Grounder

by JustAnotherEarthPony

Chapter Four: Magic

Oh boy, Magic.

As far as most magical universes were concerned, there was no reason for magic to follow any logic or structure. After all, in fiction, it’s just “sufficiently advanced technology”, right? Most fiction works, even among the MLP crowd, simply didn’t care to truly attempt to explain magic, as hand waving it is a lot easier.

Hasbro was no different in that respect. While Twilight had talked about “magical thingamajigs” and other vague, non-committal statements that could easily be retracted or ignored later in the show, the simple fact was that the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic script writers didn’t care about how Equestria’s magic worked, but only that it did.

That didn’t stop the fans from trying of course.

It had been quite a while since I’d learned the truth about earth pony magic, or lack thereof. So after a few more boring sessions at foal school, in which they realized I was clearly far past their curriculum, I was provisionally allowed into Canterlot’s only public school at the young age of five, just as long as I had good behavior and kept steady grades.

Do not ask what the name was... No, really, don’t. It’s worse than the orphanage name, which is already more than I should be saying.

Regardless, this mattered little to me. After having exhausted all of the history books in the orphanage and quickly realizing that math used by ponies wasn’t much different than the math used back on Earth, I knew that I wasn’t going to be learning anything too exciting in actual school…Except for magical theory, which I could now finally study.

I hadn’t mentioned all that many other ponies thus far because they were simply not that interesting. Sure, I could talk about the other orphan ponies and their tragic tales, or recount the stories of how I earned their friendship…but this is Equestria. Get real.

From the statistical evidence provided to me, about 99% of ponies were both incredibly naïve and really easy to befriend. Any kind of positive encouragement and suddenly they’d take you to their rooms, show you their toys, and even occasionally introduce you to your soon-to-be new circle of friends.

Luckily, this only made the occasionally somewhat friendly ponies only more interesting, not that there were any of those at the orphanage. Although, one did have to wonder how the high-class Canterlot ponies ended up so unfriendly when ORPHANS were better at friendship than them.

So it was that I arrived at the first day of class with my meager beholding of a notebook, a quill and determination to get through the boring classes until I reached “Introduction to Magical Theory”... in four hours.

All of that instantly went crashing down as soon as I saw that purple filly on her desk, gazing straight ahead, ignoring most of the looks of her classmates as she levitated her notebook, lists and quills out of her bag, which she put in the back of the classroom neatly.

I was in the same class as Twilight Sparkle.

I panicked, quickly grabbed the desk nearest to me, and rapidly put all of my stuff below it, trying to keep a cool head.

So, this changed things. First and foremost, it confirmed the fan theory of Twilight moving faster through school/high school than most other unicorns, as I knew I was at least a year ahead of where I should be and I was somewhere around her age.

What I hadn’t expected was that her parents (who had always given the impression of being well off) would put her in a public school. Normally I’d call it Celestia’s influence, but most of the students in the class were unmarked, meaning that she most likely hadn’t reached faithful student status yet.

This left me in a conundrum though. I could go all “Future Family” mode to try and preserve the timeline as much as possible by simply ignoring her, carrying on with my day while pretending that I never saw the purple pony of preparedness. I had previously decided to not be constrained by the timeline, since there clearly was need for change in Equestria, but I also knew that as soon as I started changing things, my foreknowledge would become increasingly useless.

In the end, I decided to wait and see if a good opportunity presented itself while trying to convince myself I wasn’t just hesitating to take a big decision out of fear of the consequences. Same old, same old.

“Math 1” was as boring as any of the other math classes I had back in the orphanage. I did note that Ms. Sparkle answered most of the questions that the teacher asked the class, and that she was already receiving both looks of excitement from the teacher and small glances of envy, maybe even some spite from the other students, who seemed to instantly classify her as ‘teacher’s pet’, ‘nerd’ and ‘group work partner’ all at once.

In that respect, I suppose Equestria wasn’t too different from Earth after all.

After a million years and thirty minutes into the future, the class ended and I went straight to the library to ask about magic books.

Hey, just because I hadn’t even had my first magic theory class didn’t mean that I couldn’t ask about the books, right? Surely they would have some introductory-level stuff.

The fact I saw a certain lavender filly also go straight towards library with what I assumed was the same question had nothing to do with it.

Making a snap-decision, I decided to simply walk (canter?) behind Twilight as she entered the library, making sure to be able to overhear her conversation with the librarian.

“Excuse me?” said the filly to the bored looking pony on the counter, “could you please tell me where I can find the introductory books on magical theory? Of course I already read the ones at home and triple checked them before coming here in case there was a test but-”

“Third shelve, left to right, 2nd Row. ‘Magical Theory 101’”

“Um, thank you.”

The excited little filly practically flew over to the indicated shelf and started looking through all the titles.

By now, the librarian had turned to me uninterestedly. I noticed she was a fairly old unicorn that had a closed book with a bookmark on it for a cutie mark.

She also apparently disliked me as soon as I walked in.

“What do you want?” she said in a business-like manner, informing me in that small sentence that I was only permitted onto her establishment due to the school rules and that any misbehavior would have me instantly kicked out, like a young Padawan asking Yoda for a snickers.

“Well, the same as her actually. Just wanted to know where to find the introductory level magical theory books,” I said warily, knowing about as much about how to deal with hate-at-first-sight as I did with it’s love variant.

She looked towards the direction the filly had gone, inclining her head, then gave me a stern gaze that showed no patience for youthful antics.

I gulped and went on my way, quickly reconsidering how many visits to the library I was going to make...

---

I couldn’t believe it. After all that time, how could I have not seen it!

Thousands of hours analyzing, studying the show relentlessly trying to understand and somehow I had completely missed it. So much time wasted on such affairs, and yet I had never made the connection...

An RPG. Equestrian combat and magic worked exactly like you’d expect an RPG about multicolored tiny horses to work.

Although saying it that way makes it more confusing than it really is. Let me go into detail.

First, you might be slightly confused as to why earth ponies and pegasi were forced to study Magical Theory along with the unicorns at all, considering that the flying ponies had no need to understand the innate magic that allowed them to fly and ‘grounders’ obviously had no magic.

The explanation was simple; during our first year the teachers wanted the whole class to get to know one another, so they made it to where we shared all of our classes together, no matter the phenotype. Later on, the unicorns would have their own class for Spells and such, but at the beginner level this wasn’t necessary.

The reason it wasn’t necessary is the fact that Equestria was a goddamn RPG, hiding behind a facade of a ‘normal’ pony-world.

Certain spells could only be performed when a certain amount of study and practice was put into them, while others they were born with and later developed. This explained Sweetie Bell's ability to levitate small objects, but not large ones as she had not yet developed the basic innate unicorn levitation spell.

That was their lingo. I just called it levels for simplicity. Trust me, you have no idea how much technical jargon you have to wade through to get to these basic explanations, but hopefully you get a good understanding of what I’m dealing with...

Level 0: Ability to levitate small objects. The larger the object, the harder it becomes. Apparently, precision also improves with experience and age.

Level 1: A basic light spell that might as well be called ‘Lumos’, and a cutie mark spell for some, depending on the specific talent. Perhaps Rarity’s designing spells?

Level 2: Where we start getting into the actual learning. Consider this minor light shows ala Trixie, and the animation of objects so that they move on their own.

Level 3: The basic requirements for entrance into Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns; a basic laser beam (I know it’s a energy beam but laser reminds me of Star Wars ok?), and perhaps hatching a dragon egg…

Level 4: For the studious ponies! This is where the stuff starts getting scary. At this point, unicorns can lift up other ponies and animals and lock them in place with their magic. It also includes teleportation, which becomes more extenuating the farther away you’re going.

Level 5: Impressive stuff. Barriers and forcefields, Death Star style but nowhere near as large unless some serious power was being expended.

Level 6: Thankfully very few ponies reach this level, otherwise Equestria might be completely different… This includes time magic and gravity manipulation on a small scale.

Level 7: According to the book, at this point all but the most gifted unicorns hit their peak. This is hitting on the low, low end of Alicorn power though. Memory charms, summoning objects out of thin air and even controlling the bodies of multiples ponies.

Level 8: Only the strongest unicorns in history reach this level. Supposedly, Starswirl was the last to reach this point, but there’s some sort of crossed out name that starts with S alongside his. Regardless, at this point you can use limited age altering spells, advanced dark magic, creation of new magic and *shudder* gender-altering spells.

Level 9: Celestia-only, according to the book. Although I suspect that Luna could reach this too. Raising the sun/moon, teleportation to alternate magic planes (I need to investigate that…) and supposedly magic transfer, although I’d never seen that in the show.

That’s as far as the ‘official’ book goes, although some of the more obscure books I’d find later would mention a 10th level of power...Only reachable by the legendary Elements of Harmony and in the most hidden books, a being of Chaos who went unnamed but was obviously Discord.

Now that might not SEEM too bad, but oh boy is that wrong, because as soon as I started looking into the more detailed library history books, particularly the events and battles had before Hearth's’ Warming, I realized that equestrian combat actually worked like an RPG...To an extent.

---

See, anyone who’s played Skyrim will instantly tell you that going sneaky-assassin is the easiest way to save time and resources on healing potions, better armor and anything that isn’t a good dagger + stealth skills. However, nothing stops you from playing the barbarian two handed heavy-armor Nord who simply cut everything in his way to pieces, or even playing the wise wizard who simply obliterated anything in his path with gigantic Destruction spells, quicksaving the game afterwards to continue of course.

Equestria was the same, but for the phenotypes. In war, the pegasi are the assassins, the earth ponies are barbarians and the unicorns are mages. Ironically enough, considering her silent nature, Fluttershy would be a better assassin over the boisterous Rainbow Dash, speed or not.

Rock, paper, scissors.

Earth, unicorn, pegasi.

Pegasi blitz unicorns with raw speed before they get enough concentration to cast any defensive or offensive spells.

Unicorns simply annihilate earth ponies with area of effect attacks from long range or, if one-on-one, can hold them perfectly still using magic.

Earth ponies beat Pegasi because they have the endurance to take repeated hits, and all it took for them to win was to land a single solid blow.

This was the general case, of course. Exceptions were always there.

A particularly talented unicorn might be able to teleport away from a pegasus, or gather enough concentration to hold them in place with their magic.

An incredibly fast pegasus might simply never be hit by an earth pony, no matter how many blows they have to land to put them down…

But an incredibly strong earth pony couldn’t make any difference against a unicorn, specially one-on-one, and a pegasus did always have the option of escaping a fight with an earth pony by flying out of range. It seemed I got the short end of the stick. Again.

Well, at least it was lucky that Equestria doesn’t see much combat or any sort of apocalyptic event every other week, otherwise that might have been an issue!

I was doomed…

Author's Note:

Sorry for the delay everyone! Been quite busy with college pushing me around, hopefully I get more time to write more soon! Just don't lose hope!

An important note: I did not come up with the idea for Unicorn magic being based on levels, that credit goes to AmberDust on the MLP Forums! Give it a check!
https://mlpforums.com/topic/118345-unicorn-magic/

Finally as always, any reviews, comments and suggestions are appreciated!

Comments

[I_am_XNN]

Supposedly, Starswirl was the last to reach this point, but there’s some sort of crossed out name that starts with S alongside his.

I think it's obvious who that is!

[g0tph0ne]

Me likey.

[PuppetXMaster]

8129415
it's not obvious to me....if it doesn't explain it in the story could you pm me and tell me please?

[LostArchivist]

Quite clever. I like this so far. It also means that someone's likely to confuse everyone resulting in them trying to figure out how an Earth Pony is casting spells...

Sorry, but unless it's Sombra...?

[Alondro]

8129415 Stan! That clever pony! I always knew good ol Stan would figure magic out!

[ChronoMitsurugi]

9617877
It was Stan?
Dammit, Steve lied to me.

[KvAT]

But an incredibly strong earth pony couldn’t make any difference against a unicorn, specially one-on-one, and a pegasus did always have the option of escaping a fight with an earth pony by flying out of range. It seemed I got the short end of the stick. Again.

Then don't just sit on your flank and begin inventing SAMs. Or at least anti-air catapults and magic shields.

[Schwabauer]

8441497
What other unicorn in the show had the same abilities at the level listens dn name started with s?
Sombra

[LoserkidUwU]

Level 8 : Only the strongest unicorns in history reach this level. Supposedly, Starswirl was the last to reach this point, but there’s some sort of crossed out name that starts with S alongside his. Regardless, at this point you can use limited age altering spells, advanced dark magic, creation of new magic and *shudder* gender-altering spells.

Sombra