Off on a Tangent

So, having demonstrably created a paradox, Twilight and I decided to go talk to the third most magical unicorn in town, whose special talent was being punctual. Surely, with a cutie mark like that, she’d have at least studied the non-restricted time travel theory.

“This is just a precaution, of course,” Twilight said as we walked down the street, which looked perfectly normal for mid-morning Ponyville. “You probably just failed to cast the spell properly, and hallucinated going back in time.”

“Wouldn’t you have noticed me not disappearing?” I asked. “And what happened to the memory orb, if I didn’t leave it in the past?”

Twilight smiled and shook her head. “You went somewhere, yes, but that doesn’t mean that it was somewhere real. Have you ever been to the House of Enchanted Comics in Canterlot?”

“No, but Spike told me all about them,” I said. “It’s supposed to be a very difficult enchantment to replicate. They have to use a one-of-a-kind magical printing press, and it takes twelve unicorns to operate. I don’t think I count as twelve unicorns.”

“A magical flare –“

“Would have left me burnt out,” I interrupted.

“And a temporal paradox would have destroyed the universe!” Twilight interrupted right back. “Does the universe look destroyed?”

I looked around. Everything looked normal, although there was a bit of an unusual haze in the air, making Canterlot and the Unicorn Range faded and indistinct despite the otherwise clear weather. ‘Unusual’ didn’t mean ‘unheard of’, though – I’d seen weather like this before.

“Well?” Twilight asked, as we arrived at the dentist’s office.

“I haven’t seen a destroyed universe before,” I said as I pushed the door open. “I did sort of imagine there’d be more fire and death.”

Minuette looked up from the reception desk. “I’m sorry, we only offer excruciating pain here, not fire and death. And we don’t take walk-ins. Should I schedule you for an appointment?”

“Hey, Minny,” I said, waving a hoof. “Twilight and I destroyed the universe. Maybe. Do you know how to tell if the universe still exists?”

“Oh, is that what happened,” she said, glancing nervously at the door to the back room. “I was wondering.”

Twilight’s tail twitched, some of the strands of hair getting out of place. She failed to look even the slightest bit triumphant.

I lit my horn to open the door, but Minuette interrupted me. “Wait! You don’t want to go back there.”

I paused. “What happened, Minny?”

Minuette smiled. “You’ll be happier if you just go home and forget all about this.”

“No, I really don’t think I will,” Twilight Sparkle replied, and I couldn’t really argue with her. I mean, have you ever met her? A mystery like this would consume her thoughts until she was recruiting Sweetie Belle to go back in time to tell her past self not to let Minuette turn her away.

Sweetie Belle failed to appear in a flash of time magic, so in the interest of preventing yet another paradox, I opened the door to the back room.

Twilight Sparkle took one look through the door and threw up. Her wings twitched as she heaved, and a huge orange splatter of juice and pancakes pooled on the floor of the waiting room.

I closed the door, and took a deep breath, immediately regretting it and coughing to try to clear the stench from my nostrils. “Wow.”

“What –“ Twilight stammered. “How – urrrgh.“ Her chest heaved again, but only a dribble of saliva and bile joined the mess on the floor.

“You’d better go out and get some air,” I told her. “I’ll go take a closer look, and tell you what I found without any details. Okay?” I tried to stop from licking my lips at the prospect. Twilight was too frazzled to notice my excitement, she just staggered out onto the street, leaving me to crack the door open and slip inside.

There was blood everywhere. I could feel it oozing beneath my hooves, and when something warm and wet dropped on my back from the ceiling, I glanced up and surprise! It was more blood. I put up an umbrella charm to keep it from dripping onto my face while I looked around, but short of some sort of full-body force field, there was nothing I could do to keep it from getting all over me.

The smell was terrible – when you imagine a body being split open, you think of the relatively clean smell of blood that you might recognize from any number of minor wounds. It didn’t smell anything at all like that. It was more like an outhouse, only somehow worse. It smelled like death, I suppose? Let’s just say that it smelled really, really bad and I wished that I’d remembered to learn a smell-deadening spell after the last time that I had to deal with something like this. Not that the last time I had to deal with something like this it was really anything at all like this. I don’t go poking around in corpse-filled rooms every day.

So, right. There was a body, split open. More accurately, there was approximately half of a body, reclining in the dentist’s chair. The back half – a spine, flaps of hide and muscle from her back, most of her mane, and a few little scraps of brain clinging to the remaining bowl of her skull. Little white specks made two dotted lines down the fleshy sides of the bowl of her chest cavity, and I realized they were what was left of her ribs. One of her hind legs was still attached, dangling off the side of the chair and looking like it had gotten into a fight with a cheese grater.

With a little patience and a lot of water, I probably could have cleaned off enough of the blood to make out the original color of her coat and mane, and maybe even her cutie mark, but I didn’t really have easy access to either. Besides, what did it matter? She wasn’t getting any deader if her body had to wait a few hours to be officially identified by the undertaker.

I turned to the other body. This time, it was the left half of a stallion, and enough of his face was left to recognize Strong Jaw, the dentist.

The face wasn’t attached to the rest of him, but it was lying nearby. I leaned down to take a good look at his organs, and it was amazing how undamaged his lung and kidney were – it didn’t look like he’d been thrown across the room by an explosion. It looked like the right half of his body had decided to chop itself up into little pieces and spray itself all over the place, and then the left half had collapsed in a soggy heap. His face was intact because he’d turned his head away from the epicenter of the event, which had been roughly spherical and…

I whistled a little fanfare. It had been standing right about… here. Where his apprentice, Minuette, would have been standing if she was leaning over a patient doing the initial cleaning, under his supervision.

I took a deep breath, and immediately started coughing because as I may have mentioned, the smell was horrific. I staggered back into the waiting room, and looked down at the bloody hoofprints I was leaving across the tile. I made a short trip to the restroom to wash up, and wet down one of the hand towels and used it to clean up the floor while I went to have a talk with Minuette.

“Are you the real one?” I asked. It wasn’t a big secret that part of Minuette’s perfect attendance record was because, as a filly, she’d spontaneously learned a spell to create temporary duplicates of herself. They were pretty convincing as long as you didn’t try to interact with them for an extended period of time.

The Minuette behind the counter shook her head, a thin smile frozen onto her face.

“If she… exploded… why are you still here?”

“I don’t know,” the clone said. “I don’t understand anything about magic. I was just supposed to mind the desk! She gave me her memories of the schedule and the procedures and then she just… just…”

“I’m sorry,” I said, backing away from the desk, and then I turned and ran out of there before I had to think about what it must be like to be a temporary spinoff of a pony that suddenly ceased to exist. The consolation prize for being a magical construct was that when your spell expired, you returned to the source that had spawned you. For a Pinkie clone, from the incident a while back, that meant going back to the Mirror Pond. For Minuette’s magical clones, that meant becoming part of Minuette again. What would happen when the clone faded away this time? Would she just… die?

Oh, by Celestia’s Beard, I was thinking about it.

Twilight was looking a little green, but she’d washed up in the fountain and brushed her mane and tail out.

“Looks like Minuette’s not an option,” I said, giving no details, as promised.

“Were they really –“ she started.

“No details,” I snapped. “You asked for no details. I really don’t think you want the details. Do we have anypony else to ask?”

Twilight opened her mouth again, then closed it, and stared at the building for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe Time Turner? He has a similar cutie mark.”

“He’s a watchmaker,” I said. If I sounded a little brusque, it might have been because I’d just waded through the mortal remains of one of my closer friends, her boss, and a third pony that I might or might not have known well because I hadn’t even seen enough of her to identify who she was.

“I know that!” Twilight snapped, misinterpreting my tone of voice. “But he’s at least interested in time, so maybe he’s read a few books on the subject.”

“If you kept proper records at the library, you could go check,” I pointed out.

“I’m a student – I mean, a researcher – and a princess. Not a librarian,” Twilight replied. “The library has always worked on the honor system, and I’ve seen no reason to change that.”

I shrugged. Couldn’t really fault her for that. Doing thankless tasks that probably won’t ever amount to anything is for ponies who are getting paid for the job, and have annoying micro-managing supervisors looking over their shoulders to make sure that they’re dotting every ‘T’ and crossing every ‘I’. I’ve never lasted very long in jobs like that.

Then again, I’m not a princess or a hero of Equestria. But what with the universe being destroyed, and Minuette exploding, it seemed like a pretty petty thing to argue about, so I let it go.