“...eidoles iktha si’dianoia...’Magic...twists? ‘Warps?’ ...no...that’s not…‘affects’ might be a better way to put it. Stupid old dialect Minoan,” Sunset complained to herself, writing her chosen translation into English letters. “Couldn’t they have written this in something that’s been used in the last century or two?”

Shaking out a hand cramp, she continued her effort on converting the valuable passages of the minotaur treatise into something humans could make sense of. “Magic affects your mind...’Si’krashu xiti vizakra afi-os...’ oh, horseapples, does that say zha’val or sha’val? Gotta be ‘zha’val. Strength makes more sense here than a hat...that would make it ‘zha’val Th’lesi sha’attra gripa-os.’ ‘You must be Cunning to recognize its touch, and stronger of Will to break its hold.’ Poetic, but it doesn’t really get to the how....stupid, flowery...ugh.” She sighed, taking a sip of her tea and finding it had gone cold, and scowled at the next sentence. “‘Sikuran ithar d’spaira, ek xi’zha’val kai defsi...xi’tukaish a’eidagos iki...’” Sunset sighed, dropping her pencil. “It’s official. I don’t remember enough old Minoan to translate this, unless it really does mean weak souls are having affairs with a goat while everyone else plays with spellcaster manure...”

The former unicorn slammed the book shut, rubbing her temples. She had been muddling through the tome for almost two hours now, and had managed to scrape together a single page in bullet point notes. That was beyond pathetic, though given that it had been over a decade since she’s learned the modern form of the language and actually used it in conversation, Sunset decided she was lucky she even remembered how to tell someone her name, let alone anything more. She would have to break down and either ask the princess for a translated copy, or to run it through a translation and duplication spell to provide her with a copy in proper Equestrian glyphs rather than the horrible half glyph, half alphabet that minotaurs used.

Sighing, Sunset put the tome to the side, and looked over her progress for the day. She’d done quite well—she had managed to scan and edit the unicorn first aid manual for magical injuries and exhaustion, and the file was safely in a thumb drive as well as a hard copy printed and secured in a three ring binder. The same was true for the pertinent sections of both the zebra text—and its loose pages of annotated notes courtesy of Princess Twilight’s zebra friend—and the book on wards and protections for a space. Those she wanted to give to her principals as soon as possible to give them an idea of what might be doable, but also as a show of good faith that she really was doing what she had promised.

Leaning back in her chair, she looked over the stack of books she had brought home. She’d already read The Elements of Harmony: A Reference Guide twice, comparing it with the book she had stolen from the palace archives during her first trip back through the portal almost three years prior. The reference guide had more overall information, but the book she had acquired was definitely older, and it wasn’t a tome meant for reproduction. Her find was all private research notes, ramblings and speculation mostly, by a very strange pony who had dedicated a whole section to the concept of what would happen if one of the Elements was brought to another world, a section which had been the source for her entire plan with the Element of Magic. It had actually been misfiled when she had snuck into the restricted archives during her first brief visit back, and she had taken it by mistake when she had grabbed several other books that it had been wedged between.

Despite that, the two books, along with Princess Twilight’s own notes on the Elements of Harmony had provided her with a great deal of information on the subject. They were still considered some of the most powerful magical artifacts in Equestria, and Twilight had discovered their origins in some sort of massive crystalline tree at the heart of the Everfree forest—a tree which was located over a major leyline nexus where at least eight different major lines and a multitude of tiny ones were known to converge. According to those same notes, the SET level around the Tree of Harmony was far higher than a base background reading in just about anywhere else in Equestria that had been measured, including other nexus points. The princess had even gone so far as to theorize that it was the magical oversaturation that was responsible for the wild magic and anomalous nature of the Everfree forest, and that the massive nexus the Tree sat atop was actually the origin point for the bulk of Equestria's leylines coming up from the source of magic that was believed to lie deep within the world's core.

Most of the notes Sunset had taken were far more basic than Princess Twilight’s complex hypotheses. The Elements had six known virtues, and history as well as legend described that any pony—or other creature—that bonded to one expressed that Element’s virtue as a very strong part of their personality, sometimes to the point of nearly personifying that virtue. Once bonded to a being, it seemed that the Elements themselves had some choice as to how long they stayed bonded, occasionally remaining with a Bearer until their death, other times only briefly, and in some cases abandoning a Bearer if they lost the virtue that the Element connected with (as happened with Princess Luna when she became Nightmare Moon, and Princess Celestia when she had turned the Elements on her sister.) The Elements' combined power was capable of summoning the Rainbow of Light, a purifying, cleansing force that wiped out any corrupted magic it encountered, stripping any corrupted entity of power until it was returned to its previous state of being. The one exception seemed to have been Discord, God of Chaos, who had merely been turned to stone, twice. Princess Twilight had speculated wildly in her notes as to why that was, but Sunset wondered if the answer wasn’t extremely simple—that, to the Elements, Discord wasn’t corrupted, just a problem—Chaos was a natural part of the order of the universe after all, not the result of some twisted idiot power drunk on way too much magic the way she or Nightmare Moon had been.

Knowing all of this about the Elements in Equestria only made the puzzle more complicated in the human world. The power the girls were manifesting was the energy of the Elements, but the only one any of them had ever had physical contact with was Magic (courtesy of the game of keep away that Sunset had instigated in her fit of jealous rage). The other Elements had remained in Equestria, and yet Magic, which was supposedly unable to function properly without the other five, had not only somehow recognized the virtues of the human counterparts of the current Bearers, but had managed to summon the full might of the Rainbow of Light all by Itself. According to everything she had read, that shouldn’t have been at all possible, even with Princess Twilight present as the legitimate Bearer. That suggested that the Elements--or at least Magic--were...self aware on some level, and capable of a great deal more than what the natives of Equestria knew.

And for that one exposure to the power of the Elements to leave behind an echo in the girls was one thing, but their power was growing, not diminishing. Even in just a week of daily readings, Sunset was already seeing incremental increases in their individual SET levels, and when she paired that with her own, less precise sense of magic, it had been growing fairly steadily since the night of the Fall Formal. The basic idea wasn’t far-fetched—none of them had been magically gifted before the formal, and that much power could theoretically change a being’s magical potential. What made it a problem was their power was increasing far faster and to a far higher level in a place that lacked the energies to fill whatever reserves they had acquired. The human world didn’t have the background thaumic energies that Equestria did, or the foods rich in thaumic energy that unicorns used to recover their magic. So where was the energy coming from?

She even counted herself among that question, since she knew she had drained her own magical reserves in the final fight with the Sirens, and even in Equestria with a steady and controlled diet of foods designed to replenish a unicorn from over-expenditure, it would have taken several months to recover her magic. Yet here she was, a month later with not just her magic back, but according to the scan she had surreptitiously taken of herself, her SET level was higher than it had ever been, and she was running into issues with magic surges, suggesting she was drawing in more magic than she could rightly contain.

By all the rules and laws of magic, Sunset and the other girls were an impossibility. One that she didn't even know how to start figuring out beyond what she was already doing: taking notes and readings and testing their magic under a variety of circumstances to learn how it worked.

Speaking of magic she didn't understand...

Blue-green eyes drifted to the mysterious diary that had been left in Pinkie’s locker, her senses automatically stretching to feel the strange magic that permeated it. She was still reading through it, but she was beginning to wonder if the explanation in what was different with the magic in the girls lay in understanding the native magic that had existed right under her nose in the human world, magic she had believed was nothing more than fanciful myth influenced by a visitors through portals to Equestria over many millennia.

The book had certainly caused a stir amongst her friends, but she stood by her initial perception. The magic in it was not Equestrian magic in any fashion. It was a completely different energy with its own resonance that was unlike any magic the former unicorn had ever encountered in any of her studies. She had defended that idea to her friends several times since the book had come into her hands.

“Human magic?” Applejack questioned skeptically. “Ah thought y’all said this world don’t have its own magic?”

Sunset ran a hand through her mane, resisting the urge to toss her head in agitation. “As far as I had been able to learn, this world didn’t have magic worth mentioning. And believe me, when I first got here, I looked. The best I could determine is that there is more than one portal to Equestria and that over the centuries a handful of beings and creatures from Equestria have ended up here, allowing for the spread of legends and stories from that side of the portal to come here. Nothing ever suggested that there was magic here, not even my own senses.” She rested a hand on the diary, feeling the energy pulsing under the surface. “But this book...it’s magic, clearly, but it’s not Equestrian magic. It doesn’t feel right to be any kind of magic in Equestria, even some of the more ancient or obscure ones. It’s completely foreign to me.”

“Are you absolutely certain that it’s not simply a magic type you’ve never run into in Equestria, darling?” Rarity asked gently.

The redhead closed her eyes, a slow breath exiting her nostrils. “If I were anypony else, that would be a definite possibility,” she agreed. “But I was the personal student of the Princess of the Sun, an immortal alicorn who has been around for thousands of years. I grew up in the palace, exposed to the greatest collection of artifacts from across Equestria that exists, including a whole host of pre-Discordian objects, and had plenty of interactions with creatures from every corner of Equestria in my place at her side. There are very few flavors of magic from Equestria that I have not encountered at least once, from the dunes of Saddle Arabia to the frigid northern reaches of Yakyakistan, to the peaks of Mount Aris and beyond the Badlands.”

There was a scoffing noise from Rainbow Dash. “You sound like some kind of egghead, Sunset, and besides the world’s a big place, right? Even with all that, there’s probably a lot of stuff you just didn’t have time to see.”

She bristled at the implications, feeling Flash actually put a hand on her shoulder when she tensed up. “C’mon, Rainbow,” he tried. “This doesn’t seem like something Sunset would exaggerate with.”

“Yeah, but even an egghead doesn’t know everything—just look at the stuff with the Sirens. Sunset didn’t know anything about their magic when they first showed up.” The comment stung, even more because Dash didn’t seem angry or upset. She sounded like she was just offering a reasonable viewpoint....and Sunset realized, from her point of view, she was. The human world had a lot more cultures and humans tucked away in all corners of the world, compared to her world’s much lower population density and large tracts of unsettled territory.

“I still could tell it was Equestrian magic of some kind. It had the right flavor, the right feel,” she responded, trying not to sound petulant. “It wasn’t a hundred percent match but it did overlap with a number of magics I have felt before, several of them nasty. It’s...it’s hard to explain, because things really are so different here than Equestria....but I promise you, I do know what I’m talking about. I’m not exaggerating or lying.”

Applejack interceded when Rainbow Dash opened her mouth again. “Ah believe ya,” the farmer said firmly, emerald eyes boring into Sunset. “If ya say that there book ain’t from Equestria, then it ain’t. Simple as that. ‘Specially since listenin’ ta both you an’ Twi talk about Princess Celestia makes me think she’s not just a pony wearin’ a crown where y'all’re from.”

The conversation had only gotten worse at that point. Sunset had tried, somewhat futilely, to explain the Goddess-but-not-worshiped nature of alicorns, Celestia in particular, and had run straight into the culture clash of human belief systems compared to Equestrian ones. The concept of a god was virtually inseparable from religious beliefs for them—the notion of a Goddess who wasn’t related at all to a religious system of beliefs, whose power wasn’t speculative or faith based but tangible, measurable, and real was something that had never happened with humans. In the end, she’d given up before she had snapped at her friends over something that was unimportant in the grand scheme of things and not pertinent to the subject of human magic.

Since then though, she’d been trying to read her way through the diary, looking for anything that might prove useful. So far, Sunset knew that it was the record of the life of a young man trying to recover a sweetheart who had been kidnapped by magical beings and spirited away. He detailed his interactions with a woman in Ireland who gave him some solid advice on beings she called ‘the Fair Folk’ but Sunset wasn’t sure how much was truth, as the diary had yet to indicate its author had actually encountered any magical beings. Most of it had been just an endless stream of journal entries, but occasionally he had done sketches and diagrams of plants, locations, and objects that he deemed pertinent, and it was those almost scientific pages of notes that were of more interest to Sunset than the chronicling of his trek.

Sunset snagged the old book off the desk, flipping it open to her bookmark, skimming through several entries, detailing the author’s search for “a weapon capable of cutting through lies”—something that sounded way too fanciful to her. Running a hand through her fiery mane, she sighed heavily. She was nearly a decade’s worth of entries in, and a lot of what she’d read in there sounded like the plots to a bunch of movies Shining had insisted needed to be on the watch lists for Friday nights. If it weren’t for the fact that the object radiated magic all its own and still prodded her every time she went to open it, the fact that she had read through more pages than the slim volume should have contained—an enchantment mentioned five years in by the author, done by the woman in Ireland—or the Age Approximation Apparatus that had been among the tools from Equestria, Sunset would have thought the book some kind of prank....

But those three factors proved it was anything but. The whole thing was older than Shining’s movies by decades, and humans couldn’t trick her magical senses like that. More than that, something about the account felt authentic in a way she couldn’t articulate to the girls. Already it at least confirmed magic was here in the human world, though it seemed to be rare, disbelieved, and half hidden from human prejudice. Sunset needed to keep slogging through it to hopefully find useful information.

The redhead rubbed her eyes tiredly, feeling the strain of her evening’s work. It didn’t help that the writing in the diary was atrocious to the point of being barely legible at times. It reminded her of the time she’d come into Twilight’s garage lab to find her trying to take notes while running three simultaneous experiments. Human writing was already messy and despite their fine motor control most of them had no care for penmanship...and that was compounded by their alphabet and its different styles of being written. She made a face. It was so messy, all random curls and loops and lines, about half of which were superfluous and depended on the writer, but with enough overlap with parts where the loop changing direction drastically changed the letter. It was nothing like the elegant way glyphs flowed across a page, and was the primary reason Sunset preferred to read human script printed by a machine.

Her stomach growled at her, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since brunch at Twilight’s house. She dropped the book on the desk and sat up, wincing when the movement pulled on muscles gone stiff from being hunched over for so long. “Stupid, Shimmer,” she chastised herself. “You know this body hates it when you study like that..”

The former unicorn pulled herself up from her seat and made her way out into the main part of the loft to arch her back in a stretch. Pain followed by distinct relief accompanied the popping sound of vertebrae realigning. “Oooooh...” she uttered, the long groan echoing through the space. “That’s better...” A pang of longing went through her for her telekinesis—it was so much better on her body to use her mind and magic to do all the work while lying comfortably.

Sighing, she began doing some light stretching exercises, feeling her muscles start to unkink. She wanted dinner, but feeling the way her muscles protested, it seemed like a scalding hot shower was on the agenda first, followed by an order of takeout. She could really go for a shrimp lo mein and the seafood and tofu stir fry...maybe if she asked nicely they’d add extra peppers and some baby corn to hers.

Licking her lips at the thought of dinner, she grabbed a towel from the bucket of clean laundry and headed for her bathroom and the siren song of hot water.

A more boring chapter than ones previous, I apologize, and one a bit dense with information, bruhahaha.

Few rambly notes. The language in the beginning is something I made up years ago and have been adding to since I was in middle school, so...trying to google translate it won't help. I'll save someone the trouble of that now. And the whole bit of Sunset trying to translate it is a bit of a tongue in cheek joke about how much of a pain in the ass it actually is to translate scripts from one language to another, especially incomplete ones, outdated dialects, or languages that are extremely different from each other. Its not as easy as the movies make it seem.

Little bit of background on the Elements here, whooooo! And hints at a bigger mystery, one that was started by a line in the canon EqG movie that never gets answered. How DID Sunset have any more knowledge about "what happens when you bring an Element of Harmony into another world" than Twilight?

(Also, the reference to her "first trip back" is a note about the previous cycle of the portal, the one between her arrival in the human world and the one that takes place in the first movie.)

Little bit of world-building peeks too--with references to the Discordian Era, the much lower population density of the Equestrian natives, and of course, a bit on the "figures with the power of gods but not as the source of religious worship" that seems to be a thing in Equestria. Maybe I'll get around to doing some rambling on those in a blog.

And then there's this mysterious journal and all thats in it...Hmmmm. Wonder what's up with that. :P

Anywho, happy reading, cats and kittens! Stay tuned next week for more shenanigans!