Beyond the Bounds of Universes

by CTVulpin

Scene 9 - Library Workroom

Sci-Twi and Sunset walked into the workroom and froze at the sight that greeted them. Starlight Glimmer, her mane disheveled and sporting a few singed locks of hair, was maintaining a large turquoise bubble of magic full of lighting. Near the center of the bubble, Princess Twilight hovered inside a smaller shield bubble of her own as she poured magic into twisting a huge piece of wood that was shedding the lightning every time it changed shape. Sunset and Sci-Twi stared blankly at the spectacle until Starlight noticed them out of the corner of her eye and snapped, “Shut the door!”

Sunset did as she was instructed, and then she and Sci-Twi sidled carefully around the edge of the room until they found Spike. “What’s going on?” Sci-Twi asked the dragon over the loud crackling of electricity.

“They’re making the frame for the new mirror,” Spike answered.

Sunset watched Princess Twilight coax the wood into a mostly straight beam shape, and then asked, “Why the lightshow then?”

“It’s Zap Apple wood,” Spike replied, simply. When Sci-Twi and Sunset both gave him curious looks, he sighed and elaborated, “Really, really magical – and temperamental – trees that on grow on Sweet Apple Acres and somewhere in the Everfree Forest. Princess Twi figures a frame made of living Zap Apple wood will give the new Mirror enough magic power to sustain a portal.”

“Ah, I see,” Sci-Twi said. She flinched as the wood let out a particularly large lightning bolt in her general direction, but Starlight’s magic just absorbed it like all the rest. “Uh, anything we can do to help?” Sci-Twi asked.

Princess Twilight grunted and bent the wood slightly in the middle. When the electric reaction died down, she glanced down at the group and said, “The mirror, please.” Sunset turned her head to where she’d placed the mirror she’d bought and lifted it in her telekinesis, and then floated it through a hole Starlight made in her shield until Princess Twilight took control of the mirror. The Princess carefully separated the mirror from the frame it had come with, casting the frame aside, and then with even greater care she folded the Zap Apple wood around all four edges of the mirror and shaped the bottom segment into a set of legs so the mirror could stand upright.

Once the lightning storm from this last molding of the wood died down, Princess Twilight lowered the mirror and herself to the floor, Starlight dispelled her shield, and the two ponies sat down hard, fanning their horns and panting. “That was intense,” Starlight said. “I haven’t pushed my magic that hard for so long since… crafting my time-travel spell.”

“We’re not done yet,” Princess Twilight said, “but… the rest shouldn’t be as exhausting. Spike, the gems?”

“Right here,” Spike said, going to a nearby desk and pulling a large, heavy-looking bag off of it. He carried the bag over to the new mirror and then started unloading its content onto the floor: big spools of copper and gold wire, gems in a rainbow of colors and ranging in size from as large as a hoof to twice the size of Spike’s thumb, and finally a couple sheets of paper rolled into scrolls. Princess Twilight set to organizing the gems while Spike unrolled the scrolls and laid them out in order on a desk.

Sci-Twi went over to the desk, scanned the papers quickly, and then turned to the others with a frown. “These are designs for a necklace,” she said.

“Not just any necklace,” Princess Twilight said, finishing her organizing and joining Sci-Twi at the desk. “Ashen Blaze’s Artifical Element of Magic.” She walked over to the blackboard, erased some of the diagrams from before, and sketched a stick-unicorn. “Ash was one of the Order-naries,” Princess Twilight explained, “and he was a prime example of the differences between how magic works in various universes. In Equestria, unicorns and alicorns power their magic from internal reserves built in part by the energy of living, but mostly by just passively absorbing some of the magical energy from the world around us.” She drew several arrows pointing into the stick unicorn’s head. “Earth pony and pegasus abilities work in similar ways, but unicorns tend to have larger ‘reserves’ than the other tribes, and some unicorns have an even bigger capacity for magic than that.” She gave Starlight Glimmer a meaningful look. She then turned back to the chalkboard and drew another stick-pony with one hoof outstretched. “In the universes like the Order-naries’ home, however,” she said, drawing arrows that gathered around the pony’s hoof, “magic is cast by actively drawing in the ambient energy and shaping it into spells. That style of magic can technically work in Equestria, but because ponies are always drawing magic into themselves, there’s not much left ‘free’ for mages like Ashen Blaze to use.”

“But, Ashen Blaze was a unicorn when he was in Equestria, wasn’t he?” Starlight asked with a confused look.

“He was,” Princess Twilight said, “but his natural capacity for magical energy was actually on the smaller side of average for a unicorn, so he couldn’t supply the power he was used to using on his own. That’s where the necklace comes in. Ash and I designed it, with some help from Rarity, to essentially… disrupt the natural magic around it just enough so it wouldn’t be drawn into anypony and thus be available for Ash to weave in his style.”

“All right,” Sci-Twi said, “but what does that have to do with the mirror?”

Princess Twilight scuffed her hoof on the floor a bit. “We’re going to need a gem array to shape the raw magic in the frame into the actual portal spell,” she said at last, “and I figured if we based the array on the design for the AEoM, it’ll give the portal a resonance similar to magic in Taryn and… have an easier time finding and linking up to Taryn?” She smiled weakly, her eyes betraying her uncertainty.

“No offense,” Sunset said, “but that sounds… a bit farfetched.”

“This entire project’s farfetched, Sunset,” Sci-Twi said. “We’re creating a whole new branch of science… er, magic. Magic science.” She walked over to Princess Twilight and put a hoof on her shoulder. “Point is, the only way to know if your hypothesis is right is to try it.”

Princess Twilight gave Sci-Twi a grateful smile for the support and nodded. “Ok everypony,” she said, “let’s build this thing.” She picked up the design documents while Spike, Sunset, and Starlight gathered around the mirror to await instructions.

Sunset placed simple spells into each gem to double-check their durability before setting them on specific spots on the mirror’s frame. Spike braided wires together and wove them around each gem as he came to them, linking them gems together into a looping array that went all around the mirror. Starlight moved behind Spike, using her magic to fuse the wire into the wood.

Sci-Twi stayed back and just watched as she felt a new little doubt start to form in her mind. I was specifically asked to be here. What can I contribute to this that the others can’t? Her hoof strayed to her magic detector device, and her thoughts to her experience with holding the original mirror’s magic. She tried to banish the memory, but as the new mirror’s construction continued, the memory kept returning. No! she thought, screwing her eyes shut, I can’t do that again. I couldn’t handle the power then. Why think that I could now?

At length, the gem array was finished and the mirror set upright. As everypony looked it over, Sci-Twi noticed an odd space in the wiring at the very top. Before Sci-Twi could point it out and ask, however, Princess Twilight brought out a black claw and floated it up to the space. “With this piece of a living, solid, Chaos spirit,” the alicorn said, “we should give this mirror’s magic the ability to reach outside our universe, where the spell can hopefully locate and connect with the universe of Taryn.” She fit the claw into the array and tightened the wires around it a bit.

“Is it supposed to be… doing something?” Spike asked after a moment.

Princess Twilight frowned. “I was hoping for a reaction of some kind,” she admitted, “but maybe we need to give it an actual portal spell first.”

“And that puts us back on our original problem,” Sci-Twi said, desperate to contribute. “We don’t have a portal spell to use yet. Although…” She scratched her head thoughtfully. “Princess,” she asked, “if we put a spell into this mirror now, could we… remove it later and set the portal spell in it instead? Just to test the array.”

Princess Twilight frowned in thought. “That should be possible,” she said. “After all, Ash’s necklace was designed to enable spells in general, not hold and maintain a particular one. Spike, take a memo please: devise a way to lock the portal spell into the mirror.”

“On it,” Spike said, going over to the stack of notes.

“As for now,” Princess Twilight said, turning her attention back to the mirror, “let’s try putting a normal teleport spell on this to… the Castle of the Two Sisters.” Her horn lit up as she narrowed her eyes in concentration, and after a moment a matching magenta glow surrounded the mirror. The light swirled for a moment and then disappeared into the gems. Princess Twilight released her magic and took a couple steps back as the gems started glowing in their respective colors and the glass of the mirror clouded slightly. Discord’s claw trembled against the wires holding it in place, and the glass cleared and showed an image of the library in the Castle of the Two Sisters. Princess Twilight grinned triumphantly, but just as she started to take her first step toward the mirror, the image suddenly vanished, the gems started flashing erratically with near-blinding light, and the whole mirror began to shake.

“What’s happening?” Sunset exclaimed.

“It’s overloading!” Starlight yelled, diving for cover under a table. “Twilight! Shut it down!”

Princess Twilight reached out to the mirror with her magic, only to be thrown back by a lightning-laced pulse. “Oof!” she grunted as she hit the wall. “The Zap Apple wood!” she exclaimed, “Its magic has overwhelmed the gem array!” She tried to wrangle the shuddering mirror again, only to thrown back again. “Ugh… I can’t control it. Everypony, get out of here!”

Reacting faster than conscious thought, Sci-Twi removed her magic detector from around her neck, switched it on, held it out toward the mirror, and opened it up. The detector beeped twice, and the magic flowed out of the mirror in the form of a white light into the open device. The mirror ceased shaking as the last of the magic was pulled out, and Sci-Twi quickly snapped the detector closed and checked the dial on the front. “Less than an eighth full,” she said in mild surprise.

Sunset came over and bumped shoulders with Sci-Twi. “Nice save, Sci-Twi,” she said.

Starlight crawled out from under the table and gave Sci-Twi a wary look. “What did you do?” she asked.

Sci-Twi showed Starlight the detector and explained, “I pulled all the magic out of the mirror and into this. I can hold it for a while, but if I don’t put it back soon, things might… get weird.”

“Twi,” Sunset said flatly, “you’re just holding a teleportation spell and some raw magic, not a dimension-spanning portal. I think the fabric of reality’ll stay stable. Not sure I can say the same about that,” she pointed at the mirror.

“I don’t know what could have gone wrong,” Princess Twilight said.

“Mixing Discord’s magic with Zap Apple wood would be my guess,” Starlight said.

“I accounted for that,” Princess Twilight said, going over to the notes and riffling through them. “Let me show you the calculations I’ve made on the interaction of Chaos magic with natural Equestrian magic. There shouldn’t have been any conflicting energy-”

While Starlight and the Princess launched into a discussion of how magic from different sources interacted, Spike nodded at the magic detector still floating in Sci-Twi’s magic and asked, “Can you do anything else with that magic, or just hold it and put it back where it came from?”

“Well,” Sci-Twi said, “I could tap into it myself, like a secondary reserve of magic like the Princess was talking about. Last time I did that, though I kinda went… crazy.”

Sunset sighed. “The situation was more complicated than that, Twi, and you know it” she said. “You’d never actually used magic before then, it was an awful lot of power to get all at once, and – most importantly – you were under a lot of emotional stress from… many sides." A look of guilt crossed her features for a second. “Look,” she said, “I don’t want to pressure you, but I think you should consider how much stronger you’ve grown as a person and at using magic, and consider the unique perspective that this,” she tapped the magic detector with a hoof, “might be able to bring to this mystery. You overcame your fear of becoming Midnight Sparkle once already. I know you can do it again if you want to.”

Sci-Twi looked into Sunset’s eyes and saw the confidence and trust her friend felt toward her. She then looked at the magic detector and nodded. “You’re right, Sunset,” she said, slipping the device back around her neck, “I shouldn’t be afraid.” She held the device up with one hoof, took a deep breath, and slowly opened it up again.

Comments

[badninja]

Well I hope as I-Twi will at least wait until Starlight and Princess Twilight stop fighting and are fully paying attention before she messes with this magic. I think those two are going to keep arguing.

[BenRG]

I'm betting that the Zap Apple Wood is the problem. It's wild magic from an environment that is known to be resistant to most pony magics so logic suggests that it would screw up any pony magical matrix that was imposed upon it.

[CTVulpin]

8151288
That's actually a good point.