25 - Thaumatopsis
Lex sighed as he finished chanting, placing his forehooves back on the ground now that there was no need to direct the energies any longer. Glancing around the room confirmed what he already knew: that Nosey still wasn’t back, having left some time ago to see if she could chase down why the mayor’s plan to evacuate the city was so full of holes.
Going over to inspect the half-eaten lunch she’d left behind in her rush to “pound the pavement,” as she’d put it, Lex idly wished she’d hurry up and return. It wasn’t that he enjoyed her presence; she was quite clearly an irresponsible moron who cared more about fame than the public good, but now that he’d finished restoring his magic, there was nothing left to do, and nothing to keep his mind from wandering. With only the oppressive silence to share the room with, he could already feel memories of his recent breakup coming to the forefront of his thoughts, with all of the heartbreak that entailed.
Picking up a salad that Nosey had ignored in favor of the dessert portion of her lunch, Lex – having decided that there were no more preparations that could be made for tomorrow and determined to distract himself – dug in even as he pulled a scroll out of his haversack, spreading it on the room’s only desk.
At a casual glance, this scroll was no different from the myriad others that he owned. However, a closer inspection showed that this one was not only thicker, but also more worn than most, with ink spots and lines upon lines of text visible even through the thick paper due to having been written and rewritten on many times over.
Slowly, Lex unfurled it and began to read the text from the beginning. He didn’t need to, of course; like most of the scrolls he carried with him, he was the author of this particular treatise, and had long since memorized its contents to the point where he could recite the entirety of it without a second thought. Nevertheless, he forced himself to consciously and deliberately devote his full attention to each word, each equation and diagram, as he read through the lengthy paper. Maybe this time some new insight would come to him, some new idea or approach that he hadn’t thought of…
Reaching the end, Lex put the scroll – which contained all of his notes, formulas, and details regarding the system of magic that he’d invented – onto the desk. Staring at his own hornwriting, it silently confirmed what he already knew to be true: that although his magic eclipsed the power of the native spellcasting that unicorns used in Equestria, it contained a flaw of crippling proportions, with no obvious solution.
Sighing again at the continued lack of a breakthrough, Lex forced himself to think the problem through from the beginning…
That all living creatures could utilize some magic was a lesson taught in schoolhouses all over Equestria. But while most teachers were content to treat that as being an object lesson unto itself, with only minor follow-ups about the specific ways that different creatures could use what magic they had, Lex had wanted to know more.
After raiding his local library had proven insufficient, he’d eventually managed to badger the staff there to borrow some books from a larger institution. It was only then, with books written by scholars rather than schoolmarms, that Lex had made his first breakthrough: that the process of gathering and directing magical energies was tactile in nature.
Magic, in other words, was gathered and used via the body.
It was because it was so obvious that Lex had never realized it until the book had pointed it out. Of course magic was a physical process! That was why pegasi needed to flap their wings to use their flying magic, or earth ponies could only direct their magic into their limbs. And it was only because unicorns had a special organ – their horn – that they could externalize their magic into specific effects called “spells.” For all creatures, magical ability was quite literally a part of their body.
That knowledge, however, had quickly proven to be bittersweet. It had only taken a few experiments to confirm what his library books had already concluded: that while maintaining a healthy body could slightly improve one’s overall magical competency – or rather, that it could make sure that one’s magical abilities weren’t impeded by poor health – an individual’s magical potential was immutable. You couldn’t make your body channel larger amounts of magic any more than you could make it function without sleep. Once maturity was reached, there was no further growth in magical potential to be had.
Worse, while this total potential was based on physical attributes, the specific nature of those attributes was entirely unknown. Two unicorns could have near-identical physiques, but one might be able to use slightly greater magic than the other, and yet the reason for this was completely unknown. The leading theories had to do with there being some particular aspect of bodily growth, but that was all it was: a theory.
The sole point of differentiation that was known were those ponies that had cutie marks – the secondary magic that boosted a pony’s ability to perform their special talent – related to magic. But even then, that boost was itself static in nature, and not subject to further improvement. As a unicorn, Lex knew that he could expand the range of spells that he knew, but that only allowed for an increase of versatility. Any spell that called for more energy than his body could handle would be forever beyond his ability to use.
Such an unpalatable revelation had been completely unacceptable to Lex. It was one thing to know that he’d never be able to use the magic of pegasi or earth ponies – as far as he was concerned, that was an acceptable tradeoff for the variability that true spellcasting offered – but it was something else again to realize that there were some spells that would be permanently denied to him simply because of the vagaries of physical development.
Despite being a colt who hadn’t even gotten his cutie mark yet, let alone finished growing, Lex had vowed that he would not be so limited. Magic was – despite his parents’ earnest-yet-futile attempts to nurture his social life – one of his few pleasures. The very idea that some of it would always be out of his reach due to factors beyond his control felt far too much like how it felt whenever one of his attempts to make friends collapsed. There was nothing he could do about that in the realm of interpersonal relationships; he’d not let that happen to him with magic as well!
It had taken six months of painstaking research before he’d been forced to admit that he couldn’t isolate the X-factor that tied physical growth to magical ability. Not having the requisite knowledge of anatomy, to say nothing of the lack of any method of safely testing his theories on anypony – not that he had anyone besides himself to test them on, and a single subject simply wasn’t enough – had doomed that line of inquiry before it had even begun.
Most other ponies, let alone foals, would have given up there. But Lex had always been exceptionally stubborn, and after sufficient brooding he’d come up with an alternate line of attack. If unicorn magic couldn’t be revolutionized, then it would simply need to be abandoned in favor of another form of magic instead.
That other forms of magic existed wasn’t in doubt. He’d read enough books by that time to have heard about “dark magic,” even if the details of it were vague and ill-defined. Still, the very fact that a distinction was made between that and “not-dark” magic was enough to convince him that there was an alternate to be had. The problem was figuring out what attributes such an alternate would possess, and how to utilize it.
It had taken more than a year just to come up with the theory, and twice that long to actually put it into practice, but eventually Lex had figured it out. It ultimately hinged upon changing the method by which magical energy was absorbed and stored.
Creatures that used magic didn’t create the required energy by themselves, Lex knew. Rather, it was absorbed from the ambient energy that filled the world around them. For typical unicorns – along with all other living things – that was a function that the body performed. The energy was taken and stored within the full capacity of their corporeal self.
Lex’s revelation had been in figuring out how to do the same thing with his thoughts.
The core of his new method – which he’d named “thaumaturgy” – relied on the fact that thoughts were nonphysical in nature, and so could in theory hold an unlimited capacity of energy. Of course, preparing to utilize that method had required him to change the way he thought. Literally.
More specifically, his research had indicated that he’d need to keep certain conceptual forms – the containers where the energy was retained – distinctly within his conscious mind, but isolated from the rest of his thoughts. Failure to keep them segregated meant that the energy they contained leaked out, at which point it couldn’t be shaped into the specific patterns necessary to form spells and was useless. But so long as they were kept isolated, the energy remained intact until he saw fit to use it.
On paper, it was a magical revolution that would have put anything Star-Swirl the Bearded had ever invented to shame. Because the energies were kept within thoughts, there was potentially no limit to the amount of energy that could be stored. So long as the user had the intellectual discipline to hold more and more complicated thought-forms in their mind, almost anything could be achieved. True, the spells utilized had to be prepared ahead of time, rather than spontaneously formed the way typical unicorn spellcasting worked. But that was a small price to pay for enhanced magical capability.
But as with so many of Lex’s theories, the actuality had turned out to be quite different.
Lex grit his teeth as he remembered the shock and bitterness he’d felt when he’d first attempted to absorb the necessary energy for a spell using his new method, only for it to fail utterly. He’d tried again, and then a third time, only for the magical power to refuse to fill his thoughts again and again. Furious, he’d thrown himself back into his research with frenzied desperation, trying to discover what the problem was. After years of effort to develop a theoretical model, there had been no acceptable alternative but to figure out what had gone wrong.
After several weeks of sleepless nights, of eating the bare minimum to keep himself going, Lex finally found the answer. Doing so, however, brought him no peace. If anything, it was the opposite.
His initial theories about containing energy within thought-forms hadn’t been wrong. Rather, they’d been incomplete.
Lex had assumed that the difference between using his thoughts instead of his body to hold magical energy had been one of containment; that the trick had been to mold his thoughts into receptacles capable of storing the requisite power. But that had been only half of the equation. The other half was the process by which the energy was absorbed from the surrounding environment in the first place. And in overlooking that, Lex realized, he’d made a critical error.
Unlike the body’s natural method of pulling in energy from the surrounding environment, the power that he wanted his thoughts to contain had to be forced into them. Where his body could absorb magical energies as easily as breathing, putting that same energy into his thoughts required that it be compressed to fit into such an ephemeral vessel. And compressing energy…required energy. More than could be found in ambience.
It was, Lex had realized, like trying to fold a book-sized piece of paper. Fold it to a thousandth of its original size, and it’d be much easier to carry, but that would require folding it ten times, which was smaller than it would easily allow itself to become. Doing so would require a method of gathering enough power to overcome the natural resistance that such an attempt would generate.
All those years of work…all of that effort at coming up with the necessary formulas and twisting his thoughts to follow the patterns he’d devised…all of it to invent a style of magic that was utterly unusable.
The despair he’d felt when he’d realized just how futile his efforts had been felt like it had been the end of the world. The memory was enough to make the current Lex snort in derision at his past self, who had gone back to work after a few days of moping.
His new efforts had involved finding a method of compressing the energy he needed, or alternatively coming up with a way to gather larger amounts of energy to begin with, since that way some of it could be converted into a compressive force on the fly. He had also kept trying to absorb the requisite energies each morning anyway; he knew that it was a futile effort, that his thoughts wouldn’t benefit from repetition the way his body would, but doing so had become an act of personal defiance, his way of spiting the circumstances that he’d found himself in.
And thus his surprise had been complete one morning, weeks after he’d begun trying to call the magical energy into his thoughts, when it came pouring in easily.
It had been one of the happiest days of his young life, though now that he’d known a mare’s affection that joy seemed tepid by comparison. Still, at the time he’d been beside himself with excitement, rushing from his room to tell his parents of his accomplishment. The day had passed in a blur as he’d finally been able to cast the spells that he’d prepared, proving once and for all that his new magic worked.
He’d been writing letters to the princesses to let them know of his accomplishments (as well as another, much nastier letter to the instructors at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, having previously attended only to later withdraw in disgust due to their lack of innovation and his antipathy towards the cliquish student body) when the day had come to a close. His mother had later told him that she’d caught him still grinning in his sleep.
The very next day, the energies had again refused to heed his call, leaving him bereft of magic.
Rather than despair at this latest setback, Lex’s reaction had been white-hot rage. It was the sheer caprice with which it had happened that upset him the most; to have things fail was bad enough, but to have them fail for no discernable reason was utterly untenable. It was just like his fickle peers who had thought him weird and rejected him for their own inscrutable reasons.
It was only months later, when his magic suddenly worked again on the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration – held on the day of the solstice – that Lex realized that the first time his magic had worked had been on the day of the vernal equinox. That time he’d run every test he could think of, and invented a few more besides, but all of them had been inconclusive, save for one: the level of ambient magic had swelled.
Why that had happened was unknown – and remained so now, even after years of experiments – but it fell to normal levels the very next day, and remained there until the autumnal equinox, when it again buoyed, rising enough that Lex was able to use it to simultaneously compress and absorb the necessary energy to charge his spellcasting.
Lex had taken little joy in his new discovery. A form of magic that could only be recharged four days out of the year was barely any better than one that didn’t work at all. But there had been one ray of hope: he now had proof that the magic he’d invented could work, if it just had sufficient energy at hoof.
Theorizing that certain major magical artifacts would radiate increased amounts of magical power – artificially creating conditions of enhanced ambient magic in their immediate vicinity – Lex wrote to the princesses, asking that he be allowed to study the Elements of Harmony directly. Surely the relics that had let the princesses defeat the monster Discord would have sufficient energy to let him recharge his magical reserves! And if so, then maybe…maybe he’d be able to find a new breakthrough, some way to overcome this new hurdle.
The reply he received, weeks later, had left ashes in his mouth. Written by a former instructor from Celestia’s School, whom Lex had openly – and correctly, since she had advocated adherence to existing magical doctrine over breaking new ground! – called an imbecile during his attendance and who had since moved over to the royal archives, it smugly made it clear that Lex would sooner become an alicorn than be allowed to access Equestria’s greatest treasures.
With his options dwindling, Lex had made arrangements to visit the Crystal Empire in hopes of being able to study the Crystal Heart. He’d had no idea, at the time, how much that visit would change his life…
But as much as it had, being caught up in King Sombra’s disastrous coup had meant that any chance to study the Crystal Heart had slipped through Lex’s hooves. Moreover, history had repeated itself a few months later with the Tree of Harmony. Discovering it while living like a vagrant in the ruins of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna’s old castle had been the silver lining to losing his home and his parents, but a lack of proper equipment had meant that his examinations had barely gone beyond being cursory, even if it did make for a convenient battery to recharge his magic.
Or perhaps it hadn’t been so fortuitous after all. Had he not been able to – for the first time ever – use as much magic as he wanted, Lex was certain he’d not have been so overconfident when facing that hideous thing that called itself Tirek. It had seemed, at the time, like the perfect opportunity; what better way to showcase what his new magic could do – and, he’d since decided, why he was more fit to rule – than by defeating such a monstrous scourge upon his homeland?
That he’d been so casually defeated, his very ability to use magic ripped from him and eaten by that freakish horror, was a humiliation of irreducible proportions. Worse, it had been the loss of what little he had left. Losing his magic, the magic whose pursuit had indirectly cost him his home and his parents, the only ponies who had ever cared about him, was unendurable. Chopping off his now-useless horn to replace it with King Sombra’s – having found it in a field and having kept it as a macabre curio when he’d seen that it was still magically active despite its amputation – had been agonizing, but proven itself to be a wise decision.
The same could not be said for what he’d done next. In hindsight, it was clear to Lex that he’d been half-mad with pain and shame over what had happened. But even so, attempting to use the dark magic he’d gained to force open that locked box at the Tree of Harmony had been a hideously ill-conceived plan. He was lucky that all that’d happened was that he’d been banished, even if it was to the hellish world known as Everglow.
Everglow…
As much as Lex despised the place, he had to admit, however grudgingly, that he’d been fascinated to discover that the native spellcasters of that world also relied on thought-forms to use their magic rather than crude physical channeling. But whereas he was struggling to come up with how to handle the large amount of energies demanded by his spellcasting, the ponies of Everglow had come up with compensatory techniques designed to not only make it possible, but regular.
The techniques had proven fascinating, but ultimately none of them had lived up to Lex’s strict standards.
The first that he’d come across was utilized by a group of religious adherents. Their method of spellcasting, which Lex had privately dubbed “sacerdotal thaumaturgy” since their name for it – “divine spellcasting” – was too euphuistic to be taken seriously, had initially intrigued him. But some questioning had quickly revealed that they had no idea how their spells actually worked, relying on their “gods” and similar, unspecified divine servitors to prepare and deliver their spells to them.
His next encounter with an Everglow magic-user had seemed more promising. A “sorcerer,” that pony was able to compress the necessary energies on their own, and for a few moments Lex had dared to hope that he’d found his answers at last. But again, it was not to be. The sorcerer-pony had, after a considerable bribe, admitted that their power was entirely innate, rather than something learned. They were able to cast spells because they “just knew how,” and could no more articulate the process than they could articulate the mechanisms which kept their heart beating. Worse, they had virtually no control over what spells they knew; instead, new magical formulas and abilities of random natures came to them at random times, if at all.
But the most promising had been the ones called “wizards.” Unlike in Equestria, where the term was applied to any unicorn that made a career out of magic, wizards in Everglow were a particular sort of spellcaster, ones who relied upon consultation with a book of spells as a method for replenishing their magic. Lex had initially discounted such a method – after all, he had his own set of scrolls with the formulas and diagrams that he’d written when developing his thaumaturgy – but had eventually purchased a beginner’s spellbook on little more than a lark.
On reading it, Lex had realized that he’d been mistaken to discount Everglow-wizardry so easily. While it was filled with formulas as he’d expected, their nature was far more than mere recipes for new spells. Instead, each spell’s listing in the spellbook had – insofar as Lex had been able to understand – externalized the process by which a thought-form would contain the requisite energy for a spell. Essentially, the energy was driven into the proper form within the pages of the diagram itself and then imprinted directly onto the mind reading it. Though the fact that not everyone on Everglow was a wizard proved that there had to be some sort of mental training required to properly receive the imprinting.
Still, Lex had been impressed, despite himself. It was an innovative method to solve the very problem that he was still struggling with. Unfortunately, it was an avenue that was closed to him. He’d tried to make use of it, of course, but accomplished nothing other than to give himself headaches so painful that they’d caused crippling nausea. In the end, he’d come to the conclusion that by reordering his thoughts in order to learn thaumaturgy, he’d closed off whatever pathways were needed to make use of this alternative process. In essence, learning Everglow-wizardry was literally “unthinkable” for him.
Still, investigating wizardry – unlike sorcery and “divine” magic – hadn’t been a total waste of his time. Lex had discovered that, so long as he focused purely on the text in a wizard’s spellbook and nothing else, he could translate its formulas into thaumaturgy quite easily. Even if he couldn’t make use of the energies, he could still expand his repertoire of spells.
It had been small compensation for being exiled from his home for what had been the second time, but that hadn’t been the only way that Lex’s time on Everglow had improved him. On the contrary, that world had forced him to grow in ways that Equestria likely never could have. Its nature as a rougher, more dangerous place demanded that he had become stronger in order to survive, as it demanded of all of its inhabitants. For the first time, he no longer had the luxury of pushing for new knowledge, instead being forced to rely on creative ways to use the knowledge and the magic that he already had.
To that end, he had learned several new tricks, such as how to-
A thump at the door drew Lex from his reverie. Blinking as he was pulled out of his thoughts, he glanced at the window, seeing that the sky was beginning to darken. Apparently he’d succeeded in passing the time, if nothing else.
Going to the door, Lex paused to listen for a moment. The sound that he’d heard had been a single muted thump, as though something had been tossed against the door. But now there was silence. Glancing through the peephole, there was no one in front of it either.
Opening it slowly, the mystery was solved as Lex caught sight of the newspaper on the doorstep. Picking it up with his magic, he quickly turned away and shut the door before some passerby noticed his glowing eyes, letting himself become absorbed in the headline:
TALL TELLER: SPECIAL EVACUATION EDITION
Narrowing his gaze, Lex began to quickly scan the paper. Glancing through the reprinting of the mayor’s speech, a Q&A section, and a breakdown of who’d be evacuated when, he finally found what he was looking for: the instructions for the evacuees. According to the paper, the first batch of them would gather in the town square tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM, and would be led to the dockyards to be loaded onto a ship that would be waiting.
Snorting at the implausibility of that scenario, Lex mentally calculated how long it would take a crowd of ponies to traverse the seven miles between Tall Tale proper and the dockyards. Given that they’d be nervous and in a hurry, they’d probably keep a brisk pace, but the lack of light would slow them down, so…probably around 7 AM or so. At that point they’d arrive, and the dragon, or whatever it was, would make its move. Turning his gaze to the clock on the far wall, Lex grimly noted the current time.
In just over twelve hours, he would match his magic against the might of a dragon.
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Thats a whole bunch of lots of explanations for all those fiddly annoying bits that are generally just waved away as Scutters, Sonic Screwdriver, or it must be Tuesday.
The trick with th externalisation of magic is that you need stupid amounts o magic before it becomes self sustaining. Unfortunately, at that precice point, if you are not extremely well conversant in handling such power levels, it undergoes runaway reactions. Thinks Twilight surging.
Now imagine what happened when Celestia surged. Maybe the Badlands?
Pity externalising a light spell in a magical storage gem doesnt destabilise it in a surge style. Give the dragon a Reign Of Fire welcome.
A neat look into Lex's powers, and into how memorizing spells works for D&D/Pathfinder arcane casters,
Huh, so that's how Lex ended up in the Everglow. He should have known better than to mess with a magic box that sprouted from the Tree of Harmony, though given his mental state at the time, I doubt he cared.
So, to sum up Lex's internal thoughts about the Everglow magic, due to his conditioning of Equestrian Magic, he can't use Everglow magic the same way so he adapted the spells themselves into his repertoire.
The one sentence in there would probably flow better if you put:
Failure to keep them segregated meant that the energy they contained leaked out, at which point : or perhaps : that the energy they contained would leak out: or even : that the energy they contain to leak out: but as it is, it just feels awkward.
Just a thought.
7689650 Typo corrected, thanks for catching that. I was going back and editing and re-editing various parts of this, and so I suppose it's inevitable that something like this would get by me.
7689252 Shedding light on some more of Lex's past was another goal for this chapter; I basically wanted to pull back the curtain on things that had been hinted at up to now. But yeah, that was a mistake that cost him dearly; one of several he's made up to now.
You're basically right about the difference between the magic that Lex invented and the magic used in Everglow. It's basically the same technique, but applied in different ways. Everglow wizardry is close enough to what Lex has developed that he can use spellbooks (and arcane spell scrolls) to add new spells to those he knows.
7689220 Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!
It's long been an irritation of mine that D&D/Pathfinder-style magic is so metagame in its description, leaving the in-game nature of it to be cobbled together from intuition about what the characters in the world would know. Given that how magic works is kind of important for a spellcaster in general, and Lex (who invented his own magic) in particular, it felt appropriate to get into the nitty-gritty of it here.
7689130 The background points are oftentimes the least sexy, but they're quite often the most important, since the tend to be the bedrock upon which everything else rests.
As for creating self-sustaining magical effects...I could have gone into that here, but the chapter seemed long enough as it was.
Good chapter, explanations of magic are always welcome. Think I might adapt it for my story...
7690435 Thanks! These explanations are the culmination of many D&D-related writings that I've perused over the years, so by all means continue the tradition and adapt them for your own work.
7690512
I am also wondering, would you mind looking at my story once it is up? I hope a second set of eyes may catch some typos that I missed, I have joined David in the crusade.
7690520 I'll definitely give it a read once you post it!
7690577
Sorry to have a few more comments than I should, but I wonder what would happen if Lex met my OC and they had a good long talk. If Lex did not change because of that, I don't think anything would change him. Maybe he could make an appearance in my story? Or vice-versa. It would be hilarious watching those two argue over Lex's policies.
7690585 Given that I don't know anything about your OC, it's impossible for me to say. That said, I'm disinclined to think that Lex would change. He's brilliant, stubborn, and adept at philosophical maneuvering. As such, it's fairly easy for him to counter any points that might come up during a debate about logic, ethics, morals, etc. Emotion tends to work better with him, but that's stymied by the fact that he's emotionally involved with almost no one; Sonata, of course, is the exception to that.
As for a crossover...I tend to shy away from them, if only because those tend to introduce issues of world-design (e.g. how someone else's character gets to this world, or vice-versa) that then have to be accounted for from then on out. That's doubly true if the character in question is one of significant power or ability (e.g. if someone else's OC is powerful, and on a good relationship with the main character, then there's a permanent issue of "why doesn't he just ask that other character to come help when things get bad?"). It's the issue of what to do with an indelible stamp, in other words.
But I really do appreciate the interest, though!
7690608
There is limited info about my OC on David's user page, in the comments, as well as a few points on my page, again in the comments. But I have a feeling that Lex would change, my OC has argued with every personality out there, thanks to being alive for about 4000 years at the point I am using him. More info will be available in my first story, so I suggest you read it to get a feel for him.
And, I don't think Lex would call on my OC, because Lex is too proud to admit to needing help, and my OC won't call on Lex, because Lex is not powerful enough to help with what mine would be dealing with
7690617 A fun idea: does your OC have D&D/Pathfinder stats? I've statted Lex up extensively, at differing parts of his life - albeit using a third-party product that allows one to make characters via point-buy, rather than class-levels (since I find those restrictive in what sorts of characters can be made, or at least made effectively) - and I've used that as a basis for his powers and abilities. I find that to be a good way to comprehensively chart what a character is and isn't capable of, which in turn is a useful thing to keep in mind when writing them.
7690708
He, unfortunately, does not have DnD stats, but if he did, they would be insanely high in everything, and that's not taking into account various magical augmentations that he does every life. I think the only thing I need to say for that, is that he would be able to take on just about anything in the DnD world, except maybe many of the gods at once. Even then, it's iffy. He would probably win by virtue of being able to last longer, but I have no plans for having him face off against a DnD God.
His constitution, insanely high, he has survived an instant kill spell, killing the one casting it, and basically using their soul and blood magic generated from that, to distintegrepate the target. He survived that, barely, but he did. He was comatose for months afterwards, recovering from that and severe magical drainage.
His intelligence is akin to at least a hundred times the smartest person to ever exist. He has nearly genetically perfected himself, causing his brain to have around 20x the normal amount of brain cells, making many more connections, and much more thought too. Plus he takes a drug that allows him to use his entire brain for conscious thought, the only downside being that he then actually has to consciously think about everyday bodily functions, as well as not feeling pain like others do.
His strength, without magical augmentation, is quite high. He has lifted several ton blocks of stone before.
His dexterity is also insanely high, due to being able to think at least 4x faster than the average person.
And his wisdom, well he has lived for approx 4000 years, so he has plenty of experience.
As for his charisma, he can get people that hate each other's guts to work together. Partially because they fear him more than they hate each other, but still.
So his stats would be insanely high. As well, he can cast spells multiple times in a period of an hour that anyone else,(aside from a god) would only be able to cast once a day. But he also has on his person several magic artifacts that allow him to focus and amplify magical energy, thus making him use less than the average Mage.
Whew, what a comment, hope it helps.
7690716 Such a character strikes me as overpowered - hideously so - at least as compared to my story and characters. With that information in mind, I can definitely say that I won't be using him in my works or vice-versa; I simply don't see any narrative gain to it, since that'd serve only to make everything that everyone else does irrelevant.
That said, I'll take a look at your story when you post it.
EDIT: I originally posted this reply on the story's main page, causing it to be filed under the latest chapter. I've since deleted that and reposted it in the correct chapter.
And of course he chopped off his horn before waiting a few days for the magic to return after Tirek's defeat, because he always acts without thinking things all the way through. Or, rather, while thinking them all the way through but making assumptions without realizing that they're assumptions.
So the perfectly reasonable assumption that 'no one else can defeat Tirek' turned into something certain enough to cut off your horn over.
7690761
He has morals which prevent him from taking the easy way out. As well, the reason he seems overpowered is because he was chosen by a coalition of Gods to imprison the devil, his power is mainly God derived. I think you will be surprised by my story, it may make you rethink the inclusion of him. This is also why I said he would not call on Lex, Lex has significant power, but it is just a drop compared the my guys lake.
As well, most of his power is in a few pieces of jewelry, mainly a ring. But he's got a studded belt, as well as a fetching necklace. Those items together comprise about 75% of his power. But even without them, he is still formidable. He usually goes to get his stuff when his body turns 21.
And your point about him, taking over the story, Lex did the same thing in A Dangerous Sparkle.
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As you noted, it wasn't a question of "thinking things through," since that would presume that it was possible to foresee Twilight's eventual victory over Tirek, when in fact there really was no way to do that - heck, Twilight herself ultimately lost her fight with Tirek, as he had a winning strategy (e.g. using hostages) after the initial round of violence ended in a stalemate.
Insofar as making assumptions goes, it was more a case of making the best decisions that he could with what knowledge he had available to him at the time. The loss of magic that came from being drained by Tirek wasn't temporary; it had to be actively reversed by a greater magical power. It was an assumption to presume that there'd be no cure-all forthcoming, but it would have been an even greater assumption to assume that there'd be a large-scale "fix everything" event happening in the near future.
That and losing the magic that he'd already sacrificed so much for hadn't exactly left Lex in the best state of mind, as he acknowledged here.
It begins, again!
7697443 I never stopped thinking about this fic. I just needed the power of
the Makyo starNaNoWriMo to help me get back into it.7697950 Go for the 50k!
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No, he didn't. A good deal of the story did focus on him when Lex debuted in A Dangerous Sparkle, but that was entirely meta-narrative in nature; that is, the "camera" shifted to focus on Lex in addition to several other characters. He had his scenes, and other characters had theirs. He had a few chapters that were entirely about him, but there were also chapters (after he'd joined the group) that didn't include him at all. That was balanced, which was a far cry from him taking over the story.
All of this was justified (and abetted) by the fact that he didn't have more power than anyone else, and so never had any sort of in-character ability to render the rest of the cast superfluous or insignificant. Indeed, when I wrote Lex's stats I deliberately used the number of levels that David had given to Twilight as my benchmark to make sure that that was the case; Lex did have a bit more versatility, due to how he was designed, but this included drawbacks to balance out his strengths.
That's far different from outshining everyone else the way your character would. Lex is dynamic in what he can do, but Aurthur Issaria is (grossly) overpowered.
i wonder if other ways of bypassing an unicorn max power reserve exist or have been explored. Something like the mana battries in upheaval or some form of dopage.
I suppose it must pose some control problem
8310308 It depends on if we're talking about them using their native form of spellcasting, or abandoning it in favor of another form of magic altogether.
For the latter, absolutely. One of the central premises of this fic is that the native magic of unicorns is rather weak compared to the magic Lex uses, which closely resembles the arcane magic from Everglow...which itself has several other types of magic that eclipse what Equestrian unicorn magic can accomplish (at least, at the upper levels of power).
With regard to the former...that's an open question. The major issue is that, with its foundation relying on physicality, it's hard to push it to higher levels of effect, since that would require that you have a greater physical form through which to channel it (which isn't to say that they can just get fat or bulk up; those would either degrade or help refine, respectively, what's already there, but not actually add anything more). However, an exception to this rule already exists: cutie marks that involve spellcasting can improve a unicorn's ability to use magic (i.e. just look at ponies such as Starlight Glimmer) beyond what their bodies could ordinarily handle, so we know that there are ways around that particular limitation. The issue is that nopony - with the exception of legendary figures such as Star-Swirl the Bearded - seems to have tried to push the boundaries of what's known or be accomplished in this regard.
And, of course, there's the alicorns...
Beyond that, however, nopony seems to care very much. And after all, why should they? They're already content pursuing their individual destinies and living in harmony with each other, and there's no pressing need to have unicorns acquire more magic. After all, if necessity is the mother of invention, then Equestria has been orphaned for a very long time, at least where widespread cultural growth is concerned. That, of course, came back to bite them when the elemental bleeds happened, which puts a rather fine point on Lex's criticisms of the alicorn princesses' rule.