The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

Curiosity Killed The Scientist

"Is that moon glass!?" Valey pointed a shocked hoof at the damaged tank, black crystal spokes poking out from the surface and through cracks in the sides.

"That's your name for it?" Anemone had a mop, diligently cleaning spilled liquid from the cracked tank. "Anyway, funny seeing you here..."

"What did you do?" Shinespark asked, staring at the damage.

Professor Sea Star shrugged, stepping back towards the exit. "That's your problem to explain. I'll be seeing if our readings have miraculously changed over the weekend..."

Anemone slumped, taking a lab stool next to an intact tank and seating herself. "Friends, I'm guessing?" She glanced between Shinespark, Starlight and Nyala.

Valey frowned. "Came to see if you wanted to hang out. I guess these things are trouble no matter which side of the mountains we're on, though... What did you do?"

"Tried submerging it in an ether bath," Anemone replied. "We pipe it up from down below so we can experiment with it. Ether is intensely harmonic, so I thought it might counteract and neutralize the heart's passive effect."

Valey raised an eyebrow. "And you didn't think to just drip a little on first to see if it would go bad instead of tossing in the whole thing?"

Anemone shook her head. "We have splash protocol. First we put it in a tank of running water, then switch the water feed over to ether to flush the tank and refill it. Look, before we point hooves, have you seen this before and do you know how to clean it up? I've tried a crowbar and these crystals are unbreakable."

"Uhh..." Valey glanced at Nyala. "The only thing I've ever seen like it is that there are ways to liquify this stuff and inject it into the hearts, and that causes them to explode with magical ice..." She frowned, stepped closer, sniffed it and raised a hoof.

Anemone looked at her skeptically. "You're going for the touch test already? I've only handled it with gloves."

Valey shrugged. "I have a thing that gives me a good idea of whether touching something will kill me." Then she wound up and punched the black crystals as hard as she could. "OW bananas!"

She jumped back, shaking her hoof and holding it, then glanced around at Starlight, Shinespark and Nyala. "Ow."

"If that's freshly created, it's empty," Shinespark warned. "Did you really just touch it because you felt like it?"

"I knew it wasn't gonna kill me..." Valey repeated, nursing her hoof and tapping her cutie mark with her tail. "Bananas, though. Either touching moon glass is different for me now, or..." She rubbed the hoof against her pendant. "Or that stuff isn't actually moon glass. Honestly felt more like the ice from the explosion, only turned up to a million."

Nyala grimaced. "Forgive me if I don't want to test it myself."

"Well, if you can touch it..." Shinespark reached out a hoof of her own, tapped it and frowned. "It's cold."

Anemone watched them with stupefied fascination. "If this is how you do science in the north, how are you not all dead?"

Valey's eyes shifted to Shinespark. "Technically, she's the only one of us who hasn't been dead at some point or another, and that might even be a technicality depending on your beliefs about cutie marks. It happens. You just gotta know enough science and be friends with enough gods to come back."

Anemone was still fascinated, but now equally disturbed.

"This thing feels..." Valey held a hoof just a hair off the crystals again. "Have you ever wondered what it would feel like if a rock hated you? This would be it."

Starlight's ears twitched.

"No, that's not it," Valey grumbled, thinking. "It's more like... bah, how do I put this into words? I just get this feeling."

"I'll touch it," Starlight volunteered. "I don't think I can get glassed anymore..." She glanced at her own cutie mark. "Pull me off if something bad happens."

"Roger." Valey nodded.

Tentatively, Starlight reached for it herself. She made contact, expecting the familiar grabbing sensation of loneliness given physical form, a rock that wanted to take her and keep her and never let her go. Instead, a cold apathy stung her hoof, like the substance was actively pushing her away. It wasn't grabbing, it was rejecting, and she imagined it might do it more violently if she attacked it like Valey.

"I don't think it's moon glass," she agreed, pulling her hoof back as well. "It looks the same, but it feels completely different."

Anemone watched her with interest. "So you haven't seen this before, but you've seen enough that you have ideas?"

Valey slowly frowned. "So real quick: how much do you guys know about this stuff?" She tapped the pendant on her chest. "The professor recognized it on me, and I'm pretty sure she knew what it does to bats. But do you know how and why?"

"The glass from the meteor?" Anemone asked. "Classified hazardous material. The only piece I'm aware of on the island is a chunk in Doctor Lost World's collection. The archipelago is too small to have received any when it fell. Recently, though, there's been a debate about what to do with it now that we have the Arc Manta and can feasibly harvest the pieces that fell into the sea. It hasn't been extensively studied, as far as I know."

"Moon glass is loneliness in physical form," Starlight cut in. "Just like ether is hope in physical form. Maybe this new crystal is some other emotion."

Anemone stared at her as if she had just invented the wheel. "Really? That's what your moon glass is?"

Starlight nodded.

"But that makes..." Anemone's face twisted in thought. "Hey! Starfish!"

She charged away, managing not to stumble despite the clunky safety suit that covered her body and legs. Valey and Starlight blinked at each other.

"I think you told them something they didn't know," Nyala sighed.

"Is that bad?" Valey raised an eyebrow. "We do need them to lock these hearts up and disable them so they're not doing bad things to us and our friends, you know."

"I just..." Nyala swallowed. "You heard what they said about what they were using ether for, right? Rocket fuel?"

Valey slowly nodded. "Yeah...?"

"If this is the bottom of the world," Nyala said, "then it's completely built on a sheet of ether. Which makes it the world's foundation, and sort of like the world's blood. They even said rock is a conductor, like how blood moves through our bodies. Do you really think that's something that should be experimented with?"

Shinespark blinked hard. "Or placed on something to be fired into space. If any left the world, would it lose it for good? If this lifestream stretches beneath the entire world, there's a lot of it, but once you find a way to extract and use it..."

"I meant more on a spiritual level," Nyala corrected. "But that too."

Valey's jaw sat slightly open. "Alright, so scientists are messing with things that maybe should be left alone. Pessimistic solution: what else is new? Like actually seriously, what are we gonna do about it? Because these dudes are friendly and likely not evil and I don't wanna mess with that."

"There are places in Icereach I never showed you," Nyala replied. "Do you remember when I told you the story of the first casualty?"

"The first bat to get glassed, back when they were using hearts to remove cutie marks forty years ago and the meteor hadn't even fallen yet?" Valey raised an eyebrow. "I'm pretty sure I do. I told it all to Amber, and in bits and pieces to everyone else."

Nyala nodded. "After the research was decommissioned, I told you the scientists sealed the remaining windigo hearts in a cave in the deepest part of the city. Remember?"

Valey blinked. "The deepest... Wait, you mean this deep? I thought you just meant regular deep, deep. Is that what you're getting at?"

Again, Nyala nodded. "Icereach has always been a cave complex. Many of the underground rooms we stayed in were originally caves that were sculpted into buildings, rather than digging whole rooms from scratch." She glanced at everyone, making sure they were following too. "And there were a lot of unexplored areas. But if you went as far down as you could go? The caves were connected to the very bottom. And they left the hearts there and then blocked off the way down up near the top."

Valey listened raptly. "Where are you going with this?"

"After Navarre and his team unsealed the caves and reclaimed the windigo hearts, they didn't seal them again," Nyala replied. "You and I... the old you... went to explore them for fun. It had been thirty years, and everyone near the surface had either forgotten their significance or had their memories tarnished by what had happened and what the caves were used to store. But we found guidelines and a trail to the bottom. Ponies used to go there a lot, it turns out."

She smiled in remembrance, continuing. "At the bottom... there was a holy place. We found carvings and writing, and learned how our people had been going there for thousands of years to pay their respects to the world we live in. You could feel it in the air that the windigo hearts had been stored there, but it had been consecrated by so many centuries of care that it would be only a matter of time until it was like the hearts were never there. I believe the reason the hearts were stored there wasn't to keep them far away from ponies, but because the ponies of Icereach were trying to counteract them, too."

Nyala took a last breath before finishing. "No one else really rediscovered that place. We kept it as our secret, up until you... you know. But I can feel it in my hooves and wings how special it was. So now I have the chance to be this low again, but... this is a place where ponies are trying to figure out how to use the world, or making things like that." She pointed at the crystals. "They're not here to thank or appreciate it. It has none of the feel of the cave in Icereach. And that's why I don't like it here."

"...Bananas." Valey blinked. "How come you never showed me this?"

"That's a story for another time," Nyala replied. "It isn't important. What matters is that I don't like this, and maybe it's just me but I still don't."

"Huh." Valey hunched her shoulders. "Well, I'll grill them about it a bit for you. Now where are those goons?"

Anemone and Professor Sea Star turned out to already be on their way. "What's this I'm hearing about loneliness given physical form?" the professor demanded, an intense thirst for knowledge on her face.

"Hey, doc. Took your time," Valey greeted. "That's moon glass. You know, looks sorta like this except it fell from the sky?" She pointed at the cruelly-spiked explosion of crystal growth. "What's it to you?"

"...Fascinating." Sea Star stared at her for a moment. "And this is the same, then?" She pointed at the crystals.

"Maybe?" Starlight answered. "It looks the same, but I don't think it's loneliness."

Sea Star watched the group for a moment. "Knowledge share. Fill in the gaps in what we know?"

"Actually, we've got a question first." Valey grinned and leaned forward. Then her look turned serious. "This ether stuff is basically, like... the world's blood, or something? You definitely call it the lifestream. Give me all the reasons you've considered for why ponies maybe shouldn't do this."

Nyala looked grateful. Sea Star looked slightly caught off-guard. "We have an administrative ethics department..."

"Sure you do." Valey folded her hooves. "I just wanna know the kinds of things they thought about. You're a teacher, you like pop quizzes." She pointed a wing back at the crystals. "And just to be clear, I'm asking because something bad happened and it looks like you weren't one hundred percent ready."

Anemone stepped forward. "If you really want to know? That's part of why we're doing it. We don't know a lot about what can happen to the lifestream when you interact physically with it. But we have a lot of equipment to measure that, and the university decided it was far better for us to experiment on it, being fully able to stop if we detected something bad happening, than to let knowledge on it be pioneered by someone who might have other goals or just not care. If you want a true worst-case scenario, it's possible that were it to disappear entirely, either the world would literally crumble, or all life would lose the ability to reproduce and the world would be extinct within a generation. There are millions of scenarios we could consider that are less dire than those two, as well. The point is that this has never been studied before within our section of the world, and it's best if ground is broken by someone responsible enough to care."

Valey sat back and blinked, then glanced at Nyala. "If you guys have that kind of integrity, yeah, I'd say that's a pretty decent answer."

Nyala didn't look quite appeased.

"What she said is correct," Sea Star cut in. "I'd appreciate shifting our focus back to the topic at hoof, though. You were saying this thing may still be a type of harmony?"

Starlight glanced at the crystal and made a face. "There's nothing harmonic about that thing."

Sea Star stared at her. "But you said it was emotion given physical form?"

Valey tilted her head. "Yeah? What's that have to do with harmony?"

"This," Sea Star sighed, "is why I was afraid we might have the same names for different things. Seat yourselves and listen."

Everyone listened, and the professor began. "Harmony, simply put, is a thing, for lack of a better word, that has a dual nature as substance and concept. Does that make a lick of sense to any of you?"

Valey and Nyala both looked confused, but Starlight nodded. "Like how ether is hope, but you can touch it."

"Exactly," Sea Star praised. "There are a lot of categories it can be broken up into, but in essence it is a bridge material between the physical world and our minds, thoughts, and emotions. Some have theorized that this implies the world may exist in two distinct planes, our physical one and another mental or emotional one, with harmony acting as a link between them, but there is no way to test this hypothesis. Regardless, harmony acts as a mechanism by which thinking creatures can conform the world around them to their wills."

"Uhh..." Valey frowned, then pushed a stool. "I just willed that stool to move, and then conformed it to my will. Harmony?"

"Yes," the professor replied. "Because you are a harmonic life form. In metaphysical terms, your body is such a vessel by which you can act upon the world. This is why life and harmony are so closely related."

Valey blinked.

"As for exactly how it's categorized and what subtypes exist, I'm afraid I can't tell you," Sea Star continued. "Because if you're serious about this, there's a good chance some of our theories need updating and are wrong."

Starlight sat stoically through the speech. None of this sounded too different from what she had heard from the flame of love at Garsheeva's crystal palace... Maybe she hadn't shared as much with her friends as she thought she had. Probably because of Chrysalis.

"Well, good to know we're talking about completely different things," Valey sighed. "So your harmony is different from the stuff we find in the crystal palaces. Honestly, the reason we have these windigo hearts in the first place is because they act as batteries for that, so I'm a little surprised they don't just suck the ether up."

Anemone adjusted her glasses. "Say more about these crystal palaces?"

Valey shrugged. "They're palaces, and this might blow your minds but they're made of crystal. Look, if you wanna have an extended talk about this, that's great, but I think my friends are bored..."

"You have other plans?" Sea Star asked, glancing at a clock.

Valey patted her flank. "Someone was curious about the workings of a certain butt brand. And I kinda wanted to get the scoop on a certain gravity machine. Curiosity for curiosity, you know?"

Anemone stared longingly at Valey's cutie mark. "...Alas, a certain someone else is too busy cleaning up a lab to participate. If any of your brains have ideas on how to get rid of these, it's in all of our best interests to help me."

"Ah, bananas." Valey got to her hooves. "Someone get me a hammer. If hitting it hard didn't work, let's try hitting it harder."

Comments

[Phoenix Kitten]

Valey applying the Goku method.
If it doesn't break, try hitting it harder, if that doesn't work, hit it harder together.

[Oberth Effect]

Don't scare me with a chapter title like that!

Hrm, yet another surprise. Perhaps there's a class of materials that are crystallized opposites of harmonic emotions? Crystallized loneliness, and now crystallized... anger? Jealousy? The other feelings that fill windigoes that Puddles listed that I can't remember?

So it turns out Nyala did know something. And it leads to some interesting questions -- For instance, if the lifestream (or areas near it) can pick up on emotions in the vicinity over a long period of time, what happens if you bring an extremely concentrated negative emotion near it? The windigo hearts doing the equivalent of giving the lifestream blood poisoning is a pretty bad consequence. I wonder if ponies other than Nyala could pick up on those emotions, too. And whether she was feeling some of those emotions when descending to the lab.

"We should study it because other people could do worse" is a valid reason to study the lifestream, but it depends extremely heavily on trust, and the cost-benefit analysis is extremely tricky when you're working with something both potentially vital to the world's functioning and more or less completely unknown. I think Nyala is right to be at least somewhat skeptical, but I can also understand why the scientists want to study it.

And it turns out "harmony" has a subtly different meaning here. Guess this means I should go back and reread the chapters since arriving at KMCA, although I'll probably just put it off and miss a hint somewhere.

[Czar_Yoshi]

9987841
Puddles' chapter, if you were looking for it.

since arriving at KMCA

[Oberth Effect]

9988529

Hem, so it seems there are a few parts to the Windigoes:

[ol] The emotion they represent, i.e., the anger you get when you can’t have something and don’t get it (the “cosmic temper tantrum” The command to create disharmony among ponies Anger at their situation
[/ol]

Based on Starlight’s description that the new moon glass feels more like apathy/rejection, I’m not sure it’s based on Windigo feelings unless it’s more like the apathy/rejection of depression caused by a miserable existence (unless I’m missing something, obviously).

And are you telling me I need to reread even further back?

[Venlinelle]

". Some have theorized that this implies the world may exist in two distinct planes, our physical one and another mental or emotional one, with harmony acting as a link between them, but there is no way to test this hypothesis."

I’m going to guess that the other plane is where Luna goes between dreams (like the hall of doors we see in Bloom and Gloom), and where Celestia goes with Twilight after her ascension.