Today, I had something different in mind, Sumac. Today, I want to push the realms of what is possible, and I need your help to do it. We are unicorns, Sumac, and if a day goes by that we don’t push against what is possible, it is a day wasted. Don’t worry, Twilight gave me permission, and these lozenges are new. The aftereffects will be minimal.

The colt eyeballed the index card covered with Vinyl’s careful, meticulous writing that he held in his magic and then he glanced at the lozenge on the low table that had been pushed up close to the couch. Without moving his head, he looked at Vinyl, his master, his teacher, his kind instructor. Sumac adored her in an almost worshipful way, and they had grown quite close during their mutual recovery.

Such was the way of unicorns—the sacred bond of master and apprentice. Sumac had first experienced it with Trixie, and Trixie had become his mother. Now, he was experiencing it with Vinyl, and she had become his… friend? No, this was more than a friend, this went beyond friendship, this was a bond that Sumac had no means to express, no words to describe, it went beyond everything he knew and understood.

“Of course I’ll help,” Sumac said to Vinyl, and wishing that she could reply.

Another index card was presented, and Sumac realised that Vinyl had been planning this out for quite some time. She had thought this out, she had prepared, and he knew what she wanted; results. Anything that Vinyl prepared this much for, she was keen on accomplishing it. Sumac was beginning to know his master well.

I’m going to talk, Sumac. I’m so close, but I’m not good at illusion magic. Not good enough anyway. I can make sounds happen, I can make all kinds of sounds manifest, and even voices, but I can produce only what I hear, and I don’t have a voice that I can listen to. But I want one, I want one real bad. I’m not skilled enough to make the voice I want from scratch, but with your help, I think I could. It’s like sucking a milkshake through a straw, and getting something stuck in the straw. I’m stuck, but if I could just clear the straw, I think I could make this work.

Reading the index card several times, Sumac understood. He too, had endured stuff getting caught in his straw when drinking a milkshake, like a juicy bit of pineapple or a cherry. Once you got past the initial blockage, the milkshake could flow again. Vinyl lacked force, or suction if one followed the metaphor to its logical conclusion.

Being a sorcerer, Sumac could give a pony force, he could amplify even the weakest magics, but he wouldn't go as far to say that he could make Vinyl suck. The corners of Sumac’s mouth tugged upwards a bit and the edges of his eyes crinkled while he thought about this. Beside Sumac, on the couch, there was a faint, soft squeak from Boomer, followed by a rising curl of smoke from her backside.

Both he and Vinyl giggled, though Vinyl made more of a wheezing sound.

The laughter came to an abrupt halt though, as trace amounts of nitrogen dioxide, trithioacetone, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen telluride, and hydrogen selenide filled the air. Sumac, unable to move and sitting in the direct blast zone, let out a whimper and gave Vinyl a pleading look. Vinyl coughed and appeared a bit faint.

“Vinyl, help, that smells a lot like Stinkbug’s stink.” Sumac coughed and watched as Vinyl flailed about in her chair, trying to get up.

“DID SOMETHING DIE?” Octavia screeched from the kitchen, no longer sounding like her usual brilliant, cultured self. “TARNISH! WHAT DID YOU DO? ARE YOU EXPERIMENTING ON THE CACTI AGAIN?”

“NO!” Tarnish shouted from somewhere else in the house. “Well, yes, I was experimenting on the cacti again, but I didn’t cause this!”

“TARNISH! YOU FIEND!”

“I didn’t do this!”

“No, Twinkleshine, don’t fix it, we all remember what happened the last time you tried!” Octavia hollered from within the kitchen, and her working-class Grittish accent echoed through the house.

From the kitchen, Pebble let out a gibbering cry and said, “SMELLS BAD!”

Getting up from her chair, Vinyl rose to become the hero that the house so desperately needed.

The excitement was over, but things were far from normal. Somehow, Boomer had slept through everything, oblivious to the mayhem and chaos she had caused. The shouting had died down, though Maud and Pebble had not returned from their walk. And so it was that Sumac and Vinyl resumed their task of finding a voice.

“Listen to me, I’m all posh and fussy.” Octavia’s voice seemed to come out of Vinyl, though Vinyl had not moved her lips at all. “Yes, Sumac, I am aware that I’ll need to practice lip-syncing.” When Vinyl was done speaking, her horn went dim and the spell ended.

Impressed, Sumac managed to make his head nod, just a little, and Vinyl’s horn lit up once more.

“My name is Mister Teapot and I speak for the trees,” Vinyl said in Tarnish’s voice, trying to make her lips move along with the sound. Then, in Maud’s signature deadpan she added, “I like rocks. And pumpkins. Feed me pumpkins, do it now.”

“That’s neat.” It was neat, and Sumac’s mind blazed with the possibility of using the voices of other ponies.

“The Great and Powerful Trixie taught me a lot about illusion,” Vinyl said in Trixie’s voice, a dead perfect impression, though her lips did not move, nor did her mouth open. “The Loud and Scratchy Vinyl is not very good at illusion, but I’ve stuck it out through the difficulty of studying audiomancy.”

And Sumac knew why; there wasn’t much else to do when one was recovering.

“Now, Sumac,” Vinyl said in Twilight’s voice. “Pop that lozenge and let us see what we can do about giving me a voice, shall we?” There was a sound, like a record scratching, a distorted noise, and the voice that came out of Vinyl now was an exact copy of Princess Celestia’s. “Do good, Sumac, and be righteous, you hep cat.”

“What’s a hep cat?” Sumac asked, grinning because of the sound effects that Vinyl had added.

In the voice of Princess Luna, Vinyl replied, “Don’t worry about that now, I’ll explain later.”

Hopped up on the zap apple lozenge, Sumac could feel his mind humming. It was a small boost—Twilight’s latest attempt at finding balance—and with his amplified intelligence Sumac thought about all sorts of things he would never think about under normal circumstances, like how dangerous this was right now.

Sure, Tarnish was keeping his distance and there were thick stone walls between them, but Sumac and Tarnish’s talents were not complimentary, not at all. Overlapping them even just a tiny bit would be inviting disaster, a feedback loop would be created and the ultimate outcome was unknown. Sumac boosted magic, and Tarnish regulated magic.

All around him, he could feel the subtle currents of magic, he was becoming more and more aware of them now while in his altered state. Boomer had her own magic, strange as it was, and Sumac was beginning to gain an inkling of understanding on how it functioned and her connection to the Infernium.

The Infernium was just one of many planes of magic that Sumac could tap into as a sorcerer, bringing more magic to the immediate area around him. Sure, it didn’t do a lot for him, but such was the plight of the sorcerer. A few feet away, Vinyl was weaving together complex spells, and Sumac could feel new knowledge protruding into his mind.

“Sumac, making sound from no source is more difficult than I imagined.” Vinyl’s voice was downright demonic, it sounded like a record played backwards, slowed, and that album being The Greatest Hits of a band called, Nightmares Given Flesh and Brought to Life.

Closing his eyes, Sumac began to understand what was going on. It was like using telekinesis, creating a chain of connected molecules that carried a magical charge, only instead of lifting something up, pushing it, or pulling it, you vibrated those charged particles together. Sumac understood with a clarity that startled him.

When he went to lift something with telekinesis, all of the molecules in the aether, whatever those molecules might be, they acted like a telegraph line, transmitting his will to the desired target, and with some help from some dense, heavy photons, he could manipulate matter. More than just lifting or pushing, Sumac understood that this was how shaping worked, like shaping wood or stone. Beyond telekinesis, there was telling molecules and atoms what to do, and the colt gained a keen awareness of the state of matter all around him.

Everything was shaking, vibrating, and everything was connected to him. Not just him though, but Vinyl too. Magic was just matter manipulation—and with this understanding, Sumac realised that many of the so-called spells unicorns used were really just modified telekinesis that had a fancy name. Pyromancy was just creating friction with telekinesis until things got hot.

It was all about the chain—the connection between a unicorn and everything around them. Manipulate the chain and anything was possible, including sound. It was an act similar to pyromancy, or pyrokinesis, but without the ignition. Sumac could feel himself edging on an even greater understanding, but to reach it, he would need a lot more zap apple lozenges, or even better, zap apple tincture. Yes, there was a way to transcend matter, to tear down one’s own matter and reconstitute it with whatever was available. Immortality was attainable by refreshing the failing molecules that happened in the body, renewing the bonds, strengthening the chain.

“Sumac.”

The voice was feminine, sort of, it was distorted and drawn out. It also seemed muffled, as if the voice was speaking from beneath a blanket, or from under the rug. Hyper-aware of the flux of magic around him, Sumac focused on the chain that connected him and Vinyl. She too, was just a pile of molecules, a collection of atoms, all held together with thaumatons.

“Sumac, I’m feeling very strange, Sumac…”

With a strange feeling of detachment, Sumac traveled along these bonds, jumping from one thaumaton charged cluster of molecules to another. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, the aether was filled with so many tiny thaumatons, and he crossed the bridge that existed between him and Vinyl.

Sumac, what have you done?

For the first time, Sumac heard Vinyl’s voice, the voice she wanted to have, the voice she longed for, and he heard it inside of his own head. No, that wasn’t right, he wasn’t inside of his own head right now, no, this body was weird. Sumac became aware of the embarrassing and awkward fact that this body was female, he could feel all of the differences, both physical and mental.

The bridge had been crossed and looking out through Vinyl’s eyes, he saw himself sitting on the couch, he had gone limp, his tongue was hanging out, and he watched his barrel rising and falling with each shallow breath. So that’s what he looked like in the eyes of other ponies. He was, indeed, beige, just as Discord had said.

Sumac, how are we doing this?

The words echoed in the strange space he shared with Vinyl, and with each echo, each reverberation, Sumac became aware of more and more. She was embarrassed, she knew that he had awareness of her femininity, a knowledge from the inside out. Sumac realised that he now knew what it meant, what it felt like to be female, and the memory of his own male body felt alien by comparison.

With a gentle nudge of his will, his own thoughts filled Vinyl’s mind, his understandings, his connection to magic, the fact that he was really very sorry for invading her privacy by entering into her mind and experiencing her flesh by wearing it. He showed her how he had followed the connection, the bridge, and he could feel her astonishment. Sumac poured his insight into her mind, holding nothing back, an apologetic attempt for causing her so much feminine embarrassment.

“Sumac, I understand.”

Confused, the colt couldn’t tell if the voice was inside or outside of Vinyl’s head. Was it a thought? A very real thought that flowed into their shared mind? It was hard to tell, but Sumac was certain he had just heard the sound through Vinyl’s sensitive ears. She had an itchy dock, she was so nervous, and she was excited, and Vinyl’s alien female body was too much to deal with as her excitement grew.

“This is the voice I’ve always heard inside of my head when I write stuff,” Vinyl said, speaking with a perfect, flawless voice, a voice that wasn’t a copy, was most certainly her own. “Sumac, this is amazing, wait, why is my voice changing?”

The voice grew distorted, weak, and began to stretch, like a vinyl record left in the sun. It didn’t take Sumac long to figure out why, and he felt himself pulled from Vinyl’s mind to move over the bridge while he was still capable of crossing. He felt stretched, like taffy, and reality became little more than a suggestion as everything warped around them.

Then, with a blink, he found himself looking at Vinyl, who looked baffled, confused, and out of sorts. Straining, he lifted his head to look at her better, and said, “Don’t worry, Vinyl, we’ll fix it. The zap apple effect is wearing off. It’ll get better with practice, I promise.”

Staring at Vinyl, the connection broke, Sumac could feel it, it was like twine being pulled beyond being taut, only to snap, and then he felt dullness settling into his mind. All of his understanding melted away, all of his lofty thoughts, all of his keen, razor sharp intellect all bled from him, and Sumac was left thinking about stinky dragon farts.

The colt giggled, because stinky dragon farts were funny.

Sighing, Vinyl picked up her slate, and began writing with a stick of bright yellow chalk. I suppose we’ll have to keep trying this until it works. Same time tomorrow?

“Chocolate milk?” Sumac blinked a few times, and had just enough presence of mind to know that he was growing stupid, and would be for a while. “Wanna stay.”

Vinyl wrote out her reply on her slate. Soon enough, Sumac. You’ll be moving in so that you can spend winter break here. You deserve some chocolate milk. Smiling, Vinyl set down her slate, after Sumac had read it, and she pulled herself up out of her chair. Moving like an old mare, she came to where Sumac was laying on the couch, leaned down her head, and kissed him on the cheek.

The colt, feeling warm fuzzies from the kiss, giggled and looked forwards to tomorrow.

Author's Notes:

Like I said, this was just a short story that itched to get out.

It isn't an end, but a beginning.