Off on a Tangent

by terrycloth

Rating: mature
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Lyra, Applejack, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Colgate, Dark, Sex, Bon-Bon
Length: 9387

Twilight Sparkle destroys the universe, leaving Lyra with one endless day to find some way to fix everything, or else to indulge herself in the things she could never do when the future mattered.

Twilight Sparkle tries to abuse time travel to solve a tricky math problem, and accidentally destroys the universe. Lyra has one endless day to find some way to fix everything, or else to indulge herself in the things she could never do when the future mattered. Or to ruin everything. Even when everything is lost, there's always a way to make things worse.

Published 2014-10-20 12:30:02 UTC
Last updated 2014-10-20 12:30:02 UTC

Twilight Sparkle Destroys the Universe

Most people who know me know that I’m not really an especially magical pony. Sure, I use magic to play the lyre, or to summon music without a lyre, or to carry groceries or to mute the stupid roosters and blot out the light of the sun when I want to sleep in, but Bon Bon is the magical crazy pony of the household. She’s a really gifted alchemist – if ponies knew half the things she experimented with, they probably wouldn’t be so quick to buy her candy!

So ask yourself, what kind of crazy pony would live with a pony like that?

Well, yes. I said ‘a crazy pony’. I was asking you to be more specific.

Hmm, I suppose ‘a masochist’ fits. But no! I mean, sure, yes, but no that’s not the important quality that I’m talking about here. If I wasn’t fascinated by the study of magic, there’s no way I’d live with Bonsy.

Now, I didn’t go to the School for Gifted Unicorns or anything – there’s a pretty nasty entrance exam that takes a ridiculous amount of studying to expect from a five year old. And if you pass that, the practical exam is a bitch. Well, that’s for the scholarship – you can also get in if your parents have oodles of money and (this is the important part) are willing to spend it on you.

No, I went to the Canterlot Academy, which is sort of a bargain basement copycat school for unicorn fillies whose parents are too cheap or not noble enough to get them into Celestia’s school. I learned a lot there! But every so often all my friends would be busy, or grounded, and I’d actually go to class, so I picked up a bit of the boring magic theory too.

Can you imagine what it’s like for Twilight Sparkle, to live in a town where I’m the second most magical unicorn?

No, Rarity’s fourth, after Minuette. And both of them are more ‘cast by the fluff of your flank’ types anyway. Neither of them was going to be able to cast a spell off an ancient scroll smuggled out of the restricted section of the Canterlot Library.

I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to be the one to do it either. “Isn’t time magic forbidden? I thought it degraded the fabric of the fate web or something like that.”

“It’s not forbidden,” Twilight said a little too loudly. “It’s restricted. And since I’m a princess, I’m able to grant permission to use the restricted spells. See?” She held up an official looking scroll that did, indeed, grant me permission to cast the spell.

“No, no, I’m not trying to imply that you’re going to get me tossed into the dungeon, I’m just wondering if this is really a good idea. You’re trying to change the past.”

“Look, Lyra, I don’t have a choice,” Twilight said. She pointed at her chalkboard, which was covered in incomprehensible mathematics. I was pretty sure they were differential equations. “Look at this mess! I’m never going to get it done in time for the Equinox. The only solution is time travel.”

“This scroll says right at the top that the spell can’t be used to change the past,” I pointed out.

“It creates stable time loops,” Twilight explained. “That makes it difficult to change the past, but not impossible. I’ll send you back with a memory orb containing the work I’ve done so far, and you use it on my past self so that she can continue from there. When that me gets to the present, I do the same thing, except that I’m farther along in the calculations. When I finally finish, I send you back anyway with a memory crystal that gives the same starting point as I received, and the loop becomes stable. QED.”

“It’s not QED until you actually give me the proof that it works,” I pointed out.

“And when you get back to the new present where I’ve finished the proof, you’ll have it.” Twilight said. “But first, you need to go back in time and use this memory crystal on my past self.” She tossed a little glass sphere to me, which I almost caught in my magic before remembering that that would activate it. I snatched it out of the air with my teeth instead, with a nasty ‘clack’ that left my gums aching.

“And use it right away! Don’t let me sidetrack you. Don’t let anything sidetrack you! Coincidence is going to try to force a simpler stable loop.”

I sighed, stashed the orb in my saddlebag, and focused on the magical spell outlined on Twilight’s restricted spell scroll. There was a flash, a crackle, a roar, a prickly numbness covering my entire body, and then – I was back in the library, next to Twilight, except that her blackboard was blank.

She grinned widely as she saw me appear. “Oh my gosh, Lyra? I didn’t know you could cast time spells! Are you from next Twosday?”

“Yep,” I said, and reached into my saddlebags to pick up the memory crystal. With my teeth. “’Ere, catch,” I said, tossing it to her.

She caught it in her teeth.

“You’re supposed to use your magic,” I said.

She dropped it carefully onto a table. “I didn’t want to activate it by mistake.”

“Well, activate it by not-mistake, then. You need to activate it.”

“How do I know you’re not a changeling?” she asked. “Or a spy? Tricking someone into activating a memory orb is a classic move.”

“Just do it,” I said.

“I’m not –“

“Do it,” I repeated, leaping towards her and poking her with a hoof. “Do it do it do it do it!”

“That’s not a logical argument!”

“Doooo eeeet!” I said, grimacing. “If you don’t do it, then future Twilight is going to be really disappointed that she didn’t get her presentation ready in time for the Equinox.”

Twilight glanced at the blackboard. “I have a whole week…”

“Next Twosday, you’re out of time, and not finished yet. Use the orb.”

“Twilight?” came Spike’s voice from upstairs. “Where do –“ I deadened the sound in the room. Twilight’s mouth moved as her eyes narrowed. I pointed a hoof at the orb, and she stomped her feet in that cute little way she does when she’s frustrated, and touched her horn to the memory orb – and then collapsed.

I let the sound spell lapse, and went over to check her eyes, using my hooves so as not to disturb the memories as they magically played out inside her head. No, she wasn’t faking. I could see the images rapidly spinning by inside her pupils.

“Twilight? Are you okay?” Spike asked, looking down at me in my black spandex time-travelling outfit, standing over an unconscious Twilight with my hoof poised over her head. “Hey! What do you think you’re –“

I jumped back, and felt my skin start to prickle as the duration on the time spell wore out. “It’s okay, Spike! I’ll see you next Twosday!”

And then, with a flash, I was back.

Twilight sighed, disappointed. “What went wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I gave you the orb.”

“If you gave me the orb, then explain that!” she snapped, pointing at the chalkboard, which had the same messy differential equations as it had had before I left. “Do you see a QED there?”

I squinted a bit. “I really can’t tell. Your hornwriting is terrible, Twilight.”

“There is no QED. I haven’t made any progress!”

“Well, I was pulled back just after I gave you the orb,” I said. “What do you remember about my visit? What made you not use it as a starting point?”

Twilight froze.

“Please tell me you remember my visit,” I said, getting a little nervous.

Minuette Explodes

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.

Worst Suicide Ever

“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.

Trains Run on Time

I came to on the Friendship Express as it pulled out of Ponyville Station. Applejack was sitting on one side of me, holding the lead of the rope that tied my legs together in her teeth. She noticed as I opened my eyes, and tapped me on the horn, gently. “Don’t try nothing, sugarcube. Twilight told me what you did to Time Turner.”

“He wanted to die,” I said. “He literally asked me to kill him.”

“Save it for the princess,” Twilight snapped, glowering at me from the next seat forwards. “We’re going to go tell Princess Celestia what happened, and she’ll fix everything! I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time and we never hear about it because Celestia fixes everything so that everything is fine, and nopony has to die. You’ll see.”

“Couldn’t you just have Spike send a letter?” I asked.

“Shut up,” Twilight snarled.

“You tried, didn’t you,” I said. “It didn’t work. Oh Celestia, is Spike okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” Twilight snapped.

“I don’t know, Twi,” Applejack said. “He wasn’t breathin’.”

“He’ll. Be. Fine.”

I closed my eyes. Poor Spike. Then again, if Time Turner’s theory was true, he was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t really think his theory held any water, though – if we’d split off from the flow of time, it didn’t really matter when we died. As far as time was concerned, it was still the same instant that the universe was originally destroyed. Either dead ponies would find the afterlife, or they wouldn’t, or the afterlife didn’t even exist in the first place.

After an indeterminate period of something that sure felt like time passing in awkward silence, Applejack spoke up. “Sure is foggy out there.”

I opened my eyes, and looked out the window, and at first it looked like fog – distant objects were lost in a white haze, but the trees and bushes near the tracks swept past as dark, hazy outlines. But then I looked back towards Ponyville, and I could still make out the town’s bright colors in the distance. “I don’t think this is fog.”

My words sounded strangely muffled, and I noticed that I’d stopped feeling the ropes binding my limbs. I still couldn’t move, but there was no sensation. “We need to go back,” I said, as I looked around and saw the train car seem to fill up with fog, blurring our view of the other seats, and the doors at the end of the car.

Twilight lit her horn, and a brilliant purple light formed at the tip. Sort of. I could stare right at it, and not be blinded, and the light it cast reflected off the walls and ceiling, but not off the fogginess that was turning everything into a muted gray.

“Something’s not right,” Applejack said, her voice faint but still audible over the equally muted sound of the train. “Twilight, what in the name of all things other than apples is going on here?”

“We’re going to Canterlot,” Twilight said, and although there was nothing like sound associated with her mouth moving, I could still sense her talking nearby, and the meaning from her words formed in my head. “We’re going to see Princess Celestia, and she’s going to fix all of this.”

Everything was white. There was nothing underneath me, and nothing wrapped around my legs, but they couldn’t move because they were tied up. I told Applejack that we needed to stop the train, and go back to Ponyville. Twilight said that she’d take care of it, and teleported away, leaving Applejack to guard me. Applejack started to panic, asking what was going on in a series of increasingly frantic exclamations loaded with her family’s traditional speech patterns. Twilight returned, said that she couldn’t find the engineer, and teleported us back to Ponyville.

We landed in the middle of the market square, and I yelped as Twilight and Applejack landed on top of me, crushing me into the dirt. White mist seemed to lift off us, rising like a tiny cloud until it evaporated in the morning sun. I wiggled in my bonds, rubbing my muzzle into the dirt and reveling in the feeling of gritty dust working into my coat, and the smell of soil and vegetables and ponies. There was sound, too – a babble of excited confusion as everypony gathered around, wondering what was going on.

“So, uh, what now, sugarcube?” Applejack asked, sliding off me and helping Twilight to her hooves.

“I don’t think it matters,” I said. “Look, you can’t even see Canterlot anymore. This morning it was still faintly visible. It’s only a matter of time until everything fades away.”

“We can still fix this,” Twilight said. “There has to be something we can do to fix this!”

“I don’t think we need to. Everything is fine, just not, you know. For us.”

“For who then?” Applejack asked.

“For the real us,” I said. “In the real time-line, after the time loop resolved. It’s like Time Turner said – when I cast the spell, time looped, but we didn’t go with it. We’re off on a tangent, trapped in a timeline that doesn’t exist.”

“Are you sure, Lyra?” asked Rose, from her flower stand, ten feet away. “I don’t feel like I don’t exist.”

“Trust me,” I said to her, smiling. “You don’t. Whatever this is, whatever is letting us experience… this, it isn’t reality. The real versions of us aren’t ever going to know what didn’t really happen here. We can do whatever we want, with no consequences.” I struggled a bit, but the ropes were still tied tight. “I mean, no long-term consequences. Can you untie me? I promise not to kill anypony else who doesn’t ask for it.”

Applejack narrowed her eyes at me.

“Okay, okay, I promise not to kill anypony else, even if they ask for it!”

“Pinkie Promise?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

Murder is not the Answer

I told Derpy that I’d take a rain check on that ice cream, and headed for the Dentist’s office. On the way, there was a distinct lack of blood in the streets, or fire, or anything like that. Yes, Rose and Lily and Daisy were passed out in the middle of the street, and the marketplace had been completely trashed, with all the merchants abandoning their stalls and would-be customers just taking anything they wanted, but there were no bodies. No pony was going crazy and killing anypony. Except me, of course.

No, I wasn’t going around killing anypony else. What I meant was that I’d killed Time Turner. And it had been so easy! Sure, he’d helped me, and he hadn’t actually died even after I’d stabbed him a bunch of times, but there was no internal resistance. No conscience telling me ‘no, don’t kill him!’ No aversion to the squelching and scraping as the letter opener plunged into his flesh, or to the blood that flew everywhere. No hesitation when I’d tried to crush his skull with the clock. No remorse, afterwards.

Nothing was stopping me from murdering ponies except for the fear that I’d be punished, and the part where I didn’t actually want them to be dead. And neither of those is really an iron-clad barrier – I can see myself tricking myself into believing that I wouldn’t get caught, and there are plenty of ponies that I don’t even know. What would stop me from randomly murdering a stranger? In the real world, I mean. In the doomed, fake world, I’d made a Pinkie Promise not to. So there was that, at least as long as Pinkie Pie was still alive and still monitoring Pinkie Promises.

But Minuette’s clone, well – she wasn’t a pony. What was stopping me from murdering her?

I found her sitting the back room, staring at the corpses. I walked into the room behind her, letting the blood squidge through my hooves as I clip-clopped across the floor, and she didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. She just kept staring at the carnage, which was exactly how I’d left it, as far as I could tell.

I turned and headed for the perimeter of the room, and searched the drawers until I found a scalpel that Strong Jaw must have used for gum surgery or something. I held it in my magic as I squelched back over to the clone, and plunged it into her back.

“Ow!” She stood up and glowered at me, the scalpel sticking up from where it was wedged into her shoulderblade. “Be more careful with that! You stabbed me!”

My horn lit as I pulled the scalpel out, and floated it around beneath her chin. “Yeah. I’m going to murder you,” I said, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, which was roughly none at all.

“What?” she said, her eyes going wide as she pulled back, only to slip on the blood and land on the lower half of the shredded corpse in the chair. “Ahh!” She scrambled to the side, and looked around in a panic. “Don’t kill me!”

I advanced on her, frowning, the scalpel held before me as I backed her into a corner.

“Please!” she said, cowering and holding her hooves up to block me. “I don’t want to die!”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, letting the scalpel drop into the layer of gore coating the floor. “I wasn’t really feeling it anyway.”

She whimpered, and continued to cower.

“It’s just – the world was essentially destroyed, and now what’s left of it is falling apart, so it’s not like it actually matters if you die now, or in a few hours when everything fades away. So it’s perfectly reasonable for me to use you as an experiment to see if I’m a complete psychopath. Right?”

The clone peeked out from behind her forelegs. “What?”

“I murdered Time Turner, and I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “He asked me to, so I did it. I don’t feel guilty or anything.”

“Why would he ask you to kill him?”

I scraped a hoof through the blood and a small pile of shredded flesh. “Some stupid religious superstition. I probably shouldn’t have done it.”

So, I explained what was going on in more detail. Minuette’s clone agreed that I really shouldn’t have killed him – if someone is trying to kill himself, you’re supposed to make them feel better and stuff, and convince them to go on living. So there was definitely something wrong with me, although neither of us had the training to really guess what.

Eventually, she seemed to remember the bleeding wound in her shoulder. “This really hurts. Did you have to stab me like that?”

I winced. “Sorry. But wait – we’re in a dentist’s office, right? There’s all kinds of topical anesthetic around here.”

“I… don’t really think playing around with that sort of thing would be safe.”

“Oh come on,” I said, grinning. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I could die.”

“Well, that’s going to happen anyway. You might as well live the rest of your life without pain,” I said. “You can try them out on me first, okay? Since it’s my fault you were stabbed.”

Even with anesthetic – and with me begging her to, literally down on my knees – Minuette’s clone wasn’t willing to stab me to tell whether or not the anesthetic was strong enough to kill the pain from a stab wound. We did a pinch test instead, and after finding a dose that deadened the area pretty thoroughly, and didn’t have any other apparent effects, she let me inject her near the stab wound.

“It mostly works,” she said. “I guess I can live with this.”

We both giggled at that, which looked like it really embarrassed her.

“Wow, I’m a mess,” I said, which was an understatement. We’d been fooling about in the Room of Death for long enough that both of us were completely covered in blood, to the point where you couldn’t tell our colors at all. I could only tell which of us was which because she was the one who I could see from my point of view without looking down at myself. Well, that and she had blue eyes, I suppose, but who notices eye colors? “Who would have thought that ponies spontaneously exploding would be so messy?”

“Why did she explode, anyway?” the clone asked. “I get that the universe was destroyed, but nopony else exploded, did they?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything about it. Was she messing around with time spells?”

“If she was, I wouldn’t know. She only gave me what I needed to run the front desk for her.”

“Why don’t we check out her house? Maybe she left some sort of clue.”

We were wiping off the worst of the blood and gore, thoroughly ruining the dentist’s towels, when something else occurred to me. “Wasn’t that room supposed to stink? I don’t smell anything.”

The clone took a sniff, and looked at me, a bit terrified. I grabbed a bottle of scented soap from the sink, and opened the lid, then took a sniff. Nothing.

On the way to Minuette’s house, we saw Rose crying into her hooves, all her flowers scattered around and stomped into the dirt. Neither of us said anything.

Spike Doesn't Eat Lyra

I burst into Twilight’s library, Minuette’s clone right on my fail, brandishing the notebook we’d found at Minuette’s place. “Twilight Sparkle, get down here!”

“Hey Lyra,” Spike said from the kitchen. “Twilight’s out.”

“Oh! Hi Spike. You’re alive?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay. Not feeling so hot, but I’ll live.”

“It’s just, Applejack said you were dead,” I explained. “Anyway, where’s Twilight. I need to murder her.”

“That’s a figurative murdering,” Minuette’s clone pointed out in case it wasn’t obvious.

“I think she went to Zecora’s,” Spike said. “She told me to wait here, and that if you showed up, I should kill you.”

I froze, and turned to the clone. “Do you think you could take it from here?” I asked her. She stared back at me, uncomprehending. “I’ve been asking Spike to eat me for ages, I don’t think I can pass this up.”

“I… I guess,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like we were going to actually do anything other than yell at her. Were we?”

“Not unless there was something in that notebook that would actually fix things, but that seems unlikely,” I said. “And I don’t know much about time spells anyway, so that would be up to Twilight. So can you go take this stuff to Zecora’s, while I stay here and get murdered by Spike?”

“Um, Lyra?” Spike said. “I’m not going to actually kill you.”

“But –“ I said, whining. “But Twilight said you had to!”

Spike rolled his eyes. “I think she was making a joke. She was really mad at you for something.”

“Look, Spike, have you been outside? The world is literally ending,” I said. “We’ve already lost individual leaves on trees and the dirt roads are like walking on sponges, not to mention our sense of smell. It can’t be long until we lose touch and taste, and then there wouldn’t even be any point in you killing and eating me. We have to do this now! It’s our last chance!”

“Lyra, I’m not going to eat you!” Spike said. “I told you, over and over again, I don’t do that!”

“But you’re a dragon!” I tried to give him my best puppy-dog eyes, but he was unmoved, folding his arms and looking down at me. “If you don’t, I’ll go and murder Twilight.”

“No you won’t,” he said.

“I murdered Time Turner already,” I said.

“Yeah, right. Just leave me alone, okay? I don’t feel like playing around with anypony right now. I’ve got a splitting headache and my stomach feels like I ate ten tubs of ice cream.”

So, I didn’t get killed by Spike. Yay. I was grumpy and stompy all the way through the Everfree, but nothing showed up to put me out of my misery. This part of the forest had never been very dangerous, and with the mists closing in on Ponyville it barely existed at all. I could tell I was walking on a dirt path, and that there were trees to either side, and that it was dark, but there were no details other than that.

We stopped outside of Zecora’s hut. We could tell that Twilight and her friends were inside, with Zecora, but not whether or not they were doing anything. Minuette’s clone didn’t want to enter the hut, because it seemed like we were on the very edge of where things were real enough for anything to happen, and if we went inside we’d be trapped, frozen as the idea of a bunch of ponies in Zecora’s hut, until even that faded away.

So instead we cooperated and used our magic to drag Twilight Sparkle outside, but as soon as she passed the threshold, she crumbled into dust, which vanished. We didn’t try to get anypony else.

Bon Bon Shows Her Love

Minuette’s clone wanted to go back to Ponyville, but I didn’t see any point to it. Without Twilight’s magic, there was no fixing this. Everything would fade away, until there wasn’t enough left for things to happen, and then nothing would happen, forever. It was the end.

Minuette had known. She’d warned Twilight, but Twilight had gone on ahead anyway. She hadn’t ‘exploded’, she’d escaped. The explosion was a side effect that she hadn’t anticipated, or at least she hadn’t mentioned anything about it in the notes on her ‘time ward’ spell.

I tried casting the time ward spell on myself, but it needed access to the timestream and we didn’t have that anymore. It was too late to save ourselves that way.

Minuette’s clone started to drag me back towards Ponyville by my tail. I told her to just leave me but she wouldn’t. She said that if she was going to die, she wanted to have sex first. I told her that there had been a big orgy already, and she’d missed it. She said that I owed her, and promised to kill me afterwards. She said she’d make dragon noises.

“It’s not that I don’t want to have sex with you,” I said, once we were real enough that we were experiencing the world again instead of just narrating it. “But if I try to have sex with you when I’m not in the mood, it’s just going to fall flat. I don’t think you really want to spend your last hours having bad sex.”

“I don’t have any memories of sex at all,” the clone said, scrunching up her face. “Was Minuette a virgin?”

I thought back to the last party Bonsy and I had had with her. “No,” I said. “No, she was most definitely not.” But that reminded me that I hadn’t been back to see Bon Bon all morning, and it was probably going to be my last chance. “Come on, I’ll take you home and we can talk to Bon Bon and see what we can do about getting you de-virginated before we all cease to exist.”

“Thank you! Thank you so much!” she said. “This has all been so fascinating, what with the notes and the forest and everything. I’m so glad you didn’t kill me.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, cringing. “Seriously, please stop mentioning it. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“I’ll stop mentioning it,” she said. “Soon.”

“When the world ends?”

“Yeah. Soon.”

It wasn’t really that funny. We couldn’t even see the sun anymore, and buildings and ponies didn’t really have shadows. Light didn’t really exist – we could still see things, but they weren’t lit to any specific brightness.

I pushed open the door, and the lack of the usual wave of scent from Bon Bon’s candy making hit me like a stagecoach. Bon Bon herself was sitting on the couch, staring at a batch of flavorless candy. “You did this,” she growled at me as I came in.

“Well… technically, yes.” I said.

“I’m going to kill you!” she snarled, teeth bared as she got up off the couch and advanced on us.

“Wait!” I said, holding up a hoof. She paused, but it was obvious that it was a pause, and that she was still going to hit me as soon as I finished making a futile plea for her to stop. “Bon Bon, the world is ending, soon. I know I don’t deserve to get anything from you, after what I’ve done, but there’s one last thing that I want you to do. Two last things.”

“I’m listening,” she said.

I took a deep breath, and smiled. “First, I want you to kill me. Literally. I don’t care how – you can beat me to death, or just stab me with something, or crush my head – I don’t care. The world is ending and it’s going to be really really boring and I’d rather have an interesting death, since I only get one. You know?”

Bon Bon glared at me. “I understand.”

“Do you think you could do that for me?” I asked, my tail tucked between my legs, and my ears flat against the sides of my head.

Bon Bon nodded, and closed her eyes, dropping her gaze for a second. “Only for you, Lyra.”

I let out a breath, although I’m not sure it was relief I felt. “Then, I want you to have sex with Minuette’s clone. Minny didn’t give her any of her memories of sex, and she wants to have some before everything fades away.”

Bon Bon paused, then nodded sharply. I walked up to her, and nuzzled the side of her head, and then her hoof slammed into my cheek, knocking me to the ground.

“What – stop!” Minuette’s clone cried.

“Stay out of this,” I said, getting back to my feet. I was only halfway up when Bon Bon whirled around and bucked me with her hind legs, throwing me across the room and into a lamp, which shattered. The glass dug into my back, although I could barely feel it through all the dental anesthetic we’d injected, and something broke in my chest. That, I felt, every time I tried to breathe.

Bon Bon charged across the room and head-butted me, right in my broken ribs. I screamed in agony, and the corner of the end table scraped down my side as I slammed into the wall. She reared up, and stomped on my belly, and there was a snap from my left hip, and something acid bubbled up inside me. Blood dribbled out of my mouth, and I pulled a hoof in to my stomach as the pain there didn’t fade after her blow. She stomped again, and a gush of bloody vomit splattered all over my chest, filling my mouth and nose.

She kicked me in the face. She stomped on my hind leg, shattering it. She bit down on the shattered leg and dragged me across the room, whimpering and moaning, into the kitchen, where she grabbed her large knife, that she used for slicing up pans of peanut brittle, and stabbed me in the stomach, over and over. It hurt so bad. It hurt so bad that I didn’t even notice when she sliced me open until I looked down and saw my organs exposed to the air, twitching painfully as my whole body quivered and went into shock.

Her hoof pushed my chin back and to the side, exposing my neck, and she set the edge of the knife against it. “I love you, Lyra,” she said, around the handle.

“I love you so much,” I croaked. “Thank you. Thank –“ The rest of whatever I’d been planning to say was lost as the cold steel drew a line of fire through my larynx, and everything sort of faded out and went away as I died.

Sex happens or something

Of course, Cloud Kicker used it as an excuse to have a massive orgy. I don’t think she really believed me – I don’t think anypony really believed me, except for maybe Applejack and Twilight who’d personally experienced near-nonexistence alongside me – but any excuse for an orgy with her, you know? It was a lot of fun, and I managed to wheedle Applejack into joining in for once. I think she ended up having angry hate-sex with Carrot Top.

It wasn’t until everypony was completely exhausted and lying around in a post-coital puddle that ponies really started to believe me. We’d been at it for hours, but the sun was still low in the eastern sky. Even if they didn’t believe that there was a real world somewhere that wasn’t doomed, it was pretty hard to ignore the sun locked in the sky. And nopony could imagine the world not being doomed without Princess Celestia.

“So what do we do now?” Derpy asked, her head resting on my belly as I lazily stroked her mane.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m pretty sexed out, but there’s no point trying to do anything constructive. And I promised Applejack no violence. Maybe we should go gorge on ice cream?”

“And muffins!”

I grinned. “Yes! And candy canes. I love candy canes. Maybe we can crush some candy canes and mix them into the ice cream.”

“Mmmm,” she said, closing her eyes and nibbling at the fur of my chest.

I giggled. “If you’re going to eat me, I should probably have Bonsy change me into candy first.”

“Mmm, but you’re so tasty right as you are,” Derpy said, nibbling more firmly, and catching a fold of skin between her teeth.

My breath caught. And I found myself saying, “Well, stop teasing me then, and take a real bite.” She bit down harder, and I gritted my teeth at the pain. “No, I mean, do it for real,” I said. “Tear off a piece.”

She let go, and I felt her weight lift off me. I looked up to see her standing over me, looking down at me with a worried frown. “Maybe we should get ice cream.”

I rolled to my feet, and my tail drooped, sopping wet like the rest of me, with sweat and… other stuff. I looked over at her, and she looked away.

Yeah, no long-term consequences for anything. Just ones that would last the rest of my life.

And then, flowers.

“And then you woke up,” Rose said.

Lyra nodded, contemplating the glass orb held in her hoof. “Then I woke up, and ran to Twilight’s place to put it into a memory orb before I forgot it. I’ve been replaying it ever since.”

Rose cringed. “Why? It sounds horrible!”

“I don’t usually have nightmares that detailed,” Lyra said. “And… and I just don’t know. The setup, with Twilight and the time travel spell? That actually happened. Except that she did remember me going back in time, and giving her a memory orb that helped her with her math. She told me afterwards that she sent me back with the same orb just to keep the loop stable – she wasn’t going to finish her work in time for the Equinox, but it wasn’t worth risking a tear in the fate web. Apparently the math wasn’t working out like she’d hoped, and messing around with unstable loops was looking way too risky.”

“So you had a nightmare about what might have happened,” Rose said.

“Or else the memory of my time-clone returned to me once the loop was finished,” Lyra said. “I was the only pony who touched the real time-line, right?”

Rose laughed. “Lyra… it was a nightmare. You weren’t even acting like yourself. Murdering somepony just because he asked you to? That sort of thing only happens in dreams.”

Lyra looked down. “I just can’t stop thinking about it.”

There was a clack, as Rose took the memory orb in her teeth, and dropped it into a drawer behind the counter, which she slammed shut. “There,” she said. “Now you can stop thinking about it. So are you going to buy any flowers, or are you just here to brighten my day with tales of adventure?”

Lyra leaned into the bouquet on display, and took a long sniff. She let out a content sigh. “Yes. Give me the flowers. All the flowers.”