This was supposed to be familiar territory.
 
Daring Do scanned the room she had just walked into. She was certain she was still in Canterlot. Just minutes ago, she was outside gazing at the signature yellow spires, whitewashed walls, and lavish decks of the Equestrian capital. Daring didn’t live in Canterlot—much too…self-absorbed for her taste—but she was no stranger to the place. She did visit the city from time to time in her non-adventuring hours, after all. Celestia knows how many times Canterlot University requested her alternate persona—Professor Autumn Kicker—to come as a guest speaker.
 
But the drafty room she had just walked into looked nothing like the inside of a Canterlot building. No chandeliers, no fancy patterned carpets, not even a single piece of ornate furniture. Just bare lightbulbs trying but failing to light the whole room and drab paint peeling off the wall. Books, papers, empty batteries, and various tools of unknown purpose littered the floor. Shelves full of potions and toolboxes leaned on the walls, some of which stood adjacent to tall rectangular machines full of blinking lights. At the far corner of a room was another machine, this one being large and circular. Two small tesla coils, one on each side, shot bolts of colored lightning into a cluster of glowing crystals perched on a podium. Daring didn’t know what purpose all these machines served.
 
But she knew that the gray unicorn sitting on the table at the center of the room did.
 
The unicorn was surrounded by smaller blinking rectangular machines. Her left rear hoof rested on the front fender of a nearby motorcycle, keeping the vehicle upright. The unicorn squinted as she levitated a small black device with two prongs, a stream of cerise electrical sparks drifting from her horn and into the pronged device. Ears folded and eyes glued at the device, she took a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of her jacket and nipped it at a loose bunch of fibers sticking out one of the prongs.
 
“Come on, come on,” the unicorn whispered to herself. “You’ve been giving a lot of trouble these past few weeks. Daring could come here anytime and~~”
 
The pronged device beeped. Fields of blue magical energy covered each of its prongs while cerise sparks snaked around them. Daring watched the unicorn’s eyes widen as the device retracted its prongs into its body and beeped a second time, a green light on its handle causing a smile to form on the unicorn’s face.
 
“Yes!” The unicorn let out a triumphant laugh. “Finally! Twilight Velvet, you’re a genius!”
 
It was then that Daring Do audibly cleared her throat and spoke up.
 
“Hey, you done gloating there? I’ve got places to be!”
 
The unicorn tinkerer jerked her head upwards. “Whoa whoa, hey there, Do Dare! You’re ruining the moment,” she said. She put the pronged device on the table, rested her left arm onto her left hind leg, and smiled at the archeologist. “Anyway, you got here just in time!”
 
Daring Do rolled her eyes at the nickname Twilight Velvet had just called her, then crept her way through the clutter on the floor. “I thought I’d see you at the Scientific Equestrian offices. And just in time for what?”
 
“It’s my day off, and Shining Armor is still in Magic Kindergarten at this hour,” Velvet said as she jumped down from the table and walked towards Daring. Without her leg propping it upright, the motorcycle clattered on the floor, the sound of grinding metal causing Daring to grit her teeth and fold her ears backward.
 
“Ooh, that’s not gonna be good for the paint job.” Velvet said, looking back at the motorcycle before turning to Daring. “So…you brought the Sapphire Statue?”
 
“Uh, yeah.” Daring produced a blue statue with two jackal heads from her bags and gave them to Velvet with her wings. “I want it back, though.”
 
Taking the statue with her hooves, Velvet took a moment to appreciate the statue’s luster and the gem placed on its center. She chuckled, swiped the pronged device from the table with her magic, and flicked a button on the device’s handle. Daring’s eyes widened as the device shot its prongs outwards and generated a small blue electrical field.
 
“I’m surprised you didn’t give this to a museum yet,” Velvet remarked. “I’m no curator, but a relic like this will fetch a couple hundred thousand bits, and that’s a conservative value.”
 
“Yeah, well, no institution I talked to was willing to cough up that much money,” Daring said. “So…, I’m ‘just in time’ for what, Twilight?”
 
“Ah, yes! This!” Velvet waved the device in front of Daring’s face, then across the surface of the Sapphire Statue.
 
Daring rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. You invented a barcode reader for ancient relics. I’ll let pre-industrial Hay-Mart know that will come in handy.
 
“Velvet chuckled. “No, it’s not that! Besides, if I wanted to invent something for a company, I’d do it for Barnyard Bargains; I have stocks invested there. No, this—” Velvet flicked the device a few times “—is an etherocrystal dating device.”
 
Daring quirked an eyebrow upwards. While she wasn’t a wrench wench like Velvet, she was knowledgeable on the limitations of measuring the amount of unicorn magic enacted on an object to determine its age. “Twilight, you do realize etherocrystal dating is a destructive process, right?” she said as Velvet continued scanning the Sapphire Statue. “You need to chip a piece of the relic off and get it processed in machines as big as those things over there.” Daring pointed a hoof at a machine full of blinking lights on the wall. “Why do you think I never tried to send the Sapphire Statue off for etherocrystal dating? It’s far too valuable and fragile for~~”
 
“470 years ago.”
 
Daring blinked. “What?”
 
“The Sapphire Statue was last handled 470 years ago. See?”
 
Daring grunted as Velvet dragged her closer with her telekinesis, knocking a few books and papers on the floor out of the way. The unicorn then brought the device to eye level, pointing to an LCD year counter on the handle with one hoof while holding the Sapphire Statue with the other.
 
“Well, I’ll be, of course!” Daring muttered to herself. “That coincides with the horse pox outbreak that quartered the population of the Tenochtitlan Basin at that time.
 
“It was Velvet’s turn to raise her eyebrows. “What do you mean ‘quartered?’”
 
“Well, when Hernan Coltez came to the Tenochtitlan Basin from the Kingdom of Caballos, some of his crew came down with horse pox from one of their Zebrican slaves. The disease then spread to the native population. One in four of the Tenochtitlan ponies died from horse pox alone, contributing to the eventual collapse of the Tenochtitlan Empire.”
 
Velvet blinked as her brain attempted to process Daring’s impromptu history lesson.
 
“What’s the Kingdom of Caballos?”
 
A groan escaped Daring’s mouth as she placed a hoof onto her face.
 
“Hey, come on, don’t blame me,” Velvet said. “I don’t study history. I just make the crap you use to study history.”
 
“My faithful student,” Daring said, a hint of sarcasm on her voice as she swiped the Sapphire Statue from Velvet’s hoof, “you still have a lot to learn.”
 
===
 
A character profile for  
Daring Did  
Tales of an Adventurer’s Companion
 
By Seriff Pilcrow and AdmiralKew
 
Theme music created by The L-Train
 
Daring Did: Tales of an Adventurer’s Companion is an upcoming fanfiction series that aims to breathe new life into a once popular headcanon: that Twilight Velvet—Twilight Sparkle’s mother—was directly involved with Daring Do and her adventures. Travel with Daring Do and Twilight Velvet across Equestria and beyond as the discover treasures of old, battle dangerous foes, and unearth the knowledge the world’s past has to offer. Drawing inspiration from real-world archeology, locales, and cultures; auxiliary MLP material like the IDW comics and G.M. Berrow chapter books; and standard action-adventure fare like Uncharted and Indiana Jones, Daring Did aims to create an immersive, yet flexible narrative with its main premise, allowing fans to weave their own stories into the universe.
 
More information on Daring Did can be found here.
 
Other Daring Did art can be found here.