Underped

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 7: Increasing Neuroconductivity

Far away from Ponyville, in Canterlot, the students of Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, the ancient hallways had become remarkably and peculiarly empty. What few students remained were in the process of bustling about in their shared exodus, pleased to be returning home for the upcoming spring break. None of the commuter students living locally in Canterlot had been required to come in for the day, giving them an early start to their break but also further decreasing the effective population of a school already largely devoid of pupils. The others were working on hauling their luggage to various Pegasus-drawn carts or to walk to the local airship port for the sometimes long journey back to their beloved families.

Most of the students were, at least. Although class was not in session, one of the room was only nearly empty—occupied by a lone gray unicorn, a young and abnormally short girl hard at work on a scroll, her quill held firmly in her teeth.

The door opened and, as it did, the girl hurriedly spat out the quill, holding it in her magic instead, looking up to see a tall and elegant unicorn mare enter the room, clad in the colorful robes of a wizard. The robes that Dinky someday hoped to wear—even as proud as she was of the opportunity to wear the dreary novice robes she had been given as a school uniform.

“Professor Peaches,” said Dinky, standing.

The unicorn turned to her with exceptional grace, but did not initially speak. While Dinky found it awkward the strange way they tended to be silent, she understood that it was simply her own bumbkinness failing to account for the way wizards talked. The way they regarded everything before they spoke.

“Ms. Doo,” she said, almost floating into the room. “Class is not in session today.” She looked at the chalkboard, finding almost all of it filled with a vast demonstratory equation scrawled in tiny, geometric arcane text. “Nor is this the material we have covered this year. This is the spring project for the graduate-level students.”

“I thought I could learn from it, a little.”

Professor Peach raised a thin eyebrow. “And have you?”

Dinky opened her mouth—but remembered to regard the situation, and realize that Professor Peach was very likely already reading her mind. “No,” she admitted. “Not really.”

“You ought to be preparing for your return home.”

Dinky stiffened. “I already submitted the forms to stay here over the break. I have a lot of work to do, and the cultures for Dr. Burning need close observation so I figured—”

“Burning can take care of his own work and in all honesty your talent is wasted on biomancy anyway.”

“But you’re a biomancer.”

“I am. And you are not good at it. At all.”

Dinky stiffened even more stiffly. “Which is why I need to stay and study. My family isn’t wizards, I—”

“Do not understand the duality of speech.”

Dinky looked up from her scroll. “What?”

“You are among my most talented of students. You were the only one this year who could successfully create a Bag of Holding without forgetting the mass constant or creating a singularity excursion and getting pulled in.” She looked annoyedly out the door. “I have spent the last hour yanking students out of their failed final projects by their tails. One had been partially ingested by a gloam-wraith he had somehow managed to trap inside it.”

“Is he okay?”

“Oh, yes, of course, no need to worry, the wraiths only devour the soul, not the body.”

“Oh.”

“Oh indeed.” She turned sharply to Dinky. “That said. You have a limited time to be young. I can guarantee that your family misses you.”

“But I can’t get behind on my studies!” protested Dinky, standing up—but being only marginally taller doing so than she had been sitting down. Professor Peaches, like many of the unicorns present at the school, were the tall and lanky sort that tended to inhabit Canterlot. Dinky herself was far shorter, and in a society where wealth, power, and divinity were regulated by height, it left her with a severe disadvantage. “They’ll understand! I even wrote a letter to my mom, I was super-nice in it and everything!”

“Why would you not be nice to your own mother?”

Dinky did not have an answer—but she heard the creak of the heavy door opening and she turned sharply, half-expecting to see another student entering the room to give her some justification in her path—some proof that she was not the only student who put her academics over the need to waste time in a podunk town where the only real wizards were a living god, Twilight Sparkle, and whatever Trixie was.

Instead, she saw a pair of familiar eyes staring toward her—and into her. She squeaked as a shudder ran through her, having never seen both those eyes focusing on her at once. The feel of it was simply overwhelming.

“MOM!”

“Yes, I am,” said Derpy, stepping into the room. She blinked, her newly focusing eyes having a moment of fogginess at the light. For a brief moment, she felt as though she had seen something beside Dinky. A strange distortion in the air, like heat rising from the very hottest part of some sort of baked good.

It quickly cleared, and Derpy found herself once again in an extremely architecturally advanced room of swooping arches and elegant, oversized windows. A tall peach-colored unicorn was standing at the far end of the room, watching her with something not quite disdain. Regarding her, rather, with the pretend disinterest that could only be achieved by a wizard so wizardly as to actually live in a tower somewhere.

“Interesting,” said the unicorn, one with a probably peach-related name based on her color. Considering her profession, Derpy imagined her name was probably something like “Professor Peaches” if only for the inane alliterative value. The unicorn continued speaking. “You had been telling the other students that you were a pureblood.”

“I—I am—I mean—”

“If this mare is your mother, then no, you are not.” Professor Peaches turned to look at Derpy. “She is a Pegasus. I can tell as I can see her extremely ample and well-fluffed wings.”

“I—I can explain!” Dinky rushed forward, tripping over a desk and landing on her face, only to stand up and trip over a chair, sliding across the floor, followed by tripping over a third desk—before finally reaching a space she could cross without injury.

“Look at you in your little robe!” said Derpy, reaching out for a hug. Dinky tried to push her away and back out the door, but Derpy was larger and stronger, and managed to hug her with great vigor. “Look at you in your fancy wizard school! I’m so proud of you!”

“Mom, you can’t be here, it’s for unicorns—”

“She has every right to be here,” noted Professor Peaches. “We are open to the public, especially to family.”

Dinky’s voice became hushed. “MOM! How did you even get here?!”

“I took the train. The new crystal-driven one. I got to ride with the conductor and we talked about how they’re still trying to work out the dimensional annularity problem.”

“You...what? You used the train? All by yourself?”

“It wasn’t even that hard, the stations all have maps and Canterlot is really easy to follow once you realize the streets are all logarithmic curves.”

“They...are?”

“They are,” noted Professor Peaches, approaching. Derpy stood as the tall unicorn towered over her.

“So tall...”

“I am quite tall, yes.” The professor smiled. “And I am gaining clarity as to why Dinky has grown into such an excellent student, even arriving from a locale so primitive and limited in educational facilities. It is clear she inherits it from you.”

Derpy blushed. “Oh...no...it’s probably from her dad’s side, he was a unicorn. Probably.”

“And would it not be appropriate for a mare of intelligence to seek a sire of potent magic to create a powerful daughter?”

Dinky let out a high whine of horror as she covered her face. “No no no no...”

Derpy smiled and wrapped her hoof around her daughter, pulling her closer. “I came to pick her up for spring break, I scheduled the train that goes around the old track so we could see the Everfree from the hills. She used to love taking that trip as a little filly.”

“No, you used to love taking it, and only after I spent a year convincing you the steam train wasn’t a scary monster trying to eat you! And I submitted paperwork already, I can't go home!”

“Paperwork I can deny,” said Professor Peaches, casting a spell to summon the paperwork form its virtual file. “I had considered not doing so, but since your mother is here to pick you up.”

“Mom, why? I need to work on my studies—”

“As we were just discussing, Dinky is one of my most excellent pupils. To realize that this is in spite of being from a rural town and that she is a half-breed only intrigues me even more.” She pointed to the chalkboard with her long, hard horn. “Why, she was even trying to learn this spell here.”

Derpy released her daughter and walked up to the board, staring in awe at all the scribbling and numbers. “Wow! That’s really fancy! What does it do?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” snapped Dinky.

“It is intended to formulate overlay matrices of eight-type spells onto reduced lattice forms with a self-adapting algorithm. Essentially a derivative for creating an enchanted crystal, but agnostic to lattice substitutions regardless of mana-atomic signature. To the extent it could be used on objects as a parallel to the normal mundane-integration protocol for enchanting objects.”

“Oh, wow,” said Derpy. “I used to be an inorganic chemist specializing in magic-synthetic materials.” She turned to Professor Peaches. “Can I try a hoof at solving it?”

“Mom, no!” whispered Dinky, weakly. “You’re embarrassing me!”

“If it pleases you.” Professor Peaches levitated some chalk to Derpy, who took it in her mouth.

Dinky covered her eyes. “Please don’t eat the chalk, please don’t eat the chalk...”

Derpy took the chalk and spread her wings, flying upward to the part of the equation where the solution was appropriate. Looking at it one more time, she started scribbling with her terrible mouth-writing a possible solution. All the while Dinky was covering her eyes and shaking her head.

Derpy returned to the ground, and Professor Peaches smiled broadly.

“A most elegant solution indeed,” she said. “Never in my six hundred years of teaching has a student solved the system with a recursive process.”

“It seemed like the simplest solution.”

“Because it is the simplest solution. But not the most forthcoming without a very deep understanding of the material.” She turned to Dinky. “Your mother’s solution, used in a crystal, would enable spells to take up less than one percent of the spacetime that they otherwise would. Meaning you could use even a low-grade lattice to hold a potent spell almost instantaneously.” She turned to Derpy. “Indeed. Dinky’s unnatural intelligence makes all the more sense now.”

“But...”

Professor Peaches’s horn flashed, and a small piece of neatly folded paper appeared. She passed it to Derpy.

“What is this?” asked Derpy, opening it.

Professor Peaches leaned closer. “My telephone number.”

Dinky let out a nearly inaudible scream of horror and nearly collapsed.

“Interesting,” said Derpy, opening it. “That area code is for the Biomancy District.”

“Indeed it is.” Professor Peaches leaned closer. “My own graduate work was on recovering a functional version of Clover the Clever’s genderstate-fluidity spell. So while I am a mare now, I do not need to stay that way...if you prefer.” She smiled. “I also devised a cast-on-other on contact function for it. So if you like, we can practice every possible permutation...”

Derpy shivered as her wings suddenly and violently extended, striking her daughter in the face and knocking her over.

“Oh no,” she said, looking back. “Not again...”

“And so very fluffy..." Some peach-colored magic gently wound through Derpy's feathers. "Just as I suspected...”

Derpy smiled awkwardly—and put the number securely into her bag.

Comments

[GlitchyFox]

im guessing this is less derpy suddenly being amazing and more that she suddenly has something that helped her retern to who she once was. wont dinky be shocked

[Treefrogger]

I'm getting Flowers for Algernon vibes from this

[Thought Prism]

“MOM!”

“Yes, I am,” said Derpy

[FanOfMostEverything]

Dinky never knew her mother with an intact brain. This must be the most confusing day of her life. Also the most embarassing.

As for the steam coming off of Ditzy’s little muffin… I fear I see how this goes horribly wrong. We’ll see if I’m right.

[ponepony]

This is great, but why does the "Dark, Horror, Sad" tags make me nervous?

[Samey90]

“You are among my most talented of students. You were the only one this year who could successfully create a Bag of Holding without forgetting the mass constant or creating a singularity excursion and getting pulled in.” She looked annoyedly out the door. “I have spent the last hour yanking students out of their failed final projects by their tails. One had been partially ingested by a gloam-wraith he had somehow managed to trap inside it.”

“Is he okay?”

“Oh, yes, of course, no need to worry, the wraiths only devour the soul, not the body.”

He's fine, he became a lawyer.

[Brony4Lyfe]

“I took the train. The new crystal-driven one. I got to ride with the conductor and we talked about how they’re still trying to work out the dimensional annularity problem.”

Is this a "This is the Last Train Car" reference