0. Preparations
The hooded figure’s horn blazed violet and the room was plunged into winter. Icicles erupted from the ceiling like jagged teeth while, on the floor, a web of ornately inscribed glyphs flared to life with a keening hum and sickly green glow. The bitter cold air wept droplets of a strange liquid, which fell to the ground or ran in rivulets through the coarse skin of ice that now coated every surface, from stonework walls to oaken bookcases to even the wood of the torches that lit the chamber from their iron sconces. On the floor, beads of fluid skittered about like swarms of carrion beetles. The atmosphere was noxious, suffocating, as though the air had been bled of all that was wholesome and nourishing and good.
With a soft hiss, the aura surrounding the figure’s horn turned black, then billowed outward like a cloud of ink. Dark tendrils surged ahead of the roiling mass with a mind of their own, snaking their way toward the torches lining the walls. On contact, they latched on and coiled their way upward; the flames flickered and sputtered, as though desperately trying to escape the shadows’ grasp. Then, the flickering subsided and the flames dimmed until all life was strangled from them. The rest of the cloud followed soon after, snuffing out what embers remained. It was now pitch black.
A series of rapid clicks rang out, as though a dial were being turned, and the torches flared back to life in violent, roaring gouts of flame. The ice that coated the walls and ceiling melted, droplets of water sizzling and vanishing as they struck the superheated floor. Then there was another series of clicks, slower this time. Steadily, the flames subsided and the air chilled until the room was slightly cooler and slightly darker than it had been at the very beginning.
The mysterious figure removed her chef’s hat, pulled back the hood of her cleanroom suit, reared up, and clapped her purple hooves together. “Perfect!”
Then she turned, about to speak again, and noticed the baby dragon rocking back and forth in a fetal position at her side. A cart of kitchen supplies lay abandoned next to him.
“An air conditioning spell!?” Fifteen minutes, twenty mugs of hot cocoa, and several kilograms of fire rubies later, Spike had finally recovered enough composure (and body temperature) to speak. He gaped at her from where he lay, curled up in a mesh suspended above a bunsen burner on the central counter in the Friendship Castle’s basement laboratory.
Twilight busied herself not far away, still tidying up in the wake of the earlier chaos. “Technically, a thaumaturgical thermostat. Lots of ponies get them confus–”
Spike’s death glare stopped her in her tracks. Ears pinned back like the tacky “edu-vational” poster she’d just reattached to the wall, Twilight set aside her protractor and pulled up a chair.
“Sorry, Spike,” Twilight said. She sat down, fidgeting with her hooves on the counter. “The spell was supposed to regulate atmospheric and lighting conditions so as to maintain a constant temperature in a defined area. The book said it was the most precise spell of its type ever created!”
Twilight averted her gaze, taking a sudden interest in a tray of empty beakers nearby. “I guess they just forgot to mention that the dial starts, by default, a hundred degrees below zero.” A nervous laugh escaped her. “Or that the controls can be rather… finicky. I guess now we know why nopony ever uses it.”
Spike let out a long-suffering sigh and took another deep draft of hot cocoa. “It’s fine, Twilight. An honest mistake, right?”
He leaned down and placed the mug back on the counter. “Maybe just... warn me the next time you try something like that?”
“Of course, Spike.” Twilight nodded. “Again, I’m really sorry.” She placed a hoof on Spike’s shoulder, then yelped. “Hot! Hot-hot-hot-hot-hot!”
Spike sniggered as he watched her nurse her throbbing hoof. “Huh. Now that I think about it,” he said, holding a claw to his chin. “Why didn’t the spell turn you into a pony popsicle too?”
“Oh, that’s simple. The lab has a built-in–” Twilight’s eyes went wide, and she flinched.
“Remember that green glow when I started casting the spell?” she continued in a small voice.
“Yeah. What was up with that?” said Spike, hopping down from his improvised metal hammock. “Seriously creepy.”
“That was the PPE activating.”
“P-P-E?”
“Pony protection enchantment,” came the barely audible reply.
Spike stared at her. “Pony protection enchantment?”
“Yeah. Funny thing about those,” said Twilight, retreating into herself in a manner that would have impressed Tank himself. “Despite the name, they’ve been tested and shown to work on all kinds of creatures. Gryphons, mules, zebras, bunyips… ”
“So what you’re saying is…”
“Yes!” Twilight sobbed, collapsing into a blubbering purple blob. “Because of m-my gross lack of d-due diligence regarding basic lab safety, you’re lucky to even be alive!”
“Huh? That’s not what I–”
She buried her head in her hooves. “I-I should’ve paid more attention to that footnote in Trotter et al.’s paper on thermo-regulative g-glyphs. In appendix ‘g’, they explicitly mentioned–”
“There’s no way you could’ve–”
“–terrible role model for impressionable, scientifically-inclined foals and dragonlings–”
“Come on, Twi. You’re being–”
“–should be sent back to magic kindergarten! Or at least be made to retake that lab safety training course back in–”
Spike dragged his palm down his face and walked over to the tray of beakers. It was much too early in the morning for this – snapping Twilight out of some inane train of thought wasn’t in his schedule for the day until at least ten o’clock.
He gave one of the beakers a slight nudge, disrupting the neat rows that the they had been arranged in. They tinkled against each other as they shifted and Spike turned to Twilight expecting a response.
“–could have doomed us all. Ponyville, Equestria, the entire–”
Nothing. He’d have to try something more extreme.
Spike steeled himself. Years of living with Twilight had conditioned him to feel dirty about what he was going to do, but this situation called for drastic measures. Hopping off the counter, Spike walked over to a shelf and pulled out two books at random.
An Introduction to Advanced Applied Friendship Theory (D.D. 302.3)
and
Using Scissors for Dummies (D.D. 745.5)
To misplace two books with the same Dewdrop Decimal number would be a minor sin, understandable even. Switch two books within the same subject area, and one might eventually find redemption for their transgression. But this…
Spike forced his eyes shut and whispered a brief prayer for mercy to whichever higher power governed the organization of libraries.
Then, he swapped the books.
Flinching back immediately after, Spike gazed upon his claws as though they had been permanently soiled. Yet, no retribution–divine or otherwise–had befallen him.
At the counter, Twilight continued her blubbering, oblivious to the sacrilege that had been committed in her presence. If even this vile act could not pierce the veil that clouded Twilight’s Library-Sense and snap her out of her episode, that left Spike with but a single option.
Letting out a defeated sigh, he switched the books back. “Hey, Twilight–”
“–terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible–”
“That thermostat spell you mentioned sounded really interesting. Why don’t you…” Spike gulped. “Tell me more about it?”
The silence was deafening in the wake of those terrible words, and Spike immediately began to regret his decision. Twilight’s ears swiveled forward.
“Y-you… you really mean it?” she asked, looking up, hope in her voice. She gazed at Spike the way Winona did whenever Applejack came back from Fluttershy’s with treats.
“Yeah!” said Spike with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. It was all he could do, looking into Twilight's pleading eyes. To deny her a lecture now would be downright cruel.
Twilight’s eyes sparkled and her tail practically wagged in excitement. “O-of course!”
“Why don’t you explain how it works?” Spike said. The bone had been tossed, and there was no turning back.
A huge grin spread across her face as she leapt to her hooves, even as Spike resigned himself to his fate.
“... And thus, the November 16th Chicken Coup of ‘47 was thwarted through an ingenious application of elementary thermodynamics, avian neuropsychology, and subaquatic canistromorphy.” Twilight finished, leaning over the podium she’d brought out halfway through the lecture.
“Huh,” said Spike, who was once again sitting on his improvised hammock. He tossed another fire ruby into his mouth. “That was really informative. I would never have guessed that was how the November 16th Chicken Coup of ‘47 went down.”
“I know, right?” Twilight said with a grin, closing the book she’d pulled up for reference. “Simply a fascinating period in Equestria’s history.” It was always lovely to see a student so interested in learning.
“One thing I still don’t get is… Why?”
“Huh?” Twilight inclined her head; that had been an awfully broad question. Had she missed something? She was sure she’d delivered a fairly comprehensive overview of the field of thermal magic. . .
Her heart skipped a beat. What about–
Twilight grabbed her notecards, her pinprick eyes darting about frantically as she cycled through the stack in a panicked frenzy of telekinesis.
History? Check.
Applications? Check.
Implications – societal, economical, governmental, philosophical, theological, lexicographical and geological? Check, check, check check, check, check, and check.
This was bad. Spike had entrusted her with his education, his future! Had she left out Coltzmann’s paper on arcanothermic friendship crystals? No, she’d touched on that about two hours into the lecture. What about Hot Shot’s thesis on–
“What I meant was, why did you need to cast that spell?” Spike was giving her Bemused Look S-37c: ‘You are being stupid, but probably not in a way that will get us both killed.’
“Oh!” Twilight said, blushing. She set her notes back down on the podium. “Well, Spike. In the book you assigned me yesterday, The Egghead’s Guide to Obsessive-Compulsive Cooking, line seven of page two says that cooking often involves the application of heat to food.”
Spike looked at her as though waiting for her to continue (Expectant Look S-25c, to be specific). Had her explanation not been enough?
“Uh, sure,” Spike said, eyebrow raised. “Cooking does usually involve heating food up.”
He shot her Sarcastic Look S-42f: no duh.
“There’s baking and frying and boiling,” he continued, ticking each item off on his fingers as he went. “But I’m pretty sure ‘freaky air control magic’ wasn’t one of the methods listed in that book.”
Covering her mouth with a hoof, Twilight giggled. “Spike, the air wasn’t meant to be a primary source of heat. It was a confounding variable. With that spell, the air temperature in this room will always remain at exactly twenty-two degrees centigrade.”
Spike stared at her. “That… really isn’t how cooking works. Besides, don’t you think that’s a little… overkill?”
“Of course not!” Twilight said. She closed her eyes and placed a hoof on her chest. “A good scientist always acts so as to limit the effects of confounding variables.”
“Let me guess. That’s why you were wearing that clean-suit.”
“Yep!” she said, trotting around the podium and over to a cabinet. “I even had Rarity make you a set!”
She levitated out a hanger and with it a white baby-dragon-shaped cleanroom suit, which shimmered with such intensity that Spike was forced to shield his eyes. “The emeralds were a little unnecessary,” said Twilight with a fond smile and roll of her eyes, “but they should be chemically inert with respect to most common kitchen ingredients.”
Sighing, Spike hopped off the counter and walked over to the cart of kitchen supplies. “That’s also why you insisted on using disposable, magically-cloned, diamond-tipped food scalpels?”
He rummaged around before pulling out a clamshell twelve-pack branded with the image of a grinning gryphon chef tossing a scalpel over his shoulder. In a brightly colored explosion were the words “NOW 20% MORE DISPOSABLE!”
“Makes cross-contamination less likely and decreases the confounding effect of blunting between successive cuts,” said Twilight, nodding. It had taken forever to find a store that would sell those, for some strange reason.
“And on only using milk taken from middle-classed members of the Saddle-Arabian Da’iry tribe between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-seven?” Spike held up the carton of demographically-precise dairy.
“Indeed!” Twilight beamed. “The reclusive Da’iry tribe of Saddle Arabia is one of the most genetically homogeneous groups in the known world!”
“And… lettuce from the vegetable mines of Fillydelphia, harvested only in winter under the full moon on Tuesday midnights with titanium pickaxes?” The packet read, in large bold letters, "100% non-organic!"
Twilight wiped a tear of pride from her eyes. Her little baby dragon had always been a quick learner.
“Yep,” she said, ruffling Spike’s spines with a hoof. “Quarried produce is more consistent than the farm-grown stuff, and who knows what effect the lunar cycle might have on food?”
Spike slapped his forehead with a claw. “You know what?” He said, taking a step away from Twilight. “Let’s just get this over with.”
He turned back to the cart and began to unpack, pulling out plates and boxes and bags of ingredients and setting them on the counter.
Twilight watched him for a moment. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to learn more about–”
Spike almost dropped the plate he'd been holding. “No!”