Follows A Little Spark 15&16

>You have been an exceptionally efficient pony, today.
>It had only taken you a few nights to work through your post-return backlog. The palace’s administrative wing buzzes with fully optimized productivity. You're all caught up on paperwork that actually needed your attention.
>Better than caught up, even; you have some free time.
>The palace’s main areas are always quiet around noon. For a couple hours, most activity ceases, in the span between Celestia’s private court hours and hearing public petitions.
>This makes it the perfect time for a stroll.
>Your hoof-beats echo through the stone halls of the palace’s main floor, a solitary sound with no others to join you in your chorus of movement.
>The place is deserted.
>That’s fine, it meant nopony would bother you with other minor problems only you could address.
>Sometimes you regretted making yourself so valuable to the state machinery.
>Then you realize how much smoother everything runs with you here.
>Nothing wrong with a little pride in one’s work.
>As you round a corner, you see a purple bundle of anxiety dancing in place at an intersection.
>So much for nopony needing your help.
“Your Serene Highness, may I do anything to help you?”
>Twilight stops her shuffling and turns to look at you in surprise, as if she wasn’t expecting anyone to show. “Oh, Raven! Have you seen Anonymous around? We were supposed to meet this morning, but he never showed.”
>You note the small but stuffed saddlebags she wears.
“Your Highness now makes deliveries to the ambassador in exile?”
>She shuffles in place and takes a step back, looking at her own bags. “Oh, this is for a project we’re working on. We’ve been working together a lot lately.”
>You chuckle at her obvious agitation.
“I know, Your Highness. Apologies. I have not seen Anon all day; he may be sleeping in. He spent a significant portion of last night with Her Majesty, Princess Luna.”
>Twilight recoils at this, wings half-unfurling.
>Poor mare needs to stop wearing her heart on her wings, no matter how new they are to her.
“Not like that, I assure you. They walked the city.”
>She looks ashamed at her own reaction, then looks around. “I’m sure the guards are having a field day with that.”
“The Night Watch rarely speaks to the regulars about anything, and their loyalty to Her Majesty would prevent them from gossiping.”
>Twilight recovers herself then walks towards you. “That’s good. He has enough problems already.”
“Do you wish me to escort you?”
>”I know the way.”
>You give her a very carefully calibrated look, and adopt your most helpful tone.
“I live to serve the princesses, of which you now count among, Your Highness.”
>Come on, Twilight. She knows you’re not that dense, and you know she’s not that dense.
>Then she flashes an apologetic smile. “I’d appreciate the company.”
“Allow me, then.”
>You take the lead, but Twilight soon falls in alongside rather than behind you.
>”Now that he’s not as shut in, have you noticed Anon’s behaviors can be… peculiar?”
“His people have all sorts of strange mannerisms.”
>”He does so many things that are unexpected. And unexpectedly forward, if you know what I mean. I don’t even know if he intends it. I was thinking I might have to educate him, but I’ve never talked to colts about, ah, that stuff before.”
“I cannot think of any more qualified. Your Highness’s professional yet friendly demeanor precisely suits such a task.”
>”It’s just a little embarrassing to talk to him about things like eye contact, certain elements of personal space, and uh…”
“Socks.”
>”Socks.”
>You two look at each other after saying that same word at that same moment, and can’t suppress laughs.
“Do his inappropriate behaviors bother Your Highness?”
>She seems shocked at the question, and readjusts her wings on her back.
>Seriously, mare, get those wings under control.
>”N-no, not at all.”
“Then surely explaining such matters to him poses little problem.”
>You two continue in silence for a time.
>Twilight’s wings still settle awkwardly over her saddlebags.
>”Am I wrong to be receptive?”
“Pardon, Your Highness?”
>”I want to be offended, Raven, despite knowing it's likely a misunderstanding. Call me old fashioned, but stallions don’t behave in certain ways. Coming from someone so obviously foreign, though, it's more endearing than off-putting. And he’s so eager to share what he knows! I never thought I’d meet a stallion who could teach me something. Is it wrong to be receptive, even if he probably doesn’t mean it?”
“If Your Highness would allow me some boldness, if things play out that way, your heart will not allow anyone to speak against it. Any further advice would fall under Her Majesty, Princess Cadance’s purview. I can write a letter to her on this, if Your Highness wishes.”
>”Ah, no, I’ll be fine. Who knows how she’ll tease me about this. I’m just confused. I don’t know how I should feel or react.  I don’t know how I DO feel.” She sighs. “I guess I could at least be open to the possibility.”
“We all can only ever remain open, Your Highness.”
>Twilight looks you over, then away again. The two of you file into the stairway that leads to the floor Anon’s workshop is on, and ascend in silence. She rolls one wing at its shoulder when the two of you reach the top. “Ah, if I can have a turn being bold, why don’t you have anypony? You’re the most dependable mare I’ve ever known, and I guess with all this, you’re more sensitive than I’d imagined.”
>You start down the hall again.
“Equestria and Equestria alone has my love, Your Highness. I make myself his most loyal, dutiful, and devoted mare. I desire only that, and it suffices.”
>”More devoted than Princess Celestia?”
“I did not claim leadership of the metaphorical herd.”
>The two of you arrive at Anon’s workshop’s door. Twilight opens it, and you peer inside.
>Anon is at his desk, slumped over it. His upper body is sprawled across the table, with his head resting on his arms, snoozing.
>You look at Twilight’s expression. Then her wings, which are slowly sliding down the sides of her body into a loose, relaxed position.
“Perhaps we should return another time?”
>”No, it’s fine. I can work around him. I don’t want him to think I brushed him off. He needs these pieces I have.”
“As Your Highness wishes.”
>Twilight walks into the workshop, but stops and turns back to you. “Thank you, Raven. Seriously.”
“As I said, I live to serve. Your Serene Highness may seek me out at any time.”
>Twilight lowers her head and forebody in a short bow.
>Now that’s just gratuitous. If any guards saw this flagrant reversal of courtesy, you’d lose your careful composure.
>Seriously, you’re blushing.
>You bow your head back to her and hastily close the door, turning back for the ground floor.
>You are Raven Inkwell; Chief Archivist, High Secretary, Princesses’ Right Wing, and foremost servant of Equestria
>And now it seems, between encouraging Anon’s helping Celestia and this, Royal Matchmaker.

* * *

>Something tickles the back of your neck, stirring you awake, but not enough to open your eyes or elicit any movement from you.
>Oh shit, you'd fallen asleep at your desk.
>Again.
>The thing tickles your neck once more.
>There’s also a very light pressure across your shoulders.
>Your upper back is warm, like you’ve been covered with a blanket, but that weight isn’t distributed right, and you hadn’t intended to fall asleep out here in the first place, so your bedding should still be on your bed.
>It doesn’t cover nearly enough of you to be a blanket anyway.
>You finally open your eyes
>Twilight’s head is only a foot and a half away from yours, dozing just as peacefully as you so recently were.
>One of her wings is draped over your shoulder, the other fallen to the floor beside the chair she’d moved over to you to rest on.
>On the table on front of you two is a smallish bag and several sheets of paper you don’t remember being there last night.
>On those pages are many diagrams with labels and calculations in Twilight’s writing.
>She did all this while you were asleep?
>Twilight’s wing is slowly sliding down your back, on its way to join its sibling hanging to the floor.
>You reach a hand out underneath it, but twisting your body to do so finishes the job.
>You’ve never held a live bird before, so having all these feathers in your hand is a new experience.
>The biggest feathers, at the end of her wing, are larger than you’d imagined, and larger than any feathers you’ve ever gotten your hands on.
>The way they fit together is some natural marvel of engineering.
>Despite it’s light weight, the entire structure is sturdier than you’d imagined.
>Nature is fascinating, and a better designer than you’ll ever be.
>As gentle as you’re trying to be, your manhandling of her wing wakes Twilight up.
>She nickers softly and half-turns, half-rolls her head towards you. “Mmph. What are you-”
>She opens her eyes.
>”AH!”
“AH!”
>She yanks her wing back, then pinwheels the other to stay seated on her chair.
“Sorry, you, uh, y’just...”
>You point a finger over your shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up, honest. Since you apparently were careful enough not to wake me.”
>She looks away from you and sits up on the chair. “You looked cold.”
>You pick up the small bag on the desk and open it.
>It’s filled with a tiny, translucent rings of various colors and sizes.
>”When you said you wanted me to grow some crystals for you, I didn’t expect you to ask for donut-shaped ones, and I didn’t expect you to need them so small.”
“Y’know, how do gemstones not fall under the whole money duplication thing?”
>”Our jewelers know enough to look for impurities we can’t reproduce.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
>”So what are these for?”
“Working with tiny motors and tiny gearboxes, we can use a different sort of bearing. That’s what these are for; they’re jewel bearings. Very small, low-friction, low-wear bearings . Perfect for the high reliability I want. And you just proved you can replace them. I hope it wasn’t too much effort.”
>“It was more difficult than usual, only because of the abnormal shape. When we grow crystals magically, we just let it grow according to natural inclination.”
>You look over her sheets.
>They’re filled with different designs for a claw-like hand, using ballpark estimates of electrical properties, run through formulas you’ve taught her. The mechanics are drawn up according to anatomical principles Twilight said she derived from many works on zoology.
>She’s quickly outgrowing the basic stuff you’ve already taught her.
>No wonder she was Celestia’s personal student.
“You really go hard in the paint on this, huh?”
>”Hard in what? I’ve spent my whole life studying, Anon. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.”
>You pat her on her back.
“I like that.”
>She sits ramrod straight.
>”Ah, Anon, maybe we need to have a little, uh, talk about, er, cultural exchange.”
“You know, where I’m from, that could be innuendo."
>How does a purple horse blush?
>”I mean talk about certain, er, social norms and practices!”
“Hey you wanted to know about my smartphone, right?”
>You take it out of your pocket, thumb through the screen lock, and bring up your music library.
>”Well, yes, but...”
>You can almost see her curiosity override whatever she was trying to say.
“Well I got a bunch of music on here, if you want some cultural exchange. Listen to this, it should be very different than any music you have here. It’ll keep you occupied while I look over your work.”
>You pull out your earbuds, remove the rubber tips, and plug the end into your phone.
“Here, lemme see your ears.”
>Twilight hesitates, but ultimately complies, turning her head towards you and down.
>She only looks up at you for brief moments as you gently place the earbuds into her ears, nestled so the speaker portion is properly oriented but not fully inserted.
>”So what are these fo-”
>She immediately clamps her mouth closed when you start the music.
>Her eyes go wide, her face gets all screwed up, and she looks like she wants to toss her head to chuck the earbuds out of her ears, but she settles down when she gets used to music being piped directly into her skull.
>”Oh, this is what you meant when you said you couldn’t take credit for that ‘poetry in motion’ comment.”
>You look over the first of Twilight’s sheets. This one is mostly her crunching the numbers you’d provided, running calculations for different circumstances. She’s currently using your calculator to beam synthpop to her brain, so you can’t check them, but they looked accurate enough to you.
>She really is a quick study.
>The next of the sheets goes a lot further into mechanical design, showing several different configurations for hands, with notes and ideal measurements for each. They all look distinctly like bird talons to you, but you suppose that makes sense. From what you could tell, the closest analogue to your hands were minotaurs, which were somewhat rare. Some form of avian species was the next best candidate, and besides them, griffons were more readily available and used their talons to manipulate objects.
>The designs allowed for excellent flexibility, but you were worried about how many motors would be necessary.
>”You w-write songs about this?”
>You glance at Twilight, who looks mortified.
“What, about making love?”
>”Yeah, I me- wait, the elements of harmony?!”
“Elements IN harmony.”
>”Oh.”
>You return your attention to her work and flip to her third sheet.
>This one, it seems, is mostly written for your benefit. It details some quirks about the spell Twilight needs to make this whole contraption work.
>The calculations in the first sheet, it turns out, were Twilight playing with different values to take burdens off the spell itself. The more power provided by mundane means, the less work the spell needs to do, so the longer it would last and the easier it would be to cast.
>The same is true with mechanical linkages; the spell could apparently make a leg without a knee just by positioning two sticks, but giving one a groove for the other to rest in made it easier, and a fully-formed hinge easier still.
>Flipping back to the second sheet, you notice the various designs are built around certain joint configurations. Twilight must have been working out which would be easiest for the spell to manipulate.
>At the bottom is a section separated from the rest, circled in red.
>Apparently the spell could handle position reporting itself, but also integrate whichever system you intended to use for that purpose. But it goes on to say there’s utility in making the spell work harder if it meant minimizing the number of independent channels for control and feedback the spell needed to track.
>Complex magical systems on Equestria, the notes explain, when used in or around animate objects, tend to spontaneously demonstrate emergent sapience. Many animals in more magic-rich environments like the Everfree Forest – apparently a location near where she lived – display intelligence above and beyond expected of them by large margins. The spell should be crafted in such a way to minimize this possibility, lest the hands literally develop a mind of their own.
>What the fuck.
>It goes on to recommend each hand be animated separately, even though this will increase the amount of time needed to acquaint a user with their function. Efforts taken to lessen the load per-channel on the spell are unambiguous improvements away from this possibility, but more important is cutting back on the number of channels where possible, even if this requires the spell to do more work overall. Omitting every other feedback sensor is an option, letting the spell figure the gaps between the ones that remain on its own.
>This presents a new and very interesting wrinkle in all your plans.
>Twilight finally shakes the buds out of her ears, and levitates them to the benchtop. “I think you’re the one blinding me with science, Anon.”
“It was a big song from over three decades before I came here.”
>”The fact this device can reproduce the performance so well is incredible.”
“It’s better with the rubber tips on the earbuds, but I haven’t exactly cleaned them, nor have we duplicated any for you. We can do that another time.”
>”How much music do you have on here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Hours. Far longer than that thing has battery life.”
>She looks down at the device, then back to you, eyes sparkling. “Is there any way we can fix that? I want to listen to everything!”
“Well, we can make a new power pack. We’re going to have to eventually duplicate that phone and rip it apart to get the battery out anyway. Then we can keep duplicating the battery, and make banks of them. Putting a bunch in parallel would be equivalent to making one that lasts longer, but we’ll also need sets in series for higher output levels for some of the things I want to make. Combine series and parallel to make power packs for higher voltages that still last longer. Those are going to be our primary sources of power, though we’ll need to make charge limiters for each one, so we can recharge them safely off our little bench generator. Lithium-ion batteries like those tend to set themselves on fire if you’re not careful.”
>”I’m not sure I can duplicate something this complex.”
“We’ll try it when you feel ready, and when we have stuff set up so you don’t hurt yourself. Not today, that can wait. First, I want to go over some of these details regarding this spell of yours...”