“So where did you come from?” Twilight asked Starswirl the Bearded's Timetravel Compendium, scratching her neck as if she could itch the answer out of her mane. The book lay in the light of the morning sun pouring in from the window, looking like a gift from divinity; something that it probably was.
Books were not supposed to appear out of nowhere lying on top of one's desk, especially if that desk was Twilight Sparkle's. But this one had.
She had tried to find all sorts of ways the priceless book could have come her way.
She had searched high...
Dear Princess Celestia,
Not that I'm not grateful in the event that what I suspect is true, but, did you actually send me-
She had written that with her horn-writing going completely illegible by the end.
The collected and calm response had been a negative to her question.
She had searched in the middle...
“Spike, do you know about this?” She'd quizzed the dragon while he was sweeping up the dust from one of Rainbow's interminable collisions.
He'd been rather put-off, and had just grunted. Some of the dust made its way into Twilight's lungs, initiating a painful coughing fit.
“Spike, this book is more than worth its weight in gold! And it just happened to arrive on my tabletop!” Twilight tearfully reiterated.
“Well I dunno, Twilight. We must have had it since the beginning. Celestia knows how many strange books are hidden in this tree.”
Disappointed on that end, she'd even searched the relatively insane realm of probability, namely Pinkie Pie, because you could never discount her involvement.
“Wow! A book! Where did that one come from?” She'd asked obliviously.
“That's what I'm trying to find out Pinkie,” Twilight muttered.
And then she had searched low...
She had sent a letter to Princess Luna asking if she had a hoof in that book's appearance, as if it could be some mysterious benefaction kept under wraps from Celestia for some reason.
A thoroughly linguistically-tangled letter assured her that it was not so.
On a whim, she asked her Owl about it too. No answers there either.
Sighing, she sat down in front of her desk, hoofs resting on the satin-smooth cover of the priceless book, daring herself to open it. She couldn't bring herself to, though. It felt like stealing. Books of that importance could only be accessed after a proper amount of procedural haggling. To have it at the end of your hooftips with no price to pay was... unsettling, to say the least.
She looked out the window, and she saw herself trotting down the road with Miss Cheerilee.
After a few seconds of incomprehension, the table went flying, and Starswirl's book was going to go along with it until a glow of telekinesis saved it and set it back on a shelf.
Twilight, shocked beyond belief, ran out of the library and onto the street.
“Woah! Watch the floor, Twilight! I just cleaned the darn thing up!” Spike gasped.
Twilight bumped into a couple of ink bottles that shattered in her wake.
Out she rushed, and she reached the end of the street just in time to see her tail vanishing behind a house with an Ivy encrusted balcony.
She gave chase, but by the time she could see around the corner her prey had vanished. So had Cheerilee. Looking around and glancing behind a curtain of the thick vines, she tried to poke them out into the open out of whatever cubbyhole they might have sprouted themselves into.
She even teleported onto the top of the house she was next to, giving herself an enhanced vantage point, but she obtained no view of what she wanted to see.
Pinpricks of worry assaulted her, worry that seemed to go straight to her stomach. Another Twilight roaming around town could not be a good thing. For all she knew, it could be a malevolent imposter who was doing Celestia knew what harm to the innocent citizens of ponyville.
Maybe it was a changeling!
Twilight already knew what was really happening though. The book's arrival was too well timed.
Twilight teleported and set her hooves on the ground, shivered a little, then made her way back to the library.
She opened the door to see a floor devoid of inkstains and three perfectly sound inkbottles where there had only been shards and puddles.
Feeling the beginnings of guilt as well as the unpleasant feeling of nerves, she hastened to get its uncomfortable load off of herself.
“Spike, I'm sorry about the bottles, I- How did you fix them, anyways?” She asked, looking over the objects in question, searching for any flaws in their reconstruction.
“Um, you just came and fixed them a few seconds ago? I thought you were back in your room, why'd you go back outside?” Spike's befuddled voice came from the cupboard where he kept his cleaning tools.
Twilight's left eye twitched exactly three times. She walked upstairs into her room, holding back a scream full of half-mixed unpleasant feelings that really wanted out. She opened the door to see the tail end of a timetravel spell carrying her other self off to who knew when.
She fell back down on her rump, in the same place she had been sitting down on before she saw herself outside and clutched the edge of a hoof to her forehead.
Time-travel. She was time-travelling, and she had seen herself going around Ponyville and then back while she had gone chasing herself. She glanced over to the book and saw it opened to a specific page on the readjusted desk.
It was a spell targeted to go into the future.
That was news for Twilight; She had not known that Starswirl had worked on that version of the spell too. With a squeal unsuited to the moment, she thought about just what kind of a treasure she had in her grasp. She just couldn't resist it.
She read the spell in its entirety, letting the colours of that particular magic permeate her understanding completely.
“Huh,” she thought. “It's pretty simple, just slightly altered from the other time travel spell I used.”
She shook her head, shaking the wonder and awe out of it.
Why would I be jumping all over time in the first place? She thought and she thought, and she didn't like the ideas she was getting. Granted that she had been worrying over nothing the last time this had happened, but still. Anything could have necessitated the usage of those spells.
And whyever would she want to go to the future?
“Ugh. I don't like this, Spike,” she moaned to her assistant later in the evening, an assistant who was having a hard time believing all the things that had come out of the mare's mouth. “Of all the things that could have gone wrong in Ponyville, why did it have to start with a book? And such a great book too.”
“Oy, don't get me started,” the dragon muttered. “Everything that happens here started with a book, Twilight.”
“Yes, well,” Twilight struggled to find the right words to express her anxiety. She already had the telltale signs of stress wormed onto her face, and its tendrils were starting to find their way into her mind. Her thrice accursed gifted gifted gifted mind.
“You know what happened last time, Spike. I fretted over a Time Travel spell for days and all it turned out to be was a useless circle of wasted time.”
Spike was cradling the sleeping body of Peewee, The phoenix having dropped by with his parents for a while; parents that were rather concerned about the time, as their sunward glances suggested.
“But more importantly, I made the jump back in time anyways. So if I've already seen myself doing it, does it mean I'm pretty much doomed to do it?”
“I dunno Twilight, sounds like future-Twilight's problem to me,” Spike chuckled. He brought the baby phoenix over to Twilight and held him out, and the unicorn took him into her forehooves, cradling the precious little thing.
“But If you're so worried about it, why don't you just lock the book away? If you don't know the spells, you won't be able to jump around in time, and then you'll have nothing to worry about.”
Twilight looked at the peaceful child she cradled, and the desire for such peace of mind made her decision for her.
“Okay, Spike. I'll tell the Princess that I'm entrusting the book to her for safekeeping and she can keep it with her. Who knows, she'll probably be really glad to see it too.”
“Cool. Just so long as it keeps you from getting another eyepatch,” Spike laughed.
He woke his avian friend up, and his parents took over, guiding the sleepy firebird off to their home in the mountains. Spike waved for a while into the setting sun before heading back inside. Caught in the beauty of the moment, Twilight followed him outside and looked around.
She breathed the fresh air, stretched her tired legs, looked at the numerous colourful, happy souls that populated her town, and felt silly for feeling so conflicted all morning.
All that went out the window when she saw another image of herself wandering around with Rarity, headed off towards the oddly named boutique her friend managed.
The sight was troubling in itself, and Twilight felt the strange urge to go and drape a bag over the other Twilight's head and drag her down to her basement. Celestia knew the sorts of things her image could reveal about what was happening there.
She then realized that she had the book; she could find out anytime she wanted to.
She then stopped thinking for a while as she witnessed her image nuzzling her friend's ear, then giving her a short, sweet kiss, a kiss that Rarity accepted with a giggle and returned a few moments later.
Indeed, she stopped thinking for so long that she didn't realize that she had until the sun had gone down and Spike had shouted out that he was going to lock her out.
She shuffled back inside, on the verge of letting the memory run through her mind again, but stopping before she could collapse out of the sheer absurdity of it.
And so it was that Twilight Sparkle, protege of the Princess and bearer of the element of magic, nearly unraveled the fabric of the universe with rampant time-travel not for some epic quest to save the world or in the name of scientific inquiry, but to see just what the heck her future-self was thinking.
She pored over the book, absorbing its contents from cover to cover, and she was struck by the elegant simplicity of everything she studied.
The prospect of messing with time was rather iffy, but Starswirl was so firm in his belief that the practise was safe that he had let his draft of the short-term time-rewind spell accessible to the general public in his library.
The crux of Starswirl's assurances weren't very elegantly worded, however.
“Imagine a time-traveler goes back in time with the intent to cause his or her parents' demise before he was even concieved. Naturally the universe should collapse from the paradox. However, if the time-traveller initiates a chain of causality starting a paradox, that universe would cease to exist there and then. Of course, there are other ways the situation could have gone which kept the situation from turning into a horrible mess, so everything continues just fine.”
It tied into a lot of other theories; theories like Multiverse-theory and Schroediamond's Dog, but it all boiled down to something unnervingly simple. In short, nothing could go wrong with time travel because if it had, you had already been wiped from existence.
Then there were all the expansions on the spell she had attempted in the Starswirl the Bearded Wing.
There were directions on how to control the time of arrival. That was simple enough-
Twilight flipped the book back to something she found extremely intriguing; the timewalker spell, something that stopped the traveller from getting yanked back to their present after a few minutes. Like the cloudwalker spell, it kept you in a place you were not meant to be. No doubt the cause of how all the other Twilight's could stick around for so long.
There were a lot of other discoursive notes regarding other time manipulation techniques, such as actively rewinding time around you, or changing its direction relative to yourself and yourself alone, but the complexity and strength required to perform those put off Twilight considerably.
She then took a moment to hyperventilate into a small paper bag she had kept close to her for that very purpose. Sometimes the sheer audacity of what she was going to accomplish made her go a little bit tizzy.
It didn't help that she was still warring with herself regarding the whole issue and what she should have done with it. She knew what the safe thing was. Involve the princess, or her friends and unravel the issue right there, right then.
But... she had kissed Rarity. And Rarity had liked it.
She could not wrap her head around any part of that occurrence. The absurdities were too many to even begin to address. A lot more than the paper bag could stand to compensate for, anyways.
This burden of responsibility was like her spree into quantum arcanics back when she was in Celestia's school. The princess had told her not to pursue that line of theory just yet, saying that it would warp her conceptions of magic and she might never cast the same way again if she read those books before she had the rest of her education safely under her belt.
She had snuck into the library anyways, stealthily sneaking around in her black suit and poring over book after book of forbidden knowledge. Needless to say that when her mana-bolt streams actually manifested as mana-bolt bullets in class the next day, the princess was rather disappointed.
But this was something that concerned herself. Surely she had the right to determine what the correct course of action was.
After staring at the paper bag and realizing just how pathetic she was being, she threw it across the room and made her mind up. Time travel may be a shady course of action, but the only thing that would illuminate it would be to use it.
She made a round of the library, checking all was in order, then went up to sleep. Tomorrow would be a day she wouldn't live in the present, and she wanted to do it as not-tired as she could.
Uneasy dreams of collapsing bridges asaulted her mind a few times before dissolving into safely ridiculous things, like flying books and raining marshmallows. Amidst it all a midnight blue alicorn watched and wondered.
“What manner of chaos is she brewing?” she muttered, calmly looking at the apocalyptic visions of a rather strange pony. “And her...” she looked at another dream of the same pony, somehow managing to appear simultaneously.
This dream wasn't nearly as benign. Twilight kept going to the future only to find that she was stuck in the same place, no matter how much she tried. A typical stuck-in-place-while-the-world-ends nightmare, Luna would have gone and broken it up if she understood any of what was happening.
“And then there's her dream...” Luna focused on the third instance of Twilight's dream, also manifesting with the others.
This one seemed an entirely different flavour of them though. A tea party with her friend Rarity, with about a dozen or so Twilights popping in from everywhere.
“How is she doing that? If I didn't know better, I'd say that she had a three way personality split, but-”
“That would be too extreme a conclusion, yeah,” Twilight groaned from beside her, leaning on the Princess's back and looking like she'd been sleepless for ages.
“DAAH!”
Somewhere in the lofty towers of Canterlot, a midnight blue alicorn jumped as if she had been pricked by a needle. Thoroughly confused and more than a little shocked, she narrowed her eyes at the distant lights of Ponyville.
She'd always been impressed by her sister's student in many ways, but she wasn't so sure she liked this particular development.
____________________________________________
When Twilight awoke the next day, she did not bother waking Spike up. Grabbing a muffin from the kitchen and chewing on it, she laid out the checklists for that day and went over the two spells she was going to perform.
Time travel spells had this unique... colour of magic. An element to their construction that was unique to them and them alone. It was rather hard to hold in her mind's eye, what with her unfamiliarity with it.
She had a lot of misgivings, but she swallowed them one by one with a little side helping of Sugarcube corner's finest. Besides, once she was in the past, all those questions would be moot.
She bit down on her guilt and made it go away. A little too easily, in fact. Rather worried at her excitement, she struggled to bring her guilt back.
“Well, here goes nothing.”
She cast the Timewalking spell, and felt not a single difference about her.
She cast the Timetravel spell, aimed at yesterday's dawn.
Once again, no difference. Except for the sudden appearance of a Twilight in her bed and a sharp shift in Spike's posture, both sleeping peacefully.
She stared at them for a while, her mind knowing that it was something interesting, but not knowing just how.
Her hoofs carried her over to the edge of her own bed, clacking on the floor ever so slightly, and she eyed the rumpled covers and the up and down motions of the occupant within. Briefly the heat and dryness in the air around her made itself apparent. Her throat was dry, and she gulped some wetness back into it.
She wasn't sure about what she had expected to see there, but finally leaning over and looking at her face... She saw herself drooling into her pillow, mouth open and tongue lolling.
Unbidden, heat climbed up her neck and onto her cheeks. Surely this wasn't what she looked like every night she slept, was it? Frowning, she reached over and pushed her tongue back into her mouth and closed it shut with a little nudge. On an afterthought, she picked her falling tail off the edge of the bed and put it neatly under the navy-blue covers.
The sleeping Twilight did not even twitch a muscle.
Darn, but she was a deep sleeper. Inconvenient, she mused.
Satisfied, and reasonably relieved to see that she could leave her room without any hiccups, she left it.
She picked up a notepad and a pencil in her horn and walked out the door into a still-dark Equestria.
She breathed in the crisp-as-a-razor air and tasted the morning in her nose and tongue.
She felt rather silly for making the trip into a completely sleeping ponyville.
A blonde-maned pegasus flew overhead, trailing through the sky in a wobbly trajectory.
Twilight walked aimlessly behind the airborne pony, chewing on the tip of her pencil absentmindedly. She glanced down at the pad and made herself a checklist.
“Come back to yesterday morning, check.
Leave room undetected? Check.”
Now came the things that she had yet to do.
“Investigate Rarity and the other Twilight.” Twilight made a square box and wrote the objective down next to it, and paused in the middle of the road she was treading.
Investigate.
How would she do that, exactly? Slip on her catsuit and shadow the two?
She found herself sitting in front of the Carousel Boutique, lost in more ways than one.
She sighed. It was just so silly! She shouldn't be wasting her time stalking herself like this. There were books to be read! Papers to be written! Friends to hang out with and learn so much more about!
She heard footsteps sound from the inside, and her heart caught in her throat. She teleported wildly and found herself stuck in the branches of a tree overlooking the residence.
It's bark was rough. The leaves were covered with dew, and a few feathers and sticks fell in her mane from a bird's nest above her. Beginning to feel the hints of misery growing, Twilight groaned.
At least she had a view on the inside.
Rarity stepped out the door momentarily, looked around, then walked back in. Only slightly muffled by the closed windows, Twilight could hear what was being said.
“No dear, I can't see you anywhere out there,” she said.
“You can't?” Twilight heard her own voice come to her.
After a moments pause, it resumed. “Oh, right. I got myself stuck in a tree.”
“Oh! Aren't you going to help yourself out?”
“Don't worry about me, I can handle myself. Besides, some things need to go a-”
“Very specific way, I know darling.”
Remember? So she was going to come here and spend the day with Rarity in the future?
Twilight was distracted by a thud, giggle and a playful ow.
She strained to get a better view of the inside. The linoleum tiled floor was very nicely arranged, but as pleasing as that was Twilight sought to see beyond that. Perhaps the two ponies inside were on the couch Rarity kept in her lounge.
She strained so hard that she broke the branch that had supported her chest and flopped messily onto the ground.
Her ow was not so playful.
Ponies were starting to wake up by that time. Some had even appeared onto the street she was lying on in so undignified a manner. She brushed herself off as she rose to all fours, shaking her head.
Future Twilight and Rarity seemed to know that she was outside and spying on them, so it wouldn't have made much of a difference if she had knocked on the door and stepped inside.
She tried to argue her hesitance off as a scientists' preference for covert observation. After all, even when Pinkie had realized she was trailing her back when the world was young, she had not abandoned her post.
She knew the difference one's presence made in an observation.
But then she thought of herself in the presence of those two, doing-
Her mind could not go there, not yet.
She rubbed her forehead, feeling very disappointed in herself for not being able to face what she came here to find out. It couldn't be that bad, could it?
She knew for a fact that sometime later that day, Rarity and herself had done something extraordinarily intimate, something Twilight could never have envisioned herself doing. Not realistically, anyways,
It wasn't something scary, for sure.
Then why was she so afraid?
She groaned and walked over to a bench set next to a small park and sat down, tail and ears dragging, pencil and notepad discarded to the side.
And she had had such plans. Such a swimming start. What was she thinking, going out so badly prepared? Oh, if Princess Celestia could see her at that moment, she'd surely be wondering what she had seen in her to take her on as her student.
She picked the notepad up in a hoof, and held the pencil in her horn. She scratched through the entire bullet about her investigating, rubbing the pencil against the paper with a vengeance.
Then she closed her eyes, puckered her lips and bent her brain to complete the sentence she had not been able to complete earlier. She caught all the errant thoughts that made it; all the words that refused to come, and with a burst of adrenaline, let it take form.
She thought of herself in the presence of those two, doing... all sorts of lovey dovey things with each other that she had always wondered about experiencing and now that she had seen herself actually doing them, she had to see just HOW she had done it.
When she was finished, she gasped for breath, punching her chest and coughing for air.
Thinking had never been that hard.
But once it was done with, little bubbles and radio buttons of thought began opening in her mind. The ideas flew, and Twilight eagerly followed.
So she wanted to know how she had managed to change her relationship with Rarity that much over however long it had taken her to do it.
She just needed the right equipment to do so. A set of binoculars, a cloud, and a much, MUCH bigger piece of parchment than the pad she had.
With the flash of a teleportation spell, Twilight vanished.
She reappeared on the street next to the one the library rested on; strange, considering how precise her aim usually was. Still, it wasn't much of an inconvenience. She could walk.
A few steps later and she heard somepony calling her.
“Oh, Twilight!” The addressed mare turned to see the cheerful face of Cheerilee heading her way with a saddlebag hefted on her left side. The imbalance in her posture tickled a compulsion for symmetry somewhere deep within her, but it did not manifest, thankfully.
“Are you going back to the library?” Cheerilee asked, and Twilight nodded, still trying to get her bearings straight.
“I was going to pick up some things I'd forgotten for a project of mine. Are you going there too?”
Cheerilee nodded.
“I had to return a few books from last week,” she explained.
They fell in step together, and in a matter of seconds their destination lay in view.
The library was in their line of sight. Perched in the window, Twilight saw herself.
Twilight saw herself looking back at her.
She was assaulted by a brief wave of nausea and sudden disorientation; her mind couldn't seem to decide where she was at that precise moment. Another glance showed her that she was not at the window any longer, so that meant-
“Cheerilee, this way! I'll explain later, but we need to run!”
-she was on her way to chase herself, and the chase had to be futile.
Startled, but trusting in the unicorn enough to follow her odd request, the two of them dashed to the corner of the street until they could make a right turn.
“Slow down,” Twilight whispered, and casually walked around the ivy-encrusted building, a befuddled schoolteacher in tow.
Once they had rounded the corner, Twilight pushed Cheerilee into a wall and leaned next to her, counting down.
“4... 3... 2... 1...”
The schoolteacher, still a very innocent bystander in these odd proceedings, worded a protest but the teleportation Twilight primed at that exact moment swallowed the sound. They appeared in front of the library door, and Cheerilee was subjected to another round of unexplained orders.
“Cheerilee, I'll take your books here. I'm sorry, but there was this whole mess with a spell, and you need to get out of here-”
Twilight was interrupted by a book landing on her hoof and the sound of a pony galloping away. Twilight sighed; she hadn't wanted to scare the poor mare away, but there was only so much a normal pony could stand to be exposed to.
Shaking her head, she made her way into the library and found Spike staring catatonically at an expanding puddle of ink on the floor, surrounded by sparkling shards of glass.
“Oh! I'm so sorry, Spike, let me get that.”
With a little bit of concentration, Twilight cast an oft-used repairing spell at the focus of her assistant's chagrin.
The now whole bottles wobbled slightly before coming to rest, and Spike picked them up.
“If only you'd clean up your messes like this more often,” he morosely muttered before walking off to put them on a shelf. He halfway threw them there, letting them wobble to rest on their own.
The clink of glass striking wood made Twilight wince.
So did the emptiness of Spike's tone. Sure he'd been abrasive that whole day, but she'd chalked it off to him being a little nervous about Peewee's first visit since he went back home. She'd fix this, she vowed. Once she fixed whatever she was doing.
She moved to grab her binoculars from a drawer in her desk-
She was ploughed over by another Twilight racing in, up the stairs and into her room.
Seriously?
This Twilight looked extremely emaciated; her ribs were clearly visible, the alternating depressions and crests of bone and flesh casting shadows that shifted as she ran up and out of sight.
Then she recalled that last inexplicable Twilight that had read the spell to go into the future, and then she remembered that she would come back soon after, after being disappointed in her search for the Twilight accompanying Cheerilee.
By Celestia, this was a complicated ball of yarn to understand.
She drew the things she needed to herself with her horn and then proceeded to make like a puff of dragon smoke and teleport out of there, back to the bench she had been slumped on.
When she got there, she felt definitely out of sorts. She realized that she had stretched herself a little too far, and she lay down on her haunches, hooves clutching her head. Her plans of cloudwalking and procuring a cloud for her viewing ease would have to wait; she could barely lift her own head at that moment.
She waited for a few minutes there, regaining her strength. The minutes turned into an hour, and Twilight felt a nudge on her barrel. She opened her eyes, saw no one in her vicinity, then discarded the occurrence in favor of regarding her grumbling stomach.
“All that rapid fire teleportation sure works up an appetite,” she said to herself.
She trotted off towards Sugarcube corner, the thought of a milkshake burning through her mind.
Of course, she saw that her targets had made their way there before her. Her stomach cried out in despair, not that it had a reason to.
She stepped inside the little establishment, choked, and rushed back outside.
This was harder than she had thought. To see them literally before her eyes, in that posture, sitting across from each other...
To see herself like that was like seeing someone else entirely. Someone a lot braver than her.
The certainty that she would become this stranger was terrifying to think of.
She took at least 2 minutes to compose herself. Then, inspired by exactly who she was chasing, she summoned a fedora, tilted it across her eyes and stepped back inside.
She found that not having to watch herself and Rarity as she stepped inside worked wonders for her courage. On numb hooves she made her way to a booth right behind the one she was sitting on.
She gave a deep, shuddering sigh of relief and spread her parchment on the desk, leaned back and closed her eyes. She listened to the sound of her blood racing.
Then she heard her voice order three milkshakes. Pinkie came and deposited one in the centre of her writing board.
“Pinkie!” Twilight protested.
“Hey, I don't know much about this stuff, but I think that mare that looks exactly like you likes you!” She cheerily stage whispered and walked off. Twilight just groaned, picked up the drink that she had ordered; well not her, exactly, and sated her thirst and exhaustion.
She almost moaned with pleasure at the little vanilla affair she was consuming.
Then she spent the next minute or so lamenting the little circular wet patch the mug had left.
She listened in to the goings on behind her; Rarity was discussing some of the things her shop had been going through.
“Don't get me wrong dear, having you around has been an immense pleasure, but I don't think the boutique can stand any further Twilight Sparkles appearing and disappearing out of nowhere. Can't you ask them to give it a little breathing space?”
Her voice chuckled. “Oh don't worry about that Rarity. Today's the last day they'll come by.”
A poignant pause followed. Twilight slurped the dregs of her icy cold milkshake down her throat and set the drink next to her.
“I mean, they're all me at some point in the future, so I can just make sure I don't come by after today.”
“I didn't mean it quite like that, Darling! Surely you're going to stay a while longer?” There was a very unsettling tone of desperation in Rarity's voice.
“Of course I am! But just one of me, not the indeterminable dozens like we've had these last 4 days. For the life of me I don't understand why and how I would do something that disruptive.”
“Well It's just a matter of perspective, is it not? Maybe you'll find out once you've finished this entire loop you've caught yourself in,” Rarity mused. Then- “Oh! Twilight dear, are you sure you can't take a nap? You're falling in your seat as it is!”
On instinct, Twilight looked behind her to see herself slumped on the table, Rarity stroking her foreleg gently. Her future self got up, slowly. “No, Rarity, I-” She yawned up a storm, massaging her temples. “-have to go through with this. This is the day it all begins, after all.”
Rarity let out a strangled laugh. “And today is the day it all ends. Thus is concluded the shortest romance of the ages.”
The ascribing of a label to this entire debacle seemed a rather significant event, and Twilight noted it with a strange twinge of dread.
On the other side of the wooden wall, it was her turn to be the consoler, it seemed. The hooves shifted in position; Twilight grabbed Rarity's. “Not if I can help it. I know I made a mess of things, but it's a mess that has to end at some point. We're here, aren't we? Things can only get better.”
A classy sigh escaped her friend. “You know where I stand with that idea of yours, Twilight.”
“I know,” her other self admitted. “But you can't blame me for hoping otherwise.”
Another sigh. “I suppose not,” Rarity said, tapping the table with a manicured hooftip.
Twilight realized that she had been leaning over for quite a while now, and Rarity met her gaze with impeccably unfortunate timing. She managed to glimpse a sly smile just before she darted back on the other side of her sofa, hoof clutching her heart.
The sound of someone getting off their seat only made the curl-into-a-ball-NOW instinct scream louder.
Twilight shut her eyes tightly, and her hat fell onto her face even further. She heard someone sit down in front of her.
A teal glow emanating from behind her closed eyelids distracted her enough to get her eyes open. She saw her hat getting yanked off her head and it flew straight into Rarity's inspecting hooves.
“Effective, I suppose, but rather horribly chosen. Those hats are soo last decade, dear.”
Twilight's brain broke. So did her face; evident from the incredibly awkward smile she was sporting. Rarity looked at it; her cheeks inflated while a hoof kept laughter at bay. She didn't say anything though, mercifully.
She just tore off a long strip of paper from the side of Twilight's parchment and cut it into even thinner and shorter pieces. Before Twilight could object though- “You'll like it better this way anyways; it's a perfect square now,” -Rarity assuaged her fears.
It seemed to break whatever was holding her back.
“H-hello Rarity,” Twilight rasped. She swallowed, thumping her chest a little.
“Hello Twilight. You've been rather adamant about me not coming to talk to you about everything that's been happening these past few days, I'm afraid.”
Twilight looked behind her once again, only to see herself conked out on the table again, a thin trail of drool covering the hoof supporting her head.
“Oh don't worry about her,” Rarity continued. Twilight looked at her and saw her fitting the strips of paper around the hat, folding and arranging them above and below each other to make a very artistically crafted mat, extending the brim of the hat by about three inches on each side. “She's been awake the whole night working on her 'Map of absolute time', she needs her rest, whatever she might think.”
“Umm.” Twilight couldn't seem to marshall her thoughts into anything coherent. Bits and pieces of appropriate conversation ran through her mind, but then again. Bits and pieces.
“That looks pretty,” she impulsively blurted out, looking at Rarity's completed impromptu hat.
“Yes, It does, doesn't it?” Rarity surveyed her creation with unmasked pride. Some strips of paper splayed out further than others, some looped out of their plane of alignment and cast shadows on the rest of their length and it all came together as a very fashionable hat. “You've been wearing this hat for days now. I was wondering when I'd get the time to make this.”
Rarity made the paper blend in with the rest of the object and toned it a dark Navy blue. Considering it was something summoned out of unicorn magic in the first place, it was rather easy for the fashionista to take to the magical hammer and anvil, so to speak.
The hat floated down onto Twilight's head again. Her horn poked out between a seam of strips, and a final alteration from Rarity's aura widened the gap a little more.
Twilight lifted it up from her head and held it in front of her. She looked down at it, twisting it about.
She raised her gaze to see Rarity resting her head in her hooves, leaning on the table with eyes her various books had taught her to be defined as 'smouldering'. Try as she might, Twilight just couldn't shake off the Deer-in-the-lanternlight effect such anachronistic behaviour seemed to induce in her.
“You needn't be so afraid, Darling.” Rarity's voice was just a whisper compared to all the things she had said before.
She reached out and held Twilight's shoulder. The touch was in no way anything she hadn't been subject to before; it was just something passing comfort between two friends.
The familiarity of it all wiped the fog away from Twilight's responses and she managed to relax in her seat.
“I know, Rarity, but it's just that I have no clue about what I'm doing. In fact, the whole reason I came back in time was to figure out how we went from being meet-each-other-sometimes-a-week friends to, well... kissing in the middle of a street.” Twilight subconsciously held the hat in front of her muzzle and stared at some of the strips that weren't in line with each other. She began nudging them around, trying to get them to follow some semblance of order.
“Oh it wasn't easy, let me tell you that right now. Just imagine, you meeting me 4 days ago having already seen us in a rather unstable relationship for some 5 days yourself. Then somehow you had to get it all to start so that you could justify your past!” Rarity rubbed her temples after carefully reaching under her mane to do so.
“Honestly the chances of you having managed that were so microscopic that the only reasonable explanation seems to be this 'Law of paradox resolution' that you're so fond of. Um, no offense dear.”
“I know, right?” Twilight muttered with a lack of self-esteem. It struck her then that that sentiment didn't seem very fair. She wasn't that bad at romance and stuff, was she? It wasn't particularly nice of Rarity to say that either, but then again she didn't have the same perspective her white-coated friend would no doubt have at this point.
“I think it's absolute hogwash though. 'Paradox resolution' my flank,” Rarity all but growled.
“Well, that was the theory Starswirl based all the spells I'm using on. It can't be complete nonsense, after all,” Twilight said, startled by Rarity's vehemence.
“I'm well aware of that dear, but don't you see what it would mean?” In a moment, Rarity's demeanour switched to being distraught. It was rather fascinating, the way she was so mercurial. Twilight just shook her head.
“It would mean that everything that happens in a loop of Time-travel has no definite cause! That everything we've come to feel for each other just came into existence out of thin air! I refuse to believe that something as deep and significant as love could be a cosmic joke,” Rarity spouted off, glaring a hole into the circular patch in the middle of her piece of parchment.
Love, Twilight briefly considered. Such a strong word. Surely she doesn't...
“I, for one, firmly believe that Time-travel can only validate things that were bound to happen anyway. It's just a little mistake in the fabric of how things happen; a mistake that I'm not sure who commits or how, but a mistake that resolves itself. In short, there is always a place where the loop starts, even if we might not see it.”
Rarity tapped the centre of the circle a few times, as if to get the message across in more than one way.
Twilight couldn't wrap her mind around the concept though. Something existing out of time? Absolute nonsense. Positively heretical, even. Besides, Rarity wasn't exactly Starswirl.
“I hope you don't mind if I say that I'm not so sure about that yet.”
“Oh, you always say that. It's just a matter of time, darling... Heheh, pardon the pun,” Rarity went back to scrutinizing the very hairs off Twilight's coat.
Twilight took the time to look back at her sleeping self, who had her tongue out of her mouth again.
Harrumphing, Twilight shoved it back in and shut her mouth.
Honestly.
“Twilight dear, aren't you going to ask me anything?”
“Hmm? Like what?” Twilight said, genuinely unsure.
“Well I know pretty much everything that you are going to encounter later on. You might as well... hmm... Cheat.”
“Huh?” Twilight glanced backwards, blinking. “Does she know about this?” she asked, pointing behind her.
“Well, yes,” Rarity deadpanned, pointing in front of her.
“Oh,” Twilight sheepishly smiled. “Well, not really, per sé. I mean, I've made it fine to this point, so it doesn't seem necessary...” The question tore itself from her then. “I don't do something really really embarrassing, do I?” she looked up at Rarity, partially hiding behind her mane, pupils constricted.
Similarly, Rarity couldn't hold her chuckle in. “Of course you do!”
“Really?” Twilight asked, choking on the word.
“Many many times, in fact. You aren't exactly smooth when it comes to the finer aspects of wooing someone... Not even in the baser aspects of that, actually.”
Probably spurred on by the way Twilight was wishing for the earth to swallow her, Rarity added, “It was all part of your charm though. Don't worry. Like you said, you did fine, didn't you? Or you will.”
Twilight still wouldn't face up, so Rarity held her hoof out and lifted her chin, revealing that the mare was on the verge of tears.
Instantly repentant, Rarity began cooing, caressing the side of her face. Twilight instinctively shied away.
It left them in the middle of an awkward silence, and for Rarity, an awkward pose.
“I suppose I should wake you up,” Rarity mumbled, getting up and walking over to the sleeping mare whose tongue was out of her mouth again.
Sleepily blinking and rubbing her eyes, Twilight looked behind her at the distraught time-traveller. “You really scared me that time, Rarity,” she said, and Twilight just cringed a little more in her seat.
She tried to find something else to focus on aside from the table top and her empty mug, but the establishment had just opened. There was no background noise, nothing she could distract herself with. She heard her company get up and trot outside. After a few seconds, Twilight followed.
__________________________________
The rest of the day, Twilight didn't feel so good about everything anymore. She had been nervous about everything, yes, but she had been excited too. Knowing that she was going to screw up on multiple occasions later, or previously, seemed to take a lot out of her.
She still kept trailing them with diligence, though. Twilight wasn't one to give up on a job when undertaken.
Her mission took her to many places. The two of them went to a park soon after, and Twilight lay down with her head on Rarity's lap, pelting the mare supporting her with wildflowers she'd uproot with her horn.
Twilight had tripped midstep when she saw that, and had walked off to the other side of a tree. She had sat there with an ugly mix of a grin and a grimace twisting her mouth while she shuddered from a thousand objections.
Then they had gone to Zecora's hut where Rarity had asked for some stimulants for Twilight's sake. Armed with Ginseng and a few other herbs whose names Twilight couldn't catch and Rarity couldn't remember, they had gone back.
Then they had gone to the lakeside, a place that was unnaturally deserted. The two subjects jumped right in, splashing and having mindless fun in general. It all changed when Twilight got yanked into the lake in a cyan aura.
Faced with a mischievous giggle and a sympathetic smile from herself, Twilight had floated there, feeling like it was the first day of Magic kindergarden all over again.
Rarity's smile had died a long, slow and painful death while Twilight scampered back off to the shore.
They had just started roaming around town after that, and it was evening. The sun was setting, painting the sky with a rich autumn spectrum.
It just reminded Twilight that the moment that set everything in motion was going to start now.
Rarity had been slouching in misery ever since the lake, and Twilight - the other one - had been consoling her ever since. The way she was acting, steering Rarity around with placid sureness, as if she was the calmest being in the world... She slightly resembled Princess Celestia herself, grace and poise and confidence oozing out of every pore.
“I was horrible, absolutely horrible to the poor dear. I really didn't expect that from myself,” Rarity would say, beating herself up. “Don't worry, I forgave you,” Twilight would say, shooting a warning glance behind her. The recipient of that glare would just sneer, more intensely annoyed by the second.
There was just one more street to cover before they would turn right into the road in front of the library.
Their pace had slowed down to a crawl.
“-to go and see Starswirl now,” Twilight caught herself saying that, and her ears twitched to tune in, interest sparked.
“But he lived more than a thousand years ago! Are you sure you can make the jump?”
“I've been looking into the elements of Harmony, and I think there's a way I can use the times they were used as checkpoints. It should be doable.”
“Oh everything is doable for you,” Rarity cooed with a nuzzle. “But are you certain you'll be fine? You don't know what lies ahead as of this moment.”
“I really wish that this wasn't necessary, you know that, but-” Twilight sighed. She looked to the sun, as if searching for her mentor's face in the light. “I have to find out, Rarity. I've figured out nearly everything that I need to do to clean this up except for the book itself. Starswirl should know how It just appeared there.”
“I still wish you wouldn't have to go...” Rarity said, her voice teetering on the edge of a whine. Her eyes locked with the mare she was half-leaning on. “Are you sure I can't convince you otherwise?”
They were in front of the library.
Twilight gently nuzzled Rarity's ear, then gave her a short, sweet kiss, a kiss that Rarity accepted with a giggle and returned a few moments later.
Twilight stopped walking and turned around to look at herself staring at herself walking off towards the boutique with Rarity. She sat down and kept looking until Spike called Twilight back in.
Five days. That's how long it had taken for that which had happened today to happen, but Twilight still hadn't found out what she had come here to see. She wanted to know how she had done it. Today just seemed to have begun from the conclusion of it all.
Her shuffling feet took her over to her little bench outside Rarity's house. It didn't exactly face the house, which was just as well. Distractions were high and plenty where she was then, what with the entire town moving back to their homes for the night.
She managed to catch a couple walking in much the same way she had seen herself do.
She scoffed, folding her arms and looking resolutely to the side.
Frivolous, she thought. Completely unnecessary and frivolous.
Then she looked back at them, at the look of absolutely carefree joy that they seemed to summon out of nothing but each other.
Frivolous, but... Nice.
Twilight did not like the way every little part of her brain was fighting each other.
The part of her that thought that friendship would only distract her from more important things seemed to have risen its ugly head again.
Unfamiliarity, Twilight mused. So many strange things were happening and they were making her revert back to something she had perceived as safe for the entirety of her childhood. The old priorities of knowledge, knowledge, organization, Princess Celestia and Spike.
But she was nothing if not a model student. This time, her subject of interest was herself. She would not stop until she understood how she had gone from being herself to the Twilight she couldn't help but slightly admire.
Rarity was still slippery ground for her thoughts; they couldn't find purchase one way or another.
A door opened; Twilight walked out and broke into a gallop headed towards the Everfree, not looking back even once.
The door remained open, shafts of fyre-flye light dancing onto the steps in front.
Try as she might, Twilight couldn't look away. She gathered her ever-present yet unmarked sheet of parchment and rose up, walking towards the porch.
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