The Trouble with Wormholes

When your town or city is in a situation of extreme peril, the first thing you must never ever do is look up.

The second thing you must never ever do is panic.

The reason that this is, by far, the worst thing you could ever do is because it enables a little tiny lizard part of the brain that is well known for making poor decisions in times like these. For example, it thinks that screaming and running is the best way to deal with a disaster that you could neither scream or run from.

The denizens of Ponyville looked up and panicked; their inner lizards went wild.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem for Ponyville given their frequent history of disasters, but this particular disaster was different from the occasional bugbear attack. They weren't dealing with something organic here.

This was especially apparent to Twilight Sparkle, as well as her friends as they tried to convince Ponyville that having a fear-driven herd mentality was not the way to cope.

"Everypony calm down! We have things under control!"

Twilight's shouting was drowned by the cacophony of screaming. She couldn't help but feel annoyed. She was the princess, gosh darn it. Why does nobody ever believe her when she says everything's going to be okay?

"What in tarnation is going on?" Applejack inquired. She looked up, her jaw dropping immediately. She would've joined the crowds in flailing around too had Twilight not pinned her to the ground.

Fluttershy tried to understand what was putting everypony on edge. She looked up as well, her breathing went breakneck. "Twilight?!"

Twilight forced her to look away. "Stop that!"

The remaining three turned their gaze towards the sky.

"Girls!" yelled Twilight rather sharply. The three turned away before they could get a good glimpse. "We need to be able to think things through logically."

"How the hay are we supposed to do that if we can't even see what's going on?!" Rainbow Dash screamed over the crowd.

Rainbow had a point. If Twilight couldn't see the disaster, she wouldn't know how to deal with it. At the same time, looking at it would make her go hysterical. She hated when she couldn't win.

"We need to evacuate! Try to move as many ponies as you can to the safe zone!" The suggestion was nothing more than organized screaming and running, but unfortunately Twilight had no other choice.

The group dispersed and tried herding ponies to the best to their abilities. Twilight went to evacuate stallions on the east side of Ponyville. She zapped them one by one with a teleportation beam that led straight to the safe zone.

It was very time consuming. Very, very, very consuming. In retrospect, Twilight thought, it would've been much easier to learn how to teleport the whole town at once instead.

Slowly, but surely, the town was evacuated. At first it seemed that Twilight's work was finished, but perhaps not.

She caught eye of a stallion standing out in the midst of the streets with an unseemly calm stance. He was staring straight at the sky and did nothing else. In fact, it looked as if he was observing.

Twilight could've zapped him with a teleportation spell, but she didn't. Why wasn't he freaking out? She went over to ask him.

Without announcing herself, the stranger turned to look at her as if she was always beside him.

"Lovely weather we're having?" he said ironically. He pointed to the sky, "Sorry about that."

Twilight blinked at him quite cluelessly. "Sorry for what?"

The stallion didn't answer, his focus was geared more towards the large gash in the sky. He turned to Twilight once more.

"Ever wanted to know the meaning of life?" he asked. "You'd better start searching now because very soon there might not be one."

With that he ran off.

Somewhere in the vicinity, a small green alligator cried in anguish.

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