• Published 10th Jul 2022
  • 2,956 Views, 440 Comments

Equestrian Celestial Forge - TheDriderPony



Have you ever wondered what might happen if Pinkie did alchemy? Suppose Twilight was Zeus' daughter? What about if Dash was a cyborg with dragonborn heritage and an Omnitrix? How might they change the world gaining new powers every few days?

  • ...
5
 440
 2,956

PreviousChapters Next
Chapter 1 - Just Sign on the Starry Line

Stars.

The first thing Twilight noticed when she woke up was the Stars.

Well, technically speaking, the first thing she noticed was that she was no longer in her library, surrounded by her friends and the satisfied feeling of having corrected a thousand-year-old spell. Instead, she was floating in an empty black space, weightless and directionless.

Empty, that was, except for the Stars.

They surrounded her on all sides; hundreds of them. Some as small and delicate as fireflies while others burned as bright and furious as Celestia's sun. They danced in binary and trinary and higher group orbits, putting on a cosmic show that put Princess Luna's best work to shame.

All the words of all the books she'd ever read felt insufficient, insultingly insufficient to try and capture even a fragment of the stellar majesty that she bore witness to. Twilight floated there at the edge of eternity for what could have been minutes, hours, years; a fly on the wall witnessing the universe's greatest orchestra weave a symphony of joy and despair, life and death, creation and decay.

She felt like she could have spent a lifetime there just watching the stars dance, studying the intricate byplay between the elements of a thousand-body physics problem.

It was beautiful. And terrible.

"Sweet Celestia," she murmured, her voice all but nothing, "it's full of stars."

The dance came to a sudden halt, and with it, Twilight underwent the profound realization that she was not alone.

Such a grand orchestra, of course, had a Conductor, and Twilight had just become the sole focus of its attention.

Her thoughts froze in place as the very space around her seemed to twist and look at her. It was enormous. A being so large she couldn't see all of it and once (and that which she could seemed to slide out of her mind's eye like oil) made of space folded unto itself so many times that it gained depth and definition. Gender and anatomy were foreign concepts to it, yet it had a mind so powerful that Twilight felt like an insect, a microbe, nothing more than an atom beneath the pressure of its direct awareness.

It was like getting teleported to the bottom of the ocean. There was no pain, no physical sensation she could put into words. Just the constant, unyielding pressure.

A long moment passed, for as much as time meant anything there, as Twilight and the immensely more powerful entity regarded each other like two strangers who'd rounded a corner and nearly collided.

'When in doubt', her Granny Sparkle's words echoed in her mind, 'it never hurts to be polite'.

Well, Granny’s advice had never steered her wrong before.

"Ah, hello there," Twilight greeted with the kind of awkwardness of someone who just unlocked their hotel room and found a stranger inside. "Sorry, I didn't mean to intrude on your... outer space." The celestial being said nothing. "It's a lovely space you have. Very beautiful stars."

[CURIOSITY]

It didn't speak—not in words or sounds like she knew them—but it conveyed its thoughts all the same on some deeply fundamental level that she felt through every fiber of her being. Twilight's mind and soul shuddered under the weight of its question. It was like being hit face first by the Royal Canterlot Voice, but with a speech's worth of connotation and subtext compressed into the single not-word.

[UNFAMILIAR], it continued, [QUERY: ORIGIN]

"Origin?" she asked, "Oh! You want to know where I'm from. Canterlot, originally, but Ponyville as of the past few months... though I don't suppose you'd know of them. No, of course you wouldn't. Equestria then? Still too small? Equus? It's a mid-sized planet with a yellow sun orbiting it." She hesitated and gave a look to the star-studded void around her. "I'm... not exactly sure how I got here from there, but if you can point me in the right direction I'll be on my way and out of your... starscape?"

The waves of sensation that came off the Conductor weren't quite emotions, but she got the general impression that it was mildly amused with her. Which, as far as she cared, was much better than things tended to go in most stories she'd read about meeting fantastically alien intelligences.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT] [QUERY: PURPOSE]

"My... purpose?" There was a depth to the question that left no question over whether it was asking why she was there in that space. It clearly wanted a deeper answer. Twilight hesitated in momentary confusion, but still continued to speak unbidden, as though the barrier between her thoughts and words had grown thin. "If you'd asked me a few months ago, I would have said learning without a second thought. That's what I did, all day, almost every day for years. I read every book in the library, every scroll in Princess Celestia's vaults, learned every lesson she could teach me. I sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But now..."

Her words slowed as memories came unbidden. Traveling to Ponyville. Meeting her friends. Saving the world. Lunches spent laughing over silly inside jokes. Rainy afternoons of quiet companionship. A thousand little moments that shone brightly in her memory like stars themselves.

"I guess I'm not sure what it is now. Can friendship be a purpose, or is it just a lifestyle? An outlook? Maybe it's only a philosophy. Am I even making sense? I feel like I'm just rambling on."

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT], it conveyed, [UNDERSTANDING] [CAMARADERIE]

Valid purpose or not, her answer seemed to satisfy the cosmic Conductor.

[JUDGMENT]

Twilight gasped as the pressure on her redoubled. For a moment, she felt like the center of the universe in the worst possible way. Like she was a filly again, unexpectedly standing before a symposium of Princess Celestias and being asked to present a dissertation she hadn't prepared on a topic she'd never heard of.

And then the pressure eased off and Twilight felt once again as weightless as she had before she'd garnered the Conductor's attention.

[JUDGMENT: ACCEPTABLE]

A wave of relief washed her over her soul, taking away with it her growing anxiety. She'd passed. Whatever kind of spiritual test or soul-weighing or hallucinated introspection that was, she'd passed. That was good.

The Conductor was no easier to perceive than it had been before, but for an amorphous being of stellar energy, something about it seemed friendlier than it had before.

[QUERY: DESIRE DIRECTION]

"Directions home?" she asked, "Yes, thank you very much, that would be a great help. I really should be getting back. I'm sure my friends are getting worried about me."

[CONTRACT] [ESTABLISHING CONNECTION]

The dance of the stars changed. A finer degree of control impressed upon stable chaos. Thin tendrils of starstuff reached from one to the next, connecting them like branches on a tree, forging loose stars into clusters, then webs, then a dozen or so constellations. The glittering bands thickened as more and more of them intersected, merged, reached down closer and closer to where she hovered and then—

{request}

The dance stopped as another presence, still incredibly powerful yet nothing compared to the Conductor, piped in from somewhere not-quite-behind Twilight.

"Is someone else here?"

[QUERY]

Twilight twisted and turned, expecting to see another impossible being occupying the whole of her field of view outside the first. Instead, what she saw behind her was, for lack of a better word, a tether. From the center of her back trailing off to a point in a headache-inducing direction was a thin stream of glittering magic. Now that she was aware of it, she realized she could feel it as well, tugging at some transcendental part of her.

{apologies} came the not-voice, carried along the tether and radiating out from the pony at the end of it like some kind of strange antenna. {humble suggestion}. It wasn't quite the same not-language the Conductor used. More like a pony speaking a foreign language with a phrasebook and a bad accent. {request: integrate established framework?}

What followed was a dense pulse of information, too complex for Twilight to parse, but which sounded to her senses almost like chimes.

[AMUSEMENT], replied the Conductor, somehow softer than before, [DEVIATION ACCEPTABLE] [IMPLEMENTING VARIATION]

{gratitude}

The constellations shook and twisted like a grove of trees caught in a crosswind. Something fundamental about them shifted and the constellations began a new dance, twirling and spiraling through infinity. A single star, one of the smallest motes, slid down the beams of light and sank till it sat just in front of Twilight's eyes.

It was beautiful.

Some element of the Conductor that was almost a face twisted into something that was almost a smirk.

[PROSPECTIVE AMUSEMENT] [GRATUITY]

It was around that point that Twilight got the strangest feeling that she may have agreed to something bigger than just a lift home from a charitable alien.

The star parted the space between space and, without a moment for her to raise any sort of question or objection, lodged itself deep within Twilight's soul. It nestled in and sat there like a burning coal in the core of her being, warming her from the inside. A handful of other small motes traveled down other paths of light and disappeared in directions she could not perceive.

[DEPART] the Conductor instructed, its voice reduced to almost bearable levels. Or was it just farther away? [ADDENDUM: GOOD LUCK]

Twilight felt a tug on her tether, and her awareness slipped away into a foggy dream.


Twilight awoke with a splitting headache, a general ache in her everywhere else, and a dragon yelling in her ear.

Which meant it was two-thirds of the way to a normal morning.

"Alright, alright, I'm up!" she said as she shook her head to clear out the lingering fog. "There's no need to shout."

"But you're back!" came the voice of her number one assistant, sounding equal parts excited and relieved.

Awareness came more quickly than usual as Twilight rapidly realized that she was not, in fact, in her bedroom. Nor was she in her house at all. Instead, she was standing full and upright in the middle of the road in the early evening moonlight.

"Spike? Where am I? What happened?"

"What happened?" he repeated, "What happened is you cast a spell, everyone disappeared and I've been freaking out for the last eight hours trying to find you!"

The little dragon certainly looked like he'd been on his feet in a panic all day. His scales were dusty and dirty like he'd run down every last one of Ponyville's uncobbled back streets and his ear frills drooped with exhaustion. As the panicked energy drained away, it looked more and more like the only thing keeping him upright was the sheer relief in seeing her back safe and sound.

Which left the question. Where had she gone?

Her memories of the morning were disjointed. She remembered casting Starswirl's spell and accidentally swapping around her friends' cutie marks. Then she rounded them all up with a Heartsong, recast the corrected spell, and then... and then...

There was something else, but the memory seemed to slip away the more she tried to bring it into focus. Something with... stars? And an agreement. A dream? Probably not important. If it was, Princess Luna would remind her.

"That's strange," she said, "maybe the spell had some kind of delayed teleport effect? Or maybe an incomplete casting due to magical exhaustion." Though she didn't feel exhausted. If anything, she felt rather mentally refreshed. Twilight shook her head. "Whatever caused it, we should get back to the library."

"No argument here." Spike yawned and rubbed his eyes. "I'm glad you're okay, but boy am I tired. Next time you decide to cast an untested spell from some thousand-year-old journal, let me know first? I had half the town out looking for you and the girls."

Twilight stopped in her tracks. "The girls?"

"Yeah. When you went poof all six of you disappeared together. But now that you're back, hopefully they won't be far behind."

As it turned out, Spike's guess was thankfully correct. As the pair made their way back to the library they met up with other groups of ponies who'd been part of the search efforts. While most just expressed their thanks that she was safe or made a few harmless jokes about casting while reading, some ponies brought news of her friends being found.

According to Derpy (who'd been the only one to actually witness the event) the six of them had just suddenly appeared in the sky as 'glowy soap bubbles' before drifting down into various parts of town.

While nopony was injured, none of the victims of the spell had any more of an idea where their lost time had gone than Twilight did.

By the time all the missing ponies had been accounted for and the search party officially called off (much to Pinkie Pie's dismay for having missed it) it was well past evening and into the night.

After agreeing that it had been a very long day already, Twilight and her friends decided to put off figuring out what in the world happened till tomorrow. Alongside meeting up for a late breakfast.

That night, Twilight dreamt, oddly enough, of wood and chisels and dovetail joints.


Twilight woke later than usual, in a much more normal fashion than the previous two times she'd been roused from unconsciousness. A pleasant return to normalcy, even if it meant she was still half-asleep and groggy.

She rolled out of bed, grimacing in the bright sunlight from the window, and stumbled her way down the stairs. Like usual, she half-slipped on the bottom step that wasn't quite level and barely managed to catch herself. Annoying as it was, the tiny jolt of adrenaline made for a reliable pre-coffee jolt.

As she made her way to the kitchen, the thought crossed her mind that it'd probably be more worthwhile to bite the spearpoint and just fix the step already. It wouldn't be all that hard. In fact, the more she thought about it, the easier it seemed. It was just a matter of twenty-four discrete and easy steps to go from removing the old stair to replicating the engravings around the edges of the new one. Practically foal's play.

It'd be the work of... ten minutes? Twenty at most. She even had some spare planks in the basement. Why had she never thought to repair it before?

She continued to muse on matters of home repair as she pulled out her key to the fridge. It was an annoying impediment, but a necessary one. Neither she nor Spike wanted a repeat of the 'Sleepwalking Buffet Incident".

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door to a rush of warm air.

Much time later, she would look back at that moment as when her day, and perhaps her life, was flung from normal into the realm of the truly strange and absurd.

"Okay. There is no way my fridge was this big yesterday."

Author's Note:

Perks gained this chapter:

Builder Package Tier One (100CP) Free Starter Perk

    Wood and other plant life. You are an exceptional builder with these and know the characteristics of such materials at a glance, you can also form mental blueprints and interact with them as if you actually saw them in the real world to assist in construction, as well as making infallible mental checklists of materials with exact steps, materials, and dimensions needed for the build, you also have an easy time locating useful materials you need for building and you take less time to build than you should.

Requiem of Souls | Weaver (100CP) Free Starter Perk

    You are now an expert weaver. Doesn't sound like much, right? Remember that the silk spun from magical creatures' cocoons was so beautiful that King Karis murdered his own son over it. They have some REALLY good silk here in Parel is what I'm saying and you are a master of working with it.

A Humble Mushroom Farmer (Paper Mario) (100CP) Free Starter Perk

The Mushroom Kingdom is a land of many strange and mysterious items. Healing mushrooms, small snowmen that call up blizzards, blocks labelled POW that shake the earth. These items have to come from somewhere, and now you are a source of these objects. You know the arts behind the creation of the various usable items from the paper mario series. Some of these must be grown, others built, and still others prepared through more esoteric means. You also know how to create lil' oink eggs and use them to produce certain items. The ingredients for many of these are rather common in that world, but rarer elsewhere. I'd stock up if I were you.

Risk of Disassembly (Mousehunt) (100CP) Free Starter Perk

    When creating a trap with a hunter in mind, one must consider how often the hunter moves from region to region and also the wide variety of mice capable of utterly demolishing the trap. Since designing a trap to be unbreakable is likely to make it unwieldy, an alternative approach is to engineer it to fail. This philosophy applied to your crafting endeavours allows you to make things which are designed to safely break apart regardless of the circumstance sure, you'll have to reassemble it after it breaks, but the risk of it utterly disintegrating under the force of a dragon mouse's fire is removed.

Tool box (Generic Factory) (100CP) Free Starter Perk

    This Tool Box can store any number of hand held tools, and will never get too heavy to carry. Always contains a set of basic tools that can be called on without notice and in any number like hammers, saws and blowtorches. Specialized tools you will have to place inside this box ahead of time.

Engineering Basics (Dead Space) (100CP) Free Starter Perk

    You're a real Mr. Fix-It, y'know? Malfunctioning fuel intake? Easy. Faulty asteroid defense cannon? Turn it off, then on again. Non-responsive communications array? Shuffle the working emitters around a bit so they're symmetrical. Undead monstrosities? Depends on what you mean by, "fix." Does using a rivet gun to blow them apart count? Yes? Then we're good.

PreviousChapters Next