"Try turning it again, maybe it needs another start," Twilight said.

Lyra nodded and began to turn the large crank beside her which was attached to a large, blocky-looking contraption which took up the majority of Twilight's basement. Well. It had started out as a small box about the size of a bread-basket. I'm going to control+f for 'breadbasket' in ten thousand works of literature and if I find it in even a single one I'm going to leave that instance of 'breadbasket'. But if I can't find a single one then I'm going to replace it with something more jovial and contemporary. Maybe an iPad.

So the breadbasket. It started out about that big. Think about a pocket computer. Twilight thought about them a lot. She thought about them obligatorily, because her brain was made of them, and thinking of thinking of thinking is a lot of the process of becoming eternally alive, and also what electrons do when they are bored.

Breadbasket. Computer. It started as a small, grey box.

Then other things had happened.

Lyra came over. She was Twilight's assistant. From the 'Helping Hands' Temp Agency. Twilight said 'Hooves'. Lyra shrugged. That was introductions.

They had poked the breadbox/computer and attached a few buttons and knobs and blinky lights. They poked the buttons and turned the knobs and watched the blinky lights. A piece of paper, fed into the paper tray, was yanked slowly through the mechanism, strips of runes embedded into its surface with tiny fragments of ink.

"'Metanarratives'," read Lyra, holding the piece of paper at fore-leg's length, mostly to keep away the smell of ink. Scrunkle-face. Smooshy nose. Lyra turned herself sideways for posterity.

"I think we need to do more work," Twilight had said.

That was when more bits had shown up. This one was a calculator, for... calculating things. It looked exactly like the one Twilight had in primary school, except attached to a breadbox. Then the breadbox became bigger. Ten breadboxes. A whole pantry. Twilight said more computational power required more finite physical resources. Lyra went downtown and came back with a box of fluorescent vacuum tubes. Twilight tried to find a bug repellent that worked on the moths without damaging the vacuum tubes. Lyra had suggested adding a translation output. Twilight had reorganized the breadboxes. Somepony (hopefully) had added the thing that went 'parp'. And a section for Roman numerals (despite the concrete in-universe non-existence of 'Rome). Twilight found herself staring at an etch-a-sketch with a crude imprint of her face on it.

She frowned. The etch-a-sketch grinned back at her.

"Are you still turning?," she asked.

Lyra, who had been distracted by a picture of a glove, hastily shoved the Polaroid inside her pony-pocket (we're not talking about that) and turned the crank as suggested. It took a few full-body heaves to get the thing going, but once it did, the wheels practically span by themselves. A bit of lightning at the top... oh, heck, two lightnings. And a soft-serve ice-cream machine, for good measure.

Lyra slowed the winding of the crank as the last few words printed out onto the new sheet of paper. The thing that went 'parp', went 'parp'.

"'The real treasure was the friends we made along the way,'" Twilight read out, in something of a deadpan.

Lyra shrugged. "Beats me. Any guesses?"

Twilight sighed and threw the sheet of paper over her head, adding it the layer of carpeting that was the day's previous 243 attempts. It's funnier if you pick a specific number. Kroog compressor.

"It's just making me want to rewatch One Bit," Twilight said grumpily. Adverbs are back in, tell a friend, tell them quickly, tell them Joyceanly, ahuehuehue.

"Can we do that instead?" Lyra asked, raising an eyebrow to the general heap of debris and DIY science fair that Twilight's basement had turned into. For the purposes of this canon universe, Twilight's library requires a basement. Not any particular other elements are necessarily relevant. I mean, we're talking about character archetypes here. Twilight is figuratively first because she's the Magician in the show's archetype. Show? In the grand Equestrian narrative that is our lives, it is to say. Were we narrating? Three quarks for muster mark. I think the reason most people didn't enjoy reading that style of prose is because you're supposed to put a concerted effort in to ensure that a given paragraph contains information contextually related to previous paragraphs, and that the sentences are causally intertwined in such a way that they lead satisfyingly to a conclusion. The inherent difficulty in writing, therefore, is not to edit, but to decide before you have spoken that anything you are going to say is worthwhile.

From there, you enter the point of translation apex which we can term gnosis at least for the sake of this comparison if not objectively and eternally. And if we return to the kabbalah, we understand that the archetype of the Magician is inherently fallible, because I'm going to stop using big language at which things become more important. If you are the first being to do anything, you will be looked at and thought about in ways you have never imagined before. You will be unable to know what to do with these thoughts and feelings. While you will compare some parts of your experience now to parts of your experience previous, many of the comparisons will come up short, and particularly in instances in which you are unable to find a sufficient amount of similarities, you will recede into a regressed-competency-state. This will be as though you were a Magician suddenly without his wand, or suddenly with the knowledge that his wand no longer worked, or suddenly with the knowledge that his wand had been just a bad trick of the light the whole time, or just a fancy use of a thesaurus, or just an incredibly long sentence mimicking the prosody of long-dead post modern magnum oppai and that pun will conclude this elongated mimicry in the middle of our otherwise boring but still tangentially related story. Fanfiction is a crime against the threshold of creativity. An idea is rinsing material for the one doing its work. You throw them into a bucket like old chicken bones and anything that dredges up from the sewers to collect the gristle is good enough to publish. This entire chunk made it through edit, didn't it? God fucking damn it.

"Scene," Lyra said, panting and clutching at her stomach for breath.

"What? I've been sitting here waiting for you to say something interesting for five minutes."

"At one point the amount of minutes would have been exact but also approximated. Now it's a round number five."

"Do you want to have an entire dialogue over whether or not ponies are in the habit of accurately reporting the amount of time they've been waiting for something?"

"I think it deserves at least a paragraph or two."

"Well we're putting it in the footnotes.¹"

"You can't start with footnotes. You're going to decay the entire interactive principle of the narrative here."

"It's a narrative. It's not supposed to have interactive principles."

"But it's a post-modern narrative, in a digital multimedia format. Of course it's going to be interactive."

"Which one of us is speaking?"

"Did you just say that sentence?"

"Did you just type me saying that sentence?"

"Did you just read a sentence containing the words "Did you just type me saying that sentence?"

Help.

1: They didn't put it in the footnotes.