Broken Symmetry

by Trick Question

The First Experiment

As I walked Twilight to the edge of Canterlot, my mind was still buzzing from that crazy story she'd just told me.

"I'm not sure I fully understand what happened between you and this Starlight Glimmer pony," I said. "A few weeks ago, Lyra told me about that time travel debacle you went through last year..."

"Really? How did she find out about that?" said Twilight, not angry, but clearly surprised.

I chuckled. "I think your dragon friend blabbed to a bunch of ponies."

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Of course," she said. "It's okay, though. Even without Spike's shenanigans, I don't get much privacy anymore."

I picked up the pace to a canter, and Twilight kept in step. I kind of expected her to ask me to slow down. Maybe she was just as eager to get to my lab as I was.

"Anyway, I did some research on the topic," I continued, raising my voice in case she fell behind. "I don't have access to the Star Swirl Wing at the Royal Canterlot Library, but his public works claim that Neighvikov's self-consistency principle always holds: if you try to change the past, events will align to ensure that everything stays the same. That's what happened to you the first time, correct?"

"Yes, exactly," said Twilight. "That's probably why that particular spell I used only works one time per caster, and lets you to go back at most one week. It would be much too easy to violate consistency if you could use it multiple times."

I looked over my shoulder at my friend and slowed my pace back down to a trot. The conversation was starting to interest me more than our destination. "But then how was Starlight Glimmer able to change the past in a way that altered the present using that same spell? That's a direct causality violation. She'd have to reengineer the entire spell framework, wouldn't she?"

Twilight took a moment to catch her breath, and I slowed even further to a four-step walk. All of a sudden, I wasn't sure why I'd been running in the first place. Something about talking with Twilight had made me nervous, like I was going to mess up and say something wrong and lose her as a friend again. It was almost like I'd been running from her. I resolved to fight that instinct.

"You're right, and I'm not entirely sure," said Twilight, catching back up. "Some of it makes sense: the Cutie Map allowed Starlight to go further back in time than a single week, and even though I was able to recast the same spell multiple times, it did the same thing each time and was tied to her original invocation. She did use it once to take me to a different point in history, but we were observers disconnected from the setting so I believe that case was at best an illusionary projection rather than actual time travel. That means Starlight didn't need to break either the one-week restriction or the once-per-caster restriction which had been built into the spell's design. The only significant modification she made was to break the symmetry of time travel, and she told me last week that it was easier to do than she expected. Until I saw what the modified spell could do, I didn't think it was possible to change the past at all."

"I'm obviously out of my element since I haven't seen the spell in question, but that still seems like one hay of a magical coup," I said. "You said she was powerful, but adapting a spell that can break time? That's a little hard to swallow."

Twilight stopped right there on the sidewalk and and tugged on my shoulder, turning me to face her.

"Moondancer, please listen to me. I'm not exaggerating when I say Starlight Glimmer is a powerful mage," said Twilight, her voice hushed. "I'm an alicorn, and she can do things even I can't do. I realize it's highly unlikely that the pony in the image is actually her, even though she's our only suspect—"

"Agreed. We extrapolated an artefact of time travel to develop that hypothesis, and we aren't even certain how that sort of time travel works," I interjected.

"Right. Nonetheless, we can't afford to take that chance. I'm going to take steps to make sure you're safe and secure. I'll call in the Royal Guard, magical security measures, the whole nine yards. No, make that ten yards," said Twilight, without a hint of humor in her voice. "I won't risk having anything happen to you."

I felt color burn my cheeks. "Thanks," I said. "Anyway, the lab's right up there." I pointed to the metal building at the end of the street, and we walked up to it together.

"Ironically, I was planning to do more research on Star Swirl's writings for the same reasons you just described," said Twilight. "I guess now I have an even better reason to. I can get you access to the Library too, of course," she added, with a grin.

"Holy Celestia, having a princess for a friend is incredible," I said under my breath, then immediately felt bad. "Oh gosh. I hope you don't think that means I'm using you, or something. You're actually a really good friend in general, even without the perks. I mean, I would want to be your friend even if you were a complete nopony—no, wait, I'm not saying—"

Twilight placed a hoof to my muzzle and smiled, and her eyes shined. "It's okay! It's good you can admit I come with 'benefits'. If you were really trying to use me, then it wouldn't be bothering you."

I nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess so," I said, and I felt much better.

The building was a one-storey windowless brick of shiny metal with fins on the roof. The only other obvious feature was a large door set into the long side of the building, facing a makeshift gravel path to the sidewalk. Next to the door was a small hole. Reaching the end of the path, I inserted my horn into the hole and used my telekinetic signature as the identification spell. A mechanism in the door clicked.

"Put your horn in," I instructed Twilight. "I might as well give you access now. Just try to use your tee-kay to push against the end of the hole, and it should add your signature to the access list."

Twilight blushed as she placed her horn in the hole. I wasn't sure why, so I assumed she thought it looked silly. Another click sounded. Then I opened the door.

"Allow me to give you the grand tour," I said, and led my friend into the lab before shutting the door behind us. "This is the workroom, which takes up most of the West side of the structure. There's not much here except my desk and a futon for when I'm tired, but I haven't slept here since the incident."

"I can't believe it's all metal in here! Those walls must be half a hoof thick at least," said Twilight. "Thank goodness for the air conditioning, though the floor is freezing? And it's glowing, which is also weird, but I guess the walls reflect enough to make it ambient."

"The floor's freezing because it isn't AC. It's refrigeration conducted directly through the walls. The test rooms can't have air go in or out, so we just built the whole place this way," I explained. "The floor glows because the basement is where all the power is routed, so I just have a magic light enchanted from beneath except in the test rooms, which stay dark. And in the basement it's the ceiling that glows instead of the floor, obviously. That door there goes to the basement, the other one to the bathroom, and the one on the far wall leads to the test chamber anteroom..."

"Wait, you built this facility?" said Twilight. "And your magilectric bill must be enormous! I mean, if you're cooling through the metal, you're fighting the sunlight outside as you try to cool the inside..."

"Oh, right. Yeah, the cost is astronomical, but I have a backer in Manehattan with deep pockets. We had to build this thing to precise specifications. I'm actually paying to have a current delivered directly from the castle," I explained.

"Ah. That explains the humming sound," said Twilight. "Though I didn't notice you turn anything on when we walked in."

"I didn't. It's always on. My experiments draw so much more power than the cooling system that the way we control the temperature and lights is almost an afterthought," I explained. "It costs more to turn it on and off than it does to keep it pumping in. I'm pulling a little more than half a meg."

Twilight froze, then laughed. "Sorry, I must have been distracted. For a moment there I thought you said you were pulling in half a million horsepower."

"I did," I said.

"What?!" said Twilight, as her jaw hit the floor (metaphorically speaking). "That's crazy! Princess Celestia lets you draw that kind of power?"

I shrugged. "For enough bits she does. I had to clear some of the research parameters with the Court, of course. Mainly they needed to see evidence that I wasn't storing the energy for later use, which is easy enough because we have no magilectric capacitors in the system and there isn't a lot of flux in the power juncture they set up where the line splits off. Upstream, I mean."

Twilight leaned in close, as though we could have been overheard even though we were all alone in a giant metal box. "Moondancer, what in Equestria are you researching?" she whispered, her eyes focused directly on mine.

I grinned. "Antimatter," I said.

Twilight Sparkle squealed like a schoolfilly. I thought it was kind of adorable, though that's a pretty weird thing to think about a friend.

"So you're running a bunch of enormous bangbox experiments right here!" she said.

"Nope," I said, still smiling. "Better. I'm running long-term experiments."

"Oh! How do you contain the particles?" she asked.

"Not particles. Macroscopic quantities," I said.

Twilight's face changed from thrilled to horrified in a split-second. "MOONDANCER! We have to shut it down now!" she said, grabbing me by the shoulders.

I pushed her back, a little miffed by the reaction. "It's okay, Twilight."

"ButtheamountofenergyfromamacroscopicantimatterexperimentcouldlevelhalfofCanterlot!" she said, all in one large breath.

"I thought you might jump to that conclusion," I sighed. "No capacitors, Twilight. Do the math."

Twilight paused for a moment, and looked up at the ceiling as the gears turned in her head. "Okay... I guess it's not that bad. With that kind of input, in the worst case you'd have an explosion worth half a million horses. But you could still kill yourself and blow up a large portion of this structure," she warned.

"Nope. Take a look," I said, leading her to my desk. I pulled some schematics out of one of the drawers. "I found a way to create an energy field that can change matter into antimatter and vice versa. Large quantities of it. Megagrams worth, even. The matter and antimatter can even exchange kinetic energy between the field without colliding. The field is only permeable to light and gravity."

"That's incredibly impressive, but it's still impossible," she said, looking over the design. "You're not pulling in a fraction of the energy necessary to produce that kind of a potential energy imbalance."

"Exactly. That's because the field is absolute. Anything that would collapse the field automatically reverts the material inside of it to its previous state," I pointed out. "The field's integrity and the change in state are the same thing. I tested it out on particles and individual molecules for proof of concept. This is the first scale-up."

"This is one heck of a scale-up from molecules," said Twilight, with a whistle. "But you must be right. You don't have enough energy to cause a breach, so whatever method you're using... it has to be totally foalproof."

"Simple conservation of energy," I grinned, feeling a swelling of pride. "Pretty cool, huh?"

Twilight squealed again, and she actually pronked in place. I've never seen a pony so giddy before.

"Oh, Moonie, this is amazing! We can witness the macroscopic properties of antimatter for the first time! It's, it's... this is a historic event in scientific progress! What all have you done so far?" she asked, and finally stopped her bouncing.

Moonie? Eh, whatever. I decided to let that one slide.

"Nothing. The damage to the lab happened right before the first test run," I said. "Then I caught that mare on camera, and immediately contacted you. Although technically, the fields are always up inside the experiment chambers, so I've looked at small amounts of data already. Nothing really interesting, though."

Twilight Sparkle's muzzle twitched and her eyes widened. "Moondancer, if I help you with the security and research access... Could I maybe assist you a little bit with the experiments...?" she whispered, her lower lip quivering.

"I'd love to have you. If you're not too busy?" I said.

Twilight grinned from ear to ear. "YES! I mean, no, I'm not too busy! I'll go on vacation starting now, and restrict communication to emergencies and visits from friends," she said. "I might get interrupted if there's something important I need to take care of, but I should be able to stay up here with you most of the time, for the next few weeks at least."

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think this experiment is going to be even more fun with somepony to share it with," I admitted. "I'd invite some of our other friends, but let's face it: you're the only pony I know who can fully appreciate my work. Alright, what's next. The basement is where the current gets pumped in from, which is boring, and I'm going to guess you've seen a bathroom before. So let me show you the test chambers."

I led Twilight into the anteroom. It was a small room with five doors, not counting the one we came in: four on the opposite wall, and the fifth on the side. One of the metal doors on the opposite wall was missing, and fragments of metal door littered the area.

"Oh wow. You weren't kidding," said Twilight. "Is this all the damage?"

"Yeah. I haven't touched the pieces, just step carefully. Initial examination suggests it was deep-frozen and shattered from the inside of experiment room two with a heavy kick," I explained. "I didn't have the nerve to stay long enough to look for clues. I basically set up the camera outside and got the buck out of here."

"You said room two... are you numbering from right to left?" asked Twilight.

"No, I started from zero," I answered. "Oh, and the side door there is a second entry to the bathroom. Anyway, you can see roughly what the interior of the other three rooms looks like from this one. The field isn't up here, though. A failsafe turned off the field to chamber two once the structural integrity of its door was compromised." We stepped carefully around the debris and into the tiny chamber. There was barely enough room for two ponies to stand comfortably. We were awkwardly close, but I felt surprisingly comfortable with Twilight by my side.

The chamber was barren, with walls of smooth steel. The exception was an array of plastic slats affixed to the wall opposite what remained of the door.

"This must be the detection equipment?" said Twilight. "Looks sophisticated. I don't see the camera. And the lighting is off?"

"There isn't one. Mechanical cameras need too much light, and electrical ones get disrupted by the field. In my initial experiments on the smaller scale, photos were blurry and video too grainy to make anything out. That's why none of the experiment rooms have lighting in them. The field muffles audio, as well."

"I thought you said you were measuring light interaction?" asked Twilight.

"Low-energy light seems to come through okay—radio and the like, and these detectors are almost like cameras for those frequencies," I explained. "I'm sure you realize that each room is a Fawnaday cage, which protects the field from any outside electromagnetic influence. That's also important because of the charge symmetry of antimatter, but again you already know all this."

"It's okay, I like hearing you explain it," she insisted. A little weird, but fine by me. Talking out knowledge helps to solidify it, and this was much better than talking to myself. The experience of sharing knowledge with a friend was strangely gratifying.

"Anyway, that's still not the real payoff. Most of the data comes from changes in the strength of the containment field itself. It worked perfectly in the small-scale, but it's been finicky at this level. I really should have predicted that. I'm not trying for a vacuum, so all three sealed rooms are essentially filled with antimatter air as we speak," I said.

"Wow," whispered Twilight. "That's so crazy. So much potential energy that isn't actually potential energy, mere inches from us. Are you sure leaving this on all the time is really a good idea?"

"I'm not kidding, it takes a ton of draw to turn it off and on. I'd be offline for weeks at a time if I didn't keep the fields on," I explained. "I'll open one of the rooms so you can see a working array, but I don't open them casually. Every time one of these four doors—er, three, now—opens up, it causes a power drain on the whole system. If two doors were to be opened at the same time, it would kill the power completely. The doors have automatic locks with an ninety minute cooldown to prevent that. In order to open one door, you have to shut the currently open one—if one exists—and wait. Except for the broken one, because there's no field there anymore."

"If the other doors locked down, that might explain why the vandalism was confined to a single room," said Twilight, as she walked back to the entryway and examined its hinges. "Interesting. Hay, Moondancer, come take a look at this." I walked up behind her to see what she was pointing at. One of the metal hinges was bent at an odd angle. It looked like it had been torn partway off.

"The force of the kick must have damaged it," I said. Twilight raised a brow and said nothing, so I looked again. "No, wait. It's twisted, not shattered like the rest of the door. But the force shattered the entire door, so not enough of the energy would have remained to provide the torque necessary to twist the hinge..."

"Unless the door was all the way open when it was kicked," Twilight said, with a smug look plastered across her muzzle. A forgivable one, at least. It was a valid deduction.

I pursed my lips in thought and adjusted my glasses. "Clever. That's actually an unfortunate datum, though. If Starlight, or whoever, had done this from inside the room like I'd originally assumed, it probably would have indicated they had no idea what they were doing," I said. "You'd have to be suicidal to try to break the antimatter field, not to mention ignorant enough to think it was possible in the first place. So the fact that they smashed the door from the outside while it was open doesn't really tell us anything useful."

"True. But at least we're narrowing down what happened," said Twilight. "I think we can move the fragments to the corner of the anteroom, though. It looks like the door shattered in a single buck, and it was undoubtedly fragile enough that it didn't deform on impact to leave a hoof impression."

"Yeah, I was thinking that too, but it's good to have a second opinion. Well, before we go get the Royal Guard or whatever ideas you have for locking this place down, let me show you one of the active rooms," I said, stepping over the door shrapnel again and walking to room zero. "You can experience the field discharge. It's kind of neat."

Twilight stepped behind me, and I paused. "Hay, why don't you do the honors?" I asked, pointing her to the door. She made a little squeaking sound and hopped up, then her horn lit up and a look of confusion crossed her face.

"I can't grab the handle?" she said.

"Magic is nullified in close proximity to the fields. You need to do it by hoof," I explained. "Although it is possible to cast magic into the chamber from the basement where the fields originate, but even then only passive magic—not teleportation or telekinesis."

Twilight Sparkle reached out and held onto the handle with a hoof. "Right, of course. If the fields didn't negate magic, you could teleport the antimatter out, which would invalidate the conservation law," she said. "Okay, here goes..." Twilight winced and tugged at the door, then tugged harder and it finally opened. There was a soft, staticky popping sound, a familiar smell of ozone, and a gentle whoosh of warm air emanating from the room. That seemed very strange to me, because there shouldn't have been an air pressure or a temperature differential.

However, those data weren't what drew my immediate attention. Even though it was dark in the room because the chambers were unlit, I could clearly make out an object resting on the floor.

"What the hay is that?" I said.

Twilight turned on her horn, but the light fizzled when she tried to lean her head inside, so she pulled it back out to provide better illumination. On the floor of the empty room lay some kind of dark fabric.

"Hold that light there. I'll go grab it," I said.

"Wait! Are you sure it's safe?" asked Twilight.

"Yeah, positive," I said, exaggerating the truth a little. I stepped halfway into the room and felt an electric tingling across my pelt. I reached out and touched the fabric and felt a slight static discharge. I grunted.

"Moondancer! Are you okay?" asked Twilight.

"Yeah, just a static shock. But this fabric is, like, insubstantial somehow? It's passing through itself as I grip it and I can't pick it up—no, wait, I think I've got it now," I said. After a couple of squeezes it had entered my hoof. I stepped back and tugged at it, and it started to unroll. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen in my life: the fabric seemed to be stuck in the area it was resting in, as though it were trapped in a gelatin mold, and I had to tug it free into the open air around it. It again seemed to pass through itself as I pulled on it, but one last tug yanked it up into my hooves. Now it looked and behaved like a perfectly normal...

"Dress?" I said.

"It's a dress," repeated Twilight, just in case that still wasn't clear. Even after we'd both said it, it still seemed unreal. It looked like a formal gown of some sort. The fabric was very soft.

"Did you see the way it was stuck there in space?" I asked her, still reeling from the experience. "And it seemed to pass right through itself, like a manifold in extra dimensions. But now it just looks and feels like an ordinary piece of clothing."

"I noticed that too. Was it made of antimatter?" she asked.

"It would need to be normal matter when the door is open, even though the field is still active. Maybe what we saw was just a weird visual effect caused by the field acting on normal matter, or something," I pondered aloud. Now fully out of the room, I used my magic to levitate and examine the dress. It was absolutely stunning: a ballroom gown in deep purples and midnight blues, spangled across the hemline with tiny diamonds and wisps of silver. "I'm no expert, but this thing looks really expensive—for lack of anything more relevant to note."

"Hmm. It looks a little familiar. May I?" asked Twilight. She levitated it from me and looked around inside of it for a moment. "Ah, there's the mark! I knew it. This is one of Rarity's designs. It's probably from her Canterlot store," she said. "Wow, Rarity is going to totally freak when she finds out one of her dresses became antimatter! She'll probably charge a fortune for it. I should convince her to donate it to a museum..." she babbled.

"Twilight, focus. What the hay is one of your friend's dresses doing in my test chamber?" I asked.

Twilight took a deep breath. "It must be Starlight Glimmer. This is too many coincidences in a row," she said. "She's the only pony I can think of who has a connection with you, me, and Rarity. She must have left it here as some kind of warning or something, after she broke the door..."

"Maybe she left it shortly before she broke the door. I didn't open any of the rooms around the time it happened."

"Then we should check the other rooms," suggested Twilight.

"Not right after we opened room zero," I said, and then I closed the door to room zero to punctuate the point. "Remember, we need to let the power stabilize before we open another door. Every time we open a door, it's an experiment," I explained.

"Right, sorry. Actually, now that you mention it, maybe we should wait before doing anything with rooms one and three," said Twilight. "We already have a preponderance of data that we don't understand."

"Agreed. Methodical examination needs to trump curiosity at this point," I said. "I guess we can open room one tomorrow and room three the next day. But in the meantime, we need to secure the facility. If Starlight Glimmer can sneak past the lock, she could completely trash the place next time. She might even have performed her own experiments using the facilities, in which case we'd be working under a substantial knowledge deficit. If she's as smart as you suggest, she could have figured out most of the basics of my research from the documents I keep here."

"That's disturbing to consider, but you're right. We need to assume she knows more about your antimatter experiments than either one of us," said Twilight. "Alright, here's the plan..."

For a moment I felt irked at Twilight taking the reins like that, but then I smiled. It was actually a little inspiring to watch her spring into action. I wasn't about to tell her that, but still.

"...I'll go get a guard detail. Two guards on the facility, twenty-four hours. Another two on your place," she said.

"Do you think I really need to be guarded?" I asked. This whole business was starting to feel weighty.

"Yes, but now that I think about it, we should make them both plainpelts. They can recon your house while you stay at my old place," she said. "My place is already warded and in a high-traffic part of town where somepony trying to break in would likely be noticed."

"I should sleep there tonight, then," I said.

"Oh, right," said Twilight, blushing. "Well, yeah. You can sleep in my bed there, the sheets are clean and everything. Maybe a little dusty is all. I can, um, stay at the castle."

I've already been sleeping there once or twice a week, I thought to myself, but I bit my tongue.

Twilight scrunched up her muzzle. "Actually... I'll have at least one guard watch my place too, just to be extra safe. And the entire Royal Guard will be warned that Starlight Glimmer herself may be in danger, so they'll keep a lookout for her safety as well as ours."

"Sounds good. I may head to your place now, actually. There are some books on physics I want to review to see if something might explain the odd behavior of this dress," I said.

"Well, keep in mind this is uncharted territory," said Twilight. "We really don't know what to expect from large-scale quantities of antimatter, so it's okay if you don't. But I agree with you that research is the right step. I'm going to pick up some books from the Royal Library while I'm setting up the guard. She may be dangerous, but once the entire Royal Guard has been alerted, we should pretty much be Starlight-proof."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "I guess I have nothing to worry about, then," I said, with a wry chuckle.

I still felt worried, though.

Twilight had a brave face on, but I could tell she was worried too.

Comments

[Trick Question]

Technically, I published this story just before midnight on Sunday...

...which means chapter two appears today! Happy early Hearth's Warming, everypony!

[raw666]

Good job on the story, keep up the good work.

[Catalysts Cradle]

Antimatter production and spells that allow symmetry breaking...

Yeah, I'd be worried too.

[blank check]

"It's okay, I like hearing you explain it," she insisted.

Kinky, Twilight.

"Exactly. That's because the field is absolute. Anything that would collapse the field automatically reverts the material inside of it to its previous state,"

Interesting. So magic is like physical type theory. ∀A. ∀B. λ(f : A -> B). λ(g : B -> A). id.

This comparison was in no way affected by my study interests.

[Keradon]

Let's see... effective mystery, nice eager geekery, and the plot flows smoothly.

You've earned the Track and the Like!

...now to see if the story can earn the Favorite. Rough guesstimate - the next two chapters, I hope?

[FanOfMostEverything]

Well, this is intriguing and more than a little worrisome. Also, I can't help but recall that antimatter is indistinguishable from normal matter traveling backwards in time...

[Alexey]

"...I'll go get a guard detail. Two guards on the facility, twenty-four hours. Another two on your place," I said.

That last "I" should presumably be "she"?

[Trick Question]

6994886
Yes; thanks for the catch. Fixed.

[Emperor]

This chapter vaguely reminds me of a blog post that I read awhile ago that posits that while Twilight may be a decent researcher, capable of ferreting out knowledge from old books and understanding concepts and data, she isn't actually a very good scientist. Feeling Pinkie Keen is the most obvious example, where she gets impatient after only a few minutes after hooking Pinkie Pie up to the brainwave reading machine. It goes a bit deeper than that, in that she doesn't believe in the Pinkie sense until the end of the episode because 'it doesn't make any sense'. However, books horse is putting the horse before the wagon there. When it comes to cause and effect, you don't have to specifically understand the mechanics behind the cause in order to be able to predict the effect, so long as cause and effect stay strictly correlated (not the greatest real-world parallel since the Earth's north and south magnetic pole slowly move over time, but we used lodestones and compasses for millenium without understanding the specifics about electron spin and the specifical elemental properties that make Iron, Nickel and Cobalt the three main magnetic metals). Pinkie doesn't understand her own Pinkie Sense, but she has been able to recognise the pattern that such and such twitch always means such and such action, and set out to categorising them.

Moondancer here, in half a season, went from shut-in to getting a massive research project online and starting state-of-the-art experiments, presumably designing the building in addition to actually overseeing its construction. That's worlds ahead of the Magical Mystery Cure mumbo jumbo.

If we bring time travel into this story, there's a lot of potential avenues. For all we know, it could have been Future Starlight popping in to Moondancer's building because she knows something is going to happen there in the future, and wants to sabotage the experiment early on and is using the Cutie Map to forcibly create a new timeline.

[livinthelife]

I've been going through your stories and thought I'd reread this all in one go to hopefully get a little more understanding. I forgot the fun of watching Twi's blatant advances crash against the rocky shores of Moondancer's cluelessness.

[Trick Question]

8409207
For the reverse version of that interaction, see Irreversible.

[Misty Spell]

 It would be much too easy to violate consistency if you could use it multiple times.

Still pretty risky. All it'd take would be one determined assassin to go back in time and stab Celestia in her sleep.

you're the only pony I know who can fully appreciate my work.

Or understand half of the technobabble

symmetry

Something tells me I'm going to be sick of this word by the end of the story.

She may be dangerous, but once the entire Royal Guard has been alerted, we should pretty much be Starlight-proof

Twilight I dare you to name one time the royal guard has ever been effective. Just one.

[mishun]

... they needed to see evidence that I wasn't storing the energy...

Doesn't this mean that all (or at least the most) of ~1/3 gigawatt input ends up as heat immediately? It should be pretty toasty there

[Alicorn Capony]

Coincidentally, 2 days after I read this fic I found a video on CPT symmetry without even looking for it that explains what's being talked about in this fic to some degree. Watch this if you want to get some idea of what's being talked about.

[Luminous Grace]

I'd say Moondancer's lab is actually rather cost-effective. Fun fact, antimatter is, by far, the most expensive substance in the world, estimated to be 63 trillion dollars per gram. The aid of magic helps bring the costs down I guess, but it's still pretty impressive.

"I found a way to create an energy field that can change matter into antimatter and vice versa. Large quantities of it. Megagrams worth, even. The matter and antimatter can even exchange kinetic energy between the field without colliding. The field is only permeable to light and gravity."

If I'm understanding what she's saying correctly, regular matter can only be permanently turned into antimatter according to the mass-energy content that was put in. In this case, 500,000 horsepower or 3.73E8 Watts. So therefore, converted antimatter being outside the conversion field would violate conservation.

Even so, megagrams of of antimatter is nothing to laugh at. If she's wrong about the conservation preventing huge amounts of antimatter being created, this could go from potentially disastrous to potentially apocalyptic. It takes only half a gram of antimatter to release as much energy as Little Boy.