Refusal

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

----

Marley wished she still had alcohol in the house from time to time.

More so recently than before.

She loved being a foster parent, she really did.

It was stressful, messy, difficult and an all around hassle, but having kids in her life, kids who looked up to her and trusted her to help them and keep them safe filled a void in her heart.

Though some nights she'd lay in bed, reflecting soberly on her life choices and think she was just using them. Offering them a bed and food so she could feel loved, until they got adopted or grew old enough that she couldn't keep them here anymore.

And other nights she wished she'd never signed up for the whole mess.

Lately she'd been having a lot of 'Other nights'.

Spike, out cold in his room, was the source of those nights lately.

Going back and forth to the doctors, watching a sweet, though often confusing and easily confused boy whither away while test after test came back negative was wearing away at her resolve more and more every day.

Shaking him awake in the mornings he couldn't get out of bed left her scared witless.

More often than not he had a scalding fever anymore. No appetite to speak of and he had a hard time keeping down whatever she forced down his throat.

She'd had kids get sick before. She'd fostered children with serious illnesses, too.

She'd never seen one deteriorate like this, though.

And she had no idea what to do about it.

----

'Yes!' Twilight, most intelligent student of Crystal Prep Academy thought to herself. 'My theory was right. Or at least partially correct.'

Red lines peaked and troughed across a scrolling page of paper in her lab.

An abandoned, unused classroom in the schools basement filled with old, out of date electrical engineering equipment.

She had no idea why that elective was no longer offered.

"Alright." She mumbled to herself, jotting down her notes. "So this 'Magic of Harmony' stuff does express interference across local static energy fields. This 'dead' radio station, which for the past few days showed no variation in signal, is now oscillating at... a frequency of one-hundred and five hertz per minute, margin of error at five."

This was good. Very good!

Energy can be detected, manipulated and converted. Even should that energy be created as a byproduct from another reaction.

"It's not being kept a secret very well. Someone would have to be blind not to see that something weird is going on at that school." Her friend had proven an invaluable resource in figuring out a lot of the goings on she'd discovered.

Fieldwork was working wonders for the rest.

"Spike, alias Thorn, told those girls he was avoiding the 'Sirens' because of 'Dark Magic'. Speculated to be referring to emotional manipulation of some sort. Very uncomfortable." It didn't take much to blend in over at Canterlot High.

A hoodie and jeans made for an effective enough disguise there.

And the data she'd gathered onsite had allowed for her to start designing a prototype device to detect local, active sources of magic.

Something she absolutely had to have before returning to her rival school. Being a wallflower in the auditoreum while the bands played was nice.

Being objectively aware that her emotions were being manually twisted by external stimuli? Was honestly horrifying.

She had a trio of pictures, all of the faces of girls, circled with the word "Siren?" above them.

Strangely enough, all of them were human.

Externally.

Strange considering Spike had implied, heavily, that before his 'Time Travel Incident', he hadn't come from Equestria as such and he was supposed to be a dragon.

He refused to tell her what he'd come through as.

It hadn't stopped her from writing down her own theories.

She'd seen her own counterpart after all. And her counterpart had come part and parcel with a dog, almost certainly named Spike.

It... Explained a few things.

Her spiderweb of evidence explained a bit more.

A human girl with red hair and blonde highlights. Her photo next to a printout of an image found online of a great red giant that was stepping on what looked like an idiot in a knockoff Broadway costume.

Sunset Shimmer. Age Unknown. Residence Unknown.

Sources cite her as Equestria Native.

Race: Unicorn

Across from her was a photo she could almost mistake as being her own.

Except not quite right.

Her hair was down, she wasn't wearing glasses and she was smiling brightly while surrounded by people.

Twilight Sparkle. Age Unknown. Residence: Palace of Friendship (?)

Sources cite her as Equestria Native.

Race: Alicorn (Ascended unicorn?)

Along with those two were the rest of the girls who'd participated in a major way during the last event, each of them with a printout of their profile pulled from the current popular social media website.

Far beneath them was a photo of Spike, her friend. Two threads connected him to the other Equestrians. As well as another one connecting him to a photo of a dog.

Twilight knew she didn't have the full picture, not by a longshot. But she was piecing it together, more and more each day.

Deductive reasoning and examination and reexamination of the facts would pull out the secrets that continued to hide, just like a sudoku puzzle.

"Just keep holding on, Spike." She stood up and stretched, moving away from her computer and various attached monitors. "I can fix this, I know I can."

If she could discern the root cause, if it was the anomalous energy interference or if that was simply the byproduct, she'd be one step closer.

She just wished she knew how many more steps she'd have to take after that.

Author's Notes:

So, who can figure out what's wrong with Spike?
I've given all the hints I'm going to, no new symptoms are going to show up or some strange, esoteric illness from any underdeveloped countries.
Being broke, I can't offer anything to whomever figures it out, I'm sorry about that.