fandomhigh | Library, Friday

Entry tags:

library

Library, Friday

Today a dragon sat behind the desk, reading a novel. Given her current state Lucille felt she was excused from doing much work today, but at least the library was open. She did her best not to get chocolate and the remains of cotton candy clouds over the books. Trying out her wings had been a bad idea.

[Open! ~~Wait for OCD.~~ OCD is up for your library needs.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If that's your thing.

Obi-Wan... was still there. He had only left briefly last night to ensure the eopies were all right, and then he'd returned.

True, the situation outside was rather more silly than disastrous - so far - but it wasn't as if he had much better to do. There was a crisis on, after all.

Well, Tali had managed to find the book, The Elements of Harmony by Star Swirl the Bearded, sometime late in the evening yesterday, and gotten to work on the translation project right away.

That had turned out to take longer than anticipated, and she'd ended up actually having to cobble together a dedicated computer to do it, but that part was easy. Hacking her translator program to decipher a language it had no points of reference for whatsoever was a bit more demanding.

There'd been a lot of poking at the computer, and frantically typing in commands on her omni-tool, and muttered half-complaint half-encouragements of "Come on, you bosh'tet, you can do this!" at the translation computer. (She could have hacked the translator program code in her sleep, but adjusting it to something 21st-century human tech could handle took a bit more work. And frustration. Honestly, humans, get with the rest of the galaxy's times already.)

The one hitch in the plan: the only way she'd been able to get the program to work with the available processing power was to have it learn contextually. Which meant it might have to skip words or phrases and come back to fill in the blanks later, once it had learned some more.

She was sitting half slouched over at a table next to the computer, monitoring the translation progress, compiling the translated phrases into her omni-tool where she could organize them, and feeling like she'd give anything for a dextro triple espresso after being up all night.

"Hang on," she said, and then had to pause to yawn. "I think I've got something."

"There are six Elements of Harmony," she read out loud, "but only five are known: Kindness, Laughter, Generosity, Honesty and Loyalty. The sixth is a complete mystery. It is said, the last known location of the five elements was in the ancient castle of the royal pony sisters."

She tapped a few more commands into her omni-tool, made a curious noise, and reached for the book to take a look at it.

"And there's something else here, at the bottom of the page, that looks like it's handwritten . . . no, I guess it would be hoof-written, wouldn't it? "The sixth element is Magic, which ties the other five together and allows them to release their power. The Elements were rediscovered by Twilight Sparkle and her pony friends when Nightmare Moon escaped from exile and attempted to conquer Equestria. They are now safely locked away in the Canterlot Royal Treasury with the other crown jewels of Equestria."

Obi-Wan heaved what had to be his fiftieth sigh of the week. "I don't suppose anyone has Professor Pie's phone number...?" he said. "Or any other Equestrian?"

He already knew the answer was 'no'. He just had to sigh about it.

"So the real Elements of Harmony are locked away in some Equestrian palace?" Karla checked. "That's going to be a right pain in the ass."

Although...hmm. Maybe they didn't need them. Or, at least, not those things specifically...

Karla frowned, peering over Tali's shoulder. Because who needed personal space, that was why.

"Wait, you can read that?" Sorry, she was a Queen of a magic land, not a technological one. She had no idea what Tali was doing with her Omni-Tool there. "Hold on a second, let me write that down. What did you just say?"

"I can't read it, but the computer can," replied Tali, always (well, almost always so long as the geth weren't involved) willing to give technology due credit.

She used her omni-tool to project a copy of the text onto the table in front of her. "So the sixth element is Magic, but it's starting to look like we might have to break into the Equestrian royal treasury somehow?"

Karla called in a notebook and pencil and started scrawling down the basic gist of the information the book was providing. "So, Laughter, Generosity, Kindness, Honesty, Loyalty, and Magic," she murmured. "These are some kind of enchanted relics or something?"

Not that it mattered much, considering they were a world away. "I wonder if we can get a portal to Equestria. Make a request to borrow them. Or plan a heist to take them. Whichever seems easiest."

They'd return them, of course! Just after this Discord creature was dealt with.

Armed with a translation of the text and mounting frustration, Karla settled down in an empty corner of the library to think, calling in heaps of her old books on Craft. She knew she'd learned something about substituting one thing for another in spells--no, not which herbs could be safely swapped in various potions, this herbal was definitely not the book she was looking for--but using one bit of magic for something else.

Several hours of reading later, she slammed her book closed and stood up on the table. "That's it!" she yelled triumphantly. "The answer is sympathetic magic!"

"There's probably a joke to be made there, but I'm too tired to --" a yawn interrupted Tali mid-sentence, thereby emphasizing her point -- "make it. But since magic isn't exactly my strong point, I should just go take a nap. Maybe right here. Here's good."

What? Someone had to look after the computer in case it turned up anything else that might be useful.

"You rest," Karla said, calling in a blanket and pillow and floated them over to where Tali was sitting. "Get comfortable. I'm pretty sure I've got the rest of this, but the rest of that book might be useful."

Karla had become such a mom over the years.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Library, Friday

Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.

Re: Research.