"I noticed you picked out a stack of books already," began Twilight, heading up the stairs. "I'll find you some more good general ones, but most of my potion stuff is up here near my dresser if that's the direction you're wanting."

"Okay," replied Totality, following her up.

Twilight began yanking select books from her library shelves of some of the more intriguing topics while Totality browsed through the potion section. Twilight stacked the books one by one in a tower on the floor until she noticed something odd.

Near her bed were drops of what looked like dried, dark red blood on the floorboards and a partial bloody horseshoe print. She scratched the back of her neck, staring as it all began to coalesce in her brain.

"Can I ask you something blunt, Totality?" she began without looking up.

"Huh?"

"How good are you at necromancy?"

Totality's face tightened and her blood ran cold like somepony had just put a knife to her throat. "Wh- why would you just assume I know about necromancy?"

Twilight rubbed her face. "Well, there's the discoloration on the tip of your horn from overuse of the life spark spell, the odd location of the cut on your foreleg which is more consistent with somepony cutting themselves purposefully, especially to get blood quickly, and the blood drops on my floor and your horseshoe print around the bed where I overdosed, not downstairs like you said. It's strange that you would just start bleeding that much around a dead pony unless you were trying to-"

Totality interjected. "No, I cut myself trying to… get you out of bed," she choked, struggling to come up with any explanation free her from this accusation. She was on the verge of tears. "Please don't tell anypony!" she cried. " Everything will be ruined. I'll never get into Canterlot or anywhere! It'll be impossible for me to ever amount to anything in my cutie mark field." She began wheezing with short, shallow breaths.

Twilight's face softened in concern as she walked over to her. "Whoa. It's okay. You're not in trouble. I don't care. Maybe I would have, once upon a time, but I don't have any reason to tell anypony."

Totality sat on the floor, eyeing her saddle bag in the corner of the room. She dumped it out in a panic, levitating her inhaler to her mouth.

Twilight waited for her breathing to normalize, feeling guilty that she'd unintentionally startled her so badly.

"I haven't done anything like this in years," gasped Totality

"Well, I can see that's true. The blotchiness has almost grown off your horn."

Totality stroked the tip of her horn. "I didn't even know that's what that was," she murmured.

"Is that how you saved me?" asked Twilight.

Totality took a deep breath as if testing her lungs. "I didn't bring you back to life, if that's what you're asking. The paramedics did. When I found you, you had no pulse. With all those meds still in you, there wasn't much I could do that wouldn't be immediately undone. I'm not powerful enough to carry you by magic all the way to the ER. I knew that by the time I got to the hospital and then they got to you, you'd probably be toast. All I did was buy you some time with the quickest, easiest thing I could do to increase the likelihood that they'd be able to resuscitate you." She pointed at the potted tree by the window. Yesterday it had been perfectly happy but now it was withered and brown, sucked dry of its life.

Twilight put a comforting hoof over her shoulder. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put you through all this. You did something risky and selfless for me, even though I treated you like garbage. I don't deserve you as an assistant... Forgive me if this sounds completely misinformed but when I figured that out, I couldn't help but wonder… Could you bring Spike back?

Totality's face tightened again. "How do you not know necromancy but you can identify a user?"

"Old anti necromancy PSA reels from school," replied Twilight flippantly. "'Spot the Signs.'"

Totality exhaled. "In answer to your question: theoretically, yes definitely."

Twilight's eyes bulged. "You're serious?"

"Yes. That is totally a doable thing, but you can't just… Listen, I can but I shouldn't. You know why. You've heard the stories."

"I've heard one-sided propaganda," corrected Twilight. "What do the necromancers have to say?"

Totality stared up at her, thinking and fretting. "Fine. But it's not exactly a quick explanation. She stood up slowly and walked over to the big blank chalkboard.

"Uh, where to start," she muttered to herself. "Well, there are several degrees of quote unquote back that somepony can be. The end result of a resurrection is contingent on a hoofful of factors including length of death, completeness of the remains and… we'll say 'resources sacrificed.' The basic rule of hoof is that what you lack in one variable, you have to make up for in the others to balance the equation."

Twilight, who was now sitting on the floor, raised a hoof. "Umm, Ms. Totality?"

Totality waited awkwardly for her to ask a question until she realized Twilight was actually waiting to be called on. She pointed. "Uh… yes, Twilight Sparkle?"

"Can you explain the 'degrees' of backness somepony can be?"

"Uh, yeah. Well it's a spectrum of things like their intelligence, their memories, behavior and the state of their body. They can look and act just as they did before they died, or they can be significantly less than that. I'm assuming you're wanting a one to one scale perfect revenant who's completely there physically and mentally, just as you remember him. Is that right?"

"Yes," nodded Twilight carefully.

Totality squinted at her. "And you're not willing to haggle on that?"

Twilight put a hoof to her chin in thought. "Probably not."

"Okay," sighed Totality. She floated a piece of chalk up to the chalkboard and scratched lines for four columns, labeling them and writing a ten in the last one. "So you want a ten result. That means you need a ten in every column or the sum of the four columns should equal about forty. If you wanted a two, you'd need a score of eight. If you wanted a five, you'd need a twenty. This isn't absolute math, but it gives us a rough idea. So, you know where his body is, right?"

"Eeyup."

"And three months of decomposition aside, I assume he's all there, correct?"

Twilight screwed up her face. "Well, actually no. He's basically just a skeleton."

Totality blinked. "A skeleton? But how? What happened to him?"

"I told you he died in a lab accident. The accident was liquefication of the flesh."

Totality's lips curled. "Eew."

"Yeah, I came in and he was a skeleton laying in a pool of chunky soup. It is a really nice skeleton though," added Twilight thoughtfully.

"So you have a skeleton," continued Totality. "I'd call that a three for completeness…" She paused to rub her chin in thought. "Actually, he's little, so maybe a four since this is based off of resurrecting an average sized pony." She wrote a four in the first column and floated the chalk over to the next one.

"Second column, which is length of death... unfortunately, anything over a day without intervention gets a zero." She wrote a zero in the second column. Then she wrote a question mark in the third. "Now since one and two are fixed variables we can't do anything about and four is non negotiable for you, that just leaves us with three, or 'sacrificed resources', to pick up the slack with a big fat twenty-six. It would be very costly. But hypothetically, if you put a 'two' as your goal Instead of a ten, then you'd only need a one or two in sacrifice and with minimal effort you could have a stupid, reanimated skeleton who probably doesn't recognize you and might even attack you. See how this works?"

Twilight squinted at the chalkboard, wondering why this methodology felt so modern when it concerned an archaic discipline that hadn't been touched by researchers or academics for hundreds of years. "What is this system that you're using?" she asked, pointing at the board.

"Uhh, well it's…" Totality suddenly seemed embarrassed. Her eyes went to the floor. "I- I invented it. I call it the Totality Scale." Her voice dropped off.

Twilight's mouth dropped open. "Seriously?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Because this is amazing."

Totality began to blush. "Well, it's not like it's a solid math equation or anything. It's just a subjective analysis tool."

"But it quickly explains a somewhat ill defined concept with concrete values. This would be invaluable for say, teaching a class. And who's to say that with enough research and fine tuning it couldn't become a math equation? I can't believe a high schooler came up with it."

"I was actually in middle school at the time," she laughed nervously. "But anyway, there are many different spells and rituals out there that will get you what you want, but they're all basically going to follow this rule. That's why I'm doubtful that we can find one that we're both going to be comfortable performing."

Twilight bit her lip in worry. "Just so we're clear, a twenty-six in resources for a Spike resurrection would include a live… pony sacrifice?"

Totality set the chalk down and pushed up her glasses. "You can sometimes fudge these things with an equivalent substitution of lots of 'tiny payments', but a number that big, it's unavoidable, might even need multiple live sacrifices. Is that going to be a problem?"

"Yeah," sighed Twilight with conviction.

"Okay, good. That's what I wanted to hear. So… we're done here?"

Twilight buried her face in her hooves, struggling to find the light at the end of the tunnel. "Listen, I'm at wit's end here. I don't want to just close the door on this without actually seeing what's out there first. Will you please help me? We'll just do some research and if we don't find what we're looking for, I'll stop talking about it and we'll just knock out your thesis or go eat a gallon of ice cream or anything you want."

Totality's forehead creased in worry. Her thought was that Twilight was just desperately latching onto a false hope, setting herself up for an inevitable fresh bout of despair and so soon after her attempted suicide. It was horrible and unfair to herself as well. She suddenly felt as though she was shouldering the entire burden of keeping Twilight stable and alive all by herself. What would happen if she said no to the project or tried to leave again?

"Twilight," she breathed. "I'm very uncomfortable even just talking about this stuff. I've lived almost half my life now with an irrational fear that somepony has a picture of me or will somehow find out and then my life will be over."

Twilight shook her head dismissively. "It's just research, Totality. That part isn't as taboo as you think it is. It's restricted, but technically a student could even write research papers under supervision. In the unlikely event that things go sideways, I would take a hundred percent of the responsibility. It's only fair, right? What do I even have to lose?"

Totality's eyes darted about the room as she thought. "Okay, but the other thing is that you need to temper your expectations. It might sound cruel, but you have to go in expecting this to not work out… because it won't. You can't try to kill yourself again when it doesn't. Can you imagine being me in this situation and then living with that, especially if you succeeded?"

Twilight shook her head again. "I would never do that to you. I promise. But I also don't want you to think that you have to do this for me."

Totality sighed. "I'll help you if only to shut down this avenue and force you to begin a genuine healing process."

"You sound like a therapist. See? I don't need a therapist, I have you."

Totality rolled her eyes. "If you're looking for a live-in self help guru, you've come to the wrong place. But I will pass along something that my therapist told me. Only you can save you from you."

Twilight made a mental list of all the best leads for tracking down viable necromantic materials and put them in order of most desirable to least desirable. At the top was asking Zecora. Next was raiding the Canterlot archives in some sort of daring heist. Then came several blank spaces, finally ending with asking Dischord.

Twilight and Totality approached the open door of the lonely hut in the Everfree Forest. "Hello, Zecora?" called Twilight. "It's Twilight Sparkle." The two stopped in the doorway to find the zebra stirring a big boiling pot.

She looked up in surprise. "Oh, Twilight! Congratulations on the bed you rock, with the red stallion with the giant c-"

"OKAYTHANKSALOTZECORA!REALLYAPPRECIATEIT!" blurted Twilight loudly, her face crimson in embarrassment. How the hell did she know about that, thought Twilight. She lived alone in the middle of nowhere.

The unicorns stepped inside and Totality's eyes began to dart around the room in wonder at all the mysterious sights. She sniffed a hanging bushel on the wall that smelled of sage and stared into the eyes of a strange mask.

Zecora placed a big wet spoon on the table. "Just finishing a brand new pot. Who is the friend that you have brought?"

Twilight gestured to Totality. "This is my assistant, Totality. She's a student. Totality, this is Zecora."

The two greeted each other.

"What are you making?" asked Twilight.

"Powerful contraceptive, guaranteed to stop even the most virile seed. Take all you need." Zecora gestured, cheerily to a wooden box of full, neatly regimented vials.

"I think I'm good," laughed Twilight, suddenly somewhat fearful that Zecora had made an enormous batch of birth control potions specifically for her.

Totality surreptitiously tried to float a vial out of the box until Twilight shot her a dirty look.

Zecora brought the bubbling pot off of the fire to let it cool. "You look like you're in a rut. What brings you to my little hut?"

"Well," began Twilight, trying to sound as casual as possible. "I had a project I was working on and was just wondering if you had, or knew where I could find... instructional necromancy literature."

Zecora laughed. "For that you came all the way out here? I have no books on this, I fear. But I can say somewhere they would be. Turn around and go to the Ponyville Library."

Twilight's jaw dropped "Our library has necromancy literature?"

"Why, yes, indeed it does… uh…" The Zebra scratched her head and frowned as she struggled to come up with words for her prose. "For this you must… Ugh. Just ask a librarian about it," she shrugged.

"Okay, thanks," nodded Twilight excitedly. Then she furrowed her brow. "Hey, wait. How come that didn't rhyme?"

Zecora sighed listlessly. "I don't have to rhyme every time I speak. It's not like it's a rule. Sometimes I'm just tired and want to say what I want to say, y'know?" She stared vacantly into the settling pot.

It was late by the time the two got back to Ponyville.

"Let's just go straight to the library," proposed Twilight.

"No library's going to be open at this hour," countered Totality

"Ours is, and it's the perfect time to go. It'll be a ghost town."

Totality was surprised to find that the library was indeed open. But as they entered, they found the place completely vacant without a pony in sight.

"It's such a 'ghost town' that there's not even any staff," droned Totality.

"Hello?" called Twilight. They waited, but there was no response. "It's open and the lights are on," she reasoned to herself. "There has to be somepony here." Her eyes fell on the 'staff only' door behind the empty counter. "C'mon," she breathed.

The two walked up to the door and Twilight pushed it open. They stuck their heads in carefully to see Pinkie Pie, sitting alone on the break room couch, smoking a cigarette.

Pinkie Pie's eyes shot open at seeing their faces and she quickly flicked the cigarette haphazardly across the room.

"Pinkie Pie? You smoke?"

"In the library?" added Totality.

"What?" she exploded defensively. "Who would say such a thing about me?" She crossed her forelegs. "Ridiculous!"

Twilight and Totality exchanged quizzical looks.

"Nopony said anything. I just saw you smoking and I smelled the smoke and then you tried to ditch the cigarette in a ficus planter."

Pinkie Pie threw up her hooves. "Ugh. Fine, mother, I've been smoking since I got fired from Sugar Cube Corner. Happy?"

Twilight's eyes widened. "You got fired?"

"Yeah," shrugged Pinkie. "That's why I work here now."

"Why'd you get fired?"

"For fucking Carrot Cake. Did you never hear about this?"

"No," gasped Twilight, suddenly realizing how distant and out of the loop she'd become. "Wait, do you mean Carrot Cake the baker or carrot cake the... cake?"

"The baker, obviously," scoffed Pinkie Pie. "Carrot cake the cake is one of the least fuckable cakes. It's way too crumbly."

An unfortunately timed lull in the conversation forced everypony to gestate uncomfortably on this thought.

Finally Totality cleared her throat and nudged Twilight to begin talking before Pinkie could. "So anyway, the reason we're here is…"

"Oh yeah," remembered Twilight. "So, Pinkie, you're a librarian now?"

Pinkie Pie screwed up her face and shrugged. "Probably."

"Prob… ably?" blinked Twilight. "Well, can you get me anything you have on necromancy?"

"Sure," replied Pinkie, rising to her hooves. "Follow me." She grabbed a big ring of keys and the three exited the break room.

"As you know, it's restricted material," began Pinkie. "But somepony in high standing, affiliated with Canterlot academia such as yourself of course has privileged access to that stuff."

Twilight and Totality cringed and side-eyed each other.

"Who's your friend?" asked Pinkie cheerily.

"Oh, yeah," laughed Twilight. "This is Totality, my assistant." She turned to totality. "And this is Pinkie Pie... So how are the Cakes doing now?" she added warily.

"They're fine," muttered Pinkie Pie callously. "They're going to work it out, AKA: Mrs. Cake doesn't want to raise two kids and run a business alone. The real story here is how I'm now banned from Sugarcube Corner." She scowled, thinking about being cut off from all that discounted candy and pastries.

They headed down some stairs and into a long hallway. Pinky finally stopped at a decrepit old door and fiddled with the keys. She muttered curses under her breath after failing with half a dozen of them. Then she shot a glare back at the two ponies. "I'm still new!" She shouted angrily. "Give me a break!"

Totality gave Twilight a what the hell shrug, confused by the unprovoked outburst.

Finally the door clicked open and everypony breathed a sigh of relief.

Pinkie Pie lit a lantern and turned up the wick for maximum brightness. "Just a heads up, if you hear any weeping, screaming or strange, almost imperceptible murmurs seemingly scratching at the darkest recesses of your brain like a long repressed memory of some unforgivable sin that you thought was dead and buried and then you're hiding in the barn…" A faraway look came over Pinkie's eyes. "Shh. He's coming. He'll find us. No, father!" she shrieked. "Put it down! Run! Ahhh! No, please! Not the cellar again! I'll be a good filly just like you want! Not the cellar!"

Wide-eyed, Totality cautiously took a step back.

"Uh, Pinkie Pie," interrupted Twilight.

Pinkie's eyes refocused as she snapped back to the topic in her previously cheery tone. "These are all perfectly normal and mostly harmless experiences you might have in the restricted literature section of the library. However, if you ever hear a tome, scroll or parchment speak directly to you, it's very important that you do not answer it." She tapped a dusty plaque on the wall which said 'Danger: Do not speak to the books.' and then placed a cheek against it, caressing it sensually with one hoof. "But most important of all, have fun!" She smiled, her face now smudged with dust. Then she bounced out the door.

"Wow," breathed Twilight. "She's so much better now that she's medicated. I'm really proud of her."

Totality said nothing, mashing her lips together for fear that she might.

"I mean, homewrecking aside," clarified Twilight. "And losing her job… and the smoking."

"In the library," added Totality.

The two surveyed the dingy room which looked like it might not have been entered by anypony in years. There were a modest number of shelves which sat crammed full and disorganized. Some books and parchments were even strewn carelessly on the floor. It didn't look so much like a curated feature of the library but more a place to hide and forget about things.

Twilight illuminated her horn. "What exactly are we looking for?" she asked, entering a random aisle.

"This doesn't look organized at all," sighed Totality. "But I'd say, ignore everything with a modern binding. Only look at scrolls, papers and hoofstitched things." She let out a hoarse wheeze.

"Are you okay?" gasped Twilight.

"Fine," muttered Totality. "Just taking a precautionary rip off my inhaler before the dust decides to kill me."

They dove into the books and soon realized that it really wasn't organized. A few thousand documents in one room, completely scrambled.

"This is like looking for a diatom in a haystack," muttered Totality. "But these titles are great. Listen to these. On the Virtues of Cannibalism. Practical Trepanation. Phrenology of the Damned. Breeding with... Ghosts? I thought it said goats but it actually says 'ghosts.'"

Twilight wrinkled her forehead. "Can you do that?"

"We could find out, I guess?"

"Hard pass. Have you found anything at all on necromancy yet?"

Totality put a hoof over her nose to stop herself from sneezing. "A couple," she replied. "They weren't helpful."

"Some of these things I can't even read," muttered Twilight. "They look like they're written in-"

"Runic Arcana?" enquired Totality. "Pull those out and I'll look at them."

Twilight locked eyes with her through a gap in the books. "You can read that?"

"Eeyup. Only because of the hobby. But it's actually super easy. We can check out a primer. You could skim it and have a working vocabulary in an hour… if we ever need to, that is."

"If you say so," sighed Twilight. "I assume you're a self taught necromancer. When you were little, how did you get your contraband?"

"Library," Totality replied absently. "Found an old book in a discard pile. Somepony must have screwed up. I just took it."

The two continued digging and digging. By the time they'd gone through a third of the documents, they were both tired, dirty, and feeling pretty hopeless.

Totality had found nothing that would accomplish their goal, pony sacrifices or not. Twilight had amassed a modest pile of books to show her, but wasn't holding her breath.

Totality began going through the documents in Runic Arcana with her magic. "Nope. nope… nope." Around the bottom of the pile, she picked one up and actually opened it. It was stitched by hoof and a little thin, only featuring a single ritual.

Totality squinted at the first page. "Well, this actually says it does what we're wanting to do, so there's that." She began to skim through the book over detailed drawings and diagrams and messy ink splatters, all of it written in a strange code.

Totality's jaw went slack as she reached the end of the book. She closed it and flipped through all the pages again and then again in reverse. She shook her head slowly. "This can't be real," she breathed. "This is…" She turned to the inside cover and adjusted her glasses to scrutinize the page.

Her eyes bulged and she looked back up at Twilight. "It's inked by Grim Void. It's real. It only uses blood and non pony ingredients." She began shaking in excitement. "This is it. This is the unobtainium I used to dream about. Ethical big league necromancy."

Twilight laughed in disbelief. "Hey," she said. "You're really smiling." She pointed at Totality's face.

"Am I?" asked Totality.

"Yeah, just like in the picture. It looks nice."

"Actually, now that you mention it, I'm kind of pissed off that this appears to fly in the face of my scale," she complained, still smiling.