“For Science!” Eric concurred, excitedly, pulling his legs up into a crosslegged position as he rode the magic. “I’d particularly like to see if there’s any chance I will be able to regain the power, and if there’s anything that can be done to expedite it."

With nothing in her way, Twilight made off with Eric. Night Watch dipped her head at the happy couple. "I'll leave you two to have some privacy. If you need anything else, you just shout." She rose to her hooves and trotted heavily out of the room, leaving Tom and Wave alone.

“Thank you, Night, we will,” Tom warmly remarked, chuckling at the sight of Eric being carted off. Turning to Wave, he wrapped her up in his arms and fell back against the bed, smiling at her. “Now, where were we?”

In the basement, Twilight set Eric down on a chair, then put a fancy-looking helmet that could double for draining pasta on his head. "Let's start with getting some baseline measurements. I wish we could have gotten some before the event, but we can't go back in time."

“We can’t? Oh well, much too headache inducing, anyways, I’m sure. I love the aesthetics, in here, by the way,” Eric said as he settled into place. “So, baseline. Go for it.”

Twilight zapped a machine with her horn and it began to spew out reams of papers that she looked over with soft 'hmm's and 'ohhh's. "You don't match Jake's readings very well at all. There are clearly lingering effects, or you're just different humans. I'm afraid I haven't had many to compare with."

“Well, we’re different, but we’re both male humans. So what kinds of differences are you seeing then?” Eric inquired.

Twilight frowned at the readouts thoughtfully. "Some of this, I admit, I'm just guessing at. I'd need a much wider sample size to start making educated guesses. I would like to try something." She smiled sweetly. "Permission to use magic?"

“Permission granted, though I would like to know what you’re doing,” Eric confirmed, waiting eagerly to see what would happen.

Twilight lit up Eric's form with her magic as she looked him over. Odd little patterns played over her horn, each one intricate and detailed, and each one playing quite quickly before the next. "Are you a student of the arcane arts?"

“I’m aspiring to be one. What I did back home was… ‘arcane’ in the sense of being exceedingly complicated and well outside most people’s understanding. But we didn’t have magic, so I’m learning that mostly from scratch. Your book has been… informative, if difficult,” Eric answered.

Twilight lifted an ear. "You've only had it for a little while. I can't imagine you got that much out of it. Do you even know the alphabet?" She played the alphabet over her horn rather quickly, not that most people could see it, but humans and trained mages could with practice.

“I’m sure you could have gotten much more. In truth that ‘alphabet’ and a fair number of terms are too foreign to be of use to me, yet, but that doesn’t mean I got nothing from reading through. For one, my goal at the moment was to learn a better sense of what shadow magic can and cannot do,” Eric admitted. “I’m not sure how relevant your alphabet will prove. I don’t have a horn, but will it be possible to… I don’t know, emulate one with something akin to sign-language? I have no idea.”

Twilight tilted her head, looking curious a moment. "Well that would be the challenge, wouldn't it? You have to direct the energy. For a unicorn…" She reached up and poked at her horn. "That happens up here. We control the volume, the flow, the signalling for the universe, all of that, up here. You don't have one, as you pointed out. If you plan to use magic, you're going to need an alternative way to do the same thing."

Eric nodded. “I was hoping your analysis might help point to how I managed to do it before. The shadow played a large part, but he made a point of pushing me to doing it on my own, or so it seemed. Back then it was mostly just a matter of will and focus. If it was within the limits of my power, I basically just had to… wish it? I imagine he was translating that, somehow. I don’t know. You’re the experienced magic user here.”

Twilight frowned a little. "That makes perfect sense. It needed you to work up your reserves and general output, but it was handling all the rest. The signalling, the volume control, all of the fine details were left to it to handle." She waved a hoof at Eric. "I'm glad Cadance got to you when she did, or you'd eventually be a puppet for that thing."

“That sounds about right. It was careful enough to never let me catch it in a lie, or break my trust, but I always had the sense that it was just waiting for the right moment. Biding its time and waiting for the point when it could betray me in the most spectacular way. Though I guess it could have been a lot more anticlimactic than I realized, simply whittling away my true self until I was too far gone to notice the change. So without it then… am I well and truly mundane? Or is there still a chance I could learn to do this stuff myself?” Eric inquired.

Twilight brightened with a wide smile. "No! If you had any output at all, that means it's there. If it could make its own output, it wouldn't need you." She wobbled a hoof. "That wouldn't make sense. It needed you to generate the magic. The only part we're missing is… the rest of it. Technically, earth ponies have magic, but explaining how to get it out of them, that's the tricky part."

“I had a particular spell I got a lot of practice with. I’ve been trying to repeat it on the way over here to no success. Would you mind seeing if you can see any sign of it working, with your analysis thingy? It’d be good to know if I’m on the right track in the slightest, or completely off base,” Eric asked. “If it’s at least getting things moving, maybe I can try something simpler.”

Pinkie suddenly poked out from behind Twilight. "You mean I could learn magic?"

Twilight sprang ahead with a cry of alarm. "Pinkie! I swear… You already have magic! You don't need more magic!"

Pinkie tilted her head. "You really think so? Huh…"

“Oh! The Pink one! The one with the legendary powers of the Fourth Wall!” Eric said. “Eric Wolfgang,” he said with an offered hand. “Forgive me, I don’t know your name…”

Pinkie rose up to two legs and shook hands with Eric eagerly with one of her own hooves with remarkable ease. "Pleased to meet you, Eric! Wolfgang huh? Do you have a special talent with wolves? That's pretty cool! Oh! Party." She pulled out a card and offered it to Eric, not that she seemed to have pockets.

Eric took the card, glancing it over before pocketing it. “Well I once turned a vicious dire wolf into a cute little puppy. But she got hurt so I had to turn her into a smaller, sleeker ninja-wolf that could teleport herself out of the chasm she fell into. I hope she’s okay, and being a good wolf now.”

Pinkie looked a little baffled. Twilight stepped in and nudged Pinkie out of the way. "Rewind a little bit there. What's this about wolves? What did you do?"

“Hmm? Oh,” Eric began, switching contexts. “We were attacked by a shadow-infused giant wolf monster thing, but I was able to subdue it with shadow magic and then remove the power from it. And when I did, it turned into a cute little puppy dog. But our pony friends that were with us ran in terror during the attack, and got lost in a blizzard, so we tried to find them. Poppy accidently fell into a chasm and broke her leg, so I upgraded her with a bit of shadow magic to a form that could self heal and teleport, to get back out. She, uh… ran away when I tried to undo it though. It’s really hard to catch a teleporting wolf that doesn’t want to be caught.”

Pinkie blinked cluelessly. "Huh, well be sure to be there!" And off she went, vanishing into whatever temporal anomaly allowed her to get around town.

Twilight peeked behind the machine Pinkie had ducked behind, but found nothing. She didn't expect much, and turned back to Eric. "It sure sounds like you were working yourself out pretty good. That dark magic… thing… would have taken you over in no time at all. You should write Cadance a thank you letter."

“She slipped past the Fourth Wall again, I take it?” Eric asked, following the ponies’ antics with his eyes. “I’ll write that letter, later. But in a sense we owe the shadow our lives. Both for that, and for the, uh, insufficiently well aimed teleportation that got us onto the train to Cadance’s place. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried teleporting onto a moving train? I don’t recommend it.”

Twilight raised a brow. "I couldn't more strongly recommend against that. You could have killed yourself, and your friends." She let out a soft breath. Ding! The machine she was reading spat out new set of papers for her to look over. "Fascinating…"

“It arguably would have beat starving and/or freezing to death. And in the end it merely resulted in a unique form of food fight,” Eric countered. “What did you find?”

Twilight lifted the paper that was held in her magic. "Well, it's not a perfected science so far, but your general thaumic levels are quite acceptable. For coming from a magic-starved world, you're doing very well. I'd put you on the level of a healthy earth or pegasus pony. The trick remains, how to channel it into something… I don't know what the 'natural' human ways are."

“Well… according to legends it involves speaking otherwise incomprehensible words and/or making hand gestures, but those legends may be completely bullshit. So why don’t we start by seeing if there’s any measurable reaction to… this!” Eric focused really, really hard on making a diet coke appear. Come on… always Coca-Cola… He tried to recall exactly how it felt when he had done it successfully before, cursing the casual ease of his prior success.

Twilight stared at where Eric was staring. When nothing happened after a while, she raised a hoof. "Maybe you need a horn too?"

Eric sighed and relaxed. “Alright. That would simplify a lot of things, I imagine. Is that something you can arrange?”

Twilight tapped at her chin. "It would be better if the princess, another princess that is, did something that dramatic, but…" She pointed out in a direction Eric didn't know. "Zecora could probably manage it. She knows about little tricks of magic that can even surprise Celestia."

“Alright. I suppose it isn’t urgent, and we can put that on our todo list after we get back from Baltimare. Unless you think I should prioritize it? I can probably continue studying abstractly for now, if you would let me borrow the book… or perhaps one a bit more targeted toward neophytes like myself?” Eric responded. “Though… I have a party to attend before we leave. Is Zecora close?”

Twilight shrugged softly. "Your friends said they'd stay a day or two, and you were invited to a party, so why not say hello to her? Besides, she's here in the castle often recently, looking after me and Night Watch, so there's plenty of opportunity to introduce yourself."

“It’s decided then. Introduce me the next time she stops by. We can discuss the matter, then, and see what she has to say,” Eric said. “Is there anything else you want to analyze?”

Twilight took that as a cue and depressed a button on the big machine. Beep! "You're clean of outside influences. If you hadn't been exposed to magic-use to begin with, you'd be entirely normal as far as I can see. You could just let this go, but you don't strike me as that sort of pony?"

“Not really. I guess if I had reason to believe I’d be going home soon. Is that something particularly likely? If I’m going to stay here, my professional skillset is useless, aside from my practice at rapidly learning new systems… which will hopefully serve me well as a wizard,” he shrugged. “And while we have a fair amount of bits for the moment, and generous treatment by Princesses, I expect we’ll need and want to earn our own way eventually.”

Twilight winced lightly. "I tried to reach your homeworld, or at least one of the human homeworlds, and it didn't work out very well at all. I've promised not to try that again." She moved to disengage Eric from the monitoring equipment with her hooves and magic. "There's not a lot to learn until you can do it, I warn. It's like learning the reading alphabet while blind, not that practical."

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