Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

FoME's Quantifiably Mad (gapty's "Overpowered")

Author's Note:

[Sci-Fi][Slice of Life][Overthinking]

This is an interquel for gapty's Overpowered (2,069 words, [Sci-Fi][Slice of Life])

OVERSUMMARIZED: Human Twilight's attempts to study magical anomalies in the girls goes oddly awry. In the process, she develops a notification system.

“Hey, Twilight.”

In another context, hearing that from a girl in a leather jacket might be terrifying. In this case, Twilight just turned from her locker and smiled. “Yes, Sunset?”

“Had a question about this. Call it professional interest.” Sunset held out her phone, open to her texts.

Your geode’s power is now 180
Please log your current action for analysis

Twilight furrowed her brow as she tried to find the issue. “The test message from the geode scanner? I thought I told you about that.”

“You did, but a hundred eighty what?”

That got an owlish blink as Twilight turned her attention back to Sunset. “What?”

“Units, Twilight.” Sunset spared one last frown at her phone before putting it back in a jacket pocket. “A bare number doesn’t tell me much, and I don’t think you’re using thaums.”

“Thaums being?”

“One is the amount of magic needed to exert a telekinetic force that can lift one hoofweight one ponylength in one second.” Sunset rattled that off at a familiar, rapid cadence that spoke of memorizing it years ago.

“Ah. A fair assumption.” Twilight looked away as she thought about the kludge behind the numbers. “I admit, I took the High Farrier route and just used previous data to set a baseline.”

“What previous data?”

“The spectrocapacitor I had at the Friendship Games saved its readings to the cloud. Up until Midnight Sparkle, anyway.” Twilight cleared her throat, staring at her shoes. “Turns out getting consumed by my own unfettered curiosity didn’t do any favors to the wireless connection.”

A hand on her shoulder got her to look back up to Sunset’s understanding smile. “Yeah, my phone was fried after the Fall Formal.”

They both just grinned for a moment, ignoring any demonic cackling in the backs of their heads. “Anyway, I used the energy readings from the others—I didn’t know enough to know how to separate the portal’s energy from yours—averaged them out, and used that as one hundred.” Twilight shrugged. “Not terribly scientific, but we’re on the frontier here.”

“Good enough for me. One hundred eighty Sparkles it is.”

After a few Rarity-like sputters, Twilight got out, “I-I mean, I was just thinking of them as arbitrary magic units. Sure, I’ve always wanted a unit named after me, but this felt a little self-congratulatory.”

Sunset smirked. “You’re not just getting useful data about energy that shouldn’t exist in this world, you’re doing better than the mare who majored in it. I’d say you’ve earned it.”

“That’s… nice of you to say.” Going by how her face was heating up, Twilight wasn’t many more bits of praise away from bursting into flames.

“I mean it.” Sunset shrugged. “But hey, if you’re worried about them falling out of use when something better comes along, we can call them Shimmers.”

Twilight just stared at her, mood thoroughly killed.

After a moment, Sunset cleared her throat and looked away. “Or not. AMUs work.”

“This is far from the first time you’ve made that kind of self-deprecating joke,” said Twilight. “I know I’m not anyone’s first choice for this kind of conversation, but… do you want to talk about your feelings regarding my counterpart?”

“Um… Well…” Sunset backed away a step, eyes darting about the hallway. "Hey, look at my wrist! Good talk!” She didn’t quite run away, but she certainly walked with considerable vigor.

Twilight sighed. “Right, going to bump that one up the priority queue…”

Comments

[Forcalor]

Oh wow, that is the awesome idea and execution!
Now I'll just hope that one of my works appear here someday 😁

[UrsaMajor]

Is High Farrier a reference I'm missing?

[FanOfMostEverything]

11879481
Farenheit. Bit of a stretch, but I was able to work in a layer of horsepun.