A Handful of Possibilities

Twilight had written three pages of safeguards before I arrived. I knew because she had stacked them beside a fourth page headed QUESTIONS WE ARE NOT ANSWERING TODAY, which felt like a personal challenge to any scholar with a quill.

I sat across from her at the library table and read the first page again. “No deliberate memory prompts,” I said, touching the line with a hoof. “Good. And I get to stop without explaining why.”

Twilight rested one forehoof on the draft. “Yes. If you stop, the reading ends. We record the point where it stopped, and nothing more happens that day.”

The words were plain. That helped. We were talking about my body and a magical pattern I didn’t understand, and it would have been easy for the conversation to fill up with impressive-sounding terms that left me nodding along while someone else made the decisions.

I moved to the next paragraph. “No crystal. No trip to the valley. No trying to get the variable feature to change on purpose.”

“Agreed.” Twilight turned her quill over between her forehooves. “For now, we can compare ordinary readings taken under similar conditions. We record the time, what you’ve been doing, and whether you feel anything. That may help us notice a pattern. It won’t tell us what caused it.”

I had been expecting her to make a case for something bolder. Her willingness to say what the data couldn’t do took some of the fight out of me. My hoof stayed on the page, though.

“Add that we don’t call a reading of zero ‘gone,’” I said. “We say the instrument didn’t detect it. That matters.”

Twilight wrote it in the margin, then added it to the clean copy. “It does.”

We went through the remaining limits together. One reading at a time. No repeat just because the first result looked odd. I could decline before or during the procedure. Any increase in pressure, horn heat, dizziness, or trouble keeping my balance meant we stopped. Twilight would explain the equipment and the spell before using either. I would approve any sharing of my notes beyond the people already responsible for the investigation.

A written protocol was a strange thing to find comforting. I’d spent a lot of my life signing forms in rooms where the forms were mostly there to prove someone had asked. This one changed what Twilight was allowed to do next.

She read the final version aloud, then slid the quill toward me. “If you want any part changed, we change it.”

I looked over the page. There wasn’t a line that felt like a trap. “I’m okay with this. One baseline reading today. Then we stop, whether it’s interesting or not.”

Twilight nodded and signed first. I added my name below hers, slowly. Horn-written letters had improved since the early days, though my handwriting still looked like it had been introduced to the alphabet under protest.