Jammed in my head. Had to get rid of it. Enjoy?
Fascinating.
In the deep hours of the night, the cavernous library was
dark and still. Overhead, the bright
waxing moon cast its light through the roof-spanning skylights, but the height
of the towering shelves created deep valleys of darkness.
Through the stacks moved a tall, bipedal figure, moving with
calm and silent efficiency across the deep-pile carpeting. Weaving among the maze of shelving, it came
to a halt before an empty spot on one shelf, and a long-fingered hand raised
into the light, revealing itself to hold a book which fit perfectly into the
empty space. Said hand moved to the adjoining
book and removed it with a smooth, practiced grace that made caution
unnecessary, despite the age and fragility of the tome.
Mission accomplished, the figure turned to retraced its
steps through the library, but paused as an unanticipated sound was perceived
by its sharp ears. The figure remained
still for a moment, weighing options, then changed course towards the most
likely vector of the anomaly, moving with unhurried stealth but no real overt
caution.
The sound revealed itself to be accompanied by a dim
light. Just around the nearest corner,
the figure paused. At this range, the
anomalous sound resolved into a muffled voice.
Young, female, strained, the figure judged.
“…almost…. Just a …. Little… ugh! More….”
Additional sounds, filtered for reverberation and
distortion, seemed most likely to indicate that the owner of the voice was
climbing the high, freestanding bookshelf.
A hazardous course of action. If
certain random factors were to resolve in an unfortunate way, the young female
might well be at risk of harm. Such risk,
if realized, would necessitate the figure revealing itself, with wide-ranging unforeseeable
consequences.
A sudden creak, accompanied by a frightened “oh oh,” signaled
that random chance had indeed tended towards maximum entropy in this case. Aural analysis left no doubt that the tall
shelf had tipped its center of gravity past the perimeter of its base and had
begun accelerating onto a trajectory that would terminate upon striking the adjoining
shelf… or upon knocking down said adjoining shelf, and potentially crushing the
young female beneath it.
The potential “chain of dominoes” effect upon the rest of
the shelving in this section would also be unfortunate, although potentially
interesting from a distance.
Such analysis required less time to perform than describe. The towering shelf had only barely begun its
acceleration as the figure slipped quickly around the corner, leaving its book
tucked neatly into a handy space between shelves, and took several swift steps
down the length of the aisle. One long
arm reached up to plant a hand against the central vertical support, at the
highest practical point in order to maximize leverage against gravitational
acceleration, while the other made a long calculated arc and hooked the young
female away from the shelf she was beginning to fall from and hugged her
tightly against the figure’s chest.
One leg swept back to the optimum bracing angle and dug a
foot into the floor, as the other remained braced beneath for lifting
power. For long moment, strength and
calculation struggled with gravity and inertia.
From the upper shelves, a few heavy tomes fell, one of them bursting
rather explosively on impact. But with
inertia halted, gravity alone proved insufficient, and a carefully calculated
push pivoted the shelf’s center of gravity back inside its base perimeter. The shelf tipped back towards, and then past,
vertical, threatening to topple the other way, but a swift tug at the correct
moment was sufficient to settle the heavy shelf back towards center, rocking
like an inverted pendulum. Several books
–did- fall from the far side of the upper shelves, judging from aural analysis,
but serious harm had been averted.
Returning to a vertical stance, the figure finally free to
turn its attention to the young female whose back was still pressed against his
front, dangling from the curve of his arm.
Said young female eventuated to be a young unicorn filly, whose horn was
still emitting the modest red glow (of nearly the exact perfect amplitude and
wavelength for a covert mission in low-light conditions, he noted) that he had
noticed just earlier. The light made
ascertaining the color of her coat a dubious exercise, but other clues made
that unnecessary. The filly’s identity
was not, he mused, much of a surprise.
“Twilight Sparkle,” he said in a measured, slightly gravelly
voice. “That was an unwise course of
action.”
The unicorn, for her part, appeared to still be catching up
with events. Indeed, her horrified
attention was fixated on the books that had struck the floor. “Oh no, oh no, oh nonononono! I broke a BOOK! I broke a BUNCH of books! Princess Celestia is going to banish me to
the moon! No, she’ll throw me in a
dungeon, and then banish the DUNGEON to the moon! With me IN it! Ohhhh, and she’s going to be SO disappointed
in me, and I know she told me to stop staying up all night reading but I just
couldn’t stop reading the third volume of the biography of Starswirl the
Bearded and when I hit the end I just HAD to come get the fourth volume because
I was NEVER going to be able to sleep without knowing what happened but I knew
I couldn’t wake anyone up just to help me get a book and I was SURE I could do
it myself but now she’s going to be so DISAPPOINTED in me and that’s even worse
than when she’s MAD at me and I BROKE A BOOOOOOK!!!!!!”
That last was delivered in a strangled wail of despair that
still stayed at a volume low enough to avoid being noticed by any theoretical
authority figures which might for some reason be roaming the library at this
hour of the night. Young Twilight, he
noted a bit dryly, was possessed of a rather impressive lung capacity for a
child with such a sedentary lifestyle.
He bent to place Twilight gently back in contact with the
ground. “Books,” he noted, “can be
repaired. After all, what is truly
important is not the books themselves, but the information which they
contain. Although as a fellow
bibliophile, I cannot entirely disagree with you. To see books needlessly damaged is…
distressing. Even if backup copies
exist.”
“But! But!” Twilight
stammered in protest, turning to look at him.
“Hurting a book is like kicking a puppy or a kitten, but even worse because a book can’t
run away and… and… and….” Her eyes
slowly travelled up from his knees to his face, growing rounder with each
millimeter to an anatomically improbable diameter by the time they made contact
with his. “Who… what… are you?”
Moving slowly in order to avoid spooking her further, he
dropped into what his old friend would have called a “catcher’s crouch,”
reducing his probably intimidating height.
“I am a friend of Princess Celestia’s, which is how I know your name,
Twilight Sparkle. She speaks of you
often, and usually with pride and affection.
Which leads me to conclude that your fears of banishment to the moon are
rather exaggerated.” He felt the tiny
ghost of a smile cross his normally impassive features. “I am a castaway, whom Her Highness was kind
enough to provide with a place to stay and access to her library, albeit after
hours, while I research a means of returning to my home. My name is Spock.”
She stared at him long enough that he began to wonder just
how badly the series of shocks had affected her. She hardly moved, indeed barely even blinked,
for an improbable length of time. When
she spoke, her first question caught him completely by surprise, although he
later concluded that he really should not have been.
“What’s a ‘bibliophile’?”
……………
She trotted along at his knee as they traversed the library,
asking questions as quickly as her inexperienced but impressive intellect could
generate them (which was more quickly than she was capable of verbalizing them,
a bottleneck which obviously frustrated her).
“You said you were a castaway. A
castaway is someone whose ship broke and left them stranded, right? But you must have come from an awfully long
way away because I’ve never seen anything like you in any of my books and I’ve
read most of the volumes on major life forms in Equestria and you would really
stand out. So where did you come from?”
He paused and looked down at her innocent, earnest
expression… and found himself unable to resist indulging the sense of humor
that Doctor McCoy would have insisted he did not posess. Lifting his free hand, he pointed up towards
the skylight… and waited.
Her eyes followed, and rounded improbably again after a
gratifyingly short pause (such a quick mind on one so young was, while
potentially exhausting, undeniably a pleasure).
“The MOON? But that means that
the speculations about ecological conditions on the moon are actually all wrong
since you can obviously breathe our air and move comfortably in this
gravity. Was it a case of parallel
evolution or—“
“No,” he interrupted her gently when a raised palm proved
insufficient to the task. “Further.”
It should not have been amusing to watch her head tilt
further and further back, as she stared up through the skylight at the
brilliant stars, until she toppled onto her hindquarters with a thump that
failed to pry her grasp from the firmament.
But it was, despite the fact that he would never had admitted it to the
doctor.
“The STARS?” she whispered.
Her expression was easy to read, exhibiting a sensation he recalled
fondly himself – that of one’s mental horizons suddenly and unexpectedly expanding,
of unprecedented vistas unfolding before the mind’s eye too quickly to be
grasped. That bright, shining moment of –possibility-,
when limits and constraints momentarily ceased to exist. Such moments came to him all too rarely now,
but the vicarious experience of seeing it through her eyes was in some ways
even better. The thought of becoming a
teacher again was certainly taking on increased appeal.
She pried her eyes away from the stars with an obvious
effort and looked at him again, struggling to enunciate the first of what would
certainly be a lifetime’s worth of questions – and halted almost painfully as
he raised a hand for silence.
“Perhaps we should first retire to my quarters,” he
suggested, suppressing a smile, “and begin repairing this book.” He gently gestured with the badly damaged
tome, bringing a shamed blush to her cheeks.
“Oh. Yes. Right.
We should do that first.” Her
crestfallen expression tempted him to laughter with an intensity he had not
felt since… since the last time he had been in the presence of his
friends. It felt good.
“Of course, I’m sure I can answer some questions while I
work. It is, after all, only logical to
develop a talent for multitasking.” She
brightened like Engineer Scott being presented with a new engine upgrade to
experiment with, and fell into step beside him, sparkling with questions like
her namesake again.
There was a line of dialogue, he recalled, from an ancient
Earth film which his mother had been quite fond of. Something about “the start of a beautiful
friendship….”
Fascinating.
In the deep hours of the night, the cavernous library was
dark and still. Overhead, the bright
waxing moon cast its light through the roof-spanning skylights, but the height
of the towering shelves created deep valleys of darkness.
Through the stacks moved a tall, bipedal figure, moving with
calm and silent efficiency across the deep-pile carpeting. Weaving among the maze of shelving, it came
to a halt before an empty spot on one shelf, and a long-fingered hand raised
into the light, revealing itself to hold a book which fit perfectly into the
empty space. Said hand moved to the adjoining
book and removed it with a smooth, practiced grace that made caution
unnecessary, despite the age and fragility of the tome.
Mission accomplished, the figure turned to retraced its
steps through the library, but paused as an unanticipated sound was perceived
by its sharp ears. The figure remained
still for a moment, weighing options, then changed course towards the most
likely vector of the anomaly, moving with unhurried stealth but no real overt
caution.
The sound revealed itself to be accompanied by a dim
light. Just around the nearest corner,
the figure paused. At this range, the
anomalous sound resolved into a muffled voice.
Young, female, strained, the figure judged.
“…almost…. Just a …. Little… ugh! More….”
Additional sounds, filtered for reverberation and
distortion, seemed most likely to indicate that the owner of the voice was
climbing the high, freestanding bookshelf.
A hazardous course of action. If
certain random factors were to resolve in an unfortunate way, the young female
might well be at risk of harm. Such risk,
if realized, would necessitate the figure revealing itself, with wide-ranging unforeseeable
consequences.
A sudden creak, accompanied by a frightened “oh oh,” signaled
that random chance had indeed tended towards maximum entropy in this case. Aural analysis left no doubt that the tall
shelf had tipped its center of gravity past the perimeter of its base and had
begun accelerating onto a trajectory that would terminate upon striking the adjoining
shelf… or upon knocking down said adjoining shelf, and potentially crushing the
young female beneath it.
The potential “chain of dominoes” effect upon the rest of
the shelving in this section would also be unfortunate, although potentially
interesting from a distance.
Such analysis required less time to perform than describe. The towering shelf had only barely begun its
acceleration as the figure slipped quickly around the corner, leaving its book
tucked neatly into a handy space between shelves, and took several swift steps
down the length of the aisle. One long
arm reached up to plant a hand against the central vertical support, at the
highest practical point in order to maximize leverage against gravitational
acceleration, while the other made a long calculated arc and hooked the young
female away from the shelf she was beginning to fall from and hugged her
tightly against the figure’s chest.
One leg swept back to the optimum bracing angle and dug a
foot into the floor, as the other remained braced beneath for lifting
power. For long moment, strength and
calculation struggled with gravity and inertia.
From the upper shelves, a few heavy tomes fell, one of them bursting
rather explosively on impact. But with
inertia halted, gravity alone proved insufficient, and a carefully calculated
push pivoted the shelf’s center of gravity back inside its base perimeter. The shelf tipped back towards, and then past,
vertical, threatening to topple the other way, but a swift tug at the correct
moment was sufficient to settle the heavy shelf back towards center, rocking
like an inverted pendulum. Several books
–did- fall from the far side of the upper shelves, judging from aural analysis,
but serious harm had been averted.
Returning to a vertical stance, the figure finally free to
turn its attention to the young female whose back was still pressed against his
front, dangling from the curve of his arm.
Said young female eventuated to be a young unicorn filly, whose horn was
still emitting the modest red glow (of nearly the exact perfect amplitude and
wavelength for a covert mission in low-light conditions, he noted) that he had
noticed just earlier. The light made
ascertaining the color of her coat a dubious exercise, but other clues made
that unnecessary. The filly’s identity
was not, he mused, much of a surprise.
“Twilight Sparkle,” he said in a measured, slightly gravelly
voice. “That was an unwise course of
action.”
The unicorn, for her part, appeared to still be catching up
with events. Indeed, her horrified
attention was fixated on the books that had struck the floor. “Oh no, oh no, oh nonononono! I broke a BOOK! I broke a BUNCH of books! Princess Celestia is going to banish me to
the moon! No, she’ll throw me in a
dungeon, and then banish the DUNGEON to the moon! With me IN it! Ohhhh, and she’s going to be SO disappointed
in me, and I know she told me to stop staying up all night reading but I just
couldn’t stop reading the third volume of the biography of Starswirl the
Bearded and when I hit the end I just HAD to come get the fourth volume because
I was NEVER going to be able to sleep without knowing what happened but I knew
I couldn’t wake anyone up just to help me get a book and I was SURE I could do
it myself but now she’s going to be so DISAPPOINTED in me and that’s even worse
than when she’s MAD at me and I BROKE A BOOOOOOK!!!!!!”
That last was delivered in a strangled wail of despair that
still stayed at a volume low enough to avoid being noticed by any theoretical
authority figures which might for some reason be roaming the library at this
hour of the night. Young Twilight, he
noted a bit dryly, was possessed of a rather impressive lung capacity for a
child with such a sedentary lifestyle.
He bent to place Twilight gently back in contact with the
ground. “Books,” he noted, “can be
repaired. After all, what is truly
important is not the books themselves, but the information which they
contain. Although as a fellow
bibliophile, I cannot entirely disagree with you. To see books needlessly damaged is…
distressing. Even if backup copies
exist.”
“But! But!” Twilight
stammered in protest, turning to look at him.
“Hurting a book is like kicking a puppy or a kitten, but even worse because a book can’t
run away and… and… and….” Her eyes
slowly travelled up from his knees to his face, growing rounder with each
millimeter to an anatomically improbable diameter by the time they made contact
with his. “Who… what… are you?”
Moving slowly in order to avoid spooking her further, he
dropped into what his old friend would have called a “catcher’s crouch,”
reducing his probably intimidating height.
“I am a friend of Princess Celestia’s, which is how I know your name,
Twilight Sparkle. She speaks of you
often, and usually with pride and affection.
Which leads me to conclude that your fears of banishment to the moon are
rather exaggerated.” He felt the tiny
ghost of a smile cross his normally impassive features. “I am a castaway, whom Her Highness was kind
enough to provide with a place to stay and access to her library, albeit after
hours, while I research a means of returning to my home. My name is Spock.”
She stared at him long enough that he began to wonder just
how badly the series of shocks had affected her. She hardly moved, indeed barely even blinked,
for an improbable length of time. When
she spoke, her first question caught him completely by surprise, although he
later concluded that he really should not have been.
“What’s a ‘bibliophile’?”
……………
She trotted along at his knee as they traversed the library,
asking questions as quickly as her inexperienced but impressive intellect could
generate them (which was more quickly than she was capable of verbalizing them,
a bottleneck which obviously frustrated her).
“You said you were a castaway. A
castaway is someone whose ship broke and left them stranded, right? But you must have come from an awfully long
way away because I’ve never seen anything like you in any of my books and I’ve
read most of the volumes on major life forms in Equestria and you would really
stand out. So where did you come from?”
He paused and looked down at her innocent, earnest
expression… and found himself unable to resist indulging the sense of humor
that Doctor McCoy would have insisted he did not posess. Lifting his free hand, he pointed up towards
the skylight… and waited.
Her eyes followed, and rounded improbably again after a
gratifyingly short pause (such a quick mind on one so young was, while
potentially exhausting, undeniably a pleasure).
“The MOON? But that means that
the speculations about ecological conditions on the moon are actually all wrong
since you can obviously breathe our air and move comfortably in this
gravity. Was it a case of parallel
evolution or—“
“No,” he interrupted her gently when a raised palm proved
insufficient to the task. “Further.”
It should not have been amusing to watch her head tilt
further and further back, as she stared up through the skylight at the
brilliant stars, until she toppled onto her hindquarters with a thump that
failed to pry her grasp from the firmament.
But it was, despite the fact that he would never had admitted it to the
doctor.
“The STARS?” she whispered.
Her expression was easy to read, exhibiting a sensation he recalled
fondly himself – that of one’s mental horizons suddenly and unexpectedly expanding,
of unprecedented vistas unfolding before the mind’s eye too quickly to be
grasped. That bright, shining moment of –possibility-,
when limits and constraints momentarily ceased to exist. Such moments came to him all too rarely now,
but the vicarious experience of seeing it through her eyes was in some ways
even better. The thought of becoming a
teacher again was certainly taking on increased appeal.
She pried her eyes away from the stars with an obvious
effort and looked at him again, struggling to enunciate the first of what would
certainly be a lifetime’s worth of questions – and halted almost painfully as
he raised a hand for silence.
“Perhaps we should first retire to my quarters,” he
suggested, suppressing a smile, “and begin repairing this book.” He gently gestured with the badly damaged
tome, bringing a shamed blush to her cheeks.
“Oh. Yes. Right.
We should do that first.” Her
crestfallen expression tempted him to laughter with an intensity he had not
felt since… since the last time he had been in the presence of his
friends. It felt good.
“Of course, I’m sure I can answer some questions while I
work. It is, after all, only logical to
develop a talent for multitasking.” She
brightened like Engineer Scott being presented with a new engine upgrade to
experiment with, and fell into step beside him, sparkling with questions like
her namesake again.
There was a line of dialogue, he recalled, from an ancient
Earth film which his mother had been quite fond of. Something about “the start of a beautiful
friendship….”