as I beat a hasty retreat, hustling to get away from this madness and find the library at last.

---

When I arrived at last, the doors were wide open. This was a public library, so I didn't think anything particularly strange about that, and strolled inside. Not seeing anyone at first, started perusing the titles of books. I could see already that my Equestrian vocabulary was going to be stretched to the breaking point here. Concentrating on Deus, I started to let loose thousands of tiny mechanical spiders: each was charged with crawling into one of the books and making its way up and down every page, while Deus sorted and recorded the symbols they found. I had no idea which of these books would prove to be the critical clue, much less a life-saving piece of general knowledge.

"Ah ha!" a voice said from an overhanging room. Looking up, I saw a lavender unicorn looking down at me, with a strange glow in her eyes. "You really do have magic blood. And, what's that all over my books? Are you magicking my books without permission?!"

"Oh, um, yes. I am just reading them. Is that not permissible? Do I need a library card first?"

"Oh, I guess that's fine, as long as you don't harm any of the books. But while you are doing that, can I study your magic blood?" She descended from her perch, picking up a terrifyingly massive hypodermic needle in her lavender telekinetic grip.

A funny thing about phobias. They are called 'irrational fears' for a reason. Logically I knew that a little blood donation wasn't going to kill me. Despite the comically exaggerated size of the needle, I knew logically that I had lost a lot more blood than that from each of my recent injuries, and with Deus to help me I was going to get through it just fine. As it was, I was out the front door before she could reach the ground floor. It took all my willpower to stop and hide beside the door frame and call back to her. "Perhaps we can find a less invasive way to study it?"

"Oh, eheh. Sorry, I guess you are afraid of needles?"

"They are the bane of my magic blood." Deus promptly chided me for projecting my own weaknesses onto him. I chided him for letting his name go to his head.

"Okay. I've put the needle away. Can you come back in? I can just do a magical analysis of the blood while it is still in your system," she offered.

"That sounds a lot more reasonable." In the distance I thought I saw pink-colored movement. Now seemed like a good time to be back inside the library.

"Here, just take a seat and I'll get started. Let's see.. I'll need Starswirl's Guide to Magical Analytics... here it is. Oh, your magic is still on it.. do you mind?"

"I'll just, get back to that one a little later," I offered, as I moved the spider out of that book and into the next. I was having a hard time making any practical sense of that book anyways, or any of the books on magic. I could memorize the words and diagrams, but without the basic understanding of a wizard, I couldn't really make sense of them. They assumed an underlying education I simply didn't have. And that's before considering the sheer data-overload of reading an entire library in parallel. I wasn't really processing the information yet, just storing it for later.

As I took my seat, Twilight flipped through the pages, finally settling on what she needed. She took a few minutes to review the information before turning her horn on me. "Here goes nothing!" she said before her horn began to glow brightly. I was bathed in a haze of lavender lights, and saw what looked like a variety of text showing up in the air around me, at an angle that was impossible to read. I noticed the spiders were completely unaware of the magical light, so I couldn't even use their alternate perspectives to try and read it. In Twilight's magic, my blood lit up brightly, looking like a diagram of the human circulatory system.

"This is amazing" she said, before spouting off a chain of what I can only assume was Equestrian technobabble. Magibabble? Arcanobabble? The term 'arcane' seemed particularly appropriate at the moment.

"So, how did you get magic blood? I thought there wasn't any magic in your world. Or did you get it after you arrived?" I realized she was actually asking questions I could understand again.

"In the process of coming here, we had a chance to get one item of our choice. I chose this." I gestured at my glowing body. "It was an idea I had had sometime back, though I can't claim it was 100% original. A particular refinement of more well known ideas. I was lucky it worked out as well as it did. It was definitely an opportunity for one of those 'be careful what you wish for' scenarios. Stories of this sort of thing going horribly, horribly wrong are more common than stories of it going even remotely right. But I figure that's more a question of what works well for stories than any sense of realism. If everything goes right, where is the tension and the drama?"

"So what all can your magic blood do?" she asked.

I tensed up, looking away uncomfortable. I really didn't want her knowing the full extent of my capabilities. The worst case was far outside the realm of anything I would ever chose. One nanospider, with the right order, could convert its entire environment into more and more nanospiders, ultimately converting the entire world. Even that was only a convenient stopping point, not the limit of its destructive potential. The bigger it got, the smarter, and it would be trivial for a planet-sized fractal spider to launch little clusters of nanospiders at other worlds to convert them as well. It could even launch them out into deep space, calculating the paths of distant suns and planets and the gravity wells along the way to eventually hit worlds lightyears away and convert them as well. The 'grey goo' scenario was within my physical capabilities, and that was terrifying to even know, much less share with others. While I had complete trust in myself to never chose to end the world, why would strangers be willing to trust me with such power? And if they knew, would their fear push them to push me into a corner, where ending the world might seem like less and less bad of an idea?

Fortunately, there was a -lot- of room between the minimalist use I had been making of Deus so far and all out apocalypse. And plenty of uses I could admit to without going into his full capabilities. And also Twilight wasn't the best at distinguishing partial honesty from full disclosure.

"I'm still learning how to make full use of it, but it has quite a few handy uses. The best so far is that it can keep me alive through some degree of otherwise fatal injury, and help me recover more fully and quickly."

"Our own medical magic can do something like that, but I can see how it would be handy to have it already in your blood, in case nopony can get you to a hospital in time."

I nodded before continuing. "It also allows me to send out little spiders to perceive my environment from different angles, or even do physical tasks for me at a distance." I demonstrated by assembling another fist-sized spider within my hands and let it start roaming. I had it pick up a small hand-broom and start sweeping up, slowly and awkwardly since the broom was a bit big for it to wield.

"Oh, that's how you cleaned up Fluttershy's place, even though you were so hurt?"

"Yes" I oversimplified. "It also can help me remember things, and in some ways think them through. For example, it helped me learn Equestrian more quickly, and now it's memorizing as many of your b-" I cut myself off mid-word to stroll over to one of the bookshelves and pull a book off the shelf. Placing it on the table, I opened it up to the page my spider had discovered. The book looked ancient, with old yellowing pages. But there, halfway through the book was a set of seemingly random black and white blocks, with a telltale set of squares within squares in three of the corners. It was a QR code. While there was no plausible explanation of how it could be here, it was definitely there. "Twilight.. does this look at all familiar to you?"

"Well, yes and no. I mean, I've seen it before in this book as part of reading through the library, but I've never seen anything else like it and there is no other explanation within the book. Why? Is it familiar to you?"

I took out my phone, only belatedly realizing it still had a charge despite all reason to the contrary. Actually, the battery icon wasn't even being displayed, which was quite strange. While Deus could easily memorize the QR code (but not decipher it. I had no idea how QR codes were interpreted, so he didn't either), I figured it might be valuable to show someone else. So I snapped a picture of it. "Back in our world, we call these QR codes. They're a way of presenting a block of information that anyone with the right reader can access. Usually just a pointer to someplace with more information."

To my surprise, the phone automatically responded to the QR code. A window popped up showing the code overlayed with the word '<Magic>'. It took up only about a sixth of the screen, with five empty boxes of about the same size on screen as well. There was an '<Activate>' button under it within its box, but the button was grayed out and unresponsive.

"What was that?" Twilight asked, looking over my shoulder.

"A piece of the puzzle. Do you happen to know of a set of six things.. concepts or what have you, one of which is 'magic'?" I asked.

She gave me the blankest of blank looks, normally reserved for when a grown man asks you what color the sky is, or what's the opposite of up.

Comments

[Seeking Dusk]

I was wondering when it would hit him that 'Survival Game' doesn't have to mean 'fight to the death'. Some people, honestly. *shakes head slowly* Always leap to the worse case scenario. I'm guessing Frank doesn't have a phone so he didn't know about the death alerts the Text sends out?

[Istaran]

5897649 He has one, but he was too caught up in the moment to realize no alert went out from his 'kill'.

Frank isn't a stone-cold killer, and trying to play one for a moment didn't go over so well for him, mentally.

[APS]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

[Star Flank]

"Aaaaah!" a pinky pony with balloons tattooed on her flank screamed at me unexpectedly.

I'm not sure if this is just supposed to be a play on her name or what, but it doesn't quite flow right with the rest of the sentence.