Off on a Tangent

“How can you possibly think Sapphire Shores is better than the Canterlot Philharmonic? They play the classics! The best of the best, collected from thousands of years of music history!”

“It’s not like modern musicians throw away all of our history and make songs up out of thin air,” I said. “We take those thousands of years of musical theory and apply the latest techniques and our knowledge of contemporary culture to create songs that resonate with modern ponies. Sapphire Shores is popular because she’s really, really good at it, and a pretty good poet, too. I’d like to think that someday I’ll be able to write music as famous as hers, but I’ll need somepony else to handle the lyrics. Maybe Cherry Berry?”

“But she only uses, what, three instruments? How can you possibly get the same level of craftsmanship from a few stringed instruments and a drum set as from a hundred ponies working together in harmony?”

“That’s one of the problems with orchestral music,” I said. “It’s so much work arranging the scores for dozens of instruments that you don’t have much room to branch out and be creative. If you really want to hear the best of the best of the classics, you need to listen to some of the chamber music from old Pegasopolis. No violins, no drums, just – oh, we’re here.”

Twilight frowned at the sign hung from the doorknob of Turner’s Timepieces. “He’s closed.”

“All the better for us,” I said, swinging the door open and walking inside. “We’re not here for business.”

The shop was dark, and full of ticking clocks, the sunlight filtering in through the front window in sparkling rays as the dust kicked up by our passage swirled through the air, but not getting past more than the first couple of rows before the looming clocks blocked every last bit of light, leaving only ambient scatter to guide our steps. It smelled like wood and oil, and not at all like feces, blood, or rotting corpses. There was nopony behind the desk, of course, what with the shop being closed, but Time Turner never locked any of his doors, and I led Twilight to the stairway in the back that took us up to his apartment on the level above.

Halfway up the stairs, we could hear the sound of a struggle, and without having to say a word we both broke into a trot, and burst out of the stairwell into the living room.

The room was a mess. The furniture had all been pushed to the sides, haphazardly, and the rows of carefully laid out gears and sprockets that Time Turner always kept in order with Twilight-level fastidiousness were in complete disarray, the main box of tools and parts actually overturned on the floor, scattering tiny glittering instruments across the rug. In the center of the room was a wooden chair, lying on its side. Above it, dangling from a rope attached to the ceiling fan, was Time Turner, struggling with the noose that somepony had tied around his neck and one of his forelegs, under the shoulder. He couldn’t reach it with any of his limbs, or his teeth, and his struggling and kicking in midair didn’t really do much other than swinging him slightly back and forth. At the same time, there wasn’t enough pressure on his neck to cut off his airway, so he wasn’t about to suffocate any time soon.

“Ah, Princess. Lyra. A little help?”

I untied the rope while Twilight supported him with her magic, and set him on his hooves. “What happened?” she asked. “Who did this to you?”

“Why were you trying to hang yourself?” I asked.

Time Turner cringed, and Twilight’s eyes went wide.

“Does it have something to do with Twilight destroying the universe?”

“That was you?” he snapped, lunging at her and grabbing her shoulders. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Twilight calmly set a hoof on his chest, and pushed him back until she had a reasonable amount of personal space. “If you know anything about what’s going on, then I’d appreciate it if you’d explain.”

He led us to a back room, where he showed us a strange glowing clock sitting on a work table. It was made out of crystals and gold wire, and I could recognize some of the patterns as magical runes. The hands were frozen at 8:25.

“This is my masterpiece,” he said. “A clock attuned not to the periodic oscillations of a spring or a pendulum, or the rate of flow of water droplets or sand, but to the aetheric vibrations of time itself! It’s guaranteed to be more accurate than anything that mere physics could provide, and never needs winding or repair, since the components are bathed in pure time energy and no longer exist in reality per se.”

“It’s stopped,” Twilight pointed out.

“Yes,” he said. “You see my problem. It’s impossible for this clock to stop, so long as time continues to flow. What did you do?”

“She had me travel back in time and create a paradox,” I said.

Twilight gave an exasperated sigh. “That spell can’t create paradoxes! It only creates stable time loops!”

“Does this time loop look stable?” I asked. “Minuette exploded!”

“And my clock stopped!” Time Turner added. “This is the worst possible thing!”

I nodded to him, but had to ask, “Why were you trying to kill yourself?”

He pointed a hoof at the clock. “It froze at the exact moment that we were removed from the timestream,” he explained. “The longer we continue to not-exist in this destroyed universe, the harder it will be for our souls to travel to the afterlife. My wife is waiting for me, off in the Summer Lands… I don’t want to be trapped in some doomed tangent, where I can never… I thought that maybe if I died now, before too much time had passed…”

“There isn’t any such thing as an afterlife,” Twilight snapped. “Mortal ponies don’t have immortal souls. Your consciousness is a self-perpetuating energy pattern contained in your brain cells.”

“Twilight, is this really the time for a religious argument?” I asked, lifting the stopped clock in my magic, and bringing it over for a closer look.

Twilight scowled. “This isn’t a matter of religion. It’s scientific fact!”

“There are spells to bring back the dead,” I pointed out. “I’ve seen them cast. And what about ghosts?”

Twilight gave a heavy sigh. “A dying consciousness is imprinted on concept space, and a high-level unicorn can manifest a recreation. It’s all just smoke and mirrors.”

“That sounds suspiciously like the pony’s soul continuing to exist after death,” I pointed out.

“No,” Twilight snapped. “Things in concept space do not exist, by definition.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to settle the argument once and for all, at least to my own satisfaction,” Time Turner said. “Would one of you please kill me? I tried to kill myself, but it went kind of badly.”

“No pony’s killing any pony,” Twilight said, just as I bashed him over the head with his big fancy crystal clock. He staggered back, bleeding a little from a gash over his eye, so I hit him again, with all the force I could muster. This time, he fell to his knees, his eyes going a bit unfocused, but before I could finish him off, I was thrown back into the wall hard enough to crush the plaster.

“Ow,” I said, the clock dropping to the floor with a loud thunk as I lost concentration.

“That’s enough!” Twilight snapped, peeling me off the wall and holding me up in the air. “I understand that things are going weird, but nothing is going to be solved by killing each other!”

“But he asked me to!” I said. “I’ve never gotten to kill anypony! Do you know how many times I’ve fantasized about murder? I mean, yes, usually it’s about being murdered, but killing somepony would be the next best thing.”

“I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say that,” Twilight said through clenched teeth. Her magical grip tightened painfully, to the point where I couldn’t even squirm.

Then she screamed, holding her head in agony as Time Turner smacked her horn, disrupting her spell. “Quick,” he said, pulling open a drawer and tossing me a letter opener. “Before she recovers.”

I was able to stab him seventy two times in the neck and chest before Twilight recovered enough to stun me. He wasn’t actually dead after that, but he was bleeding enough that it was only a matter of time.