Chapter 27 - And They Were Roommates
"Okay, so a diamond, two small fire opals, and a piece of jade makes a round gem with kind of swirly colors and a bit of sparkle. Time for a taste test."
The sound of crunching and chomping filled the still air of the crystal hub along with the scritching of a pencil on paper.
"Mm. This is a nice one. Tasty start. Good crunch. Kind of a fruity undertone. Very smooth flavor."
Shards of a nameless gemstone, the only one like it in the world, rained to the floor as Spike wrote down his thoughts in a little pocket notepad. He chewed for a minute more before grimacing.
"Not the best crumbliness. Gets all weird. Like a mouthful of mulch. Three stars for taste, one for texture."
He grabbed his mug and took a swig of water to wash away the remainder of the offending texture. “What can I add to fix that? What’s a soft crystal? Mica? Could work, if I have any left.”
A bit of rummaging found a stick in the depths of his ingredients box (one of the many quickly made and just as quickly abandoned projects from when Twilight had been testing the differences between her and Dash’s wood skills) and tossed it inside the Horadric Cube along with his gem-with-one-bite-missing and swiped a claw against the squiggly lines that made it start working.
Out of all the weirdness that had happened since Starswirl's spell had turned the world upside down, the Cube was claws down his favorite. Sure, having an unlimited supply of new furniture was neat, for a few days before the novelty wore off and the clutter settled in. And Fluttershy being able to rival Pinkie in dessert making was sweet too. But none of that compared to the crazy stuff the Cube could do.
Not to mention that it was something he could use on his own instead of just watching from the sidelines. Watching his friends perform crazy tricks with weird skills just didn’t have the same appeal of doing something magic on his own. Something like making new gemstones in the dark of night when everyone else was asleep like some kind of alchemist chef.
It had to be late at night because that was the only time he could be sure no one else was using it. He wasn’t the only one who liked the magic gizmo; that’s why it’d been brought from the Hunter’s Workshop into the main room. Across all the ponies that had joined on to help study and document things, it was easily the most popular mystery to research.
Which was a polite way of saying that everybody loved playing with it.
Oh sure they called it research, but Spike hadn't hatched yesterday. Scientific inquiry could only justify tossing a cupcake into it so many times before it was obvious they just wanted to see it make new flavors. Though when pressed, Minuette had justified herself in a way he absolutely planned on reusing.
'It's only messing around if you don't take notes. If you do, then it's science.'
And he had to admit, she had a point. He'd gotten much better at repeating successful gem recipes after he'd started writing down what worked and what didn't. Midnight improvisational cooking didn't make for a great memory the next morning of exactly what steps he'd taken.
The little lightshow of the Cube’s process faded back and his finished gemstone popped out of the top. He pinched it between two clawtips and held it up to the light.
“Color went a bit grayish,” he narrated, even as his own claw wrote down his words. He wrote better when he was taking dictation. It was a long-ingrained habit. “Round edges got squared-off too.” Crunch. “Crumbliness is better, but it messed up the flavor. Whole thing tastes like an aftertaste even while I’m still chewing. Needs something… with a bit of kick. Do I have any pearls left?” He checked his stash. “One left.” That was disappointing. Pearls had the most incredible salty kick to them, but they were a lot harder to get ahold of than normal gems since he had to get them imported from the seaside. Half a pearl would have to suffice.
He bit the creamy orb in half and tossed it into the Cube, followed by the not-so-tasty rock. A swipe of the claw and the combining process started again.
Of course, no midnight snacking adventure came without temptation. Even as the Cube worked away at making another new and no doubt delicious gem he could feel the itch in the back of his mind, urging him towards the forbidden fruit. The one gem so savory in appearance, so delectable in smell, that he was forbidden from ever eating.
Originite.
And not forbidden without good reason. He'd seen the effects of trying to combine it with things in the Cube, and their resulting craters. He’d listened to the warnings from Rarity's what-am-I-looking-at ability that rarely gave anything more than the bare minimum details yet in this one case explicitly instructed not to eat the originite.
He knew all this and yet... and yet...
It just looked so unbelievably appetizing.
Like a piece of soap shaped like a gooey gummy candy. Intellectually he knew it was dangerous, yet his dragon instincts insisted that there was no such thing as a gemstone that couldn't (or shouldn't) be eaten.
It didn't help either that the box of it was stored just a room away. Only a few steps. He could be there and back before the Cube even finished.
...A quick sniff would be fine, wouldn't it? So long as he didn't actually put it in his mouth. He had that much self-control, at least.
The originite was gone.
Spike knew exactly where it was supposed to be. Second rack from the door, fifteen steps down, first shelf. But instead of a small basket full of crystals, there was just an empty space.
Which meant that someone had been experimenting with them then put them back in the wrong spot.
Again.
He sighed and once again wished that Twilight's Canterlot Crew had as much of a dedication to organization as she did.
Aside from a small bubble of organization that reached a few steps out from the door, most of the Warehouse was a disorganized mess. The dozens of racks had come empty, but the team seemed determined to fill up as much of the gymnasium-sized space as possible.
There were shelves of books and antiques from the Everfree Castle, still waiting to be catalogued and repaired. Boxes of gizmos and gadgets brought from Canterlot to try and measure different magical effects. A whole three aisles near the middle were filled with nothing but stuff made by the Cube that was still waiting for Rarity to find the time to magically identify.
In short, finding anything that wasn't in the small organized section was a real pain. Luckily, in this one case Spike had an advantage. A better-than-pony sense meant he could still smell the originite wherever it'd been moved to.
He'd just begun his search when he nearly jumped out of his scales as the sound of a soft boom echoed through the chamber.
His heart leapt into his throat, as he suddenly and quite vividly remembered that he had no guarantee of privacy here. There were five doors he couldn't control and anybody could just walk right in. Even burglars.
A bright light bursting into being a few aisles down gave him something to focus on. Before his panic could escalate too high, it was cut short by someone else speaking first.
“Who’s there? This is a private facility and I will not hesitate to call the local authorities and have you arrested for trespassing.”
Spike’s heart rate settled down as he followed the source of the light to it’s aisle of origin and tried to put a face to the familiar voice.
“Moondancer?"
The light dimmed enough he could make out the shape of Twilight-but-with-a-weird-manecut and the shelves around her. Shelves that were pretty different from the standard ones. Someone (Moondancer, almost definitely) had sectioned off a small portion of the Warehouse and built a cramped hideaway into the space. Papers and scrolls and books formed a wall around the sides, all easily accessible, with a low table that looked like Rainbow Dash's work set up in the middle. A chest of drawers sat half open, revealing a selection of stationary and a collection of similarly-colored sweaters. Pushed against the back wall was a tangle of blankets and pillows that might charitably be called a bed.
"Spike?" Moondancer asked. "What are you doing here?"
"What am I doing here? I live here. This is my house. What's your excuse?”
Strictly speaking, the whole crystal dimension had been deemed a communal area with no real single owner, but it was really hard for him not to think of it as an extension of the treebrary since Twilight always left her door open and most of his day was spent ferrying supplies and materials through it.
Moondancer allowed her horn to extinguish fully, letting a few crystals placed about her hideaway cast the space in a soft light. She cleared away the remaining surprise from her expression and answered after only a couple false starts. "The common area was too crowded to hold my notes and reference materials. Twilight said I could utilize a portion of the unused space as a personal workspace."
“Even at midnight?”
Moondancer avoided his gaze, looking for all the world like a foal caught on top of a teetering pile of furniture next to the cupboard with the cookie jar. "She said nothing about the permission expiring at a particular time."
She shifted and not-so-discreetly kicked something under the blanket. Unfortunately, her blind aim was poor and she managed to draw more attention to what looked suspiciously like a takeout box.
“Moondancer,” Spike did his best to not sound too accusatory. "Are you... living here?" he asked. The implied 'in our closet' went unsaid, but understood.
She squirmed beneath his gaze. “Not… technically. I still have my house in Canterlot. There’s just a bit of trouble with some local busybodies kicking up a fuss about it being an ‘eyesore’ and ‘lowering property values’ that brought me the unwanted attention of some local agencies. Once they finish their inspections I’m sure they’ll deem it suitable for equine habitation again. After all, I’ve been living there for years without a problem.”
Spike hadn’t seen her house since he’d moved out of Canterlot, but Twilight had told him enough after she saw it that he couldn’t help but doubt her confidence. Still, even if she had tenuous permission, knowing that somepony was sleeping in their glorified storage room gave him an unsettled feeling. “You know, I’m sure Twilight wouldn’t mind putting you up in the library. We have a spare bed, and you wouldn’t have to sleep in, well…” He gestured around himself.
She straightened up and smoothed any lingering awkwardness out of her voice. "Thank you, but no thank you. I’m quite comfortable with my current setup. I suppose I’ve grown… accustomed to living in compact quarters. And it's not as though I'm merely wasting time here. I've been busy with research."
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “At midnight,” he repeated.
She nodded. “Researching magical phenomena is not a process that conforms itself to a nine-to-five workday. Experiments take as long as they require and observations should be recorded while they are still fresh." She shrugged. "Besides, this is easier for me since I don't adhere to the standard sleep schedule most ponies use. I find it far more efficient to use the Ubermare variation."
“The what?”
She adjusted her glasses and settled into a pose nearly identical to Twilight’s pre-lecture position. “Most ponies follow a monophasic sleep schedule. Sixteen to eighteen hours of continuous wakefulness, followed by six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. The Ubermare approach is a multiphasic cycle where I take a twenty-minute power nap every four hours.”
“That can’t be healthy,” Spike commented as he tried to grapple with the idea of willingly never getting a good night’s rest, let alone sleeping in on the weekends!
“On the contrary, many famous ponies throughout history have utilized it to great success. Yes, it took some time for my body to adjust, but once it did I’ve seen great benefits. It provides an overall longer active period while still fulfilling my daily needs and making me resistant to unexpected disruptions in the solar-lunar cycle. Over the course of a year it accumulates an extra ninety-one days that would have otherwise been lost. It’s really the most efficient method.”
“Huh. Weird. Sounds like that'd be really hard to make plans around though.”
She gave him a level look. "It's been a long time since I had to concern myself with the schedules of other ponies.”
Spike winced. Right. The recluse thing. He internally berated himself for letting it slip his mind. Still, the whole thing felt kinda weird, even if Twilight had given her permission to basically move in and she had nowhere else to go. "Wait, have you been going out at all or are you straight up in here round the clock?"
"I leave when necessary. To acquire more reference materials or other resources only available in Canterlot."
So, yes, she was living there. Not really ambiguous at all. "That seems kinda... extreme. I know Twilight's excited about figuring all this out, but even she still takes breaks. Are you really learning all that much by being here round the clock?
Moondancer nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. In fact, I've made several discoveries that it's unlikely would have been made otherwise. For example: did you know that the supply of originite is self-replenishing?"
She nodded towards a shelf on her left. Spike noticed several cardboard boxes of the smoky gem, seemingly loosely organized by size and color.
“Once a week, every Tuesday at precisely midnight, the original container will refill to precisely twenty kilograms worth of material. By assuring that the box is completely emptied before that, I've been able to stockpile much more of it than we thought we had access to. We were hesitant to perform research with it before due to the limited supply—” and also the explosiveness, Spike thought but didn't mention, “—but it seems quantity is much less of a restriction than we originally thought.”
“So as long as we dump the box before midnight, we have an infinite amount?”
“An infinite amount of anything is absurd, but assuming a functionally large quantity then the difference is semantics.” She pulled another box off the shelf, a wooden crate this time. “I've been doing just that during the rare times when the Horadric Cube is not otherwise in use. Refining and condensing the leftover material into a denser, more purified form. There’s a percentage lost in order to fuel the refinement, but it’s a negligible loss.” She picked up a crystal and let it catch the light. It was a much darker shade than the ones he was used to. “It’s astounding how much energy they can hold. If we could find a way to properly harness it… I can hardly imagine the kinds of spells it could power…”
She trailed off with a faraway look in her eye. It was a look Spike was familiar with, just not quite in those colors. He sighed and decided that, even if it felt weird to have a pony living in his closet, it was her choice and really not his problem. He cast his eyes across her work-slash-living-space. If she was going to be a permanent fixture, he might as well help make her “room” the best it could be. The shelves of the Warehouse couldn’t be moved, but there was a lot of furniture in storage he could bring out to help liven the place up. Chairs and a better table, for one. Maybe a cot or at the very least a hammock. Blankets on the bare crystal floor couldn't be comfortable. Some better modular storage for all the junk piled into the shelf-walls around her.
Peering closer at the vaguely organized mess, something unfamiliar caught his eye.
“Hey, what's that hammer do?”
She blinked a few times to clear whatever fantastic things she'd been imagining. "What hammer?"
He pointed to a shelf near the top of the rack. Nestled between a spare blanket and a pile of scrolls was a hammer that looked like it'd been ripped from the pages of a pulp fantasy novel. The head was nearly as big as he was with a shaft twice as long as he was tall. The whole thing was made of a gray stone-like material save for several golden insignias and decorations. Every inch of it except the striking planes of the head was covered in so many dense carvings and runes that it looked more like an art piece than a functional tool.
"That hammer."
Moondancer's eyes practically popped out of her head. "I didn't- where- how- when did that get there?!
"Maybe it's what caused that boom earlier? There was a similar noise when the originite first showed up."
"But how?! I have five kinds of magical sensors right here—" she gestured to a collection of crystal and brass contraptions on her desk, "—and not one of them picked up anything!"
She grabbed the hammer in her magic and heaved it off the shelf. Almost instantly it ripped itself out of her grip and plunged towards the floor. The table stopped it for a moment before it caved to the weight and the hammer continued on through in a blizzard of dust and splinters.
Spike coughed as the cloud of dust hit him and reeled back a few steps. “Moondancer! Are you okay!?”
“Fascinating!” he heard her through the woody smokescreen, “These runes look just like the ones on the Horadric Cube. I need to document this immediately!”
As the dust cleared Spike was soon able to see again. The unicorn looked unharmed, thankfully, or at least unharmed enough that she wasn’t incapable of taking down notes about the hammer that even now sat in a pile of rubble that had once been her table.
Spike sighed as he realized the inevitability of his situation. Even with their differences in opinion on friendship, Moondancer really was like Twilight in many ways. If he left now, no doubt she'd keep working despite the dangerous mess and eventually either burn herself out or get so distracted as to neglect her crazy sleep schedule and suddenly crash in the middle of something important. It'd be dangerous to leave her alone. He shook his head and cracked his neck. There would be no rest tonight. An assistant's work was never done.
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A much more relevant problem than in our world.
Ok, now I also want to see what happens if Spike eats the originite.
I like the shifting of Spike to Moondancers assistant over Twi's, she's busy co-ordinating all this...
Whoa. Great job on this latest chapter. Took a while, but was quite well worth the wait. REALLY appreciated the work that went into the exchange, characterizations and future chapter set-up. Yeah. I feel for Spike. He had gotten so used to Twilight's organization that he is a bit frustrated with the rest of the Canterlot team's disorganization. Though I did like his reflection on the kind of work that went into the gems as well as appreciate him being worried about burglars. Though, if he can handle Sombra, he should be more than a match for most burglars. Really liked the dialogue with Moondancer as well. It IS pretty clear that she needs the help just as badly as Twilight does. Also really loved the description of the newest perk gained by ALL the Mane Six.
Definitely looking forward to more of this.
Good chapter, I enjoyed this one
It sounds like Moondancer couldn't use the hammer herself. Does this mean it belongs to somepony else? Like Pinkie's tool box?
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Nah, that's just me having some fun with the lore.
The Diablo wiki says it requires both a Strength and Dexterity stat of 16 to use. I figure Moondancer's the kind of pony who's lived a life where she has Dexterity in spades, but Strength is effectively her dump stat. Not like Twilight "Pick up an Ursa Minor with my mind" Sparkle.
I just made this account so I would be able to comment here; I love this story. It’s always worth the wait to see a new chapter pop up :^)
The way the plot is mainly composed of social dynamics and investigating the forge itself, the way powers are split up between multiple people, the way nothing has to be kept a secret or focused towards solving some huge overwhelming problem: it’s all such a breath of fresh air. And even beyond just the concept, it’s very well executed on a technical level. Easily up there in my top ten CF fics.
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Huh, that makes sense. Does it also have to do with how the hammer “stabilizes magical energies?” My assumption was that it neutralized the telekinesis being applied to it.
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Does the limit of their TK count as 'strength' in your mind, or would it be more of an earth pony thing?
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Waits for Pinkie to balance it on her nose like a seal with a ball
I totally thought it was Mjolnir for a second, except then she wouldn't have been able to move it at all XD I forget who gets black text? Or is this another general tool?