Chapter 40 - Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride
"Now, let's begin. I want you to look deep into my eyes. Deeper. Deeeeper. Deeeeee-ow! Not that deep!"
"Sorry. I got excited."
"Sit back down. Look deep into my eyes, without getting up. You are falling into a trance. A deep sleep that leaves you open to suggestion. Now, when I count down from three, you will believe you are... hm... ah!... you'll believe you are Twilight Sparkle, the most boring bookworm in Ponyville."
'Hey!'
"Quiet now, Bookhorse. No interfering with the test, you said. Counting down to Twilight time in three, two, one... zero! Now, tell me... who are you?"
"I'm Pinkie Pie!"
"What. No, you're Twilight."
"No, that's Twilight over there with Moondancer behind the pane of glass. I'm Pinkie."
"Hmph. Maybe that was too complex for you. Something simpler then. Look back into my eyes. Watch the swirling colors. Deeper. Deeper. When I hit zero, you will be a chicken, got it?"
"Got it!"
"Three-two-one-zero! Now cluck!"
"Bkawk!"
"Ha! That time it worked!"
"No it didn't. I just clucked cause you asked me to."
‘He's not doing very well, is he?’
‘Let’s let it continue a bit more. This is still good data.’
"Fine. We'll do it the boring way then. If you're not going to play by the rules then neither will I! *SNAP!* There! You're under my control, so do a jig or something."
"But you told me to stay sitting."
"How are you still resisting me?! *SNAP!* You are a worm! A worthless, lowborn, dirt-eating worm!"
"Nnnnnooope! But would you still love me the same if I was~?"
"Why." *SNAP!* "Won't." *SNAP!* "You." *SNAP!* "Obey!?"
"Have." *CLAP!* "You tried." *CLAP!* "Asking." *CLAP!* "Nicely?"
"I think that's enough for now." Moondancer tapped on the glass to get their attention. "You may stop. Clearly she is immune."
"No she's not!" Discord snarled. "You can't just be immune to my powers. I'm the Lord of Chaos! I use the laws of physics as a bathtowel and logic as a dental floss!" He spun back around to Pinkie who remained on her stool, smiling placidly. "How about round two of inversion therapy?"
He flicked the tip of her muzzle and a grey pallor began to creep across her body.
Or rather, it just about reached her eyeballs before it swiftly reversed course, her pinkness coming back even pinker than before. She sneezed and sent the last little droplet of grey negativity flying like a spitball.
"Sorry," she giggled, "I guess I'm allergic to bad vibes."
"Why you little—"
Rolling her eyes at their unprofessionalism, Moondancer activated the silencing spell on the barricade and all sounds from the other side abruptly cut off. At the change, Twilight looked up from her notes. "I think we can call this a success," she said. "As vague as it sounds, Pinkie is immune to mind control."
"Discord's, at least," Moondancer clarified. "There's still changeling hypnosis, dark magic, mundane brainwashing, and several others that we lack a way to test. Not to mention the 'inability to be erased from a timeline' aspect that seems inherently unprovable."
Twilight gave her a look. Moondancer, she realized, was exactly the kind of pony who'd go out and learn ancient secrets of dark magic purely for the sake of scientific study. She'd have to keep an eye out for that. Maybe Celestia could teach her some kind of dark-magic detecting spell. Just in case.
"Still," Moon Dancer continued, "It's quite convenient that you have such a powerful creature available to test these things."
"He’s not a creature, he's a friend."
Her fellow researcher made an unimpressed noise. "As you say. Incidentally, your 'friend' appears to have Subject Five in a chokehold. Should we be concerned?"
Twilight snapped her attention back to the glass partition that separated them from the testing area. Discord had both his claw around Pinkie's neck and her tail in his paw and was stretching her out like a piece of taffy. But Pinkie seemed to be laughing about it so... "She's fine. I don't think he'd do anything permanent."
"I meant concerned for us. Wasn't he evil not long ago?"
"He's... figuring out friendship," Twilight hedged. Figuring it out in stumbling baby steps. "I think working with Fluttershy has been good for him." At the very least she seemed to be having better luck channeling his chaos in constructive directions.
"About that.” Moondancer made a few final notes before shuffling a fresh page to the top of her clipboard. “Despite my insistence, she's refused to allow me to perform a vivisection on their creation. Can you use your authority to convince her?"
The nib of Twilight's quill snapped off against her notes. "Can I what? Why would you want to do that!?"
"Because I haven't studied it yet," she answered easily.
Twilight took a deep breath, held it for a five count, and released it. She didn’t want to snap at her or get upset, but day by day it was getting harder. It was honestly starting to get concerning how little social boundaries seemed to matter to the mare when it came to pursuing novel research. Twilight knew she herself could be a bit overzealous at times, but Moondancer’s fixation was practically monomaniacal. Food, sleep, relationships, social niceties. Everything that wasn’t research was a bother to her.
At some point she needed to sit her down and have a very serious discussion about things… but at the same time, Twilight couldn’t help but blame herself for possibly setting her down this path. For poisoning the well just when she was starting to open up. And if she pushed back too hard, made a request that Moondancer found unreasonable… would she lose this one second chance to help her former friend recover?
And so she didn’t push back. She acceded to Moondancer’s requests, giving her as much room as she wanted and the freedom to direct her own research. Friendship had to start somewhere, but she was giving so much to even get back to neutral ground.
But in the meantime, she still considered Moondancer a friend even if the feelings weren’t reciprocated. And even if she lacked a certain amount of... empathy for others. And for possibly sapient plant-creatures.
"I'll ask, but I don't think she's going to change her mind. I'll see if she'll make a copy of her own research for you."
"Ugh, fine." Moondancer rolled her eyes. "I doubt it'll be up to any professional standard, but a hobbyist's notes are better than nothing. It can't be worse than her scribbled recipe cards for medicinal desserts." Her ear twitched to the side. "Speaking of which."
Twilight jumped as something orange and creamy smacked into the barrier hard enough to break through the noise cancellation spell.
“Parry this you filthy casual!”
“Pear, you say? I’ll have you know this is apple country!”
In the scant minutes she’d looked away, somehow Pinkie and Discord’s argument had escalated into a full-blown cupcake war. Lines had been drawn in the sand, battlements hardened, siege engines readied, and already a good portion of the room had been repainted in a thick splatter-coat of icing.
“Hey!” She reached across the room with her magic and stopped a half-dozen sugary missiles in flight. "I said no food in the testing area!"
Pinkie peered up from behind the table she’d repurposed as a tower shield. “Yeah, but you said it's okay if it's an experiment.”
Twilight paused. “What experiment?”
Answering by example, Pinkie unleashed a furious fusillade of red velvet ordinance. “Question: How good is Discord at dodging?!”
Discord juked and dived, twisting his body in several highly improbable ways. “Hypothesis: Very!”
Twilight sighed and recast the silencing spell. She was just about finished with testing anyway, so they could have their fun. Besides, Pinkie knew the lab rules (even if she was a little too keen on exploiting loopholes). She’d make sure to clean up after or risk losing some of her earmarked time with the Cube.
The Cube was a fantastic tool for keeping chaos managed (draconequus interference notwithstanding, of course)
"See?" Moondancer's voice was laced with smugness like icing on a cake. "The blast shield was necessary, even for a supposedly clean test. This is why I said I'm not taking any more chances when it comes to Subject Five.”
And then there was that. The odd phrasing that had been cropping up in her reports lately. "Calling Pinkie that is a little much, don't you think? There's such a thing as too much professional detachment."
"You wouldn't say that if you'd lived through what I experienced." She shuddered as her eyes took on a thousand-yard stare.
"This is a copy of the Equestrian Board of Education standardized tests in mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Since I've been informed you were... homeschooled... for much of your youth, this should provide something of a benchmark of where you stand having received new knowledge. Any questions?"
"You can put your hoof down. This isn’t school and you're the only one here."
"Does it matter what color I answer the questions in?"
"...Black ink is preferable."
"But does it matter?"
"Just use black."
"Okay! Do I have to answer the questions in the form of a question?"
"How... how would you even do that?"
"I don't know. That's why I'm asking."
“You… no. Just answer them normally, as thoroughly as you can. Any more questions?”
“Yeah, is your name one or two words? I can never remember and I wanna get it right for your ‘I survived one month in Ponyville’ celebration cake.”
“...just take the tests.”
Three hundred minutes later, Moondancer learned that Pinkie interpreted ‘answer as thoroughly as you can’ to mean ‘derive everything from first principles and include proofs’. In the end she answered only five questions, though they were irrefutably correct.
“Hey! Moondancer! Look what I made!”
“I see you've wasted several boxes worth of uncooked pasta and glued it into a pile of junk. Very impressive if you were a quarter your age.”
“Aw, thanks! But you haven’t seen the best part! Look what happens when I pump the bellows.”
“Oh. Wow. It's capable of self propulsion. That's actually a rather impressive display of mechanical engineering. It looks quite insectile with so many moving legs. Was this inspired by changeling biology?”
“Nah, just a weird dream I had. And watch this, I can make it dance!”
“Is that part intended to flex quite so— oh.”
“Whoops. I guess the macarena was too much for store-brand glue. Oh well.”
“I don't suppose you made any record of how it was constructed?”
“Nope!”
“Of course you didn't.”
"Heya Moony! You want to see a hydrophilic expanding long-chain sucrose polymer?"
"It’s Moondancer, and absolutely not. I'm eating lunch."
"Come on, it's really neat and Rarity didn’t— oh no. It should not be frothing like that. Random, totally unrelated question: you don't happen to keep any acetic acid in here do you?"
"Nothing beyond the vinaigrette on this salad."
"Yeah, that'd do it. Hit the deck!"
"Do you know the thaumatological coefficient for pomegranate-plum buttercream frosting, Twilight? I do. I had to calculate it longhoof because, surprise, it's not in any of my reference texts. I'm possibly the first pony to ever have any reason to need it. And despite my spellwork I swear I can still smell icing around that corner of the room.”
Moondancer shuddered briefly before composing herself and pushing her glasses up her muzzle. “I can't take seriously someone who refuses to take this research seriously. That's why I have reclassified her from research assistant to research subject. I consider her on par with the originite crystals.” She smirked slightly. “Fitting, given their shared tendency towards explosions.”
"I even-" She started to continue, but stopped suddenly, her mouth snapping shut. The smirk vanished as her usual neutral expression re-asserted itself. “She’s making faces at me through the glass, isn't she?”
Twilight glanced behind her. “Actually, no. Discord's turned her into an abstract painting of herself. I think she was making a face at him but now it's stuck like that.”
Moondancer sighed. “Of course he did. I ask again, should we be concerned?”
“I'm sure he'll turn her back.”
“I meant for how it will affect future tests. Two-dimensionality might have lingering side-effects we can’t predict and I need to know if I’ll have to adjust her testing schedule to accommodate.”
Twilight refrained from rolling her eyes. Perhaps hoping Moondancer was concerned about Pinkie’s wellbeing had been too much to ask for, but she’d get there in time.
Hopefully.
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Is it because Moondancer prioritized her own sanity before Pinkie's wellbeing? It did sound more and more of SCP's vibe rather than Equestria's.
Again, you did a VERY good job on the exchanges, characterizations and future chapter set-up in this chapter. Definitely liked Discord's testing Pinkie's resistance to mind control as well as Twilight's frustrations concerning Moondancer's being a bit too detached for the time being (referring to Pinkie as "Subject Five" and being more concerned for herself and the experimentations than for the beings themselves). I ALSO really liked Pinkie testing Discord's dodging as well as Discord turning Pinkie into an abstract painting (with the reassurance that Pinkie would be changed back soon enough). Also liked Moondancer's frustrations concerning "having to settle for a hobbyist's notes".
VERY MUCH looking forward to more of this.
If you were controlling who got what powers when, that would make resolving these emotional conflicts far less interesting. In this sort of exercise, even the author is at the mercy of other forces.
ayy it's back (:
Well that was silly fun.
If nothing else, finding a replacement would be quite difficult. Or at least Moondancer hopes it would be difficult.
XD Fabulous. Gotta love someone getting the best of Discord!
Poor Moony needs to lighten up a touch