Minuette walked briskly down the main street of Ponyville. Her reunion with her old friend, Twilight Sparkle, had reminded her that it had been far too long since she had visited her friends in Ponyville. Lyra’s birthday was coming up soon, so it was a perfect time to visit. Her schedule was pretty packed, but she had made time. After all, that was her special talent.
As she walked down the middle of the street, she glanced casually at the signs on each store as she passed. She suddenly stopped walking and stared at one in disbelief.
Right in front of her was a sign with her hourglass cutie mark on it, in full color. Her eyes scanned the text underneath. “Colgate’s Family Dentistry,” she read aloud. She decided that she had time for a quick detour and opened the door with her magic.
A bell over the door rang as the door opened past it. Immediately inside was a small but tastefully decorated waiting room. Behind a desk on one side of the room sat a light-blue crystal unicorn with a starry mane and straight-cut forelock. The receptionist was trying to rearrange several stacks of paper simultaneously and did not immediately look up, but she said in a cheerful voice, “Welcome to Colgate’s Family Dentistry. The doctor is not in yet, but she should be here in just a minute.”
As the crystal pony restacked the papers, Minuette caught a glimpse of the hourglass on her flank. Obviously, this must be Colgate. Strange, dentist offices were usually named after the dentist.
The receptionist set down the stacks and took a sip from a glass of water that sat on the desk. “I can sign you in now, and as soon as she gets here you can—" She looked up and stopped mid-sentence. “Colgate, you’re early. You’re never early.”
Now it was Minuette’s turn to be confused. “I’m not Colgate, I’m Minuette. I thought you were Colgate.”
The receptionist scowled. “Colgate, I’m really not in the mood for your silliness. I had to stay late last night to work on the paperwork and still had to come early this morning to get it done.”
Minuette glanced down at the desk and saw that the receptionist’s nameplate said “Minuet.”
“I’m afraid you have me mixed up with somepony else,” she said apologetically. “My name is Minuette, and I’m pretty sure we have never met.”
Minuet gave her a hard look. “If you’re not Colgate, you’re her identical twin. You even have the same cu—“
Minuette felt a tingling sensation in her horn that quickly spread to her whole body. The feeling was familiar; she had used this spell countless times before. This time, however, somepony else was doing it. All around her, everything seemed to be caught in invisible molasses. Ripples in the glass of water stopped traveling, birds outside hovered in mid-air and Minuet froze with a rather amusing expression on her face.
Minuette remained unaffected and glanced around curiously for the source of the magic. After a minute, she saw a blue unicorn running down the street towards the dentist office. A blue unicorn with a blue-and-white striped mane. A blue unicorn with an hourglass cutie mark.
The newcomer opened the door and trotted inside, only to stop and gape when she saw Minuette. Minuette suspected that her own expression was similarly rude, but the situation was just too absurd to do anything else.
Minuette found her voice first. “Doctor Colgate, I presume?”
Colgate nodded. “That’s me. Who are you?”
“I’m Minuette.” She glanced at the frozen receptionist and added, “with two ‘t’s and two ‘e’s.”
“This is amazing!” Colgate announced. “You look just like me!”
“You look just like me,” Minuette corrected her. “Even sisters don’t look as much like each other as we do.”
“I’ve always wished I had a sister,” Colgate mused. “It would be so much fun.”
“We even have the same cutie mark,” Minuette gestured at the frozen world around them, “and the same special talent. Why am I not frozen? The time-stop spell freezes everything but the caster.”
“I’ve always called it clock-up, myself,” Colgate said, “and I thought I had invented it.”
They stared at each other for a little longer before Minuette said, “You should probably let time resume; I’ll bet you’re getting tired by now.”
“Yeah, heh, I’m sure you know the feeling.” Colgate’s yellow magic faded and the world around them resumed moving as if it had never stopped.
“—tie mark…” Minuet finished before realizing there were two where there had been one. “Ah.” She sighed and held a hoof against her temple. “Which one of you is Colgate?”
Colgate raised a hoof. “Hey, this is great! Even Minuet can’t tell us apart. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We should trade places and try out each other’s lives?”
“Lyra’s party is tonight, we could practice there!”
“You know Lyra too?”
“Of course, she lives in Ponyville.”
The two unicorns continued to plot their prank, completely oblivious to the crystal pony covering her eyes behind them.
* * *
Pinkie Pie was making a last minute tune-up to the balloons that festooned Sugarcube Corner’s windows and doorways. She felt an odd tingling in her forelock, and then Minuette was suddenly standing next to her.
“Hi, Pinkie Pie! How are you, you old party pony?”
“Minuette! I’m glad you could come!”
“What? I’m Colgate, don’t you remember? I was part of the animal team for winter wrap-up for the last three years? I just opened a dentist office?”
Pinkie Pie looked alarmed. “Of course, Colgate! I never forget a face, heh, heh.” Or do I? She thought.
“Hi, Pinkie Pie! How are you, you old party pony?” Another blue unicorn had appeared on the other side of her.
“…Minuette?” Pinkie Pie asked uncertainly.
“Of course, who else would I be?” the unicorn replied with a cheeky grin.
“Of course…has anypony ever told you that you look really, really similar?” Pinkie smiled winningly.
The twins looked at each other in mock dismay. “What?” one of them asked.
“We look nothing alike,” agreed the other, “see?” They stood next to each other and struck mirror poses.
Oh dear, Pinkie thought, keeping everypony straight may be harder than I ever thought.
At that moment, the guest of honor walked in. “Hi, Pinkie Pie. Sw— Bon Bon sends her regrets, but she has to do…something in Canterlot.”
“Hi, Lyra!” the hourglass ponies chorused.
Lyra looked, and gaped. “Minuette, Colgate? I didn’t know you...knew each other.”
“Of course, we’re like sisters!” one of them replied.
Pinkie Pie caught Lyra wincing slightly at that remark, but the twins seemed too caught up in their performance to notice.
“We brought you a gift,” one of them asserted.
“We were going to bring separate gifts,” the other explained, “until we found out that we got you the same thing.”
“Well, uh, thank you for coming, it’s good to see both of you again,” Lyra said uncertainly.
The doppelgangers devolved into giggles. After a moment, one of them whispered to the other and they both lit their horns. There was a quick blue blur and one pony stood where two had stood before.
She waggled her eyebrows at Lyra expectantly.
“Um…Colgate?” Lyra guessed at random.
The mare just giggled and did not confirm or deny Lyra’s guess.
* * *
To Pinkie and Lyra’s great relief, Minuette and Colgate did very little to disrupt the party, mostly settling for impersonating each other to the ponies that only knew one of them.
As the party began to wind down, Lyra found the pair having a private discussion in an empty corner. She had been more suspicious of ponies in general ever since she discovered that her roommate was a spy, so she hid behind a counter and listened in.
“…but I guess they found somepony more qualified. I ended up working for a travel agency. It’s a little boring, but I get along with all the ponies, so it’s not too bad.”
“I wish we had traveled more when I was a filly, but Mom never wanted to leave Ponyville.”
“What about your dad?”
“I don’t remember my dad; he left us before I was old enough.”
“I know the feeling; my mother left when I was tiny too.”
“Hey, we should introduce them to each other.”
“Omigosh, I was thinking the same thing.”
“If they liked each other enough…”
“We really would be sisters!”
There was a dim yellow glow for a moment, and then the conversation resumed.
“I hope Lyra’s enjoying her party.”
“She should be, she has lots of friends, and Pinkie Pie always throws a great shindig.”
“I hope she isn’t too weirded out by both of us being here.”
“Nah, Lyra’s cool, she won’t care if we’re being a little weird.”
“Hi, Lyra,” one of them said right in her ear.
Lyra screamed and jumped five feet straight up in the air. She landed on top of the counter and looked all around herself frantically, pupils contracted and breathing heavily.
From her elevated vantage point, she could see now what had happened. The twins were smiling innocently up at her from either side of the counter. One of them must have been taking both sides of the conversation so the other could sneak up on her. Probably from the moment they started talking about her.
Lyra struggled to lower her heart rate to a normal speed. She noticed that everypony still at the party was staring at her. “Heh, heh. I’m fine! Nothing’s wrong, I just got…startled.” She hopped shakily down from the counter and glared at…whoever was on this side of the counter. “Somepony snuck up and surprised me, that’s all.”
She looked back to see that the other of the twins had walked around the counter and they were standing next to each other again. “Hey, Lyra…”
“Do you know our parents?”
“Uh, I know Colgate’s mom and Minuette’s dad,” Lyra said evasively.
“What about my…wait, you’re hiding something.”
“You know what happened to our missing parents, don’t you?”
Lyra sighed. “I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“Tell us,” the pair chorused.
Lyra struggled internally for a moment, then sagged. “Fine. You have to promise you won’t tell your parents that I was the one that told you.”
They nodded enthusiastically.
“You are sisters.” Lyra smirked at the matching expressions of astonishment. “Your parents broke up right after you were born, each taking one filly with them. I found a picture that time I was visiting your house, Minuette, but your dad made me promise to never tell.”
“I knew it!”
“It all makes sense!”
“We…we have to fix it!”
“Fix it? How?”
“It’s been eighteen years, they can’t still be mad. We’ll just reintroduce them to each other.”
“We’ll have a whole family!”
“Not to rain on your parade,” Lyra interjected, “but surely they would have talked to each other by now if they weren’t still mad.”
“Don’t worry, Lyra, we’ve got this.”
“We just need to set a trap.”
“We can find out how they originally fell in love.”
“And set it up again. How hard could it be?”
“What if they don’t have time for any of that?” Lyra objected.
The twins looked at each other and grinned. “We’ll make time!”
The door to Twilight’s castle swung open to reveal Spike the dragon. “Oh hi, Minuette, what’s up?”
“Hi, Spike! Is Twilight in? I need to ask her for help.”
“Well, she’s working on a—“
“It’s a friendship problem!” Minuette interrupted. “She’s the only pony that can help us!”
“Well, uh, won’t you come in?” Spike asked dubiously.
Minuette beamed and followed him back into the castle. He led her down a hall and into a side room. Several books lay open on a table next to a mostly unidentifiable collection of equipment, although Minuette recognized a video camera in the mix. Oddly enough, there also seemed to be a book built into the machine, with several wires attached to it via suction cups. The princess was buried up to her wings in the contraption and was muttering to herself about “Trottenburg’s method.”
“Hey, Twi, Minuette says she has a friendship problem,” Spike announced.
There was a clang and a groan from somewhere inside the device, then Twilight withdrew her head, cradling her forehead with a hoof. “Oh, hello, Minuette. I’m glad you came; I wouldn’t want to spend all my time on this when I should be out there, spreading friendship and, uh, you know.” She smiled sheepishly.
Minuette bounded up to the other side of the table and thrust her head forward. “Twilight! I need your help!”
“Of course,” Twilight drew back reflexively, “anything for a friend.”
“I just found out that I have a twin sister. Our parents broke up when we were born, and each took one of us. We never knew we had other family, but now we have a plan to get our folks back together!”
“That’s wonderful! What do you need me to do?”
“Can you invite both of our parents to dinner? They would never turn down an invitation from a princess.”
“That could be arranged. I could tell them about how wonderful—“
“Then, once they’re both there,” Minuette continued, “Spike comes rushing in and tells you there’s a national emergency and they need you! You rush off, leaving them at the table by themselves, and then they talk about whatever they’ve been holding in all these years.”
“Uh, that’s one possible outcome, I suppose…” Twilight said, cautiously.
“Shouldn’t you be there too?” Spike asked. “They’re your parents. Don’t you think you should talk to them?”
Minuette seemed to think that over for a second. “Yeah, then we can keep them from escaping until they talk it out.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Twilight said, “who is your sister?”
“It’s Colgate, of course! She lives right here in Ponyville, but somehow, I never met her when I was here visiting Lyra.” Twilight’s blank expression prompted Minuette to add, “She’s a dentist?”
Twilight continued to stare blankly.
“She looks just like me, goes to lots of Pinkie’s parties?”
“I always assumed that was you,” Twilight admitted.
Minuette giggled. “This is going to be so great!”
* * *
Pinkie Pie was pulling down decorations at Sugarcube Corner. She felt a tingle in her forelock and turned around to see a blue unicorn grinning at her. “Hi…Colgate!”
Colgate was levitating a box in her magic with all of the remaining decorations in it. “How did you figure out it was me?” she asked.
“Your sparkly teeth! Nopony has as bright a smile as you!” She looked at the box. “Ooh, thanks! That would have taken me a while to clean up.”
“No problem! Do you think you could help me with something?”
“You betcha! Is it a party?”
“You know it!” Colgate looked around conspiratorially and whispered in Pinkie’s ear, “Minuette and I are actually sisters!”
Pinkie gasped loudly.
“Our parents separated when we were born,” Colgate continued, “but we have a plan to get them back together!”
Pinkie grabbed Colgate’s ear and whispered back, “So you want to have a ‘getting-back-together-with-your-first-love’ party?”
Colgate nodded enthusiastically. “What do you know about romantic dinners?”
* * *
“Are you sure about this?” Minuette asked her twin as they walked into a joke shop.
“Absolutely,” Colgate assured her. “I snuck into Mom’s room and looked in her lockbox.”
“Wasn’t it locked?”
Colgate winked and flourished a set of pointy dental tools. “I found some receipts, an article from the next day’s paper, and her diary.”
Minuette browsed the shelves. “Aha!” She held up a bottle of invisible lubricant. “This should do the trick.”
Colgate looked at the label and read aloud, “Guaranteed to last at least four hours in low-traffic areas.” She snickered. “This is going to be great!”
* * *
A blue unicorn stallion with a white mane sat in the waiting area of Le Percheron. Tennessee Waltz straightened his uncomfortable suit and tapped a hoof nervously. Ever since he had received a dinner invitation from Princess Twilight Sparkle earlier that week, he had found it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else. His imagination had proposed innumerable nonsensical explanations for why the Princess of Friendship would invite him and his daughter to a private dinner. He knew Minuette had been friends with Sparkle back when she was just another unicorn, but he was pretty sure that the princess had never even met him. If the princess arrived before Minuette, it was going to be really awkward.
He glanced around the waiting room in the restaurant and noticed a very familiar-looking unicorn mare sitting on the other side. He quickly averted his eyes. What were the odds? He hadn’t seen her in 17 years, but there was no mistaking her blue-and-white mane and yellow eyes. Hydrangea.
Hydrangea happened to look up just as Tennessee turned away. She gaped. This had to be a coincidence. After all, he lived in Canterlot; he probably went to this restaurant all the time. She briefly wondered if Princess Twilight would be willing to move their private dinner to a different restaurant, but realized that would be an absurd request. Where was Colgate, anyway?
After what seemed to both an eternity of sneaking looks at each other and pretending not to notice, the front door opened to admit a pair of armored pegasi. “ANNOUNCING HER HIGHNESS, PRINCESS TWILIGHT SPARKLE!” one of them bellowed.
The princess herself rushed in right behind them, belatedly trying to subdue her entrance. “Please, not so loud, everypony’s going to…” she trailed off as she saw that everyone in the restaurant was staring at her. “Um, hi. Please continue, pretend I’m not even here.”
Colgate and Minuette walked in behind her, wearing identical dresses and mane styles. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” one of them said.
“We’re glad you could come,” added the other.
Their parents stared at them, then at each other, then at the princess. “How did you find out?” Tennessee said at last.
The twins posed next to each other. “The real question,” said one, “is ‘how did you keep it a secret so long?’”
“I hope you don’t plan to change us after all these years,” Hydrangea said.
“Of course not,” Twilight assured her with a strained smile, “we’re just having dinner. I like to have dinner with my friends. And I’m the Princess of Friendship, so I have lots of friends and…um…so I eat dinner a lot…yeah.”
The major domo came to her rescue. “Your table is ready, your highness. If you would follow me?”
Nopony said anything else until they were all seated at a table in a private room and perusing their menus.
“So…” Twilight said, turning to Tennessee, “Minuette tells me you work at the palace?”
“Yes, your highness. I work in the laundry room.” He repositioned his menu to block his view of Hydrangea.
“And Colgate says you arrange flowers?”
“I just try to keep busy. I’ve been living with my parents since…for a while.” She moved her menu to hide from Tennessee.
Twilight’s ears sagged. She glanced at the twins, who were both watching her with disturbing grins.
In a few minutes, the waiter came to take their orders and carried the menus away with him, leaving the estranged couple with no cover.
Twilight made another attempt at small talk. “So, how did you two first meet?”
Spike came running into the room. “Twilight! It’s terrible, just terrible! Nopony knows what to do! This looks like a job for the Princess of Friendship!”
Twilight facehooved with an audible smack. “Please excuse me, hopefully this won’t take too long.” She vanished in a purple flash, leaving Spike to run back the way he had come.
“So, Dad, what was it about Mom that first made you fall in love?”
“I knew it!” Tennessee pointed a hoof accusingly. “This is just like the half-baked schemes you came up with as a filly, Minuette.”
“I’m Minuette,” protested the other twin.
He adjusted his hoof to point at Minuette.
Hydrangea spoke up, “He said he really liked my mane.”
“I still do,” Tennessee admitted, “but it’s too late now. We parted due to irreconcilable differences.” He folded his forelegs as if the topic was resolved.
“Differences like how we folded towels? Everypony knows a towel doesn’t work if it’s wrinkled.” Hydrangea jabbed.
“That was never the point!” the stallion reposted, starting to talk a little louder. “If you couldn’t respect my wishes in one simple thing, how could we ever agree on the important things, like raising our foals?”
The twins had been levitating the silverware and napkins around, so as to have an excuse for their horns to glow. Minuette’s horn glowed a little brighter, and time stopped for all but the twins. “The waiter is coming. You rig the tray and I’ll trip him.”
Colgate pulled out the bottle they had bought earlier and nodded.
The bickering couple didn’t even notice the flicker, or the sudden small change in the twins’ postures.
They did notice when the waiter tripped and spilled his entire tray on Tennessee Waltz.
The stallion sputtered and floundered for a moment before regaining his composure. He reached up and pulled a now-empty soup bowl made from half a watermelon rind off of his head. He stared at the edible bowl in disbelief, then at the twins. “Watermelon soup. I had a bowl of watermelon soup dumped on me at our first date. How could you have possibly…” He looked over at Hydrangea, who was covering her mouth with both forehooves and turning red. His expression was the last straw, and she burst out laughing.
“We didn’t turn out so different,” Colgate said. “It seems to me you agree on the important things.”
“Look at Mom,” Minuette agreed, pointing at the laughing mare. “She still thinks it’s funny when you get watermelon soup dumped on your head.”
“And you still work hard for your family,” Colgate continued. “You’re both still the same ponies, the only thing that changed was us.”
“But now that we’re grown up and moved out, what’s keeping you apart?” Minuette asked.
Hydrangea abruptly stopped laughing. “Oh no, dear! It’s not you, it was never you!”
Tennessee nodded. “We always had our differences, but when we had foals, we realized how important our differences could be.”
“But we’re not that different!” Colgate protested. “You can’t even tell us apart.”
“Of course I can, you’re—“
Both twins’ horns glowed and there was a flurry of blue, but it looked like nothing had changed. “Yes, father?” they said in unison.
The stallion paused. “You’re Minuette,” he asserted at last.
“Are you sure?” Hydrangea asked. “She looks like Colgate to me.”
Another waiter set his own tray down on a nearby empty table and tried help his humiliated comrade clean up the mess. He stepped on the greased tray, and slipped backwards, sitting on the other table and flipping its contents into the air. The twins’ horns started to glow, but it was too late. Soup and pasta buried the pair in delicious karma.
As they sat in open-mouthed shock, their father regarded them with all the severity he could muster. With gravity worthy of an undertaker, he carefully picked up the empty watermelon bowl and placed it back on his head like a hat.
There was a moment of quiet, and then all four burst out laughing.
When the laughter finally died down, Tennessee said, “I sometimes wondered if we could have made it work, but now I’m working in Canterlot, and Hydra’s working in Ponyville. Neither of us can just drop everything and move.”
Twilight Sparkle appeared behind him. “Actually, I’ve been looking for someone to do the laundry in my castle. When I lived in a library, I could handle it myself, but now I’ve got a bunch of tapestries…” She noticed that both Hydrangea and Tennessee were staring at her. “Oh. I was invisible and I was here…the whole time.”
“What about the emergency?” Hydrangea asked.
“We asked her to help us get you back together,” Minuette confessed. “She wanted to talk to you about it but we convinced her to just get you here together and then find an excuse to leave so you would have to talk to each other and realize that you still loved each other and we could all be a family.” She drew a deep breath.
“Well…” Hydrangea looked at Tennessee.
“I guess it worked,” he said. “Dumping soup on yourselves was a nice touch.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Colgate admitted.
“How about a hug, Mom?” Minuette reached out her dripping forehooves, prompting Hydrangea to scoot her chair back.
“I assume you two will take responsibility for this mess and the nuisance you caused this restaurant?” Twilight asked with a stern tone.
The twins laughed nervously. “Of course, fair’s fair,” Colgate said.
“Best get started,” Tennessee said.
The twins got up and went to talk to the restaurant staff, smiling in spite of themselves. There would be time to be with family later.
All the time in the world.
