Dear diary,
I learned more yesterday than perhaps any other day in my life, and that's saying something. I mean, we're including numerous all-night study sessions and even the ordeal with Nightmare Moon when I learned all about friendship, and found out I was the Element of Magic!

Maybe I should start at the top... 

I woke up early, grabbed something simple for breakfast, and made my way down to the basement laboratory. Spike would know to come find me there when he got up, since we'd been working down there every day this week.

"Here we go! New data from the Tetrominor Receiver," I said out loud as I lifted a sizable stack of paper, still connected to the machine, and floated it to a table to review. Four ink lines zigged and zagged down the paper, page after page, indicating changes in temporal stability, chromatic consistency, arcane resonance, and one other thing. I wasn't sure what that last line represented, but it consistently showed different patterns than the others, so I left it enabled just in case.

Why was I gathering data all night? Well, to calibrate to a baseline of course! The magical aura that permeates Equestria fluctuates all the time, so I needed a good idea of the average magnitude to work from before I started my experiments.

I approached the center of the whole operation and hopped up into the chair. Wires and tubes trailed from the chair to the machines that lined room. Plugging them all in sure had been tedious, but Spike helped a lot! All those wires and machines were for reading the fluctuations caused by my magic, and for comparing it to the aura further away, to learn whether magic bleeds out and affects the environment around it. There was growing concern among the Canterlot intellectuals that magic might radiate out and inadvertently harm the surroundings. They were calling it 'radiation', a term which I wasn't fully pleased with, since it could be interpreted to have a relationship with angles and radians, but I digress. 

The setup was ready for its first test run, and I was too excited to wait for Spike. I pulled a wire-threaded colander over my head (the same one I used on Pinkie Pie that time. Actually a lot of the equipment was the same. It's a pity it wasn't able to explain Pinkie's strange abilities back then). I reached out with my magic and pulled the big red lever to fire it up.

I eagerly watched the ticking needles of the Tetrominor Receiver, but nothing happened. The same background patterns continued without meaningful change. "Huh, maybe something's not connected properly?" I wondered aloud. I used my magic to reach for red lever again, and that was when things got interesting.

Using my magic seemed to trigger a cascade. First, the arcane resonance meter started to swing harder and further, exponentially it seemed, until it finally maxed out with the needle pinned to one side. Then the temporal stability meter stopped moving entirely. Just as I started to worry that I might have accidentally looped a wire back into the machine, causing a feedback loop, the fourth mysterious needle stopped too. So did my heart.

[i]Huh, I guess that was tracking my vitals?[/i] I thought as the world went black.

[hr]

I woke up for the second time that day, but in an unfamiliar place. I was on my back, staring at the ceiling through sore eyes. I could hear a voice, heavy with sorrow and choking back tears. I thought it sounded like Rainbow Dash, but I'd never heard her like [i]that[/i]. I wasn't paying attention to her words, though, since my mind was already trying to piece together what happened in the lab.

[i]Supposing that I did cause an arcane feedback loop, it's odd that it caused the temporal readings to freeze, since they should be independent,[/i] I thought. [i]Freeze! That's it! With my magic in a maximized state, it blocked out local temporal advancement, causing me to enter total stasis. Of course, that would cause every part of my body to stop moving, and from the outside I'd look dead. But think of the applications![/i]

I jumped up and screamed out, "Eureka!" and I learned the most important lesson of the day: Your own funeral is not the right time to celebrate scientific discoveries.