A Brief History Of Time

by Doppler Effect

Rating: everyone
Tags: Science Fiction, Twilight Sparkle, Colgate, Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 5760

Twilight and Minuette discuss Starlight Glimmer's timeline disruptions. Twilight just wishes the conversation had happened in chronological order.

“Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.”
- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Twilight and Minuette discuss Starlight Glimmer's timeline disruptions.

Twilight just wishes the conversation had happened in chronological order.

Published 2016-03-10 20:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2016-03-10 20:10:01 UTC

Happening Again

“Choke on that, causality!” shouted Minuette as she disappeared into an all too familiar time portal over the cutie map, laughing maniacally all the while.

“What.” Twilight stood open-mouthed in the doorway of the map room, staring in shock as the portal disappeared. The book she had been carrying as she entered fell forgotten to the floor.

“No, no, no!” She looked frantically around the room for the spell parchment which had dropped out of the portal when Starlight had tried this. “Not again!” she protested. “I just got finished with this stuff!”

And why Minuette, of all ponies? Since reconnecting with her old school friends, she’d found Minuette to be much like a saner version of Pinkie Pie. A sweet, happy-go-lucky pony who cared for her friends. Practically the opposite of Starlight. This just didn’t make any sense.

And where was that scroll? After several minutes of searching, Twilight realised with a sinking feeling that there wasn’t one this time. Starlight had told her she dropped it on purpose when she did it, hadn’t she? There wasn’t actually any reason there had to be a way to follow Minuette.

Not only that, but as she looked around the room, she could see that nothing appeared to have changed. Shouldn’t things have changed if Minuette went back in time? Not even her memories seemed to have changed. Maybe her memories were protected by having used the spell before, when she dueled with Starlight? Or would she not even notice if her memories had changed? Or… surely being able to remember Minuette’s time travel meant her memories couldn’t have changed? Ugh. Time travel hurt her head.

With those panic-inducing thoughts in mind, Twilight left the map room to make a whirlwind tour of the castle. Her bedroom was exactly as she’d left it, and her bedtime reading was bookmarked in exactly the spot she expected. The library was still in the partially-reshelved state she’d last seen it in, and again the book she was currently studying lay open to the last page she remembered reading. In the kitchen, she did discover that the case of doughnuts she had been saving had disappeared, but that seemed more likely to be Spike-related than time travel-related.

With the evidence of the castle search inconclusive of any changes, Twilight made her way to the front door, intending to expand her search to Ponyville, and to her friends in particular. Opening the door, however, she was greeted by the smiling face of Minuette, paused in the act of knocking on the door.

“Aaah!” Twilight yelled. Reacting with the instincts of a pony who didn’t want to end up encased in crystal yet again, Twilight instantly cast a spell. Minuette made no effort to dodge, and in short order found herself floating in front of Twilight in a pink bubble of magic.

“Are you mad that I’m late for lunch, Twilight?” Minuette’s normal irrepressible good humour didn’t seem affected in the slightest by being held in a force bubble, or by Twilight’s somewhat less stable than usual demeanour. “You know, a very wise pony once said that time is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so.” She nodded sagely to herself.

Twilight felt a twitch in her right eye. She had, in fact, been expecting Minuette an hour ago. She might have expected though to find her at the front door instead of in the map room, in the process of disappearing into a time portal. Of course that was where she had found… um... this Minuette.

Were the two Minuettes separate ponies? If history had been changed, this Minuette mightn’t even remember having done it. Or… could that have been, say, a changeling she’d seen pretending to be Minuette? This was getting way too complicated. Maybe the best course of action was just to ask directly?

“Alright,” said Twilight, “this might sound weird, but I’ve just seen somepony who looks just like you vanish into a time portal.”

“Oooooh,” replied Minuette, “I don’t think I’ve done that yet.”

“Yet?” repeated Twilight, with growing alarm. “No! No ‘yet’! No travelling in time! We’ve had enough changing history already this week!”

“You’ve already seen me there,” Minuette pointed out happily. “If I don’t travel back now so that you can have seen the real me there, the best case is that you saw something else that looked convincingly like me travelling through time. Is it really a good idea to leave what you actually saw there to chance?”

“What?” asked Twilight sharply. There seemed to be an unspoken assumption in that train of thought that she wasn’t seeing. “It’s already happened. How could making sure you don’t time travel to cause it make it worse?”

“Ah, ah, ah,” Minuette corrected, waving one hoof in the air as she spoke, and somehow contriving to use that motion to set the force bubble she was held in spinning gently. “You’ve seen something already, but you don’t actually know what it is! If you specifically stop it from being me that you saw, you don’t change anything else about what you saw. Because of Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle, anything that happens, happens. That means if it wasn’t me… Hey Twilight, what’s the worst possible thing you can imagine causing what you saw?”

The wide smile on Minuette’s face as she said that was completely incongruous with her question, and she started giggling softly to herself as the bubble’s rotation began to point her away from Twilight.

Visions of a time-travelling changeling queen disguised as Minuette flashed through Twilight’s mind. That didn’t even make sense, though. Why would she have been disguised as Minuette? And she couldn’t have actually caused any problems in the past either, since nothing seemed to have changed.

More importantly, “I’ve just recently fought a time-travel battle with a unicorn named Starlight Glimmer,” Twilight declared, “during which she changed history several times, and I was forced to try to prevent her from doing so! I saw the resultant changed timelines every time she did so! Doesn’t that disprove Star Swirl’s principle?”

“Eh, really?” asked Minuette, the smile finally wiped off her face. She even started making a vigorous attempt to set the force bubble spinning back the other direction to face Twilight again.

Twilight decided restraining Minuette probably wasn’t necessary any longer, and brought her gently down to the ground. “Yes. That was actually part of why I invited you to visit today. I know you’ve been published several times in Brief Histories of Time, and I was hoping you’d be interested in a collaboration to help me edit the story down to something readable.”

Brief Histories of Time was a kind of combined speculative fiction anthology and magical science journal dealing with the subject of time travel. Twilight had previously published her experiences with time travel as an account titled ‘It’s About Time’ (and hadn’t she been pleased with herself for coming up with that name!), but that had been a pretty straight-forward (if annoying) predestination paradox.

By comparison, the thing with Starlight was just ridiculously complicated. Being honest about it, she wasn’t actually all that sure how it had all worked, not to mention how to write an account of it that worked as something approaching literature.

Minuette quickly regained her trademark grin and laughed, “Ha! Yeah, you kind of need to do a better job anonymising your stories!” Turning serious again, she added, “But really, if you’ve actually seen evidence that this Starlight succeeded in changing history, we should probably be looking into a way to spoof that as well so that it never actually happened!”

“You just said time can’t change, but you want to make it so something never happened?” Twilight asked, somewhat bemused by the apparent contradiction.

“I want to spoof it, not change it!” Minuette insisted. “Look, can you tell me the whole story first, so that we’re on the same page?”

Still not quite seeing the difference, but realising that the conversation would go easier if Minuette knew everything, Twilight sighed and agreed. “Alright, we might as well sit down. It’s a long and confusing story.” From the confident way Minuette talked about time, Twilight was also beginning to suspect she was exactly the right pony to talk to about this whole subject anyway.

She led Minuette through the castle while explaining very briefly her first encounter with Starlight. Without really thinking about it, her steps brought her back to the map room. Twilight felt a niggling little worry at the back of her mind as she led Minuette inside, but dismissed it, continuing instead to the tale of her second meeting with Starlight.

“And then a few days ago, I found her sitting in here waiting for me,” she explained. “She had a copy of one of Star Swirl’s time travel spells that she had modified to use with the map to extend its effect.”

Twilight took her seat at the map and gestured for Minuette to take a look. Minuette slipped into a seat opposite her, examining the map with open curiosity as Twilight continued her tale. She listened politely as Twilight explained how Starlight had opened a portal and vanished into it, and how she had used the scroll to follow her. It was only when she mentioned Starlight preventing Rainbow’s race that she interrupted with a question.

“You’re sure the race she prevented happened in the normal timeline?”

Something about the incisive manner of the question made Twilight actually stop to think before answering.

“Definitely,” she replied after she had properly considered. “You were at the talk on cutie mark magic I gave last week, right? It was definitely the race where Rainbow performed the rainboom that ended up linking the Element Bearers. When I fixed the timeline, I saw her perform the rainboom again, and that was the only time she performed it as a filly.”

Minuette nodded thoughtfully to herself and Twilight continued with the story. She seemed thoroughly shocked at the description of the depressing crystal war timeline, but her next question was reserved instead for the second return to the past.

“When you went back the second time, you didn’t see yourself or Starlight from the previous time you went back?”

That actually had been one of the things that had struck Twilight as odd about the whole thing - when she had travelled through time previously she had actually met her time-divergent self, so it had seemed strange that it had worked out differently this time.

“Actually… no,” she admitted. “The previous versions of us weren’t present any time we went back there. And we should have been able to see them easily if they were there.” Flashy magic battles sufficient to distract foals from their racing weren’t exactly something you could just fail to spot happening around you, after all.

Minuette listened carefully to the rest of the story without further interruption, and with an appropriately horrified reaction to the various timelines Twilight had seen. Unlike everypony else who had been told the full story though, she didn’t seem to be overly comforted by the successful mending of the timeline and Starlight’s remorse for what she had done.

“Wow,” she said at last, still sounding pretty stunned. In an uncharacteristically serious tone, she continued, “That’s quite a story Twilight. I can’t recommend heavily enough that we try to spoof that so it never happened.”

“Alright, so now can you explain what you mean by ‘spoofing’ it?” asked Twilight. “And are the stories you’ve published in Brief Histories of Time based on real events? Because your questions really seem less and less like those of a speculative-fiction author and more like those of an experienced time traveller!”

“Do you actually read the journal articles, Twilight?” Minuette asked, not quite managing to hide her amusement at the embarrassed stuttering the question elicited.

Not waiting for an answer, she explained, “In a time travel story where actually changing history is impossible, ‘spoofing’ history is when you make a change to the known history in such a way that everypony present still remembers the same things happening as before you made your change.” She watched Twilight carefully as she spoke to be sure she was following the explanation.

“The classic literary example,” she continued, “is the time traveller who falls in love with a famous historical figure with a recorded date of death, which they overcome by faking their lover’s death to match history, and bringing them back to the future with them. It works because the changed history you’re working towards was always the way history went even though nopony knew that at the time. That means that there’s no actual change to the timeline, only an apparent change.”

Twilight nodded slowly. “So… the idea is that you can change an event that you thought happened, so long as you can convincingly fake it so that it looks to everypony who witnessed it as if it still happened the same way?”

She pondered for another moment and then added, “Simple example then. There was a case of doughnuts missing from the kitchen earlier. Spike probably just ate them, but I could, technically, go back in time an hour and take them myself?”

Even for such an apparently trivial and ridiculous example, Minuette seemed to treat the idea seriously. “Possibly!” she replied. “Though since I’m guessing you don’t know if they were really still there an hour ago or not, you might also arrive to find them already gone. If Spike actually ate them, they’re eaten. Nothing to be done about it. If he didn’t, you can certainly spoof history to look like what past-you saw just by taking them before you observed them being gone.”

Twilight pondered that again. It didn’t seem all that useful an idea in general. It wasn’t possible to change anything you knew happened, and her mind rebelled at the thought that lack of knowledge could be more useful than knowledge in some cases, where it would allow more changes to be made to history. It occurred to her that Minuette had avoided an important part of that question as well.

“I admit it, I didn’t read a lot of the other articles in the journal,” Twilight said with a shrug. “They mostly seemed to be just stories, so I only read the ones that looked like real science rather than fiction. Are you seriously telling me they were all true stories? Including yours?”

“Real science, Twi?” Minuette had a sparkle in her eyes as she replied that didn’t bode well for that line of thought.

“Well, yes,” Twilight replied, attempting to ignore the teasing tone of voice. “For instance, there was an interesting paper by Professor Azimuth Asymptote on The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline. It wasn’t just a story like most of the others. It was full of numbers and tables and the diagrams for a new device he called an ‘Endochronometer’, and it had a large bibliography at the end! Real science!”

Minuette burst into peals of laughter. “Professor Azimuth is an alchemist, Twilight! He’s not a time travel specialist at all! He wrote that piece half as a clever parody of the alchemy papers he normally writes, and half as a clever thought experiment. Most of the articles in Brief Histories are thought experiments like that, of different ways time travel could work. The story just helps illustrate the points or the implications of different ideas.”

She paused for a moment, then added, “And yeah, some are accounts of real events, like yours was.” Closing her eyes and presenting her best expression of false modesty, Minuette continued with an airy wave of a hoof, “Mine are a little from column A, a little from column B.” Struggling to keep a grin off her face, she opened one eye to peek over at Twilight to see her reaction.

That wasn’t too much of a surprise with the way Minuette had been speaking about time, but Twilight’s mind balked at trying to work out the mechanics of ending up discussing time travel with Minuette because she had seen what was presumably a future version of her travel into the past. Was this another predestination paradox like the first time she’d seen Star Swirl’s spell?

Twilight sighed and admitted, “This time travel stuff is really starting to hurt my head.”

“Well, “ Minuette suggested, “it’s not exactly true, of course, but you might find it helps if you think of things just happening one after another.”

“That is how time works!” Twilight insisted, though she looked less sure of herself than usual. “Right? Surely?”

Minuette just grinned hugely at her. “Ooooh, you’re good at this!”

Twilight groaned. “I give up then. How does it work?”

“Alright,” said Minuette, turning more serious again, “there’s an interesting example of how the self-consistency principle is supposed to work.” She swept a hoof around in a horizontal circle in front of her. “Imagine I have a time portal here. Objects that enter it exit just a second before and just above it.” She swept her hoof around in another circle slightly closer to her and just above the first one.

Twilight stared at the empty spaces she had indicated, imagining two linked time portals hovering there. “Go on,” she said.

“Now, imagine I throw a rock into the bottom one,” Minuette continued, as she mimed doing exactly that, “in such a way that when it falls out of the top one, it prevents its one-second-earlier version from falling into the portal.” She now mimed the two rocks colliding in mid-air and spinning away from the portals, complete with exaggerated sound effects. With a big grin, she turned back to Twilight and asked, “So, what happens?”

Twilight frowned and continued staring at the imaginary portals. If the rock coming out of the portal knocked the earlier one away, it wouldn’t be there to knock itself away. But if it wasn’t there to knock itself away, the earlier one would enter the portal, so it would be there to knock itself away. Hmm...

That time travel headache was starting to get worse, but maybe the answer was just to take a third option. “Maybe you end up not throwing it just right, and it doesn’t work as you expect?”

Minuette shook her head, though her grin remained unchanged. “Good guess, but for the sake of argument, imagine I threw it just right. We’ll say I used a spell with an exact amount of pre-calculated force to throw it exactly where I intended.”

“Then… it’s a paradox?” Twilight asked, confusion evident in her voice. “It doesn’t seem like either the stone going through the portal or not going through the portal works.”

“Better guess!” Minuette exclaimed, clapping her hooves together in appreciation. “But the answer is even weirder. The self-consistency principle suggests that the stone in fact falls out of the top portal at just the right angle to push its earlier self into the portal in such a way that it falls out of the top portal at that perfect angle!”

“That’s…” Twilight began, only to trail off into confused thought. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all! How could it work out like that? The thing that’s causing the change would be caused by itself! Before it happened!”

“This,” Minuette said, putting emphasis on the word and leaning forward in her seat, “is one of the times when it doesn’t make sense to think of time as things just happening one after another.”

Twilight’s mind rebelled at the very idea, but nevertheless she pressed on. “How could that work for more complicated loops? With any loop that involved a pony’s free will, say?”

“Exactly the same.” Minuette’s normal grin had returned. “Things settle into a loop that’ll cause itself to repeat, which might be what happened with the me you saw in the past.”

“You’re suggesting,” Twilight said half-heartedly, hardly even able to believe she was saying it out loud, “that you’re going to travel back into the past so that I can have seen you there, and the reason you’re going to go back is because I saw you there, even though if I hadn’t seen you there you’d never have gone back?” It sounded like the predestination paradox that happened the first time she’d used Star Swirl’s spell, but at least then she’d been unaware of what was happening. Could that really still work out when both she and Minuette were aware of the ongoing paradox?

“Yep,” Minuette agreed. “Though in the hypothetical time when you didn’t meet time-displaced me, I think if you’d just told me the story of Starlight, as you were already planning to, that I’d still have suggested spoofing that. You’d probably have demanded proof of what I was talking about, and we could have ended up with this loop that way.”

She mimed throwing a rock into the imaginary portal again and continued explaining. “Like throwing the rock into the portal not being able to let it go through in such a way that it would prevent its own history, I couldn’t travel back to prove myself to you if I hadn’t already proved it to you, so we end up with this acausal loop.”

Twilight sat blinking across at Minuette for a few moments as she tried to process all that.

“I’m... not entirely sure I’m convinced, but strangely enough that would kind of match what the other you said just before vanishing into the time portal,” Twilight mused. “You said…”

“Oh, wait! Wait! Don’t tell me!” Minuette interrupted excitedly. “I can prove that it was me you saw. If I commit to saying when I travel back in time exactly what I guess it was before I tell you, you’ll know it was really me when I guess correctly!”

Twilight attempted to parse Minuette’s excited babble, but the tenses seemed all mixed up. “Uh. Once more? Slowly?” she asked.

“I’m going to guess what the me you saw before said,” Minuette explained. She paused with a big smile on her face as Twilight nodded to show she was following so far.

“I promise before I say what my guess is, that if I do end up going back to that time, that what I guess now is what I’m going to say to you then, whether or not you agree now that my guess is correct here,” she continued. “So, if I’m wrong it wasn’t me you saw, and if I’m right it was.”

Twilight took a moment before answering to think that statement through to make sure she really understood it. If Minuette correctly guessed the words she had heard before, it could mean that she was going to have been the same pony who said those words the first time, sure.

But couldn’t it also mean that she had just set up a joke in poor taste so that she knew what had been said? Though… that seemed a lot of work, and really seemed a bit too mean-spirited to be Minuette’s style. Hmm… and there didn’t seem to be anything stopping Twilight from claiming she was wrong even if she guessed right. Wouldn’t that stop her from wanting to go back and thereby break the loop?

It wasn’t really a particularly foolproof plan, but Twilight nodded for Minuette to go ahead anyway. Getting what she had said wrong would at least demonstrate something, so it was worth listening to as a possible way of ruling it out as an explanation.

Minuette paused for a moment to think, and then declared, “When I go back, I’ll say ‘Choke on that, causality!’” Unprompted, she added exactly the kind of slightly unhinged laughter Twilight had heard from her earlier.

Knowing that any hesitation would ruin what she was about to attempt, Twilight immediately answered, “Wrong! Guess it must not have been you then.” She offered a conciliatory smile, and added, “I suppose we’ll have to think of a different answer!”

Minuette merely laughed at her. “You’re a terrible liar, Twilight!” she said between bouts of giggling. “You should try to take this seriously though. You know I got it right, so what would you have done if I’d believed you and you caused a paradox? Rule one of time travel experiments: if a possible result of your experiment would break the universe, don’t experiment!”

A shudder ran down Twilight’s spine. That sounded worse than what Starlight had done! Wait…

“Hang on,” said Twilight accusingly, “I thought you told me that ‘Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle means whatever happens, happens’? Doesn’t that mean you don’t believe paradoxes are even possible?”

“Very good, Twilight,” Minuette agreed appreciatively. “That’s almost right. I’m pretty sure paradoxes shouldn’t happen, but any experiment where the possible results are either in agreement with the self-consistency principle and nothing new is learned, or else you cause a paradox with unknown, possibly catastrophic results is an experiment that’s too dangerous to perform.”

She stared intently into Twilight’s eyes, as if she wanted to convince her of the seriousness of the idea by gaze alone. “Time travel isn’t like the other magical sciences. If you prove an exception to Clover’s Zeroth Law or something, it only improves our knowledge of how the universe works. If you prove an exception to the self-consistency principle, it actually breaks causality!”

“But I’ve seen Starlight cause paradoxes by changing history,” Twilight protested. “It made the world horrible, but it didn’t break the universe!”

“It broke causality,” Minuette insisted again. “Look, in all the altered histories, you never hatched Spike, right? But he was with you throughout the whole thing. So, where did he come from? For that matter, where did the Twilight and Starlight who remembered the original history come from? All of you were cut adrift from your past - from the events that caused you to be who you are.”

Twilight shook her head, still not really following. That just didn’t sound quite right. Surely whether you knew how particular laws of the universe worked or not, it was either already true or it wasn’t? “Still, why are you more focused on that than the actual changes she made?”

“Because if we can go back and spoof what you and Starlight experienced, then Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle is maintained, and if you strip away the fancy arguments for it, the principle itself pretty much amounts to ‘history can’t change and no other timelines can interfere with this one’.” Minuette once again wore that uncharacteristically serious expression. “Which means we don’t have to worry about, say, Tirek from that universe where he had stolen all of Equestria’s magic appearing out of nowhere to destroy everything.”

Twilight hadn’t really thought of those problem timelines following her home, and she paled as she considered it now. Minuette was saying… what? That if Twilight had remained in existence absent a cause during those other timelines, along with Spike and Starlight, that those other timelines would do the same after she left? That the victorious villains she’d seen could turn up ready for a fight? Oh. That put a somewhat different spin on the importance of the principle.

“Uh, what does spoofing imply specifically in this case again?” she asked nervously.

Following Minuette’s logic, it sounded as though if Twilight, Spike and Starlight had been merely fooled into believing they had fought a time travel battle, those other timelines didn’t actually necessarily exist as places that could in any way interact with this one. In which case, the villains from those timelines couldn’t just pop into existence to wreck this timeline.

“I dunno,” Minuette answered with a shrug. “Maybe a spell to make the three of you hallucinate or dream the events you thought you experienced? Or outright alter your memories? There’s time to think of that once we’ve agreed to do it though.”

Twilight stared off into the distance, thinking it through aloud anyway. “Replacing Starlight’s scroll with one that induces a shared dream might work. She wouldn’t have paid close attention during the first casting since she’d have been concerned with me interrupting her before she could complete it. She’d have relied entirely on the scroll. Then, once inside the dream, any time either of us used it, it would have been a scroll created by the dream to look like she expected it to.”

She tapped a hoof thoughtfully on the table in front of her and looked over at Minuette doubtfully. “Though I would have expected Princess Luna to spot it if something like that happened.”

“Got it,” Minuette said, nodding agreeably. “When I go back to replace her scroll, I also have to get a message to Princess Luna telling her what we’re doing and asking her not to talk to you about it until we say it’s safe. Does that mean you’re in agreement that we should do it?”

Twilight remained silent, thinking it over again. After a while, she said, “I’m getting close, but I think I’d still like to see some proof…” She trailed off again, and then turned a sharp look on Minuette. “Which brings us back to the idea of you going back to meet me only because we know you already went back. You even guessed that you probably went back specifically to give me proof of the way you say time works! Do I actually have any free will in all this? Do I just have to do what I know is going to happen?”

“You always have free will,” Minuette confirmed. “But, you know, you also have free will to banish me to the moon for laughing at you, or to decide not to try to stop the next major threat to Equestria. Does the fact that you wouldn’t ever do those things remove your free will?”

Twilight tentatively shook her head, admitting it didn’t.

“Then how is it any different that you’re going to do this because you would never choose to put the world at risk of problems caused by time travel just to prove to yourself that you have free will?”

It somehow felt like it should be different, but on reflection Twilight had to admit, “I guess it’s not really any different.”

She sighed deeply and tried to set that aside for now. “Alright then. How are you going to go about proving it? Going back to scare the living daylights out of me isn’t enough. I’ve already experienced it, so even if you disappear into the past here in front of me, it doesn’t really add any new facts to the argument. I’d only be taking your word for it that that’s actually where you went.”

“This is where you saw me?” Minuette immediately started examining the whole room with a more discerning eye. “I can think of two obvious solutions. One, I rescue your missing doughnuts and hide them under the table!”

Twilight almost instinctively leaned back in her seat to get a look under the table, only to be interrupted.

“Don’t look yet!” Minuette insisted. “If I know if it’s there or not before I go back, it’ll interfere with the test.” Twilight reluctantly averted her eyes as Minuette continued, “Like I said earlier, it’s also possible they were actually eaten, so I’ll also take that book with me as a fallback boring proof.”

The book Twilight had dropped by the door in her shock at seeing Minuette time-travelling earlier on now flew across the room enclosed in Minuette’s aura to land in front of Twilight.

“I’ll put the book under the table in the past, and if I can rescue them, the doughnuts too. Will that be enough proof for you?”

Twilight made a brief inspection of the book which presumably had a duplicate sitting waiting to be discovered under the table right at this very moment. Once she was sure it was the same book she had been carrying earlier, she passed it over to Minuette.

“That will do, I think,” Twilight confirmed. “Do you have a spell that’ll take you back?” Twilight’s eyes flicked momentarily to Minuette’s hourglass cutie mark. She hadn’t really taken much note of what her friends’ marks were actually for when she was a filly, and it had been too awkward to ask about when they had reunited since she should really have known. Minuette’s was time magic, then?

“Alright!” Minuette said cheerily. “Operation Doughnut Rescue is go!”

Spotting Twilight’s unamused expression, she quickly amended, “And all that other stuff we’re doing too, I guess!”

With an awkward cough to cover the change in subject, she continued, “And yeah, I can manage the spell myself.”

There was a brief over-and-back discussion as they worked out exactly what the plan was going to be, but eventually they decided they were ready to proceed.

Minuette cast her spell and vanished into the time portal with a cheery wave. As soon as she disappeared, Twilight immediately got up and began pacing nervously around the room. Should she look under the table? It wouldn’t interfere with Minuette’s test now, and she decided that a little peek wouldn’t hurt.

Sure enough, waiting under the table was a case of Sugarcube Corner doughnuts, sitting on top of a perfect copy of the book Minuette had just taken with her.

There would still be some work to be done preparing a suitable spell scroll and a plan to replace the one held by Starlight with it, but it looked as though Star Swirl’s self-consistency principle would see to it that everything worked out just right. Starlight’s misadventure would soon all have been just a dream.

She had barely returned to her pacing, somewhat more assured of success now, when the time portal opened again. Just before Minuette reappeared, Twilight was relieved to hear the sounds that showed that part A of the plan had worked.

Through the portal came a wild cackling and the sounds of Minuette shouting.

“Choke on that, causality!”

Author's Note

Submitted for publication in volume 46 of Brief Histories of Time by authors T. Sparkle and M. under the title Happening Again.

Bibliography:

Sparkle, T. ‘It’s about time.’ Brief Histories of Time, vol 42, no. 1, p 46.

Swirl, S. ‘The self-consistency principle of time.’, Canterlot, CSGU Publishing.

Sparkle, T. and M. ‘The cutie re-mark.’ Brief Histories of Time, vol 45, no. 3, p 132.

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