“I think she might be...”

Spike gulped, as if finishing the thought would make it come to be.

Twilight Sparkle sat. That’s all. She slowly and silently breathed through her mouth. She stared with wide, frozen eyes at the unconscious pony that lay on her lab floor.

Machines and apparatus whizzed and whirred and clinked and clanked all around, dotting papers with any number of important measurements. One of the machines had run out of paper, though, so its finding would remain a mystery.

She ought to do something. Check her pulse, maybe. See if she’s still breathing.

She didn’t look to be breathing.

“Do you want to write down the results?” Spike said. His voice wavered.

Twilight Sparkle kept sitting and staring, and did not answer.

Spike took a deep breath and approached the body. He checked her pulse, then turned to Twilight Sparkle with a grimace and shook his head.

Twilight Sparkle noticed something strange. Something didn’t seem quite right. She veered her head to analyse the situation.

“No! No-no-no-no-no-no...” she trembled. “The sacchitaccharino monitor is out of paper!”

Spike raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

“The whole experiment is ruined! The key phase of the transformation just happened and we don’t know what her sacchitaccharino levels were!”

Twilight Sparkle paced the room back and forth.

“We have to hide the body.”

Spike quivered. He opened his mouth, but no words came to him.

“Don’t you get it, Spike? If there are no experimental results, then it wasn’t an experiment at all. If Princess Celestia finds out, she’ll never let me do an experiment ever again!”

Spike gulped. “What are we gonna do?”

Twilight had never hidden a body before. She knew she couldn’t keep it in the basement because it would rot and stink.

Maybe that would be a good thing. It could keep Pinkie Pie from disturbing her research.

But Applejack would start asking questions. She’d want to help with the smell. She’d want to come have a look.

The body had to be disposed of. Twilight didn’t know how to do that. She didn’t know what to do, so she knew exactly what to do.

“Spike, get me a book on how to dispose of bodies!”

Spike tilted his head. “What section do you think that’s under?”

“Biology? Chemistry?”

She thought a little more on the question.

“Gardening?”

Finally she came to the answer she knew to be right.

“Farming! Some farm animals eat meat, don’t they?”

Despite being a dragon, the mere thought of carnivorism almost made Spike throw up.

“What about transformation magic?” Spike suggested.

“I can’t do transformation magic, Spike!”

Spike pondered on the problem some more. “Can you teleport her?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check.”

Twilight Sparkle stood beside her subject and went through the motions of teleportation. In a quick white flash, she and the body appeared on the other side of the room.

“Looks like I can.”

“Then I suppose you could teleport her to the Everfree Forest, or Froggy Bottom Bog, or anywhere there are giant things waiting to eat ponies.”

Twilight Sparkle’s features lit up in an instant. She had the solution! Admittedly, she did not think of it herself.

In another quick white flash, she and the body disappeared from the library’s basement.

Shortly after, Twilight returned, slightly covered in mud.

With the body disposed of, Spike and Twilight Sparkle breathed a sigh of relief.

“Now all we have to do is make up some data for the experiment,” Spike said.

“We can’t do that. Falsifying data is a cardinal sin for a researcher. We will get another subject and repeat the experiment. This time, we won’t make such little mistakes.”