Adjusting for Local Date
Monday April 3rd, 2017
Entry #1

I never thought I’d be keeping another very informal research journal, but to channel my old mentor, this is some really fascinating material. Yeah, it’s kinda-sorta amoral to be treating seven teenagers as test subjects, and I suppose in the grand scheme of this whole outing, I’m just as much a subject, but that’s beside the point. I’m going to keep a log of things as they progress, but the scientific method has already gone out the window.

Firstly, I need to get this off my chest: I crossed a line I had no right crossing. No, I’m not talking about embarrassing her because of some soapy ice cubes she left for Sunset. This isn’t even about taking such a huge risk petrifying her when I wasn’t even sure depetrifying her would work in this world, though I definitely need to stop doing risky shit like that. There were any number of innocuous places I could have gently bit down on to break the curse, but no. I had to kiss her on her lips.

Anybody reading this probably isn’t aware of this, and, honestly, whoever is going through my journals should feel lucky I’m not skilled enough to bewitch my journals like some of the really dark wizards out there, but Rainbow Dash is a lesbian. Stop the motherfucking presses, so cliche, I know. In Equestria it isn’t so bad because the skewed gender ratio there makes same-sex relationships relatively normal, so she never had a reason to really hide who she was. Her Equestrian counterpart never ended up getting together with AJ, but she’s been in a steady relationship with Cloudchaser from the Ponyville weather team for years.

That’s Equestrian Rainbow, though. This is a human world, and I unfortunately know all too well how unaccepting people can be. Fluttershy pulled me aside while everyone else was getting their shit stowed in camp and explained just how far in the closet this Rainbow is. Of course she’d know, having been her best friend since childhood. Unfortunately, Dash’s had her pro athlete father’s image to watch out for, and she has her own image to be paranoid about.

I can definitely see where she’s coming from. Word gets out that she’s a lesbian, and all the heterosexual girls on the soccer team are going to start feeling uncomfortable around her in the locker room, worried she’s got wandering eyes or considering copping a feel. Suddenly her dad’s getting unwanted attention from the paparazzi, and maybe he’s not accepting here like he is in Equestria. And I just kissed her in front of all of her friends, only one of whom actually knows with some certainty.

So she’s hurting pretty bad, and avoiding me... which is pretty counterproductive when I’m trying to help them learn their magic.

On the topic of teaching them, the first day hasn’t been a complete waste. Most of the girls—which is to say Sunset, Twilight, Rarity, and Fluttershy—have all taken quite well to the meditative method, although Twilight seems reluctant about her transformation. I can kinda see why.

Unlike Rarity, who only seems to exhibit pony ears, or Fluttershy, who exhibits pegasus wings and ears, Twilight manifests a pair of wings reminiscent of a bird of prey, a spike of raw magic surging from her forehead, and what seems to be a tangible aura surrounding her eyes. The symptoms do remind me a lot of depictions of certain dark mages from Equestria’s history. At least she’s not alone in standing out. Sunset shows a similar transformation, though her wings are pure magic. Note to self: sit down with Twilight and see if you can’t help her with her confidence.

Rainbow Dash might actually do okay with meditation after we get over this whole ‘I kissed her’ thing, but until then, she’s obviously uncooperative. Applejack and Pinkie, though? I don’t think they can sit still long enough to enter a proper meditative trance. We all know Pinkie’s gonna Pinkie, but AJ is a bit of a unique case. She’s got a good mind on her, but she’s not all that imaginative. More of an in-the-now sort of gal, which makes her more perceptive, but too perceptive for any meaningful trance. Gonna have to find some alternate triggers for both her or Pinkie.

For now though, I need to start dinner. There are eight ravenous people here, myself included, and regardless of how pissed some of them are at me, I’d rather not have them going mutinous.

Entry #2

Damn it all. I bought equal portions meat and vegetarian products because I figured at least some of these kids would have a normal human diet. The only meat eaters in the group were Pinkie Pie and AJ. Seriously!? Why didn’t Sunset think to mention that only two of her friends ate meat when I hit the supermarket? Now I have more meat than we can eat, and now the girls need more food. Nothing to do about it now, but I’m gonna have to send out for Big Macintosh tomorrow afternoon and have him pick up some things on my dollar.

The only good thing to come out of any of this is that Pinkie and AJ somehow managed to pony up in the middle of a fight over the last hamburger. I don’t even know why, though! Was Applejack being honest about that being her burger? Was Pinkie only doing it for a laugh? These kids’ll drive me to drink, I swear.

Ugh... This is not turning out to be a good day.

~ 09 ~

Tuesday April 4th, 2017
Entry #1

Right, so it’s three in the morning right now, and I just got back from Twilight’s tent. Even though I told everyone I was providing the tents before this started, she still showed up with her own tent among her camping gear. This can be put off on account of this being Twilight Sparkle we’re talking about, because overpreparedness goes hoof-in-hand with that girl. Unfortunately, something I’ve noticed about her interactions with the rest of them, just over dinner, tells me that she still feels a bit like an outsider. I can relate.

Anyways. Twilight’s tent. I was doing a short patrol around camp—you know, cleaning up any litter missed from dinner, keeping an eye out for unwanted guests, and all that—and I heard whimpering coming from Twilight’s tent. Nobody has to tell me that it wasn’t my place to wake her up and talk to her about it... but goddamn if these kids don’t press my mom button. Surprise, surprise, the poor girl is having nightmares about what happened at the Friendship Games.

It’s ~~kind of a shame~~ fucking awful that she’s all tied up in this, because right now, what she needs is gentle therapy, not confrontation. She’s fucking terrified of her magic, the consequences of what she did, and she’s convinced that the Elements of Harmony didn’t completely purge that darkness, this ‘Midnight Sparkle’ from her. That’s why she’s distant from her friends, and that’s why she’s been hiding these nightmares from her friends since the games. The long and short of it is that she’s suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s influencing her interactions with her friends.

Fuck only knows how good of an idea this all is, but I decided to talk to her in depth—mostly—about my experiences with thaumaphobia and my own sanity slippage. Our situations are different in that she fears what her magic could do and how it makes her an outsider from the group, while I feared how magic could be used to abuse me, but they are fundamentally similar enough for me to make two points to her.

The first point was that ponies, and similarly people, can be surprisingly forgiving when it comes to things done when not in one’s normal state of mind, and most of the time, it’s only a matter of forgiving yourself. Just like how I was put into an impossible situation and crumbled under the pressure, Twilight was pressured to do something she had no understanding of, and was ultimately corrupted by the power she seized. In both cases, we both almost did things we would have regretted, but still others forgave us. For me, it took a long while before I recognized that and forgave myself. For Twilight, her friends have forgiven her, and are just waiting for her to forgive herself.

The other point was that she’s already shown that she’s already shown she’s not about to go mad with power again and attack her friends. Let me just say that, for such a smart lass, she has a tendency to be particularly obtuse at times. She didn’t get it when I compared her awareness of the capacity to hurt her friends to a gun owner being aware of how careful they need to be when handling their firearm, so I had to reword it into something a bit more philosophical. That’s when it hit me that I’d heard something similar so long before, something that resounded with me. “Insane people are always sure that they are sane. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit they are crazy.” Was it Nora Ephron who said that? Either way, she was starting to get it, so I decided to hammer it home by pointing out that by questioning how safe she was with magic in her hands, she was showing that she’d be able to handle it responsibly.

I’m not certain that I got through to her, but at the very least she seemed to relax a little bit. All that I know is that she didn’t cry out in her sleep this time. Welp, I’m going to go get a little bit of shut-eye before I wake up to start breakfast.

Entry #2

Things went a lot better today in the magical training than it did yesterday. I’m not sure if AJ and Pinkie were practicing before bed, but both of them were actually ahead of the game when I tried to work the others through tapping their magic and transforming. Once everyone in the group—well, mostly everyone—had done so, and everyone knew how to channel their magic well enough, I was able to let the more experienced unicorn talk everyone through some basic stuff like levitation and light.

That, unfortunately, meant I had to work with Rainbow, who had yet to Pony Up at will. I don’t think I pointed it out in my previous entries, but since the whole farce yesterday, she’s not said two words to me. In fact, she’s been pointedly avoiding me, often going off on her own. Unsurprisingly, she slipped off while I was working with the others this morning, and I found her a fair bit away working at turning a dead tree into firewood.

She didn’t say anything or even act like she noticed I was there when I found her, but she didn’t have to. I could see the change in the way she was cutting the wood. She was splitting logs with far more force than was strictly necessary, and actually had to work to get the maul out of the stump serving as her chopping block. Were she a pony, I’d even say she’d worked herself into a lather, yet in spite of it all, she hadn’t even broken a sweat.

So I just stood there, watching her split wood for half an hour. It wasn’t until the handle of the splitting maul was starting to grow slick with her blood that I called a stop to it. Oh sure, she struggled and fussed, just like a filly will when it comes to putting on ointment, but in the end, I got through to her enough to relax and let me lotion and wrap her hands. Turns out that questioning her loyalty to her friends, and how she can possibly protect them with her hands all fucked up is still a good way to manipulate Dash, even when she knows she’s being manipulated.

Bringing the firewood back to camp, I apologized to her in a drawn-out roundabout sort of way. You know how it goes, I started out by telling her a story about a pony who really enjoyed a good prank, even if others didn’t share her enjoyment. How she decided to prank everypony in her town, only for the townsponies to turn the prank around on her in such a way that she genuinely thought she was in mortal peril, just to prove that a prank is only fun if the victim can laugh too. I explained to her that this pony was her Equestrian counterpart and that like her, I could sometimes take things too far. Then I told her I was sorry for nearly outing her to her friends.

She’s still not too pleased with me, and I can’t blame her for feeling violated, but she did admit that I pulled a good one on her, kiss notwithstanding. That opened the door for me actually working with her. It’s pretty much as I figured, as far as meditation goes. For all the brashness on the surface, she has enough self-discipline to not scoff at the ideas I put forth this time, and she had enough inner focus that it only took an hour for her to Pony Up. From there, I gave her a short tutorial on manipulating her energy before sending her to join Sunset and the girls to catch up in learning practical magic.

By that point, it was late afternoon, so I took that opportunity to call in a suppertime pizza order, and walked down to the farm so I could wait for the food. During the wait, I took the opportunity to hand off a grocery list and some money to Mac to bring by either tomorrow morning or afternoon. Given that he was to keep the substantial change, he didn’t complain.

I also took the time to check in on the pendant I was regenerating for Sonata. It was definitely doing a lot better than it was before it came into my possession. It looked more like an actual gemstone instead of a pile of ruby shards. Not only that, but it was also beginning to interact with the minute flow of magic around it, searching to feed. Soon enough, I’d be able to pass it back on to its proper owner.

Again, though, I must confess to something very... amoral. The sirens are emotional manavores, that much is true, but they seem to thrive off the energy generated by conflict—a sort of antithesis to changelings, who thrive off love. I may have used a bit of changeling DNA to treat the stone during its earlier phases of regeneration, and while I’m almost certain this should allow her to thrive off positive emotions in addition to the negative ones, it definitely shows that I’ve tampered with it: it’s purple.

I’m thinking about coming clean to her about it when I pass it off to her. She’s not stupid, but from the sound of her sisters, she’s probably the least likely to be upset. Hell, if this works, she might ask me to help them without telling them. It’d be better for them, that way, right?

When did I become such a horrible person? When did the greater good become the Greater Good? I suppose when a person breaks, there are just some things you can’t fix; instead, you can only fake it by making a conscious choice to do it.

~ 09 ~

Wednesday April 5th, 2017

Today was the first major experiment for the group, myself included. The idea was that we needed to test our limits, as well as determining whether or not we can increase our magical reserves by pushing ourselves. Especially the girls, because this is their world... their home.

First test consisted of simply Ponying Up and going about as normal until we could go no longer. Guess who was the first one who had to stop. Yeah, that’s right; me. It took me about a half-hour fully transformed, without doing anything else, before I had to tap out and pop a restorative. Any longer, and I’d have been at risk of having a repeat incident of Saturday. Admittedly, it’s longer than I expected, but the girls all went an hour and a half before they even broke a sweat. Pretty sure it’s this damn heart that’s holding me back.

Considering we started at dawn, it was a good opportunity to feed them all some restoratives in addition to breakfast. The girls—yes, even Rainbow—were all concerned by how pale I was, which apparently meant my skin was near translucent. I had to reiterate that using magic in this form was putting a strain on my already weak heart, but that I wouldn’t let that get in the way of helping.

Applejack chose that moment in the meal to live up to her element. “If’n your ticker’s that bad, and you have no stake in this here world, why’re ya pushin’ yourself so darn hard? It seems kinda stupid riskin’ your health preparing for a fight that ain’t yours when you got kin back home y’all should be protectin’,” was what she said to me. Even now, I’m not sure that I have an answer. It seems pretty stupid in hindsight, showing up here just because I got a letter from my alternate future self. Hell, if anything, I should’ve taken it as a warning to stay away. So why did I do it? Why would I condemn myself to possibly facing the same death as the other me? Penance?

I didn’t have a legitimate answer, even now as I write this before bed I have no idea. So I told them all simply, “I am not a clever pony, nor a good pony. Haven’t been for a long time. I try not to let it keep me down.”

After everyone had recuperated and was back up to full strength, we moved on to active magic use duration. This time, I had the girls creatively use what they’d learned from Sunset to push themselves. It was definitely a neat thing to watch... especially when they started doing things Sunset hadn’t taught them. AJ and Dash both figured out how to use their magic to augment their strength, stamina, and speed. Gotta admit, it was kinda funny seeing them trying to run as fast as they could and while carrying their own body weight in stone. Leave it to them to make it a competition. AJ’s totally a tank, and Dash is definitely DPS.

In addition to flying, Fluttershy managed to create a small butterfly-shaped shield; it’s nothing like what my Twilight can do, but a defensive role suits her. Gotta wonder if Sunset couldn’t teach her how to do some minor healing magic, because that’s the sort of shit any party needs, especially if we’ll be facing real combat. I don’t even know what’ll happen if we don’t have a white mage in our party. I’m not expecting miracles like resurrection, but at the very least she could help stave off death... and if she could, for lack of a better term, buff the rest of the group, they could become nigh unstoppable.

Pinkie... she’s definitely the group’s rogue, with a magical twist. Since tapping into her magic at will, she’s gotten far more Pinkie like. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was actively using a blink spell, but Princess Twilight says that whatever our Pinkie does, it isn’t anything like her teleportation spell. Human Pinkie is now doing Pony Pinkie’s inexplicable reality displacements... which honestly scares the fuck out of me given that I’m basically helping these kids prepare for war. Do I dare suggest she learn how to debuff?

Rarity basically did what Pony Rarity does. No, not making dresses, though she certainly does enough of that for it to be misinterpreted as her sole character trait. She was manipulating multiple objects with telekinesis and weaving them through the air in pretty patterns that’d make a butterfly jealous until it realizes it isn’t made up of sticks, mud, stones and a bag of feminine hygiene products Dash thought would be funny to attach to a rock.

Sunset, on the other hand, spent that period of time not trying to push herself, but working with Twilight on some more advanced magic, namely the actual blink spell. Rather than testing on herself—which just isn’t safe outside a classroom setting with a specially trained unicorn who can fix it if you end up half inside a wall—she was having her move objects... which was going pretty well until she blinked a boulder inside a tree. I’ve never seen a tree explode like that before.

As for me? I decided to test a theory about magic output and directing energy flows to certain parts of my body. For whatever reason, I got it in my head that I lacked a focus in the same sense that the girls do. It’s hard to explain in words when their magical focus is a concept rather than something tangible, but for me, I don’t have a natural focus because my magic isn’t native to this world and I have no links to anything like the Elements of Harmony. Still, I noticed during the first session that the girls didn’t have the same raw output that I seemed to, as though they had some sort of valve that I lack. That really got me thinking.

For my little experiment, I transformed and started channeling a spell that covered whatever I touched into ice. With a bit of mental discipline—read playing with more mental constructs—I managed to isolate the spell output to my feet, and walked out onto a nearby lake. I don’t imagine myself to be some Christ-like figure, but the ice spell certainly made it look the part. I immediately noticed the difference with the increased focus. I wasn’t using nearly as much power as I was before.

Not content with just standing on water, I decided to do the tai chi exercises I learned to destress when my daughters entered adolescence. It’d allow for more manipulation of the water beneath my feet, which only froze enough local water to hold me up, without lowering the overall lake temperature. It worked out pretty well for me, and I was actually at it for more than two hours before any of the others came looking for me.

I was only sorta surprised that I lasted longer than Pinkie, Rarity or Fluttershy, but then AJ and Rainbow showed up, all sweaty and roughed up. When Twilight and Sunset finally showed up, I actually laughed. I’d been at that for two hours, and I hadn’t even exhausted more than half of my magical reserves. It was as if I’d finally discovered how to use my magic without straining my heart, and had shown up a bunch of young whippersnappers in the process.

At that point, I finally got cocky. Not content with just dancing on water, I decided to start playing with water as though I were some character from an American not-anime I watched only one episode of more than two decades ago. Water rose up out of the water in two thick tendrils to encompass my arms. The pull of gravity no longer held any sway, allowing the water to behave more like a whip-like extension of my very body than something that belonged with the rest of the lake.

For the next fifteen minutes, I continued my laketop dance at an increased pace. As graceful as it probably looked, it was a pulse-pounding experience, and took a lot more magic than I’d have liked. I quickly burned through the magic that had lasted me hours. Sweat poured off me, and I could feel my heart in my eyes.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that I blacked out. I mean, I went at that for hours without tiring before switching it up and increasing the drain. It was probably the change and sudden surge in magic that did me in.

No, what surprised me wasn’t that I blacked out, but rather who dove in to save me. I know I smoothed over that whole kiss thing with Rainbow Dash, but honestly? I’d have expected one of the more powerful telekinesis users to pluck me out of the water before anyone else could swim out to grab me.

Of course, the first thing Rainbow said to me when I regained consciousness mid-CPR? “We’re even.” Smartass.

Tomorrow, I’m going to run them through it all again until noon, and then it’s back to the farm. As much as I’d love to push them right through ‘til Friday, they need to at least get one day of school in this week, on top of all the prep work they need to do for the Friendship Formal. That reminds me that I need to find something to wear that’ll fit in, but not restrict my movements...

~ “This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” ~

People and ponies alike always told me that their lives flashed before their eyes in a moment of near death. The last time I died, there were no visions of the past, or anything. I just died, showed up in the Nexus of Souls, and then returned to the land of the living.

This time was no different; I didn’t relive my entire life in a single moment as I plunged towards the great maw straining to burst through the portal, nor did I have any major epiphanies about my life. Only two things crossed my mind, and they weren’t even world-shattering revelations.

The first thing to cross my mind was that I had failed my daughters. Even if the great devourer couldn’t move on to Equestria because of all the timeline tampering, my Aqua Pura and Aqua Clara will grow into adulthood never knowing what happened to their mother. All they’d know was that I’d vanished without a trace checking out another world for Twilight. As bright as they are, they wouldn’t understand, and they’d probably start to resent the Princess for something that was so outside her control it couldn’t have even been predicted, never mind prevented. I’d never see them in their primes, or forming their own herds, finding the loves of their lives.

The second thing to cross my mind was the fact that I would finally be returning to the afterlife, and I’d be going on to Elysium. I remembered what future me told Ice Blossom, what she’d repeated to me. “Time isn’t made of lines; it’s made of circles. That is why clocks are round.” I’d be going to the afterlife, but how long would I have to wait until she’d show up for me to spring that Cabooseism on her?

Except, as I fell towards the gaping maw of this great eldritch abomination, the fang-filled death I expected—the one I’d earned through foolhardy arrogance—never came. Rather than bite down on me and end my life, it opened up wide and I plunged into the black void within. Would I fade into nothingness until not even my soul remained? Would I simply cease to be? Or would I achieve terminal velocity, only to find something solid to strike, here in the abyss?

I just fell, on and on, as though that was my sole purpose now. In the arbitrary beneath me, I saw the light of the human world seeping through the distant mouth of the enemy, and though I plummeted further and further into the black expanse, that mouth seemed to grow ever wider. It was almost as though it intended to swallow the world whole.

With a lurch in my stomach, gravity reasserted itself, and before I knew what was happening, I began to fall back the way I came. It could have been hours or minutes before I hit the hood of a car with an impossibly soft thud. Somehow, I was back in the same intersection I’d been consumed in.

Sprawled on my back, facing the sky, I saw a great column of inky blackness writhing up into the sky. The moment it shot past the cloud layer, the end of it spread out in all directions, quickly blocking all light from the sun. Belatedly, it occurred to me what in the world was actually happening. The portal opening wasn’t inside the realm of our enemy; it was inside the enemy itself. Those tentacles weren’t some sort of defense mechanism, they were part of its digestive tract.

All those incursions... all those deaths... We’d thought it was trying to gather enough magic to break the barrier between this world and its own, I thought dryly as the world was plunged into darkness. It wasn’t trying to do anything like that... Something weakened the boundary between this world and a point inside the creature and it knew about it.

“So this is how the world ends,” I whispered with a dry laugh, “not with a bang but a gulp.”

After a few moments, the street lights flicked on, and I became aware of a whimpering nearby. It took a lot of effort for me to get up off the hood of the police cruiser; I was losing a lot of blood from all the punctures and slashes I’d accrued from my fight at the portal, and unless I sought a first aid kit, I’d bleed out within a few hours. Still, I wasn’t out of the woods yet, and the crying could be a trap.

In the blinding light of the halogen street-lamp, I discovered that the shotgun I’d borrowed had landed very close to me. It even looked to be in working order. With a limping gait, I stalked over to it and snatched it up. Without a second thought, I flicked on the mounted tactical light and took aim in the direction of the piteous sound, off in the darkness.

I almost wished I hadn’t; the shadows weren’t as empty as they looked, and the grotesque spider-like creatures that had attacked countless times since I came to this doomed world skittered out of sight. Even now, they gave me the creeps, and I had no doubt that they would be prowling in even greater numbers now that the world was inside the belly of the beast.

The urge to blast one of the head-sized monstrosities was hard to suppress, but the urge to see to it that any civilians that hadn’t evacuated the area could get to safety won out. Besides, surely someone could stitch me up in repayment for saving their arse, right?

Not far off, near an alley mouth, was the human Twilight Sparkle. She was just sitting there, clutching the still form of Sunset Shimmer close to her, sobbing and whimpering. There was no reaction from her as the light hit her eyes. No hand shot up to block the light, nor did she call out. The pitiful young woman just clutched her friend harder to her breast.

As I drew nearer to the girl, I realized that she was talking to Sunset. “This is all my fault,” she’d whisper, brushing a lock of fiery hair out of Sunset’s slack face. “This all happened because of me, and now I’m all alone again.” I paused and listened as she spoke. “Why did I get so greedy with the magic? If I’d just left things alone, this... thing would never have found us. Yet I reached out, and tore the boundaries between worlds asunder. It felt me, and wanted me, and now I’ve doomed the human race.”

In that moment, those words were the worst thing I could ever hear. They struck so hard, deep inside me in a way I never thought possible, and from that wound in my spirit, a fury that eclipsed anything I’d ever felt before erupted in my belly. Not even when I had been raped and forced to witness the death of Ice Blossom had I felt so out of control.

She’s the reason you’ll never see your daughters again, the darkness in my heart whispered, and like a guitar string wound too tight, something in me broke. This child, who worked alongside us never once stopped to think that things might work out better if she had just said something. I might never even see the afterlife now, because of her!

My grip on the pump-action tightened until my hands began to tremble. No, I will not allow this child to prevent me from seeing my loved ones again. It was crazy how easy that thought came to me. Judgement is upon you, Twilight Sparkle.

I leveled the shotgun at her chest, and pulled the trigger.

The deafening bang that echoed off into the darkness was a pale shadow of the sound of the last of my humanity dying with that girl. I would not die here if I had anything to say about it, and if I was lucky, I’d get the chance to make sure she paid again. That would have to wait, though. First I had to live through the night.

Author's Note

This chapter took a lot longer than I'd have liked, and for that I apologize. This is, for the most part filler, which pretty much everybody hates, myself included, but as much as I'd love to do a training montage, this felt like the right way to go.

Now, you're probably wondering about the end there. Yes, that is exactly what you're probably thinking. Bad Future Silver survived her apparent death, and now is just plan Bad Silver. How, or when, will she strike? Is she really foe, or friend? Find out on the next episode of Dragon Ball Z? Wait, I feel like I've done that joke before.