more accurately a homophone
“And it’s not as if I ever make her take night court on short notice when she’s been up all day!” Luna was ranting at the walls as she paced in the anteroom behind the throne room. “The nerve of it, Twilight!”
Twilight idly stirred her tea as the sugarcubes dissolved. “Mhm.”
“In a moment now I’m going to have to go back out there and do the second half of her blasted court even though she promised she’d be back by now! Celestia always takes my help for granted! And she’s always ‘well you did defer a lot of your petitioners to me, Luna’ or ‘I think you owe me for spying on my dreams against my will, Luna’- like I do it all the time! A couple times a week, tops! And I never learn anything that incriminating!”
Twilight was only half-listening. In her head, she was making a checklist of things that absolutely had to be done before she slept that night. Her visit to Canterlot had dragged much further into the day that she’d anticipated. Luna was doing her best to convince her this was entirely Celestia’s fault. Twilight brought the tea to her lips, ear twitching as Luna went on.
“I’d understand if she were meeting a foreign dignitary on short notice or attending to her harem or somesuch--” here Twilight blinked and hurriedly swallowed a too-hot sip of tea-- “but I’ll wager she’s doing nothing of the sort!”
“Her harem?” Twilight asked, eyes watering slightly. “She has a harem?”
“No, not anymore,” said Luna, sitting abruptly and taking a sip of her own tea. Her voice grew wistful. “I had a wonderful harem, back in the day. You wouldn’t believe what ponies in the second era liked to do with their--”
Twilight was spared Luna’s reminiscing by the sudden flash of green fire that heralded a message sent via Spikemail. Hastily she unrolled the scroll with her magic, trying to stop the blush that had begun to creep toward her face.
It read, in Starlight Glimmer’s hurried hornwriting:
Twilight, I know you wanted to open the delivery for our school library yourself, but some of the students started asking about it and I kind of wanted to check the new books out too. You weren’t here to stop us so we unpacked them. Anyway, things kind of spiralled.
Luna’s eyebrows simply raised quizzically as Twilight’s met in a frown. Some of those books were actually for her, not the school library, and might not be safe. She read on:
Long story short there’s some kind of rift in space in the middle of the library now, Sandbar and Yoona fell into it, Gallus went in after them, and Silverstream is unconscious. Also, some kind of lightning spirit came out of it and flew out one of the windows. Smolder and Ocellus are chasing it.
I’ve been pouring over the book we think caused this but no luck. You should get here like now.
-Starlight
Twilight dropped the tea she’d been holding along with the scroll. The sound of breaking china didn’t even register.
“Is something the matter?” asked Luna, alarmed.
“Yes. Very much so,” Twilight replied through gritted teeth. “A certain purple guidance counselor has made a mistake that I intend to make her regret.”
“Ah,” Luna said uncertainly. “So are you going to attend to that now, or--”
She was answered by Twilight’s vanishing with a bright flash, leaving behind only her stool and the small mess made by the teacup.
Luna sighed grumpily.
Twilight appeared at the doors to the school library, preparing to burst in dramatically, but they were, disappointingly, already wide open. Within was a fairly chaotic scene. A blue-white crack in reality bathed the library in a dull light which intensified at the periodic lances of lightning it spat. Each one made an unpleasant buzzing noise as it burned a jagged line into the walls, shelves, or ceiling before dissipating. Behind a shelf lay the stricken form of Silverstream, being tended to by Spike, unconscious as Starlight had said. Starlight herself was taking shelter behind an overturned table, frantically flipping through a massive orange tome.
You.
Twilight marched over to Starlight, scroll held aloft. “What the buck is this, Starlight?!” she shouted, eye twitching.
Starlight looked up with some relief. “Twilight! Good that you’re here. I can’t figure out what caused this… thing and I--”
“What. The. BUCK. Is. This,” deadpanned Twilight in a dangerous tone, pushing the scroll toward the unicorn threateningly.
“Um.” Starlight peeked over the table at the glowing rift. “A letter? About the rift of unknown power and origin here? You know, the one into which three students have disappeared?”
Twilight spared the rift a single glance before once again shoving the letter at Starlight. “Read what this says.”
Starlight took the scroll in her magic and uncertainly began reciting, “Twilight, I know you wanted to open--”
“The last line, please,” said Twilight, tapping her hoof as an arc of lightning narrowly buzzed by.
“I’ve been pouring over the book we think caused this but no--”
“See anything wrong with that, my dear student?”
Starlight paused. Twilight hadn’t referred to her as her student in a fair while. Again glancing at the rift behind her, she looked over the note, wondering if the headmare was entirely grasping the situation. “...Nnnnnnno?”
“The word,” Twilight nearly yelled, “is poring, Starlight!”
Starlight Glimmer looked at the note, then down at the book between her hooves, then back at the unpleasantly buzzing rift, then back at Twilight.
“Yes?”
“With an O. As in P-O-R-I-N-G. The middle Ponish form of the word “peer”, meaning to look intently or meditate on something.” Twilight looked like she might have a stroke. “Well?!”
“Oh. Yeah, I see that now,” said Starlight with some incredulity. “You don’t actually care about that right now though, right? Did you even read the rest of the letter?” She gestured over the table at the incursion in question. “Three students? Lightning monster?”
As if to punctuate her words, a form nearly too bright to look at burst through one of the unbroken windows and screamed around the library’s walls, leaving a trail of charring behind it. Smolder burst through another previously-intact window and followed it as it flew upward through the skylight with blinding speed.
“Doesn’t that take priority over a misspelled word?”
“NO!” replied Twilight. “You’re perpetuating the incorrect phrasing of that… phrase! In an official correspondence, no less! The head librarian at Canterlot library taught me well! One of her mantras was there’s no excuse / for homonym misuse!”
“Okay, Twilight,” Starlight said, a bit of impatience creeping into her voice. “I know you’re super neurotic about proper spelling and stuff in letters but we kind of have bigger issues right now and--”
“Not until you apologise, and write this letter out again with the correct homonym in place!” Twilight conjured a fresh scroll and an inkwell and thrust them at Starlight.
Starlight’s eyes narrowed and she pushed aside the articles with her hoof, holding aloft the offending spellbook in her magic. “I’m not going to do that and you need to get a grip. You knew what I meant. The message got through. You need to help me figure out which part of this Silverstream read.”
“My ability to understand what you meant has nothing to do with it. Language has rules and you broke one in a letter to a superior. That’s a detention-worthy--”
“Did I, though?” said Starlight, mentally glossing over the ‘superior’ and ‘detention’ bits. “What rule of grammar exactly did I break? Pouring and poring are both verbs.”
“When was the last time you poured yourself over something, Starlight? You’re not a liquid.”
At this point what little remained of the skylight shattered as the lightning monster again burst through, this time in the death embrace of Smolder and another dragon, presumably Ocellus. They flashed by almost too quickly to register and disappeared into the rift with a harsh buzz.
“That’s five students into the quite-possibly-deadly unknown, Twi. And turns of phrase are almost always metaphor. When was the last time you died because you wanted something? I distinctly remember you were ‘dying’ to open this delivery.”
Twilight was thrown for a brief moment. Starlight took the opening.
“And anyway, these days most ponies don’t know the right word. They say ‘pouring’, write ‘pouring’, and imagine themselves liquidly spilling over the reading material. If anything, language constantly evolved and this phrase has done so along with it.”
“That’s… a terrible argument! The ponies saying that are wrong and you’re just trying to get out of your punishment!”
“Okay, Twi,” replied Starlight with a roll of her eyes. “If I promise to write the letter again will you help me figure out how to save our students?”
“If you even need to,” muttered Spike from across the floor. Both Starlight and Twilight turned to look at him. He blushed. “I mean, have you noticed how they’ve been fixing stuff more than you guys lately?”
Starlight gazed contemplatively at the rift. “I suppose they do have a weird sort of problem-solving synergy.” She looked sideways at Twilight. “Almost like you guys used to have.”
“Used to…? Hey, We still save Equestria plenty!”
“Yeah, from your own mistakes.”
Twilight stomped her hoof and shook her head. “You’re just trying to distract me. You’ll write that damned letter again right now while I see what I can do to fix the other dire mistake you made today. And I’ll have an essay on common erroneously used phrases before the week’s out.”
Starlight considered hitting Twilight with the memory-erasing spell she’d only used three times since they met, a considerable show of restraint in her eyes. But it took some charging and Spike was a witness. Maybe later if she really needed to get out of the essay.
“Fine.”
At that Twilight turned to Silverstream, horn glowing as she tried to sense any sort of trauma. Starlight took her original letter in her magic, hastily diving behind the table again as lightning buzzed across the floor in her direction, and began hastily copying her words onto the new scroll.
Silverstream stirred, eliciting a happy gasp from Twilight. Then the hippogriff shot bolt upright, looking around wildly until her gaze landed on the glowing rift.
“Ohhh no no no no no!”
“We’re here, Silverstream, just tell us what happened,” said Twilight soothingly.
“I was just figuring out the puzzle in that tome that Starlight showed--”
“Uhm, WHAT puzzle,” interrupted Starlight loudly, looking up from her parchment guiltily. “That book that I definitely didn’t give you guys doesn’t have any puzzles in it, I’ve been poring over--”
“Quiet, you,” growled Twilight as the old letter was picked up and shoved into the unicorn’s face forcefully. Grumbling, Starlight returned to the task at hoof.
Twilight picked up the enormous book in her magic and held it open before Silverstream. “Show me what you’re talking about, Silverstream, we don’t have a lot of time.”
“Well, first of all,” said Silverstream, taking the book in her claws and inverting it, “it’s gotta be upside down. That’s how I read the...”
She stopped abruptly, staring at the page. Then she looked back at the rift. “Wait, did my friends all get sucked into that thing?!”
“Uh, sort of, yeah,” said Twilight with some frustration. “But I’m not going in after them until I know what we’re--”
Silverstream squawked and jumped into the air, still holding the tome, and dove around the bookshelf, flying headlong into the rift with a depressingly familiar buzz.
“DAMN it!” shouted Twilight, stomping again.
“Yup, that seems right,” said Spike wearily from her side.
“Done!” said Starlight triumphantly, holding the corrected letter aloft.
Immediately Twilight turned to her, ears perking up as she apparently forgot entirely about the crack in reality and her six missing students. “Let’s see it!”
As Starlight held out the scroll between the table and shelf, a deadly buzz shot across the room in their direction, shearing the letter diagonally into two charred halves.
Twilight and Starlight both stared at them, Twilight in horror and Starlight in weary apprehension.
“You… you did that on purpose,” accused Twilight in a hushed tone.
“I did not. Look, you can still read it, I think.”
Twilight hastily took both halves and held them before her, glaring at the last line.
I’ve been p- ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ -ok we think caused this but no luck. You should get here like now.
“Starlight,” said Twilight quietly, conjuring another blank scroll, “you’ve now violated two sacred mantras. And I haven’t yet seen evidence of your rectification. So write it again.”
Starlight facehooved. “What’s the second mantra?”
“Make sure it’s a fact / that your parchment’s intact,” replied Twilight promptly.
“Of course.”
At this point, the buzzing noise emanating from the rift in space rose sharply in both pitch and volume. Spike thrust his claws over his ears as the others winced.
“That’s probably not good,” Starlight said over the noise, charging up her magic and preparing to step out toward the rift.
“Oh no you don’t,” Twilight yelled, not even sparing it a look, “a crack in reality’s not getting you out of this--”
Before she could finish, the buzz became a deafening whine and the library was suffused in brilliantly harsh blue-white light. A loud pop, and then all six of their multiracial students came tumbling out of the rift, Oceullus still in draconic form.
Silverstream immediately jumped into the air, holding the tome before her in her claws as she shouted something that could only be indistinctly heard by the ponies on the other side of the room. The rift seemed to quiver, and the arcs of lightning came more rapidly. It was unmistakably shrinking, though. In a few seconds it wasn’t wide enough for even a colt to fit through.
Starlight thought she heard the scream of the lightning creature, and the rift flashed a few times as if something was bashing into the crack from the other side, failing to push itself through into their world. In another moment, the whine stopped and the rift was no more.
“Well, that’s that,” said Spike, walking toward the students.
“WHAT?” yelled Twilight through the deaf ringing that filled her head. Starlight sighed and cast a spell on herself and Twilight and the ringing stopped; she could hear again.
“Well that’s a relief,” she said, also moving to join the six as they pulled themselves up and cheered in a group hug. She was stopped by Twilight, who held Starlight back in her magic with a glare.
“Are you six alright? Anyone hurt?” asked Twilight across the room.
“Uh… no,” said Gallus, looking around at his fellows as they shook their heads.
“We’re all fine, I think, Headmare Twilight,” said Ocellus.
“We were almost stuck, though,” said Smolder. “We were trying to get the lightning dude to--”
“Yes-great-Spike-make-sure-they’re-fine-and-take-the-book-away,” said Twilight, not taking her eyes off of the floating guidance counselor. Starlight shot back a glare of her own and broke herself free of Twilight’s grasp just forcefully enough to remind the alicorn that she probably didn’t want to provoke her too much.
Twilight ignored the implication and simply shoved the two scrolls and the inkwell at Starlight once more.
“Get started.”
Starlight thought for a moment, then smiled. “Sure, Twilight. Of course now that our students are safe, I’m happy to indulge your bizarre, slightly unhinged neuroses.”
Twilight was slightly taken aback but glared even more deeply at the slight.
“But how about,” continued Starlight, “We go to my office? I can take my time with proper hornwriting and make the letter as it should have been from the start.” She looked over at Spike and the others. “Spike, can you and the students get started on clearing up this mess?”
“Uh, sure,” said Spike as the students in question groaned. Twilight merely looked at Starlight with a look of pleasant surprise.
“Oh, and I can get started on that essay, too,” Starlight said happily. “Follow me and I’ll repay you for my unforgivable mistake, Headmare Twilight.”
Twilight knew she was being mocked, but it’s not like Starlight could get out of it now. She followed the unicorn through the library doors and they walked together to the guidance counselor's office.
“After you,” said Starlight with another smile. Twilight entered looking faintly appalled at the mess on Starlight’s desk. Starlight quietly closed the door as she followed.
No witnesses.
⠀