The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

The Flavors Of Harmony

With a crack, Valey flew across the room, slamming into an empty tank and grunting. "Ow..."

"As much as I admire your dedication, I'm going to have to ask you to stop," Anemone requested, adjusting her glasses. "Before you prove yourself to be more durable than this room."

"But I almost had it..." Valey staggered to her hooves, rubbing her shoulder muscles and picking back up her hammer. The dark crystals across from her were completely unfazed.

"It's going to take something magical to remove them," Shinespark interrupted. "What have you tried before we got here?"

"Hitting it," Anemone admitted. "Mostly I've been cleaning up the spill and adjusting pipes so this room is temporarily decommissioned. The plan was to disassemble the tank around it, then just carry it out. It should fit in the elevator."

Starlight frowned at the crystals, doing her part to come up with a fix. "Normal moon glass melts when you give it harmony," she remarked. "But if you don't know what our harmony means, then that doesn't help. And this isn't normal moon glass." She glanced over at Valey. "How fragile is normal moon glass?"

"I haven't done a whole lot of testing." Valey shrugged. "I mean, it sure looks breakable. Back a long time ago, I thought the stuff would literally break if you dropped it. But who actually knows?"

"Either way, this isn't moon glass," Nyala pointed out.

Starlight hummed in concentration. She wasn't certain which emotion it was, but if these crystals were made of emotion... didn't it stand to reason they'd need something that could damage that?

"Where did they come from?" Starlight asked, thinking. "Did they just appear out of nowhere, or did the heart or the ether turn into them?"

Anemone bit her lip. "I was watching a pressure gauge when it happened."

"Can we bring down another heart and give it just a drop?" Starlight suggested.

"And risk making another of these?" Nyala looked skeptical.

Starlight shook her head. "This one was in a tank. Maybe we could learn something about how it works if we gave it only a tiny bit."

"Sound reasoning," Sea Star advised. "I'll bring another."

As the professor left, Nyala rubbed the side of her head. "I have a question. These rooms are suspended in water because you said water is a harmonic insulator, right? So how does your ship work? Wouldn't it be completely insulated by being underwater? If I'm following, the lifestream should have no effect whatsoever there."

Anemone looked as if she had been asked a question she really didn't want to answer. "That's... complicated," she admitted. "Imagine putting salt in water. It dissolves, right? But then it's very difficult to get your salt back unless you let all the water evaporate away. So if you have a wall of water and want to get a pinch of salt to the other side... it won't stop you from putting it in, but you can't just get it back out."

"So it dissolves?" Nyala asked. "Interesting."

"Effectively," Anemone replied. "It's not entirely the same, but many of the rules apply. You can also completely saturate water with it. Because rock is a conductor and we have a sheet of water between these rooms and the rock, the water is fully saturated and won't absorb any more ether from the rocks themselves. Regardless, being in these rooms or the Arc Manta prevents liquid ether itself from reaching us, but doesn't stop any of the reactions we try to measure in ponies from being near it. Does that make sense?"

Starlight was only half paying attention. The only thing she particularly cared about was the black crystal that apparently needed to be removed for them to do anything else with their day. "So does that thing get dissolved?" she asked, fairly certain the answer was no.

Anemone shook her head.

"Maybe you can burn it?" Nyala guessed.

Eventually, Sea Star returned carrying another windigo heart and a glass vial. "Ether," she said, setting the vial down. "I imagine you already know the rules about how to handle it. Experiment away."

"Rules?" Nyala asked.

Starlight had already taken the vial in her mouth, opting not to use her horn even though down here, it might have been safe. It was lighter than she expected, and filled with a liquid that was somehow more colorless than water, without any sort of smell. She pushed the windigo heart onto a table, lifted the vial, and dripped a drop onto the sphere's surface, stepping back quickly to see what would happen.

The ether landed. At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then the heart's core glowed faintly, and the drop of liquid sizzled and started to turn black. After a few seconds, the ether crystallized in a flash, leaving a tiny, dark faceted spike on the surface of the ball.

"Hmm." Anemone stared at it.

Valey glanced back at the bigger crystals. "So this stuff was originally ether, and the heart turned it into something else. Maybe there's a way or something to turn it back?"

"...Maybe it's ambition," Nyala suggested.

Everyone looked at her.

Nyala gave Valey a look in return. "Didn't you pay any attention when I tried teaching you about the Church of the Nine Virtues?"

"What, like eight years ago?" Valey rubbed an ear. "I might have had some memories of Icereach that were stronger than others. Why?"

"Well, I'd guess these crystals either represent wrath or ambition," Nyala continued. "Since wrath is what windigoes represented, and ambition is inverted hope... Hope for yourself, not for others. But they have teachings on many ideals."

Anemone looked intrigued. "You have a religion based around these substances?"

"Ether and moon glass?" Nyala shook her head. "No. Based around ideals. But maybe it's founded on something relating to these."

"As cool as that is..." Valey rubbed her neck. "You think it's got anything that could bring us closer to getting rid of this stuff?"

"I could always try hitting it with my sword," Starlight suggested.

Anemone glanced at her. "I... was going to say force clearly doesn't work, but what are you doing with a sword? Where are you even keeping it?"

Starlight nudged her saddlebags.

Valey shrugged. "Yeah, sure, why don't you give it a try? Not like we've got any better ideas."

Starlight withdrew the sword, feeling incredibly self-conscious with the professor and Anemone watching but figuring they were better than a crowd. It was currently shifted into a dagger so as to fit in her bags, and she held it in her teeth, tapping the hilt against her cutie mark. The runes around her barrel activated with a flare of light, linking to a similar circle around the dagger's handle and letting it float on its own power.

Anemone and Sea Star stared as the dagger transformed into its full form, the metal flowing and growing in response to Starlight's will. Anemone's glasses slid halfway down her muzzle. "What kind of magic artifact is that? I am not familiar with anything like this."

"I don't know. I found it somewhere." Starlight stared at the crystals... and then lifted up the black blade and dropped it on them like a knife.

The sword didn't usually have issues cutting through physical objects, slicing them like thin air. Against the crystals, it met resistance... but the resistance was momentary. Starlight cleaved the eruption in half, the crystals splitting instantaneously once they broke with a metallic ring and a flash of light. For a moment, the lights in the room flickered wildly, and Nyala dove for cover.

"What was that!?" Professor Sea Star stared around in surprise.

It was probably a power fluctuation, Starlight figured, more interested in the crystals. As she watched, leaning closer, the two severed halves of the protrusion slowly glowed gray... and then decayed away from the sword stroke outwards, crumbling into flakes of ash until they were nothing but gray piles and a dull, unscathed windigo heart.

It was that kind of ash.

"What happened to the light?" Anemone also jumped in concern, inspecting the walls one by one. "All the light here is natural, from the rocks," she said over her shoulder for everyone else's benefit. "It never changes. Did you do something to everything down here?"

Starlight was still staring at the ash, the same as she had seen after batponies were taken by her sword. "No. I just cleaned up your crystal problem."

Shinespark wandered over. "Well, if those crystals were made from ether, it stands to reason they were still connected somehow to the rest of this place."

Starlight started staring at her sword again.

"What is that?" Anemone repeated. "Whatever you just did had a big effect on this place..."

"Beats me." Valey stepped in. "Honestly, though, this is how we do science up north. You guys are talking all about classifications of harmony and making sure we have the same words for stuff, and up there we just think outside the box, try stuff that has to do with other stuff, and sometimes it works. You'd probably be offended by how unprofessionally we first got our ship in the air."

"But you just..." Anemone's hoof trembled. "We had no understanding of that thing's chemical properties, knew it was resistant to everything, thought we were going to have to synthesize some sort of acid to dissolve it, and you were all, 'Oh, I have a thing in my saddlebags that might do the trick! Hey, it worked!' How do you even do that!?"

Valey shrugged, patting Starlight's back reassuringly. "That's how we roll."

Anemone made a face. "That's cheating."

"It gets results!" Valey retorted. "When you've got an apocalypse seconds away, you don't have time to study and learn every little thing. No offense to everything we were doing earlier, trying to wrap our brains around things, but what we do? It works. And that's why we do it."

Starlight's ears fell. "You mean you try everything you can think of, and then I do something and it works just because."

Valey instantly winced. "Okay, don't go there?"

Sea Star suddenly looked curious. "You have a talent for things you do simply working?"

"No!" Starlight protested. "I mean... maybe. I don't want one. I don't like thinking about it..."

Sea Star gave Valey a concerned look. Valey shrugged.

Starlight exhaled, looking at the heap of ash. There was actually quite a lot of it, almost a dozen dead sarosians' worth. "So if you like studying and knowing things, do you know what this is?"

The scientists came over and inspected it. "That's a state of ether," Sea Star quickly surmised, floating over one of the flakes with her horn and setting it on her tongue. "Mmm. Definitely ether. It's an unusual state with different properties. Usually, we only see it by putting a powerful mana electrode inside an ether tank and running extreme quantities of energy through it, but it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't and we haven't been able to isolate why."

"Did you just eat that?" Shinespark squinted. "That was... formerly the crystal..."

"And you call us risky and unscientific," Valey tsk'd, shaking her head. "I suppose you tried to lick the black crystals, too."

"Actually, I did," Anemone replied. "They tasted terrible."

Everyone stared at her.

"The properties of tasting or ingesting ether have been well-documented since we were building this place, when one of the workers fell into the lifestream in an accident," Sea Star said, taking a step forward. "It's not poisonous."

Valey rolled her eyes. "Nah, not poisonous, it just puts you to sleep, unless you're me, in which case it's really, really amazing and makes you never want to leave."

Sea Star's eyes widened slightly. "You've eaten it yourself!?"

"Uhh..." Valey paused mid-step. "You say that like it's a really bad thing?"

"Oh, no, I'm merely surprised you're here to tell the tale." Sea Star shrugged. "To batponies, we discovered ether is extremely addictive. It also has powerful medicinal properties and can act as sustenance, but if you found your way to a source, I wouldn't have expected you to ever care to leave."

Valey squinted. "Okay, yeah, I'll admit I maybe really liked it a lot. But not quite enough to stay down there forever, you know?"

Starlight cleared her throat. "So do you want me to do anything with this pile of ash?"

Anemone shook her head. "We'll find a way to package it. It's useful for experiments since it's hard to get and behaves slightly differently from liquid ether... The flakes aren't addictive, to use an example we were just talking about."

Valey shuddered. "Yeah, I'd hope they aren't. You realize those things are what batponies are made of, right?"

Once again, both scientists stared.

"That sword." Valey pointed at Starlight's floating blade. "When it kills us, it turns us into... that. Like, poof. We're dust and ash." She scratched her chin. "Hey, if that stuff is like some raw form of ether, and those black crystals were made from it, and so are we, maybe that sword just works by reverting the stuff back to its original form? That kinda makes sense, right?"

Anemone held up the second heart, the one still with a tiny black spike on the side. "Makes me all the more curious to research what this is. I'd like to know more about that sword, too."

Starlight cleared her throat. "Or, you could say that since all your problems are solved, you could put the hearts in a box and not let them affect anyone and we could all live with what we don't know and be happy that we're safe."

Professor Sea Star sighed. "Except that we tried that, and only brought one down here in the first place because there was still something interfering with our readings. We suspected we weren't sealing them properly... though now I'm strongly imagining you and your friends are just loaded down with a storm of these artifacts and we've barely seen the first wave."

Starlight glanced at her sword. "You think this is affecting anyone's minds too?"

"We could take it up top, do some tests and find out," Anemone suggested.

"...You know what?" Valey shrugged. "Sure, why not? You guys are finished down here, after all. And you probably owe us for solving your problems for you?"

Anemone sighed. "What are you hoping for?"

Valey grinned. "That gravity manipulator you were talking about. It wouldn't happen to let ponies go inside, would it?"

Instantly, Anemone brightened. "And if it did?"

Valey patted Shinespark's back. "Got a friend here who really misses the sky. I wanna see her be weightless again."

"I think you're making a bigger deal of this than necessary," Shinespark mumbled. "It's not very important to me."

Valey blew a raspberry. "Uh huh. And what actually is? We gotta get you doing stuff you enjoy, girl. Come on, she just said we could play with it!"

"I didn't say it was a toy." Anemone chuckled.

"Actually?" Valey raised an eyebrow. "You definitely did. When we first met? Kinmari's most expensive toy, you called it. And I wanna play."

Anemone blinked. "Oops. So I did! Alright, you got me, it's a toy. But I think it does a little more than you're expecting. Shall we go up and see it?"

"Yeah!" Valey cheered, pushing Shinespark along.

Shinespark frowned and resisted. "Where's Nyala? I haven't seen her since the crystal broke."

Valey blinked. "Wow, good question. She was right under that table a moment ago..."

"Is she gone?"

"I'm right here," Nyala whispered, sticking her head around the corner from the corridor to the next room. Her mane was slightly askew, and she had a haunted look in her eyes.

"...You don't look so good," Professor Sea Star remarked. "What happened?"

Nyala's ears fell. "Sorry. Something happened just there that I have a history with. Nerves. This place is making me nervous, can we go back to the surface now?"

Valey glanced quizzically at her. "That whole thing with the church you were talking about?"

Nyala nodded mutely.

"Yeah, let's go." Valey stood up and took charge, beckoning everyone along. "This is a place for folks who really want to study things I don't think mortals have any reason they need to know. Let's go do happy, carefree things."

Starlight bounded thankfully after her, shrinking and stowing her sword on her way out once again, the ambient lighting staying stable behind her.

Comments

[Phoenix Kitten]

The sword does deaden emotions, if the crystals are just raw physical emotion, then it makes sense the sword would work like that on it.
Oh boy! Anemone is gonna get voluntarily stabbed I bet!

[Oberth Effect]

If ether dissolves in water, I wonder what would happen if one of the hearts were to be dropped into the ocean. Is the heart itself catalyzing some kind of reaction from the ether, or vice versa?

I'm inclined to think that lights flickering is the power, just not in the way Starlight may think. If the lights come from the rock, then it's entirely possible that the light is the lifestream itself, or at least ether. If the crystallized ether is still connected with the lifestream as Shinespark mentioned, perhaps it "feels" and reacts to the loneliness from Starlight's sword. IIRC, bat ponies were made from hope, so if their reaction to the sword is any indication of how the lifestream would react it's probably best that the sword remain as far away as possible. Perhaps Nyala would have some clue as to why that particular reaction?

I never realized that pool thing back in Ironridge was the lifestream. I don't remember if Valey knew this at the time. I wonder why Valey seems to react differently to it. Maybe it's because she was created instead of born, or maybe because her cutie mark is an artifice? Yet another thing to keep in mind if/when I reread this...

[Czar_Yoshi]

9989220
Valey reacts differently because she's a batpone.

[Oberth Effect]

9990262

I meant compared to other batponies. But I guess it could be similar to how different people react differently to different drugs.

[Hap]

If the crystals are really ambition, then it makes sense that a sword made of despair would destroy them

[Alchemik]

I'm having serious concerns about that blade's intended purpose if it was intentionally made what it is.

[Venlinelle]

Starlight's ears fell. "You mean you try everything you can think of, and then I do something and it works just because."

Starlight, even if you don’t like it, we love you for it.

I completely forgot about the weird goop in the crystal palace back in Ironridge. It’s been a while.