Princess Diaries

by emstar

Job One 1.3

“Bleh,” I grumbled. I sauntered over to my bedroom. The treehouse had two bedrooms, a large closet that we retooled to be Spike’s bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, and a couple smaller closets. One of the bedrooms was being used as my actual bedroom — which was more or less a bed, a dresser, and a mountain of bookshelves— while the other bedroom served as my office— just a desk, some experiments and tools, and a mountain of bookshelves for my arcane reference texts. One day, maybe I’d be able to get a proper research lab built. I was used to conducting experiments in heavily warded rooms that were in the basement of my teacher’s country home. A small bedroom just doesn’t allow for the same wiggle room.

I flomped down on my bed, not even bothering to slide under the sheets. I fiddled with my Daring Do mechanical alarm clock— I’d had it since I was five, and it was one of the only possessions I still had from my childhood. I grumpily set it to wake me up in just about an hour, before letting my head slump into my pillow. Hopefully I’d be more functional after a nap than my current state of “being a useless pile of ouch, oof, owie” that goes along with suffering acute arcane exhaustion. That’s maybe being a little melodramatic, seeing as I’m pretty strong, mystically speaking. I could have held that shield for another minute or two and probably tossed out a blast of force and a gust of wind on top of that, but that would have been my limit. Limit in the “I’m about to pass out from exhaustion” sense. Magic was tiring stuff.

Let’s talk about magic.

Let me tell you the reality: magic was a fundamental force of the universe, fundamental in the same sense that “gravity” or “time” are fundamental. They simply are. There’s a sort of… presence that all living beings— living souls, if you believed in souls— had, that cast a sort of shadow on physical reality. Changing it, ever so slightly. If you’ve ever wondered why you can suddenly sense somepony entering the room you’re in, or why you seem to have scarily appropriate dreams that have just a sliver of foresight? Have you ever felt, deep in your bones on a lonely starless night, that something was watching you, and gotten that crawling feeling running up and down the back of your mane? Have you ever wondered why, very rarely, it seems like the world itself will reflect your expectations of it in some tangible manner, positive or negative?

That’s magic at work. Bubbling up beneath the surface in ways that might not be so obvious.

There’s things about magic that everypony knows, of course. Those were the obvious ones, the ones that nopony in their right mind would even try to hide. They were just normal, everyday things that you didn’t bat an eyelash at.

Earth ponies had an unbelievably large amount of physical strength and stamina compared to anypony else. They were generally tough as nails. They also seemingly had some amount of inherent proficiency with gardening, farmwork, mining, all sorts of things that involved, well, the earth.

Pegasi have the innate ability to fly just by flapping their teeny-tiny wings, obviously. Even though normal wings of that size definitely shouldn’t support their weight, if you ran the calculations. They also could physically interact with clouds and other weather phenomena: standing on them, laying down on them, moving them around and rearranging them. It’s why most densely populated areas in Equestria had a weather schedule, it was their job to make sure everything ran according to however the federal meteorologists said it should.

Unicorns have “spells” that they were able to cast with some incantations while focusing energy through their horn... at least according to the public. The reality is, compared to true-blue honest-to-goodness, magical spells, they were mostly a pile of silly cantrips. I could use the telekinesis one in my sleep, en masse.

(The White Council had cracked that mystery ages ago: the reason unicorns could seemingly develop minor levels of magical talent much more frequently than any of the other two types of ponies was simply because we were born with some pretty efficient magical focuses stuck in our heads. You had to try pretty darn hard to make a staff or a rod that was more efficient at channeling magical energy than a unicorn’s horn. In fact, I’m not even sure that that’s technically possible, as far as I understand things, but I’m definitely no expert on the matter. )

Now, I’m not saying any of that isn’t magic, but it’s not really what I’m talking about when I refer to magic. When I do proper magic, like the shield spell I used earlier today, I’m reaching out to the world and channeling a pile of fundamental forces together to make something happen, usually using my thoughts, my will, an incantation, and my horn (of course) as structural components to guide those energies to not only achieve some sort of result or have some sort of tangible effect on the physical world, but to also do that in exactly the way I want.

That was magic. And it wasn’t easy. I had almost a decade of regular experience— both practical and theoretical— at doing what I do, and the average wizard would maybe consider me a particularly talented amateur. On a good day.

I still had quite a lot to learn about magic.

(Which was kind of great, actually, since I absolutely loved learning!)

But I definitely knew more than most, and one thing I knew all too well right now was that the words “black sorcery run amok in Ponyville” were, going by the Official Twilight Sparkle Dictionary, synonymous with “call for help immediately”.

The White Council of Wizards only had seven laws, but those seven laws were pretty serious stuff, and they governed the use of magic by mortal practitioners everywhere on the planet. If somepony somewhere broke one of the laws and the Council found out about it, then it was off with their head. Literally, and they didn’t give a horseshoe nail about extenuating circumstances.

Luckily, they were pretty simple to write down:

The first: Thou shalt not kill by use of magic. This one is pretty self explanatory, I think. The Council can be pretty extensive on what does or doesn’t count with this law, and I don’t think anypony sane would ever test how indirect you’d have to be for them to not care. If you really need to kill somepony, just shoot them with a gun.

The second: Thou shalt not change the form of another against their will. No involuntary shapeshifting of another mortal being, since the cognitive dissonance and feedback from being stuck in a body not their own will probably destroy their psyche in most cases. It’s also a terrible thing to do to somepony, obviously.

The third: Thou shalt not invade the mind of another. No mind reading. Telepathic communication is slightly different, in most circumstances that you’d want to apply it anyway.

The fourth: Thou shalt not enthrall another. No mind control. Ugh.

The fifth: Thou shalt not reach beyond the borders of life. Basically, don’t do a necromancy.

The sixth: Thou shalt not swim against the currents of time. I don’t really know what circumstances would allow this to happen in earnest, but this law is the reason the aspects of divination magic that we are allowed to practice boil down to vague prophetic nonsense that I personally would never waste my time with.

The seventh: Thou shalt not reach beyond the Outer Gates. In short, don’t summon up eldritch horrors from beyond reality.

The Laws of Magic had good reasons to exist. Breaking the laws required doing something termed black magic — basically, it was taking a force of creation and life and joy and freedom in the universe, and twisting it to evil and existentially destructive ends, in an act that usually ended up corrupting the practitioner as well. Once you performed black magic, you were named a warlock, because, as far as anypony who had ever explained to me could tell (also, wizards live a long time, so that's a lot of statistical evidence right there) sooner or later you’d be cackling in a dark cloak and plotting the end of the world as we know it like some sort of psycho supervillain.

Yeah, it’s that bad.

I drifted off to sleep.

o-o-o

I woke up to my alarm clock about thirty minutes later.

Blah. That’s not nearly enough sleep, but it’ll have to do.

I blinked wearily, and crawled out of bed with a yawn. I don’t really do naps, but sometimes they’re the only thing that’s going to cure a particularly bad headache. I shuffled over to my office.

My office was a small room with a desk on the far side opposite the doorway, a large sturdy bookcase on the right side, a rug in the middle of the room with an ornate summoning circle carefully woven into it (every square inch was glued securely to the floor, mind you), and a bit of shelving on the left as you came in that was covered with all sorts of experiments I didn’t really have time to poke at right now.

Even though I really wanted to get more data on how my thaumaturgical fridge project was going — I had two silver discs, one served as a heat sink, the other served as the cold component, with inscribed spells on both that allowed for a one-way thaumaturgical link that forced heat from the cold one to the heat sink, that I had safely buried in a pot full of dirt at the other end of the shelf. It was my hope that the sympathetic link between the two would be efficient enough that they’d be able to power themselves indefinitely(!) without too much energy loss, or at the very least that they’d last until the spell inscriptions needed to be redone and the enchantments needed maintenance and the —

No. Focus Twi, focus!

I blinked, mentally forcing the runaway train of excited thought to quit doing its thing, and walked over to my desk. I unlocked the big drawer on it with a key from the key ring that I kept in my saddlebag, and began pouring through the files inside.

“Aha,” I said, finally finding what I was looking for: the contact information of one Donald Morgan, regional commander of the Wardens in my geographical jurisdiction.

I left for the post office immediately, since it could very well be the case that sending a telegram out as soon as possible would save somepony’s life. Luckily it was just down the street from the Golden Oak Library. After a short walk and a tiny bit of waiting in line, my distress message was sent out into the world, to hopefully arrive at Mr. Morgan’s doorstep within the next day or two.

That done, I stopped to consider my options.

Warlock or not, if strange things were happening in Ponyville, it would definitely be to my benefit to become a bit more mobile, which means I had to go pick up my ride, if I didn’t want to trot everywhere. I was a wizard, a bookworm, and a nerd, not a world-champion athlete.

So I started walking towards Fluttershy’s place to pick up the Blue Beetle.

Author's Note:

---

AN: A bit more exposition that I didn't get a chance to get to in the last chapter (grumble grumble) and stuff that probably isn't news to someponies reading, but this is definitely in the bin of "I'm going to get this crap out the door now so that I don't have to remind you every 30 chapters what a wizard is."

Updooting the rest of what I have for today shortly (in a few hours + before I go to bed, at least) after some quick edits. Sorry for the notification spam.

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Arch Chancellor Mustrum Ridcully described wizards as, Someone who knows magic, and knows not to use it?

As for the unicorn horn thing, First estimation of construction requires ten million holograms, one every 3 seconds for a year, to make a 2/3 inch diameter horm to atomic presicion. Which wont work as expected because a living horn is laid down in a dynamic living magical field, which makes the complexity of the hologram look like a pencil stick figure on a cheap paper napkin.

Simpler? Horns are four dimentional holograms that generate 5 dimentional energy forms. If you want any more details, ask Pinkie.

[Arkonfleight]

>Magic limit
That seems pretty tiny to start.
>Donald Morgan
Unusual name, for the rest of the setting.

[Mister Morden]

Ah, an explanation of how magic works in this world... Interesting.

And now the Blue Beetle... I am expecting it to be a giant living blue beetle. Unless Fluttershy is a mechanic in this world...

[Pinklestia]

11046652

To be fair Twilight probably overdid it and threw the strongest shield she could, but yes she seems weaker that canon Twilight.