Login

The Mare from the Moon

by Evilhumour

Chapter 14: Chapter Fourteen

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Later that afternoon, Spliced Genome fidgeted as she stood in Twilight’s library. “So, what exactly are we doing here?” she asked as her eyes roamed the titles of the books, some being reasonable in their nature and others appearing to be completely fantasy based nonsense. A book about the rules of physics was next to a book that was labeled Principles of Magic. It was grating on her teeth to see such things, but Spliced did her best to not voice her opinion now; she was trying to avoid getting on Twilight’s bad side.

“We’re here for your magic lessons Spliced,” Twilight said as she began to pull several books down. “These will start us on the basics but before we do that, I would like to see what you can do. Besides the basic telekinesis, of course.”

“Well, I’ve worked on a few anti-thaumatic arrays in the past,” Spliced said. “But in terms of personal usage, the applied quantum physics that allow me to use my thaumatics to move things around, either pushing it out through my hooves to grasp things or by manipulating them with the raw energies, are it.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “I’ve seen you make diamonds before…”

“Basic geology - diamonds are formed through heavy compression of other minerals,” Spliced replied with a shrug of her shoulders. “All I did was apply a lot of pressure in a very short period of time.”

“Right,” Twilight said tilting her head to the side before turning to face some heavy looking books. “I would like to see how strong your magic is as a baseline.”

Spliced did her best to not react negatively to Twilight’s continued usage of the word magic but by how Twilight looked at her she failed. “I’m sorry but where I am from, such words and terminology are reserved for foals and idiotic stories.”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed for a moment, looking almost furious until her eyes went wide and gained a smirk on her ace. “Spliced, I’m surprised in you for missing this.”

Spliced blinked rapidly before frowning. “Missing what?”

“It’s really simple, if you think about it,” Twilight continued to smile, causing Spliced to frown more as the younger mare managed to get under her coat.

What is so simple, Twilight?”

“Two different dimensions, two different words for the same thing,” Twilight said.

Spliced’s eyes went wide at this before facehoofing. “How could I be so stupid to not think of that‽”

Twilight’s face fell at this, feeling somewhat ashamed of her smug attitude. “It’s perfectly okay Spliced,” she told her, placing a hoof on her shoulder. “When you deal with something under one name for so long, sometimes it’s hard to recognize it when it’s called something else.”

“Yes, but still, I am so much more-” Spliced cut herself short but Twilight’s guilt vanished.

“So much more what, exactly?” Twilight asked sharply.

Spliced let out a sigh, rubbing her face. “Educated,” she said. “I was enrolled in the best academy in the galaxy and was among the best in my field and I missed this.”

“Well, something I’ve heard is that just because you had the best education, it doesn’t make you the smartest,” Twilight said with Spliced shooting her a pointed glare before the green mare let out a sigh. “Trust me; I was the personal student of Celestia for the most of my life and while I was the best in her school, I never knew how little I actually knew about the world itself. I’ve learned so much since coming to Ponyville.”

“In my world-”

“Dimension,” Twilight corrected her.

Dimension,” Spliced repeated the words. “There is an ancient but wise saying; "I am the wisest pony alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.".”

“We have the same saying here, Spliced,” Twilight smiled. “Now shall we continue with our lesson?”

“Yes; let’s.” Spliced said, looking back at the book. “How is this suppose to be a test?”

“I want to see how much you can lift with your magic,” Twilight said. “From there, we will move onto how many things you can move at one time. Once we have that information, I can begin to formulate a plan for how to further your education as well as see what else I can teach you, be it something as simple as creating as a watch light or as complex as teleportation.”

Spliced let out a short whine, eyes straining. “Tele-teleportation; as in moving from one location to another teleportation?”

“Yes,” Twilight said as she teleported across the room. “Teleportation.”

Spliced’s eyes went even wider. “That’s…”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Spliced sank backward into a sitting position. “Where I come from, nopony has ever been able to do that,” she said. “There have been attempts to perform it via technology, but it was still theoretical when I was imprisoned. When Discord showed he could do it, I chalked it up to his being… well, something beyond normal. But if you can do it…”

“I’m far from the only one,” Twilight replied. “Princess Celestia and Princess Luna can both do it, Starlight can do it, though I had to teach her… and I know unicorn fillies who’ve done it when they were infants and having magical surges that they couldn’t control. And my little niece Flurry Heart too, for a while - Princess Celestia said she’d mentioned her to you?”

“That’s right,” Spliced said. “But… how?”

“Well, I learned it after I was teleported once,” Twilight said. “But that’s because I have a natural talent for magic; even then, it took me a while to get a handle on it, but I managed. I expect it’ll be more difficult for you - even Starlight took some time to master it when I was first teaching her.”

She can teleport?” Spliced perked up at that with Twilight rolling her eyes at their feud.

Before we even think about that, we start with the basics,” Twilight said as she tapped the book. “Now try and lift.”

“Right,” Spliced focused her attention onto the book and tried to lift it upwards. She began to paw at the ground, trying to focus all her strength to make it rise before she had to stop with no actual progress made. Panting, Spliced looked at Twilight's surprised face and quickly smiled. “It was one of those trick tests; correct? That book is secretly welded to the table and the table to the floor, right?”

“No, it’s not,” Twilight said as she picked the book up with her hooves with some straining before levitating it with her thaumatics to show it was not a trick. Twilight put the book down before glancing at Spliced. “Let’s see how many things you can lift, Spliced.”

“Right.” Spliced took a deep breath, then stared at the pile of books. Focusing her thaumatics, she concentrated on wrapping the energies around first one, then a second, and began to slowly lift them.

When the first two books were an inch off the table, she sent more energy out, trying to lift a third, but had barely gotten it surrounded when she gasped and dropped all three.

Twilight looked at her, obviously concerned. “Are you okay?”

Spliced shook her head. “I’m not used to splitting my focus on more than one or two things like that - I’m better at high-precision work that requires my complete focus on a single task.”

“Is this difficulty normal for you?”

“For the most part, yes,” Spliced said. “Both types of my thaumatics have been sluggish ever since I have been placed on my moon.”

“Both types?”

“There’s tactile thaumatics, the kind all ponies can use through our hooves, and the raw energies I’m trying to use here,” Spliced replied. “They come from the same source, but using one is different enough from using the other that ponies in my dimension tend to differentiate the two.”

“Ah.” Twilight nodded in understanding.

“Even after four hundred years, it has barely emerged more than the trickle it is right now,” Spliced leaned against a bookcase. “I have no idea when I could even attempt to continue my own research safely.”

Twilight frowned. “Do you have any idea what could have caused this? I mean, is it a side-effect of your immortality, or just from being away from the planet so long, or…?”

Spliced shook her head. “I honestly don’t know. I remember it being better when I was a normal pur-alicorn, but I haven’t been able to figure out why it’s gotten so much weaker. My best theory is that those who made me immortal also made sure that I wouldn’t be able to use it as effectively as I once did as a further punishment, and to reduce my ability to escape if I ever figured out what was going on.”

“What do you mean by that; figure out what was going on?” Twilight asked her.

Spliced closed her eyes for a moment, remembering the time she spent as Doa. “I mean that they not only locked me up, made me immortal and weakened my powers, they bound my memories. It used to be that every time I died, I’d only have faint dreams of dying, but nothing else - I didn’t even know my own name, or what I’d done. Eventually, something happened and I remembered everything. And from then on, whatever they’d done to try and keep my mind locked like they did before, it stopped working.” She frowned. “And then, like I told Princess Luna, they killed me more times in a single day than they had in the entire hundred years I’d been up there before in the hopes of killing my memory again, but it didn’t work. That, ironically, is part of how I figured out I was coming back so much faster than I used to.”

“That’s horrible,” Twilight said, moving to hug the green mare who seemed very surprised at this gesture. “I cannot fathom what one would have to do endure that for so long; and it doesn’t make sense to punish somepony for crimes that they cannot remember. It’s just… cruel!”

Spliced wormed her way out of the hug, looking guiltily off to the side. “I…” Spliced shook her head, unsure why she was feeling all these emotions. “Can we get back to the lesson, Twilight?”

Twilight nodded, but she was looking thoughtful. “I wonder if there’s a way to find whatever they used to restrain your magic and remove it…”

“Believe me, if there is, I would be very grateful to anypony who found it,” Spliced replied. “I know it’s not anything physically within me; I’ve checked.”

“You’ve checked? How did you che-Oh,” Twilight blanched, wrinkling her nose.

“I’m functionally immortal with the ability to revive from death,” Spliced replied. “It wasn’t a fun experience, but it served my purposes at the time; still, I’ll admit I’d have much preferred to do a full-body MRI if I had the proper equipment opposed to my own hooves.” She then chuckled. “Also helped me vastly improve my knowledge of my own body’s working.”

Twilight shuddered. “Still…” Then she looked at Spliced curiously. “What’s an MRI?”

“Magnetic resonance imaging; it’s a thing that lets us take pictures of your insides without having to do any surgery first, but you can’t use it on anypony with metal in their body - it reacts as you would think,” Spliced blinked. “You know, I explained this to Princess Celestia when I was up in Canterlot, and she already had one done of herself long before I came along, actually. Maybe you could ask her for a copy, if you’re interested.”

“Oh!” Twilight’s eyes lit up. “I know exactly what you mean now. It is a very big machine that has the pony lie inside of it, right?”

“I suppose that was how it was done in the past for my dimension; we have much simpler methods now that are less claustrophobic in nature,” Spliced brushed her mane out of her face. “I do not mean to be constantly insulting your level of technological progress but I cannot help make comparisons between the two; it is like cave drawings to complex computer equations for me.”

Twilight gave her a look, but nodded. “Different cultures have different ways, I suppose,” she said. “I’ve- er, read about another place where their technology levels are… considerably higher than our own, but it’s not easily accessible.”

Spliced looked curiously at her; was Twilight actually trying to fib for a change? She shrugged it off; she’d probably find out the truth sooner or later.

“At any rate, if you can figure out some kind of… magical scan, determine if there’s anything in my thaumatic flows themselves, that would be wonderful. But for now, we’ll have to stick with what I can do as I am.”

Twilight nodded, then looked contemplative. “I know a few other ponies who are really good at researching and magic… I can always ask them for help.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Spliced said before looking at the books again. “What other lessons do you have in mind for me to learn?”

“Well we can always try some pegasi magic if you think you are comfortable with it?”

Spliced’s eye twitched as she recalled the cloud but did not fight the illogical impossibility and decided to embrace the madness. “What do you mean by that; more nephology?”

Twilight blinked at her in surprise. “How do you know the correct term for that? I’ve met countless pegasi who don’t know that term.”

“I had very good education and a lot of time of my hooves to reason out the proper words,” Spliced replied.

“In any case, yes. The pegasi of my dimension are responsible for creating and controlling the weather, and as you witnessed before, can walk on clouds.”

Spliced gave her a look. “And how, dare I ask, did that come about?”

Twilight spread her hooves. “I really don’t know,” she said. “It’s been that way since before Equestria was founded, possibly even before the ancient kingdoms came into being - even Princess Celestia may not know; if she does, she hasn’t said anything about it. Only a few places, like the Everfree Forest, have their own weather systems that pegasi don’t control, and we don’t know what caused that either.”

“Perhaps that is just nature in effect without your influences over the local ecosystem?”

Twilight shook her head. “There was an experiment a few hundred years ago to try and figure it out, where a small area was left to its own devices for a few years. Without pegasi to bring in new clouds and create rain, it resulted in the worst drought anypony had ever seen in that area in living memory - and mind, it had been a perfectly normal valley before ponies moved in - and took a very long time to get things back on track once they brought the clouds in again.” She sighed. “I’ll admit, the system isn’t perfect… there was an incident in Ponyville a few years ago where the scheduled rain was forgotten about for a few weeks, and they gave us a storm that was practically a monsoon to make up for it, but without our pegasi handling the weather, Equestria would suffer drastically.”

“Well, what was the surrounding area like? Was it a completely closed environment? Was the fact that there was a wall of controlled weather prevented anything from coming in?” Spliced asked.

“It was a massive box canyon with rocky cliffs to the north and mountains to the east and west, and only one land route in or out,” Twilight informed her. “And the nearest town was thirty miles away. They didn’t have any pegasi actively keeping the clouds in or out, they just didn’t deliberately send any that direction.”

Spliced tapped one hoof against her chin. “Hmm,” she said to herself as she began to bring a piece of paper and pen in front of her and began to trace out her thoughts. “Well, from what you said, it sounds like a one time experiment that was done semi scientifically; of course weather isn’t a stable, consistent creature. As you said, it was left alone for a long time and only after ponies began to study the effects of not managing the weather did things begin to deteriorate. That might imply some inherent effect that the scientists were bringing into their experiment but then again, it might have just been a poor season for that location. One would need to take in the location, the history of the area, the composition of the soil along with a host of other factors into their results. For example, we would expect that places near the equator to receive more sunlight opposed to some place near the ice caps. And places like that, a box canyon might not have much access to natural water as I doubt that water runs uphill in this dimension so it might be more arid than other places.” Spliced stopped for a moment, to catch her breath. “I would like to review the experiment to see what was done, if you do not mind.”

Twilight had picked up the paper she had scribbled on, taking in the notes she had said as well as the ones she had thought in her head; a brief list of typical weather in different environments with a small chart of the type of soil in each environment before looking at her. “While this,” indicating the paper held in her hoof. “Is fascinating in its depth, I am more surprised that you are not reacting negatively to the fact we control the weather. I thought it would annoy you or something, to be honest.”

“Well, back in my home dimension, we have done experiments with seeding the clouds and creating rain, or even putting chemical crystals in the air to draw vapor together to make new clouds, and I know that several other galactic governments have highly sophisticated weather systems that make their planets habitable,” Spliced said with a careless shrug. “Once you get down to it, everything is a science that has its own rules that, once fully understood, can be used to replicate the result you wish.”

“Remind me to show you our weather factory up in Cloudsdale then,” Twilight replied. “You’ll probably find it quite fascinating… but, word of advice? Don’t try to drink the rainbow juice, because it’ll burn your mouth. Pinkie found that out the hard way.”

Spliced’s eyebrows rose. “Rainbow juice? As in, you literally make rainbows?”

“Well… it’s what’s left over after they get done mixing raw magic, sunlight and water to make clouds for their buildings," Twilight said. “I’m still not sure how they gather the sunlight for the process. We do get mundane rainbows whenever there's a rainfall, but there are also pre-made ones that get put out just to make things prettier. The PR ponies have a thing about ‘beautification’ and the like.”

“The magic issue aside,” Spliced said with a wave of her hoof. “The fact that your ponies have managed to create an entire factory for making your clouds and rainbows implies that there is a science behind it. Also, did you say they used clouds for their buildings?”

Twilight nodded. “Cloudsdale is an entire city made of clouds - they’re a lot more durable than the kind we get rain from, but they’re still clouds. There’s also Las Pegasus, which was made from clouds, and there are single cloud houses, like the one Rainbow Dash lives in. Of course, anypony who doesn’t naturally have wings will need a cloud-walking spell to visit - I had to cast one on some of my friends the first time we went up there, but it’s not permanent, though there are ponies associated with the tourist industry who are working on a permanent version. You and I wouldn’t have any problem, of course.”

“Do you think we could go visit your friend’s house?” Spliced asked. “I am still hesitant to just call all of this magic as the sole answer, so I would like the chance to study the nature of it to better understand.”

“Rainbow Dash would love to have us visit,” Twilight told her. “And I know some very old and dry scholarly theses that referred to magic as morphic resonance field control, if that helps,” she offered as she got up and walked over to the door.

“It does as it implies there is some science and logic behind all of this,” Spliced said. “It’s a lot more in line with how things were back where I grew up…” She blinked. “Of course, a lot of what we could do with our thaumatics was just basics, moving things around, though some were more skilled with precision control while others just did brute force. And I always preferred the more physical sciences anyway. Still, I am finding this new knowledge fascinating.”

Twilight beamed. “That’s what I like to hear!” She reached out and gave Spliced a gentle tug. “So, come on! I don’t know how long we’ll be able to stay, but I do want you to see what it looks like while the sun’s still out!”

Nodding, Spliced followed her out of the room.

Next Chapter: Chapter Fifteen Estimated time remaining: 4 Hours, 47 Minutes
Return to Story Description

Login

Facebook
Login with
Facebook:
FiMFetch