Powerless
It was a scene of highest horror, of tremendous thaumic terror, and Twilight Sparkle was completely powerless to stop it.
Cadence poked her head through the door and sighed. "Shiny, stop teasing your sister, or I'll keep calling you Shiny."
The barrier surrounding the donkey doll held strong as the adolescent unicorn smirked. "I just had a sudden, violent urge to keep teasing my sister..."
Two lavender hooves slammed an encyclopedia down on top of the barrier, producing a clear bell tone. Twilight glared at her foalsitter. "Cadence, stop helping!"
The pink alicorn in question giggled. "Well, if you insist!" Her head vanished from sight.
Her attention no longer divided, the filly turned her annoyed gaze on her brother. "Can't you find something else to practice your shield on?"
"I probably could," Shining Armor conceded, "but this way I get to test how strong the shield is, and not just how much I can cover with it!"
Twilight stamped a hoof. "You leave logic out of this!"
"No." Shining stuck his tongue out at her.
Twilight's jaw worked wordlessly for a few moments, before she hung her head in defeat. She'd tried everything she could think of to take down her brother's barrier, and they both knew it. "...Fine, you win. I'll..." She gulped. "I'll stop studying for the exam. Now can you please give Smarty Pants back?"
Her brother chuckled as he dropped his barrier and levitated her beloved doll into her arms. "There, now, was that really so hard? Don't answer that," he added hastily, seeing the look on his sister's face. He sighed, continuing, "I know how much you want to get into the CSGU, and I know you want to do as well as you can on the entrance exam. I really do. But if you don't stop studying and do something to relax before your tests, you'll just end up being too tense to focus properly." He smiled. "Besides, you're more than good enough to get in already."
Twilight rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, you keep saying that, despite both of us knowing that the only reason I can use telekinesis at all is because of that time I reflexively prevented a full set of gold-bound encyclopedias from falling on my head!"
Shining just smirked. "Well, that just means you're one of the few ponies they've ever tested who really, truly knows the disadvantages of having too much knowledge!" He dodged the book she threw at him with ease and ran laughing out of the room.
The entrance exams were taking place in one of the school's solitary towers. This was as much to keep any rogue magic that might manifest during the exam (which had been known to happen in the past) as isolated as possible, as to keep the dozen or so nervous colts and fillies away from prying eyes for the test.
Twilight fidgeted in her seat, waiting for the proctor to arrive. Finally, a golden-brown unicorn stallion entered the room, levitating a test neatly onto each student's desk as he did so. "Good morning, everypony, my name is Gilded Tomes, and I will be overseeing the written portion of your exams. Instructions on how to complete the test are printed on the front page of your test booklets. You have up to one hour after the time I sit down to finish this portion of the test. Once you are done, please turn in your test to me and head upstairs for the next portion of the test. You may begin whenever you're ready."
Fifty-eight minutes later, a somewhat disheveled filly handed in an immaculate test paper to a somewhat confused-looking Gilded Tomes, then slowly walked upstairs to find a comfortable-looking waiting room with punch and cookies. A sign on a door at the end of the room read "Please wait here for your name to be called. Once it is, please enter this door."
There were a couple other fillies whispering to each other in a corner, but Twilight paid almost no attention to them. All she could think about was how powerless she'd felt when she knew she'd made a mistake somewhere on her test, but couldn't find it after spending two-thirds of the exam time on the issue. She grabbed a cookie and a cup of punch, and sat down to wait.
"I-I'm sorry, sir, could you please repeat that?"
The stern grey unicorn looked down his nose at her before responding. "Is it really so difficult to understand? Miss Sparkle, you must hatch a dragon egg. That dragon egg, in fact." Twilight turned her head to see a purple spotted egg the size of her head be wheeled up next to her.
Twilight glanced at her parents (why were her parents here) who smiled awkwardly at her. She then looked up at the examiners, smiling nervously. They responded by scribbling furiously on their clipboards.
"Well, Miss Sparkle?"
Twilight began to sweat profusely. She had absolutely no idea how to hatch this thing. She barely knew anything about dragons at all, let alone their eggs! Twilight quickly began wracking her brains for anything that might be even vaguely useful for hatching an egg of a species that regularly bathes in lava.
"Well, Miss Sparkle?"
Twilight backed up, aimed her horn at the egg, and attempted to incubate it via immolation. Her horn sparked angrily, but nothing else happened.
She tried to knock on the shell with her telekinesis (having read once that some egg-laying species assist their young with hatching in this manner), but couldn't get any sort of grip on it.
One of the proctors yawned. "We don't have all day."
Twilight was beginning to panic. She tried an awakening charm (fetuses aren't awake, right?), an unlocking spell (an extremely long shot, but maybe eggs count as doors), and even attempted a Zebrican ritual dance (she wasn't sure what, if anything, it was supposed to do, but you never know). Nothing caused the egg to so much as budge. Most of her attempts didn't even cause her horn to light up.
Finally, after one last attempt at setting the egg on fire (for completeness' sake), she sat on her haunches and hung her head in defeat. She'd failed, utterly, at a task the examiners clearly considered to be easily doable by any unicorn who was actually good enough for the school. She had to be the least powerful unicorn ever. "I'm sorry I wasted your time."
There was a bit more scribbling, then after a moment one of the proctors cleared her throat. "Well, I do believe we've seen enough."
"Congratulations, Miss Sparkle. You've been accepted into the Canterlot School for Gifted Unicorns."
Twilight stood completely still for a moment, then fell over onto her side.
The mint-green filly walking at Twilight's side chuckled. They'd met shortly after the exams, and had been assigned the same room in their dormitory, so they'd struck up a conversation as they walked through the tour of the grounds. "Yeah, I can believe it. You're way too logical for your own good, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the kind of nonsense they throw at you in those exams actually did make your brain shut itself off. But seriously, they actually gave you the dragon egg?"
Twilight moaned in frustration. "I don't get why everypony thinks it's so significant that I had the dragon-hatching test instead of the sphere-inverting test or whatever! It's just another impossible task, designed to ascertain how well we deal with an unwinnable scenario, right?"
"Well, that's the thing, though. The dragon egg's the only one that nopony's ever done. The rest of them actually are possible for somepony with just the right spells or Cutie Mark to pull off. Actually, I think there's a filly in our year that managed to pass the 'invisible basketballs' test, now that I think about it..."
"...So you're saying they specifically wanted to make sure I couldn't pass under any circumstances."
The green filly shook her head, smiling. "No, I don't think you get it. Nopony has ever hatched that egg. I think Princess Celestia even tried way back before she gave it to the school, but nothing happened. They've been giving the egg test to the most promising kid each exam, just on the off chance that they'll have their magic go haywire or something and manage to hatch it!"
Twilight blinked. "...Kid?"
The green filly blushed. "Er, sorry, I...kinda spent two years living in a mountain goat town, I keep using their words for things by accident...but you get my point, right?"
"No, I don't! How can I possibly be the most promising new student? I spent forty-five minutes on the real test just rechecking my answers!"
"You spent forty-five minutes, out of sixty, rechecking a perfect exam," the filly deadpanned.
Twilight blushed. "Well, it only took me fifteen minutes to complete it! You can't just stand there and tell me that completing an exam in one-fourth of the allotted time is a sign of accuracy!"
"...You have a point, I guess, but I still say you're selling yourself a bit short, buddy."
Twilight stopped walking. It took the other filly a few seconds to realize Twilight wasn't next to her anymore, at which point she stopped as well, glancing quizzically behind her. "You okay back there?"
"...You think we're buddies?"
The green filly cocked her head. "Uh...yeah? We've been getting along pretty great, and that's pretty much exactly what buddies are, last time I checked?" Her ears slowly drooped at the expression on Twilight's face. "Okay, uh, that's probably the third-creepiest smile I've ever seen..."
"Thank you, Lyra."
Lyra stared at Twilight for a moment, then began to chuckle. "That's it, I am going to educate you about friendship, before you become a book hermit or something."
Nopony was in the CGSU's entrance hall at sunset; the new students were all busy unpacking, and all the other students were enjoying the beautiful weather outside. A door at the end of the hall creaked open, and a lavender filly walked nervously into the room.
Twilight walked up to the stand upon which the purple egg rested, and laid her hooves on either side of it. She glanced around to make sure nopony was watching, then leaned forward.
"Hi, I...uh...well, you aren't born right now, so you probably can't hear me, and you almost certainly won't remember this, but...well...I need to thank you. I..." Twilight glanced at her hooves nervously, then continued, "I've never been that good at magic, to be honest. I mean, I'm great at books, and I love magic. I even have a really big magical reserve, apparently. But I've always had a hard time accessing that reserve, so I was only ever below average at actual spell casting. The worst part is, I'm really, really bad at talking to ponies, so I couldn't get any help for it outside of books. But now I'm in the school, I'm going to be taught how to get past my limitations, and I even have a friend. And in a way, I guess it's all because of you. So...thank you."
"Crack."
It would eventually be discovered that the egg had been more or less ready to hatch for months before that day. It is true that, in theory, given her magical reserves, the lavender filly might have been able to hatch the egg a few hours early at her examination. But she did not, and as a result the egg did not hatch in a loud, brightly lit, magic-inundated classroom. Instead, it hatched in a quiet, dimly lit, vaguely cavernous entrance hall, an environment much closer to its native habitat, supervised only by a single foal. Therefore, the filly watching it had no reason not to focus entirely on the small, purple dragon hatchling as it stretched, yawned, and opened its large, green eyes.
Their gazes met; and for the fourth time that day, Twilight Sparkle was completely powerless.
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Thank you! It's nice to see someone went the Koyashimaru path with Twilight's entrance exam!
Amazing. Please continue this. Also I would like permission to write in this AU.
1321434
I'll consider it. Definitely not happening before this story's complete, though.
Of course not. But there are just so many things to be done here it would be great to be able to write in it.
1321334 Yeah, the whole 'Why do they even have a dragon egg' thing has always bothered me,
considering how they later go out of their way to establish Ponies know squat about dragons.
Nice chapter.
Great chapter glad to see Spike will still be with Twilight. Was worried he wouldn't hatch from the egg at all.
1321916
yeah it makes more sense it was test for failure situations. Where you aren't supposed to hatch the egg, it's meant to see how you'd react.
I really love this story. I've seen a few "what if the rainboom never happened" stories, but this one does an excellent job of crafting a believable alternate reality, as opposed to just reaching a similar fate by different means.
You, sir, are brilliant
Brilliantly written sir I look forward to more. A shame that your story doesn't have more likes and views...it certainly deserves themdl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_Redheart_gasp.png . Of course I'm a bit biased cause I really love AU stories, anyway keep up the good work. dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/misc_Lyra_smile.png
Excellent.
Yes...
Excellent.
Like the story so far, but shouldn't the acronym be CSGU?
1341415
Le fix'd.
Tis an excellent story, sir or ma'dam. This ought to have gotten a feature. If I do say so myself.
hey nice fic. i know you must be buisy but i am eagerly awaiting a new chapter. Thank you for writing this.
Just checking in to let you know you're not forgotten
Finally, one that doesn't get some kind of ridiculous unexplained Deus Ex Machina! I felt the feels.
1341901
I know you have moved this to someplace else but you made the same mistake here: