Special Talents

by InkFathom

Lightning-Struck Dreams

Daydream, Pinkie, and Derpy were in the library, watching Twilight pace, ramble to herself, and occasionally flip through a book only to discard it on the floor.

“This isn’t right. This isn’t logical. It should’ve worked. Why didn’t it work? This doesn’t make sense.” The lavender unicorn had been doing this for about an hour, ever since she realized that Daydream remembered everything after Derpy had accidentally struck her with lightning.

Daydream, having had enough, decided to interrupt. “Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”

Twilight turned to her. “Because it IS a big deal! The memory retrieval spell is famous all over Equestria for being fail-proof. It always brings back memories, and if it can’t then nothing can. Something as simple as lightning shouldn’t have been able to restore your memory!”

“Why not? The natural voltage of the shock in the lightning contains more energy than the artificial voltage of the shock in the spell. Wouldn’t it work better?” Daydream inquired.

Twilight glared at her. “If that were the case, then ponies would get electrocuted more often than the spell would be performed.” She turned to another book. “And it still doesn’t explain why the lightning not only brought back your memory, but somehow supplied you with knowledge that you did not have when you first came in this morning.” Twilight shot a sideways glance towards the unicorn. “Unless you already knew about the difference in voltage between magic and lightning.”

Daydream was genuinely surprised. “Well… no. I don’t think so.”

“Well all right then.”

They all sat in silence for a few more minutes.

“So…” Pinkie asked tentatively, “what information did you get so far?”

Still flipping through a book, Twilight answered, “I found that, in rare cases where a unicorn does not want to remember something, they may cast a spell on their memory to prevent the memory retrieval spell from working.” She tossed the textbook aside and pulled another in front of her. “However, lightning still shouldn’t have broken through such a spell.”

“So, you’re going in circles with this research?” Daydream asked drily.

Twilight sighed. “Pretty much.”

“Well, let me know when you make a groundbreaking discovery.” The lilac unicorn stood up and stretched her legs. “I’m going home.” With that she walked out the door.

The sun was going down, turning the sky beautiful shades of scarlet, orange, and gold. One bright star shined in the sky, reminding Daydream of the one in the middle of her cutie mark. She started for her house across town. After everything that had happened that day, the lilac unicorn was exhausted.

She saw ponies she knew from merely passing them on the street. Ever since she was struck by lightning, she had discovered a memory that held on to every last detail of her life. She remembered what she ate for lunch on her first day of school, the time of day it was when she read the twentieth chapter of her eighth chapter book for the third time, even the number of tiles on the floor of the kitchen at Sugarcube Corner, in which she had been only once in her life.

She remembered everything.

Well, she thought, almost everything.

That familiar cloud of obscurity still covered the part of her mind that hid exactly how and why she got her cutie mark, along with everything before the fact.

Oh, well, she thought as she climbed into her bed. I’ll figure out how to remember it eventually. For now, I need some sleep…

************
Surround it by an impenetrable fortress of magic...

Absolute protection...

A memory safe for her to bring back...

Too easily harnessed...

Darkness...

Key element...

Something rare, yet more powerful than magic...

Lightning...

Conditions would be complicated...

Could be accomplished...

Simple as a dream...

************
Daydream woke up with a start. For years, she had had the exact same dream, night after night. Never ending, reoccurring, and obscure, the only thing she knew about them was that they were identical. It was almost soothing. She could depend on the repetitive drone of the same dream every night.

But she’d had a different dream that night.

************

The lilac unicorn raced through town. The fact that it was morning barely registered with her. Wind buffeted her mane. Tears streamed across her narrowed eyes. Her hooves pounded over the pebbled dirt road. Ponies launched themselves away from the lilac rocket, yelling at her to “Trot, don’t gallop!” She didn’t listen.

I have to get to Twilight! She thought. She’ll know why I had a different dream! Daydream didn’t remember what she dreamt, she only knew that it was a different dream than usual. It alarmed her out of her wits.

Daydream burst through the door to the library, her eyes wide. “TWILIGHT!”

She was met by a small, purple and green dragon carrying a tower of books. Upon her sudden arrival, Spike yelped, jumped a couple of feet in the air, and dropped his load of textbooks, disappearing in an avalanche of pages, ink, and hard, wooden covers.

“Ugh,” he groaned for what must have been the hundredth time “why does Twilight need so many books?”

Daydream paid almost no attention to this small disaster. She demanded, “Where’s Twilight Sparkle? I need to talk to her!”
“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Spike grumbled sarcastically. “Twilight’s in her study.” As Daydream bounded up the stairs, he warned, “I wouldn’t disturb her, if I were you. She’s been obsessing about something since yesterday and she gets all cranky when she doesn’t get enough sleep.”

Paying no heed to Spike, the lilac unicorn burst into the study. “Twilight! I need your help!”

Papers, charts, and books were strewn across the room. Several quills were littered on the floor, having been used up. The floor was hidden by a layer of scrolls, which were crumpled and torn as if they had been stepped on over and over. A desk sat in a corner of the study. Twilight sat in a hard wooden chair at this desk, hunched over as if concentrating very, very hard.

The lavender unicorn whipped around to face the newcomer, exhaustion and annoyance covering her face in a scowl. “What do you want?” she snapped.

Daydream flinched. Hesitantly, she said, “Something really weird happened last night.”

Sighing, Twilight sat down on the floor, motioning for Daydream to do the same. She took a deep breath (and a sip of coffee) and calmly asked, “Okay, what happened?”

The lilac unicorn gasped in a long breath and began. “Ever since I can remember, I had the same dream every single night. I could never remember what I dreamt about whenever I woke up, and the only thing I ever knew was that I had the exact same dream. But last night,” she paused. “I had a different dream.”

Twilight stared at her. “That… that’s it? You had a different dream than usual? Do you remember what it was about?”

“No. But I know it was different.”

Twilight dropped her head and groaned. She stood up and turned back to her research. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m far too busy to deal with something as irrelevant as an unusual dream that you can’t even remember. Come back later if you get more information.”

Daydream looked over the lavender unicorn’s shoulder. “What are you working on?”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “I’m still trying to figure out why lightning worked better than my memory retrieval spell to retrieve your memory.”

The word ‘lightning’ sparked something in the back of Daydream’s mind, but she shook it away.

“Well, maybe the fact that I had a different dream last night is somehow connected to that,” she tried.

“You think so?”

Daydream had absolutely no idea if her dream was somehow changed by the lightning strike, but it disturbed her far too much to let Twilight dismiss it so quickly. “Sure.”

Twilight abandoned her desk and proceeded down the stairs. “Then let’s get started.”

The lilac unicorn was surprised by this sudden change of mood, and Twilight was already pulling out books when she started after her.

“Now,” the lavender unicorn began, “we need to start by researching dreams. Specifically, how to recall them. After that, we can look into interpreting dreams, connections they have to memory, and the effect that personal experiences have on them.”

Twilight had been piling large textbooks onto Daydream’s back, and the somewhat overwhelmed unicorn collapsed under the weight of the large textbooks. “You do a lot of research, don’t you?” she puffed.

“Yes I do.” Twilight trotted down a flight of stairs to her basement, Daydream lugging her heavy cargo after her.

At the bottom of the stairs, the lilac unicorn dropped the books on the floor and looked around her. The basement was filled with varying gadgets, tubes, and vents. Roots from the large hollowed out tree that made up the library hung down from the ceiling and wrapped around some of the taller instruments. One machine was placed around the middle, and was topped by a cylinder that rhythmically moved a pen in jagged lines across paper that flowed from a slot into a box. Spiraling wires connected it to a wide helmet covered in all sorts of bulbs and a contraption with metal restraints attached to it.

“What’s that?” Daydream asked, referring to the machine.

“It’s a machine I can use to get scientific information on your bodily functions. In this case, your dreams.” Twilight started preparing it for use.

“WHAT?” Daydream slowly backed up the stairs. “Is this really necessary?”

Twilight scowled at her. “Yes, it’s necessary! We can’t figure out what your dreams have to do with the lightning strike until we figure out what your dreams are about. Now stop messing around so we can get started.”

“Can we do this in the morning? Like, when you’ve gotten more sleep?”

“Quit stalling!”

“Okay, okay.” Daydream hesitantly stepped towards the contraption. “So, what do I do?”

Twilight trotted over to where the helmet and restraints were. “First, you put your hooves on these,” she pointed to the restraints. “This will measure your heart rate and blood pressure. Then,” she continued, now referring to the helmet, “you’ll put this on. It will measure your brain activity, eye movements, and even give some idea as to what you’re thinking or dreaming about.” The lavender unicorn stepped next to the machine with the paper. “That information will be recorded in seismic readings on this scroll.”

Twilight turned back to Daydream and noticed that the lilac unicorn was taking shallow breaths. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Daydream replied in a tiny voice.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” Twilight consoled. “This could probably be a bit stressful for some ponies. True, I haven’t really had this problem before,” she reflected, “but my only other test subject was Pinkie Pie and, well, she’s Pinkie.”

“So, you only tried this once before?”

“I guess.”

“I’m out of here.”

“Daydream!”

Daydream was pumping her legs, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Looking down, she discovered that she was hovering a foot off of the ground, her hooves not even touching any surface. She stopped trying to run and looked behind her. Twilight was using her magic to hold her in place, sporting a severely annoyed expression.

“Look, I’m tired. I just want to go to bed, but I can’t sleep until I figure this out. So will you cut it out and help me so we can GET THIS OVER WITH?”

Daydream’s jaw dropped. She had only spent any real time with Twilight when she was in the library reading a novel on one of the beanbag chairs the librarian kept around. But she had never seen her get this angry. “Okay,” she complied meekly.
Twilight smiled and let go of the levitation spell she had put on the lilac unicorn, effectively dropping her to the floor. “Good. Go put the helmet on.”

Daydream reluctantly went over to the machine, strapped on the metal helmet, and laid her hooves on the restraints. As the restraints snapped over her hooves, she looked to Twilight. “I won’t get electrocuted again, will I?”

The lavender unicorn chuckled softly. “Of course not. My machinery works by the energy of magic, not lightning.” She glanced at Daydream. “What would give you that idea?”

Furrowing her brow, Daydream replied, “I don’t know…”

“Hmm…” Twilight pondered over this as she turned on her machine.

The paper in the machine began to flow into the box, covered in fresh jagged lines from the readings. A pump on the side blew out steam every few seconds, staying in rhythm with the chugging of the gears. The helmet on the lilac unicorn’s head began to flash, the bulbs on top blinking with light.

Daydream was surprised. She was expecting something more sinister than the vibrations of the restraints, which gave her a pleasant ticklish feeling. The helmet gave a faint hum as it searched her brain waves for strange activity. Though she had woken up only a short while ago, she began to feel sleepy.

“Okay,” Twilight instructed. “Now I want you to go to sleep. We can only record your dream sequence when you go into REM.”

Daydream was about to ask what REM was, but the vibrations and humming she was experiencing was soothing her so much, she could only nod and drift off.

************

Protect what she knew...

Matter of survival...

It was perfect...

Generations of experience...

Cocoon of energy...

Reached her mind...

Spell was completed...

Last memory faded away...

************

Daydream gasped, sitting up abruptly. Even though she had no recollection of what she dreamt, she knew it was different dream, even than the one she had that very morning.

The lilac unicorn looked to Twilight, who was asleep by the machine. “Twilight!” she shouted.

The lavender unicorn snapped her eyes open and sat up, jolted to consciousness. “Wha-? What happened? Huh?” She looked around, reassuring herself of where she was. “Oh. You’re awake,” she said to Daydream. “Do you remember your dream?”

Shaking her head, she replied, “No. But it was definitely different than this morning.”

Twilight yawned. “Okay. Let’s see what the machine picked up on it.” She stood up, stretched, and started shifting through the paper.

“Why were you asleep?” Daydream asked. “You said you wouldn’t be able to sleep until you figured all this out.”

Twilight blushed. “Well, you were dreaming for so long. And I was pretty tired…”

The lilac unicorn shrugged. It didn’t matter.

Daydream found that she could easily slip her hooves out of the restraints, and began unstrapping the helmet on her head.

As she laid the helmet on the floor, Twilight called her.

“Daydream, you’re going to want to see this.”