Having trouble falling asleep when you needed to fall asleep to do research was hard. Having to wait days to do research simply because you needed to wait for somepony to get his patootie over to the lab was even harder. But Twilight managed.

Two days after the first attempted research project, not long after Sunburst had arrived at her castle, Twilight was pacing a ring into the floor of the library. Which was impressive, considering the hardness of corundum. “It said it’d be here,” Twilight said. “It needs to be here. We can’t do anything without it being here. It’s past time for it to be here.” Whirling on Starlight and Sunburst, flaring her wings, she yelled, “So why isn’t Moondog here?!” The Royal Ponyville Voice, though less loud and a little bit squeakier than the Royal Canterlot Voice, still had enough of a punch to scatter their neat stacks of paper.

A golden gleam collected most of the paper and restacked it. “It… forgot?” suggested Sunburst.

“Or,” suggested Starlight, “it’s late because your definition of ‘late’ is about thirty seconds after the arrival time.”

“That’s late!” screamed Twilight. “Technically. Kinda. Sorta. Not really. But I had dream magic handed to me on a silver platter and now I can’t study it and DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO HANDLE THAT wait I bet you do you’re handling that right now WELL I CAN’T HANDLE IT THAT WELL AND IT’S-”

Abruptly, the air in front of them rippled and Moondog tumbled out onto the floor. “Sorry, sorry!” it said. The stars twirled in its coat as it stretched. “Real-world teleportation is so weird. It’s like, you misplace one stupid little mana fragment and you’re at the Tree of Harmony rather than the Castle of Harmony for some stupid reason, and if you get the relative granularity wrong, you can- Sorry.” It folded its wings close. “Being out here is weird.”

“-NOT MY FAULT I’M SO READY TO LEARN AND I HAVE THE PATIENCE OF A oh hey Moondog’s here.” Twilight blinked like her train of thought had derailed at the station it was heading to anyway.

“Yes, I am,” said Moondog. “And waiting for you to get on with the analyzing. Blah blah, Princess Luna, you heard it a few nights ago. Spells should work on me now, just FYI.”

“We’re pretty much starting from scratch,” said Starlight. “Why don’t we try a diagnostic? Like Flemane’s Fitness Filing or something. I know it won’t do much, but it’ll give us a place to start.”

“Well, um,” said Sunburst, “actually-”

“Good idea, Starlight,” said Twilight. That spell was very simple, the kind of thing most unicorn surgeons learned in their first weeks of study and discarded a few moons later once they learned more comprehensive spells. But it was easy to cast, and it was as good a place to start as any. “Hold still, Moondog.” Moondog snapped into a rigid standing pose as Twilight launched the spell.

But something was off. She clearly saw the spell connect, but it didn’t return any results, like it’d just hit a wall. Not even any readings on bioarcanics. She tried again. Same result. “Huh,” said Twilight. “That’s strange. The spell says there’s nopony there.”

“Well, there isn’t,” said Moondog. Sunburst grinned, then quickly looked away.

Twilight opened her mouth and lifted a hoof declaratively, then planted her face in it. “Duh. No biological life signs. Let me try something else.” If the usual diagnostic spells didn’t work, then maybe one that scanned for magic would. She switched to the most basic probe spell she knew and fired it at Moondog. Although “fired” was perhaps too intense; “lightly tossed” would be more accurate.

Once the spell hit (“lightly encountered”) it, Moondog hiccuped; the stars in its coat twisted, flipping in and out of neat, straight lines. Its entire body rippled and its wings cycled between every possible style Twilight had seen: pegasus, batpony, old changeling, new changeling, butterfly, dragon, and more. Moondog hiccuped again and a small cloud of rainbow-colored smoke poofed from its ear. When it spoke, it sounded like three or four ponies with almost the same voice speaking just barely out of sync. “Okay, whoof. Weird.” It clapped itself on the chest and the changes stopped. “But I feel fine.”

At the same time, Twilight’s spell returned its results. Its rather impressive results. In spite of its simplicity, the spell had given Twilight an idea of a complex, interlocking series of thaumic and dream spells alike (mostly the latter), layered on top of and beneath and around and through each other. She only had the vaguest sense of what each spell actually did, but that was what the more specialized spells were for.

“Good, good,” she said, grinning with a little too many teeth. Her eyes were twinkling in that manic way that is seen only in Twilight Sparkle studying new magic. One expected her mane to go all frizzy of its own free will. “That worked. Now we’re getting somewhere. Starlight, get Biro’s Auto-Dictation Charm ready. Moondog, hold still. Sunburst, um… provide moral support.”

“Glad to be of service,” muttered Sunburst.

“C’mon, don’t worry about it,” said Moondog, grinning. “Best do-nothing buddies forever! Or at least until the dictation’s done and you can start analyzing the results and I’ll still be doing nothing. Until then, hoof bump?”

“…Hoof bump.” Bump.

Several dozen spells, a few hours of recording results, almost fifty reams of paper, and sixteen burned-out quills later, Twilight was sitting within a veritable, if tiny, castle built of equation-covered paper, grinning like an insane baroness. “Yes,” she whispered, rubbing her hooves together. “Yesssssssssss…” Her wings wriggled with glee.

Starlight rolled her eyes, but Sunburst gulped. “Um, T-Twilight? Are… you okay?”

“Okay? Of course I’m okay! Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m more than okay, even! Look at all this paperwork!” Cackling, Twilight hugged several of the larger stacks close to her like a dragon might its hoard. “All these spells, all this magic, right at my hooftips! More complicated dream magic than anypony besides Luna has ever seen or imagined! Maybe including Luna! And it’s mine, all mine! All in the name of science! Luna might think we can’t summarize this magic in any reasonable space! Well, I’ll show her!” She threw back her head and roared with mad laughter.

Moondog glanced at Starlight and Sunburst and, making little explosion-y gestures that trailed electricity, said, “Thunder, thunder, boom, lightning crack, pipe organ, bwa-na-na.”

“Let’s go,” Starlight whispered to Sunburst. “We don’t want to be around when she crashes.” She nudged him into a corner and claimed her own, carrying her notes with her.

In some ways, the more you looked into interpersonal dream magic, the more disturbing it became. Sliding into a person’s unconscious unnoticed and being able to pick through their memories were just the tip of the iceberg, and they were bad enough. Starlight was glad she’d never learned of these spells before meeting Twilight, or else she’d never have gotten kicked out of Tyrant Mode.

Now that she had a conscience, staying away from that temptation was as easy as just not learning those spells. They were high-level dream magic, and so turned your mind inside out when you looked at the instructions. Old Starlight would’ve devoted years to learning them; New and Somewhat Improved Starlight would think nothing of putting the book back on the bookcase.

But Starlight still felt weird as she stared at the spells that let Moondog access a pony’s desires to personalize dreams. Moondog had had these spells since day one, and it was a little… impulsive, to be honest. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Moondog was looking into the personal lives of everypony just because. Of course, the spell had originally come from Luna, who didn’t do anything like that (…probably), and yet-

Behind her, Moondog cleared its throat. “I’m doing my best to ignore the anxiety vibes you’re sending out,” it said, mildly embarrassed, “but you’re making it kinda hard. Especially since I can tell that it’s about me.” Something flowed around Starlight’s legs and beneath the desk, gathering up across from her and plumping out into Moondog. “Sorry, but I’m tuned to mental magic. Can’t help it.” It shrugged.

Starlight weighed the pros and cons of telling the truth, but only for a moment. “No offense, it’s your access to memory,” she said. “It’s supposed to be used for good, but every story I’ve heard about memory spells like that puts them in the hooves of bad ponies who invade privacy like they’re thieves plundering a vault.” She expected Moondog to explode defensively, both emotionally (Rainbow-Dash-style) and physically (puffer-fish-style). Nothing of the sort happened; if anything, it was nodding in agreement. “So, it’s just- What keeps you treating headspace privacy as a right rather than a polite suggestion?”

“Same thing that keeps you from using mind control to make your work easier: it’s a bad thing that’s bad. ’Course, you have a point.” Moondog lowered its voice and extended its neck until its head was right next to Starlight’s. “Wanna know a secret? It actually took me a few weeks to learn that casually rifling through ponies’ memories is a bad thing. Which doesn’t sound like that much, but it was, like, half my life at that point.”

Moondog pulled back again. “Mom was really firm on that once I woke up. Going through hers was okay — it was part of how she taught me — but nopony else’s. And in fact, she even put in something in case I slipped up — maybe you’ve gotten to it already…” It reached over, flipped through Starlight’s papers, then pointed at one spell in particular. “Right there.”

Starlight had detected the form of the spell based on her own measurements, but she hadn’t really examined it, even as she was writing it down. Now she did, and- “Is that a self-administered amnestic?” she asked in disbelief. The idea of it made her feel… strange. Who would come up with something like that?

“If I see something that’s too private…” Moondog reached knee-deep into its ear, pulled out a little bag that said, Personal secrets, and tossed it away. “And just like that, I forget that I’ve seen it. I don’t need to use it often, but every now and then, I make a mistake, so just in case, poof.”

“…That is messed up. And coming from me, that’s saying something.”

“Messed up for a pony, maybe. Good thing I’m not one. And it’s way more effective than an NDA. Besides, what’re you freaking out about? You’re the one who made it.”

“No, I didn’t!” protested Starlight. “I’d remember- something like… Oh Cele-”

FLASH. Starlight blinked starry lights out of her eyes as Moondog lowered its camera, grinning. “You didn’t, not really,” it said as it shook the Pommelroid paper. “Mom started making me before you became Twilight’s student. But your face right now was pretty great.” It held up the picture.

It was a pretty great face, admittedly. Starlight chuckled in spite of herself. “Yeah, that’s good. Just don’t spread it around, okay?”

Moondog tucked the picture beneath a wing. “Promise. I’m not that bad at keeping secrets. Although if you want to hear about why I keep that spell around, ask Mom about the Duchess Ponderosa Incident.”

“…What happened?”

“I don’t remember. Mom won’t tell me, either. That’s why you need to ask her.”

Although the lattice for the spells is static, its effects on it are incre

Aaaaand he’d forgotten proper use of antecedents again. Sunburst groaned and rewrote his sentence for what felt like the fifth time that hour.

Although the lattice for the spell is static, its effects on Moondog are incredibly diverse, from wide-ranging environmental manipulation to levitation of small objects. It mostly uses its ba

Groan. Rewrite. Again.

Moondog mostly uses its basic functionality to ensure its

Another tack, then.

Although the lattice for the spells is static, its effects on Moondog are incredibly diverse, from wide-ranging environmental manipulation to levitation of small objects. They mostly u

Sunburst dropped his quill and walked over to Twilight’s desk. Moondog was perched on her head as she wrote spells down and making occasional comments. “Hey, um, Moondog?” said Sunburst.

“Yeah?” asked Moondog, glancing at him. Twilight didn’t look up from the diagram she was sketching, but one of her ears angled towards Sunburst.

“Is there, um, any reason we keep referring to you as an ‘it’? I know that you’re gender-neutral, but…” Sunburst swallowed. “No offense, but it, it feels like I’m talking about a machine.”

Moondog raised an eyebrow and slid down Twilight’s back to the floor. “I am a machine.”

“Actually, since you can change your own, your own working parameters, you’re an animus, which was purely hypothetical until you showed up.”

“Huh. That’s a new one,” Moondog said, tilting its head and flicking an ear. “Anyway, no, there’s no reason. Just what people have been doing. Why? I don’t mind, if that’s what you’re asking.” It glanced at the ink splatters on his robe. “Having trouble writing?” it asked with a grin. “Don’t worry, I won’t be offended.”

Sunburst nodded. “I have to constantly rewrite my, my antecedents so readers know which ‘it’ or ‘they’ I’m talking about. If it matters, I can stick with the way I’m writing, but-”

“You can go with ‘she’. Or any other pronoun, I won’t mind. Just stic-”

Twilight’s quill speared through the parchment and into the desk below. “Whoa, hold on. What? Moondog, you shouldn’t just let ponies change your- identity like that just because it’s convenient for them.”

“Why not? I let them change my everything every night because it’s convenient for them. I let you change my dimension because it’s convenient for you.”

Sunburst cleared his throat and said, “I’m, um, I’m fine with sticking with using ‘it’, so you don’t need to-”

“This is different,” protested Twilight. “We’re trying to study you, like you asked, not trying to change who you are!”

“But- I-” Moondog groaned and planted its face in its hoof. “You know I was built, right? Solely to serve ponies? And that letting them use whatever pronouns they feel like is a weirdly specific part of that service, but a part nonetheless?”

“Um, excuse me?” said Sunburst. “Is, is anypony-”

“Even if you were built to serve ponies, there’s more to life than doing what you were built to do. Starlight, Sunburst, and I all have special talents related to magic, but we’re more than just our magic.” (“I’m not sure I am,” Sunburst said in a quiet voice.) “You’re allowed to be your own person.”

Moondog snorted. “It’s possible to be servile and self-actualizing at the same time, you know. I mean, stars forbid devoting your life to helping others being a bad thing. If you care about what I think, I think I should declare this matter more closed than a swimsuit shop in winter.” It pointed at Sunburst. “Just use whatever pronouns you feel like. He, she, it, they, s/he, zhe-”

“How in Tartarus did you pronounce the slash like that?” demanded Twilight, her earlier worries already forgotten.

“Trade secret,” said Moondog.

“I, um…” Sunburst pushed his glasses up his muzzle as he looked Moondog over. “I think I’ll go with ‘she’. You kinda look a little bit like a ‘she’. Maybe. If you’re biased. I… think it’s just your long mane.”

“Alrighty then. HEY! STARLIGHT!”

“I heard!” Starlight yelled from her desk. “Might change what I’m writing, but I dunno!”

“Right,” said Sunburst. He shifted his weight from one side to the other. “Sorry to bother you and I’ll, um, get back to writing.” He paused, then returned to his desk. After re-inking his quill, he scribbled a note at the top of the first page.

Although biologically genderless by default and capable of turning into either sex (or both at once), feminine pronouns will be used for Moondog for simplicity of writing, by her own approval.

Good. The second he lifted his quill from the paper, Sunburst heard a tiny sparkle of magic behind him. He had a pretty good guess of what he’d see, but he turned around anyway.

Reclining on the nearest table was the most sculpted pony Sunburst had ever seen, one that was to stallions what Celestia and Luna were to mares and then some. The alicorn’s horn had been shined with cosmic dust, his wings preened with nebulae. His jawline had been chiseled from a mountain, or at least, that was what it looked like behind his beard. His beard that, like his windblown mane and tail, used luxuriousness itself as conditioner and was so silky smooth it made silk itself run home sobbing in inadequacy. His hooves were the smoothest arcs imaginable, polished to a mirror shine, and capped off legs as thick as oak branches and as strong as pistons. Galaxies twisted and quasars spun through his coat, far more than the ordinary night sky. Twilight seemed to be sneaking glances at him every few seconds.

Moondog glanced at Sunburst with his serenely glowing eyes and smiled a sparkling smile. Literally, considering those teeth had stars in them. “I’m sorry, I was distracted,” he said in a flowing, very masculine voice of honeyed ambrosia. “Did you say something?”

Sunburst rolled his eyes. “No.”

Smirking, Moondog put a hoof to his mouth to hide a chuckle. “Sorry,” he said, “but I had to. Just this once.” His voice shifted back to his usual one. “Seriously, promise,” she said. “Won’t do it again.” Moondog yanked her beard off and tossed it away; it vanished before it’d gone five feet.

“Right.” Sunburst went back to the spot that had started all this.

Although the lattice for the spell is static, its effects on her are incredibly diverse, from wide-ranging environmental manipulation to levitation of small objects. She mostly uses its basic functionality to ensure her control over it, but is not averse to more advanced uses.

Sweet Celestia, that read so much better.

Twilight wrote, but her mind wasn’t on her writing. (For once.) Sunburst had decided to change something about Moondog’s identity just to make his writing easier, and Moondog was just… okay with that? Okay, so Sunburst had been nice enough to ask, and it was like ninety-nine percent Moondog’s decision anyway, but still. Did friendship go that far? Rarity being generous didn’t entail her giving away every single thing she owned, so why-

Moondog coughed behind her. “Wow, and I thought Starlight’s bad vibes were obvious.” It meandered around Twilight and slouched across her desk. “You need to chillax, sah. I. Am. Fine. With Sunburst’s… thing.” It propped up its head with a leg. “But you don’t think so, right?” Its grin was sympathetic.

“It’s… I don’t know,” said Twilight. It was a weird feeling, one she couldn’t fully articulate. “Your identity shouldn’t be so… susceptible to peer pressure. You know what I mean? Even if you were an ‘it’, you were still a person, and Sunburst should be able to accept that.”

“Hoo boy. This talk again.” Moondog sighed and ran a hoof through its mane. “Look. I am not a pony with some magic laid on top of me, so stop treating me like one. I am a Tantabus. This body-” It waved a hoof up and down itself. “-is one part of making ponies comfortable in their dreams. It makes just as much sense for me to look like a pony as it does for me to look like a dragon or a yak or anything. I put on a kaleidoscope of faces every night, all of them as real as this one, if only for a moment. If you want me to be the ‘real me’, you should probably get used to trying to talk to a disembodied blob of energy that lives in your head and communicates through sensation, thought, and hallucinations.”

“I could get used to that,” said Twilight. Could she? She could. Probably. Yes. Maybe? Definitely.

“You got used to sprouting wings in, like, a week. You’re a special case. If I was a pony, yeah, Sunburst just changing how he refers to me would be weird. But, for the umpty-fifth time…” Moondog melted into a starry timberwolf. “Not a pony.”

“Right.” Twilight went back to her paper, and idly scratched out a few equations, lost in thought. Honestly, yes, it was easy at times to forget Moondog wasn’t a pony with a magically-dyed coat and a talent for dream magic. But it — she — was anything but. Part of Twilight tried to argue that Moondog was only okay with that because she’d been designed that way, but the (much larger) rest of her pointed out that how much of Twilight’s own personality and skills with magic had been “designed” that way? It was all very confusing.

Stupid first-time establishing of golem social norms. Maybe she should’ve hired a psychologist to hang around.

“Don’t worry,” Moondog said in a deep voice. A bit of hair snaked into view and playfully flicked Twilight’s nose. “You’ll get over it.”

At the changed voice, Twilight looked up. Moondog was a model stallion again and the hair tickling Twilight’s muzzle was his beard, not his mane. Her wings twitched outwards and she quickly looked back down.

Moondog snickered. “I think you need to get out more,” he said. His beard batted Twilight again, then went limp. “Speaking of getting out, are any ideas getting out of your head?”

“Not quite, but I might be onto something.” Twilight fanned through the last five or so pages she’d written down. “If you put all these spells together, plus a few more I’m still looking at, they could be enough to give you pattern recognition.”

“Okay…” said Moondog. “So what?”

“So what?” Twilight boggled. “Pattern recognition is one of the most underrated elements of the sapient psyche! It’s incredibly versatile and observed in all intelligent species, and yet nopony’s sure where it comes from! Why, it might even be the key to your own self-awareness!”

“Really,” said Moondog flatly. “You think I’m self-aware because I have pattern recognition.”

“Well, maybe. You were designed to make good dreams, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So eventually, at some point, you recognized that dreams coming in were different than dreams going out, and you asked yourself why. And then you realized that you, as a dream-controlling tulpa, existed. Then you started making changes to yourself so you could make changes to dreams better, and… eeehhh?” Twilight gestured off vaguely, making a somewhat hopeful sound.

Moondog rolled his eyes. “That theory’s thinner than Rarity’s last order of silk.” Which was pretty dang thin. Rarity hadn’t shut up about the misshipment for a week.

“Look, we don’t know what makes us self-aware,” Twilight sighed. “A conscious being trying to study consciousness is like a mirror trying to look at itself.”

“…I am so stealing that line. Put that line in your report.”

To be honest, it wasn’t half bad. Where had it come from?

“Think they can hear us?” Moondog asked.

“Twilight, maybe,” said Starlight. “She’s pretty alert, even if she doesn’t look it. Sunburst, definitely not. He doesn’t just get tunnel vision, he gets tunnel sensation and tunes out everything. He gets a one-track mind par excellence.”

“Wanna test it out?”

“Sure.”

Moondog walked over to Twilight and lightly tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, cousin-in-law?”

Twilight didn’t look up. “Yeah?”

“I’m bored, so I’m gonna go to Canterlot, pretend to be you, and utterly trash your reputation, especially with Celestia.”

Twilight’s voice was disinterested. “Mmhmm. Go ahead.”

Moondog glanced skeptically at Starlight. “And if that doesn’t work out, I’m gonna give ponies all across the country dreams to make them paranoid and start a race war.”

“Uh-huh. Remember to take data from it if you can. If you want it to be fast, start by convincing the earth ponies that they need to look out for number one. They’ll hoard the food they grow and exacerbate any problems beyond repair. Also, yes, I can hear you.”

“Told you,” said Starlight, smirking. “Try Sunburst, now.”

“Hey, Sunburst?”

“Yeah?” He sounded almost as disinterested as Twilight.

“I’m bored. You know those spare robes you brought?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna burn ’em.”

“Okay.”

Moondog blinked. She vanished and reappeared within seconds, wearing robes identical to Sunburst’s. “These robes.”

“Uh-huh.”

Moondog snatched an oil lamp from the wall. “With this fire.” Starlight’s eyes went wide.

“Yep.”

Starlight made “no, don’t”, motions, but Moondog stuffed a corner of the robe in the lamp. One second later, it was burning merrily. Four more seconds later, in spite of Starlight’s best efforts, it had completely caught and was flaking to ashes. Moondog wasn’t the least bit perturbed by the flames licking her body. “Like that.”

“Cool.”

By the time Moondog had hung the lamp back up, the robe was gone. She walked back to Starlight and muttered, “Okay, that’s impressive.”

“You burned Sunburst’s robe,” gasped Starlight. “Why did you burn Sunburst’s robe?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snorted Moondog. “That was just an illusion. Why do you think you couldn’t put it out? Seriously, I would never do something like that.”

“Oh. Right. Duh. Sorry, I’m thinked out at the moment.”

Starlight and Moondog looked at Sunburst. He hadn’t twitched.

“He’s got it bad, hasn’t he?” said Moondog.

“You have no idea.”

“Hey, Moondog?” asked Sunburst.

“Yeah?”

“You can’t get hurt, right?”

“As far as I know, yeah. Why?”

“This is why.” And Sunburst bucked Moondog a clear forty feet across the room. She rolled across the carpet, tumbled over a table, and landed sprawled against a couch.

Starlight was yanked away from her work in an instant. “Sunburst!” she yelled. “Just- What was that for?”

“Science!” said Sunburst, smiling. “One of my hypotheses was confirmed!”

“What hypothesis?” demanded Starlight. “Is this about your robes?”

“I’m fine, by the way,” said Moondog, sliding its wings out from between the cushions. “No, really, I am.”

Sunburst waved a hoof dismissively.“No, no, this isn’t- Wait. What did she do to my robes?!” he squealed.

Research went on for almost a week. Trying to make sense of dream magic in the physical world was like herding cats (and not in the “just get Fluttershy to ask them nicely” way). But progress was made, equations were balanced, and eventually, they had organized their notes and findings into something resembling presentable. Before doing the final compilation, they agreed to share (a simplified version of) their findings with each other before diving into their notes and more technical reports and making them look professional.

Papers were scattered (and sometimes stacked) all over the library in a form of chaotic organization, like a windstorm had ripped all the pages from all the books. As Sunburst assembled his notes, Twilight spritzed some of the library’s plants with a water bottle; they needed some care. Then she spritzed herself; she was a little sweaty from the intense studying. Starlight was sprawled on a couch, power napping, and Moondog was rocking back and forth on her hooves as she stared at Sunburst. Spraying another plant, Twilight said, “You can go back into dreams if you’re uncomfortable, you know.”

Moondog shook her head. “No. Not now. We’re, like, right at the end. The physical world isn’t that weird.”

Starlight cracked an eye open. “You could sift through our memories.”

“Nowhere near as fun.”

Finally, Sunburst managed to get his things in order. Everyone turned to him as he cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “um, I stink at beginnings, so… here we go, oneiroturgy and thaumaturgy. Moondog is unique among beings in that, when she’s in the dream realm, she can’t wake up. While Luna projects herself into our dreams, she’s… not exactly asleep, but a part of her definitely remains in the physical realm. Moondog goes completely from one to the other, and the easiest way to do that is to travel through a pony’s dreams. Short version, when moving from dreams to reality or vice versa, Moondog can only use the dream of a sleeping sapient to do so, since a dream is, as we all remember…” He took a deep breath. “…a subdimension outside of space and time at the nexus of consciousness and matter tethered to a pony’s essence.” He kept straightening his papers and flipping through the pages, but he barely looked at them.

Moondog’s hoof shot up. “So when can I use dreams to time travel?” she asked, grinning.

“When the pony travels with you,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up. “Or to be more precise, when you travel with them. You can squash and stretch time, but since a dream is connected to a pony who still lives in time, you can’t actually break it. Unfortunately.” He sounded a touch forlorn at the lack of free time travel.

“Dagnabbit.” To Twilight and Starlight, Moondog added, “And if you’re wondering how I get from dreams to here at the right time, there’s pretty much always somepony napping around here for me to use. Usually Rainbow Dash.”

Sunburst flipped through a few pages, still not looking at them. “Now, when it comes to actual real-world magic, Moondog can barely do anything unrelated to herself. She’ll struggle with basic levitation, which even I can do. But she can make it look like she can do a lot, since she’s exceptionally good at illusions. Which makes sense, since illusion magic and dream magic are closely related. In fact, she’s so good at illusions that she probably doesn’t even know she’s casting illusion magic right now.”

Moondog blinked. “I am?”

“Your body, it’s…” Sunburst nibbled on his lip. “How do I put this… It’s not physical at all. It’s a quale.”

Twilight’s ears went up and her wings sprang open with an, “Ooo!”, knocking over the water bottle. Starlight, however, was left a bit befuddled and Moondog wrinkled her nose. “What’s a quale?” asked Starlight.

“It’s a sensory perception,” said Sunburst. “Moondog’s appearance literally doesn’t exist outside of our heads. She doesn’t cast a shadow and she doesn’t have a reflection because there’s no physical body to have a shadow or reflection. She won’t show up in pictures and I wouldn’t be surprised if recording devices can’t pick up her voice. We can still feel her because the magic that makes her up is trying to keep things out of her ‘body’, like in dreams, but in the real world, it’s not as effective, so she feels a lot lighter.” He glanced at Starlight. “I mean, did you really think I was strong enough to kick a real pony across the room like that?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Starlight. “Maybe. You get defensive about your robes.”

“I, I’m sorry, can we go back a step?” said Moondog, making a flicking gesture. “Something about me not having a reflection? I’m not a vampire, you know! Not at the moment, anyway. I’m too…” She looked at her starry leg. “…sparkly.”

“It’s got nothing to do with vampires,” said Twilight. She sounded like she was ready to explode with knowledge. “It’s because the nature of your existence means the appearance of your body isn’t projecting or reflecting any physical light, and instead only exists within our minds. Because you’re not interacting with light, you’re not producing anything to be reflected.”

“So… I’m a sapient hallucination who’s hallucinating herself.”

“Exactly!”

Moondog turned away, rubbing her head. “Ow,” she muttered. “I thought feeling your mind break was just an expression. Ow. Ow.” She smacked herself on the side of the head; a few sparks fell out of her ear.

Sunburst cleared his throat. “ALSO,” he said, drawing everyone’s attention back to him, “what magic Moondog does cast, it tends to follow dream logic rather than real-world logic. Less ‘magic’ and more ‘low-key reality warping’, but nothing like, say, Discord.”

“I should hope not!” said Discord.

“It’s…” Sunburst flipped to a page at the back of his pile. “It’s too complicated to get into here,” he admitted. “Just, just read my report, and it’ll make sense.” He swallowed and muttered, “I hope.” More loudly, he said, “Anyway, that’s, um, that’s all I have to say.”

Starlight got up as Sunburst got down. “Um… mental abilities,” she said. “Most of this is pretty technical and we really don’t have the time for it right now-” (Twilight made a tiny, despairing sigh.) “-but the spells Moondog uses to, ah…” She coughed. “…get into and out of our heads are some of the most sophisticated I’ve seen. I mean, would you expect anything else from Luna? And, um, she can do it, with, uh, very little chance of being noticed.” Her voice slowly got lower, like this was something she didn’t want to talk about.

Twilight and Sunburst both glanced at Moondog, but didn’t say anything. Moondog herself didn’t look ashamed in the slightest.

“But the interesting thing I’ve noticed,” Starlight said quickly, “is that if she can, um, get into somepony’s unconscious while they’re awake, she can appear to them and only them. Basically make them see things that aren’t there. After all, what’s a hallucination but a waking dream?”

Seeing the look on Moondog’s face, Twilight squirted her with the water bottle.

“But, um, the method for that, it’s, I don’t know how to make it work,” said Starlight, “and it might not even be possible.” A pause. “Anyway, that’s all I have for now. It’s not something that sounds interesting when you sum it up.”

“Says you,” said Twilight. She exchanged places with Starlight, grabbed one of the larger stacks of paper (almost two feet tall) in her magic, and set it on a table. “On the off chance Moondog’s intelligence turned out to have one source, I did some deep digging into the reasoning part of her mind, and this-” She laid a hoof on top of the stack. “-is the results of following one thread all the way to the end. One thread, by the way. Out of dozens of thousands at least.” She gave a sort of tired smile at the stack.

“And…” Starlight pulled the first page over. The mess of spellwork there looked like a tsunami had rolled through a bookstore, mashing the mathematics, mathemagics, philosophy, and arcanoengineering books into a single work. Any one of the equations could’ve been the final result in some groundbreaking thesis. Half of it probably hadn’t even been conceived before today. “This is the source of Moondog’s intelligence?”

“No, this is the source of her love of peppermints.”

“They’re okay,” Moondog said defensively. “Not great.”

“I’m still working on the source of her shame of her love of peppermints.”

“Why is she ashamed of liking peppermints? Peppermints are great.”

“My guess? She’s closely based on Luna, Luna doesn’t like peppermints, and so Moondog feels like she shouldn’t like peppermints.”

“Luna doesn’t like peppermints?”

Sunburst stomped loudly on the ground. “Um, hello? Can we get back on track here? I feel like talking about candy too much will summon Pinkie Pie and then we’ll never get this done.”

“Fine,” said Twilight, rustling her wings. “But as I was looking at the spells, I realized that…” She shuddered. “…that I didn’t know how some of them worked. It was like they’d just been thrown together without any regard for the laws of magic, and not in a dreamlike sense. But if Luna knew how to cast those, then she shouldn’t’ve been surprised that Moondog became self-aware.” She paused just long enough for it to sink in, then added, “Unless.”

At that word, everyone flinched. It looked like Sunburst got it in an instant, based on the way his eyes grew huge. It took Starlight a bit longer, but she was soon nodding as she followed her thoughts to the end. Moondog stared at Twilight in anticipation, then in mild irritation. “Unless…?” she prompted.

“Unless,” Twilight said with a smile, “Luna wasn’t the one who made those spells.”

She took a deep breath. “In addition to the usual non-self-aware golem enchantments, I think that somewhere in Moondog is a spell optimizer, put there by Luna first thing to make its creation easier. It can affect the spells used within Moondog, the ones originally cast by Luna, based on her inputs. As she tested what would become Moondog, she sent the optimizer positive or negative signals based on how the golem reacted to certain situations, so the optimizer could change the spells in ways she couldn’t think of. That way, she wouldn’t need to give it a tweak every time something went wrong; she could just scold it with a ‘bad golem’ spell and let the optimizer figure it out.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sunburst, sitting up straight. “If, if that thing’s still running in her, then…” He glanced at Moondog. “We don’t have to worry about, I don’t know, her personality suddenly shifting when it makes a change, do we?”

“I’m not gonna go nightmare-crazy overnight, if that’s what you’re wondering,” said Moondog. Then she smirked fangily and said, “You know, probably not.”

“Technically, the optimizer’s still there, but practically, it’s not,” said Twilight. “It’s still running, but it’s not optimizing itself. As more and more spells get added onto Moondog, the optimizer has to run through more and more data. And it was fine when she was just a few animation spells with a set objective, but now that it takes an entire encyclopedia just to tell us why she occasionally likes to use big words, it can take years for the optimizer to cover everything once and decide what needs changing. In fact…” She turned to Moondog. “You’ve been getting more emotionally stable as you grow, right?”

Moondog tilted her head. “Yeah, but I just thought that was me growing up.”

“It might be. But I’ve also got a hypothesis that the optimizer was triggering your moods by tweaking your spells in one direction or another in response to outward stimuli, which it could do since you didn’t have a lot of spells that made you up. Now that you’re so much more complicated, any single change isn’t going to have nearly as much of an impact.”

Twilight shuffled her notes again. She didn’t need to; it just made her feel more official. “But the net result of this, and this is me going out a limb here, is that Moondog’s self-awareness is entirely an accident on the optimizer’s part. I think that, at some point, she just got so complex that she became sapient as an emergent property of the system. I wish I could say more, but until we know what makes us sapient, this is the best I can do. Sorry,” she added to Moondog.

“Eh, don’t worry about it.” Moondog gestured dismissively. “I didn’t expect it to be that easy, anyway.” She stood up and fanned her wings. “Thank you all for your help, and I bet Mom’ll like it, too. I’ll get around to reading your work one day, but until then, night’s coming and I gotta run.” She saluted. “Adios, amigos.” She whipped up emptiness around herself and was gone.

“She doesn’t stick around, does she?” said Sunburst.

“Say what you will about her,” said Twilight, “but she’s got a phenomenal work ethic. And I think she’s used to going from one thing to another with little in-between since, you know, that’s what she does pretty much all night long. Now…” She turned to the mess of papers strewn about the library. “We need to get this all categorized.”

“Yay,” said Starlight flatly.

“Yay!” said Sunburst.

“But we can do that tomorrow,” said Twilight. “Or, at least, you can, Starlight, because I know what I’m doing tonight!”

“Me, too!” said Sunburst. He raised a hoof. “Research buddies?”

“Research buddies!” Hoof bump.

“Nerrrrrrrrrds,” said Starlight, but she was smiling.

“It takes one to know one!” said Twilight. “Can I see your notes?”

Luna followed Staff Sergeant Iron Phalanx to the cargo entrance of the castle. “What was it, exactly, you wanted me to see?”

“You received a package from Princess Twilight Sparkle, Your Highness,” Phalanx said. “You, personally. We would’ve taken it straight to your room, but, ah…” He rustled his wings as he pushed open the door to the cargo bay and pointed. “That… wasn’t really an option.”

The metal box was a good six feet by six feet by six feet, various forms of duct and packing tape clamping it shut more tightly than a bank vault. A tag slapped on the side indicated it weighed more than six and a half tons. It sat there, ominously, waiting to be opened, yet looking like opening it was forbidden. No, Luna thought, getting that to her room wasn’t possible. It probably wasn’t even possible to get it through the door into the castle.

“We’ve done some preliminary scans, just in case,” said Phalanx, “and it appears to contain nothing but ink and paper.”

Luna snorted. “Only Twilight Sparkle would require freight shipping for a single research report,” she muttered.