The inside of Time Turner's shop felt more like a museum of horology than a store. Almost every timekeeping device known to ponykind was represented, from sundials to hourglasses to the most precise clockwork on the market. There was even a bleeding-edge experimental electromantic array of light-evoking dwoemers in storage, but it was far too delicate for the shop floor. Only one piece that needed winding was wound; the winding would've eaten most of Turner's day and the ticking would've been deafening.
Still, he didn't even need that one to know it was precisely 3:47:12 PM when the door opened with a merry little jingle. Turner welcomed the customer reflexively. "Hello, and welcome to Minute Details! Say 'minnit' or 'my newt,' you're right either way. How can I—" He cut himself off once he registered just who had come through the door, a mauve unicorn barely into marehood, whose body still hadn't quite grown into her legs. "Dinky! Well, this is a pleasant surprise. What brings you here?"
His cheer was met with utmost severity. "I need your help, Doctor."
Turner's eyebrows rose. "My, my, so formal. What happened to 'Uncle Timey-Wimey'?"
A furrowed brow briefly broke through Dinky's persistent flat look. "I haven't called you that in years."
Turner rolled his eyes, but still smiled. Teenagers. Hungry for an adulthood when they'd long for their youth. "Well then, Miss Doo," he said in his most professional voice, "what can this humble tinkerer do for Princess Twilight's personal student? A timepiece suitable for Her Highness's standards of punctuality?"
Dinky shook her head. "No."
Turner thought for a moment, tapping his chin with a forehoof. "Something in need of repair, then?"
"No."
He raised an eyebrow. "I can't imagine you're here for scientific consultation. Not when you can just ask Twilight."
"You know why I'm here, Doctor," said Dinky.
After a moment, Turner shook his head. "Come now, Dinky. You've known me most of your life. You know those rumors are all nonsense."
"You do have a blue box in your basement."
Turner sighed. "Yes, a constabulary call box from Trottingham, as you well know. Without the city's leyline network, its only uses are sentimental value and giving imaginative little fillies a place to play." He gave a sad smile. "I am happy to see you held onto your imagination, but I'm afraid you're letting it get the better of you."
"So you won't help me?"
"I can't help you, Dinky. Not if you want to travel through time."
She shrugged and turned towards the door. "Then I'll just have to settle for Plan B."
Turner didn't smile when he rolled his eyes this time. "I suppose this is the part where I ask what Plan B is?"
Dinky looked back at him over her withers. "Starlight Glimmer's modified time spell."
Turner snorted. "Dinky, if you're going to bluff, you need to make it believable."
She turned back to face him fully, glaring as she did so. "I'm not bluffing."
"Yes you are. Starlight would never teach anypony that spell. It's far too dangerous."
"What's my talent, Doctor?"
Turner couldn't help but glance at her flank and the sputtering wand that marked it. "Countermagic."
Dinky nodded. "In order to know how to take magic apart, I have an intuitive sense of how it comes together. It took years to reverse engineer that spell from Star Swirl's writings and Princess Twilight's descriptions of her battle with Starlight, but I've done it. I know the risks. That's why I came to you first." She turned towards the door again. "But since you can't help me, I have no other options."
"You devious little—" Turner bit his tongue, then took a deep breath. "Why are you doing this, Dinky?"
She didn't look back at him this time. "You know why."
Turner sighed. "It's been ten years. You need to move on."
"I'm doing this so I can move on!" Dinky whirled back, stomping her way closer. "I never got to say goodbye, Doctor. The last time I saw her, I thought I'd be seeing her again that evening. I'm not going to change the timeline. I just want to see my mother again."
Turner closed his eyes and gave a frustrated whicker. "Let me close up the shop." He kept talking as he moved about the room. "I am going to help you, not because you're holding the stability of time and space for ransom, but in memory of your mother." He locked the shop's door and turned to Dinky, fixing a glare at her that made her breath catch in her throat. "But know this: You have exhausted my good will with this stunt of yours, Dinky Doo. You have forced me to be a stallion I tried to leave behind years ago, and if you do not do precisely as I say, I assure you, you will not be able to escape the consequences. I will alert every princess up to and including Sunset Shimmer that a potential time criminal is on the loose, and they will listen. No place or time will be safe for you. This, of course, assumes that your constituent atoms won't be scattered across probability space because you didn't heed my instructions. Do you understand?"
Dinky swallowed and nodded.
"Then follow me." Turner brushed past her and made for the basement laboratory. Once they were downstairs, he began moving experiments and work tables to open up a clear space.
"Don't tell me the call box really is a time machine," said Dinky.
Turner looked around the empty area. He'd cleared a path to the old thing without even realizing it. He scoffed. "Of course not. Frankly, I find it insulting that ponies think I need external aids. Time is just another direction if you know the trick." He faced the blank wall. "Stay close behind me. It's been a while since I last did this, and if you step out of my wake, you will not enjoy the consequences. By the same token, don't use any magic while we're en route. Neither of us will enjoy the magic collapsing midway."
"I've learned a lot since my tenth birthday party," Dinky said behind them, unable to keep all of the petulance out of her tone.
"Not maturity." Turner took a deep breath. "No more than a few steps behind me, Dinky. I may not be happy with you right now, but you're still like a daughter to me. Besides, you can never be too careful with time travel." He shook his head and walked towards the wall.
Dinky followed him, trailing by less than a body length. They kept walking, but the wall never seemed to get any closer. If anything, it seemed to get further away, stretching back in an eye-watering way as swirling, cerulean light leaked into the edges of their vision. Dinky's curiosity gnawed at her, but she kept her gaze forward, fixed on Time Turner's mane. She needed to stay firm. She needed to remember why she was doing this.
She needed to stop once she realized that that mane was getting closer. She did, just managing to avoid walking into Turner.
He looked back, his lips teasing at a smile for a moment before he marshaled his scowl. "Here we are. Shortly before the moment when and where I lost track of Ditzy."
Dinky looked around. They stood in a wide prairie, a few low shrubs scattered about the yellowing, belly-height grass. The sky was thick with massive clouds, not quite overcast but with little visible blue. She turned back to Turner when she finally registered all that he'd said. "You looked for her?"
Shock and hurt flashed across his eyes. "Of course I did. Did you really think I just gave up and accepted that one of my best friends simply vanished without a trace?" He pointed towards the center of the sky, at an immense, puffy anvil of a cloud. "In about five minutes—that and twenty-two seconds as of... now—your mother will alight on that large cumulonimbus in the middle of the Tulsaddle Weather Reserve. I never see her leave in the time between her arrival and when the Tulsaddle weather team use the cloud in a storm three days from now." He turned away. "As far as I can tell, when the cloud dissipates, so does she."
Problem-solving habits learned from Princess Twilight starting running in Dinky's mind. "I take it a cloud-walking spell or gossamer wings would interfere with the time travel?"
Turner nodded. "And the only pegasus I could trust with my secret was the missing pony herself. Still, now that we're here, you're welcome to get up there any way you can. I'm sure you have some means of doing so."
Dinky nodded, then focused. A golden aura shone from her horn and spread across the rest of her body. She began to float, her mane and tail behaving as if they were underwater. "Gravity ward. Wish me luck."
"Given what you've done to get here, you are most certainly going to need it."
Dinky floated up to the cloud, propelled by thought. Once she was just above it, she cast a cloudwalking spell and dismissed the ward, sinking an inch into the fluffy surface before it sprang back. Then it was just a matter of waiting, watching the sky as her mild hornache faded.
At last, there was motion from the north, a dot of gray against the blue. Dinky reared up and waved her forelegs. Her mother's eyes might have been—might be—infamously off-kilter, but they'd still be able to spot distant motion like those of any pegasus.
The dot approached, hesitated, and descended. Soon enough, Dinky beheld a face she hadn't seen in person for far too long, giving a puzzled frown as it took in a unicorn on a cloud. Fighting through the hitch in her voice, she said, "Hi, Mom."
Ditzy Doo's jaw dropped. "Dinky?" She didn't land in front of her daughter so much as she fell, forgetting to flap in her shock. "I... You..." Emotions flickered across her face: joy, shock, confusion. Finally, Ditzy took a deep breath and settled on a flat-eared look of concern. "Doc wouldn't take you back if it weren't important. What happened?"
Dinky bit her lip and shut her eyes. Before she could force out the words, she felt a pressure on her muzzle. She opened her eyes, feeling the tears welling in them, to see her mother in a similar state, her hoof over Ditzy's mouth.
"Never mind, I shouldn't have asked," said Ditzy. "Time isn't a toy, Dinky. I learned that the hard way. Don't make the same mistake I did. You won't be as lucky as I was."
Dinky backed up a step, her brow furrowed. "I know how dangerous this is. I've already— Wait, what happened to you?"
Ditzy spread her right wing. "On the one wing, I couldn't see straight and I had never been a Wonderbolt trainee." She smiled as she spread her left. "On the other wing, I was still alive, and now I had the world's best daughter."
"That daughter spent most of her life getting back to this moment, and she learned a lot about time travel in the process, especially what can go wrong." Dinky took a deep breath. "I don't plan on changing anything, Mom. I just wanted to see you again." She held out her forelegs.
Ditzy hugged her with wings and legs both. "You've become a beautiful young mare, Dinky. Whatever happens to me, don't let me hold you back anymore."
Dinky squeezed her eyes shut, tears dripping off of her muzzle, her horn starting to glow. "I'm sorry."
"For wha—"
Time Turner was very good at waiting. It was a simple matter to slow his perceptions and let the hours pass like minutes. Too simple, actually. By the time he suspected that something was awry, it was already sunset.
Turner glared up at the cloud. "What has that filly gone and—" His eyes bugged out as realization hit. "Oh no."
He galloped into the timestream, chanting "No, no, no!" in time with his hoofbeats. He emerged back in his basement shortly after he left, just in time to see two mares pop into existence.
"—at?" Ditzy blinked, looked around, and glared at her daughter. "Dinky, why are we in Doc's basement?"
"I would very much like to know that myself," said Time Turner, moving to Ditzy's side and joining in the glare.
Dinky stood proud and unabashed. "I meant what I said. I didn't change anything."
"Didn't change anything!?" cried Turner. He pointed at Ditzy. "What's she doing here, then?"
Ditzy smirked at him as she cast a look roughly in his direction. "Good to see you too."
He allowed himself a hint of a smirk. "Don't get me wrong, under any other circumstances, I'd be delighted to see you."
"How long has it been?"
"Ten years to the day." Turner turned back to Dinky. "Now, I believe you were about to try to justify this."
The younger mare took a deep breath. "I was lying when I said I knew Starlight's time spell. I did study Star Swirl's writings on chronomancy and picked Princess Twilight's brain, but even with all that research, the best I could manage was a time travel counterspell, one that sends ponies to when they're supposed to be. That's when it hit me. If Mom vanished because of a stable time loop..." She trailed off with a small smile.
"Then she was supposed to come with you when you cast that spell," groaned Turner, a hoof over his face. "The same paradox as Twilight's little episode back when Cerberus escaped. Nothing started this, it was all just a circular chain of events spanning a decade."
Dinky nodded, then let her head rest looking at the floor. "I stole my mother from the world for ten years. I may have brought her back, but that doesn't excuse the crime. I am ready to accept whatever punishment I face."
Whatever Dinky expected, it wasn't two primary feathers pinching an ear and dragging her towards the basement stairs. "You'd better hope Twilight shows you some mercy," said Ditzy, "because I most definitely will not."
"Ah!" Dinky knew that she knew a dozen different ways to defend herself in this situation, but between the awkward stumbling gait and the pressure on an especially sensitive nerve cluster, she could barely focus enough to keep pace with her mother. "Mom, you don't have to drag me there! You don't even know the way anymore!"
"And whose fault is that?"
Time Turner trailed behind them, desperately trying not to laugh and largely failing.
Ponyville had grown accustomed to Sparkalon, the Palace-Tree and meeting hall of the Council of Friendship. As ponies flooded into what had quickly become one of the most important towns in Equestria, Ponyville had also grown around the Palace-Tree. The castle grounds were now surrounded by new homes, new businesses, and more specialized buildings like the unobtrusive barracks of the Gloaming Guard.
The Hall of Thrones had changed little, beyond adding the occasional new gem to the Roots of Memory. A few more chairs waited in storage for members of the Council beyond the original seven, but none of them had been brought out. Only one Council member sat in judgement today.
Twilight Sparkle looked as impassive as she did underdressed, wearing only her crown. Yet through stance alone, she exuded regal disapproval from every inch of her almost Saddle Arabian frame. "You are very fortunate that Starlight Glimmer is in Ourtown right now, Dinky. The rest of the Council understood when I wanted to rule on my student's misdemeanor alone, but I doubt she'd let anything keep her from telling you just how foolish this was."
"I know, Your Highness," said Dinky, bowing so deeply that her horn touched the crystal floor, her mother's scowling gaze all but burning a hole in her rump.
Twilight sighed and lifted a scroll in her magic, unrolling it to reveal several inches of arcane notation. "However, I've analyzed your spell, and its heavy reliance on fate magic supports your hypothesis. If Ditzy weren't supposed to be here and now, the spell wouldn't have taken her with you. I may disapprove of your actions, and we are definitely going to talk about this later, but I can't punish a pony for following her destiny."
Dinky brought her head back up, though she still kept her ears flat. "Thank you, Your Highness."
"However..." Twilight let a smirk crack through the royal facade. "Your mother can."
"Oh, can I ever," Ditzy said as Dinky paled. "For one, you're helping me with all of the paperwork I'll need to fill out to stop being officially dead. And that, young lady, is just the start. I am going to teach you a healthy respect for the time-space continuum if it's the last thing I do."
"And I'm expecting a letter on what you've learned," added Twilight.
Dinky swallowed. She looked back and forth between her mentor and her mother. Finally, a smile crept across her lips. "Still worth it."
