Episode 5: "We're Gonna Need a Bigger Book"
About a week has passed since we got back to Ponyville. Sunny and Crescent have been staying with Twilight, and Chow has been staying in his bachelor pad slash stolen train car, still parked on Twilight's lawn. In the week we've been here, the town has only been destroyed once.
On this fine morning, Chow decided to make some toast. Due to the toaster's magical reality-warping powers of animu, he soon realized that he was going to be late to mooch off of Twilight's pancakes, and so he sprinted across the lawn from his train car to the library with toast in his mouth.
Naturally, Twilight was reading and eating at the same time. It's just efficient, after all. Chow decided that the best way to deal with this was to summon her book with the Bookplate of Recall. Twilight seamlessly shifted her attention to the other book she was reading. Undeterred, Chow began reading aloud over her shoulder in various languages, including things such as plant speech. Chow knows a lot of languages.
Twilight countered this by shoving a large quantity of pancakes into Chow's beak to shut him up. One Linguistics check of 25 later, Chow kept talking through the pancakes. He backed off, however, when Twilight summoned a ball gag.
Now, Twilight likes books. She likes them so much that she reads them even while eating, as we just went over. Furthermore, she likes them so much that when presented with a method of permanently summoning books, she just had to expand on it. Previously we had used Summon Monster I and Amanuensis to summon and transcribe animated books. Of course, Twilight demanded to learn. And learn she did.
Anything which is worth doing is often worth overdoing. As such, Twilight had thought, why stick to manually summoning books when she could set something up to do it automatically? With this in mind, she began crafting self-resetting traps of Summon Monster I and Amanuensis.
So Twilight now had a small but growing pile of brand new books. All identically bound, except one. One book on top of the pile looked nothing like the others, and was clearly not summoned like the rest but placed there by some other means. This book just happened to be a copy of the Equinomicon, a tome written in a dead language so old not even Celestia remembers its name which contains the dark secrets and rituals of such horrors as Cthulhu, Discord, Yog-Sothoth, the Nightmare, Azathoth, and the Smooze.
After a few minutes of Chow attempting to use his plant speech to decipher it, Twilight's coffee finally kicked in and she began furiously translating. Well, not really. Not even Twilight can just decipher a dead language on the spot. But she was working on it.
Chow, Crescent, and Sunny decided that Twilight with the Equinomicon was probably Not A Good Thing. We had the common sense not to attempt to get between Twilight and a book, however (Chow's Bookplate shenanigans notwithstanding) and so we instead began investigating where it might have come from in the first place.
Crescent decided that the first step was to ask Luna for help. She took a nap in a convenient cardboard box, which she had used for this purpose several times already. As such, Chow saw fit to label it "Sleeping box, use at leisure", apparently oblivious to the rapey message that would send. Fortunately, Crescent was not raped during the time it took her to contact Luna.
Upon Luna entering his dream, Mak immediately exclaimed, "Luna, no time for sex, you need to help me stop Twilight from fucking up everything!" After the situation was explained to her, Luna saw no problem with Twilight having an Equinomicon.
"It's just a book," she said. "It's not like it makes you go insane if you read it or anything. I don't know how that rumor even started." Unconvinced, Mak wordlessly woke himself up.
Next, we tried investigating local bookstores. These included "Novels and Refrigerators", "Cookbooks and Scotch Tape", "Smutty Romance Novels and Bicicles", "Nonfiction and Necromancy", and "Toaster Owner's Manuals and Spaghetti Sauce". We decided to skip investigating every single one and just check out the obvious culprit: Toaster Owner's Manuals and Spaghetti Sauce.
Sadly, we failed to find the dark magic section in Toaster Owner's Manuals and Spaghetti Sauce. Crescent did, however, buy a 12-pack of some pretty awesome spaghetti sauce. Undeterred, we headed to the second most likely establishment: Nonfiction and Necromancy.
Sadly, Nonfiction and Necromancy was completely sold out of Equinomicons. They did have a shelf in the necromancy section dedicated to Fifty Shades of Hay, though, which we set on fire. Totally out of leads, we headed back to Golden Oaks to check up on Twilight.
The nice thing about self-resetting traps is that they can be set to activate as often as you want, even once every round. That means that this combination of Summon Monster I and Amanuensis could produce a book every six seconds.
The other nice thing about self-resetting traps is that they are neither Tribbles nor Parasprites. They don't make more of themselves. Unless you made a self-resetting trap of Fabricate, maybe. By Celestia's royal seat-meat, that would be a terrible idea, if hilarious.
The not-very-nice thing about self-resetting traps is that if you make thirty sets of them, you will very quickly end up with Far Too Many Books even if the traps aren't self-replicating. This is the plight in which we found Twilight when we returned to Golden Oaks. The library was on its way to containing more wood in paper form than in tree form. Twilight and Spike were barricaded in the basement.
With Crescent's spaghetti sauce, Chow's supplies from raiding Twilight's kitchen earlier, and both of their complete disregard for other people's problems, the two of them made some really kickass pasta.
Once the pasta was eaten, we set about actually doing something about the large influx of books. Chow reasoned that Twilight had probably enchanted her library and books to be fireproof. As such, he lit the books on fire.
He was right about the library and books, fortunately. The fire successfully disposed of most of the extra books, fortunately. Unfortunately, there was now a large, self-replenishing pile of flaming books in the middle of Twilight's library.
Sunny was chosen to give Twilight the news: "The good news is the door is no longer blocked. The bad news is there's now a... piece of performance art about, uh, the transience of knowledge, in the middle of the library."
Twilight opened the door. Twilight closed the door. Loud, unfriendly noises were heard.
Twilight opened the door. Twilight summoned velociraptors. Twilight closed the door.
So there we were, fighting six velociraptors in a library around a self-replenishing pile of flaming books. Crescent missed with a Scorching Ray, which flew out a window and hit a little filly's ice cream cone, dealing 14 points of emotional damage and causing her to start crying. Crescent felt bad about this, and promptly began having an existential crisis about her alignment. This existential crisis was short-lived, however, for it was interrupted when one of the flaming books suddenly exploded.
Amanuensis triggers but does not copy magical writing, such as Explosive Runes. Explosive Runes does about what it sounds like: Creates runes which explode when read. As far as I know there is no official statistic for what percentage of books contain Explosive Runes. Percentile dice only go from 1-100, though, so I estimated that each book has a 1% chance to contain Explosive Runes. Twilight had made thirty sets of traps, meaning that every six seconds there was a 30% chance that the flaming book pile would explode.
These percentages were all well and good. In this case, however, we decided that it had most likely exploded on Crescent because of karma from melting that little filly's ice cream cone.
In the end, it turned out that these were emissaries from the Elemental Plane of Velociraptors, and that one of them was in fact the Crown Prince of Velociraptors. Or at least, that's what they told us. Chow offered him some kickass pasta.
The velociraptors Twilight had summoned were gone. The giant self-replenishing pile of flaming books that exploded a few times a minute, however, was not. Crescent decided to consult Luna in the rape-box again: "Did you try picking it up and putting it somewhere else? That's what I usually do with my problems." "Luna, it's made of fire." "Use your magic?"
So we did just that. Sunny and Crescent used their telekinesis to pick up the giant self-replenishing pile of flaming books, and we put it somewhere else. And that is why there is now a fountain in the middle of a park which spews forth flaming books and sometimes explodes.
Submitted March 16, 2015 at 12:28AM by gameboy17 http://ift.tt/1NXSOgR MLPLounge
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