Chapters The firefly walked slowly on the ceramic surface of the tea cup. It was moving slowly towards the border, its wings fluttering slightly. Seated at the table a stallion was observing the insect with calm eyes. He had a brown coat and his mane, only a few shades darker than the coat, was styled in spikes. There was a green bow tie around his neck and a cute mark depicting a golden hourglass adorned his flank. His face was a mask of composure.
“Oh my, it seems today will be one of those days…” he said in a flat uninterested tone to the mare seated in front of him. The said mare was like his reflection in a mirror: same brown coat, same spiky dark mane and, very unusual thing, the same cutie mark. The only differences were the papillon bow tie and the thinner frame.
“I’d highly prefer if you wouldn’t use those terms. Expressions like ‘today’ or ‘those days’ are misleading and inappropriate. After all, we haven’t seen a different day in a long time” she answered in a similar tone.
“Three millions three hundred fifty four thousand and seventeen loops if I’m not mistaking” he said, and immediately added “and I never mistake when it comes to number, but you should know that, right?”
“Did you counted all the ones in which we died? We agreed to not count those ones. Consider that we are not sure that the timeline survives us until midnight, so we can’t literally speak of complete loops,” the mare adjusted her bow tie and the stallion mimicked her in a perfectly symmetrical pose.
“I disagreed later”
“In a death-loop, if I remember well, and I’m not counting those.”
The stallion leant his back to the chair’s seatback “My my, we have reached an impasse. ”
“You are bringing up Lowland Unicorn again? We are physicists. Speaking another language is not our cup of tea” she pointed at the cup in front of her “you don’t look more intelligent doing it.”
“Au contraire, ma soeur . But let me return to my previous topic. As I was saying before, the firefly flew on my cup not on my spoon, plus it’s sunny and the couple on your left hasn’t argued aloud over the fact that she’s probably sleeping with half of Ponyville’s male population. It means that this is one of those loops in which Mr. Pokey Pierce gets so mad at Miss Pinkie Pie’s rejection to satisfy his sexual urges that he beat the mare and proceed to date rape her.”
She stared at him with a slightly dubious look “Are you sure this four facts are connected? The ability to predict things doesn’t go too well with your precious quantistic theory. After all everything happens randomly, that is your creed.” There was no perceptible sarcasm in her emotionless voice, but he knew she was being ironic.
“Tut tut, are you still mad because this loops are all different from each other as I predicted? Because you thought that events would repeat every time except for what we changed? You should try to pass your little fatalistic phase. There is no purpose in reality, everything happens casually everytime and, at the same time, it doesn’t, the cat is both alive and dead. The coins are always the same ones but we can only see half of the sides. And we won’t see that combination of sides ever again. This doesn’t mean the coins don’t influence each other, making some combination more probable and therefore predictable.”
“I guess Celestia does play dices.” the mare admitted as she finished her tea in the same moment the stallion did. “So this loops will be indeed infinite, you say? We can’t try every possibility to stop them as they are endless. We won’t be able to see a different day ever again?”
The stallion actually smiled this time, a rare occurrence. “Why, of course they are. You thought we could escape? That maybe making happy a group of mares at a party, or something like this, will convince Fate or the Universe to let us go? Pardon me, but it sounds like a childish dream.” He stopped for a moment “So much differences between us for a X-chromosome, isn’t it true?”
The pair got up and started to walk outside of the bar, when the mare said “My apologies if I refuse to contract your existential pessimism. Plus,” she stopped and brushed her tail against her companion’s flank “you seemed to enjoy the differences in plenty of occasions.”
“You refer to all those sexual intercourses we had? It’s been your idea, you wanted to try everything to stop the loops. But I admit they have been very entertaining. I will remember for a while the time I deflowered you in front of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. The looks on their faces were priceless.”
“I only wish my hymen wouldn’t grow back everytime.”
“It has never been broken.”
They walked along the streets of Ponyville for a couple of hours, they watched ponies they saw thousands of times doing the exact same things they always did with only small changes. They watched and felt nothing, emotions and morals have been drained from them from what felt like years before, and only one stimulus remained in their brain anymore…
“I’m bored” said the mare.
“Why, the little conversation we had before didn’t satisfy your intellect enough?”
“We had that exact conversation plenty of times. Five hundreds and sixty-nine to be precise.”
“What about some physical satisfaction instead? We could get you a stallion to have sex with, or a mare, if you prefer. I’ve heard Rainbow Dash…”
“I don’t feel like having any type of sexual experience. Besides I already slept with everypony and dragon in this town, of both sexes, and so did you. There is hardly any significant change. We need a new objective, something hard that we can’t achieve in only one try. That should keep our minds busy.”
“Something dangerous and intellectually challenging?”
“Preferably...”
The silence descended between the two as they tried to work something out. After some time a question broke that silence, pronounced in perfect synchrony by two voices.
“Do you think it’s possible to kill Princess Celestia?”
Words were flowing quickly under the unicorn’s purple eyes. A ceaseless stream of graphics examined by her brain.
Twilight Sparkle, Ponyville’s librarian and mostly magic-talented unicorn, was reading. She loved reading, the new informations, the smell of paper, every book contained a new world to explore. At the moment she was learning about Pegasi’s old traditions, centuries before Equestria was founded.
And she would have continued reading, if she hadn’t heard knocking coming from the door.
“Aw, coming…” she said, more to herself than anybody else.
A purple glow enveloped the thick wooden door, and she opened it.
“I’m sorry, we are clos…” she started to say, but trailed off almost immediately. The sight before her was one of the most curious and creepy she had ever seen. The two Earth Ponies standing on her doorway were identical. Same coat, same eye color and even the same Cutie Mark. At first she thought they could be monozygotic twins, but she discarded that theory when she acknowledged one of them was a mare.
However the most disturbing feature about those two was their expressions. Their eyes revealed only boredom, yet their mouths were twisted in unnatural smiles. Like somepony carved them in those two faces. Twilight felt uncomfortable in their presence. Very uncomfortable. She was about to slam the door shut, when the mare spoke:
“Good morning, Miss Sparkle” her voice was monotonous, although it was obvious she was making a great effort to sound kind. “We are perfectly aware that the library is closed today. But we must insist. It’s fundamental we get a book today. We won’t steal more than few moments of your time.” She concluded her phrase with another fake smile.
Twilight was tempted to close the door without saying a thing, but decided against it. She couldn’t let her illogical impressions get the best of her. Maybe they really needed a book urgently. Actually, it wasn’t their fault if they looked and sounded creepy. Then why a voice in her head was telling her to not trust those strangers?
She suppressed the voice. “Mmmh, if it’s so urgent, I guess I could help you. Will it be quick, right?”
“We obtain what we are looking for, and then we leave” assured the mare.
“Ok, then. Come in.” She welcomed them inside, noting that they also walked in perfect synchrony. So perfect, in fact, that she could hear only a series of hooves steps and not two. Another entry in the Utterly Strange and Creepy Features List.
“What book are you looking for?”
“D. Hooves, Principles of Theoretical Time Travel and Alternate Universes ” she recited with a hint of pride.
“I’ve never heard of this book. From the title I’d say it’s physics themed. Fascinating, most of ponies here only read narrative,” she was starting to get excited.They might be ponies worth knowing, after all. Maybe they are eccentric, most scientists are. “Are you physicists? Are you studying time travel? I personally have read something…”
She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t notice one of her guests, the silent stallion, was no more beside his partner. She was still talking when two hooves, permeated by Earth Pony’s strenght, collided with the back of her head, making her collapse.
“Finally, we found out the correct way to do it. Her magic is really tricky. It took us five tries to work out a solution” he said, making sure Twilight had passed out.
“Yes: exploiting her love for literature,” she added “I almost feel bad for it.”
“Help me tie her up…”
**************
“A unicorn’s horn is an integral part of their central nervous system. Inside it courses a thick nervous fiber, which connects directly to the brainstem through the thalamus. Therefore a sufficiently strong and abrupt trauma (for example, breaking it in half)in this area leads, almost surely, to brain’s dysfunction. After which most patients die, by heart failure, or become comatose.”
The mare put down Pony Biology Vol. 2, to stare at the dead body of the former librarian. Her eyes were dim, and from a hollow hole in her forehead blood was spilling out profusely. Beside the corpse stood the stallion, a red stained, and likely very heavy, hammer in his grip.
“You should have been more delicate, brother. We agreed to remove her horn as a safety precaution. Killing her was not our purpose, if I remember well” she said.
His partner turned to her, annoyance could almost be seen in his emotionless eyes. “We agreed to never be angry to each other, too. Your sarcasm is not making it an easy task, if I can express my opinion. Next time I’ll make sure to dose my strenght properly. But now, we must decide what is to do. Should we wait until midnight? Or…”
“TWILIGHT!!!”
Two heads turned to the source of the inappropriate interruption, to see a baby dragon frozen near the door, eyes wide, a sack full of apples at his feet. The three of them kept staring to each other for some time, uncertain about what to do. Then the stallion cleared his throat:
“My apologies, Mr. Spike. I regret to admit we completely forgot about you. You shouldn’t have seen your maternal figure horribly murdered. It was very impolite from us. Perhaps next time we should get rid of you first, so you won’t be forced to witness this, what do you think?”
Spike was not totally sure, but seemed like the stallion with a blood stained hammer in his hooves was actually threatening to kill him. So he decided wisely to run away as fast as he could.
“He’s going to inform the authorities, isn’t he?” asked the mare calmly.
“Probably. Unless a meteor hits him or a fall breaks his neck. In this loop it might happen. The odd are not in our favor, though” he answered with the same calm.
“So we are spending the rest of the day in a cell. Or worse, interviewed by journalists?”
“There is no question.”
“I’m not in the mood for coming up with stories about my troubled infancy, in which my father molested us for the interview.”
“Me neither.”
“Then I’m going to look for a knife in the kitchen.”
“Sharp, please. My jugular itched a lot last time.”
***************
Twilight felt consciousness slowly creep into her, and opened her eyes. Two familiar faces welcomed her.
“Welcome back among the living,” said the mare “I hope you’ve slept well. You got hit quite hard.”
Twilight started to feel less dizzy and realized her legs were tidied. She was beginning to worry now. Who are these ponies? What do they want from her? What if..? No ,keep it together Twilight, you can always cast a spell, don’t you?
She tried to focus her magic energy in her horn, only to feel an acute pain shooting from her head. She groaned.
“We must warn you to not use magic. Because we saw your horn off, just for you to know. See?” The stallion showed her what was indoubtedly a purple unicorn’s former horn.
Twilight suppressed a scream. She couldn’t panik in front of them. “Why… why would you do that? Who are you? What do you want? Because you can have my money, just…”
She was silenced by a brown hoof blocking her mouth.
“Please one question at a time,” said politely the stallion “my name is Doctor D. Hooves, physicist, and the mare here is Doctor D. Hooves, same profession. As for what we want: it’s quite simple, we want a single piece of information.”
“How can we kill Celestia, Princess of Equestria?”
Red. A thick redness was crawling over Twilight’s world. It was rapidly getting difficult to concentrate on anything except the acute pain she was in. Everything felt blurry and distant, she had lost track of the time ages ago. Red were also the cuts that ran all around her purple body, creating a deep curious contrast with her fur.
She hadn’t lost the track of those wounds. She was painfully aware of every single one of them. They were twentyfour, mostly on her legs… no twentyfive…
“Ponies have a voluminous nervous ganglion in their front legs, just a few inches under the shoulder blade” the brown mare recited in the flat tone Twilight grew accustomed to. “Hurting it, even slightly, can cause intense pain. For this work I suggest a thin blade or a nail.”
Dr. Hooves lift her head from the book she was holding and took a moment to inspect the title. “‘A Guide to Modern and Ancient Torture by Brazen Bull’ . Ms. Sparkle, wouldn’t you think that keeping a similar book laying around in the library is very irresponsible? A dangerous or psychotic individual could have found this instead of us.” There was no sign of disapproval or severity on her face. Nor of any other emotion.
Twilight had a rag in her mouth and couldn’t have answered even if she wanted to.
She cleared cleared throat and spoke to her partner, who was currently holding a knife in his blood covered hooves. “As I said: one or two inches under the shoulder blade. Use the point.”
Dr. Hooves lowered himself over the purple frame and pointed the knife under Twilight’s leg.
“I’m just wondering why haven’t we seen that book before. It could have been really useful with those two terribly annoying colts. Here?” his voice as flat and monotonous as hers.
“If I remember correctly, and I do, we initially planned just to rape them. And maybe beat them. After we finished torture seemed like the natural continuation of the act. I admit sewing their mouths shut did an incredible favour to my mental health. No, a bit lower.”
“Still, we could have done it more efficiently. We should take a couple of loops for ourselves and use an approved torture methodology on the two of them. It might help us relax. Here?”
“It sounds like a marvellous idea. But you have to promise you will be more precise and focused: you are circling all around the correct spot.”
The stallion turned around and gave his usual bored look to his alter-ego. “Maybe looking at the picture would help me. If you just gave me the book we would have finished with this in time to eat at Quills, Sofas and Hayburgers.”
The mare lazily stuck her tongue out looking not mocking at all. “With your dirty hooves you will just ruin it and make it unreadable. Books should be respected.”
He was about to retort when he heard a muffled moan coming from the librarian. Both of them leaned closer to Twilight,the stallion took the rag out of her mouth and looked at her with an incredibly fake smile.
“Ms.Sparkle, have we finally convinced you to give away that little piece of information? Because it’s getting a bit late and we’d hate to see you bleed out on the floor. Again.” The last part said to himself more than to the former unicorn.
“P-Please…” whispered Twilight between breaths, almost unable to talk through the pain.
“I’m not sure we understand your request” stated the mare.
“Why…”
“It’s quite obvious: we need to learn how to kill Celestia, and since you are not collaborative we decided to torture you. I beg you to stay concentrated, this is important.”
She looked at them straight in the eyes.
“Why… H-how can you… do this to other ponies…”
At this question the two doctors fell silent, the stallion losing his smile. For a minute they just stayed there staring at Twilight, staring at her question. Then two mouth simultaneously breathed heavily and they spoke:
“Do you know anything about time travels, Ms. Sparkle? Of course you do, it’s a subject quite abused in literature. Some years ago someone invented this little story and used it as an argument. There was a painter, an incredibly gifted unicorn. She was able to paint revolutionary and brilliant images.
“Decades after she died an art critic decided, since time travel is reality in his age, to go back in time and meet her when she was still a young filly. Just imagine his astonishment when he met a plain unicorn who struggled even to get into Phillydelphia Art Academy. The quality of her early drawings was unexpectedly low, so the critic decided to show her late paintings. She remained so affected by them that she stole them and created copies. Thanks to those copies the young unicorn became the acclaimed artist the future knew.
“The point of the story is: where did the idea behind those drawings come from? This is the big question.”
According to the philosopher this story proved the impracticality of time travel. He said it was a paradox. But there is no actual paradox. The universe keeps working even if a work of art pops out of nowhere. The beauty in those paintings came from nothing, because beauty itself is nothing, it’s just another casual pattern in reality, equal to many others.
“Do you understand it, Ms. Sparkle? Dreams, happiness, joy, beauty, morals all these altisonant names means nothing. Even if I destroy a masterpiece, even if I gut a foal with this very knife, I’m doing nothing more than re-arranging its atoms. All the pains he feels, which ponykind condemns so heartedly, is a chemical reaction. Nothing more.”
The two ponies spoke this words in perfect union, without a hint of emotion or participation. Never stopping or never accelerating. Like a teacher that explains for the thousandth time an obvious lesson to his dumb students.
They stopped and looked at each other. And then they laughed, or at least they tried: it sounded more like a vocalization exercise.
“That story is always very entertaining...” said the mare with her usual tone, which expressed everything except entertainment. “I can’t believe some ponies buy it, we sound like two villains from a comic book.”
“Yes, I agree. Now I feel better. We really needed a pause from all that torture.” He turned to face their captive again. “I sincerely hope you enjoyed that little story full of morals and adventure, because what’s coming next won’t be as pleasurable for you”
“I… I can’t… I…” Twilight tried to speak.
“She is starting to losing it brother, she looks very pale too”
The stallion raised an eyebrow. “Mind telling me how can you see that? Her face is covered in fur…”
“Imagination is more powerful than knowledge.”
He raised the other eyebrow mechanically. “That quote is wrong and you know it, it should be ‘important’.”
In that precise moment the purple bleeding pony started vomiting, spreading her half-digested lunch all over the floor. Both doctors took a step back to avoid the foul smelling liquid.
The mare shook her head and told her: “Ms. Sparkle that is incredibly rude, you should feel ashamed. What would your mentor Princess Celestia think if she saw you right now?It would probably be something on the line of ‘What happened here?! What have this maniacs have done to you? And why is this making me slightly horny? No! What am I thinking?! Thank me that no one can hear my thoughts. But I must admit she has a nice butt… maybe she won’t mind if I…”
“This is getting out of hoof, please stop. Plus I think our host died...”
“Oh… yeah, you are correct. Do you think she missed the last part of my thesis about the sadistic tendencies of the princess?”
“She doesn’t look horrified so I would say that yes, she missed that part.”
“What a pity. We couldn’t even make her talk…”
“Apparently we failed again. We will try something new tomorrow.”
Once taken note of their failure, they looked around them at the majestic collection of books contained in the library. One could only start to imagine the immense amount of work and labour that past librarian went through to gather all this knowledge in one place.
“Sister”
“Yes, brother?”
“If we burn down this place it would be very stereotypical, wouldn’t it?”
“Indeed it would, very bad taste.”
“As I thought”
And they left without doing anythng.
