Final Mission

Chapters

1. That Fateful Day
2. A Second Opinion
3. Home was My Destination
4. That's the Doozie!
5. Only One Way to Find Out
6. What Would Life Be Without Mysteries?
7. Leap of Faith
8. Well Played
9. Familiar Runes
10. Shift in Perspective
11. The Tour
12. To Deserve Their Fate
13. A Familiar Voice
14. A Life to Live
15. As Experiments Go
16. That Ship Has Sailed
17. Intriguing Proposition
18. Protocols
19. Walking Over My Grave
20. Second Chances

1. That Fateful Day

“Fine! But we’re going to talk about this later!”

I backed into a watching crowd of ponies, doing my best to melt into the background. Maybe the sunglasses worked against that, but under no circumstances could I allow that bugbear to recognize me. Fortunately, its attention at the moment was quite focused on the Element Bearers.

My eyes glanced back at the window I just exited. Lyra chose that moment to slam the window shut. I’m so sorry, Lyra. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.

“I need my ring today, no matter the cost!” said Cranky, only a few feet behind me. “As long as it doesn’t cost any extra.”

I almost snorted in disbelief. Maybe—just maybe—there were more important things to worry about?

Yet was it really that unbelievable? Monsters attacking Ponyville had become surprisingly common in recent years. Without exception, each had been defeated in turn, consequence-free. Ponies had become blasé. The only reason Pinkie Pie wasn’t throwing a watch-a-monster-be-defeated party was because she was too busy trying to defeat one herself.

Twilight aimed her horn and blasted the bugbear, slamming it into the ground. She only succeeded in annoying it. Didn’t matter she was a freaking alicorn and the Element of Magic.

Applejack quickly lassoed it. That had about as much effect. Didn’t stop the ponies around me from oohing and aahing. Rainbow Dash bucked it as it broke free of the rope, barely knocking it off-balance. After a few more blows and blasts, the bugbear flew off to a different part of town. The Element Bearers lost no time giving chase.

The action having gone elsewhere, the crowd around me slowly dispersed, everypony returning to their lives in progress. I looked back at the Town Hall. Inside, without me, Lyra would be setting up the ballroom for Cranky and Mathilda’s wedding. Tempting as it was to go back, until that monster was dealt with I had to stay away. It was here for me and I couldn’t lead it back to Lyra.

I started walking in no particular direction. Where didn’t matter, so long as it was away from that bugbear and away from my very best friend.

The battle was out of sight, but not out of hearing. Something crashed into a building. Nopony really paid it any attention. Of course the princess and her friends would prevail. As absurdly overpowered as these monsters could be, they always lost in the end. Even I had managed to capture that bugbear. If only I had my highly classified anti-monster gear…

But my help was not wanted. Princess Celestia had made that quite clear when she shut down The Agency. As embarrassing as it was when that bugbear had escaped from Tartarus, all of us thought she had absurdly overreacted in shutting us down. In hindsight, maybe not; ever since, the monsters had been dealt with just fine without us—even parasprites.

I found myself standing in front of my closed candy store. Somehow I had wandered back to our home. Real smart. At least the bugbear was far away and quite occupied. I stared at the shelves full of candy, what had been my life for the past few years.

I knew what I had to do. Not wasting any more time, I went inside and headed for the stairs in the back. I would leave town for a few days, until I was sure the danger had passed.

After a quick gallop up the stairs, I trotted towards the kitchen to leave a note for Lyra. My sudden departure would only upset her further, but that was far better than the possible alternative.

Halfway across the living room… it was like I was trying to move through water, water that was quickly turning into molasses then concrete.

What the…

I couldn’t move any of my legs. I was stuck there. Not even my full earth pony strength would break them free. At least I could breath and move my head.

My training asserted itself. This was a magical attack. On the same day the bugbear turned up. Fat chance it was a coincidence.

First step was to identify the source of the attack. A quick scan around me revealed no others. I looked up… “Bingo,” I muttered.

On the ceiling was a large circle of glowing green gemstones, and inside that circle were numerous, complex and alien runes, of a type I had never seen before.

The runes now began to glow an unpleasant visceral violet.

“Oh crap.”

Obviously, it was the gems that were holding me. What did those runes do? Like it or not, I was about to find out.

Desperately, I looked around for my attackers. Somepony was powering those spells. They had to be close by. I had no idea what I’d do to stop them if I found them, but one step at a time.

Yet I was alone, as far as I could tell.

The runes grew steadily brighter.

Who’s powering them? What could possibly be their connection to the bugbear?

The room about me began to waver, like ripples across the fabric of reality.

There was only one bright spot in all this: if they, whoever “they” were, had wanted me dead, there were much easier ways to go about it. They wanted me alive, and there had to be a reason for that. It was only a matter of time before I discovered what that reason was and somehow used it against them.

Everything around me was fading to gray, as swirling waves washed color, brightness and darkness away. It was becoming hard to maintain my focus. Reality was dissolving around me, and with it my ability to function.

A disembodied glowing horn, suspended in the air in front of me, came into being. Is that what’s powering the spells? Unlike everything else, its reality was solidifying. But why just a horn?

I tried to speak, but couldn’t. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

A body seemingly sprouted from the horn. It was difficult, at first, to make out what it was. Certainly a quadruped, somewhat smaller than the average pony, but it didn’t appear to be a unicorn. Yet what else could it be? I had to be seeing things. I was struggling to stay conscious as it was.

My presumed attacker became increasing real as everything else faded to gray. I fought to hold on, until I could make out what it was.

I thought I succeeded.

Or maybe it was an hallucination.

Which would be the bigger joke, I didn’t know.

I could have sworn it was an oversized, unicorn rabbit.

A hoof shook me awake.

“What are you doing on the floor?” a familiar voice demanded.

I scrambled to my hooves and hurriedly scanned my surroundings.

An angry mint green unicorn glared at me.

“L-Lyra?”

“Where have you been for the past two days?”

Two days?

I gave the room another look. Everything was as it should be.

Wait. I can move.

I looked up. The circle of gemstones and the runes inscribed within them were gone, as if they had never been there.

Did any of that happen? Maybe it was just a bad dream. I must have left town as intended, and Lyra was reacting to the note I left her.

One small problem…

Why can’t I remember any of that?

“Bon Bon, you’re scaring me.”

I returned my gaze to my best friend. “I-I’m sorry… I thought it was best for me to leave town until the bugbear was returned to Tartarus, like I explained in the note I left you.”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “What are you talking about?”

I had left her a note, right? I couldn’t remember writing one, or leaving town for that matter, but even so… “You do remember what I told you about the bugbear, at the Town Hall, right?”

Lyra backed up a step. “Now you’re really scaring me.”

I looked up again at the ceiling. What if it hadn’t been a dream?

Once more I looked at the worried unicorn. “Can you at least tell me they got the bugbear?”

“What bugbear?!” she shouted. “You were never at the Town Hall. You went missing the previous day. I had to do all the decorations by myself. You even skipped the wedding! And now I find you sleeping on the living room floor? When did you get home?”

None of it made any sense. I had no answer for that last question, at least an answer Lyra would accept.

The unicorn carefully stepped forward and put a hoof on my withers. “M-Maybe you should go to the Ponyville Hospital.”

“Yeah…” I needed help, all right, but not that kind of help. Probably. I hoped. But it was as good an excuse as any to end this painfully awkward conversation. “I’ll go right now.”

A lavender glow slowly swept me from head to tail and back again, then dissipated.

“You can get up now.”

I did so, glad to be off the hard, crystalline floor, and stoically awaited the verdict.

“I can’t sense anything out of the ordinary,” Twilight said. “It would help if you were less… mysterious about your concern.”

My luck had not changed for the better. I had been trying to say as little as possible, trying to avoid a repeat of my earlier conversation with Lyra.

I headed over to a table where I had previously spotted paper and quill. Taking quill to mouth, I drew a few of the runes I had seen. I doubted I could ever forget them.

As soon as I put the quill down, the sheet of paper levitated over to the alicorn. “Do any of them look familiar?” I asked.

“I… can’t say that they do.” The sheet floated to the side as she looked at me. “What do they do?”

“I was rather hoping you could tell me.”

The princess gave me a considered look, then walked towards a particular shelf in her library, my drawing of the runes floating beside her. I followed her.

“You can trust me, you know. Obviously you think these runes have done something to you.”

She had me there. But if a princess decided I was crazy, it was game over.

Not waiting for a response, Twilight pulled down a thick and dusty tome and began flipping through its pages.

I decided to risk it. “Has the bugbear been spotted around here recently?”

The book dropped a foot before she recovered. Jerking her head in my direction, she demanded, “How do you know about that?”

I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t seen you battling the monster with my own eyes. They had done a good job of keeping it under wraps until then. There was only one possible conclusion: because I “disappeared” two days ago, the bugbear never came into Ponyville and the battle never took place. Quite simply, history changed.

Regardless, I now had her attention. The risk of being declared crazy was greatly reduced. “Do you know I was the one who captured it several years ago?”

She barked a skeptical laugh. “No offense, Bon Bon, but making candy and capturing a bugbear are two very different skill sets.”

So she didn’t know, which might mean she wasn’t authorized to know, and I could get into serious trouble by telling her. But then, that all happened before her ascension and coronation, and perhaps the subject had simply never since come up.

I considered snarking that those two skill sets were not mutually exclusive.

Buck it. Pissing off Princess Celestia could well be the least of my problems, and Twilight’s the only one who could help me.

“Princess Celestia will confirm it.”

I hope. There was no turning back now.

Twilight grabbed another sheet of paper and a quill from the distant table.

“I must warn you: this is an extremely sensitive subject. Consider that even you have not been informed.”

The summoned objects had arrived, patiently floating in front of the alicorn. “Princess Celestia has complete trust in me,” she insisted. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation as to why I haven’t been told—if what you’re claiming is true.”

I had to admit she was probably right. For my sake I certainly hoped so.

“Inform Her Royal Highness that Special Agent Sweetie Drops requests permission to tell you what you need to know.” I knew, of course, that she would immediately summon Spike to send the message.

She looked askance at me. “Sweetie Drops?”

“That’s my real name,” I simply said.

With a determined sigh, she wrote the message to her mentor. More words were written than what I had given her. Many more. Finally, she rolled it up and slapped a seal on it that had come from who knew where.

“SPIKE!”

“Coming!”

He must have been in a nearby room. It wasn’t long before the baby dragon was by our sides. Twilight floated the scroll over to him. A quick burst of green flame and it was on its way.

“We’ll continue this conversation after I get my response,” she declared, and returned her attention to that book.

Fair enough, I supposed.

That response took its sweet time coming, giving me plenty of time to torture myself with worst case scenarios. I did my best to take my mind off it, wandering about the library. I even found a book on the history of candy, going back a thousand years. Even that failed to capture my full attention.

Leaving was not an option; Twilight saw to that. The door to the library was closed and magically sealed.

It was a full half-hour before Spike burped up the reply. Twilight lost no time unrolling it. She read it, then read it again. Finally, she asked, “What’s your code name?”

Relief flooded over me. “Ginger Tartare.”

Twilight next addressed her number one assistant. “I’m sorry, Spike, but we need to be alone. We’ll be in the throne room if something important comes up.”

“No problem,” he replied.

Next thing I knew, I was in the aforementioned throne room, struggling to stay upright. Teleportation was disconcerting enough when it was anticipated. Twilight set down the book and my drawing of the runes, and closed the doors. A few spells later and we had assured privacy.

She sat on her throne before speaking. “Princess Celestia has granted your request. She expects a full explanation from you, personally, but that can wait.”

I nodded. Can’t say I was surprised.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning.”

So I did, starting with how I had originally captured the bugbear. How its escape from Tartarus convinced Celestia to shutdown the super-secret anti-monster agency I had worked for and destroy all evidence it had ever existed. That I had been living under an assumed identity ever since, praying that the bugbear never found me.

Until it did. I concluded with the events of that fateful day.

The silence was deafening.

“So you saw me and my friends fighting the bugbear,” she finally said. “In this… alternate timeline that may or may not still exist.”

Does it still exist? That wasn’t something I had considered. Did it matter? Anyway, I nodded.

“And we weren’t winning.”

“The battle seemed evenly matched,” I admitted. “What I saw of it, anyway.”

That gave her pause.

“Now that you’re here again, do you think the bugbear will come after you, putting Ponyville in danger once more?”

That was the million bit question, wasn’t it?

“I… can’t rule that out, but I suspect the whole bugbear thing was just a diversion. Perhaps it has served its purpose.”

“Which brings us back to those runes.” Twilight turned her gaze to the drawing, but did not retrieve them. “I couldn’t find anything about them.”

Not what I wanted to hear.

“I’ll have to do some research in the Canterlot Archives.” She returned her gaze to me. “I think it is best that you stay in my castle until at least tomorrow. That way I can hide you from the bugbear, keeping it out of Ponyville, and, quite honestly, to keep an eye on you to see what other effects there might be from those runes.”

I didn’t want to hear that either. “I know she can’t be told much, but could you let Lyra know that I didn’t disappear again?”

A smile graced her face, the first in a long while. “Of course.”

“One more thing…” I hesitantly began.

Did I really want to mention that? I could have been hallucinating. I probably was. I was barely hanging on at the time.

But what if I wasn’t. Twilight’s smile had faded as she waited for me to continue. I sighed. Why hold back now.

“Right before I lost consciousness, I saw… something.”

Her silence was encouraging me to continue.

“It was…” I gulped. “an oversized rabbit with a unicorn-like horn. I think it was powering the spell.”

Please tell me you know of such a thing.

But she didn’t. Twilight looked at me as if she expected a “gotcha!” from me. When it didn’t come, she exhaled, saying, “I suppose we have to consider every possibility.”

She walked to the door, lost in her thoughts. It opened before her. “I’ll show you the guest room you’ll be staying in.”

The morning light poured in through the crystalline window that was set in the crystalline wall. Just about everything in the guest room was crystalline—but not the bedsheets, fortunately, and very fine sheets they were too. I pulled them back, got out of the bed and onto the crystalline floor.

I’d been half afraid I’d be up all night. Twilight could not uncover anything about those runes in her personal library, and she hadn’t had the opportunity to go to Canterlot. She did run more tests on me, a few quite invasive, and also ran other tests in my home—what she had told Lyra, I hadn’t a clue—but all to no avail. Hopefully, she’d visit the Archives today.

Perhaps it was even safe enough for Lyra to visit me here, for the bugbear had stayed out of town. I really was hidden from it in this castle. As far as anypony knew—the few who knew anything at all, that is—it was deep in the Everfree Forest, biding its time. It had been one of the factors keeping Twilight in Ponyville, unfortunately.

Nevertheless, I had fallen without trouble into a deep sleep, a sleep so deep that I couldn’t even remember dreaming.

Once I had made myself presentable and taken care of other business, I left the room. Breakfast would be served in the kitchen. As I turned a corner, the smell of hay and daffodil omelets made my mouth water.

I found both of them inside the kitchen, Spike doing the cooking and Twilight doing the reading. At the sound of my approaching hooves, Twilight looked up from one of several open books.

Her eyes went wide, as if seeing a ghost. “Bon Bon?!”

That… could not have been a good sign.

“Where have you been for the last four days?”

2. A Second Opinion

Definitely not a good sign.

“Don’t just stand there, come in, take a seat.”

The princess kept her gaze fixed on me. Not knowing what else to do, yet dreading the conversation I was about to have, I walked over and sat down at the table.

“Four days,” I managed to say. Not three days. That meant I had “disappeared” two days before the wedding, not the day before. A scary pattern was developing. Luckily for me, I did not survive The Agency by going into denial when stuff got scary.

“You’re not sure?” Twilight’s voice was suddenly full of concern. “What happened to you?”

Right. How could I not know when I vanished, unless something truly awful had happened to me. I didn’t know what to say, yet, so I said nothing.

“We’ve had search teams looking everywhere for you. Lyra’s been worried sick about you.”

That made me grimace. Of course she would be. And the worst part was, would it matter if I tried to explain it to her? Those runes had really done a number on me, and I was back to square one with the only pony who might have been able to help me.

Spike brought me a glass of orange juice. “Thank you,” I said. I drank it, slowly, using the time to sort out my options.

Twilight used that as an excuse to continue talking. “Actually, I’m surprised you were able to get into the castle without being noticed. The search teams are being coordinated from a room on the ground floor.”

I had to say something. I could try repeating the conversation I had with her the previous day—a day that had been wiped from existence—but that would only result in the same sequence of events taking place, events that had led nowhere by the end of the day. I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.

What needed to happen today was something that did not happen yesterday: for Twilight to go to the Canterlot Archives and look up those runes.

I pointed at the notebook beside an open book. “May I borrow that? I have something to draw for you.”

The notebook flipped itself to a blank page, then slid across the table to me. A quill followed. I drew once more the runes that started all this. A sickening feeling told me it was unlikely to be the last time.

Once I had finished, Twilight retrieved the notebook and studied the runes with great interest.

“Don’t bother looking them up in your library. You already tried yesterday and found nothing.”

As expected, she looked up at me, not knowing what to make of the apparently absurd statement I had just made.

“It’s some kind of temporal spell that was used on me two days ago. It seems to be erasing one day of my past for each day that passes.”

Her muzzle scrunched. “That’s… magic I’ve never heard of before. Not even Star Swirl the Bearded had hinted at magic like that.”

Great. This wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.

“There should be some leftover magical residue in you. I just need to run some tests—”

“Don’t bother,” I said, preempting a way too lengthy checklist.

Twilight put two and two together. “I did that… ‘yesterday’ as well… and found nothing?”

I nodded. “What you didn’t have was a chance to visit the Canterlot Archives.”

She blinked. “No… I suppose I wouldn’t.”

Spike placed an omelet in front of me. I helped myself to a bite.

“Not that I want to doubt you, but do you have any evidence this actually happened?”

I couldn’t blame her, really. So what if I had drawn some random runes, runes that conveniently wouldn’t be found in any book she possessed, and then say that any test she could run would find nothing? It’d be easy to believe I was making it all up.

I was disturbingly close to being declared crazy by a princess—or worse.

“Well… the reason nopony noticed me on the ground floor was because I spent the night in a guest room, the one you had put me in.”

“Which I don’t remember doing,” she countered.

Wasn’t that the whole point? I countered back with: “The guest room does have a slept-in bed.”

“So you snuck into the castle yesterday instead of this morning.”

I took another bite as I thought it over. Twilight had admitted she wouldn’t have had a chance to visit the Archives. I could take a good guess as to why.

Looking her straight in the eye, I said, “You can’t leave Ponyville because the bugbear is in the area.”

Her jaw dropped.

Bingo.

She quickly recovered. “You saw it, didn’t you, in the alternate timelines.”

Nopony had ever said Twilight Sparkle was stupid, and for good reason.

“The details don’t matter.” Keeping this conversation focused did. “You need to visit the Archives and research those runes. It should be okay; since they were used on me, that monster has stayed out of Ponyville.”

“You think they’re connected?”

“I don’t really know.” I looked down at my half-eaten meal. “But it’s one heck of a coincidence if they’re not.”

The princess stood up. “I’ll need to check the latest status report on the bugbear, but I’ll do my best to get to Canterlot.”

“And get back to me with what you find before the day’s over,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” she uncomfortably said. “And that.”

Twilight put bookmarks in all her open books, closed them, and arranged them into a single stack. “Just so you know: By Royal Decree, you are forbidden from mentioning the bugbear to anypony else.”

“Believe me,” I droned, “I understand how sensitive a subject this is.”

The stack of books floated to the her side as she stared at me, seeing me as if for the first time. “Why you?”

“Huh?”

“Why were the runes used on you? What’s your connection to all of this?”

“That’s a very good question,” I ambiguously replied.

Twilight sighed. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

The notebook went on top of the books and Twilight left the kitchen.

Not that I questioned Twilight’s competence—far from it—but I felt a second opinion was called for. I knew just who to ask, and I had a pretty good idea how to find him.

The princess had not given me permission to leave the castle while she was in Canterlot, researching away, but in this version of reality she had never told me to stay inside. Yet I wasn’t stupid; Spike provided me with a hoodie and dark sunglasses to mask my appearance.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to go into town and deal with all the questions my sudden reappearance would raise; that disguise wouldn’t fool anypony right in front of me. As I approached her cottage at the edge of the Everfree Forest, I found Fluttershy watering the flowers. The sound of my approach startled her.

“Eeeep!”

The dropped watering can spilled its contents over the ground. I quickly lowered the hoodie, revealing my head. “It’s okay, Fluttershy. It’s only me.”

She took a moment to gather herself. Hard to believe this was the same pony who aided the other Element Bearers in fighting the bugbear.

“Oh my… you came, just like he said you might.”

I blinked.

She waved her head to the cottage’s door. “He’s inside.”

That was… unexpected. Yet it might be good news. If he knew anything about what was happening, I might actually get answers. On the other hoof, if he was in any way responsible for what had happened…

One step at a time, I told myself.

“Thanks,” I replied.

Fluttershy left to refill the watering can as I went up to the door. I was reaching for the handle when it gently opened by itself. No colorful aura surrounded the door, but then why would there be?

Pensively I stepped inside. Once I had crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut behind me. Typical. Well, it was going to take more than that to rattle me.

After removing the sunglasses, I saw him. The draconequus was lying down on the sofa, munching away on buttered popcorn. What animal’s milk the butter had been made from was unclear, but somehow I doubted it came from a cow. And let’s not get started on the species of the “corn.”

Whatever. It was all par for the course for Discord. Best not to give him the satisfaction.

“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?” I said, attempting to take command of the situation. Hunting monsters had been my job, and the creature in front of me had once been arguably the worst monster of all. Some still say he was, reformed or not.

In response, he enthusiastically sat up. The bowl of popcorn flashed, to be replaced with an even bigger bowl full of supersized popcorn. “I do love a good chase scene!” he said with a toothful smile. He stuffed a single piece of popcorn into his mouth, that being all that would fit in his claw.

I quickly looked around me, half-afraid that something might literally chase me. You could never be sure with this one. There was nothing. Yet his gaze was locked on me as if I was barely keeping ahead of a pride of ravenous manticores.

I had never personally dealt with Discord before. He had been a stone statue while The Agency existed. But I knew him by reputation and, theatrics aside, he was asserting that a “chase” was indeed happening, metaphorically if not literally.

“Fine, I’ll bite: what’s chasing me.”

The bowl disappeared, spilling the contents everywhere, which then evaporated. “Nonexistence,” he declared, standing up. “Haven’t you figured it out?” He walked around me, intently studying me. “I thought Sunbutt only picked the smart ones for her ‘Agency.’”

“How do you know about that?” I demanded. “Even Twilight doesn’t know.” Technically true, as that conversation had been wiped from existence. “You were a garden ornament at the time it was dismantled.”

“Ah, yes, the dismantling,” he said, ignoring the question. “Celestia’s gambit to protect you all.” He poked me on the forehead. “Might have worked too, except you flunked the test.”

“Test? What test!”

He sat down. “You tell me. In this reality, it hasn’t happened.”

And disobey a direct Royal Decree? I wasn’t going to do that, not yet. Besides, something Fluttershy had said…

“How did you know I would come to see you?”

“Call it an educated guess,” he replied. “Warping reality is my speciality”—he demonstrated by snapping his talons, covering every surface in garish, stripped colors, then with another snap undid his redecoration—”and you had become the epicenter of such a warp.”

“Yet Twilight couldn’t find any trace of the magic used on me.”

Discord shrugged. “Can’t say I’m surprised. This magic is of a different order than what ponies know about.”

Which didn’t bode well for Twilight’s search of the Archives. Nonetheless, Discord did know of it. That was useful to know. And not just Discord…

“What about unicorn rabbits?” I asked, daring him to deny knowledge of such a thing.

He put a talon to chin, stroking it. “One of those was assigned the task, eh?”

“One of what?”

Discord sighed. “It’s not my place to tell you. When you see it again, just keep in mind it was only doing its job.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Not his place? What the hay did that mean? When I saw it again, not if?

Somehow I doubted he would elaborate, but maybe there was still a way to get more information out him.

“The test.”

He quirked an eyebrow. Good, he was paying attention.

“I think it had to do with a monster attacking Ponyville.” No need to mention which monster, thus honoring the Decree. “A monster I had previously captured but then escaped.”

I paused a moment, to see if he’d volunteer anything. He didn’t.

“Twilight and her friends had fought it.”

Discord remained silent, content to let me continue.

“I’m kind of curious. You’re reformed, right? Why wouldn’t you have helped? I’m sure you could have captured it with one paw tied behind your back.”

He just sat there, giving me a cryptic smile.

“It’d go a long way towards improving your reputation.”

Still nothing.

“Fluttershy had put herself in danger.”

“Nice try,” he finally smirked. “It so happens I have total faith in the abilities of Twilight and her friends. How could I deny them the opportunity to rise up to a challenge?”

The draconequus got to his mismatched feet and raised his claw. Just before snapping his talons, he paused. “You needn’t worry about the bugbear anymore,” he said, and with a snap, vanished.

I had much to ponder as I walked back to the castle. Despite Discord’s final words, the hoodie and sunglasses kept me disguised. There were too many interpretations—and misinterpretations—to risk doing otherwise.

As I entered the castle’s main hallway, a soldier of the Royal Guard stopped me.

“Sweetie Drops?” he asked in a no-nonsense tone.

I nodded. That he used my real name was telling.

“Princess Celestia requests your presence. The chariot is on the balcony upstairs.”

3. Home was My Destination

Unsurprisingly, the guards had not taken me to the Royal Sisters’ throne room. The topic to be discussed was much too sensitive for that. Instead, they took me to a modest room high up in one of the towers.

We were the first to arrive. I went around the mahogany table, surround by padded, deep red cushions, to stand in front of the expansive, panoramic windows. The view of Ponyville in the distance was incredible.

The two guards stood just inside the doorway, their continuing presence sending a clear message. There was no point in speculating on why I was brought in. I could only assume Twilight had met with Celestia. At least I wasn’t under restraint.

Did it even matter? The worst that could happen was that I’d be thrown in a dungeon. Then tomorrow would come, and nopony would know how I got there or why. It wouldn’t be hard to talk my way out of that.

Like my earlier conversation with Discord, I had to view this as simply another opportunity to gather information; and I’d keep gathering more information, every day, until I found the solution. There didn’t seem to be any real urgency. It would be decades before my birth was erased—I assumed that’s what he’d meant by “being chased by nonexistence.”

Though I did have to wonder: wouldn’t killing me have been easier? Why wasn’t that good enough for them? Why did I deserve any of this?

The guards stepped aside as Princess Celestia entered the room.

Princess Twilight Sparkle, wearing her regalia, entered next. I wasn’t used to seeing her that way; she rarely wore it in Ponyville. Her presence also sent a message, a quite different one.

Celestia turned to address the guards. “You may leave us.”

They did so, after first offering a quick bow. The door closed behind them. I didn’t doubt that powerful anti-spying spells had been cast.

The princesses took their seats at the table. I did, likewise, on the opposite side, my back to the window and my home.

Celestia’s face was unreadable, as usual. “May I assume we’ll skip the formalities?” I asked. This was not my first meeting with the solar diarch, and I knew she didn’t care for them in private.

“You may,” she replied, as she focused her magic on a silver tea service that was on the table, ready for use.

Twilight’s face, on the other hoof, was painfully readable. I couldn’t imagine what had caused her such distress. It wasn’t learning about The Agency; yesterday’s events ruled that out.

“Did you find something about those runes?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, instead looking towards Celestia. The elder alicorn put tea leaves into the kettle to steep before saying anything.

“The Archives would not have any information on those runes,” she said as if discussing the weather. She looked at me with great sadness in her eyes. “I am truly sorry. This was not supposed to happen.”

“Is that why you sent for me? To offer your condolences?”

It was not, apparently, to offer me good news.

“It is true I do not have a solution,” she said, “and I do not expect you to understand the hard choices I’ve had to make.” She exchanged eye contact with Twilight. “We still wish to do what we can to help.”

They both looked at me with such earnestness, as if wishing to comfort a mare suffering from a terminal disease. What bugged me was that Celestia clearly knew more than she was letting on; I knew all too well that she liked to keep her cards close to her vest.

This conversation would cease to exist by tomorrow, and they both knew it. What harm was there in telling me everything?

Perhaps if I showed I already had a clue… “Was shutting down The Agency, destroying all evidence it had ever existed, supposed to help us, protect us somehow, me and my fellow agents?”

A small smile that faded rapidly. “You always were one of my best agents.” She sighed. “Perhaps too good.”

“Why did we need protection?” I said, pressing on. “At what cost? The monsters didn’t go away.” A thought occurred to me. “Then you decided to release Discord? How could you know he’d be ‘reformed?’”

Celestia poured steaming tea into three cups, then levitated one to each of us. “The monsters have been dealt with well enough. Even you cannot deny that.”

No, I couldn’t, but that was besides the point.

I tried a different approach. “How could Discord know about The Agency and why it was terminated, when he was imprisoned in stone at the time?”

That caught Twilight off guard. “You already talked to Discord?”

I nodded. “He seems to be aware of what’s happening to me, who did it, and how.”

Celestia lowered her cup. “But not forthcoming with the details?”

“No, unfortunately,” I admitted. “Will you?”

“I do not know as many as you might think,” the elder princess said as she returned the cup to the table and focused her gaze on me. “But I can assure you I had good reasons to disband The Agency.” On hearing those words, Twilight grimaced.

I hated to admit it, but Discord had been more helpful.

This seemed like a waste of time. I got up and walked to the window, my cup of tea untouched. Ponyville beckoned to me. Lyra was there. My life that I had made over the past few years was there.

“So what do I do?” I turned around, facing the princesses once more. “No offense, but I don’t think it’s productive to repeat this meeting every day until your knowledge of my existence vanishes.”

“Quite understandable,” Celestia said. “I trust you know how to avoid unnecessary royal attention.”

I gave a wry smile. “I’m sure practice will make perfect.”

Twilight led me through the hallway, the sound of our hooves against the stone floor echoing into the distance, only slightly muffled by the thin layer of accumulated dust. Occasional windows let in the late afternoon light, lighting up the faded tapestries on the walls.

“As you can see, we didn’t get very far in our renovations.”

This was actually one of the better preserved sections.

We stopped in front of a closed, wood door. With a lavender glow, it opened, revealing a fully restored room, complete with a bed—and only a thin layer of dust.

“Sometimes we stayed overnight.”

I went inside and looked around. It was adequate. It certainly beat staying in a remote cave somewhere.

“But since the Tree of Harmony provided me with a castle just outside Ponyville, it was pointless to continue working on this place.”

Given the amount of work they had accomplished, they couldn’t have been enthusiastic about it in the first place. Can’t say I blamed them. How practical was a castle, deep in the Everfree Forest, that had been wasting away for a thousand years?

But it suited me just fine. Close enough to Ponyville to permit frequent visits, yet for obvious reasons I didn’t have to worry about somepony being shocked at my sudden appearance in the morning. The Everfree was hardly a desirable place to be, but I knew how to survive it—and that included foraging for food.

I slid off the saddlebags Twilight had provided me, packed full of useful stuff. Probably a futile gesture. There was little reason to believe it’d be there tomorrow. Twilight had insisted on it anyway. There was no harm in trying, and there was the fact that I had woken up in a bed—more to the point, that I was under the covers, which had not reverted to their un-slept-in state.

I’d have to wear those saddlebags every night, but that was a small price to pay if it let me keep them.

“Anything else I can do before I go?” The sadness on her face was palpable.

I had to make one last attempt. Maybe without Celestia’s presence, she’d let something slip. “Please, Twilight,” I pleaded. “What’s the harm in telling me. Tomorrow, nopony will know you did, not even you.”

“You will know.”

“It’s not like I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops, or that anypony would remember the next day if I did.”

Twilight looked down, sighing. “A part of me is glad that I won’t know, myself, come tomorrow. I suppose Celestia will have to tell me for real, some day, but hopefully not for a very, very, very long time.”

“I don’t have that luxury.”

After a few seconds, she looked up at me. “No, you don’t, but that makes no difference. You can’t hear it from me or any other princess.”

Well, I tried.

The alicorn wandered about the room, avoiding eye contact. “I’m sure you’ll be tempted to explore this castle. I urge caution, and not just because parts of it are structurally unsound. There are secret chambers with dangerous magics within. Spike once found a spell book that he gave to Rarity. You might remember the chaos that caused.”

Yeah, how could I forget? Rarity had remade everything to fit her definition of elegant design. Princess Celestia herself, along with Luna and Cadance, had to help clean up the magical mess. Discord, of course, had made himself scarce, not lifting a talon to help.

She continued her meandering about the room. “I honestly don’t know why Celestia left all this dangerous stuff lying around here.” She stopped in front of me. “You’d think she’d have it all put into the Archives, where access can be tightly controlled.” A shrug. “But that isn’t your problem.”

No, it certainly isn’t. Anyway, knowing Celestia, she probably had a good reason.

“I guess this is it.” She gave me a wry smile. “I hope I don’t freak out too much the next time I see you.”

I gave her a smile in return. “I think I have a handle now on what to say—or not to say.”

She gave me a hug. “Good luck, Bon Bon. You’ll need it.”

She teleported back to the chariot that had brought us here.

A column of smoke rose from Zecora’s hut not far in the distance. I selected a less-worn path around it. I wasn’t avoiding the zebra shaman; I simply had other priorities at the moment. There was always the possibility, however small, that her exotic potions might help me.

Twilight had been right. Wearing the saddlebags overnight did result in me waking up the next day still wearing them. A simple check of the floor proved I was still cursed. The layer of dust was undisturbed, both in the room and in the hallway outside. A rock I had brought inside and left on the table had vanished. On the way out, I found it right back where it had originally been.

Too bad there was no point in sharing the results of this scientific experiment with Twilight, certainly not today anyway. I would avoid the princesses today. Home was my destination. There were some possessions I wanted to retrieve.

And I needed to talk to Lyra.

I had no idea what I was going to say to her.

No matter what I did say, she wouldn’t remember it tomorrow anyway.

The hut was not far from the edge of the forest, just far enough to discourage casual visitors. Before long, I reached the grassy field separating the forest from the town. I put on the sunglasses to complete the disguise. Maybe I didn’t need a disguise anymore, but the hoodie was still useful as protection from the wild and uncontrolled rains of the forest.

I quickly trotted through the streets, surprisingly empty even this early in the morning, and stopped in front of my candy store. A sign in the window, in Lyra’s horn writing, said that it was closed until further notice. It felt like I was standing on my own grave.

I went inside. The shelves were mostly bare. Anything at all perishable was gone, only a few boxes of hard candies remaining. The thought of Lyra having to hold a clearance sale was like a dagger to the heart.

What was I going to tell her?

I forced myself upstairs. Fighting an ursa major would have been easier.

I reached the top.

“L-lyra?”

No answer.

I entered the living room, though not before checking the ceiling.

“Lyra?”

Silence.

She should have been home, preparing for a trip to Manehattan. She was spending a week there, performing. The train would leave early that afternoon.

I checked the bedroom. Her suitcase was gone, as was her lyre.

It didn’t make sense. Lyra would never wait so many hours at the train station.

Something clicked. The streets…

I hurried back outside and trotted to the Town Hall, noticing again just how empty the streets were—as if it were the weekend. Once there, I found the board with the public announcements. On it I saw a missing pony notice with my picture on it.

My heart froze.

I had disappeared four days before the wedding, not the three I had expected. I checked today’s date. It was the weekend; Lyra had left for Manehattan yesterday.

I’d been missing for eight days, not six.

I might not have had as much time as I thought.

4. That's the Doozie!

I might not have had as much time as I thought.

I had lost an extra day. Maybe it was only a single day, but it threw all my assumptions out the window.

I went back home. I fetched my own saddlebags, the ones with my cutie mark on them, and gathered up some items. Some were practical, like bits and nonperishable food, and others purely personal, like a picture of Lyra and I on vacation in Fillydelphia.

Next I went downstairs to the kitchen of my candy store, and stood in front of a perfectly ordinary cabinet. Opening it revealed bags of sugar, cocoa powder, and other ingredients. Those all got put on the counter. I then removed the cabinet’s false bottom.

There it was, where I had put it all those years ago and hadn’t looked at it since. I removed the box and placed it on a table. Lifting the lid revealed a makeshift collection of monster-fighting tools: nothing sophisticated, and certainly not anything classified, mostly just objects with sharp points or edges. I cobbled it together after The Agency was terminated.

You can remove the Special Agent from The Agency, but not The Agency from the Special Agent.

I hoped I didn’t need to use them—because they wouldn’t be very effective against the serious monsters—but my new home was in the Everfree Forest, and they were better than nothing.

I didn’t bother putting back the false bottom and bags of ingredients. Why bother? Tomorrow, they would never have been removed.

It was too early to go shopping and I wasn’t sure what else I needed; that would have to wait until I began exploring the old castle. I didn’t want to hang around until they all opened, anyway. So back to the Everfree I went.

I almost bumped into Zecora on the way back. I had steered clear of her hut inside that tree, but she was out and about collecting herbs. I should talk to her eventually, but I just wasn’t up to it.

The rest of the day I spent wandering about the ancient Castle of the Royal Sisters, hoping to uncover some of those “dangerous magics” in “secret chambers” that Twilight had mentioned. Dangerous or not, they might be useful to me. They’d be even more useful to me if I was a unicorn, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Perhaps I could convince Twilight to help me out.

I only found one hidden room that day, full of books that had rotted away. The standard preservation spell must have failed centuries ago. I could only hope this room was the exception.

Perhaps more curious was what I had not found: evidence of structural unsoundness. Granted, I had not explored every nook and cranny, but in hindsight it made sense. This castle had been built out of stone blocks, and stone ages rather well.

Regardless, I was playing it safe. I always had my saddlebags with me just in case. I figured that if I triggered a collapse and got trapped, I only needed to sleep on it and the collapse would be undone when I woke up.

And if I got crushed? That was a damn good question and it needed an answer. Channeling my inner Twilight, I decided to run an experiment: using a knife from my anti-monster kit, I ever so slightly broke the skin on my left, rear leg and applied a bandage.

Tomorrow, I’ll know one way or the other.

I stood in front of the public announcements board outside the Town Hall. This time another three days had been erased, or fourteen days total since I had vanished. Not good, not good at all.

On top of that, the self-inflicted cut was still there, so no magic do-over if I got seriously injured—never mind killed.

I had left at the crack of dawn, the better to avoid ponies going about their business. That was probably a bit paranoid. Most ponies did not know me or pay attention to missing pony notices, and the worst that would happen would be “what happened?” questions. Nevertheless, answering such questions would eat up time that was all too clearly running out faster than I liked.

Once I got home, the first thing I noticed was the total absence of candy on the shelves of the store. How much longer before there wouldn’t be a store? In the kitchen, the counters were bare, as I had expected. I opened the cabinet and once again removed the bags of raw ingredients. Upon removing the false bottom, I saw an empty space.

The kit had been in my saddlebags as I wore them overnight. Whatever was going on, it didn’t permit duplicates to be made. When had the kit “disappeared?” The same time I had? There was no way to know.

Not bothering to put anything back, again, I made my way upstairs. Anything that had spent the night in my saddlebags was gone. As an experiment, back at the castle I had left the bits out on the table overnight. They were gone when I woke up. Sure enough, there they were, in the drawer where I kept my money.

I briefly considered leaving them there. I could re-spend the money each day. But while the money would return here, whatever I had bought with it would not return to the pony who had sold it to me. That didn’t seem right.

Besides, it was only a matter of time before I was presumed dead. I could not depend on these bits being here. I took them. I’d keep them in the saddlebags overnight from now on.

Ponyfeathers. The bits would still return here once I had spent them. “Whatever,” I muttered to myself. Nothing I could do about it. I resolved to make it up to the ponies affected once I was cured.

Five days of my past had been erased next, then eight. The somewhat faded missing pony poster stated I had disappeared twenty days before the wedding, which had taken place twenty days ago. If this pattern held as I perceived it, I calculated that my birth would be erased in two weeks.

I really didn’t want to find out what would happen then. Funny how that focused my priorities.

Lyra should have been back, but I hadn’t gone home again; I couldn’t stomach explaining why I had been gone for twenty four, then forty days. She wouldn’t remember anyway. The next time it would be sixty-six days. About a week, from my perspective, and I would be a complete stranger to her.

I had also stayed away from Twilight; it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more information out of her. I did try to locate Discord, since he’d been a little bit more forthcoming, but without success. That was curious. Wasn’t I still the “epicenter of a reality warp?” I would have thought that “warp” got larger each time.

That left as my best bet the exploration of the ancient castle, however long those odds might have been.

I was in another of those hidden rooms. I was beginning to get the hang of it, this being the seventh one I had found so far. Fortunately, the preservation spell had failed only in that first one. This one held a collection of gems, presumably enchanted and lying on a shelf, and a bookcase holding around fifty books. None of the other rooms had anything useful. This, unfortunately, looked like more of the same.

Trying to stay optimistic, I slid off my saddlebags. Now comfortable, I began perusing the books.

While I was on the third book, I heard voices approaching.

“Why are we here again?” a scratchy voice demanded. “We know the bugbear isn’t inside this castle.”

“And I’m te-te-telling you, there’s a-a-a doozie here!”

“Let’s just find it before ya shake yerself apart.”

“It’s around here, s-s-s-somewhere.”

Great, now what?

The Element Bearers were right outside—three of them, at least—and it wasn’t hard to figure out what the “doozie” was. The door was well hidden, so unless Twilight was with them—

The door opened, revealing the alicorn.

“Bon Bon?!”

“There’s your doozie, darling.”

Twilight entered the room. “You’ve been missing over a month! Lyra’s been sick with worry!”

Yeah, rub it in…

“Have you been here the whole time?!”

The other five had followed her in. I noted with some relief that Spike was not with them.

The door closed on its own, as designed to keep the room hidden.

“You could say that, yeah,” I cautiously answered.

“Do you know how dangerous it is exploring this castle?”

I didn’t have time for this. “Really, it’s okay. I was told this castle had structurally unsound parts and I’ve been real careful.”

“Structurally unsound,” Twilight skeptically repeated. “Who told you that?”

Wait, what?

Before I could question her on that…

“Uh, g-g-g-guys?” Pinkie said, violently shuddering. “That wasn’t it.”

Rainbow Dash hovered in the pink pony’s face. “How is that even possible?”

Good question, I thought. What could be a bigger doozie than me?

She shook again. “I dunno, it just is!”

Twilight spotted the collection of gems lying on a shelf. “That… shouldn’t be here.” She walked past me to get a closer look.

Applejack joined her. “Ya know what that is, Twi?”

“Yes, and I know it can’t be more than a few decades old.” Her horn lit up, and the gems glowed in response, one at a time in an apparently random sequence.

After the last one faded, they all simultaneously flashed three times. A section of the wall vanished, revealing a dark room. Wall-mounted crystals began glowing, lighting the room up and revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves on all the walls. My jaw dropped. What those shelves held was not supposed to exist anymore.

“That’s the doozie!”

Twilight entered the room and walked around, taking in the full shelves. She didn’t seem to recognize any of the objects they held, not that I would expect her to.

Applejack went in next. She stopped in front of a shelf holding objects bearing a long, thin shaft attached to a base with a hoof-grip, and she reached out to touch it.

“Don’t!” I shouted. “Don’t touch anything.”

Twilight turned to me. “You know what this all is?”

I entered the room. “Yes, but I thought Princess Celestia had it all destroyed.”

The alicorn nodded thoughtfully. “Instead she put it here, where nopony would ever stumble across it—in theory.” She walked towards that shelf. “Lucky I found it first.”

Yeah, lucky.

One of the objects Applejack had almost touched floated off the shelf. “So what is this,” Twilight said, an edge to her voice, “and what makes it so dangerous?”

This just wasn’t going to go away. Applejack was watching me like a hawk. Lying in front of the Element of Honesty was not going to get me far.

So I told the truth. “That is the type of weapon I used to capture the bugbear seven years ago.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You captured the bugbear?”

“She’s not lying, Twi.”

Twilight eyed me for a moment, then she walked over to me with the weapon hovering in front of her. “What does it do?”

I considered being non-responsive, saying it was classified and on a need-to-know basis. That was indeed true, as miss lie detector over there would confirm, but that wasn’t likely to work on a princess, not even a princess who was now realizing she had been kept in the dark.

Sigh. The sooner I got this over with, the better. Maybe they’d take it and hunt the bugbear with it. It didn’t matter so long as I was left alone. Tomorrow it wouldn’t have happened anyway.

“It shoots a magical blast,” I began explaining. “Anything it hits will experience time dilation. The amount depends on various factors, including distance to and size of the target. The effects of multiple hits are cumulative, but the effects wear off in a matter of minutes. The point is to make it easier to secure the target by reducing its ability to fight back.”

Twilight was stunned. “Temporal magic like that is unheard of. Who made these?”

I shrugged. “You’d have to ask Princess Celestia that.”

“And you had one because…” Dash said, challenging me.

I sighed, this time out loud. “Because at the time I was working for a super-secret anti-monster agency—and before you ask, Princess Celestia shut it down and destroyed all evidence of its existence after the bugbear escaped from Tartarus.”

Twilight glanced at Applejack, who nodded in return.

“Well, not all of it was destroyed, lucky for us.”

She rotated it, inspecting it more closely. The firing mechanism was obvious enough, but that isn’t what caught her attention. “Strange, I’ve never seen runes like these before.”

Runes? I had never paid attention to that; I hadn’t cared how the weapon functioned, only that it did. Along the shaft there indeed were runes, a few of them all too familiar. An order of magic not known to ponies, I thought, remembering what Discord had said.

Did he misinform me, or was he misinformed himself?

“Anything else in here we could use?” Twilight asked me as she continued studying the weapon.

“No, not for a bugbear.”

There was something else Discord had told me. I needn’t worry about the bugbear anymore. Maybe it was time to put that to the test. Would I ever have better circumstances to do so?

I went over to the shelf and picked up a time stunner for myself. “I’m coming with you.”

Twilight shook her head. “I can’t let you do that, Bon Bon. It’s far too dangerous.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m the one who captured it before,” I reminded her, “and I’m the one who’s been trained to use this weapon.”

I locked my eyes on the princess, daring her to deny me again.

“She has a point, Twi.”

Twilight looked at Applejack then back at me. “Fine,” she conceded. “Let’s go.”

5. Only One Way to Find Out

First order of business was to give Twilight some target practice, and to be honest I probably could use some myself. The Everfree Forest was all to happy to oblige. At the moment, the only thing preventing us from becoming a timberwolf meal was the shield surrounding us, courtesy of our friendly, neighborhood alicorn.

A quite efficacious shield it was too. I felt no need to hurry as I checked the settings on my time stunner. Twilight watched me, ignoring the timberwolves’ vicious clawing at the lavender bubble. Thank Celestia those claws made no sound as they scraped against the shield.

“This dial here controls the angle of dispersion. A concentrated burst is obviously more effective at slowing down a single target, but a widespread shot has its uses when confronted with a large number of targets.”

I turned it all the way to a narrow beam.

“These three toggles independently control whether the shot affects animal, vegetation, or mineral.”

I toggled vegetation on—because timberwolves—as Twilight nodded in understanding.

“The blast will harmlessly pass through anything not selected.” Which was why vegetation was usually turned off. Mustn’t give a monster the chance to protect itself behind a bush, after all.

Twilight scrunched her muzzle. “Why would you ever turn mineral on?”

“To deal with raging water or flowing lava, for example. It also allows earth or stone to protect innocent bystanders.”

I inserted a hoof into the grip, lifted the weapon to my face, and gently inserted the trigger into my mouth. I sighted along the shaft, selecting a timberwolf blissfully unaware of what was about to hit it.

I bit down on the trigger.

A near-ultraviolet ball of light crossed the distance in a split-second, far too fast to be evaded. The creature flashed the same color upon being hit dead-center.

At first it appeared to be frozen in place, but that was an illusion. It began to tip over. It tried to regain its balance, but its motions were hopelessly lethargic. It fell to the ground at an all-too-normal rate and shattered into pieces on impact.

“Awesome…” muttered an impressed Rainbow Dash.

“Its metabolism has slowed so much,” I explained, “that it doesn’t have the strength to hold itself together.”

The other timberwolves continued clawing and biting the shield, ignoring their fallen comrade as it tried to pull itself together. It couldn’t.

“It’s not hurt, is it?” a concerned voice asked.

You wouldn’t last five seconds at The Agency, Fluttershy. Not that there was much room for Kindness in that line of work. Regardless, I could assuage her concerns. “Once it wears off in a few minutes, the timberwolf will be fine. It doesn’t directly cause any injury; you can’t even feel being hit.”

Rarity gave me a skeptical eye. “How can you be so sure?”

“I’ve been hit numerous times as part of training,” I calmly stated. “Accidents can happen in the field, after all, and the worst part of being hit is not understanding what the hay is happening.”

“And just what is it like?” Applejack asked.

I gave myself a few seconds to come up with the best way to describe it. “Everything is suddenly going impossibly fast. The worst part is gravity; it seems to become impossibly strong. The real value of the training is learning how to get yourself down on the ground without injuring yourself.”

If I was feeling generous to a monster, I would use a wide-angle setting and multiple shots, so as to gently ramp up the effect.

I turned to Twilight. “It’s your turn now.”

Twilight levitated the other time stunner to herself and matched its settings to my own. She didn’t use the hoof-grip, unsurprisingly. Once aimed at another clawing timberwolf, a twitch of telekinesis caused it to fire.

Another near-ultraviolet ball of light shot out, almost missing the target. An almost-miss being as good as a dead-center hit, the timberwolf soon joined its comrade, in pieces on the ground.

I gave her score. “Not bad for a first try.”

Not content with a mere passing grade, with determination Twilight re-aimed and shot again. Too bad for her, the timberwolves had caught on and were moving around too much.

She missed.

She re-aimed and shot once more, and missed again.

I decided lessons were over for now; I didn’t have all day. I switched to a wide-angle setting and blasted them. It slowed them all down; not enough to get them to lose balance and fall apart, but that wasn’t the point.

I switched back to narrow-angle, and blasted each one separately in quick succession. Within seconds, they were all in pieces on the ground.

The six Element Bearers stared with mouths agape. If they had any doubts about my credentials before, they were just blown away.

“It’s safe to drop the shield,” I said, trying not to smirk as I put my saddlebags back on. “I suggest we depart before they recover.”

The forest, unfortunately, did not provide any additional training opportunities—not because Twilight could use it, because she could, but because it gave my traveling companions plenty of time to pester me for my backstory.

“But if this super-duper-secret agency was all about stopping monster meanies from hurting ponies, why did it need to be secret?”

I stopped, and not just because there was a big patch of poison joke in front of us.

“Yeah, shouldn’t you, like, be heroes… you know, like the Wonderbolts?”

I gazed back at Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie with a dumb look on my face. I’d never really thought about it before. To be honest, the whole secrecy thing was part of the appeal.

But knowing what I now knew… “I think it was due to the weapons we used.” Because they’re based on magics that ponies aren’t supposed to know about, I kept to myself.

“I’m sure Celestia had her reasons,” Twilight rationalized, putting an end to that topic.

Yes, and you didn’t take it well when you had learned of them.

We made our way around the poison joke, and continued on in blessed silence.

Now left alone to my thoughts, I pondered what I’d do once we were done with bugbear. Somehow, I doubted Twilight would just let me go back to the old castle. I could always explain everything once again, but she’d get Celestia involved and… it was just a big waste of time.

I might have to use the time stunner against them to make my escape. That was a last resort, but it had to be an option. To hedge my bets, I had brought my saddlebags with me, just in case I had to hide out in the forest until the next day.

We came to a wide and deep river. I looked at Twilight, wondering why she had led us this way. There was no bridge or other natural means of crossing. Was she planning on teleporting us all across?

“Steven, darling, are you there?” Rarity called out.

Steven? Why was that name familiar?

A giant purple sea serpent with overly-styled orange hair undulated towards us.

Not good, I mentally sighed.

Oddly enough, he was missing a piece of his flamboyant mustache. I knew how important that was to him, so what had happened?

His joyous smile faded when he spotted me. “What’s she doing here with you?” he theatrically demanded of the others.

“I don’t understand,” Twilight said. “What problem do you have with Bon Bon?”

“Bon Bon?” He glared at me. “You think using a fake name is going to fool me?”

Twilight locked her eyes on me. She already knew about my assumed identity, but that enabled her to deduce what might have been the serpent’s problem with me.

So I confirmed it, so as to get past this as soon as possible. “Steven Magnet was one of my early assignments. He had fit the profile.” I looked him in his humongous eyes. “It turned out to be a mistake, and Princess Celestia offered her sincerest apologies and compensation to make up for it.” And as part of the deal, he was supposed to keep his mouth shut.

I still had my doubts about him; I hadn’t been joking about that serpent fitting the profile. Like the bugbear, the hydra, the ursa major—yeah, it had the child, but where were the others of its kind?—and even Discord, Steven was one-of-a-kind. He appeared out of nowhere one day, scaring the crap out of many ponies—though not because of anything he had actually done, it had turned out. He wasn’t fated to wreak havoc on Equestria; after all, Cerberus had found a productive role for himself guarding the entrance to Tartarus.

“Even so,” he said with a dramatic toss of his head, “you didn’t have to be so brutish about it. You wouldn’t even let me explain!”

What could I have said? Among the few monsters who could talk, Discord had set a very bad example. And to this day, so far as I knew, Steven’s explanation did not include his origins.

Twilight flew over to the serpent’s head for a more private conversation. I could still make out what she was saying.

“Look, I promise I’ll talk to you later about this, but right now we need to cross this river and be on our way.”

Steven petulantly thought about it for a second. “Fine. I’ll help you across like before.” He crossed his arms. “But not her.”

Twilight sighed. “Not a problem. I’ll teleport her across myself.”

“I find that acceptable,” he said with a huff. “Give my regards to Cranky the next time you see him.”

“You can count on that.” She was about to return to us, but thought of one more thing to add. “He’s still wearing that makeshift toupee you made him. Says it’s the best toupee he’s ever had.”

Suddenly it clicked. Is that what happened to his mustache?

“Well. It was the least I could do for my best friend on his wedding day.”

Twilight brought us to a stop. Not far ahead a clearing was visible beyond the trees, and on the other side of the clearing was a rocky hill. The dark opening to a cave, angled away from us, was visible. “We believe the bugbear is hiding out in this cave,” she quietly said. “It was first spotted two days ago.”

We all stood there silently, listening for any sounds the bugbear might make as it went about its business. There was only the usual background noise of the breeze blowing through the canopy and the ever-present insects and birds.

Either the bugbear wasn’t around, or it was taking a nap in that cave.

Only one way to find out. I set my time stunner for animal only. The cave wasn’t that close, so I didn’t want too wide a dispersion. The appropriate adjustment was made. I aimed it at the cave entrance and fired several shots, panning away from the entrance to where the interior should have been. The shots effortlessly passed through the intervening trees and the side of the hill.

“I’m going in.”

Nopony objected.

I eagerly trotted to the cave entrance, the others following close behind. It’s been too long since I’d last done this.

We gathered at the threshold. Applejack got the rope ready while Twilight illuminated the back of the cave with her horn.

It was empty, apart from the remains of its previous meals.

“Now what?” Rainbow Dash said plaintively.

I thought that would have been obvious. “We wait until it comes back.”

Something Twilight had said just registered. “You said it was first spotted here two days ago. Where was it before then?”

The alicorn shrugged. “We don’t have a clue. After it had escaped from Tartarus years ago nopony could find any trace of it, then suddenly it reappeared near this cave.”

So… it suddenly reappeared just before I got injected back into this world. What were the odds?

“Uh, guys?” Pinkie’s leg started twitching. “Twitchy leg.”

I jerked around, but saw nothing… no… I could hear something, the buzz of giant insect wings in the distance, and getting louder. “I guess we don’t have long to wait.”

There it was! It was skimming the top of the canopy, dipping down as it reached the clearing. The bugbear held a small deer against its body, motionless, probably poisoned by its stinger.

It dropped the deer; it’s seen us.

I reflexively brought my weapon up, ready to fire.

But the bugbear was just hovering there. Why wasn’t it attacking? It had never hesitated to take the offensive before. Yet there it was, motionless. It just stared at us.

No. It was staring at me.

“Stay here.” I stepped forward, my eyes locked on the bugbear and my time stunner ready to fire, in an awkward three-hoof gait. It remained motionless, its face expressionless.

As I crossed the clearing, it became clear Discord hadn’t been messing with me. Sure, I had the time stunner, but I was sensing no hostility, no waiting for an opening. If it had no intention of attacking, then… what?

I stopped a half-dozen feet away. We stared at each other. I took a quick look back. Twilight had her time stunner pointed, more or less, at the bugbear hovering above the ground. Well, I could handle getting hit.

Fine. Let’s see what happens.

I dropped my time stunner. It hit the ground with a muted thud.

“What are you doing!?” Twilight shouted in surprise.

The bugbear idly looked at the discarded weapon, then calmly returned its gaze to me.

I tried to make sense of it. “Just… wait,” I told her.

“Bon Bon, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but we need to capture it. Get out of the way.”

“Something’s going on here,” I said, trying to buy more time. “I don’t think it’s a danger anymore.”

“Get out of the way,” Twilight said, running out of patience. “We can sort that out later.”

Instead, I got closer. “Why are you really here?” I asked it quietly, not that I expected an answer.

“I’m sorry, Bon Bon.”

Damn it, Twilight. I instantly dropped to the ground.

Twilight fired.

My vision flashed near-ultraviolet. I was braced for the crushing gravity, so all I needed to do was wait it out. It wouldn’t even take long; while the effect lasts several minutes, from my perspective it might last only seconds. I expected to watch Applejack hogtie the creature in record speed.

That isn’t what happened.

Instead, reality around me rippled away to gray, revealing a lime-green unicorn rabbit with cyan whiskers.

6. What Would Life Be Without Mysteries?

The rabbit reared up on its haunches, whiskers nervously twitching. It was difficult to say which of us was more surprised at seeing the other. Nonetheless, it was a chance to get some answers and I wasn’t going to waste it.

“Where am I?” I demanded.

She started rubbing her front paws together, muttering, “Oh dear…”

I stood up. It may have looked like a featureless gray void, but I was standing on something. Since that rabbit wasn’t inclined to answer my question, I began to wander around, inspecting the void for… anything.

“Please stay put,” she finally spat out. “It’s dangerous for you to go too far.”

I spun around. The rabbit was grimacing. I closed the distance between us as Discord’s words came to mind: it was only doing its job. And she was clearly worried about her next performance review.

Fine. I’d try to keep it civilized. “Look, I only want some answers. Why am I—” I looked around at the featureless grayness “—here. Wherever here is.”

She reached into a bag that was hung right above her belly and pulled out a small book. “This isn’t according to procedure,” she muttered to herself as she leafed through it. “It’s too soon.”

Her horn wasn’t glowing; it hadn’t been glowing either. She wasn’t responsible, not this time. She really was just as surprised as I was.

I stopped at a respectable distance. “I don’t want any trouble.” I put on my best warm, and fake, smile. “Just some answers.”

Then it hit me. The time stunner. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. It bore a few of the same runes as the spell that had put me in this predicament in the first place. It must have interacted with that spell, triggering… Is this what had been happening overnight?

The mysterious rabbit returned the book to the bag and lowered her front paws back to the—for lack of a better word—ground. “You are where you were,” she said carefully, protecting her secrets the way a dragon protects its treasure.

Great. Another one of those conversations.

In rapid succession, I asked, “Where’s everypony else? What happened with the bugbear? What did they think happen to me? Are they even looking for me?”

The rabbit vaguely shook her head. “Those are meaningless questions.”

Care to give me an example of a meaningful question?

I sighed. “Look, seriously, what’s the point of keeping me in the dark? It’s not as if I could pass it on to other ponies. They’d forget it all the next day anyway. You should understand that!”

“I can’t tell you why,” she quietly said. “Not yet.”

“When can you tell me?”

She briefly grimaced. “I can’t say.”

I collapsed to my haunches. With pleading eyes, I said, “Is there anything you can tell me? Anything? Like, what is this place, and how do I get back?”

I stared at her in silence.

“This place,” she reluctantly began explaining, “is your realm. You haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Okaaay…” My gaze remained locked on her.

It was a few seconds before she continued. “The thread of your existence is being unraveled from the tapestry of this reality. This grayness—” she waved a paw around “—is reality resetting itself. It’s supposed to happen while you sleep, at least at first.”

So another thirteen days of my life were being erased right now. Which explained why those questions were meaningless. “At first?”

“The reset takes longer each time.”

That made sense, I supposed, as each time the length of time affected increased exponentially. “And when it finishes resetting this time?”

“You’ll be back in the forest.” With obvious relief, she added, “it shouldn’t be much longer.”

“And I’ll no longer be able to see you.” Hence the relief, no doubt.

The rabbit nodded her head a little too quickly.

Left unsaid was that she would still be able to see me. She’s been observing me. That’s why she happened to be here when… this happened. I could ask why, but the odds were she wouldn’t answer; and if my time with her was limited, I needed to ask productive questions.

“What happens when my birth gets erased?” I grimly asked. Which might now happen one day sooner than I had anticipated.

“Then as far as this reality is concerned, you will have never existed.”

I kind of figured that. I also figured there were other realms, other realities, like one in which unicorn rabbits existed. What else? Pegasus platypuses?

She looked at me with sad eyes. “I know this may be hard for you to believe, but the point of this isn’t to punish you or make you suffer. I can even help, a little bit.” She looked at my full saddlebags. “I can hold some of that for you, so you won’t risk accidentally losing them in a reset.”

It was an interesting offer, but more for what it implied. “I’ll pass—for now, anyway.”

I was about to ask about the bugbear when ripples started to form around me, washing the gray away. They washed the rabbit away, too. The conversation was over. That there would be another was not in doubt.

In mere seconds, reality had reformed around me. I was back in the clearing. Nopony else was around, naturally. The time stunner I had dropped on the ground was gone too, having never left that secret vault.

I went back to the cave and looked inside. There was no evidence the bugbear had ever been there. There must have been a connection to me, somehow. I was going to ask about that when I had run out of time. Maybe it didn’t matter; she probably wouldn’t have answered that anyway.

I looked at the cave wall. My wanderings in that gray void could have placed me inside the hill when the reset finished. Dangerous indeed.

I left the cave and pondered the surrounding forest, wondering what next to do. There was no point in sticking around, so I headed back to the ancient castle.

The trek back was uneventful. I knew of a better spot to cross that river, one I could manage on my own. It had been a bit of a detour, but it was worth it to avoid Steven. I doubted he would ever get past that “incident.” If that serpent had attended Cranky’s wedding, and it sure sounded like it, maybe it was for the best that I hadn’t. Why couldn’t he accept that it hadn’t been anything personal, that I was just doing my job?

Like that rabbit.

Okay, I got it: it was nothing personal. But until her equivalent to Princess Celestia apologized and made amends, she was an antagonist. Nothing personal, just a fact of life.

The trip back gave me plenty of time to ponder our brief conversation. She did, if unintentionally, leave me a few tidbits to mull over, like: she couldn’t tell me much yet. I was willing to bet a small fortune the information would flow more freely once my erasure from this reality was complete. But she couldn’t admit that either. Why not?

Celestia, then Discord, and now anonymous unicorn rabbits, all knowing far more than they’re willing to say. I was getting rather sick and tired of it.

Once I was back at the castle, I resumed my search for hidden rooms, believe it or not with renewed optimism. First of all, I now had an idea of what had been done to me, so I now knew I needed to find something to reverse this “unraveling.”

Second, I deduced that that rabbit couldn’t tell me anything because it was possible to reverse it. Then I could tell other ponies, and they would remember.

Finally, I believed I had deciphered Twilight’s warning about the dangers of this place. It started with the simple fact that she had point blank lied about the physical dangers. She could not have ignored the possibility that I would repeat that warning back to her and see her react the way she did; indeed, she had to have been counting on it. She was sending me a covert message.

The rest of the warning concerned the dangers of magics hidden away in secret rooms—not stored in the Canterlot Archives, where they ought to have been kept. Magics like Agency weapons.

And then there was what Celestia had said in response to my question about Twilight’s search of the Archives: The Archives would not have any information on those runes.

How could she be so sure? Because that information was here. It all made sense.

I simply needed to find it.

Regardless, finding it wasn’t enough. It was bound to be in one of those modern vaults with a magical combination lock. There was no way I could unlock it, even if I knew the combination; only a unicorn could do that. There was a good chance only an alicorn could unlock it. I would have to get Twilight involved.

But first I had to find that hidden room.

As night fell, I was exploring the subterranean levels of the castle, something I had before avoided. Aside from the increased dangers—even if structural collapse, supposedly, wasn’t one of them—there was the minor detail it was dark down there. Sunlight did not illuminate those corridors, and magical light fixtures had exhausted themselves centuries ago.

I had a limited supply of light crystals I had picked up during my last visit home. I could have them recharged back in Ponyville, if necessary. It could be; there seemed to be more underground than aboveground.

At least I could continue my explorations after the sun had set, and I had already found many secret rooms. If anything, it was a little too easy to find them. Sure, practice makes perfect, but I couldn’t help but wonder if protecting enchantments had faded away.

I was standing in front of my latest find, inside what was probably once a guard station for the nearby dungeons. I pushed against the release mechanism, hidden under the decayed remains of paperwork that had once rested on a wall-mounted shelf. A section of wall popped out, the seams hidden by other shelves.

As I swung the door open, lights came on in the revealed room.

That was unusual, and perhaps a good sign.

Then I saw Discord, and decided to reserve judgement.

He was lying in a hammock, floating unsupported in the air. He was also wearing sunglasses and sipping through a straw some tropical-looking beverage. A warm sea breeze somehow blew through the room, and the sounds of distant birds and surf could be heard. He ignored my presence, contentedly sipping away. Yeah, as if that was fooling anypony.

Then I noticed a familiar looking collection of gems on a shelf.

“I don’t suppose you can unlock that?” I droned. Was it a coincidence he decided to show up in this room? Fat chance. I doubted that’s why he was here, but it couldn’t hurt to ask.

He noisily sucked the remaining beverage through the straw before replying. “As a matter of fact, I can get you inside that room.” He lifted the sunglasses and peered at me. “But not without triggering an alarm. Princess Sunbutt would be here within seconds.”

I briefly considered it. Alas, there was too much to explain, and clearly the princess wanted plausible deniability. She can’t knowingly let me have access to what’s inside that room. I’d have to fetch Twilight tomorrow and persuade her to let me in.

I sighed. “No thanks.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised.” Discord went back to ignoring me, and conjured up a new, impossibly-polkadot beverage.

I was seriously tempted to call it a night and leave. “Why are you here?” I asked, fatigue creeping into my voice.

He lazily waved a paw around. “Luxuriously soaking in the chaos your condition is causing.”

I stared at him. “Don’t you wonder what my condition is or how I got it?”

“I have my sources,” he knowingly said.

“One of those sources wouldn’t happen to be a unicorn rabbit, would it?”

He smiled. “I will neither confirm nor deny that.”

“Can you cure me of this ‘condition?’”

“Nope.”

“Can’t… or won’t.”

The hammock began swaying back and forth as he spiritually waved a paw above his head. “What would life be without mysteries?”

I wasn’t in the mood for these games.

I turned around and re-opened the door. “Enjoy my ‘condition’ while it lasts.”

I searched the Town Hall public announcements board a second time. I still could not find a missing pony poster with my name and picture.

When I had woken up, the dust was undisturbed on the floor. That meant another twenty one days had been erased, if the pattern held. I had become a cold case, my spot on the board now occupied by something more topical.

A loud gasp caught my attention.

A wide-eyed Pinkie Pie was staring at me. “Bon Bon, is that you?!”

Here we go…

“Uh… yes?”

Pinkie’s mouth went into overdrive. “I did have a scratchy front-right hoof and that usually means I’m about to cross paths with somepony I haven’t seen in a long time but I never expected it would be you!”

“A little over three months, I’m guessing?”

“Sure was!” Her mood suddenly deflated. “You, uh… you weren’t planning on going home, were you?”

That was ominous. “Well, yeah, why wouldn’t I?” I did plan on finally talking to Lyra, before I went to see Twilight.

“I… I guess you didn’t hear then.”

Now it was getting scary. “Hear what?”

Her sad eyes said it all. “Lyra moved back to Canterlot.”

I couldn’t say anything.

“None of us knew what happened to you. We all searched, but even with all the resources at Twilight’s disposal… even with my Pinkie Sense… it’s as if you vanished off the face of the planet.”

If you only knew…

I started walking home—correction, to what was once my home.

“I’m really sorry,” Pinkie said as she caught up to me. “You should know that Lyra sold it.”

So it had happened, if a bit sooner than I’d expected. “Who bought it?” I asked, not really wishing to know.

She didn’t answer.

I looked at her; she was already looking at me.

“I did.”

7. Leap of Faith

In bright, cheerful and pink letters, Pinkie’s Pies adorned the window. Inside, the remodeling was a work-in-progress. Pinkie opened the door and held it open for me. “I hope to be open for business in another week.”

I pensively entered and looked around. Most of the shelves had been removed. A display case had been installed and another was in a state of assembly.

“I’ve been looking for an opportunity like this for some time,” she self-consciously explained, “and, well…”

I tried to give her a reassuring smile. “It’s okay, really, it is. I’m not blaming you for anything…” I winced. “Nor Lyra.”

And in another six days or so, my candy shop will have never existed.

Pinkie went behind the counter and to the door behind it. She looked at me. “Come upstairs. There’s some, uh, unfinished business to take care of.”

I wondered what that could mean.

I wondered if I really wanted to know.

I followed.

The furniture was gone from the living room. Lyra evidently took it all with her, and Pinkie had yet to replace it. She led me to the bedroom. That did have a bed and other furniture, but none of it was mine. Once at the spacious walk-in closet, she opened the door and waited for me to catch up.

“All your belongings are in there. Lyra asked me to hold on to them in case you ever returned.”

And there they were, in a back corner: my clothes, some books, a suitcase, bags full of stuff… And there they would stay, because what could I do with them? I was carrying enough around as it was.

The rabbit’s offer came to mind. But even assuming she could collect these items when I wasn’t personally carrying them across a reset, it felt like admitting defeat. And what if I succeeded? Would I somehow get it all back?

Pinkie was looking at me, waiting for some kind of response.

“I-I appreciate that,” I said. “I’ll pick them up once I’m settled down.” A white lie would have to do.

I backed out of the closet and turned my tail on it.

Pinkie closed the closet door. “Are you staying in Ponyville? There’ll be many questions, of course.”

I sighed. “I’m sure there will be.” I began walking out of what had become Pinkie’s bedroom. “Do you know how to contact Lyra?”

Silence.

I stopped and turned around.

Please, not the sad eyes…

“She doesn’t want you to.”

My heart froze.

“Why?” I whispered.

Pinkie approached me, walking as if on eggshells. “She felt you had left her and had no intention of coming back.” She stopped in front of me. “A few of your prized possessions disappeared the same time you did.”

Like that photo and a few other items, not to mention all my bits.

“Me and the girls didn’t think it was that simple, but there was no convincing her.” She gave me an embarrassed look. “Anyway, it’s why she was so eager to sell this place and leave town. I wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.”

What cruel irony. She might have been here still if I hadn’t taken that stuff. I tried to solace myself with the fact that, soon enough, she wouldn’t ever have known I existed. It didn’t help. Maybe if I let the next reset return those items? But then nearly half-a-year would have passed since my disappearance, and she might be gone anyway—and I’d have no way of reclaiming those items.

I had waited too long.

“Trust me,” I grimly said. “I had no choice in the matter.”

I resumed walking out of our former bedroom. “I won’t be staying in Ponyville,” I said. “I’m only here to get my affairs in order. After I talk to Twilight I’ll be leaving.”

“That could be a problem.”

I continued walking. “Did I hurt her too?” I asked half-sarcastically.

“No… she’s in the Crystal Empire visiting her brother. She won’t be back for three more days.”

I didn’t know what to do. I could return to the old castle and continue searching, hoping I’d find more hidden vaults, but the end result would be the same: without Twilight, I was stuck.

I even considered letting Discord grant me access. Since the Element of Magic was out of town, perhaps I could persuade him to go full chaos mode and keep Celestia occupied while I examined the vault’s contents? Would he be willing to? It’d all reset overnight, after all. Too bad finding Discord had proven to be quite hard; each time I had seen him, it was only because he had wanted me to find him.

So naturally, lacking better options, I let Pinkie talk me into tasting some of her pie experiments.

We were downstairs in the back of the store, where the kitchen was. It looked much the same, except that a large oven replaced two of the huge floor-standing bowls I used to mix and cook large quantities of sugary syrups.

Pinkie retrieved a pie from a cupboard and set it down on the counter. She got out a knife, but paused before slicing the pie.

“Did you know there was a false bottom in that cabinet over there?” she asked, waving the knife at the cabinet in question.

How in Equestria did she stumble across it?

“Uh, yes? I don’t think anything was hidden underneath it.”

There shouldn’t have been, as I had kept my makeshift monster-fighting kit in my saddlebags ever since I retrieved it.

“No, there wasn’t,” Pinkie unknowingly confirmed. She began slicing the pie. “I knew it was there when my left ear and right eyebrow twitched.”

I could only thank Celestia that Pinkie was not a monster. I’d swear she’d be unstoppable with that Pinkie Sense of hers.

“I always get that when I come across a new home for Gummy.”

Or maybe not.

She put the knife down, lifted out a slice, put it on a plate and presented it to me. “Tell me what you think.”

I took it, inspecting it. It was… different.

“It’s my own creation: a chocolate cupcake and vanilla frosting pie.”

She had somehow marbled vanilla frosting throughout a chocolate-cupcake-like filling, and wrapped it all in a pie crust. I took a bite. It pretty much tasted exactly as I had expected it to. “It’ll be a best seller,” I said, rendering judgement. “Will you be making more traditional pies as well?”

“Oh, sure!” She fetched another pie from the cupboard. “This one’s a blueberry pie.”

I could already smell the blueberries. “How do the Cakes feel about you competing with them?”

She sliced the new pie. “That’s why I’m doing pies, because they don’t make them. Besides, they put up some of the money, so we’re actually business partners.”

She hoofed me a new plate with a blueberry pie slice on it. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“No… just thinking of something.”

I was thinking that the opportunity she had taken advantage of wouldn’t exist once Lyra and I had never met. Nor would it exist if I successfully reversed the unraveling of my existence. It seemed like a cruel joke.

Enjoy it while it lasts, Pinkie.

On my way back to the Everfree Forest, I had stopped by Fluttershy’s cottage. I had been less than surprised when the draconequus hadn’t been there. Fluttershy couldn’t say if he’d be around later that day. I didn’t bother waiting; he knew how to find me if it pleased him.

Zecora’s home was not far ahead. This time, I would not avoid it. It was time to discover what the shaman might know, whether any of the legends and myths of her people had any bearing on my situation.

I found the zebra outside collecting herbs. She noticed my approach and paused her work, her eyes narrowing as she recollected my somewhat familiar face; she had been an occasional customer of mine.

“Could it be Bon Bon that I see? Quite a surprise I find it to be.”

Ah, yes, the rhyming. I couldn’t imagine how she said everything in flawless rhyme.

I began talking as I closed the distance between us. “I’m guessing you heard about my disappearance a few months ago. It’s a long story. I could use your advice, actually, if you have time to spare.”

“Time I have in abundance,” she said, giving me a warm smile. “Welcomed are you to my guidance.” She took the handle of a basket in her mouth, a basket already quite full of various leaves and flowers, and led me back to her home.

It was a minute away at her untroubled pace. We entered her home, as I wondered who had carved it out of the trunk of this incredibly thick tree. Inside there were strange masks hanging from the walls, and tables and shelves full of herbs, powders, and potions. In the middle of the room was a large cauldron, full of some exotic brew, bubbling away.

Zecora set down the basket on a table, next to a kettle. She got out two cups and poured the contents of the kettle into each one in turn. Walking over to me, she offered one to me, which I accepted. “Thanks.” Half-afraid it was something… exotic, I gave it a quick sniff. It was just tea, jasmine from the smell of it.

“Do you have something I can write on?” I asked. “It would help me explain my situation.”

With a silent nod, she retrieved a pad of paper and a quill from a cupboard and brought them to me.

I drew the infamous runes, including two that had only been on the time stunner, as the zebra watched with interest. “Do you know anything about these?”

Zecora hummed quietly as she studied them. “I cannot say what these runes do, only that they predate equines is most true. Ancient and powerful by ancestors shown, thought to have caused creation itself by deities unknown.”

I mentally sighed. Do you have to be so cryptically mystical about it? Legends or mythologies are all nice and well, but even assuming it was literally true, how did it help me? To be honest, it was one of the reasons I had put off seeing her.

Regardless, none of what the shaman had said was hard to swallow. One need only consider the effects those runes had on time itself, never mind what they were doing to my own existence.

Zecora looked up at me, prompting me with her eyes to tell her more. As she mindfully sipped her tea, I gave her the short version of what had happened to me, starting with the bugbear attack on Ponyville and on up to my recent conversation with the unicorn rabbit. I left out The Agency and its weapons; my story was complicated enough as it was.

I enjoyed my tea as she digested my story. I had to hoof it to her; she took it all in stride, as if I was retelling an ordinary vacation to Manehattan. “I don’t suppose you happen to know of a potion that would cure me?”

She returned to that cauldron and gave it a stir, not immediately answering my question.

“No,” she finally said.

What, not even you can rhyme a single word?

She poured in a measured quantity of yellow powder. “But perhaps there is an alternative, if seemingly preposterous, scenario.”

Postponed rhyming aside, she had my attention. “I’m listening.”

“Jump into a patch of poison joke; you may be surprised what that might provoke.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “And what would that accomplish, other than making me come back here for the cure?”

She calmly continued stirring. “A monster may be either animal or plant; and now, to you, any ill will all must recant.”

That was quite a leap of faith. Sure, the bugbear wouldn’t attack me, but all monsters? On the other hoof, Zecora has lived in this forest for years, seemingly immune to its dangers. Could I really dismiss the idea that she knew what she’s talking about?

Yet there was one small flaw with this—for lack of a better word—plan. “If poison joke considers me off limits, then what purpose is served by exposing myself to it? Would anything even happen?”

She had a ready answer, her gentle smile not wavering. “Poison joke by its nature must prank; if not you, then on its masters’ chains it shall yank.”

That… uh, yeah… “seemingly preposterous” was right. As far as I was concerned, the only reason poison joke would do nothing to me was because it couldn’t think of a bigger joke than the one I was already suffering.

“I shall provide you with the cure, so that you may act once you are sure.”

I stared at the sea of blue flowers waving in the slight breeze. Their deceptively pleasant scent surrounded me.

This is totally crazy.

But I had the cure in my saddlebags, and while the chosen joke could be quite embarrassing, it was generally harmless. Wash it off with that special shampoo, and you were as good as new. I wouldn’t even have to worry about the embarrassment, since I’d be all by myself in that castle. Nopony would remember it the next day anyway.

What would that plant consider a good joke to play on me? I had to admit I was curious. Might it reveal something useful, especially if the joke was instead played on those hypothetical monster masters?

I could swear those flowers were staring back at me, daring me to touch them.

Could their magic even work on me? It only takes effect overnight, which was when the reset occurred; after that, they would have never touched me, had never come up with a joke for me.

I could stand here all day, but that wasn’t going to answer any questions.

There’s only one way to find out.

I walked into the poison joke.

8. Well Played

I forged ahead in a straight line, until the blue flowers were behind me.

There was no sudden lightning or thunder, no swarm of parasprites, not even ominous clouds. I looked back. A gentle breeze swayed the sunlight drenched blue flowers, just like before. It was anticlimactic.

So now what?

The joke wouldn’t happen until tomorrow. I had the rest of the day and this evening to kill. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I briefly considered taking a train to Canterlot, but Pinkie had refused to tell me how to find Lyra. Besides, did I really want my final conversation with her to be an argument over why I left without saying anything?

No. There was only one way to make things right with her: undo what was done to me.

Which left only one course of action, and that was to return to the castle.

So I did, and once I got back there, I went back to that hidden room I had last found, the one with the vault in it, on the off chance Discord was waiting there for me. In that room, there was no light other than what I provided, no sound but my own breathing, and no smells except that of dust and decay.

Of course he wouldn’t be here.

“Discord!”

Nothing happened.

If there was any logic to his appearances, I couldn’t see it; but then, he was the Spirit of Chaos.

I waited a few more minutes, then gave up.

Not having anything better to do, I resumed the search for hidden rooms. I found a half dozen more, but none with a magically locked vault—or anything else useful, for that matter. The preservation spells had fared poorly in that part of the castle.

Eventually, it was time to call it a night. I returned to my guest room and made myself comfortable on the bed, or at least as comfortable as I could be while wearing all my saddlebags. That had gotten old real fast.

Sleep did not come readily this time. Part of it was wondering—okay, perhaps worrying as well—what form the joke would take when I woke up, but it was also sinking in just how screwed I was. Even if I got into that vault, with or without Twilight’s or Discord’s help, there was no guarantee I’d find anything helpful.

I could only hope Zecora was right, that the joke those plants had in store for me would open a door, somehow, to new opportunities.

Something wasn’t right.

I opened my eyes. Dim light suffused the—I lifted my head in shock.

I was in a cave, some ways from the entrance judging from the lack of direct illumination.

What happened to the castle?

A reset had never moved me before. Could it have destroyed the castle? That was absurd. My having disappeared a few months earlier could not possibly have resulted in that happening.

I lift myself off the hard ground and onto my hooves. There was really only one logical explanation. I examined myself the best I could, given the poor light and lack of mirrors. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

“How about my voice?” I asked the universe at large.

That was fine too. So far as I could tell, the joke had done nothing to me other than to relocate me to this cave.

This was supposed to be funny?

I walked towards the light. Might as well see where I was. There had to be something significant about this. Just dumping me in some random spot to be forgotten—which was rather redundant, if you asked me—well, I expected more out of poison joke than that.

I followed the light through one turn, then another, and spotted the entrance. Through it could be seen a forest. That so did not narrow down the possibilities.

Once I got outside, I looked around. The trees were tall and numerous, making it difficult to see very far. The ground sloped gently down. Not much of the sky could be seen through the canopy, yet even so it was dimmer than I would expect.

This didn’t seem to be the Everfree. It was just too orderly, too… normal. But neither did it resemble any other forest I was familiar with. That meant I was more than a day’s walk away from Ponyville, assuming I could determine in which direction Ponyville was.

It was half-tempting to just stay put and spend my few remaining days in this cave. Was there really any point in getting back to Ponyville or that castle? Maybe the poison joke did me a favor.

Except that isn’t how poison joke worked.

And I still needed to eat. The ground was covered with the remains of dead plants, and most of the still living plants didn’t look terribly appetizing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were starved for sunlight—but then, how did they ever grow here in the gloomy shadows to begin with? It’s not as if these trees had sprung up overnight.

Regardless, I also needed to drink, and here there was no water.

“Well, I can’t stand around here all day.”

I started walking downhill. So long as I did that, I should reach a river or stream, eventually a valley or a lake, maybe even a town or other sign of civilization.

After twenty minutes or so, the sound of running water became audible. Perfect. Another five minutes and I reached it. First order of business was to quench my thirst. Next was to fill my canteen. That didn’t take long, perhaps unfortunately, as it was sized for convenience rather than survival.

After putting it back in a saddlebag, I studied the river more closely. It was a dozen feet across and flowing fast enough to make crossing it a challenge. Fortunately, there was no apparent need to do so. The gap in the canopy was wider here, revealing cloudy skies. It was enough to support a lusher undergrowth. I took advantage of that, too.

I continued on downstream, and within an hour I came upon a broad meadow. I took that as a sign to rest. I shouldn’t have needed one so soon, being an earth pony, but I chalked it up to my less than upbeat state.

Sitting on my haunches, I absorbed tranquility of the flowing water, of the flowers swaying in the gentle breeze, of the sounds of distant birds. A rabbit—a normal rabbit—scampered by in the distance. A really large cat dropped out of the sky in front of me, it’s horn glowing—

Wait, what?

I collapsed to the ground. I couldn’t move a muscle. No, that wasn’t completely true: I could blink and move my eyes. I could still breath, too, but I couldn’t talk. Which was a tad bit inconvenient at the moment. I’d love to ask why I’d been hit with a paralysis spell.

I helplessly watched as that unicorn cat—too many syllables, so I’d just call it a unicat—levitated a rope out its saddlebags, just like any unicorn. Aside from the horn and its size, it also differed from ordinary cats in its coloration: a calico comprised of dark green, light red, and cyan. Another cat landed beside it and folded its wings. Okay, so that’d be a pegacat. This one was a uniform pink.

As the unicat approached me, rope floating by its side, the pegacat said, “You’re sure this is it? Looks like a weirdly colored, juvenile horse to me.”

From the voice, I assumed the flying cat was female.

“It still has traces of the magical signature King Apollo detected,” her now obviously male associate replied as he bound my legs. “It’s connected somehow to that event, and I’m not taking any chances. You know our orders.”

I was beginning to suspect what the joke might have been.

“Yeah, but it’s clearly just a pack animal—look at the saddlebags! Where’s its owner? That’s who we should be concerned about.”

The unicat stepped back to inspect his work. “Who’s now out these supplies,” he said, nodding at my saddlebags. “Anyway, I’m dropping the spell. Let’s see if those hold.”

Control of my body returned to me. I tried to snap the ropes with sheer earth pony strength, but failed. I wasn’t sure why. The ropes didn’t look unusually strong. They must have been magically strengthened.

The pegacat went airborne and hovered over me. “Hook me up. I’ll fly it back to The Agency while you keep an eye out for its owner. It can’t be too far away.”

“Oh, well played,” I theatrically addressed the poison joke, present only in spirit. “Well played.”

The two cats stared at me, open jawed.

I gave them a stare of my own in return. “Yes, I can talk, when not prevented by a paralysis spell.”

“Weirdly colored, juvenile horse, huh?” the unicat droned, not taking his eyes off me.

“And I’m not weirdly colored, juvenile, or a horse. I’m a pony!”

“A pony is a juvenile horse,” pointed out the pegacat above me.

I rolled my eyes. “Not where I come from!”

“And where would that be?” the calico demanded.

That stopped me cold. Where was I now? In a place that’d never heard of Equestria, that much was clear. Those plants must have sent me to a different realm, however difficult that was to believe. Perhaps it had been within their power only because the walls between realms weakened during a reset? Speculation was pointless. The real question was, how do I get back?

I could wash myself with the antidote, of course, but it seemed unlikely that would magically transport me back. It wouldn’t hurt to try, but would I have the opportunity? They’d have to untie me first. And who knew what the next reset would do? The unraveling of my existence was taking place in my own realm, not this one.

I needed to get on these felines’ good side. If this “King Apollo” was anything like my Princess Celestia… “Equestria,” I finally answered. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“You got that right. How’d you get here?”

I arched an eyebrow. “Poison joke?”

He just sighed. “Whatever. We’ll sort this out once we get you back to our facility.”

It wasn’t a pleasant trip, what with being all tied up while suspended under the pegacat. Some kind of enchanted crystal was put on me to reduce my weight down to almost nothing. The unicat had one also, though his was powerful enough to lift him above the pegacat. Or maybe he simply weighed a lot less to begin with. At least his legs weren’t tied up.

Over half an hour had passed when a magnificent city clinging to the side of a mountain appeared. The parallels were a little too blatant, if you asked me. Next I’d discover that there was a small farming town in the valley below named Kittyville.

A few minutes later, I was lowered onto the ground in a walled-off area behind a large building. After unhooking me from the pegacat and removing the weight-reducing crystal, the next thing the unicat did was to remove all my saddlebags. “Those are mine!” I protested. I couldn’t risk not having them overnight.

They remained floating in the air beside the unicat. “You’ll get them back if we don’t find anything dangerous, and if you behave yourself.”

Another unicat walked towards us. The calico levitated my saddlebags over to this new one, who took hold of my saddlebags with its own magic and returned to the building.

Finally, my legs were freed from the rope. I had to remain on the ground anyway, to let the pins and needles come and go.

The two cats who’d captured me weren’t going anywhere. I guessed they were willing to continue our conversation now that they had me secured. “I’m not here to cause trouble,” I began. “I only want to get home, and I’m afraid I’ll need your help to do so.”

“You need the antidote to poison joke?” the pegacat asked, humoring me.

“So you know what that is?” Interesting that we had that in common too.

She nodded. “But I’ve never heard of distant teleportation being one of the jokes.”

“Me neither, until now. I think I was a special case.” I shook my head. “Anyway, I already have the antidote in my saddlebags.”

“And you’ve used it?”

“No,” I admitted. “I needed to see what the joke was, first, and, well, I didn’t get around to it before, you know, you showed up.”

The calico looked askance at me. “You needed to see what the joke was.”

“Look, I know it sounds a little crazy.”

“And what was the joke?” the other one asked.

I looked back and forth between them. If they were buying any of it, they were doing a good job of hiding it. I could only hope it was due to their interrogation technique. “In my realm, I used to hunt monsters, just like you do here. I even worked for a super-secret anti-monster organization called The Agency. Anyway, the joke was to send me here so that I’d be hunted like a monster by a similar organization.”

They looked at each other.

I seemed to have gotten their attention, so I pressed my advantage. “We used highly secret weapons based upon incredibly ancient rune magic that nopony else even knew existed.”

Oh yeah, I got their attention. After a moment of silence, the pegacat lifted a paw to the sky. “Runes like these?” she asked.

I looked up. The sky was only partially cloudy here. Sprinkled across the clear areas between the clouds were glowing runes, seemingly suspended above the air itself. Some of which were all too familiar.

“Yeah,” I said. “Runes like those.”

9. Familiar Runes

My eyes were glued to those celestia runes. “So what are they doing?” I asked.

The unicat rolled his eyes. “You really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Come along,” her partner said, nodding to the building. It was not a request.

Not being in a position to refuse, I started walking. Where else could I go anyway? “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“You aren’t in a position to ask any,” he pointed out. “Theodosia, go inform the King.”

The pegacat launched into the air and flew towards an upper balcony. I still hadn’t gotten used to flying cats. I turned to my remaining captor. “May I ask what your name is? Mine is Sweetie Drops.”

He didn’t look at me. “Funny names you ponies have.” We took a few more steps. “No reason we can’t be civilized about it,” he conceded. “My name is Diodoros.”

Speaking of funny names… None of the cat names I had heard so far had been even remotely descriptive. “And the name of this city?”

“Nocat could be that ignorant,” he muttered under his breath. “Pouncelot, the capital city of Felinia.”

I didn’t press my luck; I had enough to chew over for now. Nocat was obviously their equivalent to nopony. That made sense enough. Pounce-e-lot was similar enough to Canterlot, given that cats pounce and ponies canter. Same for Felinia. It was as if our two realms had been created from the same template, differing only by species. Was there another one in which rabbits ruled? How many others? What did it all mean?

And what about the monsters?

We entered the building and followed a hallway. There were a few other cats about, each staring at me as we went by. They were mostly unicats, but I saw another pegacat and even an… earth cat?

Finally we reached their holding cells, all empty. Diodoros magically unlocked and opened the first one to the right.

I did not enter.

“Please don’t make it any more difficult than it needs to be.”

I looked into his eyes. There was little doubt he could and would paralyze and telekinetically force me inside. Even if I could overpower him, where would I go? Worst of all, resisting would not help my cause—or get me my saddlebags back.

Sighing, I entered my prison.

The throne room was as every bit as magnificent as Princess Celestia’s. The walls were clad in flawless and flawlessly carved marble, lined with powerful columns supporting a vaulted ceiling. The floor, likewise, was marble, polished to perfection. Exquisite stained glass windows let in the sunlight, though unlike back home these did not portray historical events nor anything else recognizable as a picture. The throne itself—only one—was sculptured from a single block of granite, a sun emblem of pure gold inlaid into the back.

That seat of power was currently unoccupied. So was the throne room itself, for that matter. “Where is everypony?” I asked.

“Where is everycat,” Diodoros reminded me yet again.

Everycat, everycat… I really should get with the local dialect.

“The royal court is not scheduled to be in session,” Theodosia said, actually answering my question, “so the usual retinue and staff are not present.”

I had spent nearly an hour in that cell. I couldn’t really fault them. If the situation had been reversed and one of them had wound up in Equestria, we probably would have done the same. Theodosia did keep me company for a few minutes, engaging in some smalltalk—mostly about my cutie mark. The cats didn’t have them, nor anything equivalent. It had reminded me that that unicorn rabbit didn’t have one either. Was there any significance to that?

My minders stopped in the middle of the room, and I quite naturally stopped with them. The seconds ticked away in silence, until a side door opened and a large, golden lion entered. From the crown, it was safe to assume this was King Apollo. The fact that he also had a long horn sticking out of his forehead and a pair of wings was another sign. This must have been the feline equivalent of an alicorn. All that was missing was the really long mane flowing in an unseen breeze—but then again, Twilight and Cadance lacked those as well.

The King leisurely walked to his throne, our presence for the moment unacknowledged. Only once he was seated did he look at us—look at me. “You may approach,” he commanded in a deep, methodical voice.

Diodoros and Theodosia were by my sides as we all advanced towards the throne. I stopped when they did. The two cats bowed; I did likewise.

“Your Majesty, I introduce Sweetie Drops,” Diodoros said.

King Apollo gave a subtle nod. “You may rise.”

We did as he studied me with curiosity. “You say you traveled here by means of poison joke.” It was said as a plain statement of fact, devoid of judgement.

Don’t blow it, Sweetie Drops.

“Yes, Your Majesty. I did not know I would come here. I only wish to return home.”

“And this is your true appearance, unaltered in any way by the joke?”

“So far as I know, the joke did nothing to me besides transporting me here.” I still had had no opportunity to look in a mirror. “I come from a realm of ponies, from the land of Equestria.”

“Intriguing.” He laid down on his throne. “However you got here, you are the first visitor from a different realm that I know of.”

I had no proof of my story, of course. “I know my story sounds incredible, but I may have an explanation for why the poison joke did what it did, but… uh…”

The monarch silently waited for me to continue.

“Something was done to me. When I informed my princess of it…” I glanced over to first Diodoros then Theodoria. “Well, it turned out to be, shall we say, a very sensitive subject. Something having to do with ancient runes, like those in your skies, and the ones who use them.”

Apollo nodded thoughtfully. “I well understand your ruler’s position, but I am way past keeping secrets here.” As proof, he had not ordered my guards to leave. “Your skies are free of runes, are they not?”

I could only nod my head. Perhaps I’d get some answers now?

The king wearily sighed. “Then your princess has acted with greater wisdom than I had done.” With suddenly tired eyes, he looked at the unicat. “Diodoros, please explain our current situation to our guest.”

I turned to the calico, awaiting my answer. That I had been referred to as a “guest” had not escaped my notice. I’d rather not be returned to that cell.

“The runes appeared several years ago. They’re slowly but surely draining the magic from our world.”

Which might explain why I hadn’t been able to break those ropes, or my odd lack of stamina.

“If it only affected our ability to use magic, we might have been able to deal with that. Unfortunately, magic is also what powers our Sun.”

Everything was clicking into place. So that’s why the undergrowth was dying in the forest: their Sun was dimming. “H-how much magic will be drained before they’re removed?” As if I needed to ask.

Diodoros did not answer. He didn’t need to.

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“We’re trying to fight it using the forbidden magics,” he told me without enthusiasm, “but so far we have little to show for it.”

I was beginning to comprehend the “hard choices” Celestia had mentioned. This was a death sentence. As much as I wish I had a solution for them, I didn’t.

“But enough about our problems,” Apollo said. “What is your story? I shall do whatever is in my power to help, little as that may be.”

I started to feel some glimmer of hope. If they actually knew something about these… forbidden magics…

I took a deep breath.

“The short version, Your Majesty, is that those runes were used to cast a spell on me, a spell that is unraveling my very existence. Each day I wake up to discover that I had disappeared ever earlier. It won’t be long before I had never existed. I’m looking for a way to reverse it… and I’m getting desperate enough to try crazy things, like walking through poison joke.”

The monarch did not seem surprised, but then neither had Celestia been caught off-guard by my situation. “Has this happened to any of your subjects here?” I asked. Perhaps Apollo would be willing to volunteer information that Celestia would not. It sounded like he had nothing left to lose.

“That I know of, no.” He then briefly smiled. “But then, I wouldn’t, would I?”

No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It was the nature of the spell, after all.

“But I am aware that spell exists.” He stood up and leaped to the floor. “And knowing what I know about it, I can confidently predict you will be returned home before the next reset.”

He walked to that side door as I processed what he’d just said. “Follow me,” he commanded.

Before the next reset? I wasn’t sure what he was implying. “You know how to send me home?”

He paused to look back at me. “Me?” He barked a laugh. “No. But the ones who did this to you will have no choice but to send you home. The reset must happen in your own realm, where the spell was originally cast, that much I do know.” He resumed walking, this time quickly. “We may not have much time.”

I had to trot to keep up. “I need to have my saddlebags back before my ride home arrives.”

“We’re heading in their direction now,” he assured me. “You never did explain the poison joke connection. I’m beginning to wonder just who was the true victim of their joke.”

We were traveling through a little-used corridor, purely utilitarian in nature and lacking any ornamental pretenses. “You could be right,” I observed. “I was told by a shaman that I was off limits to monsters because of what was done to me. It’s why I tried the poison joke. Supposedly, if it wasn’t allowed to play a joke on me, then it’d play one on its masters. I was hoping I’d learn something useful as a result.” I sighed. “Like I said, I’m getting desperate.”

“I’d say it worked out for you.” He made a left turn at a junction. “And I’m glad to have learned of it, in case they ever used that spell here in the future.”

“But won’t you forget all this after the next reset tonight?”

“The reset only affects your own realm,” he said, as he led us into a stairwell, heading down. “Your existence shall not be unraveled from this realm.” His sudden laughter resonated up and down the stairwell. “Truly did the poison joke put one on their masters. Even if they got you home in time, just being here outside your realm, where the thread of your existence cannot be unraveled, will create problems for them.” We passed another floor on the way down. “Nothing they can’t handle, unfortunately.”

So Zecora was right after all—or half-right, maybe? Off-limits I may have been, but they had still found a loophole through which they could prank me too. They didn’t change a single thing about me, giving those plants plausible deniability. Or maybe I was just overthinking it, seeing something that wasn’t there.

We exited the stairwell on the bottom floor and continued navigating the corridors until we arrived at our destination. The spacious room had various tables spread about, and on one of them were the contents of all my saddlebags, haphazardly arranged. The saddlebags themselves were on a nearby table. The anti-monster kit was on yet a third table, the contents also dispersed about.

“Diodoros, why don’t you help repack everything. I’ll be back in a moment.” The king teleported away.

There was no rhyme or reason to how everything had been laid out. I needed to pack everything myself if I was to know where to find anything, but I didn’t want to outright reject their assistance either. Thank Celestia nothing seemed to be missing. “I suppose you can start with my makeshift anti-monster kit over there.”

It didn’t take him long to reassemble that kit. He came over and started packing a saddlebag with whatever was closest to him. I let him. Time truly was of the essence; after all, I didn’t know when my ride would arrive or what form it would take. For all I knew, I’d be teleported without warning. I could always reorganize their contents once I got home.

He picked up my vacation photo and paused to look at it. “This is you, and another pony?”

“My very best friend in the whole world,” I replied. Who now believes I’ve abandoned her. “We were on vacation in Fillydelphia.”

“Huh. Fillydelphia.” He carefully inserted it into the saddlebag. “Not Kittydelphia.” He next picked up and examined a bit. “The face of your ruler?”

I kept on packing a saddlebag as I tersely answered, “Yep, Princess Celestia.”

Picking up on the hint, he said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, it’s just that…” He began moving the other coins into the saddlebag. “I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”

“No need to apologize,” I said, sighing. “I understand. We just don’t have that luxury now.”

The repacking continued in silence. We were just about finished when Apollo returned in a flash of light. He held two items in his magical grasp. One was a crystal with runes inscribed upon it, the other was some sort of long, thin cylinder with a handle designed for paws. I approached, curious. There were runes inscribed on the cylinder. Familiar runes.

“Ah,” he said, nodding his head. “You know what this is.”

My eyes shifted to the monarch. “We call it a time stunner. But why bring one to show me?”

“This time hunter, as we call it, is the cure for your condition—in theory. We’ve never had a chance to put it to the test.”

“You mean by giving me a zap?” I sadly shook my head, my hope fading. “That won’t work. I’ve already been zapped once by accident. It triggered an immediate reset.”

The rune-inscribed crystal drifted over to me. “But you didn’t have this in your possession.”

I plucked it out the air with a hoof. “In theory,” I droned.

“It’s the best I can offer.”

“Maybe you did put it to the test, and it failed.”

“I cannot deny that possibility.”

I studied the crystal as I mulled it over. I had no clue if it would actually work. I had nopony I could ask, certainly nopony who would give me an answer. Yet the hard reality was that I wasn’t likely to find another cure.

I returned my saddlebags to their rightful place on my back. They had never felt so good. I then held the crystal against my neck and closed my eyes. “Do it. Zap me.”

10. Shift in Perspective

“I cannot.” The weapon floated in a golden glow over to the nearest table—to him, not to me—and set down on its surface. “It must be done in your own realm.”

Of course it would. I opened my front-left saddlebag and, with a sigh, put the crystal inside. “That weapon isn’t going to fit in a saddlebag,” I said as I closed it.

“The crystal you may have, but not this time hunter.” He looked at me curiously. “Did you not say you had them too?”

“Yes and no,” I said, hesitating. I didn’t really feel like going into detail. “A few years ago, Princess Celestia shutdown our Agency and allegedly destroyed all the weapons. I suspect you can guess why she’d do that; she never gave us an explanation.”

Apollo nodded, but didn’t offer one himself.

Beyond keeping secrets, eh? Perhaps he had more to lose after all. “Turns out they weren’t destroyed, only hidden away. I now know where, but access is another problem.”

“I truly am sorry,” he said, lowering his head, “but that is a problem you’ll have to solve on your own.”

Frustrating it might have been, but this problem I could deal with. “I already got access to them once. I should be able to get access again.” I just needed to find Twilight and come up with an excuse to get her to that vault. Shouldn’t be that hard, really—so long as she’s in town.

“There’s no need for physical contact,” he continued. “You can keep the crystal in a saddlebag while you’re wearing it; it’ll still work. You should keep it hidden there. It would be best if one of them did not see it.”

Like a certain unicorn rabbit? Got it. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t have the time stunner? There was no way to keep that hidden. But the rabbit must have seen me get zapped by one. Maybe it didn’t matter because the departure of that weapon from the vault, along with the acquisition of any new knowledge of it, would get reset. On the other hoof, if it wasn’t with me, what would happen on the next reset to something brought from another realm?

I didn’t know. I wasn’t going to push it, not when I had good enough alternatives.

The view from the top of the tower was impressive, to say the least. As I had thought, there was indeed a small town in the distant valley below. It wasn’t a farming town, however. Large, fenced-in grasslands with scattered bushes and trees surrounded the town, and within those areas were large herds of grazing animals. I couldn’t make out what kind, but they seemed to be smaller than ponies. Large rodents?

Well, what did I expect from cats?

The monarch waved a paw at the vistas below. “And that is Kittenville, a major producer of food for my kingdom.” Some pegacats were flying around, clearing the skies of clouds. “Do you have pegasi to manage your weather too?”

Naturally, there was no reason for them to use “pegasus” as an adjective, anymore than we did. “We do, unicorns too.”

He hummed to himself. “How strange, to have horses with wings and horns.”

“I know the feeling.”

He looked at me for a second, then broke out in laughter. “Yes, I suppose you do.”

After King Apollo had returned the weapon to wherever it was kept, he took it upon himself to give me a tour. Diodoros and Theodosia had also tagged along, for reasons that weren’t clear to me. The attention was nice and all, but…

“Not that I don’t appreciate the personal tour,” I eventually said, “but aren’t there other demands on your time?”

He smiled at me. “I want to see how they return you to your own realm.” He looked towards the late afternoon sun. “Everything else can wait.”

Was that why the other two had tagged along? Was he hoping to… detain one of them?

Not that I really cared, so long as I got home—and got a few answers myself.

“Let’s skip the waiting part,” a familiar voice snarked.

Diodoros reacted first. “You!” he shouted. He took a fighting stance and charged up his horn.

Apollo held a paw to his forehead and groaned. “Stand down.”

“But sire!”

“That was not a request.”

The unicat stared at his monarch in disbelief, but powered down his horn as commanded—not that it was clear to me what he had expected to accomplish. I looked into the red and yellow eyes of the interloper. “What are you doing here, Discord?” I asked, as if I couldn’t guess. “Our realm not enough for you?”

The draconequus crossed his arms. “I’ll have you know that I have many responsibilities.”

Theodosia flew back to us, having momentarily left to check on something. “The statue is still there!”

Diodoros turned back to Discord, mouth agape. “How did you escape?!”

“Things are not always what they appear to be,” he smugly answered. Those mismatched eyes locked onto Apollo. “Isn’t that right, catnip-breath?”

Apollo wearily sighed. “Just take the pony home. We are no longer your concern.”

“As much as I’d like to spread some chaos around—just for old times’ sake, you know—you are, alas, quite right.” He wetted a talon and held it up, as if testing the breeze. “Magic is rather thin here anyway.”

He hadn’t done a single random act of magic, it was true.

Apollo addressed his agents. “You are not to speak of this to anycat. As far as you are concerned, Discord is still imprisoned within that stone statue.” He fixed his gaze on each in turn. “Have I made myself clear?”

The two cats looked back at Discord, who gave an angelic smile in return.

“Understood, Your Majesty,” they dutifully replied.

“Well!” Discord exclaimed, “now that we got that out of the way…”

I stamped my hoof. “Well, it isn’t clear to me!” I approached the Spirit of Chaos. “Is that why you’re nowhere to be found most of the time? Because you’re busy terrorizing other realms? Aren’t you reformed?”

“Reformed?” Theodosia repeated.

Apollo raised an eyebrow, his curiosity piqued.

Discord’s eyes dashed back and forth between cats and pony. “It’s… complicated.”

Let’s see just how “complicated” it is. I began to explain his alleged reformation. “Princess Celestia had him released from his stone imprisonment with the intention of reforming him through the magic of friendship, so that his powerful magic could be used for good. It could have gone smoother, granted, but it seemed to have worked—”

It hit me.

“The whole being-turned-into-stone bit was just an act, wasn’t it?” The pieces were clicking into place. “And Celestia knew it.” I looked at this realm’s version of Celestia. “Just like you knew.”

King Apollo reluctantly nodded.

“The magic of friendship?” Theodosia said, trying to wrap her mind around the concept.

A slow clap rang out. “You got me,” Discord said. “Though I suppose it doesn’t really matter, given the circumstances. Let’s just say Princess Sunbutt was an excellent negotiator and leave it at that.”

I didn’t know what to think anymore.

“We really need to be on our way.” Discord turned to his side, and with paw and talon tore open a hole in space itself, revealing ultimate blackness. He turned his head towards me. “After you.”

I stood my ground; I had to take advantage of this opportunity. “You will remember everything that happens here, right? Even after the next reset?”

He looked as if he just ate something distasteful. “Unfortunately, yes. I can handle the minor paradox, due to my chaotic nature. That’s why I was assigned this task.”

“Then remember this: look me up after the next reset. You’ve done so before.” I planned on getting access to that vault first thing upon returning, but it wouldn’t hurt to hedge my bets.

His eyes focused on me. “Not that I remember—big surprise—but your reappearance would stick out to me if I happened to be around.”

“Then plan on being around in…” I quickly did the math. Twenty one, thirty four… “fifty five days.”

And I would have been missing for over nine months. I just hoped that crystal worked, and that I got to use it within the next few hours—maybe in the next few minutes, if Discord was cooperative.

“Fine, fine,” he irritably said. “I can’t keep this open all day.”

I looked back at the cats for the last time. “Good luck.”

“And to you,” returned Apollo.

I approached the hole. The blackness was impenetrable. Shouldn’t I be able to see Equestria, or something?

I reassured myself that Discord had every reason to return me home. If they were going to do anything else to me, they already had had plenty of opportunity to do it.

I took a deep breath, held it, and stepped through the hole back into Equestria.

Except that it wasn’t Equestria.

The landscape around me… how to even begin to describe it? It was like one of those drawings of “impossible” objects, objects that could never exist in reality. They could be drawn on a flat surface by messing around with the rules of perspective. Here, it was somehow real.

The ground twisted and bent, forming junctions and loops to fill the world in which I had found myself. I couldn’t see more than maybe a mile, at most, but I had little doubt that this—whatever this was—was far larger. There was no apparent source of light, yet everything was illuminated, with inconsistent and nonsensical shadows being cast.

Numerous buildings dotted the landscape. Some of them even made sense to my eyes. Others… it wasn’t always clear what was a floor and what was a wall, or even what was inside and what was outside. Creatures of all colors walked about in the distance, always sticking to the ground; gravity must be pulling to the ground, regardless of orientation. Then there were the flying creatures… were those paths even physically possible? All were too far away for their species to be identified.

I looked back, ready to demand answers from Discord. He wasn’t there. The hole in space he had opened was gone too. He wasn’t coming. Which meant I was trapped here.

To be fair, Discord had never said where he was sending me. He had merely failed to correct everypony else’s assumptions.

So now what?

My surroundings still baffled me. It must have been an illusion, a trick of perspective. If I went somewhere else, the illusion would fall apart. It had to! Of course Discord would put me in the precise spot where the illusion was perfect. I tried not to think about it, why this realm would have been constructed so as to create that illusion at this one spot.

I was in a large, grassy field. Picking a direction in which the field eventually curved up, I started walking. A few feet, a few dozen feet, a few hundred feet. It made not the slightest difference. Looking to either side, or above me, the shift in perspective exposed other parts of this realm. It was more of the same impossible geometry.

I collapsed to the ground and closed my eyes—and kept them closed. At least the cat-realm made sense.

How was I supposed to get home now? Why was I even brought here? Wasn’t it necessary to get me back to my own realm before the next reset? Or was Apollo wrong about that too. But Discord had come for me. It all made as much sense as the insane world around me.

My ears locked in on something approaching. The gait was odd, definitely not a pony. What more can go wrong? I lifted my head and opened my eyes. A large rabbit was hopping towards me. A lime-green rabbit that possessed a horn.

11. The Tour

“Should I bother asking questions?” I sort of snarked. My heart just wasn’t in it.

The rabbit came right up to me and laid down on the grass herself, whiskers twitching. “I’ll take you back to your own realm soon. We need you to be here while we prepare for your next reset, no thanks to that poison joke.”

It looked like Zecora was right, judging from the way she had spat out those last few words. Apollo was right, too, for that matter. “And where, exactly, is here?” I asked, expecting the same sort of non-response I had gotten from her before.

“This is the Nexus. All realms, including yours, are embedded within.” Her eyes wandered about us. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the unusual geometry of this place.”

An actual answer. Dare I hope for others? “Hard to miss it,” I sarcastically replied.

“You’ll get use to it, in time,” she nonchalantly replied. “What you’re seeing is sort of like a three dimensional ribbon that snakes around a higher dimensional space, splitting and rejoining over and over as it goes past all the realms.”

I gave her a blank look.

“The straightest possible lines are still curved here?” she offered. “That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. Not that any of that mattered to me.

“It took me a while to get used to it too.”

I reopened my eyes. “No offense, but how long before I go home?”

The rabbit’s horn lit up. “You still have poison joke residue on you. I have a spell that will remove it.”

A aquamarine glow surrounded me. There was a spell for that? Not even Twilight knew of one, so far as I knew. While this was much better than using that special shampoo, I wasn’t going to let it distract me. “You didn’t answer my question,” I pointed out.

The glow lasted a few seconds longer before fading away. “You shouldn’t think of that realm as your home, not anymore.”

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Thread of existence being unraveled and all that. “So what is home?” I droned. “This place?”

“Basically… yes.” She gave me a wry smile. “It’s not so bad, honest.” She stood up. “Let me show you around. We got some time to kill, and you’re here, so we might as well.”

I got to my hooves. “Just so you know, I’m going to keep asking questions.”

“And believe it or not, I’m authorized to answer them—well, some of them.” She started hopping towards a cluster of buildings. “It’s against protocol for you to have been brought here so soon, but… well… poison joke. That doesn’t mean we have to lock you up somewhere until we’re ready to send you back to your realm.”

“Not sending me back is not an option, because of the resets.”

“Correct.”

No surprises there. I didn’t mind the tour; not so much as to familiarize myself with my alleged future home, but to better understand what I was up against—what Celestia herself had been up against. The cluster of buildings up ahead were refreshingly normal. All had four unambiguous walls and a roof. None were over two stories high. It looked like a miniature town more than anything else.

I continued to pump my guide for answers. “The reset won’t erase my existence from here,” I stated, not asked. That was the case in the cat-realm, after all.

“Only your realm is affected by that,” she said in that odd cadence imposed by her hopping. “Your presence in that other realm has created… complications that are being handled right now.”

“And my presence here? That doesn’t add to the… complications?”

“No. The Nexus exists outside of time as we understand it.” She gave me a smile. “It’s certainly outside of my understanding.”

Which, come to think of it, would explain something. “You remember the conversation we had when I, uh, accidentally triggered a reset.”

We had entered the “town”—for lack of a better term—and were approaching what looked like an apartment building.

“I was outside of time, relative to your realm, when that happened. You were too, once it did happen. We were both in Nexus time.”

Which, I guessed, was why the resets had no effect on my memories, my body, or on anything I was carrying. It must have been within Discord’s power to sidestep the resets, yet evidently he didn’t—maybe, because if he had not participated in the reset, he would not remember the modified history. I certainly did not remember it.

The rabbit stopped in front of a door, numbered one-one-six. She levitated a key out of the bag she kept above her belly and opened the door. “This will be your temporary home, until you get established.”

We went inside. The rabbit stayed near the entrance while I walked around. The kitchen had the expected appliances. There was a bed in the bedroom. In the living room there were chairs, a sofa, a table, and lights. Nothing fancy, but serviceable.

“You can leave some of your stuff here,” she said as I walked back to the front door. “It’ll be safe from the resets.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I said politely enough, “but I’m still going to decline.” I was going to undo that curse they had put on me. This was never going to be my home, temporary or otherwise.

“The sooner you accept this,” she countered, simply stating the facts, “the easier it’ll be.” She hopped back outside. I followed. “As you can see, across the street are various establishments to fulfill your needs.”

Nopony was about. I’d yet to see another soul. How many were in this ‘Nexus?’ Were they all kidnapped from other realms, like me? I was getting the impression this rabbit hadn’t been born here.

My eyes scanned the aforementioned businesses. A general store, a salon, a bakery, and on and on. Okay, not everypony could be… whatever this rabbit was. This… place was still a town, and like any town it had a lot of jobs that needed doing.

Did it need a skilled confectioner?

I gave the rabbit my hardest stare yet, practically drilling a hole with my eyes. “Why me?”

“That,” she carefully said, “is one of the questions I am not authorized to answer.”

I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Discord mentioned I had failed some sort of test.”

She looked away. “I’m not going to comment on that.”

A really small elephant, about the size of a really large pony, came out of the bakery carrying a full bag with its trunk. No wings or horn on this one. How many different species are there?

“Fine. How about this question: Once I’m here for good, what will I do with my life?”

“That’s mostly up to you. No one would object if you opened a candy store. We do offer resources to help newcomers get established.”

No one? Well, with all the different species here… Anyway, I was pretty sure I wasn’t in this mess because of my talent for candy making. “That wasn’t my only career,” I pointedly said.

“I am aware of that.” She began hopping down the road. “Follow me.”

So I followed her. What else was I going to do?

We went down the road a bit, then made a turn into an alley—except it wasn’t an alley… not exactly. The ground curved gently downwards until it was going straight down, gradually widening into its own landscape.

The rabbit had not paused, of course. I hurried up. Never did I feel as if I was ascending or descending; if I closed my eyes, I would never have known that the ground wasn’t completely flat. I’m never going to get used to this. Nor would I ever need to, as far as I was concerned.

I looked back the way we came… and stopped. I had expected to see the underside of that town, even if that underside had plants, roads, and buildings of its own. And I did see a bit of that, right around that “alley,” but it then curved away out of sight—curvature that had not existed on the topside. Mostly what I saw was… stuff that could not be seen from the town, and the surrounding stuff that could be seen from the town was no longer visible. This was simply physically impossible.

The unicorn rabbit had noticed I had stopped and came back for me as I stared incomprehensibly into the distance. “Like I said, this is a higher dimensional space. We just took a turn in one of those extra dimensions.”

I blinked, hard. “Uh, okay.” I focused my eyes on the rabbit, the better to not see this crazy place. “How was this all created?”

My escort resumed hopping. “No idea. How was any realm created?”

Couldn’t argue that. I had no idea how my own realm had come about, not the origin of the Sun or the Moon or the ground. Celestia might know—maybe—but nopony else did. It wasn’t even myth or legend.

“I, uh, see your point.” Did having more dimensions really make this realm’s origin more mysterious?

But then Zecora came to mind. Maybe some did know.

We were walking through what looked like a park, mostly grass but with bushes and flowers and some low trees to either side. “Is this landscape natural or does some… one maintain it?”

“Nothing is native to this realm. Someone planted it at some point, and it does need some care.”

There didn’t seem to be any clouds. Did it ever rain? And where the hay did that sunlight come from? All good questions, to be sure, but their answers weren’t very meaningful right now. A better question occurred to me. To ask it, I trotted to catch up to the rabbit. “I never did get your name.”

“Beyond,” she replied. “Do you prefer to go by Bon Bon or Sweetie Drops?”

“Your name is ‘Beyond?’”

“Indeed it is!” she singsonged. “You’ll discover that different species have different approaches to names.”

“Yeah, I’ve already seen that.” The cats, for example. “As for my preferred name… Sweetie Drops is my real name, but I’ve been going by Bon Bon for so long now… I guess I don’t really care.”

We were coming up on a lone building. It was one of those. My eyes refused to make sense of it. The walls did not join to make a sensible building. I couldn’t tell which wall was inside and which was outside; for some of those walls, for both sides of those walls, I could trace a path that indisputably placed it inside, and a different path that placed it outside. It gave me a headache.

I tried not to look at it. “Where are you taking me?”

“Through that up ahead.” Beyond looked at it as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. “The walls were put there to make it comprehensible to beings like us, believe it or not. That region is especially convoluted, bringing distant points into close proximity.”

We approached the—for lack of a better word—entrance. “That’s comprehensible?” I droned.

“With practice.”

Without hesitating, Beyond crossed the threshold and grabbed hold of a long, metal rod that was just floating there, and left the ground. “There’s no gravity in here, so hold on to this rod and follow it.”

The rod dipped to the ground, but did not touch it, right at the threshold. I held on to it and entered. I was falling, except I wasn’t. Beyond had already begun pulling herself along, and I hurriedly did likewise. It wouldn’t do to fall behind, for it was a maze in there; but a maze with a sign at each junction. Not that the signs made much sense to me. At least they were physically sensible, unlike everything else around me.

The rabbit navigated it with ease. In a sane realm, there would have been no way we could have gone very far. It seemed like we were just going back and forth and around in circles in random directions. The signs proved that hadn’t been the case, as I never saw the same one twice. Thankful for small favors, it wasn’t strenuous: once in motion, you stayed in motion, gliding along the rod. What kept that rod in place I hadn’t a clue.

Finally, we crossed another threshold and gravity reasserted itself. A short distance away was a large, industrial looking building. Beyond set out for it.

It didn’t take long to reach it. We went inside. A winged hippopotamus behind a desk greeted us. “Hi Beyond. So this is the pony causing all the fuss?”

“Sure is! Just giving her the tour.”

A hippo with wings. Now I’d seen everything.

We went down a corridor and entered a large room. A translucent force field of some sort blocked off most of it, and on the other side of that barrier… “Are those what I think they are?”

“I would imagine so,” was Beyond’s answer.

There must have been hundreds of them, maybe more, buzzing about. Tiny, adorable, pastel colored spherical creatures with insect-like wings, tiny legs, and a body that was mostly mouth.

Parasprites.

12. To Deserve Their Fate

The parasprites had noticed our presence and were pressing against the force field, doing their darnedest to look cute and adorable. Even the buzzing of their wings sounded cute. Hard to believe they were among the most dangerous of monsters, leaving nothing but famine in their wake. If only I hadn’t been out of town when they had swept through Ponyville.

“Ever wonder why parasprites are never found in the wild?” asked Beyond innocently enough.

That got my attention. It was one of the big, unsolved mysteries: Where did parasprites hang out when they weren’t invading a town or ravaging crops? Nopony knew where they came from nor where they went. And since they eat just about anything and breed like… well… parasprites, what prevented them from turning all of Equestria into a wasteland?

I gave Beyond an incredulous look. “Are you telling me that they’re released into Equestria from here? That afterwards, you somehow round them all up and bring them back?”

“Not just your realm,” she clarified. “And we don’t exactly return them here.” She shrugged. “The way they expand their numbers, we’d have no place to put them all.”

I shook my head. “But why?!”

The lime-green rabbit frowned. “I can’t tell you, not yet.”

“And what about the other monsters, like the ursa major?”

“They are native to other realms.”

“Even Discord?” The thought of an entire realm full of draconequi… no, I didn’t want to think about it.

She didn’t answer immediately. “Draconequi are… different.”

Oh, Celestia, there really are more than one.

No more information was volunteered. “Let me guess, you can’t tell me more about them?”

“You’re catching on,” she said with forced humor. “But truthfully, I don’t know much anyway.” Beyond again shrugged. “You could say they’re in a distant part of the org chart.”

Remembering back, Discord had, in fact, said some things that could only mean he was not a free agent, despite his reputation, and that he had worked for and with others. Considering the raw power he had, what did that say about his superiors?

I turned away from the force field and pensively walked a few feet. “Why are you showing me this?”

“You do have options.” She made a hop towards me. “They’re not the options you want, I understand that, but we could use use your talents.”

That made my blood boil. “Why would I want to help you do… whatever it is that you’re doing with those… things!”

Beyond sighed. “Maybe you won’t. Just keep in mind there is much you don’t yet know.”

And I have options you do not know. I just hoped that crystal worked.

The rabbit hopped towards the door. “They should be finishing up by now. I’ll take you to the Gate room. From there you will return to your realm.”

“Lead on,” I flippantly said.

We went down the corridor to the back of the building. Along the way, we passed a graying unicat going the other way. Had the crystal been used on her without success?

The Gate room was at the end of the corridor. At the back of the room was a crystalline, rune-engraved circle, large enough for an ursa minor to pass through—not that anything was going to pass through it, as it was up against the wall. Off to one side was a bank of dials, meters, and crystals, all giving the impression of being turned off.

Beyond went over there, to what I guessed was a control panel of some sort, and started doing stuff. The meters and crystals came to life, with moving needles and colorful glows. A few twists of some dials, and a turn of a crystal knob, and she turned her head towards that huge circle against the wall.

I shifted my gaze towards it as well… I saw Ponyville! The Town Hall, to be precise, practically glowing in the moonlight. I walked over and stopped right in front of it. It looked like I could walk right through. I lifted a forelimb and…

“Don’t bother.”

I froze in place and looked back at the rabbit.

“It’s not fully open at the moment. You can see, but you can’t pass through.”

I looked once more at my home—and it was my home, no matter what that rabbit kept telling me. Once I was through, I’d head to the castle and see Twilight… except it was already dark.

My heart sank.

There was no way I was going to convince Twilight to make a trip through the Everfree at night. I wasn’t keen on it myself. How late was it anyway? There were no ponies out and about.

Was there even time to walk back to the old castle before the reset?

Yet there was no place for me to spend the night in Ponyville, no place immune from an awkward conversation in the morning.

“Is something wrong?”

My eyes remained fixed on the image of home. With resignation, I said, “It would be best if you returned me to the castle where I’ve been spending most of my time.”

“Which castle is that?”

I looked at her in surprise. “You don’t know?”

“Why should I?”

Huh? Something wasn’t adding up. “You’re not keeping an eye on me, watching everything I do?”

She gave me a confused look. “Why would you think that?”

Either she was being deliberately obtuse, or I was missing something obvious. “You were there when I accidentally triggered a reset.”

Her mouth made a silent ahhh. “I think I see the source of the misunderstanding.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “And?”

She looked inwards for a few seconds. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. I was keeping an eye on the bugbear, not on you.”

I looked back at the Town Hall. No lights were on inside. I went through the motion of asking. “And why would you be doing that?”

“You know the drill,” she apologetically said.

I sighed. This secrecy was getting tiresome. What purpose did it even serve?

A cheerful thought re-occurred to me: it only made sense if it was possible to undo what they had done to me—and, once it had run its course, no longer could it be undone.

I could live with never knowing, so long as I lived.

“You know the ancient castle in the Everfree, next to the Tree of Harmony?”

Beyond nodded. “Yes.”

“That’s the one. Twilight showed me a room I could use to spend the night.”

She silently turned back to the control panel and and turned a few dials, the view through the Gate violently shifting as she did so. Within seconds, the ancient castle was visible.

“I can put you in that room, if you show me where it is.”

That would be convenient. Unfortunately, I didn’t know, exactly, where that room was on the outside. I compared what I was seeing with the view I remembered from the room’s window. “It’s not this side. Try the side around the left.”

A few tweak of the dials later and that side of the castle had presented itself. “I think that’s it.” I knew it was on the second floor. I scanned the windows. One was not like the others.

If she could put me within any room… It was tempting: no need for alicorns or draconequi. Just position this Gate inside that vault, and I had access to a time stunner.

But how would I leave that vault? Certainly not through that Gate. I couldn’t let Beyond see me use that crystal. Even once the Gate was closed, she might still watch me for a while, wondering whether and how I exited the vault. And that’s all assuming she wouldn’t be bothered by the vault’s existence and report it to her superiors. I didn’t know what King Apollo had done to cross the line, but I had a sinking feeling Princess Celestia came uncomfortably close to crossing it herself.

On the other hoof, Beyond had to have known about the time stunners in our possession when we were hunting the bugbear. There was no evidence she had been concerned.

I made my decision, and pointed at the window. “That one,” I said. The vault was too risky. “It’s a new window, unlike the others.”

The window rapidly approached. Suddenly, the view went dark.

“I’ll have to switch to night vision.”

Beyond tapped a crystal and my home away from home appeared in muted shades of gray. “That’s it,” I confirmed.

She tapped another crystal, and the perimeter of the Gate glowed violet. Light from this side now spilled over into that room, overwhelming what little moonlight streamed through the window. “We can walk through now,” she said as she hopped over to me.

“We?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’ve got nothing else to do right now.” She waved a paw towards the Gate. “After you.”

Whatever. I walked right up to the Gate and stepped over the perimeter. I was home once more—for some definition of “home.” A fine layer of undisturbed dust coated everything, proof that a reset had indeed happened since I walked through the poison joke.

Beyond hopped into the room and looked around. “I’m guessing this was all done recently.”

“Yeah, it was.” I walked over to the window and looked outside. From the position of the Moon, it was late indeed, not far from midnight. “Still no working plumbing, though.”

“You won’t have to put up with that much longer,” she said, trying to cheer me up. “As the resets take longer to complete, you’ll be spending more time in the Nexus.”

That did not have the desired effect, of course. I turned around and…

The floor caught my attention. The layer of dust. It was undisturbed. No hoof-prints. Or rabbit paw-prints. I scraped the floor with a hoof. The dust remained undisturbed. I glared at Beyond. Somehow this was her doing.

“Right, you wouldn’t know.”

I kept on glaring at her.

“It’s not a big deal. Really. We’re still on Nexus time. That means we’re not quite physically present. Once I go back and close the Gate, I’ll drop you all the way back into this realm.”

My glare weakened, though I remained silent.

“I may have secrets,” she chided me, “but I’ve never lied to you. You can’t be on Nexus time when the reset begins; otherwise, we could have just kept you in the Nexus.”

I turned away from her and went back to the window. “Can’t argue with that,” I said in defeat. “Can I ask another question?”

“Sure,” she replied. “I’ve got a few more minutes.”

I stared at Luna’s moon. “What did the cats do to deserve their fate?”

“You mean that realm you got sent to?”

I nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened to them?”

I suppressed my gut reaction. There was no reason she had to know what had happened; she was assigned to my realm, not theirs. I gave her the short version: “Their sky is full of runes that are slowly draining the magic from their realm.” I looked back at her. “Magic that powers their Sun.”

She joined me at the window. “Yeah, that’s…” She gulped. “I’ve heard stories of that happening.”

“But why?”

She avoided my eyes. “I guess… I guess you could say they’ve outlived their usefulness… were more trouble than they’re worth… so the resources are being redeployed.”

“I guess you could say many things,” I snarked.

Beyond lethargically hopped—no, more like walked—back to the Gate. Just before she reached it, she stopped. Without looking back at me, she said, “They were a failed experiment.”

The rabbit hopped through the Gate. A few seconds later, it closed, plunging the room into darkness.

13. A Familiar Voice

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

My eyes snapped open to darkness as my ears flattened against the assault. I looked around, but I couldn’t see the source of that racket, couldn’t see anything.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

I blindly worked my way out of bed and onto the floor, ready to buck whatever it was into next week.

It stopped.

I reached for an ever-present saddlebag by my side, to pull out a light crystal, when I was suddenly blinded by light.

“About time you woke up.”

I recognized the voice, of course; I should have seen this coming. I cracked open my eyes. As my sight adjusted to the illumination, I saw Discord: in his paw he held a metal triangle and in his talon a metal rod. “Was that really necessary?” I said, fuming.

He threw the objects over his shoulders; they vanished without a trace. “You asked me to find you after the next reset,” he explained without remorse. “The reset has just completed.”

I rubbed my forehead to stave off a headache. Between falling asleep late and being forced awake before sunrise… I didn’t know how much sleep I had gotten, but it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t in the mood to put up with his random crap.

But he was here now, like it or not. It was time for Plan B.

I said to him, “You are aware of the vaults that Princess Celestia has hidden in this castle?”

“I am,” he said, stroking his goatee. “I’m curious as to how you know about them.”

“You wouldn’t remember,” I began, ignoring his implied question, “but you told me you could get me inside one of them.”

A throne-like chair popped into existence. He sat down and fixed his gaze on me. “Then I’m sure I also told you that doing so would trigger an alarm, that Sunbutt would be here within seconds.”

That he was repeating that now made it almost certain he hadn’t been messing with me before. “You did,” I confirmed.

He resumed stroking his goatee. “I’m guessing you didn’t go through with it before, but you’ve had a change of heart.”

“You could say that.” I walked towards the door. “I’ll take you there.”

Discord remained seated. “Which one is it?”

I stopped and turned around, afraid he wasn’t going to cooperate this time. “It’s on the ground floor. I don’t know how many there are.”

He held up three talons. “On that floor, there’s only one.”

A flash of light, and we were in the hidden room adjacent to the first vault I had discovered, the one with The Agency weapons. Discord was still seated in his chair.

I went over to the gems comprising the magical lock, the one Twilight had so effortlessly opened. “I suppose Celestia is sleeping now. How much of a difference will that make?”

“Hard to say,” he said with a carefree wave of a paw. “That may delay her a few seconds, or maybe Moonbutt will come in her place.” He summoned up a beverage of something violet with green stripes. “Either way, I’m not taking the fall for this, just so you know.”

I snorted. “We both know you won’t be turned back into stone.”

He gave me a knowing grin.

Regardless, I’d have to deal with the consequences. I only needed seconds to zap myself with a time stunner. If it didn’t work, none of it mattered; I’d simply wait it out until the next reset.

But what if it actually did work?

What would I tell Celestia? How would she react?

What if Luna showed up instead? Did she even know about The Agency? It had been shut down, after all, before her return.

I didn’t know which was worse: a wide awake but clueless Luna, or a sleep-deprived Celestia. Two sleep-deprived ponies; what could go wrong?

Discord covered his mouth with his paw, hiding a yawn. “I’m getting bored.”

That shook me out of my thoughts. I couldn’t have him disappearing on me now. But I found myself unable to set things in motion just yet. “Aren’t you curious as to why I want to get inside that vault?” I asked in an attempt to buy more time.

“Not particularly,” he nonchalantly replied, “so long as it causes some chaos.”

“Like triggering an alarm that drags Celestia out of bed?”

He gave me a toothy grin. “I will neither confirm nor deny that,” he said.

I went to the vault’s hidden door. It was time to either put up or shut up. Do whatever it took to undo the spell, or resign myself to spending the rest of my life in the Nexus. Did it really matter whether I got inside with Discord’s help or with Twilight’s?

Discord was here now. Twilight might be out-of-town—again.

“Do it.”

A flash and I was inside. My presence caused the lights to turn on. Everything was as I expected it to be. If there was an alarm, it was silent. I hurriedly trotted to the time stunners and picked one up. I headed back to the door—

It was closed.

Damn it, Discord.

He hadn’t unlocked and opened it.

First things first. I’d worry about the door later. Maybe it could be opened from the inside, which is why he hadn’t bothered.

I laid down on the floor, set the weapon for a wide aperture, pointed it at myself, and fired, immediately dropping it as I did.

A near ultraviolet flash, and the world around me rippled away to gray.

Did the crystal work, or did I simply trigger another reset?

I looked around: no unicorn rabbit, no Gate, and no draconequus. I was alone in the featureless void.

If it had worked, I could expect a princess to open that door once reality had reformed itself. But if it hadn’t… well, it was too late to see if it could be opened from the inside.

I stared at where the door had been and would once again be, the point being that it wasn’t there now. Nothing stopped me from walking to the other side.

I just had to be careful with distances.

With carefully measured steps, I worked my way to where the door should have been, then took a few steps more into what should have been the middle of the hidden room on the other side.

There was nothing more to do but wait for the reset to finish. It seemed as good a time as any to catch up on my sleep, so I laid down and got as comfortable as I could on what passed for a surface. It didn’t take long for me to drift off to sleep.

I woke up in absolute darkness.

I got up on my hooves and extracted a light crystal from a saddlebag. I figured the absence of light was proof I was both post-reset and outside the vault. I turned it on. Sure enough, I was in the hidden antechamber.

Alone.

No Discord and no Celestia.

It was starting to look like Apollo’s crystal had failed to work. How many months this time? I wasn’t in the mood to do the math.

I exited the room and entered the lit hallway. It was sunny outside.

I went up to my room to check on its condition. The dust was undisturbed, just as I feared.

I slid off my saddlebags onto the low table and dug around for that crystal.

It wasn’t there.

I double checked. Same result.

I collapsed to the floor.

That had been my only chance.

I had no idea what happened to it. It definitely did not fall out through a hole in the saddlebag, there being none to fall out of.

Could Discord have sensed it and removed it?

Whatever. If he had, in fact, taken it, I wasn’t likely to get it back from him. It was probably in the Nexus, somewhere, forever out of my reach. Or destroyed. It didn’t matter anymore.

I found the energy to put the saddlebags back on. Keeping them in the Nexus for safekeeping was starting to look attractive.

I didn’t do much for the rest of the day. I just wandered around the castle a bit, not to search for more hidden rooms—I was done with that—but because I just couldn’t stand being cooped up in that one room.

At one point, I did go outside to visit the nearby Tree of Harmony—not that I’d expected that to accomplish anything. It wasn’t as if it granted wishes or anything. Maybe I subconsciously hoped its inherent harmony would rub off on me; I certainly felt as if my situation was as unharmonious as it got.

It was pretty enough to look at, but that was about it.

As night fell, I went back to what had become “my” room. That I now thought of it as such only added to my depression. In the hours until bedtime, not to mention the next overnight reset, I had plenty of time for all that I had learned to finally sink in.

It wasn’t a pretty picture. I could now understand Twilight’s reaction upon learning the truth from her mentor. How did Celestia manage it?

I woke up to morning sunshine.

Out of habit, I glanced at the floor, to verify that another reset had taken place.

It had—wait… the layer of dust was all messed up.

I looked at the table, and saw saddlebag-sized disturbances in the dust.

I didn’t dare believe what my eyes were telling me. I had lost the crystal; the time stunner zap could only have triggered another reset. To think the Tree of Harmony was responsible was wishful thinking, at best, yet… the only other possibility was that somepony had been inside this room shortly before I woke up.

None of it made sense. I had to know. There was only one way to find out: go to Ponyville and see how ago I had vanished.

My old hometown came into view as I reached the edge of the Everfree Forest. I was making no attempt to disguise my appearance; I wanted ponies to react to my presence.

As I trotted along street after street, not one of the numerous ponies I passed paid me much attention. Had it been so long that they’ve forgotten me?

Every now and then I’d pass a damaged building. There must have been another monster attack. I came upon one under reconstruction and stopped to assess the damage. Something flying must have crashed into the upper story, something a lot heavier than infamously crash-prone Rainbow Dash.

It only reminded me that I now knew who was responsible for those monsters.

“Bon Bon!” angrily shouted a familiar voice.

A mint-green unicorn charged towards me.

Lyra? Why would she be back in Ponyville? And had I hurt her so much that the pain hadn’t dulled after all this time?

“I’ll explain everything,” I hastily said, “but can you first tell me what happened here?” I pointed at the repair crew.

My former very best friend looked at me like I had lost my mind. “You’re telling me you don’t know what happened yesterday.”

“Please, Lyra, just indulge me.”

She stared at me for a moment, not knowing what to make of me, then glanced at the building in question. “I’m guessing the bugbear crashed into it.”

“The bugbear attacked Ponyville?” Why would it, with me not having been here?

I might as well have asked whether Celestia raised the Sun in the west. “What is wrong with you?!” Lyra demanded.

Ponies were looking at us. “Can we take this somewhere less public,” I told her in hushed tones.

Lyra lowered her voice, but not by much. “Yesterday, you were going on about how that bugbear was after you, then you left me to finish decorating the Town Hall all by myself, you never came home—” she eyed my saddlebags, then rolled her eyes “—whatever… and now this.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Lyra had remembered the events of that day—not only that, but it had all happened yesterday! It was as if… could the crystal have been consumed in performing its spell?

Did it really matter? I’d done it. Everything was back the way it was.

Lyra was still glaring daggers at me.

Well, almost everything.

How would I make things right with her? Somehow, the truth didn’t seem like an option. Before I could find something to say, a pegasus flew down to hover above us.

It was Rainbow Dash. “Uh, Bon Bon? I know this will sound weird and all, but you need to see Twilight, like, right now. Princess Celestia has requested your presence.”

14. A Life to Live

Twilight hadn’t wasted any time, escorting me immediately to a waiting royal chariot. We were now on our way to Canterlot. Nopony else accompanied us, not even Spike. Why Celestia had wanted to see me, she wouldn’t tell me; that would have to wait until my audience with the diarch.

I could take a good guess, though, as Twilight had been informed of certain facts about my past. If nothing else, it allowed me to put off my day of reckoning with Lyra. I just hoped she hadn’t repeated that Agency stuff to anypony else.

“So how did you capture that bugbear?” the newest alicorn asked, increasingly frustrated with my less-than-informative answers. “Even with my friends helping me and, well, me being an alicorn, it was impossible.” She looked out at the city on a mountain ahead of us. “If it hadn’t eventually just… given up and flown away… I don’t know what would have happened.”

Somehow, that outcome didn’t shock me. I had an unfair advantage, of course, when I had captured it—apparently too unfair an advantage. “Your Highness,” I began, pointedly going formal on her, “with all due respect, if you don’t know how I did it, it isn’t my place to inform you.”

She blinked.

From an alternate timeline, I knew Celestia trusted her with that information; but, for whatever reason, she had yet to do so in this version of reality, and, as there would be no more resets, I would play it safe.

“Celestia has complete trust in me,” Twilight finally insisted.

“I’m sorry, princess, but it isn’t up to me.”

I followed Twilight into a room high in the palace, the same room in which my previous meeting with Celestia had taken place. I almost bumped into her royal posterior when she suddenly froze.

I did too, upon seeing who was seated next to Celestia.

Celestia addressed her former pupil. “I’m sorry, Twilight, but we need to speak to Sweetie Drops alone.” Twilight’s mouth was hanging open. “I’ll talk to you later, I promise.”

I was getting the impression that the reason Twilight wouldn’t tell me why Celestia had wanted to see me was because she hadn’t known herself. I had a damn good idea what the topic of discussion would be, and it scared me.

Twilight hadn’t budged. “You trust Discord more than me?”

“It isn’t about trust,” Celestia calmly said. “There is much you don’t know, and this is not the time or place to bring you up to speed.”

Twilight stood there, frozen in disbelief.

“Twilight,” I said, “Princess Celestia’s right, and if you did know, trust me, you’d wish you didn’t.” She was about to open her mouth. “Don’t ask how I know that.”

She silently gaped at me, took one more look at Celestia, then slowly turned and left the room.

With a golden glow, the door closed. The walls, floor, and ceiling all flashed as Celestia cast a privacy spell. Once that was done, she asked me, “So how do you know?”

I looked uneasily between the two immortals. I didn’t know how much Celestia knew about the Nexus, but with Discord sitting there it was pretty obvious she knew enough. “Early on, after the first reset I think—” I briefly paused, but neither seemed unaware of what I had meant “—you, apparently, had explained everything to Twilight… and she didn’t take it very well. She told me she was glad she wouldn’t remember any of it after the following reset.”

“I see.” Celestia levitated the ever-present cup of tea to her lips. “I shall keep that in mind when I explain it to her.”

My eyes drifted over to Discord. He had been unusually quiet. I assumed he was here as the designated Nexus representative. Might as well cut to the chase. Addressing both of them, I asked, “So what’s going to happen to me?”

It was Discord who spoke next, surprisingly with a smile on his face. “I have to hoof it to you: Never have I seen so much chaos inflicted on that ossified bureaucracy. Long overdue, if you ask me. What you just did has never been done before. There were no contingency plans at all.”

“Okay…” I looked back and forth between them. “So… what does that mean?”

Celestia lowered her cup. “We honestly don’t know yet. Right now, they’re in damage-control mode.” Her eyes drilled into me. “How did you undo that spell?”

“Don’t answer that,” Discord commanded.

“Really, Discord?”

“You know better than that,” he chided. “That knowledge will certainly be declared off limits.”

The draconequus returned his attention to me. “Someone will be around to debrief you. It will very much be in your interest to cooperate.” His eyes hardened. “Until then, do not talk about anything outside of this realm.”

He teleported away.

My princess avoided my eyes. “I truly am sorry it has come to this. I’ll do my best to help you, but I’m afraid there is little I can do.”

“I won’t let them cast that spell on me again,” I defiantly declared. “Even if they somehow managed, I’ll just undo it again.” Maybe that was wishful thinking, but it wasn’t impossible; I remembered the runes on that crystal.

“I’m sure they’ll take that into consideration.”

She hadn’t said it as if it were a good thing.

If I was a condemned mare, at least I should be granted a last request. “The Elements of Harmony are powerless against Discord, aren’t they? The whole being-turned-into-stone thing was just an act, a cover story, wasn’t it?”

The diarch focused on her cup of tea, taking a forcibly leisurely sip.

“It’s… complicated.” She gave a tired sigh. “No, I suppose there’s no point; you clearly know. It’s true.” She looked at me with desperate eyes. “You must not even hint of this to anypony else. Even Twilight does not know.” Her expression turned grim. “Yet.”

Twilight and I took a detour on the trip back to Ponyville. I was not privy to her conversation with Celestia, but something was different: she wasn’t reacting as she had in that alternate timeline. She was more mad than depressed.

She had asked if I knew where The Agency weapons were stored, and for my own reasons I had said “yes.”

We approached the guard station for the underground dungeons. The decayed paperwork remnants, which covered the release mechanism, laid undisturbed on that wall-mounted shelf. I pushed against it, and as before, a section of wall popped out. This time there was no light, none apart from what we had brought with us.

Twilight levitated her light crystal inside the revealed room. When she saw the collection of gems on a shelf, she quickly trotted over. She studied them but for a second, then caused them to light up one at a time, in an apparently random sequence, ending with them all simultaneously flashing three times.

Just like that other time, a section of the wall vanished, revealing a dark room. Wall-mounted crystals began glowing, lighting up the room and revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves on all the walls.

But unlike that other time, there were no weapons here. I wanted to see what was in this vault, to discover anything that could protect me from whatever action the Nexus might take against me. Worst case, I would simply claim they must’ve been moved. I had a feeling Twilight wouldn’t be comparing notes with Celestia—if she was supposed to be here, she’d know where they were.

Twilight’s eyes lit up like a foal in my candy store; it was a veritable library in there. She teleported to a shelf, picked out a scroll, and began reading, all thoughts of weapons forgotten.

I went over to the shelves on the opposite wall and scanned their contents. Quite honestly, I was out of my league. I could tell they were quite ancient, and the knowledge they held must have been forbidden if they were kept here, but apart from that? Well, maybe if I got lucky and found a scroll with those runes in it.

“Oh my gosh, I don’t believe it! Star Swirl the Bearded wrote this one!” She looked at me, practically drooling. “I thought I’d read everything he’s written!”

But then again, if I hadn’t been unlucky, Twilight would have been inside here with me that other time, and she most certainly was not out of her league.

There was a squee as Twilight discovered yet another tome from her personal hero.

Lyra was not impressed. “I’m not going to get an explanation,” she flatly said.

“Like I said, it’s highly classified.” Twilight wasn’t throwing any punches; she was even wearing her regalia. “Whatever Bon Bon might have already told you, you must keep to yourself.”

“Understood, Your Highness,” the unicorn responded with exaggerated formality. She turned, went towards the stairs, and departed.

I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.

It was a small price to pay to be home again, and she’d get over it soon enough.

My home was as I remembered it. All that were missing were the items I had taken with me in one of the alternative timelines. My existence may have been rethreaded into reality, but those items had remained in my saddlebags.

Yet something else was missing too. I looked up at the bare ceiling once more.

This time, it did not go unnoticed. “I removed the crystals and runes yesterday,” Twilight said. “Lyra doesn’t know they were there.”

I gave her a blank look. I had assumed Beyond removed them after they had done their job.

“Aren’t they what did this to you?”

“Well, yes, but… they were gone when I woke up. I’m surprised they were here for you to find.” I gave her a hard look. “How did you find them?”

“Hard to miss magic like that,” she said with a smile. “That was also when the bugbear had broken off its attack. It was too much of a coincidence, so I investigated right away.”

Yeah, some coincidence. “Did you find out anything about those runes?”

I hadn’t drawn any runes for her at the vault. Maybe the event had taken place in this realm, but those runes had originated elsewhere. That might have been splitting hairs, but Discord’s injunction was too fresh.

“Not at first,” she told me. Her mood darkened. “Celestia claimed no knowledge either.”

“But…?” I asked, as if I didn’t know where this was going.

“That vault has information on those runes. I need to go back and research some more, but I think I have an idea of how to undo that spell or even shield against it.”

She looked at me expectantly.

I didn’t dare bite, as much as I wanted to. “Twilight,” I began, “there’s a reason that knowledge has been locked away. Perhaps you should leave it alone.”

She shot me a disgruntled look. “You’re beginning to sound like Celestia.”

Maybe bringing her there hadn’t been my smartest idea.

Taking my silence as the message, Twilight brusquely turned around and departed.

I was alone again.

As I once more had a life to live, I figured I might as well live it. I went downstairs to the store. I kept the closed sign up; I still didn’t feel like dealing with customers, and besides it was getting rather late. I made my way to the kitchen.

Like everything else, it was back to the way I had left it. No oven replaced the floor-standing mixing bowls, nor did exist any of the other changes Pinkie Pie had made. I opened the cupboard with the false bottom and returned the anti-monster kit to its hiding place; there was no evidence a baby alligator had ever stayed there.

After putting the false bottom back into place, I restocked the shelf save for the bag of sugar. I poured it into a floor-standing mixing bowl and turned on the flame to melt the sugar. From another cupboard I got out the bag of dried alfalfa sprouts. Nothing like making my signature candied alfalfa to get me back into my groove.

15. As Experiments Go

I counted out six pieces of candied alfalfa and hoofed them into a small bag. As I pushed the bag to the far side of the counter, a blonde-maned and gray pegasus counted out two bits. A unicorn filly bounced in anticipation beside her.

The mare grabbed the bag with her mouth and lowered it to the floor. “You can have one,” she said.

Two pieces floated up out of the bag. As soon as she noticed her mistake, the filly adjusted her telekinetic field and released one of them. The other piece flew straight into her open mouth.

I gave a smile as mother and daughter departed. After swiping the coins off the counter and into the cash box, I gazed about the empty store. It was a good time to take a lunch break.

I trotted out from behind the counter and to the door and put up the “closed for lunch” sign before anypony else could decide to enter. At a more leisurely pace, I made my way to the kitchen.

Beyond was waiting for me. Off to the side, I spotted the open Gate.

I reflexively looked up at the ceiling. No crystals or runes.

“We won’t be using that spell—or any other spell—on you,” she assured me. “There’d be no point.”

Whatever that meant, it probably wasn’t good for me. “Are you here to debrief me?”

The rabbit shook her head. “No, not my department.”

Deciding it was safe enough, I approached her. “Then why are you here?”

“To ask you to join us. You still can, so long as you fully cooperate with your debriefing.”

I eyed the Gate, looking through it to a familiar room on the other side. “What, like right this instant?”

“Twilight will be here soon.” Her whiskers twitched. “We can come back for your stuff later. We’ll even help you move all this.” She waved a paw at the kitchen.

What in Celestia’s name is going on?

“If I wanted to join you, we wouldn’t be in this situation, now would we?”

That made the rabbit grimace. “You have no idea how true that is.”

I was getting fed up with this. “You could try just telling me. Why don’t we start with the reason you don’t want Twilight talking to me?”

A bell rang in the distance. The front door had opened.

“Bon Bon?” Twilight called out.

“It’s now or never,” Beyond forcibly whispered, her eyes pleading with me.

I had never asked for this. How dare they presume I had any fealty to them. “I choose ‘never,’” I likewise whispered. I leaned my head back and shouted, “Back here!”

Approaching hooves got louder. I calmly stared at Beyond, wondering what she’d do.

The rabbit leaped through the Gate.

“What the—” I heard Twilight say behind me as the Gate closed.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I simply said.

The alicorn walked past me to where the Gate was, her horn lit up with what I assumed was analyzing magic. After a few seconds of this, her horn went out and she turned to face me. Her eyes held determination. “As your Princess, I command you to explain what I just saw.”

I did not flinch. “Not even Celestia has that authority. I don’t think you got the memo.”

“Oh, I got the memo,” she retorted, “but there’s been a development you ought to be aware of.”

Without warning, she grabbed on to me and teleported. We went far. I knew because I collapsed upon arriving, onto a crystalline floor as it turned out. Once everything stopped spinning, I opened my eyes. I was in Twilight’s throne room.

Hovering in mid-air, in the center of the circle of thrones, was a translucent image of our world. At both the north and south poles, something floated above the surface. I moved closer for a better look.

Using her magic, Twilight enlarged the image. The something first resolved itself to a cloud of dots, then the dots resolved themselves into runes. The cloud was expanding towards the equator, slowly but surely, as more copies of those runes popped into being.

Twilight was studying my reaction. “I looked up those runes in that secret library in the vault. It will take years, but this world will die. Our magic is being drained.” She came up beside me. “So you see, the time to obey their rules has passed.”

Beyond’s impromptu visit was starting to make sense. When had they planned on informing me that us ponies had been declared a failed experiment? But more to the point, why had they decided that? I didn’t think it was because of me. Why would they’ve offered to save me if I was the cause?

With growing horror, I looked Twilight in the eyes. “What did you do?”

“I-I don’t know what you mean.”

“Damn it, Twilight, if the rules had been obeyed, this wouldn’t be happening!”

“And they had no right to do this to us! Everything I thought I knew was a lie!”

She turned away and began walking around the image. “I’ll figure something out,” she said, mostly to herself. “I always do.”

I wasn’t so sure that was possible. The cats hadn’t. Maybe they didn’t have a Twilight Sparkle, but they seemed far from clueless.

“What’s Celestia doing about this? She’s negotiated with them, successfully, in the past.”

Her former pupil snorted. “Like how she shutdown your Agency, our best defense against monsters, and allowed for the return of a ‘reformed’ Discord?”

“Considering the alternative, yes, I think that was a small price to pay.”

Twilight pawed the ground, her head hung low. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “She won’t talk to me.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; but whatever Celestia might have been doing, it wasn’t enough. I had to do something. “Just tell me Discord isn’t a stone statue.”

“Ha ha,” she droned, “very funny.”

I interpreted that as meaning he might still be around. I headed out of the throne room.

“Where are you going?” she demanded. “You still haven’t explained what I saw in your kitchen.”

I paused at the open doorway. I did not look back. “First, I’m going to find Discord; and second, I’m not going to explain. I want to fix things, not break them even more.”

Twilight knocked on the front door. “Fluttershy! We need to speak to you!”

I didn’t particularly want her to have accompanied me, but if I was going to talk to Discord then by golly she would be a part of the conversation. If that was okay with him, I had no real reason to object. Maybe I’d be the one munching popcorn.

There was no answer.

“She’s probably out in back,” Twilight offered.

There we found her, by the chicken coop, tossing out seed to a flock of happily clucking birds.

Twilight got down to business. “Fluttershy, do you know where Discord is?”

The pegasus tossed out more seed, as the chickens continued pecking the ground. “He, uh, doesn’t wish to be disturbed.”

“Something very bad is happening. We need to convince him to help us.”

Fluttershy put down the bag and turned away. “He told me,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “He offered to save me, to take me somewhere I’d be safe, but I… I can’t leave my f-friends… these animals… who’d look after them?”

Discord was willing to do that? The whole being reformed by the magic of friendship wasn’t entirely a cover story? “This isn’t over yet,” I said as, on a hunch, I headed towards the back door of Fluttershy’s cottage.

Twilight was right behind me, of course. When I reached the door, I didn’t bother knocking.

I opened the door.

Oh yeah, he’s here. The interior had been subjected to one of his “redecorations.” Not zig zags of bold colors, nor plaids of discordant colors, no, not this time. Everything had been bled dry of color. I saw nothing but drab shades of gray.

I stepped inside.

Twilight bounced off an invisible barrier that suddenly formed behind me. Regaining her composure, she tried again, to the same effect. Her horn lit up and she disappeared.

She did not reappear inside.

The door closed on its own.

No popcorn for me, then.

I found Discord in the living room, lying on a sofa. The room was a riot of color compared to him. “Projecting your emotions onto this cottage isn’t going to fix anything,” I said.

He did not remove his lion’s arm from his eyes. “I had a good thing going on here, you know. It’d never been tried before, me not being the archvillain.”

I approached him. “King Apollo knew you for what you truly were.”

“A professional relationship only, same with Celestia and Luna.”

I did not fail to notice that he had used their actual names.

“As experiments go, this one showed much promise, enough so that Celestia was given another chance; it was her idea.” He exhaled. “Then Twilight had to go and ruin it. Maybe we can try it again in a different realm.”

I stamped a hoof. “What did she do?”

He uncovered his eyes and looked at me. “She experimented with the runes that had been used on you. She successfully pushed an object into Nexus time, not that she realized that. To her, the object simply vanished.” He laid his head back once more, his eyes staring at the ceiling.

“Why were those runes even there for her to find! Beyond had removed them the first time around!”

“No, she didn’t,” Discord corrected me. “She didn’t have to. That first reset removed them.”

“Which…” I gulped “…never happened because I undid the spell.” I turned away. “But why didn’t she notice the reset had failed to happen and remove them then?”

I realized I already knew: “Because she’s on Nexus time. From her perspective, over a week has passed since she cast that spell on me. By the time she had realized what happened, it was too late.”

“I’m out of gold stars at the moment,” he said without enthusiasm. “Would you like a gray star?”

“Whatever. It’s not Equestria’s fault you didn’t have a contingency plan. There must be some way to fix this! Take back those crystals and runes. Don’t pretend you can’t. Destroy those secret vaults while you’re at it! Why haven’t you?!”

Discord floated off the sofa and onto his mismatched feet. “It’s too little, too late. Miss Photographic Memory has already memorized enough of that library, and has made it perfectly clear she intends to put that knowledge to use.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said, glaring at him. “Why was that vault even permitted. This wouldn’t be happening if it didn’t exist!”

Discord scratched his head with a talon. “I don’t know, actually. I wasn’t around at the time.” He shrugged. “I suggest you ask Princess Sunbutt.”

He snapped his talons and I was suddenly outside with the chickens.

When I got back to my store, I found Twilight inside my kitchen, waving some scientific gadget about the spot where the Gate had been.

“Twilight, you have to stop this.”

She did not stop, continuing to examine the readings, as she said, “What did you learn from Discord.”

“If he wanted you to know, he wouldn’t have kept you out.”

“Did a good job of it too,” she angrily said. “He redirected my teleport back to my castle.”

How I wished I’d never shown her that vault. “Twilight, I mean it: the only chance we have to save ourselves is for you to stop doing this.”

Her jaw hardened. “Celestia couldn’t convince me, and neither will you.”

I watched her for a few more moments, as she gathered data and took notes, then I grabbed my lunch out of the refrigerator and took it upstairs.

As I ate my sandwich, I wondered what I was going to do.

One thing seemed clear.

Twilight was a lost cause.

16. That Ship Has Sailed

Over the next few days, Twilight periodically showed up with some new gizmo with which to study that spot in my kitchen. I tolerated it. Because of that, and the fact that I didn’t try to change her mind again, she allowed me view that image of our world in her throne room. If she was hoping that’d get me to talk, she hid her disappointment well.

The runes had already reached the skies of the Crystal Empire. In a few more days, they’d reach Manehattan, then, in another day, Ponyville and Canterlot. Word was starting to spread. Princess Celestia had put out a statement reassuring everypony that she was aware of the situation and that there was no cause for alarm.

Which was true, sort of. From my trip to the cat realm, I knew it would take years for there to be a meaningful effect. Why such a leisurely solution? The only answer I could come up with was that they were immortal, like draconequi and alicorns, so time didn’t have much meaning to them.

I wished I could talk to Celestia, to see what sort of progress she had been making and to help in any way I could, but that was proving to be a bit difficult. Twilight hadn’t been joking about Celestia not talking to her. Spike was no longer in Ponyville; he was now staying with Celestia in Canterlot.

Beyond had made no effort to contact me again, which was probably just as well. No solution would be coming from her. “Not my department,” as she might say.

That left Discord. I still didn’t know what “department” he belonged to, but a much higher rank it seemed to possess, if only because he was capable of representing their interests to Celestia. Whatever he truly was, right now he was uncharacteristically keeping to himself, spending most of his time with Fluttershy.

He was still willing to see me, so long as I didn’t overstay my welcome, but he hadn’t been willing to divulge anything I didn’t already know.

Honestly, I think he was just trying to get the most out of his friendship with Fluttershy before he had to leave our realm for good; as King Apollo had put it, we are no longer your concern.

I was sitting with Lyra on a park bench, on a warm summer day, when it finally happened: runes popped into being above the cloudless skies. There was no question about it; these were the same runes I had seen in the sky of the cat realm. “It’s really happening,” I muttered.

Lyra looked up herself. “Huh. That’ll take some getting used to.”

She had said that as if commenting on somepony’s new mane cut. I looked around the park. A few other ponies were looking up, with more joining them every second. All were taking it in stride.

And why shouldn’t they? Didn’t Princess Celestia say it was nothing to be concerned about? The runes had been appearing over the cities north of us for few days now. Nothing bad had happened, right?

“What’s wrong?”

I jerked my head towards my very best friend. “Huh?”

“You look like the world’s coming to an end.”

I… I didn’t know what to tell her, certainly not the truth. “It’s nothing.”

“Spill it.”

I sighed. “I can’t.”

She glanced at the sky then back at me. “This have anything to do with what Twilight was talking about, you know, royal secrets and all that stuff?”

I gave her a sullen look. “If, for the sake of argument, it was, you know I couldn’t confirm that.”

Lyra looked up at the sky again. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Neither do I.

It was so tempting to screw “the rules” and tell her. What more could they do?

Yet whenever I felt that way, I kept coming back to King Apollo. There were still some rules he followed. He felt there was more to lose, hard as that was to believe.

“…could get our cutie marks by solving the mystery of these here sky runes?”

My eyes were drawn to a familiar trio of fillies walking past us. They had once tried their hooves at candy making. It took hours to clean up the mess they had made of my kitchen. Why oh why had they thought that tree sap was a good idea.

“We should talk to Twilight. I bet she could use our help!”

“I dunno. Rainbow Dash says she’s been acting real weird…”

They had gone too far away for me to hear more, but I’d heard enough. It probably was for the best if they avoided Twilight, given her current obsessive state of mind, but did it really matter in the end? This world was going to die long before they could grow old—before I could grow old.

There didn’t seem to be a single thing I could do about it.

I knocked on Fluttershy’s front door. As was frequently the case, it opened by itself, letting me in. Discord was in the kitchen, making breakfast, some kind of flapjacks. They looked normal enough, cooking in the pan.

In the month that’d passed since the runes had appeared, our friendly neighborhood draconequus had been keeping his chaos pretty much to himself. “Why are you still here?” I asked him, genuinely curious. “I mean, why haven’t you been replaced by a stone statue stand-in while you move on to other realms?”

“I’m on vacation.” He lifted the pan and turned it upside down over a plate. The flapjacks fell out, started flapping, and went everywhere except that plate. The draconequus started hunting them with his fork.

After chasing one around the kitchen, he finally got one. It bled maple syrup. Once it had stop struggling, he got it onto the plate. Fortunately, for my sanity, that did not take long.

His breakfast captured, he continued: “I’ve got a few centuries of accumulated vacation time, so I figured I’d spend some of it to keep my one, true friend company for as long as I can.”

You learn something new every day.

He put the plate down on the counter. “Besides, I’m ‘reformed’ here. I don’t think that charade is needed.” His mismatched eyes studied me. “So what brings you by?”

I had never visited just to chat, and this time was no exception. “I want permission to tell Lyra something.” My inability to explain was proving to be a source of friction between us. She tolerated it only because she understood my hooves were tied.

“Can’t help you,” he said as he sliced up the flapjack. It twitched under the cutting knife. “I’m on vacation.”

“Then put me in touch with somepony who can help me.”

He waited until his mouth was empty before replying. “Celestia would be your best bet.”

I hadn’t seen the princess since she had requested my presence over a month ago. If she had no further need to speak to me, what would be accomplished by me requesting an audience? Her negotiations had failed, obviously, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

“I thought she lacked the authority to do that.”

The other two flapjacks had perched on Discord’s shoulders, one on each side, poised to launch at the slightest threat. The draconequus paid them no attention.

“She’s in touch with the ones who do possess that authority. The negotiations are continuing”—he swatted at the flapjacks, which flapped away in the nick of time—”if at a glacial pace.”

There was still hope?

“I’ll… I’ll do that.”

Lyra was performing tonight with the Royal Symphony Orchestra in Canterlot. While she was in rehearsal, I was to have my second meeting with Princess Celestia. It took nearly two weeks to arrange without the services of Twilight’s former Number One Assistant.

Said baby dragon was preparing the tea while I waited for the diarch to arrive. “I see Rarity once a week when she visits her new boutique here, but… it just isn’t the same.” He heated the kettle with his flaming breath.

“Believe me, nopony wishes Twilight would come to her senses more than me,” I said in commiseration. “It just isn’t happening.”

“So I’ve heard.” He scrutinized the kettle. Somehow deciding it wasn’t hot enough, he gave it another quick burst of flame. “Not that I want to say anything bad, but let’s just say I wasn’t too unhappy when Princess Celestia took me away.”

I couldn’t even imagine what that encounter must have been like.

The princess timed her arrival perfectly, entering the room as Spike filled two cups with tea. “Thank you, Spike.”

The baby dragon gave a quick bow and left the room, closing the door behind him. The words about to be spoken were not for his ears.

“So, what’s my answer?” I asked, dispensing with formality as usual.

She gave me a gentle smile. “A qualified ‘yes.’”

“Qualified?” I prompted. At least it wasn’t a flat-out ‘no.’

She levitated a cup over to me. “After the performance tonight, you shall bring Lyra here to this room. I’ll explain to her what she is permitted to know, on the condition she agrees to keep it secret.”

It was the best I could hope for. “I appreciate the assistance,” I said. “So what can she be told?”

“The permissible details are still being decided.” She paused for a sip of tea. “I must confess I was a bit surprised they agreed to even this much. It appears they want to remain on your good side.”

I couldn’t help snorting. “Remain? What, so I’d join them? I think that ship has sailed.”

Her muzzle developed a frown. “Ships can be turned around.”

I stared at my princess incredulously. “Are you implying they would clear our skies of runes if I did?”

Her frown deepened. “No. Twilight’s actions, and her refusal to change course, has doomed us. Even if she stopped now… as you put it, that ship has sailed.”

So leaving with Beyond would have changed nothing. It was a small relief. Interesting that they still had some interest in me, but I couldn’t see anyway to leverage that to save our world. “Could Twilight actually find a way to counteract those runes?”

Celestia looked past me, out the panoramic windows towards our cursed skies. “I truly do not know, but it doesn’t matter; even if she could win this particular battle, she could never win the war.” She closed her eyes. “I only wish I could have made her see that.”

I couldn’t contain myself. “Why do they even let her try! They’re doing nothing to stop her. They even let Discord go on vacation!”

“Curiosity as to what she could accomplish, nothing more.”

With utter confidence that they could handle whatever she threw at them.

A question I had asked Discord came back to me. “Why did they allow you to preserve the forbidden knowledge and weapons in those vaults?”

“Allow?” The princess regally snorted. “It was a form of punishment: the forbidden was to remain readily accessible to us princesses, a constant source of temptation to which we must never succumb.”

Wow. That answered a lot of questions.

Celestia obviously hadn’t trusted Twilight with knowledge of those vaults—for good reason, as it turned out. The newest princess couldn’t be denied access, hence she knew how to unlock it, somehow, but its very existence could be kept from her. And then I took her there.

I guess they hadn’t cared when the consequences were being erased by resets, but now… “If I had known, I-I never would have taken her there.”

Celestia softly shook her head. “The onus is on me. It’s not your fault Twilight willingly unlocked and entered that vault.”

17. Intriguing Proposition

Lyra dragged a hoof across the dusty floor, adding to the disturbances that were already there.

“There wasn’t much point in giving the place a thorough dusting,” I said.

“Because it’d all return the next morning.” She pointed at the hoof prints I’d left behind. “What about those?”

“That was after I had reversed the spell. I stayed an extra night after that.” I gave a sigh of missed opportunities. “If I had known I had succeeded…”

“You could have come back in time to attend the wedding,” she said, completing my sentence, “maybe even help me finish the decorations.”

I hopped onto the unmade bed. “Instead of lying here on this bed, convinced of the utter hopelessness of my situation.”

She joined me on the bed and laid down beside me. “Are you finally willing to tell me what I did after months of your life had been erased?”

Not particularly.

She looked at me with those eyes.

I sighed. Might as well get it over with.

“Because of some items I had taken and kept with me, you were convinced I had intentionally left you. You sold the house and moved to Canterlot. I don’t think you ever set hoof in Ponyville again.”

“Yeah, I guess I’d do that,” she admitted. “Who bought it?”

“Pinkie Pie, believe it or not.”

“Pinkie?!” Lyra giggled. “How could she afford it?”

“Apparently, you were so motivated to get out of town that you gave her a very good deal. The Cakes helped out too, I guess.”

“Funny how things worked out. What about the store downstairs?”

“She turned it into a bakery specializing in pies. Had some very, uh, creative recipes, too.”

Lyra rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “And I had no idea what was happening. It must’ve been incredibly hard on you.”

“Even if I had told you, even if you’d believed me, I’d be back to square one after the next reset.” I gave her a nuzzle. “To be honest, I mostly avoided you once I realized what was happening. I just couldn’t deal with it.”

She rolled upright again, grinning at me. “Look on the bright side: now I do know, and I believe you. So if it happens again, you won’t have to avoid me!”

I looked away from her. “Please, Lyra, don’t even joke about it.”

The room got deathly quiet.

Lyra made her way back onto the floor. She looked at me as if I was a condemned mare.

“They’re not going to use that spell on me again,” I tried to assure her. My words had no effect.

“If… if you had not reversed that spell, would those runes be happening?”

“They are not doing this because of my actions!”

“That isn’t the question I asked.”

Lyra had been told that the ones who had cast that spell on me were also behind those runes, but she had not been told that it was Twilight’s actions that had caused the latter. Even so, I couldn’t deny her point: if I hadn’t reversed the spell, if not for my actions, Twilight would not have done what she did.

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

She moved a bit closer. “As a special agent of The Agency, it was your mission to protect Equestria against the most dangerous of monsters. Each time you did, you ran the risk of paying the ultimate price.” She forced a smile. “Is this really any different? Think of it as your ‘final mission.’”

I couldn’t look at her. “That was before I met you.” I got off on the opposite side of the bed. “We don’t even know that would work.”

“How could it not?” she asked. “The events that caused them to do this would not have happened.”

“They’d still know they did happen, even after they stopped happening.” I shook my head. This temporal stuff sounded like nonsense when expressed in mere words. “You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

“Okay…” Lyra worked her away around to my side of the bed. “Would it hurt to ask them?”

I once more faced her. “You’ll never know I had existed,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t have even been born as far as Equestria was concerned.”

“Then… you’ll just have to remember for both of us.”

It was zap apple season. As I did every year, I made a trip down to Sweet Apple Acres to pick up a few jars, most of which I’d use for zap apple truffles. Lyra accompanied me, as she had nothing else going on at the moment.

We found Applejack in front of the barn, assembling a barrel. “Howdy, Bon Bon! I can guess what yer here for.”

“And you’d be right,” I light-heatedly replied. I’d reserved them two months ago, paying in advance.

The farm pony briefly removed her hat to wipe her brow. “Come this way.”

She took us into the barn and navigated around bales of hay and farm equipment until she reached the entrance to the cellar. She unlocked its door and went inside. The clinking of jars were heard. Applejack came back out with a basket held in her mouth, a basket that held five jars of zap apple jam.

She placed them on the floor in front of me, suddenly giving me an apologetic look. “To be honest, I reckon you might be disappointed with this year’s harvest.”

“What do you mean?”

“The signs were different this year,” she said. “Not as strong as before. Dunno why. The jam isn’t bad, mind you, but it ain’t as good as it ought to be.”

Lyra gave me a certain look; I got the message. I couldn’t put it off forever. A half-year of sky runes had, so far, little impact on our magic, but it was enough to affect an intensely magical crop such as this. How much more time did I have?

“I’d have Twilight investigate this, but, y’know, she’s off in Zebrica on a wild goose chase over those runes.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if the wood was transparent. “Princess Celestia dun think they’re dangerous. If ya ask me, they’re a blessin’. There ain’t been a single monster attack since they showed up.”

I found Discord in the living room playing solitaire. Fluttershy hoofed me a glass of lemonade before leaving the room, giving us our privacy.

I didn’t interrupt him at first, curiosity getting the better of me. The card game seemed inappropriate for him, so orderly, so rules-bound. He picked a card off the deck and placed it right where it ought to go. He picked up another card. There were several places it could go; he had to think it over.

A card, already played in the middle of a column, got up, walked two columns over, then inserted itself as the penultimate card of the destination column.

Curiosity got the better of me yet again. “Aren’t the cards supposed to stay put?”

Discord snapped his talons, and all the cards were encased in a single block of crystal, presumably preventing any cards from taking the initiative while his attention was elsewhere. “What’s the fun in that?” he sincerely asked.

“I’ll, uh… I’ll take your word for it.” I went over to a chair and sat down.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I sighed. I had to get the ball rolling somehow. “I have something to say you might find quite shocking,” I droned.

“That you’re the secret love child of Princess Celestia and King Apollo?”

“What? No! How do you even come up with something like that?!”

The draconequus shrugged. “Spirit of Chaos?”

Don’t get distracted, I told myself. Steeling myself, I began: “Let’s say I agree to have my existence erased, like before. Then Twilight won’t do what she did to break the rules. Will that give this realm a new lease on life?”

“Intriguing proposition,” he said, stroking his goatee thoughtfully. “They’ll want your full cooperation, naturally.”

“It’s negotiable,” I said equitably enough. “I’d like some assurance that new lease won’t be taken away.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“One possibility would be to destroy those vaults—after the spell has run its course.”

He pulled out a notepad and quill from nowhere. “Anything else?”

“There’s also the matter of when this deal would be consummated. So long as there’s sufficient magic left, would I be right in assuming it doesn’t matter when the spell was cast on me?”

“There needs to be sufficient magic remaining at each reset.”

Oh. Right. And the longer I waited, the longer it’d be before a reset undid Twilight’s actions. “The more time I can have, the likelier I’d be to agree.”

He gave me a raised eyebrow. “You may be overestimating your bargaining position.”

“And I really don’t want to do this,” I retorted. “You don’t remember much of it, but I went through Tartarus to get my life back.”

“Literally?”

I groaned. “No, figuratively. You know what I mean. Whatever.” I collected my thoughts. “Can you pass my offer on to… to whomever it needs to be passed on to?”

“I can,” he confirmed. “Don’t expect an immediate response.”

I didn’t know what I feared more: that they would turn me down, condemning Equestria, or accept, condemning myself. On the face of it, Discord should be right: my bargaining position sucked. If they really wanted to keep this “experiment” going, surely they could have found some other way to deal with it. Why not punish just Twilight?

Yet what Celestia had told me had given me hope that my bargaining position was better than it ought to have been. They wanted to “remain” on my good side? This was the way to do it.

Only time would tell.

The appointed hour approached. I put the “closed” sign up on the door and went into the kitchen. As I expected, the Gate opened immediately once they saw me. A familiar lime-green rabbit stood at the threshold.

Beyond stepped aside to let me through. Once I had passed through the Gate, she telekinetically tapped a crystal on the control panel. The violet glow from the Gate’s perimeter went out, yet my kitchen remained visible; the Gate was in view mode.

“You’ve made the right choice,” she told me.

I wasn’t in the mood. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Right,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led me to a conference room on the third floor. As we entered the room, off to the side I saw Discord casually chatting with a lemur. A rather large lemur, somewhat bigger than a pony, as flawlessly symmetrical as Discord was not, every strand of its purple fur perfectly in place. She didn’t have a horn or wings, but from the way the two were standing next to each other, this lemur was the draconequus’ equal.

“I didn’t expect you to be here,” I said to Discord. When he’d finally gotten back to me a few months later, with the terms for this meeting, he hadn’t mentioned he’d be attending as well.

“I’m here primarily as an observer. I should know what’s going on, assuming we come to an agreement.”

On the bright side, that was evidence they weren’t rejecting my offer out of hoof. The events that take place here in the Nexus, and his memory of them, would remain unaffected by any resets.

“You may call me Order,” the lemur said, her voice serene and composed, with a musicality that would put a harp to shame.

I looked askance at them. “Order? Discord? Am I missing something here?” If there was more than one draconequus, there was undoubtably more than one lemur. These names seemed rather… generic.

“Our true names would be unintelligible to you,” Discord replied, not as a snark or in a demeaning fashion, but as a simple statement of fact.

I pondered the implications of that as I took a seat at the table. Order and Discord took adjacent seats on the opposite side.

“I’ll be waiting in the Gate room,” Beyond said. She left the conference room, closing the door behind her.

Order gave me a gentle smile. “Shall we begin?”

18. Protocols

“How did you reverse the Existential Separation spell?”

That was the one question I dreaded the most. I had spent days pondering the answer to that inevitable question. An honest and complete answer may damn the cat realm more than it already was; any other risked the same to Equestria.

Order patiently waited for my response. What had caused me more than one sleepless night was not knowing how much they already knew. Maybe they hadn’t known anything in advance, which I was inclined to believe based on what Discord had mentioned, but could I bet on them not figuring it out in hindsight?

The lemur telegraphed nothing; she might as well had asked me what I wanted for lunch. Celestia could take lessons from her.

Taking too long to answer was probably not good either. Push had come to shove; there really was only one choice: “I used a rune-inscribed crystal provided to me by King Apollo of the cat realm. It was activated when I zapped myself with a weapon we call a ‘time stunner.’ I no longer have the crystal; it was consumed in the performance of its task.”

The crystal in question suddenly appeared on the table in front of me. “It was not consumed,” Order said, “though you could be forgiven for believing otherwise.”

I stared at it. It sure looked like that crystal. Why hadn’t it been in my saddlebag, if it wasn’t consumed. How did they get it? “I-I don’t understand.”

“When your realm had finished reintegrating your existence, the crystal remained behind in Nexus time. It became inaccessible to you.”

“We immediately sensed something had happened, of course,” Discord continued, “and I was sent to investigate. I found the crystal and secured it.”

It was becoming all too clear I had made the right choice. “You must’ve found me too, and yet you left me alone.”

“Under my instructions,” Order said.

My head was spinning by this point. “May I ask why?”

“Not at this time.”

I was getting rather tired of that response to my questions. “Did you know the cats had created that crystal?”

“Not specifically.”

“Try not at all,” Discord chortled. “Old catnip-breath pulled one over on us. And passing it on to this pony for use in a different realm?” He shifted his gaze to Order. “No one hypothesized that.”

The lemur quietly sighed. “King Apollo has proven surprisingly effective at hiding his research. However, this outcome, startling as it may be, does not invalidate the protocols that are in place.”

“Oh, just admit it: a little chaos can yield fascinating data.”

Order gave him a smug look. “The protocols do specify the use of chaotic lifeforms.”

“Only after fierce lobbying! Why, the poison joke alone—”

“Ahem.”

They both looked at me. As interesting as this battle between order and chaos might be, I doubted they were going to resolve it here and now. “Are you going to punish them—the cats, I mean?”

“The protocols for the cat realm have not changed and shall not change due to this incident,” Order said serenely. “You need not burden yourself with that concern.”

“You’re going to do nothing about it,” I flatly stated.

“That is correct.”

Was it really that surprising? They had done nothing to stop me from accessing and using those time stunners, and they had done nothing to stop Twilight from doing what she did nor whatever it was she was currently doing. The only issue, it seemed, was that they had been caught off guard, not that it had happened.

“And what about the protocols for my realm?”

“That is the point of this meeting, is it not?” Order clasped her hands together. “Recent events have provided sufficient rationale to reconsider the recent protocol changes. Your willingness to once more undergo existential separation both adds to that rationale and offers an efficient means to restore the original protocols. All that remains is to finalize the details.”

“Details like what?” The road to Tartarus was paved with details.

“You’ve expressed a desire for the vaults of forbidden knowledge and artifacts to be destroyed. That is an acceptable protocol modification; at this point, most of their value has been obtained.”

That’s a promising start.

“You’ve also expressed a desire to delay existential separation for as long as possible. No technical reason exists to deny that, nor does it violate protocols. A delay of up to five years is feasible.”

Even better.

“You may choose one.”

Wait, what? “One?”

“That is correct.”

“Why only one?”

“Why not only one?”

There were many answers I could give. There was no point in offering any of them. The bottom line was: because they could. “Do I have to choose now?”

“You have five days. You may contact Discord once you have decided.”

The draconequus gave me a smile. “Would you like a coin to flip?”

“Our first big vacation together,” I said.

Lyra took the framed photo of us in Fillydelphia and put it into the now full box. The box closed under her magic. “Without you, Twilight won’t know about those vaults. You don’t have to sacrifice our remaining time together.”

I started to fetch another box, then stopped; I just couldn’t do any more packing. “For how long?” I asked, shaking my head. “So long as they exist, the risk is there. Just because it might take decades, or even centuries, doesn’t make the outcome any better.”

“Something else might happen that crosses the line, condemning us anyway,” Lyra argued.

I gave her a stern look. “Which would be true regardless of whether those vaults are destroyed,” I pointed out. “Lowered risk is lowered risk.”

“Yet you haven’t told Discord yet.”

“I’m procrastinating,” I admitted, lowering my head. “So maybe I am hoping for a miracle.” My voice became a near whisper. “Doesn’t mean I expect one to happen.”

The Gate opened in our living room. “The boxes are over there,” I told Beyond, pointing at them with a hoof.

Lyra moved towards the open portal, eyes full of wonder.

Beyond did not move aside. “You must not pass through,” the rabbit told her, whiskers twitching. “The resets to come would cause you great harm if you did.”

The mint-green unicorn did not back off.

“Lyra, don’t. She’s not just saying that. Even Discord is somewhat bothered by it.”

“Okay, okay… I get the message,” she grumbled, stepping to the side. “Doesn’t mean I can’t look, right?”

Beyond hopped through. “You may look all you want.” She spotted the boxes and began levitating the closest one. “You won’t remember after a reset undoes these events.”

Which was why, when all was said and done, that I was allowed to have Lyra present. I didn’t want to have secrets between us for the few days I had left with her.

“So why won’t you be harmed?” Lyra asked. “Are rabbits immune?”

The first box passed through the Gate and onto the floor of the Gate room. “No mortal creature is immune,” she flatly said. “I simply won’t be here when the resets happen.”

Or, to be more precise, she’d be on Nexus time, just like I would be during the resets.

“Well… what if I weren’t here either?” Lyra proposed. “What if I was over there until the resets were all done?”

The second box paused in mid-air as Beyond gave the unicorn her full attention. “My existence is not interwoven with this realm; yours is. Anything that prevents you from fully participating in these resets will cause you great harm.”

I knew where Lyra was going next, and I wasn’t going to hear it. “Drop it, Lyra. You get to live your life, so live it.” I looked away. “It’ll be real easy, once you have never met me.”

She stamped a hoof. “I don’t want to have never met you!”

Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe I should have snuck away, sparing her this torment. “We can’t always have what we want.”

The fifth day had arrived.

We were all gathered in our living room, the final moments of my existence as I knew it coming to an end. Above me, on the ceiling, were the runes of what I now knew was the Existential Separation spell. No crystals this time; I had no intention of running away.

Princess Celestia looked upon me with sad eyes. “I truly wish I could say that centuries from now, you’ll be remembered as a hero, mentioned in the same breath as Commander Hurricane.”

Discord put a lion paw on the alicorn’s withers. “I shall remember, even if I must keep it to myself. And I shall see to it personally that the terms of the agreement are carried out.”

“I’ll be happy enough if you can keep Lyra away from these runes,” I said, glaring at the unicorn in question.

Lyra stuck her tongue out at me.

Celestia chuckled. “I shall do my best.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Let’s get this over with,” I said loudly.

The runes began to glow an unpleasant visceral violet.

Beyond was powering the runes, just like the first time, from Nexus time. The runes grew steadily brighter and the room about me began to waver, like ripples across the fabric of reality. Celestia, Discord, and Lyra were motionless, time having ceased to flow for them. As before, everything around me was fading to gray, as color, brightness and darkness were washed away by swirling waves of unreality.

It was a lot less scarier this second time around, now that I knew what to expect. Not being magically frozen in place helped too. The last thing I saw before passing out was a disembodied glowing horn sprouting a rabbit body.

A hoof shook me awake.

“What are you doing on the floor?” a familiar voice demanded.

I scrambled to my hooves and hurriedly scanned my surroundings.

An worried mint green unicorn looked at me.

“L-Lyra?”

“Where have you been for the past two days? You missed the deadline! Did you chi—uh, change your mind?”

Nopony else was present. I glanced at the ceiling, and as expected there was nothing there. Here we go again. This time, however, I knew exactly what was going on—and so did Lyra, even if she didn’t know it yet.

I calmly looked her in the eyes. “I didn’t miss the deadline.”

“But it was yesterday and you’re still…” Comprehension dawned. “The first reset… it already happened.”

“Bright and early yesterday morning,” I confirmed. “You were there, as were Discord and Princess Celestia.”

“And… they don’t remember either?”

I shook my head.

“Wow.” Lyra began meandering about the living room as she waxed philosophical. “This is so weird, to know that something happened yet have a completely different set of memories. And it’ll happen again tonight! Whatever I do today, I’ll remember something completely different tomorrow.” She turned to me, excited. “We can do whatever we want, and it doesn’t matter!”

I had to admit that kind of caught me off guard. Lyra was quite right, that it didn’t matter what we did. I never took advantage of that before, certainly not for fun, because I was utterly focused on reversing the spell and not a whole lot of time in which to do it.

“So what did you have in mind?”

A hoof shook me awake.

“You could have told me if you changed your mind, instead of running off like that.”

I opened my eyes to a somewhat annoyed Lyra. “I didn’t change my mind,” I retorted, slightly annoyed myself. Unfortunately, I was going to go through this every morning, at least until a reset reached beyond Cranky and Mathilda’s wedding.

Then it would get worse.

“Two resets have happened.” I hopped off the couch and on to the floor, then I removed my saddlebags and put them back on the couch.

Lyra looked at me quizzically. “Aren’t all your possessions in the Nexus?”

“Not the ones I acquired yesterday—my yesterday,” I singsonged, giving her a teasing smile.

“Oh, now I’ve got to see this.”

Her horn lit up, opening the saddlebag and pulling out a framed photograph. Her jaw nearly fell off once she got a look at it. “Yeah, that happened,” she read aloud. She inspected the words more closely. “I’m pretty sure that’s my horn writing.”

“Oh, it is,” I said.

The photo was of Lyra, grinning evilly at the camera, her mane and tail completely shaved. I was standing next to her, expressing my embarrassment with a hoof to my head.

“You were being all philosophical about the resets,” I explained, “and decided to play a joke on the post-reset version of yourself.”

She scrunched her muzzle. “Heh. Guess I should skip the philosophizing, then.” She put the photo back in the saddlebag. “I can’t keep that, I suppose.”

“Not past tonight, anyway,” I said, shrugging. “Then nopony will have it.”

“That kinda sucks… that and having hard proof this is actually happening.”

“Philosophy skipping, remember?”

“Oh, yeah…” She locked her gaze on me. “How come you weren’t shaved in that photograph?”

“Because the resets don’t affect me. I’d still be shaved.”

“Oh.”

We spent most of the day sitting on our favorite park benches. Lyra had blown off a music class she taught; it’d upset quite a few ponies, but what difference did that make? Nor did I bother to open my store; I doubted anypony got upset over that.

My store wasn’t what it used to be, anyway.

After the sun had set, I went, alone, to my confectionary kitchen. Most of the equipment was gone, having been stored somewhere in the Nexus. Never again would I make candy in this realm.

I stomped three times, the standard signal to open the portal; nothing could be heard while it was in view mode. The Gate promptly opened. I got out the photo of Lyra and presented it to Beyond. “Add this to my belongings, please.”

The rabbit smiled at me. “No problem.” The photo floated across the threshold into the Gate room. “Same time tomorrow?”

“I guess,” I said noncommittally. I didn’t have to touch bases with them; it simply beat carrying all my worldly possessions in my saddlebags across all the resets.

Beyond’s horn glowed, and the Gate closed.

A hoof shook me awake.

“Where have you been! And what happened to your kitchen downstairs!!”

I gave her a warm smile, which only confused her even more. I had another day with Lyra to look forward to.

19. Walking Over My Grave

I woke up to shafts of light beaming through the window. Carefully, I got out from under the covers, stood at the edge of the bed, and looked down. The thin layer of dust coating the floor was completely undisturbed, just as I had expected; the hoof prints I’d left behind after I had undid the spell were finally gone.

I hopped down to the stone floor and went to the window. My heart filled with joy when I saw the rune-free sky.

That last reset, the twelfth, had wiped out the remaining months and then some to that fateful day. I had not been there to show Twilight those vaults, so Twilight had not experimented with the forbidden knowledge, and therefore the protocols had not changed.

It also meant Lyra no longer had any knowledge of what had happened to me. As far as she was concerned, I had mysteriously vanished two years ago, along with my personal possessions and a good chunk of my kitchen downstairs.

Almost certainly she had left Ponyville a long time ago. That she had waited for me after the previous reset, not knowing how long it’d be before I returned, was miracle enough. Several resets ago, I’d gone back to spending the night in the ancient castle, so as to avoid the risk of waking up in somepony else’s home.

The Gate opened, as it had done so every morning since I’d moved back here. As had become my morning ritual, I passed through into the Gate room to pick up my saddlebags already provisioned with food and water. I suddenly stopped. Staring at me with three sets of eyes was a large dog—well, almost a puppy, really. I guess there are more where you come from, Cerberus.

An unusually large crow swooped in to a hover in front of the three-headed dog. “Stay,” he said. All three heads whined a bit, but the dog stayed put, his tail wagging furiously.

Satisfied his command was being obeyed, the crow turned around to face me. “He might lick you to death, but he’s otherwise harmless.”

I was more intrigued by the crow. Did every species have a sapient version in some realm? It was sure starting to look that way. “We’ve got one too,” I replied. “A guard dog by the name of Cerberus.” Quite playful too, so long as you weren’t an inmate. I pointed at the dog. “What his name?”

“That’s for his new masters to decide,” Beyond said from the console. “We’re sending him to the corvid realm, right after you return to your own. Their current guard dog is getting on in years.”

You mean Cerberus isn’t immortal? There had always been a Cerberus guarding the entrance to Tartarus. I never knew the current Cerberus was just the latest in a long line of guard dogs. The immortal princesses had kept that detail to themselves.

Beyond guessed what I was thinking. “I believe your current guard dog was delivered to your realm about two-and-a-half centuries ago. It’ll be at least another century before we deliver another.”

“Is their mortality supposed to be one of those secrets?” I asked.

“Nope. That decision was purely Celestia’s to make.”

Huh. Well, there was nothing wrong about that choice. Tartarus would seem more forbidding if its guardian was believed to be immortal, possessing untold millennia of experience. I was just surprised that even us agents had been kept in the dark.

I returned to the crow. “You’re a corvid too, aren’t you?” The bird nodded. “Are you making the delivery personally?”

“Huh?” He was caught off-guard by the very suggestion. “No, no, I’ve been acclimating him to corvids for the past few weeks, that’s all.” He gave a nervous laugh. “It’s not like anybird remembers who I am, after all.”

Yeah. I can imagine. Was anyone born here, or were they all like me?

I was more interested in getting on with my day than in getting this bird’s life story; I’d have way too much time to do that later on, after another week or so. “Could you move the Gate to Ponyville?” I asked Beyond.

“Will do,” she replied as she twiddled some crystalline knobs.

It wasn’t the first time I’d made that request; it beat taking the journey through the Everfree. Seconds later, the view through the Gate shifted to the edge of the forest, the town clearly visible beyond the trees.

I retrieved my saddlebags from where they rested against a wall and put them on, and trotted over to the Gate. The perimeter started to glow violet. “I’ll see you tonight at the usual time. I may be heading back to the old castle early, depending on what I find.”

“No problem. I’ll check both places,” the rabbit replied.

“Thanks.” I went through the Gate and into the forest.

I stood there for a moment, examining the town. Nothing seemed different at first glance, apart from the skies lacking runes. One building would be different, as I knew all too well, and that would be my first destination.

As it was still rather early, I didn’t encounter many ponies on the way to my old home, and the few I did hadn’t recognized me—nor I them, really. Without the inevitable questions slowing me down, it wasn’t long before I was standing in front of my old candy store.

Except it wasn’t a candy store.

Not that I expected it to be, of course, since I knew how Lyra had reacted the first time around, but I was sort of expecting it to be Pinkie’s pie bakery.

It wasn’t that either.

It was a music store.

What had gone differently? I wondered. Several theories came to mind. Lyra probably sold the place much sooner than in that other alternate history, maybe too soon for Pinkie to be ready or able to buy it. A kitchen devoid of appliances wouldn’t have helped either; it’d increase the investment needed to convert it into a bakery.

It made me a bit sad. That was silly, of course. I knew full well that once my existential separation had completed, any opportunity she may have had to setup business here would have vanished.

“How do I find you, Lyra,” I quietly muttered to the realm at large. I could ask the proprietor of this establishment, but there wasn’t much reason to believe Lyra would have told her plans to a stranger. My best bet was still Pinkie Pie.

So off to Sugarcube Corner I went. Upon arriving, I found Pinkie sitting with the other Element Bearers—including Twilight.

Before I could remind myself that this Twilight wasn’t obsessed with the forbidden knowledge, Pinkie had noticed a new customer had entered and happily bounced towards me—then stopped dead in her tracks.

“Bon Bon?!”

Waving a nervous hoof, I meekly replied, “Hi?”

That caught the attention of the others, naturally, and they all gathered around me.

“How could you do that to Lyra?” Rarity demanded.

Ugh. Here we go. It was such a pointless conversation, too. Just a few more resets, and they would have never met me. Nopony would then be hurt by my disappearance.

Well, nopony but my parents, but that wasn’t a problem yet. Ponies with living family members rarely became Agents.

“It’s a very long and complicated story,” I punted, to noponies’ satisfaction. “You wouldn’t happen to know where she is?”

Rarity looked at me like a stain on her dress. “I can say with total confidence that she would not want us to tell you.”

“Sounds about right,” I muttered as I turned around to leave. Odds were she was in Canterlot, not that there was much I could do about it today.

Twilight suddenly teleported in front of me. “Just wait a second,” she told me. “You vanished without a trace two years ago, along with your possessions and even most of your kitchen. Lyra might have assumed the worst from you, but I still tried to find you. I couldn’t even figure out how you transported those appliances out of Ponyville.” She gave me a firm, if not unkind, look. “What happened?”

I sighed, avoiding her eyes. It was still a pointless waste of time. “Please believe me, Twilight. I didn’t set out to hurt anypony, least of all Lyra, and there’s really no point in me giving an explanation. It wouldn’t change anything.”

Twilight didn’t budge. None of the others were buying it either… well, Rarity and Rainbow Dash certainly weren’t. “I’d still like an explanation,” she firmly stated.

I met her eyes. “Is that a royal command?”

Twilight opened, then closed her mouth. She tried again: “No. Neither would I throw you into a dungeon for telling the truth.”

“Twi, she is telling the truth.” Applejack moved towards her. “Maybe we should let her be.”

Twilight looked back and forth between me and Applejack. She eventually stepped aside.

“Thank you,” I perfunctorily said as I walked past her to the door.

I woke up to… well, nothing. The gray void of a reset-in-progress surrounded me. It finally happened, just as I was warned: so much of history was being rewritten that it couldn’t finish before I woke up. That might turn out to be a problem; it certainly was an inconvenience.

After getting up on my hooves, I looked around and spotted the open Gate. While I had to be in my realm as each reset started, I didn’t have to remain until it finished. I passed through the portal and into the Gate room. As usual, Beyond was at the controls. “How long before the reset completes?” I asked her.

“A few more minutes, I’d say.”

That wasn’t so bad. It was going to get worse, of course. With only four more resets left to go, each would erase exponentially larger chunks of my existence. Once this one completed, the sixteenth, Lyra would have never met me.

It was a relief, to be honest. Her suffering had ended, and I was now a nopony to Twilight and her friends; indeed, to all of Ponyville. I hadn’t returned there since my encounter with them; now I had no reason to ever do so.

Now that the thread of my existence had been completely separated from Lyra’s, I figured that future resets should no longer rewrite her past. It was time to track her down and find out what her life was like sans me. I intended to look her up after each reset, to see her life evolve as the next two decades flashed by.

The reset completed after only a few minutes, as predicted. “Ponyville?” the rabbit asked.

I shook my head. “Canterlot. That’s where she’ll be. I hope.”

Beyond began turning knobs. “How do you expect to find her in only a few hours?”

Good question. There was one pony I could think of who would have kept track of her, as she does with all graduates of her school; better yet, she would be quite interested in finding out what had happened to me fourteen years ago. “Move the Gate to the castle. I’ll guide you.”

Under her experienced paws, it didn’t take long for a conference room adjoining the throne room to come into view. As I had expected, Celestia was there with two aides, going over the business for the day.

Beyond looked at me with raised eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“What’s the worst that can happen? She throws me in a dungeon? You can find me during the reset, right?”

“Suit yourself.” She flipped a switch. “And yes, you’d be trivial to find in the void.”

I walked over to the Gate and stood in front of it. “Open it.”

“Just be aware I’m doing this only because there are still resets to come, so don’t get used to it.”

“I hear you.”

Beyond tapped a crystal. Celestia immediately jerked her head towards the open portal, her eyes going wide upon seeing me. She quickly turned her attention to her aides, who were gaping at me, flabbergasted. “Leave. Now. Do not mention this to anypony.” When they failed to move, unable to take their eyes off of the portal, she unceremoniously teleported them out of the room.

I crossed the threshold, saying two words: “Existential separation.”

The princess slowly nodded. “I suspected as much. I’m truly sorry; I must have failed if this has happened to you.”

“Please, don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s complicated, it’s a long story and you won’t remember it anyway, but this time it was voluntary. You were even there when the spell was cast. In exchange, the forbidden knowledge and weapons sequestered in those hidden vaults in the old castle will be destroyed once my separation is complete.”

“You know about that?” she gasped. Celestia glanced at the still-open portal. “There are now many things you no doubt know.”

“There are some things I don’t know, and that’s why I’m here. I want to track down a former student of your school, Lyra Heartstrings.”

“That won’t be a problem: she’s performing this afternoon with the Canterlot Symphony Orchestra. May I ask why?”

It felt like walking over my grave to answer. “After The Agency was shut down, Lyra and I had found each other, and we’ve been happily living together for the past… for five years in Ponyville.” My head lowered. “She no longer remembers me, of course.”

“Neither shall I after the next reset, I imagine.”

I silently nodded confirmation.

The princess gazed at me with a warm smile. “You’ve come a long way from the young mare who had lost her parents, seeking meaning in her life. I have little doubt you went on to accomplish much that has ceased to have happened.”

She got up and approached the Gate, but did not pass through. “I’ve never had the nerve to cross over; the side-effects, I’m told, can be quite bothersome, even to one such as myself.” She turned away and stepped towards me with resolve. “Return here at three o’clock. You shall see Lyra perform and meet her backstage.”

20. Second Chances

Seven years had passed since the spell had been cast, but Lyra bore them well. It was still weird to see her clearly older, while only days had passed for myself, and her mane had never been done up that fancily before. Her music, however, had only benefitted from the added experience. I had always wondered if moving to Ponyville to be with me had held her back. She denied it, naturally, but seeing her here caused those thoughts to resurface.

Princess Celestia had granted her an audience. They were in a room backstage, while I waited in a different room. A royal guard would eventually come around to fetch me.

The wait was killing me.

I knew she wouldn’t know me, but some part of me refused to accept that, insisted that somehow she’d recognize me or, at the very least, the chemistry we had would somehow make its presence felt.

The door opened and a guard poked his head in. “Your presence is requested, Sweetie Drops.”

This is it. I got up and followed him, praying that the butterflies didn’t fly off with my stomach. It was a battle that was being lost foot by foot as we walked.

I turned a corner and there she was, standing next to the princess. Now that I was this close to her, the added years were a bit more evident: the beginnings of a wrinkle or two, a few strands of gray hair, a few extra pounds, a more sedate attitude. She still looked wonderful.

Her eyes fell on me, and with a practiced smile she approached me. “I’m honored to meet a mare who has served Equestria as you have, especially one who is a fan of my music.”

The butterflies departed, dropping my stomach off a cliff. I knew that smile, that tone of voice. I was just another anonymous fan to her. There was no recognition.

A program guide floated off a nearby table, along with a quill. With her magic she wrote something on it, then sent it over to me. I plucked it out of the air. I read it. It was a standard-issue, meaningless autograph: Bon Bon, we can always use heroes like yourself. Lyra Heartstrings.

I looked up and managed to croak, “Thank you.”

This Celestia never knew me by that name, but I had wanted Lyra to hear the name she had known me by—not that it made the slightest difference.

“I wish I could chat longer, but I’m afraid I must be off.” The mint green unicorn started to make her way around me. “I have to help my son prepare for a school play.”

I nearly collapsed right then and there.

A son?

I watched what once was my best friend turn the corner, then looked desperately at Celestia.

“She’s been married to Posh Pants,” she softly explained, “the younger brother of Fancy Pants, for almost eleven years. They have a colt and a filly.”

I awoke to the gray void.

I opened my eyes just long enough to spot the Gate, then closed them again.

I was fine just where I was.

Intellectually, I had known Lyra would find somepony else with whom to share her life.

That wasn’t the same as having it shoved in my face.

Celestia had apologized for not mentioning it beforehoof, but she hadn’t thought the subject would come up.

Maybe it did me a favor. I had lost her, irretrievably, and the sooner I accepted that and moved on, the better off I’d be.

I had no idea what I’d do, once the reset finished. I’d lost any interest in following Lyra’s life. There was no reason to go back to Ponyville. Nopony in Canterlot would know me either.

This time I’d have disappeared while still living in my home town of Fillydelphia, living my dream of apprenticing under Caramel Dreams, a dream that had turned hollow with the tragic train accident that had claimed my parents’ lives a year earlier. There didn’t seem any point of going there either; over two decades would have passed, not to mention my parents would still be gone.

And after the next reset? I would have been about twelve years old. It’s bad enough they’d have to suffer inexplicably losing me, but what if that changed their future, enough so as to avoid taking that train? They might still be alive—quite old, but alive.

That’s all I needed: proof that I was the cause, however tenuously, of their early demise.

No. I never had Lyra. I never had parents. That is what existential separation meant.

I needed to put behind me that which did not exist.

I got up and passed through the Gate. Today I would see about getting a new candy store going; after all, I had not been separated from my cutie mark.

I hung the vacation photograph from Fillydelphia in my new kitchen; that much I would allow myself. That just left all the other boxes to unpack. The appliances had already been installed.

It was much like my old place in Ponyville. Upstairs was my home, which was on top of the store downstairs. All that really differed was the number of ponies living under the same roof—and the lack of ordinary three-dimensional space outside.

The precisely sequenced footsteps of lemur paws approached. I turned around to see Order entering the kitchen.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” she said. “I thought I would check up on you, to see how you’re doing.” Her eyes swept the room, her displeasure at the mess quite evident.

“Sorry about the mess. I just started unpacking.”

“Allow me,” she said, looking at me for permission.

“Knock yourself out.” I was curious to see what would happen. At least she asked for permission, unlike how a certain draconequus behaved.

Order reared up on her hind legs and snapped her fingers.

The kitchen instantly transformed. The boxes were empty, collapsed, and neatly stacked on a counter. The appliances were moved just enough to position them with mathematical precision, their sides perfectly aligned with adjacent walls, counters, and other appliances, either parallel to or at right angles. They were also sparkling clean, as if dismantled, scrubbed, polished, and reassembled.

I went over to a drawer and opened it. It held the utensils, perfectly arranged. I opened several cupboards; they were full of diverse ingredients, none of them mine. I shot the lemur a questioning look.

“Consider it a housewarming gift,” she said with a placid smile.

I certainly couldn’t complain about the results. Maybe she’d be generous with information as well.

“Look, I know there’s still one reset left to go, but I was wondering if I could finally get some answers to some questions.”

“You are certainly permitted to ask, and I am not so inflexible as to refuse the offering of answers.”

Not that I’d had a lot of experience with these “Spirit of Order” lemurs, but that did kind of surprise me. Perhaps it shouldn’t; it wasn’t as if Discord was all chaos all the time, incapable of an orderly thought or action.

I’d start with the big one: “Why me? Why was I selected?”

Order got comfortable on her haunches. “You had knowledge and experience with weapons based on forbidden knowledge. Your princess wisely terminated her offending Agency, quickly and efficiently, and thus she was able to negotiate protection for former agents such as yourself, in exchange for other considerations.”

“Such as the return of a ‘reformed’ Discord?”

She nodded. “Very good.”

“Yet I got zapped by that spell anyway.”

“That protection was subject to conditions. We sent the bugbear as a test.” A flawless frown graced her muzzle. “Unfortunately, you did not pass.”

So Discord had told me, I thought with growing anger. What was I supposed to have done? “Because I failed to capture it again?”

Order sadly shook her head. “Because you did anything at all. You should have minded your own business. You should not have gone back into Special Agent mode. Did not Celestia make herself clear?”

I gaped at the lemur in disbelief. “It was after me!”

“The Element Bearers had the situation under control, did they not?”

“Well, sorta, but…”

It seemed more or less evenly matched, but even at the time I thought they would eventually win. Because the monsters always lost.

“Why do the monsters always lose, no matter how overpowered they are?”

The lemur replied with an enigmatic smile. “We can continue this conversation later, perhaps after you have confections for me to sample.”

She once more snapped her fingers and teleported away.

I returned to the Gate room, perhaps for the last time. The Gate was in view mode, positioned within the library of Twilight’s castle. The alicorn herself was there, apparently giving a magic test to a unicorn filly, a filly I didn’t recognize.

Well, of course I wouldn’t! Almost thirty years has gone by. Twilight hadn’t aged at all; she might have been a bit taller, but that was it.

A unicorn mare nuzzled the filly, offering encouragement. She had a light, grayish violet coat and a golden blonde mane; if I knew her at all, it would’ve been as a filly.

Then an old pegasus mare joined her.

Those eyes.

It had to be Derpy, which meant the mother was Dinky, and the foal…

Beyond took notice of me. “Just another minute.”

I got closer for a better view. Unfortunately, no sound could be heard in view mode. “What’s going on?”

“Well, as far as I can tell, Twilight has taken on Dinky’s filly as her personal student.”

Dinky’s filly. It seemed like only yesterday that she herself had been a filly, enjoying my candied alfalfa. My life may have been almost completely erased, but their lives got to continue.

“Are you in a rush to get back?”

“No… no, I’d like to watch for a little while.”

One of the things I had learned was that they took advantage of these resets to see how the future would progress. Once the existential separation completed, time would roll back to the instant the spell had been cast, just as it had when I’d used the crystal to undo the spell.

And once it had completed, there’d be left just one bit of unfinished business.

Discord studied the door to the vault as he stroked his goatee.

“We could visit Celestia and tell her the good news,” I pointed out.

“Bah!” he sneered. “What’s the fun in that?”

I figured Discord would be Discord and decided to change the subject. “Look, while you’re thinking that over, there’s something I’d like to know.”

His attention remained on the door, which I took as permission to continue. “When you turned Ponyville into a chaotic wonderland, and Twilight and the others fought you, you deliberately let them ‘defeat’ you and supposedly turn you back to stone, right?"

His mismatched eyes continued scrutinizing the door. “Yes, yes…”

“Well, why did you wait so long before letting yourself get ‘reformed?’ That was the point of Celestia’s deal, right?”

He finished tapping on the door, with a talon on numerous random locations, before replying. “I was occupied elsewhere—the cat realm, actually. Once my services there were no longer required, I was free to try out Celestia’s idea and be ‘reformed’ by Fluttershy.” He looked wistful. “No idea it would turn out the way it did, honestly.”

Discord stepped back from the door. “I think I’ll keep it simple this time.” He thrust out his lion paw and slammed it into the door. It fell over, hitting the floor with a thud, exposing the stash of forbidden weapons.

No alarm, no flashing lights. Discord strolled inside; I followed, somewhat hesitantly. I guess we wait for something to happen. The seconds ticked by…

“Discord, what is the meaning of this!”

I spun around. A thoroughly unhappy Princess Celestia was standing before us.

The alicorn’s eyes fell on me. There was no recognition, only confusion. “Why did you bring this pony here? That’s a violation of your own protocols!”

Discord walked over and put a paw on the baffled princess. “The meaning, my dear Celestia, is that the protocols have changed.”

“Ch-changed?”

I stepped forward. “The contents of this vault, and the two others like it, shall be destroyed. They shall no longer pose a threat to Equestria’s future.”

Celestia’s gaze locked on to me. “Who are you?”

I smiled at my former princess. “A pony who does not exist.”

After the melted sugar had turned golden brown, I switched off the heat and poured in the peanuts, stirring until they were evenly distributed. Before it could cool too much and turn solid, I poured it into a large tray and spread it out to an even thickness with a spatula. All that remained was to let it cool off, then shatter it with a hammer.

My heart wasn’t in it.

Order had come back to continue our conversation. My separation was now complete and irreversible; no longer was I to be denied answers.

The monsters always lost because their purpose was not to “win.” They were there to both test and drive the development of the realm’s dominant sapient species. The real sin of The Agency, apart from relying on forbidden magics, was that it had tilted the playing field so much in our favor, that it had rendered the monsters ineffectual.

Other topics were covered too. Why populate the Nexus via kidnapping? It turned out that conception was impossible here. It wasn’t healthy for growing and developing creatures, period.

It was considered a necessary evil. They did have an involved process for identifying suitable candidates, made all the more complicated by the requirement that, with the exception of their rulers, the realms remained ignorant of the Nexus. Resets helped here, as well; as one pony was being separated, others could be approached without consequences.

Some answers were still denied. I still didn’t know who or what were above the lemurs and draconequi, who created the Nexus and the numerous realms, or what they had hoped to achieve by all this. I supposed I could live with that. It’s not as if I knew answers to questions like that back when I had a life in Equestria.

I was offered the opportunity to be a field agent, much like Beyond, though not in Equestria; field agents rarely operated in their realm of origin.

There was no pressure to accept. The Nexus needed a functioning economy as well, and I could spend the rest of my life making and selling confections. Or even split my time between the two. This really wasn’t a bad place to be, if you ignored how you wound up here. I guessed it was their way of making up for it.

Regardless, my heart wasn’t in that either. Fighting them, managing them, it didn’t matter; I was done with monsters.

I looked again at the photo of me and Lyra. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” I said to myself. Maybe I should have kept that buried in the back of a closet.

I hadn’t felt this empty inside since my parents had passed away.

Yet it reminded me of the only good thing to have come out of this: Equestria had a future. Lyra had a future. I had even caught a glimpse of it.

Sure, there was always the possibility of something else going disastrously wrong, but I had faith Celestia would avoid that. I was even allowed to give her the executive summary of what had happened, so that she could adjust Twilight’s guidance accordingly.

There was no point in running the same experiment twice, after all.

And that gave me an idea, an idea for something that would give me new meaning: If I had managed to give my own realm a second chance, what about others?

I stepped through the Gate and into the royal bedchambers. A majestic lion gazed upon me with sad eyes, his head dipping.

“So it doesn’t work.”

I got the crystal out of a saddlebag and tossed it to King Apollo. He caught it with his magic. “Actually, it works splendidly,” I corrected him. “I voluntarily underwent existential separation afterwards. It’s a long story.”

I located a cushion and set myself down upon it, and I gave the bewildered monarch a smile.

“Let’s talk about second chances.”