Able Roger Uncle
“C’mon, Spike, you can do it…”
“Okay. Here goes…” Twilight Sparkle watched her assistant mutter incantations to himself, snout wrinkling in concentration as they sat facing each other in the Golden Oaks’ basement laboratory. Ever-so-briefly, the dragon’s eyes flashed a luminous, pale blue- then flickered and reverted to their natural metallic green.
“Dammit!” he smacked a claw against the side of the worktable with no small amount of force.
“Maybe… maybe you should try casting it with your breath?” suggested Twilight, “Breath is the core of dragon magic, after all.”
“How?” Spike shook his head and hopped off his stool, pacing in a tight circle. “Magesight’s a reflexive spell, not projective, so how am I supposed to spit it out? And… doesn’t the Starswirl-Clover Thesis prove that cores are ultimately irrelevant?”
“Well, horns are projective too,” Twilight replied, more gently, surprised by the bitterness in her assistant’s voice, “and I’ve never had any problem using mine to cast non-projective spells.” Spike’s pacing did not abate. “Aaaand, since you brought up the Starswirl-Clover Thesis, we could always do a little bit of digging on traditional draconic casting techniques, and see if we can find a more appropriate alternative to classical magesight- maybe an enchantment, or something like that thaumoluminescent fog weather teams sometimes use.” Telekinetically, she reached out and twisted a dial protruding from the crystal spell-beacon they’d been using for practice, dimming it. “I think we should take a break for now, and then maybe later today I’ll see about ordering you some goggles tuned to your color spectrum, okay?” Twilight had been working with Spike long enough to know that his draconic vision found the false-color readouts of most thaumoscopes and visualization spells confusing at best, and downright painful at worst.
“Nah… it’s not just the colors. If I’ve got goggles, I might lose them- you can’t lose a spell. And they don’t ever fit right, either, at least the ones for adult ponies don’t…” Spike held out one claw, counting off on his fingers, “the lenses are too big, the bridge strap’s always way too long… And the colt-size ones that come with those ‘junior mage’ kits are just toys- they don’t have the resolution, or the output range…”
“Spike?” Twilight interrupted him as gently as possible. “That’s… not the real reason you’re upset, is it?”
He stopped pacing immediately, exhaled, and shook his head. “No, you’re… you’re right. Rarity even offered to fit me a custom set with professional-grade lenses the last time I was over at the Boutique. But… well…” He loped back to his chair and sat down, hard, idly scratching under one of his facial fins. “So… like, this whole week or so, ever since you came back from Innsbeak, it’s kinda’ just been one field dig after another, and… and you and Verse and Daycaller can all use magesight spells, and now you’ve all got that selenitic matter detection spell too, and… I’m just stuck with goggles…”
Twilight made a small ‘go on’ motion with one hoof.
“Really, more than anything… I’d kind of like to get a grip on the basics so I could maybe learn… some actual serious offensive magic?” After so many halting false starts, Twilight was surprised when the dragon continued all at once, almost too fast to understand, “Yeah, I can set a timberwolf on fire by breathing on it- or send chunks of it to Princess Celestia if I’m in the mood -but there’s a lot more nasty stuff in the Everfree than just timberwolves, and you just got petrified not too long ago and I couldn’t even do anything about it, and if we keep poking around out there at the rate we’re going we’re only going to run into more and more attacks and things are only going to get worse… I’d… umm… I’d like to be able to help. Or help more. I guess.” Twilight thought he hadn’t so much finished as he’d simply run out of words.
The unicorn closed her eyes and thought for a while, before she’d settled on something resembling a strategy. “So, you remember when you were, like, eight, and you wanted me to use magic to grow you a mustache for some reason?”
“Yeah?” Shifting around, suddenly seeming more than a little nervous, Spike rubbed under his chin. For the very first time, Twilight noticed that he was developing a sort of stubble, his scales forming into rows of spines not unlike a bearded lizard’s. Dragons, of course, could not actually grow facial hair, nor any other kind of hair. Some other varieties were known to possess impressive barbel-like tendrils -the product of unrestrained sexual selection, it was believed- but Spike was evidently not among them. Twilight fought back a shiver, regardless. Starswirl’s bells, my little dragon’s starting to grow up… and I have no idea what to do about it.
“Listen, if the moral here is that some aspects of equinity are forever beyond my grasp and I should stop pursuing them,” the dragon continued, “I’m walking out of here right now.”
That got Twilight laughing for a little while, before she amended “No, no, nothing like that, just… you don’t have to try to accomplish everything at once, I guess?”
“Hmm.” He peered at his reflection in an inactive remote-viewing mirror, running a claw along under his chin again, and carefully combing the scales into a more uniform beard-equivalent. “You think Rarity’d like this?”
“I think she’d like the clean-shaven look better. Um… clean-scaled?” was all she said aloud. “But, Spike, hold up a minute.”
“Yeah?”
The unicorn struggled to summon her best parental voice. “I… know you care about Rarity very much, but it’s your face we’re talking about. You need to be comfortable with you, first.” Oh, Harmony, I might have to write back to Mom and ask her what she told Shiny when he was Spike’s age!
Spike seemed about to reply, when up above there was a knock at the Golden Oaks’ front door.
“Crap,” the dragon muttered, “I bet that’s Captain Marigold again.”
Twilight nodded, already off her stool and heading for the stairs up to the main level. “Right. Well, no rest for the wicked, I guess…”
Twilight dashed into the Station’s hangar, Spike hot on her heels. First Sergeant Chamomile stood at the head of a squad’s worth of Guard troops; his head swiveling around like he was expecting a manticore to spring out from behind one of the hangar’s supports at any moment. Something was terribly wrong.
“There she is,” the pegasus noncom called out, “Doc, I’m gonna need you up in the air to work the instruments and calculate our position. Spike, you’re gonna be our forward observer and contact point with the ground team. Make sure-”
“Umm… excuse me?” Twilight called out, somewhat put off by Chamomile’s sudden abruptness, “What’s all this about?”
The pegasus stuck one wing in his armor’s saddlebag, and fished out a small compass-like device: a locator for the tracking gems every expedition into the Everfree was supposed to carry. Most of its numerous needles hovered steadily in place, but one flicked back and forth in a regular pattern of three short sweeps, then three long sweeps, then three short again: ‘S – O – S’.
“Private Pikesquare was supposed to report back from the site of the Council Hall an hour ago,” the Sergeant explained, “and ten minutes ago, his tracker started doing that.”
“Alright, but, why did you need to call Spike and me all the way out here just to-” several of the Guards, Chamomile included, were now looking at Twilight with decidedly venomous expressions. She paused, and amended: “Obviously, any member of the security team being in danger is a serious concern, but I’m… completely confident in the Guard’s ability to handle situations like this, and… I’m not really sure what skills I can contribute.”
That seemed to mollify the soldiers, at least for a moment. A little more gently, Chamomile continued, “We know where Piker is, or at least where his tracker is, but that doesn’t mean we know how to get to him. You’re gonna have to chart a path one step at a time through the core of the Everfree, and relay those coordinates down to a search party on the ground. And clairaudio’s gonna be rutted six ways to Sol’s Day, so the only thing we can use on such short notice to reliably stay in contact…”
“… is my firelink spell.” Spike finished. “I… I get it.” He looked a good bit more nervous than he had when he was practicing his own magic just a few minutes ago, but stepped in among the armored Guardsponies regardless.
“Alright then… let’s… go?” Trying to live up to her assistant’s example, Twilight stepped up into the Lapwing’s open troop bay. Nopony else moved.
“We should… really probably head out, then... no point in waiting around out here, right?” she prompted, after a few seconds spent shuffling her hooves and watching the others stare at her. Then she peered around the Lapwing’s interior. The engine compartment was empty, but she could hear muffled voices from behind the closed cockpit door. She trotted over and gave it a few brief taps. “Umm… excuse me… is everything… all right?”
The door slid open immediately to reveal a lanky, off-white pegasus stallion in airpony’s coveralls- their pilot, First Lieutenant Palisade. The hind legs of Tech Sergeant Leafspring, the flight mechanic, protruded from underneath the console behind him. “We’ll be ready to take off in just… I dunno, a couple minutes, okay?” he said, sounding surprisingly nervous. “Just need to double check the inertial guidance system.”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed. She had some idea of how the device in question operated, and what was required to calibrate it, and realized that Palisade’s assessment of the time involved was likely somewhat optimistic. “Didn’t you say you were doing that yesterday, though? It really only needs checking every thousand hours of flight time…”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty much the only system that can get us out of the Everfree’s airspace once we’re in there,” Leafspring snapped, with surprising vehemence, even as she remained in place with her entire front half buried underneath the navigation console. “So I’m gonna make damn sure it’s working before we're going back in there!”
“Okay. Okay. Fine…” Twilight stepped back from the cockpit door, suitably chastised.
It did, indeed, take only a few more minutes before Leafspring stepped out of the cockpit, waved a hoof for the others to climb aboard, and then disappeared back into the engine compartment. With annoying slowness, the platform holding the Lapwing slid out of the hangar and into the yard outside, rigged to one of the Station's abandoned rail lines. It dead-ended a few dozen meters into the empty field beyond, of course, but that was more than enough room. The little gunboat surged off its landing pad with a squeal of propellers, and they were airborne.
“Don’t worry, things could always be worse,” the mechanic shouted through her compartment’s door, as the red-brick bulk of the Station dropped away outside, “My last assignment was out near Tenochtitlan, and we worked out of a one-room patrol station in the middle of the jungle. We just had a little fenced-off patch of clearing to keep our ship in. Still had to do the daily fuel and maintenance checks, though… I got used to takin’ care of it all early in the morning, before the sun’d come up and it wasn’t quite so hot, but that was also when the rain usually hit…”
“Yeah, and I bet’cha had to climb a mountain just to get to the latrines, too,” Palisade snapped, “Uphill, both ways.” He paused, and then Twilight heard him mutter “but at least you didn’t have to deal with this weird shit clogging up your instrument panel, I bet…”
Twilight stepped into the cockpit and waved at the mass of dials and crystals that now jutted up from between the Lapwing’s altimeter and throttle controls, periodically disgorging paper tape covered in differently-colored wavy lines. “Lieutenant, that multi-spectrum selenitic matter detector is the only one of its kind in existence, and vital to continuing our studies of Lunar operations around ancient Everfree.” Through the cockpit’s wraparound windows, the carefully-maintained orchards of Sweet Apple Acres had already been replaced by the rambling, thatched-roofed outskirts of Ponyville proper. “It’s absolutely essential that it stay where it is and not be tampered with.” She’d based the design off of Gordon of Innsbeak’s notes, which brought new meaning to the word ‘cryptic’. She had no idea how to repair it if it was damaged short of building an entirely new unit, and she’d had a hard enough time sourcing the necessary materials for the one she had.
“Yeah, well, it’s blocking my view outside, and the inertial readout too, so… if we get stuck out here…” Palisade trailed off, that odd mixture of anger and worry back in his voice. Twilight noticed that he never once so much as glanced up at her, and kept his eyes on either the instruments or the glass cockpit in front of him with basilisk-like focus. His ears were pivoting back and forth, and he occasionally shuffled his wings against the leather seat behind him. His current task was no more complicated than getting them from one point to another, but Palisade looked like he was in the middle of a dogfight.
“So, you weren’t happy with the whole big suite of scanners, and then my friends and I go crawl around in Innsbeak of all places for a week just to get the designs for a smaller one, and you don’t like that either?” Twilight was careful to keep her tone light, reluctant to show the very real mixture of frustration and concern behind it.
“Yeah, but you never got rid of all the old scanners, either,” Leafspring’s voice admonished her over the sound system. “Every day I count my lucky stars you’re still leaving enough space in the bay for this gunboat to actually carry a few guns... This is worse than my last assignment up in the Yaket Mountains where we had to pack a week’s worth of survival kit on every patrol…”
“Leaf, we’ve never been to the Yaket Mountains…” Palisade admonished, but still didn’t look up from his instruments even for a moment. “Listen, Doc, can you please just get back and start runnin’ those calculations?”
Surprised once again by the almost pleading, anxious tone in the pilot’s voice, Twilight trotted back into the troop bay and seated herself behind a fold-out table with a map, a sheaf of weighted-down scrap paper, and the locator compass.
For a long while, the bay was silent, aside from the omnipresent roar of the rotors. Every few minutes, she’d take another bearing, calculate the next stage in a geodesic, and then send her notes off to Spike down below. Very rarely she was able to read the results off into the clairaudio spell, and even then Spike’s reply sounded echoy and distant. More commonly, she had to make do with notecards swapped over his firelink.
For what seemed like hours, his replies were always more or less the same. “Nothing.” “Still nothing.” “No sign of anypony but us down here.”
The murky depths of the Everfree outside tinted orange with the setting sun, and then fell into indistinct darkness. Only occasionally could she see the lanterns of the search party shining up through the foliage below; if it wasn’t for Spike’s continued messages she would have worried about losing track of them as well. The tracker’s needle never stopped wobbling, although the frequency steadily decreased from nearly constant to perhaps once a minute: “S – O – S … S – O – S… … … S – O – S… … …”
Finally, the clairaudio spell crackled and echoed again, this time with Chamomile’s voice instead of Spike’s. “Hold up, hold up, I think we’ve found something. Hey. Hey! Yeah, over here, it’s okay, we’re… aww, Notus’s Breath, what happened to you…?”
It had been a crisp autumn day in Ponyville, but the sky over Castle Rock remained a constant, oppressive slate gray, a condition that seemed to be becoming increasingly common in the Everfree as of late. Despite the local Weather Team’s best efforts, the rain simply refused to let up- above the clouds, there were only more clouds, extending up farther than anypony had dared measure. Twilight met up with Spike, Chamomile, Marigold, and the newly-recovered Pvt Pikesquare in the converted shipping container that served as Councilmare Derpy Hooves’ occasional office. Festooned with early Harvest Festival decorations and a few of her daughter’s school craft projects, it felt like the only cheerful spot left in the camp.
Twilight had only personally interacted with Pvt Pikesquare on a few occasions before, and never for very long, but even she was shocked by how different he looked. The earth pony’s sky-blue coat was stretched tight over his frame, revealing a slight but noticeable loss in muscle mass; his beard had grown out, and his thick tan mane was a filthy, unkempt mess. Half of his armor was simply gone, and the rest jury-rigged into place with lengths of paracord. He seemed not to have noticed her -or anypony else- as he attacked a plate piled full of eggs and buttered oats, alongside a plastic water jug and a carton of heavy cream from the field kitchen.
Feeling suddenly awkward, Twilight coughed to announce her presence, then looked down at her notes. “Okay. Okay. So… how long, from your perspective, would you say you were lost?”
He swallowed another mouthful of oats, then spoke slowly and deliberately, as though out of practice. “I don’t know. There weren’t really days or nights to go by, at least nothing consistent, but… weeks, maybe a little more than a month? I, uhh… I remember I ate a squirrel, about two weeks in. Couldn’t cook it, ground was too wet to ever start a fire. Tried eating some of the plants, but what little I could keep down just gave me the shits.”
Spike just shook his head and muttered, “How did he even get out there in the first place?”
Pikesquare returned to his meal, only speaking in between bites. “I was just about done with my shift at the Hall, when I heard… it sounded like an argument, shouting, out in the woods. It was too far away to make out words, but they were definitely ponies. I headed over to take a look, and there wasn’t anything there I could see, so I turned around, and… the path back was just gone. Tried to retrace my steps best I could, but that didn’t get me anywhere…” he trailed off.
“You… know you’re supposed to send up an emergency flare if you notice any disturbance,” Twilight reminded him, as gently as she could manage.
“I did,” the stallion practically growled, “Nopony responded.” He patted an unruly patch of torn canvas, which was barely holding his left pauldron in place. “Used up the rest of the pack the first… week-ish, and nopony saw those either.”
“He’s probably telling the truth,” Spike added, giving her a very slight sideways glance. “How many times now have we gotten false positives with those flares… investigated and there’s nothing there? Tartarus, some of those might’ve been the ones he sent up, or was going to send up. And how many times’ve we had somepony send one up for something minor, and not get any response.”
Twilight had to admit he had a point. The flares had worked well enough early on, but it seemed as though the more they were used, the less reliable they became. She thought back to Palisade’s odd behavior on the search flight, and concluded it made a weird sort of sense. By this point, her expedition into the Everfree Forest was one of the longest in its storied history- measured against those who’d made it out alive and reasonably sane, at least.
“’M fine now, though,” Pikesquare said, rather suddenly, pulling Twilight out of her thoughts. “I’m here. I’ve got food… water. A shower might be nice.”
Chamomile nodded. “You did good, Piker. I’ll see about getting you transferred out of here.”
There was a long pause before the private swallowed again and bobbed his head. “… thanks, Sarge.” He was quiet for a bit longer, staring at nothing, and then said, “There was somepony else out there, Sarge.”
Chamomile cocked his head.
“Near the end, there, I hadn't found any water in four, five days. So, I was laying there, thinking, ‘this is it, I’m dead’, when I saw somepony through the trees.”
Spike just nodded, and scratched down a few notes of his own. “What'd this… other pony look like?”
“I dunno, they had a cloak, with the hood up, but I could see their eyeshine.”
“Eyeshine? A Lunar survivor, maybe?” Twilight suggested. She thought they’d recovered any Rebel troops who might still have been wandering the Everfree three-and-a-half months after Nightmare Moon’s return, but she’d also thought the same thing before Fluttershy had discovered a pair of petrified soldiers everypony had written off as dead.
“That's what I thought, too. They had their head low, and they were pawing at the ground, like they were challenging me, almost. But I figured, Lunar or not, it was worth trying to talk to them.” The soldier swallowed hard, and continued more quietly, “Even if they weren’t friendly, I was… just about at the point where getting run through sounded better than keeling over from thirst. So, I got up and tried to approach, when I- I tripped on a vine, and fell into a puddle. It was water!”
Chamomile raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.
“It wasn't much more than a few mouthfuls of muddy rainwater, but I drank it.” Pikesquare paused again, “When I looked up, the pony -whoever it was- it was gone. And then you guys found me, the next day, I think.”
Capt Marigold waved a hoof at Twilight and spoke up for the first time since they’d arrived. “We need to talk. Outside.”
Twilight nodded and led the way out of the container. Looking out over the encampment, she was once again taken aback by how much it had degraded in just the last few months. Most of the metal shipping containers they’d hauled out were, unaccountably, already rusted through in places; some were little more than gutted wrecks, and a few were sinking into the mud that had formed from previously rock-solid ground. Wooden scaffolding was beginning to warp and rot at a vastly accelerated pace, and they seemed unable to make it through a shift without one of the tents collapsing. And, yet, paradoxically, frustratingly, the ruins of the city itself still looked completely pristine, as though the Battle of Everfree had concluded perhaps a day or two ago.
I leave town for a week, and look what happens… Twilight mused half-heartedly, Although, really, what would've changed if I was here?
During her stay in Innsbeak, Spike had suggested moving into some of the larger and more intact ruins, but that experiment hadn’t lasted long. The ancient city was haunted, which wasn’t unexpected, but the sheer level of spectral activity was unprecedented: harassment in the form of shredded notes, hidden tools, and outright attacks had made any kind of habitation more or less impossible. It seemed that for every ghost they tracked down and exorcized -itself a feat of patience in the convoluted ruins- two more took its place, which was an anomaly in its own right. Entropy existed everywhere, even in undeath. After a thousand years, all but the most resilient spectres should have dissipated. They certainly shouldn’t have retained their appearances, personalities, and the ability to execute relatively complex strategies.
The few ponies out and about were starting to converge around Derpy’s office and talk among themselves, trying to peer around through the doors. Briefly, Twilight considered ordering them away to keep them from getting a good look at Pvt Pikesquare’s condition, but then decided there was likely no point. The Royal Guard transmitted scuttlebutt more efficiently than it distributed grenades and ration packs. Everypony who cared probably already knew, and even if they didn’t secrecy would just allow soldiers’ imaginations to fill in something much worse than the truth. Twilight tried to shift herself into their headspace: that one of their brothers-in-arms just went through Tartarus, but made it out alive. That was something to be proud of… right?
“It’s watching us,” she heard Derpy Hooves mutter. The Councilmare stood quietly off to one side, a polite distance away -they were using her office, after all- but not far enough away so as to be inaudible. Her wings were very slightly extended out from her sides, and the rain bent away from her in a lopsided dome.
“Excuse me?” Spike asked.
“Sorry… sorry…” the gray pegasus shook her head, seemingly focusing on them for the first time- with her wall-eyed stare, it was somewhat difficult to tell. “I just… can’t shake the feeling that this whole place is watching us… judging us…”
Spike raised a claw. “Now, that’s a normal response to-”
“Just trust me,” the Councilmare said with surprising vehemence.
“Right…” Twilight turned back to Capt Marigold. “You wanted to talk to me?”
“Listen. Piker was one of my Guards, back when I was just a lieutenant,” said the captain, “Chamomile made the right call. Hopefully, after a round of psych evals he’ll get stationed somewhere a little more… normal. But it’s still gonna be a rutting shame to have him gone, especially after what happened to Lieutenant Salmon Salt. An honorable discharge is still a discharge.”
Twilight just nodded. 2ndLt Salmon Salt’s condition had started out as an ordinary case of trench hoof, which, given the increasingly cold and damp conditions, wasn’t unexpected. Then, an opportunistic infection had set in, and inexplicably failed to respond to any standard treatments. She'd been moved to Ponyville General for intensive care, where just as inexplicably the infection cleared up on its own; but by then, her entire hoof up to the hock had decayed to the point where amputation was the only option. Her hoof had basically rotted right off her leg.
“Ever since you came back from whatever it was you were doing in the Griffish Isles, you’ve pretty much asked us to double the security on twice as many sites, without any reinforcements from Canterlot- or any volunteers from the Ponyville Militia that you or Spike haven’t personally vetted,” Marigold continued, “and now we’re taking losses. The Night Guard can help, but there’s only so many of them, too. This is not sustainable." she paused, "And to make matters worse, we’re starting to lose artifacts again.”
Twilight nodded once more. “I… understand totally where you’re coming from, but… well, in all likelihood, the current round of thefts are the result of spectral activity, and you can’t exactly fight ghosts with conventional weapons. I don’t think additional troops or Ponyville civilians would be much help." She looked down at her now-soggy notes, limply hanging from her clipboard, “The artifacts we’ve been losing haven’t been significant or unique, which puts this situation at odds with what Shutterfly was doing, and if ghosts are responsible then they can’t manifest very far from the site they’re bound to, so things aren’t even being taken at all, just hidden. I’ve spoken to Princess Luna about the situation, and she’s confident that the material in question will reappear and no additional steps need to be taken.”
The awkward truth was that, with ponies at the Royal Academy and Ministry of Defense actively trying to cover up Celestia’s disastrous attempt to scry on Nightmare Moon in 1019, Twilight simply couldn’t trust anypony newly added to her staff. Marigold knew perfectly well that something was being kept secret, but Twilight was still reluctant to put it into words.
“Do you know how much it costs to train up a Royal Guard?” Marigold asked after another long pause, “In between jump training, dive training, ranger school, mountain warfare, it's upwards of a million bits. We’re a bunch of championship fencers in a bar fight out here, and every so often somepony’s getting her teeth bucked in. Yeah, on paper we’re stationed right in the middle of civilization, but… out here, I don’t really think we’re near anything. Ordinarily we’d be rotated out by now, but it’s been three months and there’s no end in sight.” She stepped closer and looked Twilight dead in the eye. “Look, you have that hyperfocus stuff, whatever, but you have to understand that not everypony else here does. My troops are at the breaking point. You're the project lead, Doc. You have to give us something.”
When Twilight arrived back at the Station, it was close to six in the evening, even though she’d left at four and spent easily five hours handling the situation at Castle Rock. That suited her just fine. She still had enough time to handle the welter of other problems that had no doubt cropped up in her absence, eat a full dinner, and then catch up on her sleep, before starting the next day on what Spike called ‘normal pony hours’. That was a light schedule compared to her undergraduate days at the Academy, where her normal workday lasted thirty-six hours and she kept sleep at bay with alchemical stimulants. That was how she'd graduated summa cum laude among the four hundred students who managed to graduate at all, out of her incoming class of two thousand.
As she trotted down the hill towards the edge of town, she was so lost in thought that she barely noticed the fireworks bursting over the Town Square- at least until the wind shifted and she caught the sound of applause following them.
She looked at Spike. Spike looked back, and they wordlessly trotted towards the commotion.
Ponyville never had much of a nightlife to speak of, but tonight the cobblestone streets were positively deserted. Only when Twilight made it to within a few blocks of the market square did she realize that easily half the population had gathered in the center of town. The crowd was dense enough that she still couldn’t see what they were all looking at, but near the perimeter a few big sandwich-board signs had been set up. Trotting closer, she saw that each depicted the silhouette of an azure unicorn with her forehooves raised, against a purple background of stars and radiating lines. “Witness THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TRIXIE!” proclaimed the text on an illustrated banner at the top, followed by the claim that “MAGIC AND MYSTERY - THRILLS AND DELIGHTS AWAIT”. “Town Square” and a table of dates and times had been penciled into a blank white space obviously set aside for that exact purpose.
A new barrage of fireworks crackled above, drawing Twilight's gaze skyward, as blue, green and gold stars burst overhead. The sparkling lights lingered, then converged into outlines- a bluish unicorn, and a green insectoid blob. The ground shook slightly from the crowd stamping in approval. As far as illusion magic went the mechanism seemed standard enough, although there was a definite artistry to how it was being used; multiple layers of projection shifted back and forth through each other in order to create an iridescent glow around the unicorn, and at the same time lend the green creature a decidedly slimy quality.
Looking back closer to ground level, Twilight spotted Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack all standing in one group midway through the crowd. She waved to Spike and they began the delicate process of slipping between densely-packed bodies towards the others.
Pinkie Pie turned around, grinned, and waved the two of them forward. Now Twilight could see the stage properly, a worn little collapsible model unfolded from the side of a camper wagon, painted pale yellow with bright red accents. On it stood an azure unicorn mare in a glittering purple cloak adorned with silver and gold stars, and a matching neo-Preclassical wizard’s hat. Cocked backwards, it offered the audience a clear view of her horn, most likely so they could see when she was and wasn't using telekinesis. She didn’t appear to be wearing much in the way of makeup- her glossy blue coat added more than enough flash on its own.
Spike stepped up beside Pinkie Pie. “I guess that's the ‘Great an-”
“And then!” the mare on the stage shouted, “The Grrreat and Powerful Trrrrixie summoned a lightning bolt to strike the hideous creature!”
Spike looked back to the stage. “Well, okay then!”
With a dramatic sweep of her cloak, the showmare -Trixie- extended a hoof, and hurled a small arc of silver-blue energy upwards and through the insect projection. Twilight couldn’t tell if the lightning was real or also illusory, but the target reacted appropriately enough; it darkened, took on an ashlike texture, and flipped over with its cartoon legs twitching comically. “For a moment,” the mare continued, “Trixie thought she could find her wagon in peace and leave those accursed caves far behind.” In the air above, the illusory unicorn leapt over the corpse and continued down a twisting, illuminated yellow road lined with squiggly cartoon stalagmites. Slanted greenish eyes appeared briefly in the spaces between them, and the cartoon unicorn looked around suspiciously, mirroring the movements of the real pony below. “But that was a mistake. For you see, while Ankhaps are typically solitary and territorial, they will swarm together to defend against an outside threat- such as yours truly.” The stage lights began to dim, and fade from electric blue to an oppressive greenish brown. A harsh chiaroscuro effect seemed to isolate Trixie on an otherwise dim and indistinct stage. Up above, dozens more insectlike forms surrounded the cartoon unicorn, wobbly greenish lines giving the impression that they were squirming. “They poured in from every side! Burrowing up from below, tunneling in from above, clawing their way through the cavern walls, gibbering, screeching…”
Twilight saw Spike arch a skeptical brow ridge. Now that Trixie had put a name to her mysterious attackers, the scholar could understand his confusion. The broad strokes of the story made sense- ankhaps, relatives of the more famous ankhegs, did indeed live mostly underground in the coastal areas of Equestria, were indeed giant insects, and were indeed both highly aggressive and moderately intelligent. They possessed a limited, but highly confusing and insular language; and an instinctual compulsion to hoard gold, magical objects, and- for reasons unknown- Pop Art-esque iterative paintings of monkeys. Some even understood the value of currency, although their interest in bits had fallen off sharply ever since Equestria had gone off the gold standard in the middle Third Century. True to the showmare’s word, they were typically a territorial species prone to violent squabbling over treasure, dominance, or inexplicable slights; but if one was intruded upon, dozens more would immediately come pouring out of the woodwork to attack in eerily coordinated fashion. However, despite being perpetually inimical to pony society, ankhaps were a disease of civilization. Seemingly evolutionarily incapable of constructive labor to build anything of their own, they laired exclusively in the forgotten corners of other creatures’ structures. The idea of not just one, but many, digging in natural caverns without restaurants to pilfer meals from, or the basement of a single-family house to dwell in during the daylight hours, was absurd.
Undeterred, the mare on the stage continued. “They had me surrounded,” she stage-whispered, as the spotlight around her grew narrower and narrower; the illusory insects up above drew closer and closer to the illusory unicorn. “The Great and Powerful Trixie was at their mercy- for a moment!” She trotted towards the front of the stage and leaned over it, seeming about to leap into the crowd. “Normally, the Great and Powerful Trixie doesn't condone violence to animals- even giant disgusting cockroaches- but when they opened up that sinkhole and stole my wagon, with the Stars as my witness the Great and Powerful Trrrrrixie would get it back!” The spotlight widened to cover the whole stage again, and a fresh round of pyrotechnics were set off in the back- sparklers culminating in a bright blue flare. “Trixie wasn't afraid, but discretion is the better part of valor, as they say. The ankhaps didn't want me, but they did want the wondrous treasures I've collected from across Equestria, and beyond!” Rearing back on her hind legs, she pulled off her hat in one forehoof, reached into it with the other, and extracted a frog-sized gemstone that shone blue in the stage lights. “Lucky for Trixie, ankhaps are as stupid as they are greedy! All I had to do is ask, but where did Trixie find these treasures?” The illusory anhkaps paused up above, then drew closer and closer with painful slowness. “Surely there are more, at the source! More... but not enough for all of you!” The images suddenly scattered in every direction. “It was a madhouse as they turned on each other!” Firecrackers rattled from the left and right, and the cartoon unicorn dashed a zigzag path through the mass of greenish-brown lines. “Manehattan was only a few miles away, and Trixie decided now was the time to make good on her escape! A few of the brighter ones stayed on my tail, but luckily the Great and Powerful Trixie knew just what to do!”
The illusion up above faded into a blob of hazy light, and then disappeared entirely; Trixie stepped into the curtained area in the back of the stage.
“Ya’ know, Ah remember there bein’ some big ruckus ‘bout cullin’ ankhegs near Manehattan ‘bout a decade ago, when Ah was visitin’ some kin,” Applejack muttered to Twilight, “Killed a mare when they came up through the floor a’ her basement, or somethin’. The Army got called in to deal with ‘em. Ain’t no ankhegs or ankhaps in a hundred miles’a Manehattan after that. Ain’t no caves in a hundred miles’a Manehattan, either- that’s all swamp ‘n coastline ‘round there.”
“Well, you’ve gotta give her a little artistic license, right?” Pinkie Pie admonished.
“Ah dunno,” the farmer shrugged, “Maybe this was before the cull and Trixie up there just can’t tell a cave from a culvert. Or, then again, maybe she's just fulla' wind.”
The showmare was in the process of wheeling out the second of two large, pony-sized wooden boxes, each with a door in front. She set them down on opposite ends of the stage, easily six or seven meters apart. “While the Great and Powerful Trixie didn’t much mind blinding ankhaps with the fabulous magical energies produced by this technique, she is willing to take extra measures to guarantee the safety of such wonderful ponies as yourselves…”
“Boastful lil’ rutter, ain’t she…” continued Applejack.
Feeling increasingly uncomfortable, Twilight shrugged. “I… guess?”
“Yeah, who needs all this flash and spectacle?” Pinkie shot back, “How about a magic show where a mare kicks a tree, and knocks all the apples on it into a bucket? And then…” she reared back on her hind legs and spread her forehooves wide, “she does the same thing fifty more times!”
“Am I gonna have to separate you two?” Rainbow Dash asked, before returning her attention to Trixie.
“By all means, feel free to come up and inspect the equipment to your satisfaction!” the showmare was calling out, “For this performance, the Great and Powerful Trixie has no need for trapdoors or illusion spells!”
After a moment’s pause, a few ponies from the front row climbed up on stage- Twilight recognized Cheerilee, Corporal Subtle Spark, and Applejack’s brother Big Macintosh among them. They prodded and tapped, opening the doors on the front of both boxes and feeling about inside. Seemingly satisfied, first Cheerilee stepped back down, followed by Sparky and Macintosh. “Now, is there a mage in the audience today?” Trixie asked, “A crystal-worker or enchantment inspector, perhaps?”
Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Pinkie all turned to look at Twilight. Almost unconsciously, they shuffled a few steps away, leaving her and Spike exposed in a little patch of trampled earth.
“C’mon, Twilight, you should check it out!” the dragon prompted.
“Oh, Spike, I don’t know…”
“Any-ponyyyy?” Trixie asked from up on stage, seemingly looking directly at Twilight.
“Twilight…” Spike twisted his claws together, looking for all the world like a sad, slit-eyed, scaly puppy.
“This is your kinda thing, isn’t it? C’mon, don’t be chicken,” Rainbow Dash added.
“Oh, fine.” Twilight began to make her way forward, the crowd parting in front of her, and clambered up onto the stage. There were a few, scattered cheers, mostly from the Royal Guard troops scattered throughout the crowd of Ponyville natives- it was hard to tell, as up here the lights were positively blinding and anything further out than the first row or two of spectators blurred into indistinguishable darkness. Unsure of what else to do, Twilight muttered the cantrip of her favored magesight spell and peered at the mysterious wooden boxes. They were inert and amagical, in contrast to the hazy auras put out by the stage lights and the bright ring of the amplification spell around Trixie’s neck. She played over each side of each box, inside and out, with a powerful disjunction spell, and when nothing detonated or flickered out of existence repeated the process with the stage around it. Then, on a whim, she altered her magesight to detect selenitic matter. No more was present than normal for Ponyville, which always read as slightly more contaminated than average due to its proximity to both Canterlot and the Castle of the Two Sisters. She dismissed the spell. “Alright?”
“So, would you say that there’s no enchantments, illusions, spell circles, or other such mechanisms here?” Trixie asked.
“Umm… as near as I can determine, no. Err… yes. No spells, I mean. There’s two boxes, each built around a code-standard closet door frame, I’d say… made out of modern treated lumber?”
Trixie nodded and grinned, her movements exaggerated for the benefit of the audience. She eased the door of the far box closed with her telekinesis, and then reached into her cloak and pulled out a small metal ring. “And would you say this little doodad is effective at preventing the casting of ordinary spells?”
“Well, only one way to find out.” Twilight sucked in a deep breath, summoned her telekinesis, plucked the ring out of Trixie’s hoof, and slipped it over her own horn. There was a brief, disquieting sensation of effort without action as her field was suppressed. Then she pushed all the mana she could bring to bear into a single disjunction spell- upwards at nothing in particular, of course, to avoid harming anypony. Nothing happened. Finally, she considered that she hadn’t bothered to check if the ring included a full thaumofixative anti-magic enchantment, or simply blocked projective spells. On the off chance that Trixie knew enough of the Starswirl-Clover Thesis to cast without her horn -she’d apparently conjured lightning, after all, which was usually considered ‘pegasus magic’- Twilight mouthed a simplified version of her magelight with no telekinetic components. No illumination was produced. “All right? It’s… an effective suppressor. I can’t really say much more about it than that.”
“Thank you kindly.” Trixie swiftly lifted the ring from Twilight’s horn and slipped it onto her own. Still feeling vaguely put-upon, the scholar hopped down from the stage and made her way back into the crowd. Turning around again, she saw Trixie step into the box on the left, hurl her hat across the stage, then pull the door closed while the hat was still in the air. Perhaps half a second later, the door to the right-side box opened and Trixie leaned out again. She caught the hat in one hoof, gave a quick little half-bow, and tossed it back across the stage again before disappearing inside the box once more. There was another surge of applause as the cycle continued from one box to the other, and then back again. In spite of herself, Twilight joined in.
Spike laughed a little as she stepped back up beside him. “I’m… actually a little surprised you’re… you know, okay with this. After, well, everything that happened with Luna, and the signs, and all…”
Twilight could only shrug. “Well, it’s all in good fun, is the thing! That mare isn’t actually claiming she has supernatural powers, or trying to restart an ancient religion, or bilk money and fame out of ponies, or anything like that…”
“Well, we are payin’ ‘er to sit here ‘n applaud ‘n all,” said Applejack.
“If you really don’t like the show, then why are you here?” Twilight asked, suddenly feeling a bit frustrated with the farmer’s behavior. “Wait a second, is she even charging admission? I just got in here for free.”
Up on stage, Trixie had switched from tossing the hat to tossing the ‘diamond’ she’d produced earlier. Every so often she’d let it teeter on the edge of her hoof, or bounce from one to the other, earning the expected gasps from the crowd.
“Wait- pff, that's just teleportation,” Rainbow Dash shot Applejack a confused look, and then rolled her eyes. “Twilight can do that!”
Trixie paused, leaning out of the leftmost box, ‘diamond’ held in one hoof, and looked directly at the pegasus. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
Rainbow shifted awkwardly from hoof to hoof, and shuffled her wings, and made a quiet little “Erhmmmm” noise.
“Feel free to speak up,” the showmare called, and then waved her hoof -still holding the ‘diamond’- over the entire crowd. “I offer this priceless diamond as a reward to anypony at all who can satisfactorily explain and duplicate the feats of the Great and Powerful Trixie, the most powerful unicorn in Equestria!”
"That n' a couple bits'll getcha a cup a' cider," Applejack scoffed.
“Most powerful unicorn in Equestria?” Spike’s slitted eyes narrowed. “What’s Archmage Inkwell, then? Or the Plume Doree? Shining Armor’s no slouch either! Does Princess Celestia count? If we’re just talking stage acts, what about Hoffdini, or Fire Flare? And why just unicorns, what about-”
“It’s a show, Spike,” Pinkie Pie chided, “You aren’t supposed to take everything she says seriously- like a comedian, almost!” She pulled a section of her voluminous pink mane down in front of her muzzle, perhaps attempting to emulate a mustache. “I just don’t see the appeal of those Manx Brothers,” she said in a stuffy Trottingham accent, referencing the famous Abyssinian trio, “No creature would actually believe that was his reflection in the mirror…”
Twilight nodded, chuckling. “Just repeat to yourself ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax’?”
The baker abandoned her fake mustache and got a downright wary look in her eye. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here!”
“Come on now, don’t be shy…” Trixie chided from onstage. Twilight had forgotten that she was still leaning half-out of her wooden box, looking at Rainbow Dash. In fact, a lot of ponies in the crowd were looking at Rainbow Dash, too.
The pegasus swallowed, then glared back at the showmare. “I… said that’s probably just teleportation, and I’ve seen ponies do teleportation before.”
“Oh, is it, now?” Trixie grinned, and tossed her ‘diamond’ one more time. While she leaned against the side of her box, the door on the other opened and a second Trixie deftly caught the stone in her hoof.
Rainbow Dash just stared, wide-eyed, as the crowd around her cheered uproariously.
Both Trixies took deep stage bows in nearly perfect synchrony, and the one currently holding the hat doffed it. Then they both retreated into their respective boxes and closed the doors, only for each box to unfold into a flat pile of boards, leaving the stage utterly empty. Rainbow’s mouth opened and closed a few times, producing no sound. There was a tense, pregnant pause as the crowd scanned the curtains, the wagon, and the evening sky, until Trixie tapped Dash on the shoulder from behind. The pegasus leaped airborne, head down, hooves up in a defensive posture, to the sound of more uproarious applause mixed with quite a bit of laughter. Trixie cleared her throat: “Ahem. In the future, I’d appreciate it if you held your comments until after the show is over? It's just common courtesy.”
Twilight whistled, quietly impressed. True bilocation -of one’s self, or another creature, or anything else- was just about possible with the most sophisticated conventional magic, but fiendishly difficult. Twilight had never dared attempt it. Princess Celestia could, if sufficiently motivated, reliably exist in two places at once for about eight minutes under her own power. A minotaur mage living in the Centaur Union, after decades of practice, currently held the self-casting record of fifteen minutes on the dot. A research group at Bitskatonic University had used a room full of very expensive equipment to establish an absolute record of just over two hours, before their mechanism irreparably burned out. And all of those records had been set by stationary casters in a neutral environment. Trixie had been performing a relatively cognitively demanding task for a little over a minute by now.
Some scholars had proposed a more stable method, based on a theoretical interaction between Clover’s Similio
Duplexis and certain acceleration spells, but the derived invocation contained a number of fiendishly complex parameters that remained so far unresolved. In short, despite her advanced degree, Dr. Twilight Sparkle had no idea how Trixie pulled off her little stunt.
Trixie climbed back up on stage, and with a flourish, popped the nullifier ring off her horn. Then she stepped forward and dropped into a deep bow, as volley after volley of fireworks burst overhead, almost drowning out the ferocious applause. “As for how Trixie finally managed to ditch those horrible creatures, well… I guess you’ll have to catch her next show! For now, well…” She swept off her hat, and hopped back off the stage again, into the crowd, “the Great and Powerful Trixie doesn’t charge admission, but she’s got to eat somehow…”
After perhaps ten more minutes of cheers, congratulations, and modest contributions, the crowd finally began to thin out. Twilight waved goodbye to Applejack, Pinkie, and Rainbow Dash, then lurked at the edge of the square until she and Spike were just about the only spectators left. Then she walked back up to the stage, where Trixie had already collected her hat full of bits and was starting the process of packing her numerous lights and flashpots away. “Excuse me?” the scholar called out, reaching into her saddlebags and floating a ten-bit coin over to the stage.
Trixie paused what she was doing and trotted over. Up close and without the bright stage lights, she looked surprisingly young, in her mid-twenties at the oldest, but weatherbeaten; her shimmering cloak was rather worn around the edges. Beneath her hat, Twilight could barely see a simple, surprisingly practical wavy manecut. Her eyes had a reflective, almost mineral quality around the iris, and Twilight wondered if that was due to some covert detection spell she’d cast, or simply a preponderance of Timbucktu or Crystal Empire ancestry. Such recessive traits were rare, but not unheard of. “I thought that show was pretty impressive”, Twilight continued, then pondered for a moment and stuck out her hoof. “Sorry, sorry, I’m Twilight Sparkle. I’m a… historian, studying the Lunar artifacts around Ponyville,” In fact, her doctorate was in liminology, but mentioning that tended to draw out weird questions about exactly what she was doing in town. Historians were a far less showy bunch. “This is Spike, my assistant.”
The showmare met the offered hoof with her own, nodded, and grinned. “I know who you are, Dr. Sparkle. Right now, you might even be more famous than the Great and Powerful Trixie!” She paused, then shook her head, seemingly to clear it. “Could you… by any chance, show me that funny spell you cast up on stage? After the regular magesight one?”
“Uh, I’m… sorry, I’m afraid that’s… confidential, actually. Pending publication so the journal owns it, kind of a pain really,” Twilight laughed awkwardly, purposefully omitting that the ‘journal’ in question was the database of the Destructive Arcana and Techniques oversight committee, and that publication wouldn’t be happening any time soon. “In fact, I really wasn’t actually supposed to be casting it anywhere, so, maybe if we could just keep that little incident between the two of us, that’d be great…” the scholar made her best attempt at a winning smile. Trixie seemed skeptical, but didn’t respond either, so Twilight decided to call it a win. “Anyway, what I was going to ask you about was how long you planned to stay here.”
The showmare scratched under her chin with a forehoof. “For a town this size? Probably… three days, counting today?”
“Do you think you could maybe… bump that up to a week? And maybe do a performance or two for the Royal Guard working with me? Laborers, mostly, along with a Royal Guard company. We’ve been… uhh… really busy at a camp out in the Everfree this last week or so, and could probably use the distraction.”
Spike tugged on her foreleg, and when she bent her neck down whispered in one ear: “Twilight? Are you seriously considering inviting this mare to come out to the site?”
“Yeah?” Twilight whispered back, “You saw how Palisade and Leafspring are holding up, and after everything that happened with Piker, and the cockatrice and me disappearing for a week, and Froggy Bottom Bog, and the hydra attack, everypony really probably could use a chance to relax a little.”
“But… at least tell me you’re not going to pay her…”
“I don’t know, maybe? There’s a little room in the operations budget for personnel accommodations, so… why not? They pay for performances and music shows on military bases, after all…” And this is a lot more wholesome than some of the acts Shiny used to tell us about…
Spike just shook his head. “Fine.”
Twilight looked back to the showmare. “So, what do you think?”
“When can the Great and Powerful Trixie start?”
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Incoherent noises of high-pitched excitement
Edit: It's a little early, but my guess is changeling assistant..
Yes, it's finally here!
Ladies and gentlemen, we present, the Grrreat and Powerful Trrrixie!
Woohoo! Here we gooo!
Woo, it's out! I can't wait to see what sorts of shenanigans and troubles happen, especially with whatever the Everfree could possibly throw. That brief cameo by Zecora was pretty neat too!
11162520
I was seriously expecting that nobody would get that, and someone did in minutes. Impressive.
11162521
It's funny how sometimes something like that will just go over your head and other times you'll notice something that no one else has caught.
Ha. Yes. Diss the NFTs please! They deserve all the scorn you can manage.
Hey there. Glad to see you getting the next story in this series started. Very good job on the exchanges, characterizations and future chapter set-up. Definitely liked Spike trying to practice his magic in order to improve his usefulness to Twilight and her friends and I definitely appreciated the guards voicing their very understandable frustrations (especially with that one guard foreshadowing Zecora with the flashback with getting lost in the Everfree for a month and change), with Twilight sympathizing, but understandably over-cautious concerning the group newcomers concerning information that is supposed to top secret. And, yeah, also liked Pinkie being, in a sarcastic sort of way, ironically one of the voices of reasons when Applejack vented her frustrations concerning Trixie's bragging. I could certainly see where Twilight could get the idea to hire Trixie to provide some entertainment for the understandably frustrated troops.
And yeah, the points you made in the author's notes were quite on-point as usual. And, as for dragon magic, we've seen some signs of it (mostly from Spike - stuff like his teleportation breath and, less deliberately, "greed growth" [though the latter could be weaponized with proper training; Spike learning to increase his size and proportionate strength and durability the more motivated he is by protecting those he truly cares about while still retaining his normal intelligence, even if that would realistically take a fair number of years]) and griffons, well, I'm visualizing something like a hybrid of Pegasus and Earth pony magic (though somewhat modified due to species) as griffons, as I aforementioned, can fly like Pegasi and have comparable strength to an Earth pony. But that is just a theory and much more likely to be wrong than right.
Very certainly looking forward to more of this.
Ah, glad to see more of this. Trixie is a fun character; stage magic in a world of actual magic has to be pretty tough!
11162815
You're absolutely right. With that in mind, we repainted Trixie as both a storyteller and a stage magician, weaving tricks and spectacle into a central narrative- in this case, her escape from the ankhaps. Any unicorn with a basic understanding of magic can shine some lights and move stuff around with TK, but it takes a showman to make it all entertaining.
11162815
Yeah, we spent a lot of time (and, by extension, Trixie and other stage magicians in-universe spent a lot of time) figuring out tricks that would actually be impressive and unexplainable in a world where large portions of the population can fly, use telekinesis, or toss boulders around like beach balls; and bookworm physicists can literally teleport from one place to the next. Part of that is recognizing the limits on what magic can and cannot do (and what magic can indeed do but is not widely known to be able to do), and another big part of it is, indeed, color and spectacle.
Now, I don't have a problem inherently with mocking any of the groups in this. However it feels really forced in context and dates your story, something that your other fics didn't.
Then again, it is pretty funny.
11163378
That's fair. It started out as just some ankhegs, and mutated in stages into mocking the NFT crowd.
11163388
Not to mention the buy gold, anti government anarcho-capitalist crowd lmao
11163421
Yep. It's a good cross section of the iterative process the Admiral and I use in writing these. I proposed the fight against the ankhegs, a D&D staple; the Admiral countered with the gold-obsessed ankhaps; and then weeks later I suggested we go all the way with lampooning the NFT crowd. So that part's on me.
11163421
That was actually the main purpose of the segment, or at least the joke part of it. It began with wanting to find another monster for Trixie to talk about before the Ursa Major/Minor was a thing. Serketry suggested ankhegs, a D&D monster, but I thought that didn't quite fit because MLP monsters are never just mythological creatures, they always have some kind of twist or pun or gimmick. Thus, ankhegs became ankhaps. The bit about NFTs was actually added much later on- previously, they just hoarded gold, jewels, and art objects, but the rest of the description was the same.
11162468
That's a good guess, and if it's correct, it wouldn't be the first time I've shown up in EC, either.
Here's hoping Trixie stays a good guy throughout this story.
11162535
This is one reason to appreciate all those Easter egg videos online regarding movies and shows.
But, they're for movies and shows. Here, I have commenters.