Source Incantations: Debugging
When she was younger, Twilight had bemoaned weekends. Why did they have to stick two solid days of not-studying in between every blissful five days of studying? But now that she was Headmare of the School of Friendship, she understood: weekends weren’t for the students. They were for the teachers.
It was like clockwork: every week, no matter how much she worked, little issues kept slowly accumulating on Twilight’s desk, only to be flushed out on the weekend. Then she could spend the rest of the weekend doing something relaxing, like brushing up on quantum chromodynamics. Once those two days were over, back to the old grind. As satisfying as educating Equestria and beyond on friendship was, she needed a break every now and then, so long as “now and then” meant “five days”.
This Saturday had been light on work, and Twilight had been able to get it all polished off before noon. After swinging by the front door to pick up her mail, she moseyed over to the dining room to get something, anything, to eat for lunch. Starlight was already there, finishing off a peanut butter sandwich. Seeing Twilight with the mail, she asked, “Anything interesting today?”
“Maybe.” Twilight sifted through the mail, tossing each item into one of two piles or an incinerator spell. “Bill…” Pile 1. “Bill… Personal…” Pile 2. “Junk…” Fwoosh. “Junk… Petition… Personal… Personal — oh, from Princess Luna!… Junk… Bill… Junk. Now, then…” She grabbed the letter she’d said was from Luna, a pristine scroll with an embossed seal of a crescent moon.
“Think it’s important?” Starlight asked.
“Probably not. Otherwise, she’d have sent it through Spike.” Twilight unrolled the scroll and began reading.
Ten seconds later, her high-pitched squeal of glee had caused serious damage to the castle’s crystalline structure.
“So what’d it say?” Starlight asked once they’d repaired all the chalices.
“Remember Moondog?” Twilight asked. “Luna — her and Moondog both, actually — they want to know if we’d like to study it, find out what makes it tick. It’d be a great learning experience and would further our knowledge in golemancy, in addition to-”
“You don’t need to justify it to me,” Starlight said, “I know you’re just looking for an excuse to look into new magic.”
“Yes yes yes yes yes!” Twilight squealed shamelessly. “Would you like to help? I know you two weren’t on the greatest of terms last time, but-”
“We’ve made up,” said Starlight. “Mostly. I’d be happy to help, and if Moondog doesn’t want me around, I can leave.”
“Great! I was thinking maybe we should have at least one other pony to bounce ideas off of.”
“Star Swirl, right?”
Twilight shook her head like her neck had rusted and it was taking an effort. When her next word came out, it was beyond strained. “Nnnnnnno.” She gasped. “He’s smart, but he’s still not completely up-to-date on modern magic. We’d spend more time explaining stuff to him than doing any learning of our own.” She looked up and tapped her chin. “How about Sunburst? He’s smart.”
“This sounds like it’d be right up his alley,” Starlight said, nodding. “Let’s write him a letter.”
Sunburst,
As you are probably aware, in recent years, Princess Luna has designed an arcane construct known as Moondog to assist her in protecting the dream realm. Due to circumstances outside of her control, she lacks complete knowledge of its inner workings, and so has personally extended an offer for me to study it more in-depth than she has time for. Starlight is already assisting me, and I was wondering if you’d be interested in participating as well.
Twilight Sparkle
Twilight,
Thank you for the offer, but I’m afraid I’m too wrapped up in my own studies and work to take you up on it. Flurry Heart is going through a “phase” and Cadance and Shining need all the help they can get.
Sunburst
“Three days,” Twilight grumbled. “Three days of waiting, just for that.”
“You’re doing it wrong,” said Starlight. “You’re making it sound too official and boring. Here.”
Sunburst,
How’d you like to study an oneiroturgic golem with me and Twilight? Princess Luna will sponsor it.
Starlight
Starlight,
WOULD I?
Sunburst
P.S. That’s a yes. Could you send me the details?
Starlight smirked at Twilight. “See? Easy peasy.”
“Grumble grumble stupid grumble,” muttered Twilight. “You write a letter to him. I’ll respond to Luna and we can get this set up.”
Normally, when she was anticipating something, Twilight had a hard time falling asleep the night before. Okay, no problem. She’d be a bit tired the next day, but that’d be offset by her own excitement. More of a problem when falling asleep was required for what she was anticipating.
Luna had said Moondog would gather them all into a shared dream for the first stage of the study. Twilight and Starlight had brushed up on what little dream magic they remembered, and now the only thing left to do was fall asleep, which was proving annoyingly difficult. Twilight’s heart was racing, new thoughts danced through her head every few seconds, she’d done that thing where you almost fall asleep only to twitch like you’re falling and wake back up again (and done it twice!), and she was generally too excited to be sleepy.
She needed a glass of warm milk. Warm chocolate milk. (She was a princess! She was allowed to indulge!) Twilight loped out of bed, staggered up to the dining room, and squinted into the fridge, looking for chocolate milk. Sadly, no matter how much she looked, Twilight couldn’t find it behind the dimensional portal. That was really beginning to smell; shouldn’t they get rid of it? Tomorrow. Twilight closed the door and turned to head back-
…Waaaaiiiit…
Twilight ran back to the fridge and pulled it open. Yep. Dimensional portal, and after all the fridges in Ponyville had been portal-proofed. Apparently, she’d fallen asleep at some point and was dreaming of her-
Moondog’s head popped out. “Hey,” it said. “Sorry, listen, I’m still new at the whole ‘bring ponies into each other’s dreams’ thing, so I’m just stabilizing your dream for a sec to make it easier. Be back in, I dunno, like, a minute?” It pulled its head back in.
“Wait!” yelled Twilight. “I-” She reached into the portal, then promptly yanked her leg back out as a feeling of falling apart raced up it. She examined her hoof. For a moment, it looked like several different hooves out of phase with each other, but it slowly returned to normal even as she watched. She rubbed it. It felt normal, or at least as normal as something could feel in a dream. “Mental decoherence?” she speculated. “Being in the collective unconscious without a sufficient self-image causes your dream projection to lose focus until it can’t sustain itself anymore and you wake up.” Luna had mentioned something like that. Hmm.
“…I wonder if it does that every time.” In went the hoof.
“And so,” said Flurry Heart, “in gratitude for services to our country and city, for protecting us in times of trouble, for helping me grow in confidence and in magic, and for being ridiculously good-looking, I present this key to the city to…”
Sunburst held his breath. Flurry Heart was going to pick him. She had to. He was the only possible candidate.
“-the Crystal Heart!” Flurry Heart put the key on top of the tuxedo-clad artifact next to her. The crowd applauded thunderously as the key slid off.
Sunburst breathed a sigh of relief at his mistake. For a second, he was worried that he was going to have to go in front of a crowd and do some public speaking (the horror).
“OI!” somepony yelled. “Get out of the way! Git!” Ponies flew this way and that as something plowed through the crowd. When the crowd finally parted, an alicorn-shaped hole into the night sky was standing in front of him, barely larger than himself. “Hola, amigo.” The alicorn bowed. “Name’s Moondog, and you’re going to study me, yeah? I’m here to take you into Twilight’s dream.”
Immediately, the sounds of everything faded to nothing as Sunburst stared at Moondog. He’d long wished for fully cognizant automata, and now one was standing in front of him. And it was asking him to study it. It was a dream come true while somehow still being a dream that existed only in his head. When he spoke, it felt like his tongue had been tied into knots. “And you, you’re the, uh, golem? Tulpa? Thing?”
Moondog tapped its chin and made exaggerated hmms. “Let me check.” It pulled open its chest to reveal an intricate network of mana channels twisting around and through each other. “Yep. Pretty sure that’s me.”
Sunburst’s mind reengaged. “Holy Heisenbuck,” he gasped, “this, this is incredible! Not just a self-aware golem, but a fully independent thoughtform!” He leaned in, staring at the stars in Moondog’s coat. None of the constellations were ones he recognized, but that didn’t really matter. “I wonder if, if Luna being Princess of the Night has something to do with your appearance. And guess what! I can see my house from here!” he joked, pointing at a star.
“Wrong sun.” Moondog handed a magnifying glass to Sunburst. “You wanna look at this one.”
Caught up in the moment, Sunburst took the glass without much thought and examined the sun in question. His laughs died when the glass proved to have a huge magnification value and he saw not just Equus and its moon and its sun, not just its continents, not just Equestria, but- “Mother duck,” he breathed, “I can see my house from here.” For there it was: his house, wizard-capped and all, sitting right in the Crystal Empire. Did it really look that weird from the top?
The door opened and Moondog walked out. It looked up at Sunburst and held up a sign that said, Neat, huh?
Sunburst pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “My mind hurts already,” he mumbled.
“That’s how you know the dream magic’s working,” Moondog said, grinning. “Come on. We’re gonna pick up Starlight next. Interthought portals, go!”
Twilight was still testing the portal as much as she dared when Moondog returned, meaning she punched Moondog in the face. She jumped back, her hooves flying to her mouth. “Oh, geez, I am so sorry!” she gasped. “I didn’t mean-”
“You’re forgiven,” Moondog said, its face reinflating, “but could you scooch aside a little more? Starlight and Sunburst and coming through.”
“Sorry,” Twilight said, sidestepping away.
“That’s good, thanks.” Moondog pulled its way out of the fridge completely, its horn glowing a pale violet. Half a second later, Starlight and Sunburst flopped out after it. Or, to be more precise, Starlight with Sunburst’s colors and Sunburst with Starlight’s colors.
Starlight staggered to her hooves, so dizzy she couldn’t find the floor. “Well, that was a trip,” she said.
“In all senses of the, of the word,” Sunburst added. He rubbed his forehead, only to stop when he saw the color of his leg. He looked between himself and Starlight. “And I’m not sure it’s over yet.”
“Huh. How did that happen?” Moondog pulled Starlight’s and Sunburst’s colors from each other and swapped them. “I’ll have to ask Mom. Anyway, sorry about all that, the tapioca dragon especially.”
“Did you need to come in through the fridge?” asked Twilight.
“Normally, no.” Moondog slammed the fridge door. “But I’m not a tenth as good as Mom at bringing ponies into others’ dreams, and your focus on it provided some extra mental stability for the landing. And I still got their colors mixed up.”
“That makes sense,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up his muzzle. “Just, just think about it. This whole… place is, it’s basically an entire world you’re creating through pure will unconsciously, so-”
“Ackshually,” said Moondog, “it’s a subdimension outside of space and time at the nexus of consciousness and matter tethered to your collective essences. Totally different.”
Sunburst opened his mouth, but Starlight covered it with a hoof. “Yep! Totally different!” she said loudly. “So should we get started?”
“Right. So,” said Moondog. From nothing, it yanked down a diagram of itself in the Vitrotvian Mare pose. “Mom wants to know the ins and outs of me. And if that sounds strange because she’s the one who made me, she didn’t plan for me to-” It shook its hoof and a long scroll unrolled across the floor. Reading, it continued, “-be able to talk, be self-aware, be self-determining, make decisions on my own initiative, be able to dive into the deep unconscious, and a whole mess of other things. Obviously something went weird somewhere along the line. In no particular order, she wants to know the source of my self-awareness, my connection to the mind, my connection to the real world, and any possibility of my future development going as loopy as my creation. And you’re the best ponies for the job.”
“Wow.” Starlight gulped. “No pressure or anything, right?”
“Nope!” Moondog said cheerfully. “But really, there isn’t. Mom says she doesn’t want you to stress out too much, so even a picture of you three shrugging your shoulders would be an okay report as long as you tried. In almost those exact words, too. And, um, also…” It took a long breath and flexed its wings slowly. “I know you’re all better at thaumic magic than dream magic,” it said reluctantly. “And ever since Discord rejiggered me, I can freely go in and out of dreams and semi-interact with the physical world, so… I’m willing to go outside if that makes it easier for you to cast.”
“We’ll keep it open, but it should probably be a last resort,” said Twilight. “You were made in the dream realm, you should be studied in the dream realm.” She eyed Starlight and Sunburst. “You two did brush up on dream magic as best you could, right?”
“Of course,” said Starlight.
“Not ‘brush up’ as much as ‘learn for the first time’,” said Sunburst, “but, um, yeah. I did my best.”
“And I can give any of you any help you need,” said Moondog. “Being made of magic does have some perks.”
“Great!” Twilight grinned and rubbed her hooves together. “Let’s get set up.” To see what kind of dream magic she still remembered, she pulled an image into her mind and did her best to push it out into the world. She pointed at an unassuming corner. “Whiteboard!”
And it was so. A whiteboard appeared from nowhere, already stocked with ten colors of ten markers each and several erasers. She giggled and pointed next to it. “Desk.” A desk and papers, quill and ink. Perfect.
“When’s she gonna notice we’re still in her kitchen?” Sunburst whispered.
“Ten seconds after she runs out of paper,” Starlight whispered back.
“In other words, never,” added Moondog. “Make yourselves at home. I can get you anything you need or want.”
Twilight had long desired a chair like this. Just comfortable enough that she could sit on it for hours while she did work or read, yet not so comfortable that she’d risk falling asleep if she leaned back on it while thinking. It swiveled, but when she tested spinning for the heck of it, it quickly bumped to a stop. This was going to be good.
She swiveled around to face Moondog, Starlight, and Sunburst. “So,” she said, “how do we want to tackle this? Do we want to split the load, all work on the same thing, or something else?”
“I’m fine with anything,” said Starlight. She was sitting on nothing Twilight could see, but that nothing looked awfully comfortable.
“I think we should split the load,” said Sunburst. “We’ve got a lot to study and that way, we can work on a lot of things at once without any distractions.” He glanced at Moondog.
“I wasn’t gonna make any distractions anyway!” Moondog protested.
“Dibs on self-awareness,” Twilight said quickly.
“Aww.” Sunburst pouted. “I wanted the self-awareness. Fine. I’ll do what I can to see how its magic works.” He glanced at Starlight. “Unless you want to handle that.”
“No, you can do it,” said Starlight. “I guess that leaves me with mental magic.”
“Alright.” Twilight rubbed her hooves together and her horn started glowing. “I’ve been brushing up on magic analysis spells. They’ll give us Moondog’s structure at varying granularities, which we can then study. Simple.”
Starlight rolled her eyes. “And now that you’ve said that, Marephy’s Law is gonna kick in, and it’s not going to be simple. It might be back home, but here in a dream, Spike’s probably going to grow to his adult size in an instant and eat the castle or something.”
“That’s part of the reason I’m sticking around,” said Moondog. “To keep stuff like that from happening and have everything as normal as possible.” It turned to Twilight. “Hit me.”
“Alright. Aaaaand…” The spell felt different, cast in dreams rather than reality. It didn’t require much power and it was slick, like it wanted to be cast. When it hit, Moondog twitched and its coat began slipping through different medical filters: x-ray, infrared, mana scans, blood-vessel mapping, and more. And while the pings the spell returned were strange, they were perfectly comprehensible as dream magic. It’d take a while to write them all down, but Twilight figured there was a shortcut for that.
Starlight and Sunburst both got up in concern, but Moondog didn’t fall down. Once Twilight ended her spell, the changes on Moondog stopped. “Do you feel okay?” Twilight asked, taking a step forward. “I didn’t mess anything up, did I?”
“I…” Moondog clapped itself on the chest. “I don’t think so.” It paused. “Yeah, I’m fine.” And then it puked up a scroll.
Twilight seized the (remarkably clean) scroll in her magic before it hit the ground and hurriedly unrolled it. There were the results, just like she’d wanted. They matched up with the pings and came complete with footnotes, diagrams, tables, what have you, formatted just the way she would’ve done it. It was all she could’ve hoped for and more, if only it hadn’t come in such a weird way. “Um, thanks?”
“Not me. Blame your spell. Seriously.” Moondog was wide-eyed and innocent. Very wide-eyed and innocent. Twilight decided to not press the issue.
After giving copies of the scroll to Starlight and Sunburst (“Duplicate! Duplicate! Hee hee…”), Twilight examined her own more closely. The spells on there were advanced, esoteric, counterintuitive, sophisticated, nearly impossible to do. She knew what they did, but she couldn’t cast most of them. She couldn’t cast most of them. She’d have to study for ages to learn how, unlearning everything she knew about thaumic magic in the process. It was the densest, most complicated conglomeration of magic she’d seen in a long time.
It was beautiful.
She wiped away a tear from her eye and yelled, “Alright, ponies! Let’s do some science!”
The scroll Starlight had received was an intimidating mass of dream magic, but after a bit of thought, she knew what most of the spells did. (Not even knew-ish.) She stared at one spell in particular. It was the spell Luna and Moondog used to get into other ponies’ dreams. It was beyond her ability to cast, but it got her thinking. Dreams were a product of the mind. Moondog got into dreams easily. So… “Hey, Moondog?” she called out.
Moondog flapped over. “Yeah?”
“Can you read minds?”
“Not unless you’re thinking something really hard, and even then, only vaguely. So, no, I can’t tell you what anypony’s thinking about you.”
Starlight swatted Moondog. “I didn’t mean for that. I just thought, if you knew how to read my mind, then maybe you could teach me how to read your mind. Just for science.”
“Sorry, but if it was that easy, I’d’ve suggested it already.”
“Just like that?” Starlight asked skeptically.
“Well, sure. For science, dah-dah-dah-DAAAH.” Moondog shrugged. “Besides, I don’t think it’d work outside the dream realm. This place is like 99% inside our heads already, so getting that last 1% wouldn’t change much. Our minds are already interacting a lot.” It glanced at Twilight and muttered, “Like how I’m keeping you and Sunburst sane by keeping Twilight from turning every single wall in this place into a whiteboard.”
“You’d really be okay with giving me access to your head?”
“Not everyone, but you? Twilight? Sunburst? Yeah.” Moondog sat down and spread its wings. “I know you’re all good, smart ponies who wouldn’t abuse it. You’re just not that kind of people. Heck, you’d probably use it for this one time, then never even think about using it again. I trust you, simple as that.”
Starlight blinked and looked down. “Um. Thanks.” It was strange, hearing it that bluntly. But it made her feel nice inside.
“Besides…” Moondog smirked. “I’ve been doing mental magic literally nonstop since the day I was born. What makes you think I couldn’t keep you out if I wanted to?”
Starlight didn’t have an answer to that.
“This isn’t an effort for you, is it?” Sunburst asked the air.
“What isn’t?” the air asked.
Sunburst didn’t flinch. He’d long since gotten used to it. “Keeping us lucid like this.” He gestured around. “Doesn’t it strain you?”
The air puffed into purple smoke, which collapsed into Moondog, wearing the nerdiest glasses imaginable. “Fun fact! Lucid dreaming doesn’t require magic at all,” it said with a slight lisp. “Considering we’re in-”
“-a subdimension outside of yadda yadda, I know,” said Sunburst, slightly exasperated.
“-your mind basically comes here naturally every time you dream,” said Moondog. “We don’t know how it works, but it’s on a different level than-”
Twilight blitzed over to Sunburst and sat next to him, clipboard and quill in her magic, looking at Moondog expectantly. Sunburst scooched a few inches away from her.
Moondog sighed and tossed away its glasses. “Fine. I’ll start over. Lucid dreaming, by itself, doesn’t require magic. It’s just when, absent any stimuli from your conscious, you become more aware of the not-space your unconscious occupies. Mom or I can give you a little kick to make you lucid, pull your mind from Equestria into the dreamscape, but once you are lucid, we don’t need to do anything more. Dream magic itself only comes in when you try to go from one mind to the other. Here…” It fanned a wing around to gesture. “I’m using a little bit of magic to keep you all in one place. Negligible, really.”
“Uh-huh.” Twilight’s quill was a blur as she wrote. “You said pulling us from Equestria? Does that matter?”
“I think it might, but I dunno.” Moondog flared its wings. “It’s like… part of you will always exist in Equestria, since that’s where your body is and… and… Look, I don’t know how to explain this,” it said flatly, “it’s just pulling your mind through thoughtspace from the physical world to here. It doesn’t really make sense with physical-space analogies and I’m terrible at explaining things, anyway.”
“Uh-huh.” Twilight’s quill was moving so fast that in the real world it would’ve caught fire from friction-generated heat. “Something to ask Luna about, then.”
“She doesn’t really get it, either. I know, I asked her.”
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”
Sunburst quickly nudged Twilight in the ribs. “You’re not thinking of changing the course of this project, are you?”
“I… might not be,” Twilight said, not looking either of them in the eye.
Moondog and Sunburst smirked at each other.
“Are you changing that?” asked Twilight.
“Changing what?” asked Moondog.
“That equation right there.” Twilight pointed at a line she was sure had a δm g in it before, but now had nothing of the sort. Working in dreams was great when it meant she could summon infinite whiteboards out of nowhere and expand her lab in impossible ways instantly, but not so much if it meant her letters didn’t play nice with what they were written on. “I think it keeps changing whenever I look away.”
Moondog squinted at said equation. “Nope. Not doing anything. That’s just the dream.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you keeping us in one dream?”
“If I was struggling with that, you’d see a lot weirder things than just a sentence that wouldn’t hold still.”
Twilight looked at the equation again, then blinked. The δm g was back. She closed her eyes, then opened them. Gone. Close, open, there. “Okay, really?” she said. “Quit it, brain!” She hit herself on the side of the head.
“Fine,” her brain said. “I can tell when I’m not wanted.” It pushed itself out of her ear and rolled away.
“Not my fault,” Moondog said quickly. “Honest. Want me to go get it, or…?”
“No,” mumbled Twilight. “I didn’t need that stupid thing, anyway.” Were the others having as much trouble as her? She trotted over to Starlight’s section. “Are you having trouble with the writing, too?”
Starlight didn’t look up from her own equations. “Ehm. Kinda?” she said. “It’s like… every now and then, I try to write one thing, but I write another, and then when I try to write the second thing, I write the first thing instead. Like my brain is trying to handle two different things at once.” She pushed a piece of scratch paper over. “Here’re the equations, in case you’re want to see them.”
Twilight glanced at what Starlight had written. It wasn’t too complicated, but- “A-ha! You’re here, too, you- fiend!” For there it was in the first equation: δm g. Twilight held the paper close to her muzzle, glaring at that symbol. “I will find you,” she hissed. “I will find you and I will figure out what’s up with you and I will end you.” Her eyes flicked to the second equation, which matched her second equation. “Or end you. Either one works.”
“The alicorn said to the number,” said Moondog, rolling its eyes.
Twilight took a deep breath, even though being in the dreamscape meant its effect was purely psychological. “It’s a very important number in a very important equation. If that particular equation isn’t right, any conclusions drawn from it won’t be right. And since we’re studying you, that’s kind of a big deal. And, no, we can’t just skip it, because what if that equation is the one that leads us to your sapience? So, in reality, ending one of them is actually very important.”
“What she said,” added Starlight. “She can be a bit melodramatic, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”
“…Ah,” said Moondog. “Rrrrright.” It shuffled its hooves and looked away. “You, um, want my help in tracking down what makes the bad equation appear?”
“Please.”
Twilight glared at her own equation again. The δm g was there. Moondog put a hoof right next to the equation and nodded at Twilight. She nodded back, closed her eyes, then opened them again. Gone.
“Okay, that’s weird,” said Moondog. “They’re… I dunno, layered on top of each other. It’s like you wrote them both, but you’re only seeing one at a time.”
“But then, how-”
From his little corner of the room, Sunburst yelled, “Got it!” He galloped over and slid to a stop in front of the whiteboard. “At least I think I do,” he said. “You know how, um, things can change in dreams when you’re not looking?”
“Things can change in dreams when you are looking,” said Twilight.
Sunburst turned red. Completely. “Um. Right. But, but not everything! See, some forms of dream magic, they’re locked down when we’re observing them. They can’t change. And Luna, I think she put some of those into Moondog, to make it more adaptable. It’s technically a lot of different spells at once, but just one when we’re looking at it.” His voice started speeding up and he made all sorts of wild gestures. “But the detection spell you got the equations from is behaving based on dream logic, so you got all the spells at once, and even though you didn’t recognize it like that, your subconscious did. So to keep with reality, that line is in a superposition of equations, collapsing into one whenever one of us observes it.”
Twilight blinked as she grasped the full implications. “…You’re saying I’m performing quantum magic by accident?”
“Dreeeeaaaams,” said Moondog, waving its hooves mysteriously. It grinned, but its heart wasn’t really in it, and not because it didn’t have a physical heart.
“Yeah, this isn’t gonna work,” said Twilight. She flicked her pen across the room. “Sorry, Moondog, but we’ll have to take up that offer for external study.”
“Booger. Ah, well.”
Twilight started pacing. “But that might mess things up with the schedule, because if Starlight and I are in Ponyville and Sunburst’s in the Crystal Empire-”
“I can come!” said Sunburst. “Or, um, go? I mean, I can travel to Ponyville! In two days, even! Just, just give me time to pack, and-”
“Didn’t you say you were busy?” Twilight asked, raising an eyebrow. “What about Flurry Heart and her phase?”
“So,” Shining Armor said, “here’s a list of the things we need fireproofed.”
The contractor’s eyebrow went up his forehead as his eyes went down the list. “Half of these are crystalline things that can’t catch fire.”
“I know.” Shining grinned mirthlessly. “And yet she set them on fire anyway.”
“She’s fine,” said Sunburst. “Cadance and Shining can handle it for a few days. Besides, this is important!”
“Ooookay,” Twilight said skeptically. “In that case, then, meet at the castle in two days? The day after the day following tonight, I mean.”
“Sure,” said Sunburst. “I’ll be there… definitely by the evening. Probably earlier. I do not want to miss this!”
“Then if we’re done here,” said Moondog, “why don’t I take you two back so you can spend the rest of the night in peace?” It pulled open the fridge, the portal still sitting there.
“Well, um,” said Starlight, awkwardly shuffling her hooves and flicking her ears, “is there any chance I could, um, pick up where I, y’know… left off?”
“No promises,” said Moondog, “but I’ll do my darndest.”
“Why?” asked Twilight. “What were you dreaming of?”
“That’s private,” Starlight and Moondog said in unison. They looked at each other. “ANYWAY!” said Moondog. “One by one this time.” It wrapped hoof around Starlight’s neck and yanked her through the fridge.
“And she- And it just happened to gain self-awareness? A little over a year ago?” asked Sunburst, staring into the portal. “I’m surprised it’s as mature as it is.”
Twilight shrugged. “All I can think of is that Luna’s a good mother. Mentor. Whatever. Moondog thinks of her as its mother, so that’s the relationship I’m going with.”
“I guess anything else would, it’d be more complicated,” said Sunburst. He paused. “So if multiple people contributed to its creation, would it regard all of them as its parents, or would it only focus on the person who, who did the most? Or… Hmm.” He folded his ears back and flicked his tail.
Moondog climbed back out of the portal. “Come on, Sunburst.” It waved him through and said to Twilight, “Be seeing you,” before following Sunburst. Half a second later, its hoof reached back out and zipped the portal shut.
And Twilight was alone, with nothing but unlimited study supplies and a mind full of what she’d already learned. Even if it wasn’t comprehensive, there was a lot of it. She could work with that, get her thoughts in order before Sunburst arrived in the real world. She trotted over to one of the less messy desks, her hooves clicking on the linole-
Realization hit. “Hang on,” she said to herself. “Why are we still in my kitchen?”
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HA!!!!!
Lol, that ending
THis was funny and I liked the fact that Starlight knew how to make her coltfriend enthousiastic for studying Moondog. Sunburst was also really funny when he met Moondog as was the ending.
I was actually wondering how long it would take them to realize that their note wouldn't last past waking up lol
10029277
Ponies like these, in a situation like this? They'll remember what they write. If not, Moondog can help them remember.
I can’t tell you how much my real life dogs hate you right now. I squealed with glee once I saw that there was a part two coming.
10029277
A true nerd would never forget, because a true nerd never truly wakes up from our caffeine-fueled fugue state of omnifarious study.
This line just reminded me of Portal so much I had to make this reference. I'm not even a little sorry about it either.
You have no idea how much I needed to see a chapter of this today, and the fact that there's a part two tomorrow just makes it even better. Thank you.
I think i had a dream like that once . .
That's how you know Twilight's a scientist.
Hah! Loved that ending there.^^
Ooh, nice brick joke for the ending!
Neat to see the magic and stuff expanded on, as usual :)
10029666
My thoughts exactly. Although... I probably would've done the same thing.
10029412
I'll be honest, she reminded me of Celia from Addictive Science
....tell me more about this dragon
She already did that
That was a fun read. Plenty of funny character moments. Look forward to the next chapter tomorrow
Now we only need Moon Dancer to join this Nerd's Dream Team.
I got the xkcd reference
“…I wonder if it does that every time.” In went the hoof."
Spoken like a true scientist.
10030410
Looking at the comments, I think a few of us got it
https://www.xkcd.com/242/
I love Starlight's version of the letter to Sunburst.
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Inanimate_carbon_rod ?
Flurry Heart, Princess of Chlorine Trifluoride
Aw, no dramatic thunder?
10029136
Everything is flammable if you try hard enough.
Everything.
Callback was perfectly timed
10033311
Even if that means being Hotter than the bloody sun, I mean we don't actually know what the crystals in the Crystal Empire are made of but I am pretty sure their melting point is pretty high (maybe not 5000*c+ since the highest IRL crystal melting point is 3500*c-something but pretty that's already pretty dang high anyway).
(and yes I am answering a comment from more than a week ago just to say that)
10190246 Considering the crystals of the Crystal Empire are generally hexagonal, I'd have to say they were quartz. Which melts at 1670 degrees C, but isn't combustible because it's already a stable oxide. So something freaky is definitely going on.
Yep can’t get this out of my head now...
10190246
Crystal originally was name of clear quartz)