Chapter 1
The Secret of the Spark
The blackened brick walls of the antechamber were laid bare from the stark white-blue flashes that left the air smelling of ozone and the occasional burned insect. Electric Blue stood on the metal grated catwalk that extended over the lower chamber of the facility. Through her tinted goggles she gazed up at the twin copper towers that exchanged bolts of raw power strong enough to reduce a dragon to ash in less than a second. Time and time again the crack of energy arched between the thirty meter high rods in deafening cracks that sent her teeth on edge.
She stared up, savoring the sensation that ran through her mane. It was the only real reason she had bothered to still let it grow out beyond the practical short crop she used to maintain while still attending the university. The tingle that sent itself through the length of her spine, that sent pins running down the horn in her head and defused around her ribcage like a blanket of pins - it was something she knew she would never tire from.
She glanced up toward the vaulted ceiling doming upward, and stared at the various shadows dancing along the support beams that jerked and swayed in time to the static discharge. Imagining its source, several stories below, was at once energizing and calming. Let the others say what they would, she knew that reality was not an immutable thing, and this place allowed her mind to open up to the hope that such wonders still existed in the world, more so than had ever been dreamed before. It allowed her to imagine that even time itself could one day be turned at a whim.
A jarring ringing sounded through the area, signaling a return to the duties that she was stationed here for in the first place. Moving down the stairway, she caught the side glances of passing coworkers. They were muttering to each other again. They would no doubt continue, and their tones would increase in volume and intensity once she had moved out of eyesight. She pretended not to hear. It honestly disappointed her that so few of the ponies there were allowed to know the full implications and magnitude of the facility in which they worked. A few were even afraid of some of the areas in the compound, although, for the life of her, Electric Blue couldn't understand why. She had just always considered it to be a side effect of superstitions.
As she made her way down the metal stairways and the tight pipe lined corridors that led to the lower chambers, she considered this. Perhaps they had been brought up badly, or maybe it was a side effect of ignorance. She imagined how the first of pony kind would have reacted when they were first given the gift of Fire from the ancient Protaeon, and then began to wonder if half of her race were still so much like those ponies from long ago, huddled in caves and cowering at the lightning striking outside their shelter.
She paused to press her horn into the identification lock, and her thoughts were interrupted by the wave of magic that surged through her mind. She pressed one thought to the forefront of all others and felt the magical creeping tendril latch onto it, probing intently. It read her identity memory for a moment, seemingly savoring and suckling at the edges of it, before retreating back from her mind. There was a deep low clunking noise and the thick steel door slowly slid open. She passed through the wide opening and, before the door had completed its procedural task, she again used her horn to trigger the closing sequence.
The long metal hall stretched out in front of her, lit from the corners high above with a piercing green shine that ran the length of the corridor. She had always thought it soothing, although had heard it had actually caused a few ponies to become aggravated and even hostile. In an area like this, deep in the core of the underground chambers, something like that could not at all be allowed to even be chanced upon. She walked along down the full length of the gradually sloping hallway to her station, all the while wondering why the coordinators didn't exerciser more caution by using more thorough psychological screening exams.
She turned left when the hallway terminated at a T shaped fork, and continued down past the series of doors all labeled in numerical sequence. Looking up at her own station door she read it out loud to herself. There was no pony to hear her, so there would be no pony to care, and she liked the way it sounded as it rolled off her tongue.
"Sector five thirty nine." She smiled to herself as she felt the butterflies in her tummy again. It was always like this right before she stepped into her work room. It reminded her of her first time trying to be intimate with another pony, only she knew her work would never disappoint her. She used her magic to tap in the door's pass code on a nearby numerical keypad, and her smile broadened as the door slid open.
She stepped inside allowing the door to close. The auto-lock echoed in the small chamber, as did her hoofsteps as she approached the silver shutter door embedded into the wall opposite the door. When she spoke her voice was a faint whisper, but in this room it became slightly louder than the volume of a casual diner conversational tone.
"Authorizing vector lock release. Agent Electric Blue. Glory to the Sun, and the moon She eclipses." The shutter door silently slid upward into the ceiling. The room was bathed in the flowing blue light that pored from the opening. She moved forward to the silver lined control counter that had been hidden behind the shutter door, all the while staring at the sight she saw through the wide crystalline window just above the counter. It was an effort, as it always was, to keep her eyes from watering at the sheer beauty of it. Her hoof reached over to manage the controls, and she spoke softly into the microphone.
"I watched your work during the break. You were wonderful as always." She tried to keep the waver out of her voice.
Behind the crystalline pane, the blue-white light pulsed and shifted between forms of all sorts. It consumed and produced shadows and shades of itself, and some parts collapsed into itself as it forced itself outward from other parts. Upon the sounding of the unicorn's voice, its shifting began to stabilize. Its form gathered together seeming to almost solidify. A brightly shaded mirror image of Electric Blue stared back at her from behind the crystal view plate. Where her own coat was a bright blue, this creature was uniformly colored the same blue-white as the electric arcs that emanated far above in the upper levels. For not the first time the pony found herself fondly comparing the color of her mane to the shade of the creature that stood before her now. They were very similar, and this gave her a warm feeling of kinship with it.
"You missed me. I know you did. You always do. I hurried back as soon as I could. It's the union rules though, the mandatory break times." She felt the sudden urge to reach her hoof up to the glass, and as she did so, the creature mimed her in time. Her heart surged at the thought of only a barrier of crystal separating them, and she found her mouth involuntarily falling open into an odd smile. There was a flash, and the creature behind the panel surged again, silently bouncing against the crystal, its edges becoming sharp and jagged. Electric Blue jerked her hoof back, her smile gone.
"Hey … there's no call for that now. We're friends here." The speaker on the control counter crackled to life with white noise, deafening as it raked through the chamber. Quickly the pony silenced it before turning again to the occupant behind the glass. "Enough of that. We have work to do."
She then busied herself behind the control counter turning knobs and flipping switches, as the creature in the nearby crystal prison worked itself into a frenzy of light and fury. It was that fury that was drained away by the machines the unicorn operated, and stored inside capsules composed of various metals. Later they would be collected and packed up for shipping off to the Canterlot retail outlets, where they would be sold off at a nominal price for the purposes of providing electrical power to the appliances the pony population had come to rely on daily.
The pony smiled widely, as she continued to manipulate her controls. Most would never even think to question how it was done, let alone take the time to find out. After all, 'unicorn magic' was such an easy excuse.