Headscratchers / The Great Alicorn Hunt

• Why didn’t the Alicorn Detection Spell ping off the CMC? It obviously works on nascents because it pinged off Mach and he was ascended by basically the same circumstances as Scootaloo so it’s not like she has less potential and so didn’t set it off. And the spell would have been cast within range of them dozens of times.
  • I suppose it's possible that they calibrated the spell to ignore any signatures it was pinging when they first got it so it wouldn't give false positives when more than one of them was in range.
    • That still sounds like very poor planning since it would lock out any nascents within the radius they didn't know about. If they had to do it they should have gone somewhere with no ponies first.
  • For all three of them, it seems very likely that it was their experiences immediately leading up to their ascension that made it possible for them to ascend. They just plain weren't viable candidates until the circumstances forced them to push themselves far beyond what they had believed their limits to be, whereas Mach was already a viable candidate and just needed a tiny push (which the ascension spell provides) to ascend.
    • I think the fact that two of them ascended without a spell or other catalyst indicates otherwise, especially since those two specifically are related to the Mane Six, and thus likely carry whatever genetic aspect affects potential.