~Story Excerpt~

“Who are you?” Daring growled out. She needed to think of a way out of this mess and stalling with conversation was always a good first step.

“Little old me? I’m Silver Lock and I’m about to become the richest pony in the world once I get that treasure,” the sandy mare said.

Silver Lock? Daring’s eyes widened just a bit. The name was actually familiar to her, as unlikely as that might have been. Magus Ball Lightning had mentioned the name a week or so earlier when they’d met for lunch. Some thief had tried breaking into the Arcana Building—the headquarters of the Arcane Magic Council—in Canterlot and, well, had been stopped, in a way only the unicorns could possibly imagine.

Ball laughed, lifting a fork of salad to her mouth with her blue telekinesis. “You should have been there, Yearling. The wards had really done a number on the poor mare. I didn’t even think they could crush somepony down into the size of a baseball like that, but there she was, quivering weakly on the floor. Her hooves were all flattened out and you could barely see the brown mane amidst all the smeared legs and stomach. Apparently, she’d stubbornly resisted the magic right to the bitter end.”

The unicorns didn’t take kindly to theft. They never had. That’s why Daring usually worked with the Arcane Magic Council instead of against it. When they put their minds to it, the unicorns could really mess up the other tribes. A pegasus, an earth pony, a bat pony—didn’t matter how athletic or muscular you were. One flick of the horn and one twisted thought and you’d be covered in a sheet of ice, or flattened by a not-so-illusory wringer, or compressed down into a tight little ball. They did not play games when it came to their precious artifacts, as this Silver Lock had evidently learned the hard way.

~End of Excerpt~

You can start reading the full story on Fimfiction, Deviantart, or Furaffinity.

A/N: This turned out quite a bit differently than I had originally planned. Originally, Silver Lock was going to line up exactly with the story’s depiction. She’d be the size of a baseball and only have a few small details like her hoof and some strands of mane showing. But as I drew her out, I kept adding more and more details to her compressed body and it quickly became apparent she could no longer be the size of a baseball.

Same happened with Ball Lightning. She wasn’t in the image at all at first, but as I drew it out, I really liked the idea of her horn poking out of the bottom of the frame and her using telekinesis on Silver’s crushed body. This gives the implication she’s directly responsible for flattening and compressing Silver, even though the story indicates it was a protective ward that did it and Ball’s merely picking up the compacted thief. I’m perfectly fine with all that. Anything that enhances the stimuli.

Silver’s body was quite challenging to draw with its spherical, skewed perspective. Probably not something a beginner like me should have done, but oh well. I had a surprisingly more challenging time trying to figure out the look of the telekinesis. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but it’s a lot better than what I first attempted.

On the technical side, it was drawn using a mouse and keyboard in Inkscape and took about 10-12 hours, total. No color references were used. It was all trial and error messing with the color wheel to try and get something that looked okay.