Equestrian Celestial Forge

by TheDriderPony

Chapter 9 - Bureaucratic Blues

Three days after the Summer Sun Celebration, at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon, a package arrived on the desk of Dean Sigil, head of the Department of Arcane Runes at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.

At 2:15, an emergency meeting was called among all the Department heads and professorial staff.

By 2:25, battle lines had been drawn and the conference room of scholars and intellectuals were a hair's-breadth away from full on hostilities.

Dozens of voices clamored for attention, but it was only the few that were attached to the biggest personalities that really were heard and carried the debate, as much as the term qualified.

"It's absurd!" bellowed Archmage Anvil, a corpulent stallion whose prodigious jowls were only obscured by his even more outrageous mutton chops. "A joke at best and a mockery at worst! A breakthrough I could accept. A new runic sequence would be laudable. But some fool claiming to present an entirely new sub-branch of magic?! Preposterous!"

"And yet here it is," countered Dean Mandrake of the Department of Magical Botany, a reedy mare more akin to a bundle of kindling than a living pony. She tapped her copy of the thesis and let the pages splay across her desk. "This spells out everything from the most fundamental concepts to higher-order advanced constructs. I daresay I could give this to one of my apprentices and tell him to use it as a lesson plan. It's that comprehensive."

"Comprehensive, but that doesn't mean it's right," Anvil spat back. "I could write a comprehensive guide on growing sunflowers on the Moon and drop it on your desk but that doesn't mean you'd find it worth anything more than the ink it's written with."

"B-but all the math works," came the cautious contribution of Professor Eigenvector of the Department of Mathemagical Studies during a rare moment of silence.

"I couldn't give two of Princess Celestia's golden road apples about the math! You can't make a magic array out of crystal. They store spells and nothing else. It's the Third Law of Enchanting for star's sake!"

"Stop moving the goalposts, Anvil!" An anonymous voice shouted over the din.

"The crystal's beside the point," added a second voice. "Read the part where they derive it from first principles. You could carve this in a tree and it'd work.

“Not very well,” a third added, “but it would."

The vaunted chamber descended back into chaos, with every pony shouting their opinions as if volume alone was the deciding factor. Sitting above them all, two ponies remained silent.

The first was Deputy Headmaster Minimum Erva (a true Headmaster in all but name, as Celestia herself had very little time for the actual day-to-day management of school business) who sat stoically at her raised pulpit, sketching out something on a scrap of parchment.

The other observer, seated even higher, was less patient.

"Why are we even arguing this? It's a useless spell!"

The chambers fell into shocked silence at the voice that came from the very top of the room, the only occupant of the pegasi seating area. Downbeat Draft, head of the practically non-existent Pegasus magic department, flew from her seat and landed in the center of the symposium, a copy of the research paper in her hoof. "Real or not, can someone explain to me why we even care? I've skimmed through this brick of paper and best I can tell, all this does is give a unicorn longer range. There's a section on applying it to different materials—" she tossed away a few pages of the report "—one on spells that won't work with it—" another section fluttered to the floor "—a big boring section on why it works—" half the remaining papers escaped her hoof "—and the rest is, for some Celestia-forsaken reason, construction plans to build a giant range amplifier so tall it's literally a tower." She tossed the rest of the pages into the air. "Why!? Why do we care? Are we really squabbling like a bunch of foals arguing about their favorite Power Ponies character because you want to levitate a book from an extra twenty meters away?"

The silence that followed her speech was deafening. Not even Anvil seems to know how to respond to such an impassioned speech. Eventually though, it was timid Professor Eigenvector, the youngest pony present by almost two decades, who responded.

"Ah, Ms. Draft, I think you may have, ah, read the units wrong. That particular construction would extend a single unicorn's spell range by twenty miles, not twenty meters." When no one seemed about to interrupt him (a rare and pleasant change from the norm), he adjusted his glasses and continued. "And yes, there are other spells that can extend range, but that's beside the point. The important part is that it extends the range nonegocentrically."

Draft frowned. "What does that mean in terms that don't require a specialized degree?"

"It means," Dean Mandrake continued, "that a unicorn linked with one of these relays could cast a spell from it as if it were their own horn, regardless of the distance between them. If it works as these documents describe, a pony with the skill to teleport across this chamber could just as easily teleport to Fillydelphia; so long as there was a linked relay at the destination. It means a Guard resting in his barracks could cast a stun spell at a purse-snatcher on Restaurant Row as easily as if he were standing next to him. It means that the former Captain of the Guard Shining Armor could recreate his famous city-wide bubble shield around Canterlot without leaving his throne room in the Crystal Empire."

"Which is why the whole thing is obviously preposterous," Anvil concluded with a satisfied smirk. "That is why I say we track down whatever prankster thought this waste of our time was funny and strip them of whatever academic merits they may have." He shuffled back in his chair, brow still gleaming with sweat from his earlier excitement. "Who did submit this, anyway? My copy came without a cover page."

Deputy Headmaster Erva spoke up for the first time since the meeting began. "That would be Twilight Sparkle of Ponyville, formerly of Legacy Tower on the East campus." A piece of paper floated down in her magic field, which flickered out for a moment as it passed the normal edge of her range before it quickly returned, allowing her copy of the cover page to land neatly on the ground before Archmage Anvil’s seat. A simplified magic circle had been written overtop the title and author’s name that glowed faintly with magic. “I, for one, seem to have no trouble performing the spell in a practical application.”

Anvil paled so fast, one would have been forgiven for assuming he'd died on the spot and become a ghost.

"Ah. Well. Perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty to dismiss the new and groundbreaking claims. After all, the first unicorn to invent invisibility was called a fraud at the time."

---

Meanwhile, Twilight Sparkle was at home, unaware of the disturbance in the status quo her earnestly written report had caused. Her woodworking skill and repository of Wizard Tower enchanting knowledge worked in glorious concert as she happily engraved the walls of her Treebrary with as much runescript as she could fit between the shelves, singing a little ditty to herself as she did so.

“Oh the Hetz rune’s connected to the— Jyan rune. The Jyan rune’s connected to the— Urgle rune. The Urgle rune’s connected to the— Raj rune. Then we start again down on the next shelf!”

Comments

[Ralyx]

Glorious as always.

[River Babble]

XD Twilight once again out here upsetting all the academics with her casual academic musings. The line about the stallion going pale as a ghost was brilliantly worded, I love it!

[Greenhorn]

"That would be Twilight Sparkle of Ponyville, formerly of Legacy Tower on the East campus."

I didn't know her previous living quarter even has a name nor it is a famous place in the academic world.

Her woodworking skill and repository of Wizard Tower enchanting knowledge worked in glorious concert as she happily engraved the walls of her Treebrary with as much runescript as she could fit between the shelves, singing a little ditty to herself as she did so.

By the time Tirek come, her Treebrary would become no more less than a magical fortress. I wouldn't be surprised if it can even repel his shot back at him at that point.

[Comickook]

Excellent job on this latest chapter. Again, really liked the work that went into the dialogue and future chapter set-up. Definitely liked that discussion concerning the new magic that was discovered and how that one blowhard paled when he found out that it was Twilight's work. And, yeah, Tempest Shadow would definitely be very interested in finding out about that (considering that it would allow her to use her full magical potential even without her horn and all), but that would be for a couple of years down the road. And, yeah, definitely have a hunch that the Equestrians are going to be a lot better prepared for Tirek than in canon thanks to Twilight and her friends' slowly, but steadily increasing new abilities and gradually sharing those resources with the rest of the world. Of course, whatever new abilities the girls end up getting during their "key" episodes are going to be intriguing to see.

But, anyway, very certainly looking forward to more of this.

[Moproblems Moharmoney]

Wonderful

[Herald of Opera]

11306050
The Tempest Shadow bit is even better than you seem to realize, the description said something about getting them small enough to put on a ring being reasonable, and at that point they could just plain build an artificial horn.