The Council of Twilight Sparkles (or possibly Twilights Sparkle; the Grammar Committee was still wrestling with the tense issue,) had begun as a quintet of the lavender unicorn gathered in one of the temporaspacial duplicates of the Books and Branches Library. As the knot of time loops and causal insanity that at least one of the magicians had engendered expanded to consume ever more timelines, more of her showed up to help. Well, they showed up, boggled at the sheer number of themself present, were brought up to speed by the Welcoming Committee, and were assigned to a given committee by the Logistics Committee. Eventually, there were simply too many instances of Celestia's student to fit in a single tree, so they spread out into the rest of the town. The Ponyvillians didn't mind too much, since there were an ever-increasing number of Ponyvilles that weren't infested by Twilight Sparkle, Destroyer of Time and Space. (The Public Relations Committee acknowledged that they were in way over their heads.)
It was a shame, reflected one of the first Twilights to get involved in this mess, that she couldn't just go back in time and tell herself that time travel was too much trouble to get involved with. Alas, that would result in a paradox that, at this point, could very well wipe out not only her Equestria, but the very possibility of the country ever existing in the first place. Probably. In any case, she certainly wasn't going to risk it. Or any other time travel for that matter. If she ever saw a sonic rainboom again, it would be too soon...
"What the—!?" Twilight Alpha (a name every Twilight used to refer to herself, but one that will only be used for this specific Twilight for the sake of convenience and sanity,) sighed as she heard the all-too familiar cry of yet another unicorn expressing incredulity at a town full of herself. Then she paused. That exclamation had been of a deeper timbre, almost as though it came from a... No. No, surely that was impossible. Sure, there were minor differences between timelines, but nothing so extreme as—
"Excuse me," said the definitely extant, definitely spark-of-magic-cutie-marked, and very definitely male lavender unicorn, "but what exactly is going on here?"
Twilight looked plaintively towards the heavens. "Really? Really?" All those Celestias in one place must have resulted in some kind of critical mass of mischief. It was the only logical explanation. That or the Pinkie Pies.
"Er, yes, really. I really would like to know why dozens of what appear to be female versions of myself are doing in what in turn appears to be an exact duplicate of Ponyville."
She looked flatly at her stallion counterpart. "Welcoming Committee's in Quills and Sofas. It's their job to explain how I ruined everything. I don't suppose your name is Twilight Sparkle?"
"Dusk Shine, actually."
"Well, everyus else is Twilight, so you shouldn't be too hard-pressed for names. Get moving, we need every me we can get, gender notwithstanding."
"Pronouns are going to be problematic, aren't they?"
"You'll only have to worry about it if you end up on the Grammar Committee. Now move that flank, buster!"
Dusk rolled his eyes and made for the exceptionally specialized store with a mutter of "Didn't think I was that hard on myself."
Twilight Alpha returned to her own ruminations for a moment before the peace was again interrupted, this time by excited shouting. For the sake of ease of reference, the elated unicorn will be dubbed Twilight Beta. She, like Twilight Alpha, was on the Primary Committee, devoted to trying to restore something that at least resembled normal spacetime if you tilted your head and squinted the right way. Her shouting went like this: "I think I've made a breakthrough!"
Alpha gave Beta a grim look. "The last thing we need is anything breaking through anything else."
"You know what I mean! I found an area of research that's been almost totally unexploited until now!"
This merited a raised eyebrow. "Really? Where did you look?"
All of the energy and excitement seemed to drain out of the second main protagonist, who suddenly became fascinated with her forehooves. "Oh, you know, here and there..."
"Where, specifically?"
"...the Necronomicon."
Alpha's eyes widened. No. No, she must have misheard herself. "I didn't quite catch that."
"The Necronomicon."
The first unicorn facehoofed. "The Necronomicon. Because collapsing all of reality wasn't enough. You had to awaken ancient demon-gods to eat the place before it went bad!"
Beta glared defensively. "Hay, I didn't actually open the thing! I just performed the Rite of Recommended Reading on it."
Alpha considered this. The Rite of Recommended Reading was one of the first spells she'd learned. When cast on one book, it either summoned a book on the same subject from the same room or, if one was unavailable, created a short-lived magical copy. "Okay... What, exactly, did you get out of it?"
Her answer came in a telekinetically held tome. While its binding appeared to be devoid of poorly tanned pony skin (which was more than she could say for some volumes), it still managed to disturb her. The cover was so black it seemed hewn from obsidian, throwing the stark white type and illustrations into sharp relief. On the bottom of the cover were scattered bones and skulls of an obviously equine origin. Above them was an amoeba-like being, a circle with eight evenly arranged tentacles, a single, staring eye, and a mouth that seemed midway through pronouncing a word that would shatter mortal sanity.
Twilight Alpha tore her eyes from the cover for a moment to let her imagination calm down before reading the title. "Grimoire for Summoning the Zoologically Dubious." The eyebrow came back up. "You really think this will help us?"
Beta shrugged. "Hay, its not like anything else has."
Alpha pondered this for a moment before shaking her head. "I don't like it. Existence is fragile enough as it is. We don't need to risk tipping the balance by letting in something... dubious."
Her counterpart gave a nervous chuckle. "Um, about that..."
The first unicorn got on her knees so she could bury her face in both forehooves. Through them came a muffled "What did you do?"
"Well, I may have contacted the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors who forever lie veiled in the Furthest Ring."
"You 'may' have."
"They're really quite nice if you're polite and don't start screaming immediately."
Alpha glanced up from her one-mare misery fest. "Are you the Twilight who had to deal with a time-travelling Pinkie Pie?"
"What idiot did that!?"
"From a certain perspective, the same idiot who's providing both ends of this conversation. You were saying?"
"Oh, right. Well, once I made our situation clear, they agreed to send us a specialist."
This dragged Alpha back to a standing position. "What specialist?"
"Yo."
She turned. The pony standing before her was, mercifully, not her. It wasn't even a her, and clearly wasn't a Dusk Shine either. His coat was vivid red. His short-cropped mane and tail were a platinum blonde bordering on pure white, a horn poking out of the former. His eyes were concealed behind sunglasses that simultaneously seemed cool and mildly ridiculous. His expression indicated a complete and total lack of available bucks to give.
He was only a few inches taller than one of the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
She turned back, pointing at the newcomer. "That's a horrorterror?"
"'That' can hear you perfectly well," noted the crimson colt. "And no, 'that' isn't one of those gurgling douchebag refugees from a bad hentai. 'That' has been unceremoniously belched back from the fucking dead like a pretzel that went down the wrong pipe so it can save your ridiculously duplicated ass from your own goddamn temporal fuck-up, because you, unlike 'that', can't navigate a stable time loop to save your edutaining, pastel-colored, merchandisable life." This was all said in the same laid-back, matter-of-fact deadpan, colored with a hint of accent reminiscent of Applejack. "Also, 'that' is still trying to get past the fact that it is now a fucking horse."
The two Twilights traded looks. Beta's was a well-worn "Isn't this great?" Alpha's was a mint condition "You've doomed us all, you idiot." It was clear who got the better part of the deal.
"A'ight," sighed the apparent resurrectee, "guess I better go see just how badly you managed to mangle causality."
"Bad," came the reply as another instance of the colt walked up to the first. The Twilights noted that his cutie mark was a record with the teeth of a gear, split in twain. "Like, 'John as Hero of Time' bad."
This coaxed the first red foal's eyebrows out from behind the shades. "Damn. I'm gonna have to see that for myself." Two strange devices that appeared to be record turntables mounted to hovering assemblies of gears manifested before him. He brought his forehooves to the vinyl, then paused. "Uh..."
"Just do it," advised his doppelganger.
"'Kay." He scratched the disks and vanished from sight.
The second colt turned to the identically agape mares. "So, where were we? Aside from you being a gigantic flaming moron who shouldn't be trusted with anything sharper or more magical than a plastic spoon, of course?"
Alpha stammered out syllables. "You... He... How..."
"Yeah, that ain't helpin' your case."
Beta glowered at her hellishly hired help. "Look, I understand that we could have handled the situation better, but is some degree of politeness too much to ask?"
He sighed. "Look, I tend to vent stress through snark, and we're in the middle of a goddamn paradise for both. Besides, this whole situation is pretty much shot beyond repair."
"WHAT!?"
"Wow, synchronized yelling. Nice. But yeah, you've basically created a sort of tumor in space and time, and the thing is metastasizing like nobody's business. Seriously, thing'd be growin' hair and teeth if it was in some poor fucker."
Both lavender unicorns took a moment to digest this. Alpha spoke first. "Is... is there a way you could excise the tumor? Cut it away from the rest of continuity before it consumes it?"
The colt shrugged. "Well, much as I'd love to perform timeline surgery like some sort of alternate continuity Doctor Who, it wouldn't do any good."
"Why not?" chimed Beta.
"This here's an alternate timeline."
"Well of course it is," scoffed Alpha. "Something like this clearly wasn't supposed to happen."
"Well, yeah, but that's not what I mean. Y' see, here and now? This whole tableau? It's an offshoot. If I'm right, and I see no reason why I wouldn't be, once Mad Achmed here," he nodded towards his summoner, "decided to go with Operation: Klaatu Barada Nikto instead of, say, something sane, you guys jumped off the rails. Now we've just got to wait for the crash."
The mares needed another moment to process this latest twist. Beta drooped and broke the silence. "So... I doomed us all? Again?"
"Hey, if it's any consolation, I've been in time-travel tech support for a while, and I've seen worse. Much worse. And that's just the wait between calls."
"So how long do we have until we crash?" Alpha asked anxiously.
The bespectacled coolfoal gave another shrug. "Hard to say. Probably until just after I leave. Which is hopefully soon. No offense, but I miss fingers."
The Twilights traded another look. This one wasn't in the standard print runs. Beta turned to the young unicorn. "Say, did you find any point in time or anypony you wanted to look at in more detail?"
After a muttered "'Anypony'? Really?", he replied, "Well, your partner in temporal up-fuckery seems pretty cool when not violating causality with a rusty butter knife."
The crazier of the two Twilights (though which one that was is left as an exercise to the reader,) gave a look somewhere between sly and what might be dubbed seductive on any other mare. "Why don't you go spend some time with her? I'm sure she'd love your company."
An eyebrow peaked over the sunglasses. "Welp, I can tell when I'm not wanted." He scratched his way into the past.
The mares looked at one another. "Plan X?"
"Plan X."
As one, they moved to Books and Branches, current home of the Implementation Committee. A knock on the door was rewarded with what we will call Twilight Omega. "Yes?"
"Plan X."
Omega's eyes widened with a mix of joy and horror. "Really?"
"Really."
The third unicorn opened the bottom half of the library's door and, horn aglow with a voice amplification spell, cried, "FILLIES, NONE OF US ARE GOING TO DIE VIRGINS!"
