One if By Land: Part 13
If he had gone into Canterlot Castle blind it might have taken him entire days to find the ponies he was looking for: The palace was big big. As it was, all it took to find Princess Celestia and his friends was a quick pointer from one of the guards. The three of them had apparently taken their meeting to a room Spike had never been in before, so he paid special attention to the path as he followed the guard's directions.
They weren't anywhere near the Princesses' chambers, nor the open halls for holding court. The kitchens were in a different wing entirely, same with most of the service quarter. The closest room he could place from memory was Twilight's old study hall (although for him it had been more of a napping hall), which meant they were close to the archives. The unassuming door on one wall wouldn't have caught attention from most ponies. But he was not most, nor (heh) was he pony!
This door was unusually thick according to his senses, and strongly reinforced on both sides. There was no lock and no handle, the hinges buried directly into the stone of the surrounding wall. It would be a real chore to try to open this thing without getting particularly destructive. Doubly so because Observe informed him there was a lock, just not a visible one: The entire mechanism was concealed inside with no way to apply a key.
Originally Spike had been confused as to why Princess Celestia would be meeting with her star pupil and secret lover in such a random location, but now he wanted to applaud her security. If he ran into a door like this in one of Shining's dungeon crawls, it would be brute force time unless they had an earthshaper or a teleportation scroll!
He knocked hard and waited for a moment, watching the door with regularly-refreshed Observes and his Dragon's Mind. For good measure he cut off his senses of touch and taste and smell and hearing, focusing entirely on watching and perceiving magic. A few moments after his claws hit the wood the door began to swing. There was no sign of Celestia's aura on the door itself, but Spike could see the delicate push and twist of magic manipulating the interior...
Dragon's Mind didn't record it as a spell, but for once it wasn't because his ability failed to grasp some huge and complicated spell. It was more like the opposite: The unlocking came down to the most basic telekinesis applied with impossible delicacy across a few dozen points at once. Very easy to observe, significantly less easy to mimick... But he learned quite a lot from watching it.
Dragon's Horn has gained a level!
Dragon's Horn has gained a level!
Twilight's Teachings has gained a level!
Twilight's Teachings has gained a level!
Spike stepped inside, and immediately had to hold back a laugh. His marefriend, his (word), and the Princess were all arranged around a tiny table having a positively Rarity-esque teatime. There were delicate cakes and fragile cups, although Pinkie's cup had manifested a crazy straw and her teacakes were suspiciously frosting-heavy.
He hadn't been back to Canterlot in quite some time, but Princess Celestia's mannerisms were very hard to forget. She had poised herself perfectly, taking a sip of her tea exactly as he crossed the threshold of the door. That made it all the more special when he saw her visibly pause, eyeing his newly-grown form with the barest hint of surprise. He smiled back to her and then looked up to check something he had been wondering for weeks...
[Soleil, Soleil]
Celestia
LV ????
The Princess nodded to him and her smile widened just a touch.
"Welcome, Spike: I've missed your company. I trust you've been keeping Twilight on track?"
The mare in question immediately blushed but Spike just nodded.
"Regular-ish schedule, reasonably-reasonable diet. She's totally got socialization covered now."
He winked at Celestia with that last bit, and while she didn't break character a second time (that would have been a record) she did nod back.
"Very true, as I can attest. Congratulations to you and Ms. Pie, by the way: I've been told Twilight took care of the formalities there?"
Pinkie nodded vigorously.
"Yuppers: Warned and re-warned for good measure! Gave me plenty of ideas for if somepony decides to start shacking up with my sisters, actually! I gotta be the big pony sometimes even though I'm not the oldest."
Twilight groaned and buried her face in her hooves.
"I am regretting my decisions already. Should have left it to Shining... Oh! Spike, that's right, before we get down to business I had a really important question."
He perked up his ears (to the extent he could) and waited, but he wasn't expecting the question he got.
"How much stronger is Shining Armor?"
"...Compared to?"
"Me! We had our little sibling showdown back at the train station but I forgot we had an unbiased arbiter with a defined metric of levels available."
Spike blinked a few times and then scratched at the back of his head sheepishly.
"Aheh, funny you should say forgot in this context..."
She caught his meaning immediately.
"Really?"
"I was kinda preoccupied! It was so novel to see eye to eye with him that I forgot to look any further up than that. Didn't catch Cadance's information either, come to think of it."
Twilight puffed her cheeks and fell back in her seat.
"Phooey... Alright. I suppose it's best if I don't rely on that sort of thing anyways"
Pinkie and Celestia both laughed at Twilight's reaction, but Spike just sighed. He was actually kind of disappointed he'd forgotten to check that! Princess Celestia's title didn't tell him much he didn't already know, and her level was no surprise at all. He could try to use Observe: It had become a habit over the past month, even when he knew it wasn't likely to yield results. So far the only time anycreature had even noticed it had been King Rudy, and that was more about the ring he wore than his own abilities. Luna hadn't commented on his attempts back on the train, so...
"Observe."
Spike's vision was overtaken, edge to edge, by a pulse of deep orange-red that faded away into darkness and then sparks. It reminded him of the way his eyes reacted after he rubbed them too hard, especially as it slowly transitioned back to normal vision. Once that cleared he didn't have any information about Celestia to read... Not exactly. There was an error message in an entirely new style, eye-catching red and gold text plastered onto a foreboding pure black background.
!WARNING!
Do not stare directly at The Sun.
!WARNING!
He quirked up an eyeridge. That wasn't too shocking for a variety of reasons: If anything it made him more surprised that there hadn't been a similar message for Luna. Something about a shroud of darkness or a cloak of stars, maybe? Putting that thought aside, this message echoed a classic saying and it definitely seemed like a warning... Although given how his engine had been behaving ever since he got his affinity with Laughter and Pinkie Pie, perhaps this was more like a hint.
Spike began turning his view to look around the space. Twilight Sparkle was looking like her usual self, maybe just a bit more relaxed in her Princess' presence? That was kinda cute. Pinkie Pie was enacting a proxy war between her tea cakes, although he could see how she made sure the silly shenanigans didn't spread any disturbance past the borders of her plate. Also very cute. His eyes glided past and around the Princess herself while he took in their surroundings.
The room itself was a large double-chamber, two circular rooms connected as one. In their room a table had been set up with chairs, and a few small gallery lights illuminated paintings he didn't recognize. An open track on the floor between the two spaces marked where the shutters closed to separate the rooms. The second chamber was festooned with just as many paintings and other hangings on the wall, but lacked a tea table. In roughly the equivalent spot was a mirror, a huge mirror that stood so tall that Princess Celestia's horn likely wouldn't meet the top.
Under normal circumstances he would just chalk it up as another art piece in this little gallery, but between the heavily-secured door and its odd position in the dead center of the floor... Well, Spike had a way to try to find out what it was. After all, if he couldn't look directly at the Sun? He should look at the things connected to it!
"Indra's Net."
There was a... chug? A hiccup? There was a break in his powers, a moment of hesitation as the information tried to process and present itself. Eventually it resolved as a simple menu box with a web connecting the items he tried to Observe... But unlike all of his previous uses, the web and the window were greyed out in the background, and overlapped with a new message.
Significant improvements to Observe and sensory skills, as well as other breakthroughs, have allowed for a new method to visualize Indra's Net. Use this visualizer now?
NOTE: The enhanced visualizer requires an extremely high degree of concentration. Do not activate this mode during combat or other high-risk situations.
High concentration? That (at least these days) was something he could manage no problem! Spike shrugged his assent and then immediately winced as his body grew deathly cold. His MP dropped in a single sweeping motion until it was a sliver off the bottom of the bar. Every inch of him felt drained of warmth and totally numb, as if he were falling back and out and down and-
Syzygy: [Moonsetter] has activated automatically, improving MP recovery and certain perceptions.
[The Subconscious Drone] has activated automatically, slowing perceived time to a minimum.
[Dragon's Eye] has activated automatically, disabling: Vision, Hearing, Touch, Taste, and Scent.
Everything slowed down around him: Princess Celestia's demure giggle at something Twilight said frozen in time, Pinkie's cakes seeming like they could retreat at any moment, his own body still in the chair. Then those visions blurred out to black on the edges and faded to leave empty space. His own sense of the chair beneath his butt, his body in the chair, the flow of air in the room... All of it stopped. The smell of the drinks and snacks whisked themselves away, the sound of voices grew distorted by the drop in speed before they too vanished.
Spike was left in total darkness for an unknown stretch of time, and... Well true to his word, he just waited and focused. This was probably worthy of a freak-out, except he trusted his system. He trusted himself. Time passed and he simply maintained his focus, letting things take their course. Honestly there was probably no better place in the entire world to pull this stunt: If something did go wrong he was literally surrounded by friends and loved ones. Specifically friends and loved ones who knew more about magic and weird happenings than the rest of Equestria combined.
His faith paid off when a second bank of messages scrolled across his lack-of-vision, popping into his head as simple thoughts. They weren't quite like his own, having a distinctly neutral and maybe slightly feminine tone? He hadn't thought about attributing a real persona to his system, but if stuff like this kept happening it might have to go on the docket.
Preventing direct observation of celestial bodies...
Discarding assumptions to prevent errors...
Enabling advanced perception of Indra's Net...
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What is Indra's Net again?
So clearly Spike needs eclipse glasses or something to use observe(!) ;p
11040399
It's the Observe sub-skill which lets him Observe the relationships between things, both people and objects. It was either obtained, or used to dramatic effect, during the first Rarity scene when he sorted out all the items in the Hopeless Case, if I remember correctly.
Highly advanced skills come with there own drawbacks...
If this is the mirror to the other world... And he's basically running graph visualization for it... Daymn.
Spike is gonna see sunset early lol
Nice to see Spike is using [Dragon's Mind] to analyze spells and enchanted items.
The great thing about [Dragon's Horn] is that Spike's whole body is now a magic-manipulating organ/mechanism, which means leveling it up also improves his ability to mimic Pegasus magic and Earth Pony magic, not just unicorn spellcasting.
Is The Gamer a harem web comic? What about this story?
Love the buried coded pin array for the secure lock, as you either know the code, have to decode the entire mechanism which could so easily break if done wrong, sealing the place permanently, or force the place.
But Spike is a Lithovore that can eat diamond, and most of the castle structure is Marble, or Granite at best?
As for not looking directly into the Sun, well, with experience and training, maybe later Spike?
I wonder if Spike triggering Depth Analysis on the mirror and surroundings, is going to feed back on including him, so he realises as long as he is there, as the observer he affects the readings, and they effect him in return, which he has to compensaate for, or even bettter, manipulate by altering himself?
11040452
11040485
Oh hell, I'd just assumed it a full-body mirror scaled up to be usable as such by Princess Celestia. She'd logically own such a thing, right?
Could be about the mirror, but the bit about celestial bodies... I get the feeling he's about to get a solar-system perspective of everything there.
11040513
The Gamer is a Korean manga (spelled manhwa in Romanized Korean) about someone whose real life becomes like an RPG. he becomes able to level up, his injuries are translated into loss of hitpoints with a reduced physical effect on his body, getting a good night's sleep fully heals him, he gets a UI, etc. Some gamer-inspired fanfics about other series' have introduced relationship charts with harem capability, but I don't know if that was ever made a part of the source material.
Well, at least his game system would prevent him to suffer the same fate as future Twilight.
awesome chapter dude keep up the good work!!!
11040488
Could turn into passive/active skills later on. Manipulating the weather and ground sounds useful.
Now all he needs to do is learn some water based skills and he could be an Avatar.
11040517
Spike just needs to get sunglasses.
11042541
Im sure Pinkie has a couple sets of Peril sensitive Sunglasses, for Sunglasses Emergancies.
Celestia is no big shot without reason. Sooo... Why not ask her?
11042541
You'd have to get eclipse glasses for that. Or a certain grade of tinted glass (I already forgot what kind after I bought it). Then it's okay to stare directly at the Sun.