"I wish I was friends with everypony."
The ugly stranger had given me one wish, and I had answered without a second thought. It became easy to remember names and faces after that. I baked with Pinkie Pie, and we taste-tested each other's cookies. I bucked trees with Applejack, and had a good yarn about other ponies we fancied. I posed for Rarity's winter line of scarves, I did a book report on gryphons with Twilight Sparkle. I played with Fluttershy's ferrets and shrieked when I got a bear hug. Pinkie Pie's gyrocopter can't keep up with Rainbow Dash in straight line speed, but we made that old machine do things that turned my stomach upside-down.
So many names and faces, so many places to be during the day. I absorbed more and more of Ponyville into my memory. Lyra, Bon-Bon, Big Mac, Mayor Mare, Cheerilee, the list grew and grew. It was becoming quite unmanageable, there simply needed to be more of me to go around to be a true friend to everypony. The stranger that had granted my wish led me to a cave, the way in blocked by a giant boulder. He clicked his digits, and the boulder turned into a pink balloon that drifted off into the sky. In the cave was a pool, and once I stepped in, two of me stepped out. My mind was divided, yet doubled. The strain of everypony's hopes and dreams cluttering my head was eased, and Pinkie Pie didn't question too much how I could be practicing trombone with her and gem-hunting with Rarity at the same time.
More duplicates of myself exponentially increased my combined brain mass. I could be a true and dependable friend to everypony in the village. I had wished to be friends with everypony though, without limit. I had to expand my social circle beyond just the village. I duplicated new squads of myself and sent them on every road from Ponyville. Through myriad eyes my view of Equestria broadened from Fillydephia to Los Pegasus. My analytical abilities grew dramatically, until a quick glance over a pony could inform me, by body language, minute facial expressions and situational context, the best way to approach and make friends.
More duplicates of myself meant going to greater lengths to avoid any difficult questions and maintaining the illusion of being only one pony. I started applying disguises to my duplicates, dying coats and manes was easy enough, all Rarity's influence I supposed. I had a section of duplicates that guarded the mirror pool, their brains constantly slaved to calculating new cutie marks, different accents and voice patterns, all to maintain the illusion. This was a big secret I had to keep, and blowing it would be the fastest way to losing all my new friends. Forever.
Once I was well-established in most major land based cities, I began to look upwards. Cloudsdale would present a significant challenge since Earth Ponies are such a rare sight. I dedicated four hundred duplicates to the study of spells for cloudwalking and magic wings. It didn't take too long for the mass of information to be absorbed, and for me to add another six hundred minds to the task of formulating spells to make wing spells permanent. Of course, an Earth Pony cannot cast such spells, but that's the magic of friendship; I had so many talented unicorn friends willing to give the 'old spell I found in a book' a try. The experiment yielded ten successfully airborne Pegasi duplicates of me across Equestria. With the mirror pool at my disposal, that number would rise to match my Earth Pony population.
It saddened me that a small percentage of my duplicates were dying throughout this expansion of my social circle. Even with my thousands of eyes to see, statistically it was unavoidable some of my duplicates would run into freak accidents. The pain of being run over by a cab in Manehattan, or electrocuted mid-air and plummeting thousands of feet while paralysed deeply affected me. My multitude of selves would wince and freeze up when one of our number died. I always sent one of me to attend the funeral. Obviously I had never made friends with myself, but I thought it the right thing to do to give the duplicate a proper send-off.
The Crystal Empire provided its own unique challenge, in that the Crystal Heart experienced energy surges whenever one of my duplicates came near. I had thought it would be easier to blend in since the borders had opened up, especially with the Empire hosting the Equestria Games. However, there were a few incidents during the befriending process where guards stopped and searched my duplicates, confused as to why the Heart was reacting to me so violently. A few hundred of my brains theorised that the combined love and friendship I felt for Equestria was acting as a kind of overload for the Heart, which itself was powered by the love of the Crystal Ponies. This bordered on being a danger to the continued secrecy of my existence, so I reorganized my schedules in the Crystal Empire to avoid passing the Heart most of the time.
This situation only highlighted to me the awkward problem I faced as my quest for friendship went on. Whilst I was still friends many times over with Princess Twilight Sparkle (I had created a duplicate of myself specifically to study advanced magic with her), the other three Princesses were harder to get close to. Back in the days where I had been only a hundred or so ponies, the princesses had been very remote. But now, when many of the ponies attending royal events were actually just me, the Princesses were straying across my vision constantly. It saddened me to think of the Princesses as the only ponies in Equestria I could not befriend. I felt a tear roll down my cheek, and it took me a whole second of thought to realise that it was one of the cheeks I had actually been born with. I had an army of duplicates pulled from the mirror pool to dig out the caverns. That would provide space for food and shelter, and form a core of duplicates dedicated to strategic thinking. I would use these brains to unravel the gargantuan mental task of how to befriend the Princesses.
Over the months, my friendships grew and solidified. So many bonding moments kindled warm flames in my hearts, from rollerskating down a Manehattan street with Ginger Snaps to cloud-busting with Wind Whistler. I even knew the ponies so well I could influence their own mental processes, prod them this way and that to meet up with each other and form new friendships. I even dared to play matchmaker now and then, realising the obvious compatibilities between ponies from one end of the land to the other. My early experiments had a high rate of failure, but with some practice and a bit more brainpower, I became responsible for nearly half the marriages being performed in Equestria.
There were two possible routes to befriending the princesses, my minds reasoned. Become their servants, or become their trusted advisors. The latter option appealed to me the most, but it was also the most difficult. Advisors and confidantes of the Princesses tended to be unicorns adept at high levels of magic. Whilst I understood magic better than any single living pony (apologies, my dear friend Twilight), I could only perform magic by proxy – by asking unicorn friends to perform my spells. The curious stranger had long since disappeared, I could ask him for no further wishes.
More and more duplicates had to be pulled from the mirror pool as I wracked my multitude of brains on a spell to make an Earth Pony a unicorn. Some of my duplicates were going insane and dying, their limited consciousness overloaded by the sheer volume and intensity of my collective thoughts. Fortunately, a single pony now represented such a tiny part of me, the grief at their loss was also a fraction of the emotion I had felt when I had been a mere few thousand ponies. After all, it was hard to be sad for long while you were simultaneously attending sixty three different parties (sixteen had games of Pin the Tail on the Pony. My favourite!) as well as watersliding, playing jump-rope, sharing muffins, and playing seven games of chess. I made sure not to win at those too often, a sudden spike in chess geniuses would certainly draw unwanted attention.
I cracked the unicorn problem after a grueling week of research across Equestria's libraries, discussions with my brightest unicorn friends and about an entire forest's worth of theoretical papers. I only put a choice few in for peer review; it was already odd enough that I played the part of many Earth Ponies and Pegasi with an interest in magic. I could only get one Earth Pony duplicate transformed, by Princess Twilight Sparkle herself. She proudly presented me to the princesses as the brilliant mind behind what she now dubbed Unicornification.
That new unicorn duplicate of me was named Professor Diced Apple. As Professor Apple, I was head of research in applied transmutation magic at the Solar University, and I had the ear of Princess Celestia herself. I had Diced Apple take a brief holiday in Ponyville, ostensibly to spend some time with Twilight Sparkle, which gave me cover to visit my mirror pool. It was a little awkward when Twilight introduced Diced Apple to my original self. I had always maintained a policy of avoiding contact between my own duplicates in social situations, if only because being introduced to yourself is still fundamentally unsettling to me.
I duplicated more talented unicorns that Diced Apple recommended and appointed to other positions in government. I repurposed main core of dedicated thinkers in the mirror pool caverns to construct fake identities for these new unicorns, so I could infiltrate the higher echelons of Canterlot's government convincingly. Celestia warmed to Diced Apple, and seeing her smile down at me every time we met triggered a domino effect of smiles that had my multitude of pony selves grinning and giggling to themselves across the country.
Luna was a harder nut to crack, if only because she didn't surround herself quite so much with others as Celestia did. To befriend Luna needed another trick entirely. Since I had duplicates both awake and asleep at all times, thanks to time zones and schedule differences, it was possible for me to both be awake and dreaming at the same time. A scant few of my dreams were nightmares, and Princess Luna was an exceptionally busy mare, she could only visit so many frightened dreamers through the course of one night. She gave priority to the children, and I was little too weirded out by the possibility of using age spells to infantilise portions of my mind and then hope that my child selves would have nightmares that Luna would then visit.
So, barring experiments in becoming both a child and adult at once, I waited patiently for Luna to intrude upon my dreams. My nightmares were usually nonsensical, fear of oozing abominations and dark, vague threats from which there was no real cure. The Princess did intervene though when she found a nightmare that reflected fears beyond the primordial. Many of my duplicates would have terrible visions of being alone and friendless, cut off from speaking, from hearing, or seeing. Since I could see and hear most of Equestria, and since the memories of each individual pony duplicate were shared with my other selves, the idea of being just a single creature again felt like being blind and deaf, and the thought of being limited to caring about only 150 ponies was the equivalent of being a hermit to me.
Princess Luna didn't understand why this same nightmare was haunting so many ponies, or where this fear of sensory deprivation was coming from. She was kind but firm, and stuck to her tried and true methods for coping with fear. She showed my little ponies all the good times we had had with friends, and I had to concentrate to make sure she only saw flashbacks from that particular duplicate's set of friends. She showed us there was nothing to fear so long as our friendships remained strong. I thanked her a hundred times over as this lesson was taught and re-taught for months.
I began to suggest things to Princess Luna in those dream states. Subtle indications of the sorts of things she might do as a ruler to improve Equestria. I think it's safe to say that the Lunar University owes its founding to all the duplicates I used to suggest to her how important her teachings were. She is a pony of subtlety, the mare that works behind the scenes and in the shadows, and as such the university is very secretive. I was proud that some of my unicorn selves have become professors there, and since I knew near every pony in Equestria, I was very good at finding hidden talent far and wide.
I began to 'mop up' to fulfil my wish, tracking down the last stray friendships that need to be made across the country. Isolated communities that need infiltrating, or lonely ponies that need a weekly visit from a similarly quiet soul. I realised at this point that the ink and dye economy was booming beyond proportion because of my constant demand for disguises. I remedied this problem by having teams of my unicorn selves set up in my major population centres, and use their magic to permanently recolour my duplicates. A spell I discovered in a curious town up north also let me remove cutie marks from my duplicates, and inscribe new ones. I constructed a giant vault deep in the caverns near the village to store the vast number of the same cutie mark I pulled off my duplicate flanks tens of thousands of times.
I was a little surprised with how careless I'd been about economical matters. Since at this point I was actually something like two percent of Equestria's population myself, constantly buying dye must have had radical implications. I was careful from then on to choose products from different producers, making sure to buy into local small businesses to decrease a risk of making anypony too rich by my patronage. The amount of food I bought from Sweet Apple Acres to feed my core thinkers in the caverns bordered on favouritism.
Eventually there was really only one pony in Equestria that I was not friends with. Sure, some of my friendships were stronger than others, but I was a caring and reliable part of everypony's life save one.
Princess Cadance.
I think she was avoiding my many iterations. It didn't seem to matter how I presented myself. I could be a rich socialite, a poor weatherpony, a sturdy farmer or a delicate artist, but nopony I infiltrate into her court or her social life was able to get close without her dismissing me or making some excuse to widen the distance between us. That confused me. I had made a colossal number of friendships, but that did not mean that Twilight, the Princess of Friendship sensed anything was amiss. On the other hoof, Princess Cadance's special talent was love, particularly sensing love and helping it grow. Perhaps this specialization made her aware of the blazing beacons of love that my duplicates must have been to her. How could she help foster love between my duplicates if all she detected was the blank white noise of the love I have for everypony?
I devoted towns worth of duplicate brains to solving the problem of Cadance's friendship. Every angle turned up blank, because however I approached her, she still knew I was one of those strange ponies that glowed too brightly. I briefly considered somehow cutting off a duplicate from my main consciousness, but the nightmares of being blind and deaf stayed my hoof. Doing so would have been torture to a pony that has always known the love and combined consciousness of a hundred thousand siblings.
My original self took a deep breath, and sighed. I knew what I had to do. It was a big, terrifying step, but I couldn't just leave Cadance alone. I had wished I was friends with everypony, and I knew it would bother me to leave even just one out. At this rate, I was making friends with foals as soon as they can talk. I was quite the foalsitter these days, and I couldn't help but wonder what kind of influence I might be having on the next generation.
I took the train ride to the Crystal Empire. No unicorn teleportation, or speedy Pegasus flight. Just my honest Earth Pony self. I had eyes everywhere, so the journey was hardly dull for me. I was blowing out candles on a cake for one of my birthdays, I was losing consciousness as my diving apparatus failed, I was overtaking Soarin' on the last lap of the race. I bought a snowglobe from the train station and headed for the Crystal Palace. One of my guard pony duplicates waved me through to the open royal court. I'm not used to doing this, usually I infiltrate by using fake identities. This was the real me though, the first me. I briefly wondered who I would be if this pony body I was born in died.
Cadance could already sense me as I trotted inside, my heavy hoofsteps echoing off the high crystal ceiling. From what I knew of her schedule, she had already called for a lunch break recently, so she couldn't pull that trick again to avoid me. I bowed before her throne, glancing at Shining Armor who was beside her today. I was not friends with him in this body, but he recognised me as one of his sister's friends.
"And what petition do you bring before my court?" Cadance asked. Cold and formal, unlike her normal interactions with her subjects. I cleared my throat.
"Your Royal Highness, I have come to you because of a wish I made. A few months ago I called on powers I didn't understand. I wanted to be liked, I wanted to stop being alone. I wished I could be everypony's friend.
I know it alarms you, when you see me now. You sense something impossible. The Crystal Heart does too, I can't get near it without nearly causing an earthquake these days. Your magic tells you I love too much. That I seem to have a caring affection for everypony around me. Reason tells you this cannot be, and I know you have confided your concerns with Princess Celestia about these strange ponies you keep sensing. I've blocked most of her enquiries at the universities and schools on the subject, because I want to talk to you about it myself.
The truth is I am not one pony, I am many. There is a magic pool that can duplicate ponies within the Everfree Forest. Our mutual friend Pinkie Pie used it once, and it exponentially increased her desire to have fun to destructive levels. In my case, it seems to increase my capacity for friendship."
"What do you mean, you are many?" Cadance interrupted. I could see I had her attention, she sat up straight in her throne.
"At this current time, my consciousness is spread across… let's see. A hundred and seventy-eight thousand, seven hundred and twenty ponies. Mostly Earth Ponies, followed by Pegasi. I converted to unicorns last, you see."
"Converted…" Cadance's jaw dropped, but she was quick on the ball, for a single pony. Her eyes narrowed. "Professor Diced Apple!"
I nodded my head. "He was my first Earth Pony to unicorn transformation, yes."
"That is impossible," Cadance muttered. She frowned at me, and her horn glowed. After a few moments, she shook her head. "But it makes sense. I've come across a lot of ponies lately who just… can't feel the things they feel. No one pony can have that much emotion. So if they aren't just one pony…"
"I came to you because you are the last pony in Equestria that is not my friend. I… I realise that it must sound selfish, seeking your friendship to fulfil a wish. But I think there's more to it than that. You're the only pony that's never let me try to be friends, not even once. It seems like the moment I first met you, you had reason to distrust me. I'm not asking that we instantly become best of friends. I've made more mistakes in my friendships these past months than most ponies can in a lifetime, believe me. All I'm asking is you give me a chance."
"What about Princess Celestia? Luna? Twilight? Shining Armor?!" Cadance asked, throwing a panicked look at her husband. The stallion was equally confounded, but kept his thoughts to himself. I felt a tremor in my stomach, and a few hundred of my other selves shivered in worry. Perhaps I should not have said Cadance was the last pony to not be my friend. That made it sound intimidating. But I was resolved to be as honest as my friend Applejack in this matter. I could only make a true friend of Cadance if I explained the whole truth to her.
"Yes, I advise Celestia and Luna in many matters, and I run both princess' learning institutions. I help Twilight with her studies in some of the most advanced magic I know, and I'm proud to say she is exceeding my expectations well beyond what I thought a single pony could do. As for Shining Armor, I serve him as a member of the Guard, and we meet up off-duty quite often."
I caught the apprehensive look on Shining Armor's face. I put on my best pleading expression, the one that gets most of my little ponies through the occasional tiff between friends that I'm so used to by now.
"Please, Princess Cadance. I'm not acting malevolent here. I just want to be friends with everypony, and with that comes the need to be more than just one pony. Taking on new identities is just my way of making sense of it all."
"I need some time. Come back tomorrow, you will hear my decision then, "Cadance said abruptly, with a finality that dared not be questioned. I bowed again and left the hall. There's plenty of action in my many lives to keep my minds from stressing out too much about this. Still, even with all the parties, laughs, hugs, picnics and plucking eggs from chicken's nests that I tried to occupy my consciousness with, it still felt like forever until tomorrow came.
As I approached the crystal throne again, Cadance looked defeated, her gaze fixed on the floor. I wanted to canter up the steps and offer her a warm embrace, but instead I waited for my verdict. Slowly, she looked up at me, and spoke.
"I do not see evil in your heart. But Princess Luna once craved the love and admiration of the ponies of Equestria so much, she became Nightmare Moon. If… if you ever let jealousy or greed into your heart, if for some reason you thought that force was the only way you could get what you wanted…"
I did not want to answer this. It would hurt Cadance, but I knew there was no use lying, now she knew the full extent of what I had accomplished. "If I wished to enslave the Crystal Empire to my will, as King Sombra once did?"
Cadance nodded. My core thinkers back at the mirror pool cavern took only a few moments to supply a wealth of strategic options.
"There would be many ways I could effect control. I could influence all the ponies in Equestria to boycott Crystal Empire trade, or I could whip up a fervor here to remove you from power. I could convince the other Princesses that you have become evil and that you must be banished or imprisoned. Alternatively, I could create powerful spells to banish you to the moon, and anypony else that opposed me. At the very worst, I could begin a mass duplication of myself into an army. My duplicate soldiers would be able to instantly communicate with each other, learn and adapt to counter any tactics you use against me and defeat the armies of Equestria and the Crystal Empire. Alternatively-…"
"Thank you," Cadance interrupted. She gave me a small smile, which somehow made me sadder than all the times she had rejected my friendship combined. A sob caught in my throat, and I bowed low to her once again. I hadn't realized it would be so hard to say those things until it had all tumbled out.
"Please, Princess Cadance. These things will never come to pass. I'm friends with nearly everypony in Equestria. Why would I want to hurt my little ponies for power? Friendship is the most powerful magic I have."
Cadance hushed me, as if I was a foal. I got to my hooves and held back the boiling sea of emotions that flooded across my minds. A lot of my duplicates had tears in their eyes. The Princess came down from her throne, and lifted my downcast face with her hoof.
"I know it won't come to pass. If Twilight Sparkle thinks you're a good friend, it's only fair of me to give you a chance. I just ask that you do the right thing."
I blinked my teary eyes, and searched hers. I was good at reading faces now, but Cadance was well-practiced in keeping her emotions hidden. The only thing I could discern from her expression was faint amusement.
"You don't have to tell everypony, but Princess Celestia, Luna, and Twilight deserve to know who took over Equestria."
Cadance grinned, and laughed at the shocked look on my face.
BONUS CHAPTER - Never Enough (By Ultra-the-HedgeToaster)
He had achieved maximum friendship on Equus, or close to it. Very nearly every sapient being on the planet was now his friend - yaks, griffons, minotaurs, goats, zebras, caribou, sea-ponies, even the changelings.
Creating a changeling-self using his permanent variant of the amniomorphic spell had been a particularly interesting experience, as changelings shared a form of hive-mind of their own, albeit vastly less efficient.
He had infiltrated most levels of society in every nation, large organization, and group of import. This also meant sending some of his selves to prisons to befriend the inmates, even those sitting in Tartarus.
An interesting challenge - Tartarus rarely saw new prisoners, so he had needed to limit the number of clones he sent; He had reunited Tirek and Scorpan, then worked his way down using Tirek's insight into the other prisoner's personalities.
He had gone into battles to fight for both sides, managing to stock the ranks mostly with his own selves, taking the blows himself to protect others where necessary.
He was proud to see his little ponies, his yaks, griffons, changelings and others - his friends - becoming more and more peaceful through subtle encouragement. Yaks and griffons became allies. Northern Minotauria opened its borders to outsiders. Ponies and changelings made peace.
Equestria, the world, had become a better place.
Then, he had branched out into several parallel universes, creating his own mirror-portals to access them with the assistance of Twilight Sparkle.
Ironically enough, the first universe he had gained access to had provided the biggest challenge - gaining control of the bureaucratic apparatus and forging the population census in the human world. Once past this hurdle, it was a cakewalk.
Eventually, he had even reunited Celestia with her long-lost lover, the King Sombra of another Equestria.
It wasn't enough.
One day, in a conversation with Celestia, she mentioned that Starswirl the Bearded had never made any friends. He had experienced many sad events, and learned to deal with them over the years. Yet somehow, this simple conversation would not leave him alone. Nightmares returned he hadn't had in years. It tore at his many hearts to know that somepony had lived so lonely his entire life.
It wasn't just Starswirl, of course. History was full of sad ponies and bitter changelings that desperately needed a friend.
He could not let this stand! He needed to befriend them!
Mastering time travel spells was a trivial task. However, he almost immediately hit a roadblock - his experiments proved conclusively that time travel was destructive, any change to the past would overwrite the present. This came as a shock. Going back to befriend the ponies of the past meant abandoning the friends he had made here and now!
How could the universe be so cruel?
He could easily have stood at the door to Starswirl's home and literally would not have been able to knock without destroying Equestria as he knew it.
At least paradoxes were a non-issue. A time traveler in the past was no longer part of the present being altered.
This gave him an idea.
"If I can't alter the past without changing the present, I'll just have to take the present with me into the past!"
Thus, he began the construction of a pocket-universe.
Several, in fact.
He'd need many of them. After all, there were about ten thousand years of history to cover...
Author's Note
An idea by Ultra-the-HedgeToaster concerning the ultimate end-game of Diced Apple's quest for friendship.
