Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me

by DataPacRat

Fourth Wall of Text

"Red."

"Yes, ma'am?"

"I have a doubt."

"I don't. ... What about?"

We looked over the railing at the longship, as the crew started breaking out the oars. "Does that look like a bunch of people planning on finding a spot to peacefully homestead?"

"Not at all - but if we stop to deal with every raider and tyrant who we come across, we'll spend all our time on that, and not on saving the whole planet."

"Just because we've got bigger fish to fry, doesn't mean we have to catch-and-release even piranhas."

"Ma'am?"

"Sorry - carnivore metaphor. Blanche? Come over here a sec."

"Yes'm?"

"I want you to go back down there before we head our separate ways. Apparently I'm not just a wizardess, I'm some sort of dragon, so I'm allowed to be capricious. Tell them... something along the lines that I was just looking at the sun glinting off their spears, and I just remembered that I forgot to ask them if they had any shinies and sparklies they wanted to give me. Completely of their own free will and without any coercion expressed or implied."

"'Sparklies'?"

"Gems, gold - whatever. It's mostly just an excuse to get you down there - but that's not for them to know. The actual reason is, I want you to try to give them directions to Manehattan, and, oh, let's say a level six Dairy contact protocol, with a job offer for security guards, or caravan guards, or the like - some way they can make money with the violence it looks like they enjoy, by doing good for others. This is a one-shot attempt to redirect them to a more socially acceptable path. Maybe suggest they surrender their glinty weapons if they have no other tribute to offer - be creative, just make sure you can fly back here, alright?"

"I think I get the picture. See you in a jiffy!"

---

"That was bizarre," Blanche said upon her return.

"Do I want to know?"

"Well - when I told them about getting jobs as guards or police officers... they started singing."

"I thought I heard some sort of chorus. What was it about?"

"Let me see if I can remember how it goes..."

We! Love! Violence!

With a badge and truncheon
Your right to silence ends, mare,

as soon as we go punch in.
But if you choose to join us -

the choice is clearly yours -
we'll swear that you'll be legal

when we batter down the doors!

I leaned my head against the railing. "Okay, now I'm starting to think that the spontaneous musicalism field is just messing with us."

---

"Hunh." I ran my hoof through the contents of the wooden box Blanche had carried up, picking up a few of the sparkly gems, and letting them dribble back down. "I didn't actually think they had anything like this to give - or, at least, that if they had, they'd come up with some way to offer a less expensive tribute."

Amethyst snorted a bit. "Cheap. Gems," she announced her evaluation.

"Well, I'll take your word for it. Since we've got them - I'll give 'em all a quick check to see if any are decent at holding magic, and you can add the rest to the pantry. Or maybe you can pick some to make the bowl of sparklies more impressive for the next time. S'alright?"

She shrugged, then nodded.

---

Micro helped me run the new pile of gems through a charging sequence; we were getting familiar enough with the process that she could sense a sort of 'resistance' as they got close to being filled with magical power, without over-filling and shattering them. (Amethyst had let me know that it didn't seem to affect their taste, but not breaking food unnecessarily was sort of a habit; back when I'd eaten eggs regularly, I'd always tried to crack them without breaking the yolks, even if I was about to stir them up anyway.)

"Hm," I said thoughtfully, holding up a nice purply one.

"Hm, what?" Micro said, absently, dumping power into a smooth, translucent white one.

"I'm just remembering an old physics game. 'Follow the energy'. Since, at least in general, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, merely moved around and changed into different patterns... whenever you see something that looks like energy coming from nowhere, or disappearing, it can be useful and fun to try finding it. Almost all of the time, it all ends up coming from the sun."

"Mm - doesn't seem that exciting. A cannonball's kinetic energy obviously comes from the energy stored in the chemical bonds of the propellant, mostly the potassium nitrate, which was fixated by organic processes, by organisms who ate food and breathed air, provided by plants, which collected sunshine."

"That's true - but I'm once again realizing that I'm missing some rather fundamental details, of the sort I'm used to already knowing - or, at least, knowing that I can find out just by grabbing a handy book. I'm looking at this - whatever this purple thing is - and I'm trying to figure out what makes it different, on a fundamental level, when it's fully charged, compared to when it's not. It doesn't seem to be a chemical change - Amethyst says charged gems taste the same as uncharged ones. It's not bigger or smaller, so it doesn't seem to be stretching out the crystal structure, at least not enough to cover the full amount of energy involved. It seems to be independent of having electrons poured into it, such as when it's part of a radio circuit. A fully-charged gem releases photons - but simple light can shine in and out of transparent gems without changing the magic stored. Similarly, other bosons don't seem to have anything like the required properties - which means even E8 Theory's predicted particles aren't any help - and neither do neutrinos. One option I am considering, is that what storing magic in gems actually does, is something along the lines of changing some of the electrons to muons or tau particles; or some of the up and down quarks in the nuclei into more exotic ones. But I'm also guessing that I'm only considering that option because I don't actually remember enough details about quantum field theory to rule out those ideas as being laughably impossible... for example, I can't remember just how short the average lifetimes of muons and taus are - whether they're measured in microseconds or hours. But, ruling it out would unfortunately leave me with the highly unsatisfying 'caloric' model, positing some sort of vaguely electromagnetic field permeating all of space, and which just so happens to be able to be manipulable by living beings and storable in inorganic crystals.

"You do realize that at least half a dozen of the words you were just using were complete nonsense, right?"

"Tell me that again when you've learned how to permanently transmute elements. In the meantime, none of that, of course, even comes close to a theory describing how any of that stored magic can be used to do, well, magical stuff, like the way you can shrink living ponies... including reducing their mass, without altering their biology sufficiently to prevent conscious thought, while still allowing them to breathe normal-sized molecules of oxygen. The energy required to do that should be enough to melt your horn right off your head - which seems to provide some indirect evidence that the overall magical field, for lack of a better word, has some sort of mind-like property outside of the minds of living ponies, a property which can listen for Latin-gem spells, and provide complicated lyrics and choreography to ponies who've never rehearsed. And I really don't have any good idea about what sort of substrate such a mind-like thing could exist on at all... which brings me, once again, back to the caloric field theory."

"So, what's wrong with that?"

"A good theory should be able to make new predictions, not just be fitted to the existing evidence and be changeable to fit whatever new evidence happens to come across. All 'caloric' does is replace the mysteriousness of 'magic' with another mysterious word. It sounds scientific, and it comes a step closer to being science than no theory at all - but it just doesn't quite do the job. In the meantime - if neither the muon or tau have sufficient lifespans... then maybe the 'magicon' is a fourth generation in the same sequence - or a zeroth." I sighed. "Or - I could be on the wrong track entirely from another perspective, and instead of using classical-type particle physics, I'd really need to wrap my mind around physics being about amplitude configurations... but I hope it doesn't come to that, since even when I have managed to hold that idea in my head, I've kept losing track of the details. About all I remember about this is a clever experiment involving a photon emitter, some half-silvered mirrors and full mirrors, and a couple of photon detectors, but even confirming it wouldn't seem to help with the problems I'm thinking about... though I might use it if I ever need to really impress someone with my mysterious scientific knowledge. For now... that seems to be the last gem. Any good ones?"

"All duds, as far as I can tell. A few thaums, each, at best."

"Oh well - they're still pretty little things. Hm... I wonder what chemicals in a pony's body actually carry the magical energy. For non-magical energy, the usual energy carrier is ATP - adenosine triphosphate - and using a lot of spells can tire a unicorn out... maybe there's some enzyme which takes the energy from ATP, and uses it to, if not create magical energy from scratch, help draw it in from the surrounding magical field and ley lines? Say - if I got Stoke to build me a centrifuge, would you be willing to let me have a few blood samples to try testing?"

"No."

"I wouldn't need much."

"Still no."

"It would be for science."

"Less of a no - but no."

"Just a few quick tests could potentially rule out any detectable changes to the blood as a carrier of magical energy. Then we could - hm. Well, if the blood was the same, how about some horn or hoof scrapings? I'm pretty sure both marrow and neural tissue are non-starters."

"Aaaand you've just turned my 'no' into an absolute and permanent one."

"I could say 'please' in a whiny voice for a few hours..."

"I could hide all your gems from you, and then levitate you into the ocean."

"Fair enough. If I do get a volunteer for any such samples, are you up to helping me test them?"

"... Maybe."

---

"I know it's your ship," Red said judiciously, "but is there any particular reason you're scribbling on the walls?"

"I needed a whiteboard for a concept map, and this is the closest I've got. The writing is in the GREEN WELL alphabet. I started with what we've found out so far from Dug and his ship-"

"He mentioned it was called the Bob."

"Good to know." I jotted that down near the words related to boats, then paused ."Nobody ever mentioned the name 'McKenzie', did they?"

"Not that I heard. Why? Who's that?"

"... Hopefully, completely unrelated. Anyway - by putting it all down, and in front of me, I was able to help myself remember a few things. One - GREEN WELL has two different sorts of vikings; the actual ones that lived and breathed, and the standardized fictional portrayal of them. You know how rich ponies are usually drawn wearing top-hats and monocles, whether they really wear them or not? For the past, oh, century or two, vikings were usually drawn wearing helmets with horns, or occasionally wings - but the real ones never actually wore such things. Which means that Bob and Dug down there could be closer to GREEN WELL's fictional vikings than the historical ones. Which brings narrative causality into the picture. Which is why I've been trying to jot down notes on all the viking-related stories I could think of. When I started reaching out from just Norse vikings to Germanic culture in general, I ran out of paper."

"These drawings are very... primitive."

"Give me a break - my penmanship's always been atrocious. And I'm drawing from memory of a comic strip. That bunch is supposed to be Hagar the Horrible and his family and neighbors. Here's where I remembered about berserkers, and their connections to werewolves and other shapeshifters. Here's a list of the ancient mythological figures I could think of - Wodan, Loki, Donarr. Who's sometimes known as Thor, who was portrayed more recently as a superhero."

"Figure out who 'Fraenir' is?"

"Nope. Closest I can think of is 'Fafnir', who, according to different versions of the story, was a giant or dwarf who stole a treasure, whose greed for it turned him into a dragon, and who got killed off by the hero - Sigurd or Siegfried or the like. Who then ate his heart and got some magical powers out of it. If Gord thinks I'm a dragon, I'm pretty sure Fraenir's story wouldn't have had his heart get eaten - so I'm not planning on relying too much on that source. ... of course, since this is about all I've been able to remember of that source, there's not much for me to rely on, anyway."

"Is there anything that's actually of any use?"

"So far? I've remembered a few song-type things which I might be able to use to create a distraction by deliberately inducing musicalism. Since I'm not sure how the whole process works, and at least one trope which narrative causality might use is that going into too much detail about a plan means that the plan's going to fail, but not revealing the details until the plan's in effect means it's still a surprise to the reader and thus can work, I'm not writing them down or even mentioning them aloud."

"... You know, I'm not even going to bother objecting about how insane that sounds, and just ask if there's anything you can say about what we can do to help out with that."

"Mm... let Armina have a fairly free claw in hunting for as much meat as we can store. And if you ever hear me give out a seemingly off-pitch but oddly harmonic scream - you should probably duck."

Comments

[nemryn]

Tsk tsk tsk, it looks like somecow's forgotten about Clarke's Third Law and all its various corollaries and appendices.

[Nathan Traveler]

Bob and Doug Mckenzie. You genius. Also, I love that "FOR SCIENCE" excuse.

[Jack D. Knights]

[Forevermore]

For some reason I really want Jack to send Missy a book that explains literally everything about magic and how it works but is written in an indecipherable language mortals cannot possibly understand and just watch her freak out.

[Doctor Whooves]

1230300
I don't blame Missy, really; I forget about my appendix all the time.

[nemryn]

1230945
I'd put 30 bits on her deciphering it.

[DataPacRat]

1230945
You mean, like the Voynich Manuscript, or the Codex Seraphinianus? Go ahead if you like - but don't forget, one of Missy's skills and strengths as an aspiring rationalist is to prioritize her time expenditure based on the expected utility of any given act. Just because a book has a high expected utility if deciphered, doesn't mean it'd be worth her spending much time on it if there's a low probability of success - just like buying a lottery ticket generally isn't worth the time spent telling the cashier you want one.

And that said - if a secret key is required to decipher it, then don't forget she knows a few of the basics of cryptanalysis, possibly enough to find the chinks in any pre-20th-century or non-computerized encryption system; if it uses a true modern encryption system, or something requiring similar levels of analysis, then it's as much use to her as trying to look for secret messages in the digits of pi (ie, none); and if it doesn't require that much effort to decode... then while SJ may think it's impenetrable to Missy, that doesn't necessarily mean it really is.

1230300
I prefer this one: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from Science!".

[nemryn]

1231578
That's one of the corollaries I was talking about, yeah.
And I guess really it depends on what your definition of 'magic' is. Is 'magic' inherently something that's unknowable and mysterious, or is it the name of a legitimate branch of Equestrian Natural Philosophy?

[DataPacRat]

1231695
That depends; are you talking about Twilight experimenting to see how many tricks she can do, like growing mustaches; or Pinkie routinely breaking the fourth wall? In this universe, unicorn spells and telekinesis and similar repeatable phenomena are generally called 'magic'... and most people seem to think Pinkie is just insane.

Interestingly, Missy hasn't had a chance to examine Pinkie since well before she started getting a good handle on the whole Latin-gem version of magic - and finding out more about the local spontaneous musicalism. One of my notes is to think of how the two of them are going to collide without breaking previously established details about the Chessverse...

[Forevermore]

1231541
1231759

Either you're both missing the obvious joke or you're deliberately avoiding it to screw with me, either way I feel I have failed as a comedian

[DataPacRat]

1231921
I'm afraid I'm missing the joke - there's a whole lot of books describing magic in weird languages, and I wasn't able to pick up on any particular one you might have meant.

[Forevermore]

1232083 The joke was to annoy Missy by giving her the answers to all of her questions in a way she can't understand, hopefully producing hilarious antics and rants as she tries to decipher them and fails cartoonishly. Just a good bit of cartoon humor/trolling

[nemryn]

1231759
Nah, Pinkie's powers are easy to explain. She was granted them by eldritch Deep Ones from another plane of existence, so that she may better caper for their amusement.

[RealityDowngrade]

Awesome high nerd speak in the story and now in the comments. The entertainment value of this story is quite remarkable.

[Horatiojones]

1232136
Hasn't Ivan already got one of those?

[Destructorspace]

1232586
So she is an Eldritch deities' pawn, but being an utterly unfathomable being, it chose to bestow said powers on a pony, never contacting the pony after the first meeting, where nothing was remembered.

(I'm assuming one meeting could induce slight insanity, despite the fact that she's its pawn. Also, if it's ignoring most of the rules anyway, why should it bother helping her out, or tell her why she was granted mysterious, law-breaking abilities?)

[scranity]

"You do realize that at least half a dozen of the words you were just using were complete nonsense, right?"

Oh Micro, you're the only one who understands me.

[The Lost Tourist]

Wilhelm!!!!!