Follows A Little Spark 24

“Someone’s fucking with me.”
>Twilight looks at you as you drop the box of talon parts on the table.
>”Why do you say that?”
“Those motors we assembled earlier?”
>You gesture to the neat row of them along one side of the desk.
“I found their parts sitting outside my door yesterday evening. No explanation, after all this time with it tied up. Now when I go down there, the mare at the desk was more than happy to hand this over right away. Totally different mare than usual, but I don’t think the smithy staff has changed at all. So, I say again, someone’s fucking with me.”
>”But who would do that?”
“Blueblood, I think. From my preliminary investigation I mean. I need to confront him sometime, before something weirder happens. I’m pretty sure he’s telling ponies to stop working with me. Well, except today, I guess. I don’t even know.”
>”I could-”
“No. Don’t. I want to handle it myself. I just haven’t had the time lately.”
>She stares at you, her head just barely visible over the edge of the box from where you stand. “If you insist.”
“I do. But with these pieces, we should have everything. You ready?”
>”Lay it all out.”
>You start unpacking the box.
>One ring, about the size of your own palm, with teeth on the outside.
>Pieces to make an assembly for the back of the hand, including a smaller, thicker ring with many holes around its edge for wires.
>Finally, a series of smaller pieces, combining to form a single talon of the claw.
>This last set glowed magenta, and soon three duplicate pieces sat beside it.
“Here, lets make this fun.”
>You take out your phone and put it on the benchtop, flipping to its stopwatch.
“How fast can you assemble one?”
>Twilight grins at you as you remove the now-empty box from the table, then her magic’s glow extends to all the frame pieces and half the motors on the table.
>When they lift off its surface, you hit the stopwatch.
>In that magenta field, all the parts align in a configuration similar to the final assembly.
>Then the entire formation contracts. Every single motor slots into place at once, followed by every frame piece locking into place with each other in one fluid movement.
>The few fasteners required outside the tabs and slots slip into place from every direction at the same time.
>The now fully-assembled talons float back down to the tabletop.
>It takes you a moment to react.
“Heh.”
>”What?”
“Poetry in motion.”
>Twilight smiles, then looks to the tabletop beside you. “So how long did it take?”
>You slap the phone’s screen, but it’s far too late.
“Shit, I didn’t stop it. Too lost in what you were doing.”
>She laughs, then shakes her head. “Seriously, Anon.”
“Your work’s just that beautiful. Now I gotta complete all the connections. That’ll take a lot longer than your magnificent display.”
>As you flip your new soldering iron on, she comes around the table to your side.
>”That’s fine. Human magic is interesting.”
“It’s not magic, it’s electricity to make heat, melting metal.”
>She nudges your thigh with the side of her head, prompting you to tousle her mane.
>”It’s your hands, Anon, how sure you are when you use your tools. It’s magic when you do it.”
>The two of you had designed this test article with accessibility in mind, and doing all the electrical work while it was fully assembled had been the plan from the beginning.
>It had been years since you needed to solder anything, so you had to reacquaint yourself with best practices, on top of getting the hang of a handmade iron.
>You only burnt yourself twice!
>Twilight continued to prove useful, able to hold wires to parts, either at any angle needed, while you worked with your iron and solder.
>After around an hour, the completed piece sat on the table, connected to a power pack you made the night before.
>An open socket on the back of the hand is exposed, surrounded by a ring of wire ends.
“Alright, ready when you are.”
>Twilight telekinetically inserted a small crystal into the center of the ring, to be the focus of the spell.
>You kick your stool out of the way to crouch beside her, so you’re looking at the claw from the same angle she is.
“Alright, just to be safe, lets go over what happens if we messed up.”
>”If your connections are bad, some motors won’t work, that’s simple enough. The portion of the spell controlling the motors extends only to the surrounding ring; it’ll just be magically connecting the motors with the power source, and determining how much power is transferred, based on what I tell it mentally. If my magic’s bad, some position feedback won’t work, and we won’t recognize that until I try to use it.”
“There’s no risk of messing up the thing letting you control it mentally?”
>She gives you a flat look. “I’ve cast spells that use that connection many times, Anon. It’s one of the most fundamental spells in advanced magic. Flying tortoise, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, just making sure. What if our design was wrong? What happens if it, uh, gets a mind of its own?”
>”If we overestimated our connection limits? The core of its identity will be formed by the caster’s ideas of what it is. So if we leave it, it’ll try to do... hand things? Grabbing objects, moving them, stuff like that. Something this complex would need to learn how to work itself, so we’ll have plenty of time to stop it.”
“No danger to you, through the link you make with it?”
>”If it gets a life of its own, that link will fail to form in the first place. Scholars still debate on why that happens; this isn’t a very popular field, due to how complex the spell is, and many mages are reluctant to study failure modes. The current leading theory is the mental bridge is tangled and ineffective due to the sheer number of control channels needed; this process may be how it gets its own mind in the first place. What this has to do with the intelligence-boosting effects on magically saturated animals is still in question, it’s just known they’re related.”
“As long as you’ll be fine, I’m happy. I got my scare out of your magic yesterday.”
>You wrap an arm around her midsection, pulling her close to you to steady her. If the spell took too much out of her again, you’d be ready.
>She turns her head away from you, though. “Anon, I told you it’s too soon for… this degree of familiarity. I should wait.”
“Does it make you happy when I do?”
>”Well, yes, but-”
“That’s enough for me.”
>She snorts at this, then returns her attention to the claw. Her horn starts glowing, as does the crystal inside the claw’s central socket. She closes her eyes, and you can hear her breathing faster. Then, suddenly, she stops.
>You look away from her to the claw. The crystal in the center now emits a very faint golden glow.
>As you’re watching it, the tip of one talon twitches.
“Oh shit, you did it! We did it!”
>You squeeze her tighter to you with the arm around her, while grabbing the claw with your other hand.
>She turns in your grip to hug you back, drawing your attention down.
>Her eyes are shining, matching her huge smile. “I told you it’d work.”
“Yeah, yeah you did. I should know by now not to doubt you.”
>She laughs. “I’d appreciate that.”
“You said this crystal was too small to hold any magic reservoir, right?”
>”Yes, so we will have to recast the spell when it runs down. It wasn’t that difficult though. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Alright, here, let me put it on.”
>You gently grab her closer wing, which she helpfully extends. Threading the claw’s thin straps between her feathers carefully, you eventually cinch its base against the end of the limb.
“Try it?”
>”I’m still trying to get the hang of it, give me a minute.”
>She’s only moving one of the talons, testing different angles and orientations. You watch it track around the claw’s main ring, rotating into an opposed position then to the other side of the row of digits, and back to its starting position again.
>As she’s working on learning how it works you study her wing.
“Hey Twilight, can you teach me about how this thing works? I’ve been thinking of artificial body parts lately as a natural next step from these hands, but I don’t know how these wings work. Back home, the wings humans made for vehicles were fixed in place, and just dealt with lift passively.”
>She furrows her brows while focusing on the claw, but her voice doesn’t sound strained when she answers you. “They generate lift in what I imagine is a similar manner, for one. The secret is in the feathers, obviously. Remiges – these wing feathers – have a couple special properties. The last segment of the wing’s core limb, the bit you strapped this claw to, the biggest feathers coming off that are the primaries. Each one can be individually positioned. Pegasi have incredible ranges of motion with them, so you’ll see them use them for non-flight purposes occasionally, like gestures, or attempting to grasp very light objects. Their motion is important with flight, and lets us do things like change the wing’s shape, increase or decrease drag at certain angles, and so on. The ones closer to my body in that same plane are secondaries, they form a lot of the wing’s lift-generating shape. Unlike the primaries, I can’t move them individually. These feathers are covered by the smaller tectrices on top that help fill out the shape and smooth airflow, which would be involved in the lift generation you mentioned.”
>She’s able to move all four talons at once now, and is running through different grip configurations, though every once and awhile your prodding elicits a flinch that interrupts her practice. “How did humans make flight work with fixed wings? How did you take off?”
“You could think of it like getting a running start. Get moving fast enough for the lift to carry you off the ground; we had engines that generated the thrust for that on their own, things that worked a bit like giant fans. Well, for propellers, at least. Jets were more complicated. It’d be wrong to say the wings were entirely fixed; wings had flaps that could change their shape, but they never actually flapped like yours, at least.”
>You think on the problem more as you watch her work the claw.
“Honestly, I think rotors might be better for artificial wings, but they’d only work in a matching set. I’m going to need some notes on anatomy, things like body width, neck length, and head range of motion. Can’t have tiltrotor ponies decapitating themselves. I’m sure you got some information on that in your library.”
>”They’d lose some body language pegasi look to, without primary feathers. And it’d be hard to fold the wings with the big rotor blades.”
“Nah, we can kill two- okay, that’s not a great turn of phrase. We can solve both those problems with a single solution; back home we had helicopters that could fold their rotor blades. If the user can control blade positions individually through their whole range, that should solve both problems. Think three blades would be enough?”
>“For the basics, yeah. Foldable rotors. Human technology is incredible.”
>She squirms out of your arm and turns her side to the table, extending her wing out over it. It takes her some time to get her extended wing in a good position, but she eventually gets the claws near some of the motors slated for the other of the claw’s pair. Slowly, and delicately, she closes the talons around one motor.
>When she tries to lift it, the motor slips out of her grasp.
>She grits her teeth and tries again.
>She doesn’t get the motor off the table until her fourth attempt.
>You’re hiding a grin behind one hand.
“There you go! You weren’t kidding when you said it’d take practice.
>”Shut up.”
“Hey, I’m not making fun of you. I suppose it would take some time to learn how to use an unfamiliar appendage. You got the hang of that way faster than I’d thought.”
>“It’s easier with the kinesthetic feedback, you were smart to design for that. All feedback’s working, by the way. It’s a little strange trying to grab something with no tactile feedback, though.”
“That would require a significantly more complex design, one I’m not sure how we’d implement. Even if we could provide the technological basis, that’d still put us way over the control limit. Practice and a little knowledge of what you’re grabbing should suffice. Just don’t crush anything.”
>”Easier said than done, I think. I’ll learn.”
>You look at her fiddling with small parts on your desk, tongue-tip sticking out slightly with her concentration.
>She is, you realize, just as adorable as when you first saw her, even after you’d stopped thinking of her as similar to cute animals from back home.
>Something about how she approached things, her earnest enthusiasm, her dedication to learning, and her interest in just about every skill you valued in yourself.
>She better give it all a good think, once she leaves for the Crystal Empire tomorrow. Damn her dumb timetables. Maybe this could work out after all.