Minuette nodded to herself. She had really outdone herself this time.

One month ago, in the first week of spring in Canterlot Plaza, Moondancer had asked her to teach her a spell to slow down time. “Can you teach me a spell to, you know, slow down time? Maybe just by a bit? It would really help me in my studies.”

“I could,” said Minuette, “but all the well-known slow-down-time spells are about faster reaction times. I’ll have to come up with something custom, or you’ll just be flipping pages really fast without processing them. And even then, the Consortium of High Magic had tried for centuries to get a proper time-slowing spell, so my spell would only have a minor effect—”

“Oh! You’d do that for me? That’d be fantastic!”

That’s exactly how their conversation went. And Minuette sympathized—there were only so many hours in a day, and you didn’t have amazing scheduling skills like Minuette had, then there were just so many things that you didn’t have time to do. So of course Minuette agreed because they were good friends and that’s what good friends did.

After that, Minuette looked into the old spells and subjects she used in school—basic time manipulation, timesifting, space-time fabric cross-stitching, and so on—and took bits and pieces that she could use for Moondancer’s relativistic time dilation spell. She had sifted through hundreds of dog-eared textbooks was on her way to the Canterlot Archives when she bumped into Moondancer again.

“Minuette! I was just looking for you. How’s progress on the spell?”

“Pretty slow. Turns out there’re some good reasons the Consortium has taken hundreds of years to make a proper slow-down-time spell aside from bureaucracy and budget cuts.” Minuette then said technical details, and Moondancer nodded along.

Moondancer lifted a tome out of her bags. “How about taking a look at this, then? I did a bit of research myself, and it looks like they were halfway through this particular project before their funding got pulled. I think it might be promising.”

“What made them pull funding for it?”

Moondancer flipped through the pages. “I’m not sure—something about temporal instability, I think. But hey, I’m sure the best time unicorn in our class could do something with it. It looks mostly complete.”

Minuette raised an eyebrow. “Mostly?”

“Some steps they detail need to be followed to the letter or else things might go south, but I checked the math and it looks solid. I’d trust it, at least.”

Minuette took the tome.

A week after that, she summoned Moondancer to her home.

“Is it done?”

“A prototype is.” She held out a scroll. “Like you said, the details need to be followed to the letter, but if it is, then maybe...”

“Amazing!” Moondancer snatched it from Minuette’s hooves. “I can’t wait to test this out!”

Minuette reached out as Moondancer’s horn glowed red. “Moondancer, no, wait—”

Minuette looked at Moondancer now, smiling stoically, eyelids were halfway closed. She’d finish blinking when the sun comes up tomorrow, with any luck.

Minuette nodded to herself. She had really outdone herself this time.