He blinks confusedly at the two girls.
"...Ponies," says Joy. "Like - people. Regular people who aren't dragons. They have hooves and manes and tails and they walk around on four feet instead of two like me, and have flat teeth instead of sharp like mine, and there's three kinds. Earth ponies are strong and good at doing physical stuff and growing plants, and unicorns have horns that let them do magic, and pegasi have wings that let them fly and do weather stuff."
"And you're a human and you're sort of an elf," he says, indicating Saasnil and Korulen respectively. "Okay... do all the kinds of people around here look mostly like you? I guess you said there's dragons. Is it just dragons and humanish-elfish-people, or are there more different kinds?"
"There are more different kinds. There's merfolk and there's sprites... vampires can turn into bats but the rest of the time they look sort of humanish... there's fairies and pixies that are kind of like sprites... there's leonines, they walk on two legs but they look like lions... there's wolves, but I don't know if they count because they come with riders who look humanish... there's skyfolk and they're bird people," says Saasnil.
"Well, I can't, but I know somebody who can. I can sort of pretty much tell what some critter is trying to get across if it's simple enough and I'm paying attention, but I don't hear them like they're talking language or anything. Cordy does, and she can talk back to them and be understood too."
"Well... if nobody wakes them up, they might oversleep and miss the start of spring," he says. "I guess they must figure it out somehow in the places where there aren't any ponies to help, but I don't know, I've only ever lived in Equestria. And bunny censuses are important for tracking the bunny population, obviously, so you can tell if there's a change that doesn't look right and might mean something weird is happening to the bunnies. Cordial could probably explain it better, she's the one who takes them."
"I mean, I guess we could summon you again with a non-random spell? But we are completely not allowed to let you out of the ward without getting you checked over first," says Korulen. "We weren't really allowed to summon you in the first place but that's less for safety reasons, more just we aren't graduated enough to do this big a spell unsupervised except we completely pulled it off because here you are."
"In Equestria a wizard just means a unicorn who's good at magic. Does your magic come in a bunch of different kinds? Who can do it, if you don't have unicorns? And turning the seasons means, like - actually, never mind the seasons, how do you handle your weather if you don't have pegasi? Do your bird people do weather stuff instead?"
"I have a lot of mind magic. I can let you out of the circle, as long as it's safe, and then you won't be stuck there while Korulen works on being able to send you home," explains Keo. "I won't look at anything that doesn't have to do with whether you're going to hurt people or break laws or things like that."
"Almost all the people who live in Equestria are ponies. They're... ponies. They have four feet with hooves and ones who have horns are unicorns and ones who have wings are pegasi and ones who have neither are earth ponies and ones who have both are princesses. And they don't eat meat. Because they're ponies."
"Okay, then it's yours for the duration. You can will the ward on the door to admit or keep out anybody who you want to let in or not, although I and my husband - he's the headmaster - can override if there's ever a reason. Korulen will bring you your gemstones when she's found a spell for them and conjured them up. The lift will take you to the cafeteria if you want to go there for non-gemstone food and I've keyed you to it. If people hassle you, you can tell them to talk to me. If you need to talk to me, all you have to do is think 'Keo' loud and clear and I'll pick it up and," <we can talk, like so. Any questions?>
And... cast.
There is an enormous puff of faintly glittery red smoke. Blueberry squints into the cloud, then clears it away with a little subtle telekinesis.
"That is because I'm not a treatise," she says reasonably. "I'm a unicorn. And I was trying to bring back a dragon who disappeared a little while ago, but the spell I'm using has trouble distinguishing people except by broad obvious categories like species... maybe it got confused some other way. Do you know anything about a green and purple dragon suddenly appearing somewhere near wherever you just were? He's about this tall," she floats a book to a Joy-ish height to illustrate, because even if she stood on tip-hoof she'd be much too short to gesture it herself, "and his name is Joy and he's very friendly and helpful."
"Oh, that makes sense. Well, it shouldn't be very hard to put you back now that I've got you... you're definitely the only dragon-like creature in Ponyville right now. Do you want me to do that? I'd just have to reverse a few things and then check my work, it won't take long. But then I guess you should tell Joy to go somewhere there aren't any dragon-like creatures for a size-of-this-roomish distance anywhere around him, before I try again."
"From my perspective, Joy disappeared mysteriously a little while ago and I went and looked up some spells until I found one that told me where he went, sort of, and then I went and looked up some more spells until I found one that could get him back. But it isn't very good, so it accidentally got you instead."
"Equestria is a pony country. I don't know if there are any dragons living in it at all other than Joy, and if there are, they don't live in pony villages with ponies like he does. But there's dragons in other places farther away, and griffins, and certain kinds of sea monsters that can talk... I could probably look up a list of all the non-pony creatures who're known to use learnable language, but I might have to send away to another library in Canterlot for it."
"I mean, you can teach a dragon or a sea serpent Equestrian, but you can't teach a bear or a bunny or a bee Equestrian. But certain ponies who have the right kind of special talent can understand and communicate with bears and bunnies and bees; they just don't use a learnable language to do it. Someone who tried to learn how to talk to bears might get pretty good at it, especially if they were an earth pony to begin with, but they'd never be as good as somebody with a special talent for it."
"Every pony - and I only mean ponies this time; dragons and griffins and sea serpents don't work the same way - every pony has a special talent that's unique to them. With some ponies it's more like being good at chess or fashion or dancing, and with some ponies it's more like being able to talk to animals or cast a special spell nobody else can do, but everyone gets one. Most ponies start to figure out their special talents when they're a little older than me, and when they know what it is, they get a little picture on their flanks that represents it. The picture is called a cutie mark."
"You could do that?" she asks, intrigued. "Which kind would you pick? There's three. Technically four. Unicorns like me have horns and can do magic; earth ponies don't have horns and are strong and good at some kinds of things; pegasi don't have horns and do have wings and they can fly and manipulate the weather. And princesses are like all three kinds of ponies together, and they have horns and wings and can do magic and fly and manipulate the weather and are strong and good at earth pony things. But princesses are very rare and I don't know if they're a kind of pony in the same way the other three are."
"Unicorns do seem like a pretty good choice if you're interested in magic. But if I were you, I'd wait and find out if there are any records of any other kinds of creatures turning into ponies, first. If there are, then you could find out useful information like whether or not they got cutie marks and how it affected them if they did or didn't. I could look that up for you, if you want! I might need a trip to Canterlot to do it, but Canterlot's not that far away."
"But I still think it would be helpful to know about, because even if the your-kind-of-dragon part hasn't been done before, the nonpony-turning-into-pony part has intricacies that nonponies turning into other kinds of nonponies wouldn't have to deal with. It wouldn't be a definitive guide, but it would be a pretty good hint."
"We can use telekinesis," she floats a scroll to demonstrate, "and cast spells. Usually our horns and whatever we're doing magic to glow when we do magic; I'm just weird. Telekinesis is just about as simple as it looks, and spells can do all kinds of different things and work all kinds of different ways depending on the spell, but it usually comes down to 'concentrate on the spell you're casting in the right way and it happens'."
Compass Spell
Handy for lost ponies.
Ingredients
None
Tools
None
Procedure
Visualize a large compass lying flat on the ground, then cast. The image of the correctly oriented compass may be projected from your horn like a spotlight, or appear under your hooves, or guide you invisibly as a feeling telling you which way is north. With practice, you can learn to pick which manifestation you get.
"Oh, we have potions, but you don't have to be a unicorn to make them unless they need a spell cast on them at some point to work. Some of them aren't magical at all. You could say unicorn spells involve intentions, but I think it might be more accurate to say they involve... ideas. A compass spell uses the idea of a compass."
"Oh. Yes, I see what you mean. Unicorn magic has that sort of thing too, but only incidentally. Like when I was casting the spell to try to get Joy from wherever he went, I specified in my head that wherever Joy went is where I wanted the spell to look and dragons were what I wanted it to bring back. And all the safety stuff on top of that. It's a hard spell and it's not very good, but I didn't want to wait a week while I figured out how to invent a better one."
"It depends. Mostly it's a few seconds or less, depending how big and complicated the spell is. Some spells you don't just cast once and have done with, you have to actively keep them going, and those need your concentration and oomph for as long as you want them to go on, but that's not really the same thing as casting time; they still don't take all that long to start."
She scuffs a hoof on the floor and adds, "I could look up some unit systems if you'd rather talk in those, but I don't like them because they imply much more accuracy than they really represent. And offhoof I don't remember how most unicorns' total oomph carrying capacity compares with their rate of replenishment, but I think it might be complicated, like different unicorns have different ratios and casting big one-off spells has effects on replenishment rate that aren't consistent enough between unicorns or between castings for anypony to have figured them out completely yet. It would be lovely if there was a spell that let you just tell how much oomph a unicorn has, but I don't think anypony's invented one yet. Or if they have, it takes too much oomph for most ponies to want to bother with it."
"I'd draw a fiddly little circle specifying the spell I want to use - which matters not only because different spells do different things but also because you can't have the exact same spell active twice per caster simultaneously - and then I'd wave my hand like so," he waves his hand like so, "or something, I'd have to look up the exact power pull for whichever spell I settled on, and then I'd say the magic word, while concentrating on aiming at you in particular, and then there you'd be."
She points a wee hoof at the clock. It's a little cuckoo clock.
"The long fast pointer goes by one little mark per minute, and there are sixty minutes in an hour, and the short slow pointer goes by one of its big marks per hour, and there are twenty-four hours in a day. And a second is one-sixtieth of a minute."
"I don't know how well a unicorn spell will do at interfering with a summon," Kaylo says. "It'll be worth testing, anyway - under circumstances void of unicorn magic you can only go home from a summon if the summoner reverses the spell or dies. Well, or if someone does a break, but hardly anyone's any good at breaks."
"Well, maybe, but I think if I'm going to be visiting the world in three hours anyway it doesn't matter as much. I was going to say that he should go somewhere there aren't any dragonlike creatures nearby - would that be easy to do, or are there lots of dragons around where you were?"
Scribble scribble think think scribble look something up in a book scribble scribble think scribble.
"Hmm..." She frowns a tiny frown at the finished version of the second spell, then fetches a blank scroll and opens it up beside the first scroll and transcribes her notes more cleanly. They're not written as understandably as the compass spell in the textbook; subheadings include 'Safety safety safety' and 'What?' and 'Where?', with lists of fragmented sentences laying out relevant parameters.
"Yes. Teleport safety is its own thing, I don't need to re-list all of it - the spell would be worse if I tried to pay individual attention to every single thing, because then I might miss something. But most of the time when ponies teleport they're teleporting themselves and they can either see their destinations or are pretty familiar with them, so an interworld teleport needs extra attention to things like not sending you if something unexpectedly dangerous is going on where you would be put, and not dropping you on top of a table or another person or into a pond."
"I have this long list of open problems, and magic that can take a definition and use it to sort things that are not individually analyzed by the caster is an automatic fix for a bunch of them - maybe not half - and then the question is how exactly it goes about doing that, which subdivides like crazy, probably - I'm guessing, on both counts, I'll need to sit down with my list and you and go through it."
"Yeah, she summoned me and said to tell you that if you want to go home you need to go someplace that isn't near any," he raises a hand, "spell-confusing dragons or dragonlike creatures. If you aren't in a hurry though I'm gonna summon her in about three angles - hours - anyway I'm going to summon her soonish and you could talk to her then directly."
One hour into the three-hour interval, she sees him hanging out by the side of a pond, not doing much. As far as Blueberry can tell, there isn't anypony nearby, unless they are hiding at the bottom of the pond or something.
She casts her spell.
This time the cloud of smoke resembles billowing black glitter.
"...oh dear," says Blueberry. "You don't look much like a dragonlike creature either... but last time I thought that, it turned out to be shapeshifting. Are you a shapeshifted dragonlike creature? I can put you back where you came from without much trouble, but if you're not a shapeshifted dragonlike creature I want to find out what you are instead first, in case there's something wrong with the spell."
Blueberry comes back, leading a bigger, older pony with spiderweb marks on her flanks.
"I have a special talent for communication," she says to the duck. "Which means I can tell when creatures understand me, and I can usually guess how to get them to understand me, and I can understand them if they mean to be understood. My name's Cherry Cordial. I don't want to make trouble for you, but it's important for Blueberry to know if you're a dragonlike creature or not. The spell she used has a known flaw where it can accidentally grab the wrong person if the person it's looking for is near other people of similar species. If it can accidentally grab random sparkly ducks when it's looking for a dragon, that's a whole different thing. If you really don't want to answer, I can just tell Blueberry I couldn't talk to you and get her to send you back, but it'd cause a lot of trouble that could be avoided."
"Hi, Blueberry! I tried to get out of it but apparently if I'm gonna let you out of the ward, the headmaster's wife needs to check you out, that's only necessary the first time and shouldn't come up again. She just does a mind scan thing with green-group dragon magic, she won't look at anything besides whether you're dangerous. If you want to skip it I can send you home and we can just work in Equestria instead, she can't stop me from being summoned. Oh, and this is Aar Kithen, but he can't tell how old you are by looking, nobody except dragons is going to be able to do that unless they see more ponies, I kind of recommend not bringing it up."
"Keo's the only person who can do it at the moment," explains Kaylo. "Occasionally a dragon hatches with extra dragon magic and can do extra color-group-relevant things. Green groups are empaths, ones with a little extra are telepaths, ones with a lot extra are pretty arbitrarily mentally powerful. Aaaand she says she's done -" He turns to Aar Kithen, says some things in Leraal, gets a nod, and smudges the chalk. "There you go, she's all done, congratulations, you're certified safe."
"And moves 'em in other directions. It's faster than stairs, and in this building, less badly enchanted - don't go in the stairs unless you have enough oomph to teleport somewhere that is not the stairs while disoriented in space." He shuts the door and says, "Library," and the lift moves.
"Well, figuring out interworld transport seems like the most immediately practical thing. Whether or not unicorn spells can override wizard spells, and how to make a better unicorn spell so I can go back and forth between the worlds by myself without accidentally dragging any other ponies along."
"It's possible. But it's hard to tell, because the spell I used is so bad. It was originally supposed to be for moving large groups of ponies long distances - that's why it targets by species. I managed to get it narrowed down so it didn't try to grab all of the dragonlike creatures in the building, but now I think it would be a better idea to abandon it and invent one myself."
"Well... casting a spell depends on being familiar with what it's supposed to do. So I think I'm going to learn all about how wizardry does interworld transport first, and then figure out how I want my spell to do it, and see if I can make a spell that works how I want. I haven't done a lot of work in spell invention, so it might take a while."
Wizardry can do the following things interworld: scry, summon, and send. Scrying involves looking at things in other worlds, summoning involves pulling things from other worlds and putting them in Elcenia, and sending involves taking things that are in Elcenia and making them stop being there. Objects that are summoned or sent do not leave their relevant spells active once they've made the trip, but live creatures have "native world" as a property that continues to tie them to wherever they're from; an active summon or send must constantly work against that in order to continue working. Active summons may be broken, at least in theory (breaks are difficult); sends can't but only because their targets are not in places where wizarding spells may be cast. Active spells, if not broken, must end via either reversal or caster death.
She rereads the parts about summoning and sending a few times. Then she says, "Can I have something to write on and something to write on it with?"
"Are there any books that talk about the idea of where different worlds are in relation to each other?" she asks after a few minutes of this.
"...good question. When we look for someone specific it's a matter of being able to identify it through a unique description or personal experience, like, I've met you, I could go serve as a focus if somebody else wanted to summon you, if I were going to send somebody to your world I could put them in your library..."
"Is it necessary that they be different in a way that is not just being contiguous with different things? Like, Elcenia is all the stuff that you can get to by moving around through space from here, and your world is all the stuff you can get to by moving around through space from your library, and the two don't hook up unless you're doing interworld magic, and that's all?"
"It isn't quite all, though, is it? There are different kinds of magic and different shapes of planets in our worlds, and there must be some kind of reason for that. Even if it's just that worlds are a type of thing that can start off in a lot of different ways that end up producing different magic and things, that's still a reason. The more I understand what worlds are, the easier it is to make a spell for moving between them. As it is... I think I can probably make a spell for moving between Equestria and Elcenia specifically, with just what I know now, which is better than not having one at all but not as good as having one that generalizes easily to different worlds."
"The magic could be significantly explained by this world not having unicorns and yours not having the wizarding reservoir... but... my theory about how dragon and vampire shapeshifting works involves there being an extra little world sort of attached to this one... I wasn't conceptualizing it as near in any sense, just magically accessible in different ways than worlds like yours..."
"Okay, but seriously don't tell anyone, it'll wreck everything. I've been publishing research papers under a pseudonym for several years because I'm a hundred sixty and that's adolescent for dragons and no one will take me seriously if I do it as myself. I need this theory not to be too strongly connected with my real identity yet."
"Thought you might. Okay, so the theory is called Lialenan matter theory and it supposes that shapeshifting involves storing our alternative shapes in a semi-dormant state in an attached world-of-sorts that I named Lialen for mythology reasons. Right now I'm in my human form, but if I stay in it for a year and never turn back to my natural one in that time, I will find after that year that my natural shape has grown and healed from any injuries it had and so on. If I tuck away physical objects - like, if I shifted now, my clothes would go away with my human shape, they wouldn't be destroyed or anything - then they'll come back when I resume the form. Etcetera. Shifting is truly instantaneous once the intention to do it is formed correctly, like teleporting or summoning is when the spell is completed and unlike any spell that actually changes a thing itself - a color change takes a tiny fraction of a split to happen, but it still takes that period of time, for instance."
"It's species-relevant that you happen to be the only species that can deliberately turn into glowing creatures to be scried in Lialen - isn't it? Are you? It doesn't really get any more or less species-relevant depending on whether or not whoever thinks of it can find a dragon to talk to the dragon council about it for them, anyway."
"I mean - yes, it is species-relevant that that, but they're not set up to take requests from non-dragons. If you want to talk to them about something dragon-relevant you go through a dragon, and I don't want me and my dragony-ness too close to Lialen theory. They figure if you can't find any dragons to pass up the message it can't be that important."
"That's very silly of them," says Blueberry. "But I suppose I'm not likely to convince them of that. Anyway, a glowing spell shouldn't be too hard, I'll look one up when I get home. Ideally one that stays on once it's cast and doesn't need active maintenance, but can be turned off afterward. It would probably be inconvenient if you just went around glowing forever."
"A little bit. I mostly just use my dragon shape to fly and breathe fire occasionally, it wouldn't be that big a deal, but yes, one that you can turn off would improve the situation. When you're home can you also look up that stuff about other creatures turning into unicorns? Dragons don't get species-specific magic from, say, vampires if we turn into those, but since their magic is also shapeshifting it's hard to be sure why."
"Sometimes that'll fall apart - oh, you know what's a good example of that, there's this ultra-basic one-trick spell called the Lanfen trace, it makes the tip of your right forefinger leave a glowing white trail wherever you move it until you reverse the spell. If I shift while that's on, my natural form doesn't have fingers per se and the spell breaks."
"I'm not sure what kind of 'how' you mean - for devising one for oomph I'm going to design what I want oomph to look like, since it's not in discrete units like wizarding power I'm probably going to go with a metaphorical substance in a metaphorical graduated cylinder, and then while I have that spell on, if I look at a unicorn I will be able to literally see this cylinder however full it is. I'm probably going to use you as a baseline because I've met you, with enough leeway that if you suddenly doubled in oomph the spell would handle it - I'd make a new version if I needed to handle ranges bigger than that."
"Yes, that's what I wanted to know - how it presents the information. If it matters to your spell, unicorn magic comes in colours - every unicorn has a specific colour that their horn glows when they're doing magic. My horn doesn't usually glow, but when it does it looks like this." She concentrates for a moment and a pale blue glowing aura appears around her horn; it doesn't quite just emit light, because if that was all, the colour wouldn't be so clear. "So if you made your substance look like the glow, you'd get a little bit of extra information about what the unicorn's magic looked like. The colour doesn't make any practical difference, but it seems tidy to show it anyway."
"Well, it's usually hard to tell. Most ponies get their cutie mark the first time they realize what their talent is, and especially if it's a magic talent and not something like being good at chess, there's no good way to tell the difference between not being able to do it beforehand and just not having done it yet. Maybe if I was an ordinary pony I wouldn't have found out I could make my horn not glow until I was eight, but here I am doing lots of magic before then."
"Good for Clover. I'm stuck with my aunt until I run out of ways to piss her off, pretty much - my parents wrote up this eccentric will and I only inherit any of their money if she bails on paying for my education with it, so I'm dragging it out as long as I can or at least until I have some kind of income set up that doesn't involve her."