Quantum Starlight

by Rambling Writer

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Starlight Glimmer, Sunburst, Science Fiction, Crossover, Doctor Whooves, Thriller, Original Character
Length: 40548

Time is breaking down, and it's up to Starlight and Sunburst to fix it.

When knowledge of Sunburst's great skill in magical theory spreads to the small Streamhaven University, he's offered a position on a time travel experiment. Knowing of Starlight's history with time travel, he invites her to see the moment of truth, the first actual use of the time machine. Starlight accepts. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything. The time machine malfunctions. The project director disappears. Time begins stuttering. And Starlight and Sunburst find themselves pursued by the mysterious Monarch Solutions, a company that knows much more about time travel than they should. Now it's up to Starlight and Sunburst to find a solution to their predicament before time itself ends forever.

Although a crossover with Quantum Break, no knowledge of it is needed to understand this story.

Published 2016-10-09 14:10:02 UTC
Last updated 2016-11-23 06:59:56 UTC

Prologue - A Letter

Starlight,

This sounds a lot worse than I mean it to be, but the Crystal Empire almost getting taken over by eternal winter was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Okay, a little more context. I’d been in a bit of a rut when you met me, to be honest. You probably saw how disorganized everything was at my place. Nothing was just really clicking for me. You coming back and accepting me again was the first good thing that happened, and then Flurry Heart’s crystalling was the second good thing, and now I’m up and about again. Being Flurry Heart’s crystaller has kept me busier than usual, but it’s mostly just helping Cadance and Shining Armor do all the usual baby stuff for her, nothing with magic yet. Still, it’s better than nothing.

Then imagine my surprise when some university bigwig shows up at the Crystal Palace, politely inquiring if I’d be willing to help on a certain theoretical physics experiment called Project Promenade (can’t tell you what it’s about, sorry, NDAs). See, the crystal ponies talked about the crystalling and the renewal of the Crystal Heart to their friends, and that slowly filtered through the grapevine until it reached Serene, director of physics at one Streamhaven University. She put two and two together, made some accurate guesses, and figured out that I’m rather skilled at magical theory. The school was working on a project that could use my expertise and she stopped by just to confirm her suspicions. She talked with Cadance a bit, and, well…

Long story short, having LITERALLY EVERY PRINCESS IN EQUESTRIA be able to vouch for your understanding in magic is kind of a Big Deal.

After a little bit of discussion with Serene, Cadance and Shining both agreed that my duties as crystaller weren’t too terribly important just yet, and, given the implications of Promenade (which I REALLY want to tell you about but can’t, stupid NDAs), the study I would undertake was incredibly important. They let me go for a few months so I could work on Promenade.

So now I’m over in a city called Streamhaven. Not too far from Ponyville, actually. Could do with a bit of cleanup, but I spend most of my time at the college anyway, so that doesn’t matter much. Promenade’s been going great, and we’re about to enter the final stages. But I was thinking: would you like to come and see the moment of truth? I’ve talked with Serene, and so long as you also sign an NDA, you’re welcome to. Not that it’ll matter much, because we’ll be going public less than a week later. But from what you’ve told me of your history, you’ll probably want to see it.

The final run’s a week from Sunday. If you want to come and see it, get a letter to me several days in advance so we can set up transportation. Don’t worry about paying for it; I’ve got plenty of money. Also, don’t feel you have to come, I completely understand if you don’t want to see it; I’ve been incredibly vague about what Promenade’s about (not my choice), so you might not want to go out on a limb for some theoretical physics experiment that might not be all that exciting. But trust me on this. YOU WILL LOVE IT.

Sunburst

Twilight frowned when Starlight showed her the letter. “Project Promenade,” she muttered. “Sounds kind of familiar, but I can’t put my hoof on it. And I wonder what walking’s got to do with theoretical physics…”

As Twilight was rambling about ambling, Starlight read the letter over again. Sunburst had sent letters before, but not one so focused on a specific detail. He must’ve been feeling it. And she’d only seen him once or twice since their reunion, so the idea of seeing him again was… pleasing, if she was being honest with herself, but she had her own duties to attend to. Twilight was many things, but a light teacher was not one of them. Starlight wasn’t overloaded with work and friendship lessons, but it’d be tricky to spare a few days to jaunt over to some out-of-the-way town for some experiment that she didn’t even know what it did.

Still, experiment or not, if she was able to go, she’d see Sunburst. That alone made the trip a plus.

Twilight kept chattering to herself until Starlight cleared her throat. “Hey. Talking about walking is over. Do you know what next week’s going to be like?”

“Actually,” Twilight said with a grin, “the timing on this is just perfect. I’ve got a summit in Griffonstone to attend — their spreading of friendship is going amazingly — and it just so happens to be right on the dates he was talking about. There wouldn’t be much there for you to learn, not after our last visit, so I wasn’t planning on taking you. But if you want to take a break from your studies for a few days to go visit him, that’d be just fine, since I wouldn’t be around anyway.”

Starlight’s ears went up. “Really? That’s great! Thank you!”

“Sure. Besides, you need to apply what you’ve learned about friendship a bit more, so this could be a chance for that. Most of what you’ve learned, you’ve only applied among the other five Elements, and you need to get out more.” Twilight giggled. “And when I say you need to get out more, you need to get out more.”

“…Okay then.” Starlight looked back down at the letter so Twilight couldn’t see the red creeping into her cheeks. As she looked over the letter again, one sentence jumped out at her. “What do you think he means by from what I’ve told him about about my history?”

“I’m not sure,” Twilight said with a frown. “What’ve you told him?”

“Pretty much everything. Including the unimportant parts.”

“So it could be anything.” Twilight shrugged. “Well, I guess you’ll find out when you get the- Wait. You and him have been writing letters back and forth?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been keeping the letters from him, right? For archival purposes?”

“Yes.”

“And copying them?”

“Yes.” Starlight started gritting her teeth.

“In triplicate?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been copying your letters to him, right?”

“Yes.”

“In triplicate?”

“Yes.” If Starlight pressed her teeth together any more, they’d probably shatter.

“Good,” Twilight said, nodding. “Good. We’ll need to file those sometime soon. I wonder i-”

“I’m going to reply,” Starlight said gruffly.

“Oh! Right. Sorry,” said Twilight. “Writing implements are right over there.” She waved a hoof at a nearby drawer. “Now, where did I put that…” She frowned and left the room.

Starlight rolled her eyes as she pulled parchment, quill, and inkwell from the drawer. Twilight’s train of thought did not like staying put on one track, which could make good conversation, but meant trying to talk about one thing was a pain if she wasn’t dedicated to that topic. Starlight put quill to parchment and started writi-

“And don’t forget to copy this one!” Twilight called out.

“I know!” Starlight sighed and started wri-

“In triplicate!”

“I know!” Starlight gritted her teeth and started writing.

1 - Streamhaven Welcomes You

Streamhaven, October 9
6:44 PM — 93 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Ponyville wasn’t exactly a large town. But Streamhaven was so small, Starlight suspected there were more ponies in the college than in the rest of the town.

As Sunburst had said, it wasn’t far away. Barely an hour and a half from Ponyville by train. It was one of those small, kinda-rundown towns that was just hanging on, but felt way happier than it had any right to. There were a lot of billboards around for some company called Monarch Solutions; apparently, they had a big presence in Streamhaven, although Starlight had never heard of them before.

Streamhaven sprawled, but sprawling was really the only way it could take up any space. There weren’t a lot of buildings, and pretty much every building had a front yard, a back yard, and two side yards. They weren’t always that big, but each building having a full set of yards made the whole town look more welcoming than it would have otherwise. It wasn’t much, but it kept the town from feeling downbeat, like it should’ve.

The train hissed into Streamhaven Station almost reluctantly, like it didn’t want to stop. After all, Starlight was the only pony getting off the train, nopony was getting on, and, in fact, there was only one other pony on the platform besides Starlight herself.

“Hey, Starlight.”

That one pony was Sunburst. He looked a lot happier than she’d ever seen him before, grinning from ear to ear, and his mane was actually semi-tidy. He’d swapped out his wizard robe for a lab coat.

“Sunburst!” Starlight ran up to him and gave him a quick hug. “It’s great to see you again. What’s with the new look?”

Sunburst flicked at one of the lapels of the coat. “Oh, this? Nothing, really, I just thought, since this is a bit more science-y than magic-y, I should look a bit more science-y than magic-y.”

“If it’s more science-y, why do they need someone skilled in magical theory?”

“Long story short, shortcuts.” Sunburst glanced over his shoulder for a second. “Can’t say yet, I’m not, not authorized. Serene should be here, but I don’t know-”

Another pony slid around the walls of the station with a screech, galloped towards them, and came to a halt right in front of them. She was panting heavily and sweating, but grinning broadly. “Hey, Sunny. Sorry I’m late. Some last-second organizational stuff.”

“That’s, that’s fine,” said Sunburst. “Starlight, this is Serene. Project director.”

Serene was an earth pony, kind of unimposing all around. A little on the scrawny side, dark blue coat, short black mane and tail. She had on a ratty shirt for some band called Raven Rock. But in spite of her look, she carried herself easily. She was the pony who had enough authority to get away with wearing beat-up vintage band shirts in the middle of a world-changing science experiment. “The mare of the hour, hmm?” she asked, grinning. “Except not really. Anyway, hello, hello, hello. Any friend of Sunburst’s is a friend of mine, given what he’s done.”

Starlight and Serene shook hooves. “Really?” asked Starlight. “He’s done that much for you?”

“Lemme just put it this way,” said Serene. “If it weren’t for him, today would be a year or two away, and if he was nothing more than I expected, it’d still be a month off. I just wanted a good magical theorist, and what I got was one of the best in all of Equestria.” She clapped her hooves and rubbed them together, grinning. “Yessiree, I am quite pleased with him, yes indeed.”

“Years?” Starlight asked. “Just what are you doing?”

Sunburst pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Well, um, I can’t give any spe-”

“Wup! Not here,” Serene said, holding up a hoof. “There’s a bar like five minutes down the road. If we’re gonna talk before we go to Promenade, we’re gonna do it there.”

“Call me crazy,” Starlight said, “but I don’t think going out for a beer run right before a world-changing experiment is a good idea.”

Serene chuckled. “Bars sell other stuff besides beer, you know. I was just thinking like a soda and a quick snack. Anyway, c’mon.” She walked away, whistling a tune that didn’t sound like anything in particular, but was quite peppy.

Streamhaven, October 9
6:58 PM — 79 minutes until the Fracture in Time

“Awright, den,” Serene said through her mouthful of cheesy fries, “you govva sign dis befoh we can go any fuhvuh.” She swallowed. “Standard NDA. Sorry.” She pushed a pen and paper in front of Starlight.

They were in a bar that Starlight had a sneaking suspicion made up at least twenty percent of all the bars in Streamhaven. Everypony knew Serene and a lot of them knew Sunburst. Starlight felt a bit left out. Serene had snatched up a table in the corner, and now they were munching on appetizers, slurping on soda, and talking within a silence field Starlight had set up to keep anypony from listening in.

Starlight gave the paper a quick look-over. Looked pretty standard. Don’t say this until that point, don’t mention those, keep quiet or we’ll sue your rump into oblivion, blah blah blah. Sure, she could sign it. She jotted her name on the dotted line and gave the paper back to Serene.

“Poifect,” Serene said. She took a quick chug of soda. “So you wanna know what Promenade’s about? Sunny, you wanna tell her, or should I?”

“I’ll do it,” Sunburst said. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle and grinned. “Starlight, Project Promenade is an experiment in time travel.”

“…What?”

“Time travel, Starry!” Serene said with a grin. “Mind if I call you Starry?” She kept talking before Starlight could say she minded very much. “It’s a project to develop a working time machine. And in less than an hour and a half, we’ll be scientifically sending a pony through time for the first time.”

Well. That was something. Fully-mechanical time travel.

And yet, Starlight had never been more split on an idea. On the one hoof, it was time travel. A sci-fi fan’s wet dream. The possibilities were almost limitless. They could stop disasters before they happen, cure diseases before they spread. Already, her mind was running away with ideas.

On the other hoof, though, Starlight herself had traveled through time without a machine not too long ago. Looked at next to magic, a mechanical time machine wasn’t all that impressive, and actually a bit redundant. “You, um, do know th-”

But Serene waved Starlight off. “Yeah, there’s magic spells that allow for time travel. But those all have severe limitations. Just for starters, as you keep going back, the power requirements increase exponentially. Going back more than a month would be at the limits of most unicorns. And if you’re not an alicorn, you can just forget about more than a year.”

Starlight and Sunburst glanced briefly at each other. Yeah, Starlight thought, about that…

“And you have a time limit,” Serene continued, not noticing. “Like only a few minutes. This machine doesn’t have anything like that. You go back or forward, you stay back or forward unless you go forward or back.” She flicked her hoof from side to side. “And let’s not forget the big thing: this machine doesn’t need a unicorn to work. The core’s magical, sure, but its effects are purely physical, and it’s all set up so that you don’t need magic to use it.” She grinned. “And depending on how technology advances, we might not even need the magic parts of the core if we can replicate them with pure science.”

Starlight turned the thoughts over in her head. Serene had a point. It’d taken quite a bit of time for her to figure out how link Star Swirl’s spell with the Cutie Map, and even then, it’d tested the limits of her knowledge. But if this time machine worked, then pretty much anypony could use it. And the possible uses of easily accessible time travel were, well, far-reaching, to say the least. Okay, so maybe science-powered time travel had its place in the world.

“I know that look,” Serene said with a smirk. “You’re totally agreeing with me, ain’tcha?”

“…Yeah,” said Starlight.

“Hah! Everypony does.”

Starlight stared at her drink. So mechanical time travel was a viable thing. She wasn’t physics-minded, more magic-minded, but some small part of her still kept begging to know, How? Because, well, it was time travel. From a purely technological viewpoint, it was way beyond anything she’d seen before. But they still had almost an hour to kill before they needed to get to Streamhaven University for the experiment. Why not ask them?

Sunburst and Serene looked at each other for a second. “Do, do you want the simple version?” asked Sunburst. “Or the, uh, the slightly technical version?”

Even if she wasn’t physics-minded, Starlight had picked up a thing or two from Twilight. “Let’s go with technical.” And if it was too much, she could always for the simpler one.

Sunburst opened his mouth, but Serene started talking before he could. “Keep quiet, Sunny, I’m the one who sells the stuff, I’m the one who explains it best.”

She clapped her hooves together. “Alrighty! So. We’re gonna have to jump in real deep real fast, so try to keep up, okay? Okay. So. You can’t see it, but the universe is filled with something called the Neigher-Joy field. This field produces particles called chronons, which, through an absurdly complicated mechanism we don’t fully understand yet, allow for the passage of time. By-”

“Wait,” said Starlight, “are y-”

“Whoa, hey,” said Serene darkly. “You’re throwing off my groove. Don’t throw off my groove, m’kay? Don’t ask questions. Just lemme talk.”

“…Fine.”

“Good. Anyway, thanks to the power of SCIENCE!, we can manipulate the Neigher-Joy field in such a way that chronons are produced differently than they usually are, making objects go through time differently than they usually do, making them travel through time. Those’re the basics, anyway, but I don’t have the time and you don’t have the education to go more in-depth.” She paused and leaned back in her chair. “Now you can ask questions.”

“Okay, so there’re particles that make time go,” said Starlight. “Okay, sure. But you named them chronons? Really? You do realize you sound like a bad old sci-fi novel, right? One of the ones back from when they thought caloric was still a thing?”

Serene grinned and wagged a hoof at Starlight. “But the only difference between bad old sci-fi novels and the good ones, the ones by Jules Vanner and Isaac Asicob, is that those guys were right. The numbers say we’re right, so we’re one of the good ones.” She paused. “Of course, we’re still using silly, overly descriptive terms, so we’re still an old sci-fi novel.”

“So what about paradoxes?” This had been something Starlight had been pondering and getting headaches over ever since her little timeline temper tantrum, and she still hadn’t been able to fully figure it out. “Can I go back in time and kill me before I go back in time and kill me?”

Sunburst chuckled nervously. “Um, uh, no. Long story short, paradoxes can’t happen.”

“Why not?”

Serene laughed. “You sure you want to talk about this? This is the sort of time travel crap that makes no sense and just…” She flicked a hoof away. “…fries your brain like an egg.”

“I just want to know I won’t make Equestria explode by stepping on a butterfly.”

“That’s, that’s impossible,” Sunburst said, as he adjusted his glasses. “It’s, uh, the Neigher-Joy field can’t, can’t destructively interfere with itself. Our actions, in normal time, um, they change the behavior of the Neigher-Joy field as it keeps perpetuating. But, but in pastwards time travel, it kind of…” He made some swirly motions with his hooves. “…like, loops back over on itself and self-interferes in a, uh, closed timelike curve. But paradoxes, where, uh, the interference gets destructive, it starts moving away from itself, making the interference less destructive and more constructive, so-”

The technobabble was too much. Starlight blinked and coughed. “Sorry to interrupt, but Equestrian, please?”

“Look at this way,” Serene said. “Pick a date. April 2? Okay, good date. There’s an earthquake in San Franpinto on April 2. Even with time travel, we can’t stop it. But we can evacuate the worst-hit parts. Just send somepony back to, oh, let’s just say March 2, saying, ‘There’s gonna be a San Franpinto earthquake on April 2’. So we evacuate and like no one dies. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Starlight said, cocking her head, “but I still don’t see what this has to do with being unable to change the past.”

Serene grinned. “The catch is that there never was a timeline where no time traveler came back. An ‘unchanged’ timeline, to speak. If we will eventually send somepony back, they’ve already been back. We can’t change the past, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s already been changed. You can’t look only at ‘now’, ‘cause time travel breaks causality over its knee. Effect can precede cause. Heck, the more you try to change something, the more likely it is that you’ll cause it to happen in the first place, assuming you have an effect at all. The Neighvikov Self-Consistency Principle at work!”

And yet, Starlight had seen otherwise. She’d seen the past changed. She’d done the changing herself. Did time travel via magic work differently? Why? Maybe there was something different “under the hood”, so to speak. She might figure it out if she looked into it, but considering she was barely understanding this, that didn’t seem likely. Something to ask Twilight about, apparently, once she got back from Griffonstone and the NDA ran out.

“Don’t worry too much about it,” said Serene, misreading Starlight’s silence. “Worry too much about it, try to figure it all out, and we’ll still be sitting here tomorrow, drawing diagrams with straws. Just know that paradoxes can’t happen.”

“Right, yeah,” said Sunburst. “We’ve, we’ve run the calculations numerous times, and, and paradoxes cannot happen.”

That thing with the straws, at least, seemed likely. But if Sunburst and Serene were convinced that paradoxes couldn’t happen, Starlight was prepared to take them at their word. Maybe another thing to talk with Twilight about, but still. It was a big weight off her shoulders. “Alright,” said Starlight. She sipped down some soda. “So, uh, what exactly are you doing, Sunburst? If everything’s mechanical, why do they need somepony skilled in theoretical magic?”

Sunburst blinked, pushed up his glasses, and sat up straight. “Promenade has some, ah, let’s just say some rather complex requirements. I was brought in to straighten everything out. They were on the right track, but…” He looked a bit squeamish. “Yeesh, let’s just say efficiency was not one of their strong suits.”

“And the fact that you can’t do the magic yourself doesn’t matter?” Starlight hoped that didn’t sound too blunt to Sunburst; he’d been frank about his lack of skill with magic, but the way the words came out made her cringe a little.

Sunburst, however, didn’t care. “No, no,” he said, grinning. “See, that’s the great thing about, about being a theoretical physicist, rather than an experimental one. I tell other ponies what needs, what needs to be done, and they’re the ones that do it.” He seemed to drift away, smiling serenely. “It’s like I’ve got PhD’s as interns.”

“Don’t let them hear you say that,” Serene said with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” said Sunburst, still drifting, “well…” He blinked and shook his head. “Anyway, we’re, we’re replicating some very extreme physical conditions with magic as a shortcut. Conditions that, um, normally, might just destroy the building. And the, uh, the whole campus. And, and maybe all of Streamhaven, for that matter.” He grinned sheepishly. “And I’m making sure that doesn’t happen.”

“The… the whole town,” Starlight said flatly. She snorted. “What’re you working with, black holes?”

“Who told you that?!”

Starlight jumped almost a foot in the air from her stool. Sunburst didn’t have outbursts like that, at least not when he was a colt. His eyes had grown and his pupils had shrunk, and he was taking deep, gasping breaths. It didn’t help that Serene had said the same thing at the same time and had the same look on her face with the same behavior.

“W-what?” stammered Starlight. “No one! I guessed!”

Sunburst’s breathing slowed and he blinked a few times. He and Serene exchanged glances. “No one?” He bit his lip and adjusted his glasses. “You, you’re not lying?”

“Lying? Sunburst, why would I lie?”

“…Right.” Sunburst sighed and ruffled his mane. “Sorry, it’s just… This is all very hush-hush, and if we had a security breach, it… it’d be bad.”

“Rrrrrrrrrreal bad,” muttered Serene.

“Right.” Starlight paused. “So it is black holes?”

“In, in essence, yes,” said Sunburst. “They, um, warp spacetime and the Neigher-Joy field so much that, that chronon production gets really screwed up. But if we can tweak how black holes warp spacetime, we can, we can tweak chronon production. And, and I’m basically making sure that the bending of the spacetime continuum stays in the time continuum and, and extrudes into the space continuum as little as possible.”

Starlight blinked and coughed. “Equestrian, please?”

“He’s using magic to make black holes that don’t have gravity but still muck with chronons,” said Serene. “She’s a laypony, Sunny,” she said, nudging him in the ribs. “You don’t get to use big words any more.”

Sunburst lightly punched Serene in the shoulder. She didn’t even flinch. “You call that a punch? Wuss. Anyway, Starry, got any more questions?”

“Not really. Not yet, anyway.” Her head was still pounding from the information she received and she needed some time to digest it. That way, she wouldn’t mentally puke when she actually saw it in action.

“Alrighty. Then let’s just hang until it’s time to head to Promenade.” Serene scooped some more cheesy fries into her mouth. “Should we get some more cheesy fries? I think we need some more cheesy fries.”

2 - Project Promenade

Streamhaven University, October 9
7:56 PM — 21 minutes until the Fracture in Time

The physics building of Streamhaven University was sleek, shiny, and ultramodern, with lots of long, smooth curves and even more chrome. (Why did “futuristic” always seem to mean “chromed”?) Thanks to the late hour on the weekend, it was mostly empty, aside from one or two other ponies who looked to be leaving. Serene led Starlight and Sunburst through a labyrinthine series of corridors, humming to herself as she walked and carrying a small jewelry box on her back.

As Starlight examined the halls, she couldn’t help but notice something. “Exactly how new is this place?” she asked Sunburst. “It barely feels used.” The floors were way too smooth to have been walked on much, the walls were pristine, and she didn’t hear any of the doors squeak.

Sunburst scratched his head. “Um, uh, I think a year,” he said. “There was, uh, this really generous donation from Monarch Solutions — do you know who they are?”

“Kinda. I saw billboards, but they weren’t very specific on what they did.”

“They’re this, this cutting-edge technology and magic company. Years ahead of the curve next to everypony else.” Sunburst pushed his glasses up. “Anyway, since they’re so big into innovation, they heard that a project at Streamhaven U had, had discovered the Neigher-Joy field, so, so they gave the team a bunch of money to pursue it as far as they could.” He shrugged. “And now, well, here w-”

“And here we are!” Serene interrupted cheerily. “Prrrroject Prrrromenade.” She could roll her r’s like nopony else, except maybe Trixie.

They were standing in front of an airlock-esque door: a steel-framed glass box around a very heavy-duty steel door. Serene placed her hoof on a red panel to one side of the entrance to the box. After a second, the panel changed to green and the door opened. Starlight guessed it was reading her personal magic field and comparing it with some collection of similar. If you were in the list, the door opened.

Starlight looked at the second door, the one that looked more at home in prison than in a college, then stared at Sunburst as they entered the box, flicking her ears.

“Very high security,” Sunburst said. “We don’t want anypony getting involved who isn’t involved. Just for starters, that door’s as magic-proof as we can make it. And-”

Serene unlocked the door by means of another panel. “Cool it, Sunny, can’t have you rambling again. Anyway, Starry, long story short, you ain’t getting through here with anything short of military-grade explosives or an alicorn.”

“That’s one heck of a budget you’ve got.”

“You ain’t seen the half of it.” Serene pulled open the door. “Welcome to Project Promenade.”

Behind the door was a large, circular room, sterile white from floor to ceiling. Most of it was taken up by a large machine in the middle, over fifty feet across. A thick ring the size of a hallway circled around a central point. At that central point stood a device that resembled a spherical pincushion over six feet in diameter. Wires came out of the “pins” and dropped to the floor, where Starlight couldn’t see them. Light warped strangely around the core, like looking through a fishbowl without the fishbowl. A couple of techs were scattered around the room, doing last-minute maintenance on machines both mechanical and arcane. Starlight, Sunburst, and Serene were standing on a catwalk ten feet above the floor, with stairs dropping off to a large workstation-type area on their left.

Starlight whistled as they headed down the stairs, around the machine. “Wow. Some operation. What’s up with that… thing?” She pointed at the device in the center of the room.

“That’s the, uh, the core,” said Sunburst. “Pretty much what makes the time machine go, for lack of a, uh, better term.”

“It looks pretty… set in place.”

“It’s a time machine, Starry,” Serene responded, “not a space machine. It doesn’t move. It just pushes you forward and backward in time.”

“Although-” Sunburst pushed his glasses up. “-if, if you did move it between entering and exiting the machine, you’d, uh, stay right where you were relative to the, to the core. Time is relative, and location is relative, so-”

“Complicated time stuff,” said Starlight. “Got it.”

Sunburst coughed. “Um, yeah.”

Most of the ponies, about six or seven of them, were clustered on one side of the machine, which looked like a control area of some kind. There were displays showing (what Starlight assumed was) the status of the time machine, along with plenty of switches and dials and what have you. None of them , except for a younger one (possibly a student) who extricated herself from the mass and galloped over to them. “Ma’am,” she said, “we ran the startup sequence early, just like you said. Everything’s in order, and we just need a few last-minute tuneups to reduce data noise.”

“Poifect,” said Serene, setting her jewelry box on an empty counter. “Everything’s smooth. Anyhoo, this…” She suddenly draped a foreleg across Starlight’s shoulders and yanked her close. Starlight folded her ears back and shrank down a bit. “…is Starlight Glimmer. She’s the spectator Sunny’s bringing in.”

“Mmhmm. Great.” And the student was gone without even looking in Starlight’s direction.

Starlight shoved Serene’s leg off her and stepped away. “Could you, um,” she muttered, “not do that? I’m not that good around ponies.”

“Ah, calm down,” Serene said nonchalantly, “you’re doing fine.”

Which wasn’t at all what Starlight was talking about, but better to just let the matter drop. Instead, she took a closer look at the time machine. For the first time, she noticed a door set in the outer ring. It was glass, so she could see through it to the inside, to a small room within the ring itself. Two more doors, these ones steel, were on both of the side walls, like they were entrances to the ring itself; it almost looked like an airlock. “Hang on… is that ring thing hollow?”

“Yeah, it’s um, uh, it’s a corridor, and, It’s, it’s how you go through time,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up his muzzle. “Turn the core on and, and walk in a circle around it. The corridor just keeps things, it keeps them isolated.”

“Why do I need to walk to travel through time? That’s… weird.”

“That’s easy,” said Serene. “It’s beca-”

“Serene, ma’am?” said one of the scientists. “We’re ready.”

“Tell you later,” whispered Serene. “Got a project to direct.” She stepped onto the platform in front of the airlock and turned to the assembled group. “Fillies and gentlecolts, we stand on the cusp of a leap forward in the understanding of the universe.” She paused. “You wanna listen to my speech, or wanna just do the thing?”

“Do the thing,” whispered Starlight. Fortunately, the crowd seemed to agree with her; she caught several mutters of “do the thing” and one yell.

“Good!” Serene said with a smile. “Cathode, please set the machine for two minutes to the past.” As the relevant tech started adjusting dials, Serene rolled her shoulders and took a step towards the airlock. “Alright,” she muttered, “here goes…” She stopped talking, her leg frozen mid-step.

Another Serene stepped out of the airlock, smiling. “Nothing?”

Starlight’s jaw dropped. She’d seen changelings mimic ponies before, yes, but there was something… holistic about this she’d never seen in changelings. They looked weirdly synchronized as they moved. Serene 1’s face was slowly growing a grin exactly identical to the one already on Serene 2’s. Even in the few words she’d heard, the cadences and timbres of them sounded identical. There was looking exactly like a pony, and then there was being that pony.

The crowd exploded. Starlight couldn’t hear herself think over the noise. Sunburst all of sudden was whirling her around in a hug. It looked and sounded more like a frat party than a scientific experiment.

“We did it!” Sunburst squealed. “It took all this work, but we did it!”

Starlight hadn’t even been involved for 99% of it and her mind was reeling. Sunburst’s giddiness was infectious, and she was soon laughing. “It’s incredible!”

“That’s putting it lightly!” said Sunburst, releasing her. “It’s-”

“Hey!” Serene yelled to the group. Both of them. “Simmer down!” They looked at each other and laughed.

“How’s it feel?” asked Serene 1.

Serene 2 rolled her shoulders. “Vujà dé all over again. Just wait a little, you’ll get what I mean.”

“And-”

“Physically, you don’t feel a thing,” Serene 2 said. “Just like walking down the street.”

“So-”

“It is indeed.” Serene 2 chuckled. “You should see the look on your face. Oh wait. You will!” She laughed again. “Trust me. Going through this is even better the second time.” She nodded towards the time machine. “You better get going, or else I won’t have come.”

Serene 1 coughed. “Right. Yeah.” She grinned at the scientists, yelled, “See you in negative two minutes!” and sauntered into the time machine.

Silence reigned for another moment before Serene said, “Right! Phase one complete. And we’re all very, very, very excited, but it’s time for phase two. Cathode please set the machine for five minutes in the future. Now, since I’m going forward in time, I could theoretically just hang out in the corridor for five minutes and come out. Of course, you know I wouldn’t do that, and I know I wouldn’t do that, but just so we have a bit more data…”

She flicked open the jewelry box and held up its contents. “Two watches, synchronized to the second, with no way for me to adjust them,” she announced (a bit unnecessarily, as everypony could see that). “This one stays here-” She laid the watch back in the box. “-and this one stays with me.” She wrapped the other watch around her foreleg. “You all know what comes next.”

Even if it was unnecessary, given the company, Starlight couldn’t help but be a little impressed. That was a good idea. Not mind-blowing or anything, but kind of clever. She wondered if she’d come up with something like that, in these circumstances. Probably not. But then, that was why Serene was the project director in all this.

Serene turned toward the airlock and rolled her shoulders again. “Here goes everything.” She stepped into the corridor, and the airlock door closed behind her.

An electric burst sounded from the core. At the same time, one of the techs frowned and leaned in to take a closer look at her meter. “Sunburst, sir?” she asked. Starlight could detect a subtle, but definitely present, hint of nervousness in her voice. “Could you take a look at these readings? I’m not su-”

“Let me see,” said Sunburst. He lightly nudged the tech aside and began examining the output.

Serene hadn’t moved into the corridor yet. “Something wrong?”

“I don’t think so,” Sunburst called out, “but don’t…” His eyes went wide. “Oh, no,” he whispered. He began flicking switches, slowly at first, then faster and faster. “No no no no NO!” His voice grew louder with each word.

Ponies around the room began muttering. Starlight, not sure what to do, started chewing her lip and shuffling from hoof to hoof. She coughed. “Um, Sunburst?”

Another discharge came from the core, and a high-pitched hum filled the room. Starlight felt like needles were being driven into her ears and nearly fell to the floor.

“Not happening,” mumbled Sunburst. He didn’t seem to have heard her. He was jumping from control panel to control panel, flipping switches and turning dials. “This is not ha-” His head snapped up. “Somepony get Serene out of there now!”

Starlight bolted for the airlock. She wasn’t sure what made her jump so fast. Maybe it was the panic in Sunburst’s voice, the sheer terror that never was there. Maybe it was Twilight’s friendship lessons, the ones that had taught her empathy and shown her that each and every pony was important. Maybe it was just a desire to have something to do. Whatever. Starlight bolted for the airlock.

Beyond the corridor, the light distortions around the core vanished. Another discharge came, then another, and another. Alarms began blaring. Sunburst whirled from the control panel and began shoving techs towards the exit. “Everypony out! Everypony out!” After maybe an instant’s hesitation, everypony in the room started moving towards the door.

Except for Starlight. She wrapped her forelegs around the handle of the airlock door, trying to yank it open. But it was too tightly sealed. Inside the airlock, Serene’s eyes were wide and she was battering at the glass. “Hey! What’s goi-”

Something blasted out from the core. Starlight wasn’t sure what, but it felt like she was being roasted alive. A wall of force slammed into her like a freight train; she was hurled from the airlock and smashed into the opposite wall. It was too much. She blacked out.

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:17 PM — Fracture in Time

“Hey? Starry!”

Starlight blinked a few times, but the world still refused to come into focus. At least it was quiet. She coughed.

“Can you hear me? I can see you moving!”

Her limbs. Did she have them all? She tried moving them. One, two, three, four. Barring phantom limbs, yes. She tried flicking her tail. It didn’t work, but only because it was pinned between her body and the floor. Good sign. She blinked again. The visual world slowly began to cohere.

“Get up! C’mon, get up!”

It was Serene’s voice, but it was echoing weirdly. Half there, a quarter too early, a quarter too late. Better take a look at that. Starlight groaned and tried to push herself to her hooves. Her skin screamed in agony, like she’d jumped into way-too-hot water. Her flesh throbbed and her joints ached. But she did her best to ignore it and got to her feet, wobbling.

“Yes, that’s it. Keep working. You can do it.”

Starlight groaned again and rubbed her head, keeping her eyes shut. “Serene?” she mumbled as loudly as she could. Her voice was echoing the same as Serene’s was. She could’ve sworn she heard the words before they exited her mouth.

“Oh, thank Celestia,” sighed Serene. “How you feeling?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been better.”

“Yeah. Me too. But I’m up and I’m talking. That’s something.”

Starlight snorted and looked up. “So what hap- haaaa…”

She finally got a good look at her surroundings. And what she saw left her speechless.

Everything had just… stopped. It was like looking at a still life of an explosion. No, wait, it wasn’t like that, it was that. Debris hung motionless in the air. Sparks were flying from the core, but they weren’t going anywhere. Lightning was frozen mid-arc. And yet it wasn’t silent; Starlight heard brief, incoherent snatches of voices and noises, sounding like they were coming through a tiny metal tube. Sometimes they repeated themselves, sometimes they sped up, sometimes they slowed down, sometimes cut in or out at random.

And then there were the ponies. They were panicking, heading for the exit. But they were just as frozen as everything else. At the end of the line, pushing the last pony up the steps in front of him, was Sunburst. He was staring at the time machine with big eyes and a dropped jaw.

Some dim part of Starlight’s mind, one of the more logical parts, wondered just what in Celestia’s name was going on. But her head hurt too much for it to gain much ground. The part that had control told her to go over and help him. She almost started towards him when she remembered Serene was still trapped. She turned to the airlock.

But evidently, Serene knew what she was thinking. “Go ahead,” Serene said. “I’m fine.” It sounded like only half a lie. “But…” Her voice dropped to the tone of one thinking out loud. “…how could this happen? It worked before, why not now?”

As Serene kept up her nervous muttering, Starlight lurched towards Sunburst. “Sunburst?” she asked. She knew it was futile; time was frozen. But she asked anyway.

She nudged Sunburst. He didn’t move and nothing changed. This was hopeless. “Come on, Sunburst,” she whispered. She planted both hooves on his shoulder, trying to will him to move. “Please, don’t leave me like this.”

Then he started up again.

“-ove!” yelled Sunburst, tripping up the steps. He looked up and saw the ponies not moving, but he was still too panicked to notice everything else not moving. “Don’t just stand there!” he yelled. “G-”

“Whoa! Sunburst!” Starlight pushed him a little to draw his attention. “Quit it!”

Sunburst turned to her, eyes wide. “Starlight! You’ve gotta-”

And then he finally noticed the time stop. He stared at the room, mouth agape. “Oh, no,” he whispered eventually. “Zero state. No. No. No. No. No.”

Starlight cleared her throat. “Sunburst, just what in Celestia’s name is going on? Why’s time…” Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t say the words. It was too bizarre.

“Starlight, I…” Sunburst swallowed. His voice somehow dropped even more. “I think we just broke time.”

What? He did not just say that. Starlight blinked. “Huh?”

Sunburst pressed his hooves to his forehead. “We broke time, we- Where’s Serene?”

“She’s still in the airlock,” said Starlight, pointing.

“Gotta get her out of there,” Sunburst muttered, and bolted for the airlock. “Come on!”

“It’s stuck,” said Starlight as she followed him, “but ma-”

Someone hit “play”, and the world started up again. Sparks and debris flew. Alarms blared. Ponies scrambled and panicked. And in that exact moment, less than a second after time was flowing again, an explosion blew the exit door off its hinges.

Ponies covered head to hoof in dark blue armor stormed into the lab. Most of them were strapped into repeating crossbow harnesses. A few were brandishing pikes that sizzled and popped with magical effects. The pikeponies either placed themselves at the top of the stairs or, if they were pegasi, flew to the bottom to block the scientists in. Several of the marksponies drew beads on Starlight and Sunburst and chomped on the trigger bits.

“Down!” yelled Starlight. She dove at Sunburst and tackled him to the ground. Quarrels flew over their heads and clattered against the metal floor beneath them. One bolt hit the glass of the airlock. It didn’t crack, but Serene recoiled. Panic overtook her and she staggered into the time machine’s corridor to find some cover.

“No!” screamed Sunburst. “Don’t-”

But Serene was already gone, vanishing around the bend.

The archers were pulling on their loops, recocking the crossbows. Starlight scrambled to her hooves and looked around as fast as she could. She needed to find some way out.

There. Right ahead of her, right in the middle of the floor, was a maintenance hatch. “Sunburst!” she yelled. “Hatch!”

Sunburst’s eyes snapped to her. “Hatch?” She pointed, and his gaze snapped to the hatch. “Right! That!” In a glow of magic, the hatch burst open. The two of them dove for it. The archers fired.

There was a ladder below the hatch. Starlight didn’t take it. She just jumped blindly down as the bolts streaked over her.

3 - The Number One Killer is Time

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:18 PM — 1 minute after the Fracture in Time

Starlight toppled down the hatch and smashed her head against the walkway below. Stars swam in her vision; she blinked to clear it, but it didn’t help. And with the alarms still blaring, concentration was hard.

Sunburst was still at the top of the ladder. His horn glowed and the gap between the hatch and the frame vanished as the two pieces of metal sealed together. “Should delay them,” he muttered. He rubbed his head. “Ow, that aches.”

Wobbling, Starlight stood up. The floor tilted wildly beneath her for a few seconds, and she had to brace herself against a wall. “Sunburst,” she gasped, “what… what just happened?” Her head was throbbing, and she had to think for every word.

“I, I don’t know,” he muttered. He started pacing at the bottom of the ladder. “Okay, it, all the, I don’t-” He swallowed. “Let’s, let’s just get out of here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” mumbled Starlight. She rubbed her head. “Gaow, that-” She blinked a few times and her vision cleared up a little more. They were in a maintenance area, a lot less nice-looking than the cleanliness of the time machine above. It was a tangled mess of wires, pipes, and scaffolding holding up the time machine. Red lights pulsed in alarm.

“If you need help,” Sunburst said quickly, “I can-”

A unicorn stepped into view around a corner. He was wearing a military-style uniform, and a balaclava hid his face. He twitched in surprise when he saw Starlight and Sunburst, then yelled, “Hey!” His horn glowed and he fired a bolt of magic at Sunburst.

It was like a shot to the heart. “No!” Starlight yelled. Time seemed to slow as she jumped in front of Sunburst, trying to conjure a shield. It didn’t work; her head still hurt too much to use magic. This was it for her, then. What a way to go, killed in a physics experiment gone wrong. She almost wanted to see the look on Twilight’s face when she got the news. Almost. At least Sunburst would still be okay. For the next few seconds. That was something. Not much, but something.

Starlight closed her eyes and waited for the end.

It didn’t come.

She waited.

It didn’t come.

She waited.

It didn’t come.

…Time was supposed to speed up again, right? It was all in her head, and her head could only take so much… Right?

Starlight opened her eyes.

Time had not sped back up. The bolts hung there in the air, moving forward at a pace a lethargic snail encased in a block of ice would find slow. Starlight could see every little filament running around each bolt, pulsing softly and twisting about. She moved her head from side to side, just be sure her perception wasn’t skewed somehow. It wasn’t; she moved at a normal speed. She seemed to be in some kind of hazy blue sphere that definitely wasn’t magic. On the other side of the walkway, the trooper was standing there, moving normally and probably slack-jawed behind his balaclava.

Sunburst, said some part of her head. He was behind her, wasn’t he? She whipped around, and there he was, sloooooooowly recoiling from the incoming magic. Starlight’s brain kicked back into high gear, completely clear of headaches, and she tackled him to the ground. The blue sphere broke and the magic missiles sped up again, shooting over her shoulder as she and Sunburst fell to the floor.

The moment she felt steel under her hooves, Starlight rolled onto her back and fired a blast of magic at the trooper. He didn’t react in time and caught it full in the chest; he was thrown against the wall and crumpled to the ground, out cold.

She lay there on the ground, panting. That hadn’t been magic. She’d been too panicked to cast any. And even if she hadn’t, it definitely didn’t look like any magic she knew (and that was a lot). What was going on? What did she do? That had been her, right?

“Uh, Starlight?” asked Sunburst. “How did- What did you just-” He swallowed. “Come on, we, we gotta move.” He pushed himself up on trembling legs. “There’s, there’s a maintenance room nearby we should be able to get out through.” He set off at an uneasy walk.

Starlight slowly stood up and followed Sunburst. Her mind was burning with questions, but she didn’t think Sunburst knew any better than she did.

They turned a few corners and were faced with an unassuming pair of doors. Ordinary doors, not big and imposing ones like the one up top. Beside it was mounted a keypad. “Okay,” muttered Sunburst. He started punching numbers into the keypad. “01122.”

The keypad bzzrped in a way Starlight didn’t like. “Uh, Sunburst?”

Sunburst waved her off. “I… must’ve… put it in wrong,” he said, convincing neither of them. “Let, let me try again. Zero… one one… two two.”

Bzzrp.

“They, they’ve locked me out,” Sunburst said in disbelief. “They, no. They, they can’t do that. This is my code, only Serene or I can change it! It, it worked just fine an hour ago, and… gah!” He smashed his hoof into the keypad, then jumped away with a yelp, shaking it. “That-” he hissed in pain, “did- not- help!”

“Let me try.” Starlight said. She pulled her back legs in, then bucked the door with all her might. They slammed open easily, banging hard against the wall. The room beyond was devoted to a bunch of steel racks encased in glass with wires running from them. They ran from wall to wall (in fact, the walls were even more racks), leaving only a wide aisle between them to get through the room. The shelves were tightly spaced, only an inch or two apart, and they were all filled with crystals. But in some of them, the glass had been shattered and the crystals inside smashed. Shards of gems littered the floor, glinting up towards the ceiling.

Sunburst’s eyes widened. “Oh no… Oh no no no no no…”

“Sunb-”

But Sunburst already knew what she was asking. “This room, it, it was a failsafe to keep the bending of spacetime from getting too severe. All these crystals, they regulated the flow of electricity to the core, kept it from getting too high, and… and somepony destroyed them!” He started walking around. “It’s, I mean, look at this. The glass was broken from the outside, this wasn’t an accident. Somepony deliberately ripped these crystals out, and destroyed them, and…” He crouched down next to the wall at one rack. “They, they even burned a hole in the wall! Why would they do that? But then, why would sabotage time travel in the first place? And how would they know?”

“So what does it mean if your failsafes failed?” Which sounded really strange, but oh well.

Sunburst stood up. “An overcharge in the core beyond what it was supposed to handle caused an unstable, expanding timelike discontinuity in the Neigher-Joy fi-”

“Equestrian, please?”

Sunburst groaned, then said, “Too much electricity went into the core, so, so it overloaded and bent spacetime beyond our calcu-”

“Actually, screw Equestrian, do you speak Normal Pony?”

Sunburst shot her a stinkeye. “Explosion make time go bad!” he hissed.

“Fine. That’ll do for now.”

“It better,” grumbled Sunburst. “You know, even undergrads know this stuff. Undergrads.” He whirled on Starlight and bellowed, “UUUUUNDEEEEERGRAAAAADS!”

“Well, I’m not an undergrad, so can you please try to remember that?”

“Hey! Excuuuuuuuse me for not being able to readjust to the laypony after a month of working with ponies who know what I’m talking about when I use big words!” snapped Sunburst. He rubbed his head. “This, it’s, look, I’m a bit stressed right now, an-”

“Did you hear something?”

Starlight and Sunburst both froze, and their gazes snapped to the exit door. There was somepony outside.

“No. You?”

“Maybe. Might not’ve. Probably should check it out anyway, though.”

“Yep.”

Starlight and Sunburst stared at each other. “Hide,” whispered Starlight. They both dove behind a rack, the one with the burnt-out hole on the end, and held their breaths.

Hoofsteps came from the doorway. So did voices. “Weren’t Monarch One and Raider One supposed to secure the failsafe room?”

“Yeah. They haven’t checked back yet, though.”

Starlight looked at Sunburst and mouthed, Monarch? What was a tech company doing, invading a university? Sunburst just shrugged; he knew as little as Starlight.

From the sounds of their hoofsteps, the soldiers had entered the room. Starlight nudged Sunburst and pointed at the hole. He nodded and, quiet as he could, crept into the hole. Starlight followed and found herself in some kind of crawlspace, clearly not meant for pony access. She and Sunburst were crammed in between two pieces of arcane machinery, so tightly they had to awkwardly balance on their rear hooves to fit in sideways. Sunburst was already shuffling away from the hole.

Balance had never been one of Starlight’s strong points, and even bracing herself, she felt unsteady as she moved sideways into the gap, step by step. Then one of her hooves slipped on a piece of crystal and banged into a piece of rebar. She bit back a scream, both at the pain and the sound.

Sunburst twitched. “Are you oka-”

“What was that?”

Starlight and Sunburst looked each other and went stock-still. Starlight had to actively will herself to stop breathing heavily.

“Behind the side racks?”

“Yeah.” Unicorn magelight softly pulsed through the gaps in between the racks. Beads of sweat ran down Starlight’s muzzle, and her heart pounded in her head. “Can’t see a thing,” the soldier said eventually. “Gonna have to crawl back there.”

Sunburst’s eyes went wide. “Ffffffffuuuuuuu…” he whispered.

A different voice echoed down the hallway beyond the door. “Target spotted in the service elevator! Withdraw!”

“Scratch that. Let’s move.” Hoofsteps left the room, quickly fading to nothing. Even then, Starlight and Sunburst held their breaths for another few moments.

“…udge,” Sunburst finished. He hesitated for a second, then nudged Starlight back towards the hole, and soon they’d flopped back into the room.

They looked at each other for a moment. Eventually, Starlight said, “Monarch’s behind all this?”

“It, it would seem that way,” said Sunburst. “But, but why? I mean- if they just wanted the, the time machine, they could’ve- They funded this, they could tell us to set it up in a certain place, and it- It just doesn’t make any sense.” He thumped his head a few times. “Let’s, let’s just get out of here. Elevator’s no good, but, uh, there’s a staircase nearby we can take, take up.” He swallowed. “I hope.”

They passed through a doorway that looked like the same kind of door up top, but then, it wouldn’t do to have any exit be easily compromised. Except that this doorway hadn't been forced open at all; everything was still intact. Starlight looked at it for a moment, then turned to Sunburst and opened her mouth. Sunburst gave some kind of groaning scream and made a “zip it” gesture. Starlight closed her mouth. The hallways beyond looked like the kind only meant for maintenance ponies, all bare walls and concrete floors. Signs helpfully pointed the way to the staircase (away from the service elevator, Starlight noted with relief), and the two had raced to it in no time.

Starlight poked her head up the stairwell, but didn’t see any soldiers. “Just up here?” she asked.

“Yeah,” replied Sunburst. “It, it should just take us straight to, to the-” He paused, but didn’t continue. At first, Starlight waited for him to go on, but after several seconds, she was done waiting. She pulled out of the stairwell and turned to Sunburst, only for him to start talking again. “-lobby, and from there, we can why are you looking at me like that?”

“What was that for?”

“What, what was what for?”

“You just stopped for a moment!”

Sunburst tilted his head. “What, you mean, stopped talking? No, I didn’t.”

“You did!” protested Starlight. “You were talking, and you stopped mid-sentence, and th-”

Sunburst blanched and he pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “That wasn’t me, Starlight,” he whispered. “That was time.”

“Time stopped,” said Starlight skeptically. “Really. But not for me?”

“Well, I, I don’t know why,” Sunburst mumbled, kneading his front hooves together. “It’s got something to do with the time machine, but I, I don’t- Let’s keep moving.”

“But I-” But Sunburst was already halfway up the stairs. Starlight rolled her eyes and followed.

They were only a single story below the lobby. Starlight cracked open the door and peered outside. There. The exit was right there. But there were soldiers patrolling it. Over half a dozen. They were all looking outside, probably to keep anypony from entering, but there was no way she and Sunburst were getting out that way.

Starlight ducked inside the stairwell. “Guards,” she whispered. “Any other ideas?”

“W-well, um, there’s a, an emergency exit not far from here,” Sunburst said. “But I don’t-”

“I’ll see what it’s like,” said Starlight. “Maybe we can get out that way. You, stay here, okay?”

“Heh.” Sunburst pushed his glasses up. “Not arguing.”

Starlight left the stairwell as quietly as she could. Magic helped a lot, but she still walked on tiptoe. Perfect silence. Light as a feather.

But not invisible. Just as Starlight was quietly letting out a breath, a soldier right next to the exit twitched as he noticed her in his peripheral vision, then snapped his head to look at her. Starlight panicked and tried to back up, her hooves screeching on the slick linoleum as she prayed for him to stop.

No luck. “I se-” And then the soldier’s yell just stopped, as a hazy blue sphere blossomed around him, like it had below the time machine. He was frozen. But his yell had attracted the attention of other soldiers, and they were already turning towards her, readying their magic or crossbows. Starlight dove behind the receptionist’s desk, barely two dozen feet from the exit, as the first attacks streaked overhead.

The soldier unfroze. “-e her!” And then his bolt joined the rest of the fusillade.

“Target is chronon-active!” another soldier yelled. More than yelled; she screamed it, sounding borderline scared. “Target is chronon-active!”

More time stuff. Great. But Starlight was barely processing it. She grabbed Sunburst’s tail in her magic and yanked him over to her. Several blasts of magic hit the counter, throwing up debris and eating large chunks out of it. Starlight quickly conjured a shield; at least if the counter disintegrated, they wouldn’t be sitting ducks.

The soldiers didn’t let up, slinging more magic and quarrels their way. “Drop the shield, Glimmer!” one of them yelled.

Starlight flinched as another magic missile ricocheted off said shield. “Then stop shooting at us!” she yelled back.

The only response was yet another crossbow bolt.

“Any ideas?” Starlight asked Sunburst.

“No,” Sunburst said, shaking his head. “But if w-”

Everything abruptly stopped. Silence, except for a few weird echoes. A bolt that had missed Starlight’s shield hung in the air. Starlight chanced a look over the counter. The soldiers were all frozen. She looked to her side. So was Sunburst. She cautiously waved her hoof in front of his face. “Sunburst?” No response. She was alone in here.

Well… maybe not. She’d gotten him moving again earlier, hadn’t she? Maybe she could do it again. She laid a hoof on him and… tried to draw him back in. Get him going. She wasn’t sure what she was trying, but she tried it.

Sunburst suddenly started up again, talking like nothing had happened. “-e don’t get out of h-” He stopped and flicked his ears. “Why’s it so quiet?”

“Uh… time’s stopped. Again.”

Sunburst blinked and poked his head above the counter. “Ah. Stutter.” He coughed. “Let’s… let’s take advantage of this and move, okay? We don’t want to be here when the stutter collapses.”

“Uh… okay.” The two of them started walking for the exit. Starlight slowed, staring at one of the frozen unicorns, right in the middle of slinging some spell. “Sunburst, what is go-”

“Starlight,” Sunburst said solidly, not looking at her, “shut up. This is not the time, so shut up. We, we need to get as far away from this place as we can. Once we do, we, I’ll tell you everything I can. Until then, shut. Up.”

Starlight bit back her response. Mainly because he was right. She desperately wanted to know just what the heck was going on, but for now, she held her tongue.

Outside, Monarch soldiers had set up a perimeter of some kind around the physics building and looked to be warning passers-by away. Distorted voices slipped into and out of audibility, and it was hard to tell what they were saying. The sky was streaked with star paths like a long-exposure photograph. But Starlight and Sunburst didn’t spare a moment. They ducked around the soldiers and started galloping away from the university, away from the paramilitary force hunting them down.

When time started up again, they were well away, but they kept running.

Streamhaven, October 9
8:51 PM — 34 minutes after the Fracture in Time

They found their way to an alley, well away from the university. They collapsed against the wall behind a dumpster, out of casual view from the street. The night was cold and drafty, the ground was hard and wet, and the air was clammy and smelly. But it was safe for the moment, and that was what mattered.

Her body was spent, but Starlight’s mind was screaming by at a mile a minute. Just what in Celestia’s name was going on? Time was breaking? How could you break time? The butterfly effect didn’t give two craps about some puny little equines. And what was Monarch doing there? Why were they attacking all the scientists? How could they come in at the exact moment everything went to Tartarus? And what was up wi-

Sunburst coughed. “Um, S-Starlight?”

Starlight’s train of thought was so thoroughly derailed it took her several moments for the use of her name to fully register. She turned to Sunburst and blinked dully at him. It was all she had energy for at the moment.

“H-hey, I’m…” Sunburst’s voice was very quiet and he was determined to not look at her. “B-back in the university, I’m… I’m sorry for… for the things I said. Th-the way I treated you after, after everything went d-down. It’s, I was stressed, and-”

The only reason Starlight took as long to interrupt as she did was because her mind was still processing everything else. “Hey,” she said, “don’t worry about it. I get it.” She waved a hoof vaguely and went back to staring at the ground, trying t-

“W-what, just like that?” asked Sunburst, turning towards her. “B-but I-”

“-said some nasty things, yeah.” Starlight draped a foreleg over Sunburst’s shoulder and pulled him close. He flinched, but didn’t try to pull away. “But that was hardly a normal time, was it?” She tried to grin at him and deflate the tension a little. She didn’t know if it worked. “I mean, the experiment you spent months working on exploded — actually, physically, literally exploded — and then an armed paramilitary group tried to kidnap you. I’d be a little stressed, too. Actually, I should probably be the one apologizing to you.”

“Why?” Sunburst’s voice was steadier.

“Because we were in the middle of running for our lives, and I decided that was the best time to quiz you on time stuff and get all the answers.”

“Chronodynamics, if, if you want to get technical.”

“Yeah. That.” Starlight squeezed Sunburst slightly. “The point is, I picked the absolute worst time to do all that. You snapping at me is completely justified.”

“But…” Sunburst pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “B-but I-”

“Look. We both made mistakes. We both regret them. Let’s just drop it, okay?”

After a few seconds, Sunburst nodded. “Okay.”

They sat in the dank, muddy alley in silence for several moments, resting against each other and still trying to take it all in. For Starlight, it wasn’t working. Every avenue she went down just opened up more questions. She needed some answers. Just a few would be good.

Sunburst looked up at the sky. “You and I should, should probably split up,” he said. “They’re, they’re probably looking for me since I’ve got, got a major role in the creation of the time machine. But you’re just some, just some random mare who happened to be in the room at the same time. You, you leave me, and you’ll be able to get aw-”

“No.”

“What?”

“No. I’m staying with you.” For Starlight, anything else was completely out of the question. “I won’t just leave you to get hunted down. I’m staying with you.”

“Starlight, you, you can still escape if y-”

“I’m. Staying. With you. End of discussion.”

His face was nervous, but Sunburst’s eyes lit up. And why wouldn’t they? If he was feeling anything like what Starlight was feeling, he was probably scared out of his wits. He needed somepony by his side. Sunburst smiled a little. “Thanks.”

“What’re friends for?”

Silence for another few seconds. Starlight finally managed to get a coherent thought together and act instead of react. “So, um, what exactly happened in there? How did explosion make time go bad?”

Sunburst cringed. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“Probably not.”

“Heh. Now, this is complicated, but we’ve got time, so j- Um, pun not intended. But just, just try and stay with me.” Sunburst sighed and ran a hoof through his mane. “You remember the Neigher-Joy field, right? And chronons?”

“Yeah. The field produces chronons, which make time go.”

“Close enough. Now, as best as I can tell, thanks to the destruction of the failsafes, the experiment caused a, uh…” Sunburst chewed his lip. “Basically a rip in the Neigher-Joy field. A fracture in time. And now, because of that, chronons aren’t being produced properly. So time’s stuttering. And eventually, it will end.” He swallowed. “Yeah. We broke time.”

“Uh-huh.” Hearing from Sunburst now, when he was calm and collected, didn’t make it sound any less stupid. “And how does time end?” Starlight asked, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

“By ending,” Sunburst said. “Everything, everywhere, it just stops. Forever.”

“Stops.”

“Yeah. Nothing moves. Nothing changes. It’s, it’s all frozen like that. Time ends.”

“But everywhere? How’s that possible?”

Sunburst chewed his lip again. “Okay, now, again, please, try to stick with me, because this is going to get complicated. Again. Most fields you’re familiar with are spacelike. They may change through time, but they’re largely defined by their intensity in space. The Neigher-Joy field, on the other hoof, is, it’s timelike. It’s defined by how it changes in time, not in space. It’s…” He thumped his forehead a few times. “It’s like how nine o’clock here is still nine o’clock on the other side of town. It doesn’t matter where you are in space, it’s still nine o’clock.”

It clicked for Starlight. Mostly. There were still some gaps, but she thought she got it. “So what you’re saying is now here-” She pointed at the ground. “-is now over there-” She pointed to the end of the alley. “-is now in Canterlot is now in Vanhoover. Right?”

“Yeah! Yeah,” Sunburst said, nodding quickly. “Exactly.”

“So it doesn’t matter that we broke time here in Streamhaven, time here is time everywhere, so we broke time everywhere.”

“Yessss!” whispered Sunburst. “Precisely right. And, um, really really bad.”

“And the time machine core broke time by bending it too far and snapping it like a rubber band.”

Sunburst beamed. “See? It all makes sense. It’s, um, kind of a terrible thing to happen, but it makes sense.”

That was the Sunburst Starlight knew. The one who could explain things well and got really excited when you got it. She was still a bit weirded out by the whole “time breaking” thing, but it was at least easier to swallow. Still, there were some other things she had questions about. “So what’s going on with me?” She looked at her hooves. “How come all of a sudden I can freeze time?”

“I, I’m not sure. I suspect your close proximity to the core at the moment of discharge resulted in a large dose of, um, chronon radiation, altering your connection to the universal Neigher-Joy field in some way and allowing you to manipulate it.”

Starlight blinked at him.

“You got hit real bad by the timey-wimey rays and got time powers,” muttered Sunburst.

“That’s not very descriptive.”

“Look, I, I don’t know what’s going on with you,” Sunburst said, waving his hooves around. “I’m just guessing. This sort of thing has never, never happened before. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Oh.” Whether the explanation involved chronon radiation or timey-wimey rays, it was a bunch of gobbledegook to Starlight.

“Is there, um, is there any chance you can do it again? Just, I don’t know…” Sunburst scooped up a smashed cup from the ground. A little bit of water still lay in the bottom. “Freeze this in the air?”

“I can try.” Starlight rolled her shoulders and tried to block out all magic from her mind. “Pull.”

Sunburst bit his lip, nodded, and tossed the cup into the air. Starlight followed it with her eyes and willed it to stop, to stay in the air, to not m-

Suddenly, her head was pounding. A small hazy blue sphere had sprouted around the cup, several shades darker than her own magic, and the cup itself, as well as the water flying out, had just stopped. Even the motes of dust inside the sphere were completely motionless, free of the bobbing of levitation.

“Ohhhhhhhh, stars,” whispered Sunburst. “That, that, wow. That just, wow. Wow.”

Starlight didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t magic, but… It was surreal, knowing she’d stopped that cup and yet she hadn’t done it with magic. Seriously strange things were ahoof.

“That’s cool,” whispered Sunburst, walking around the cup. He was grinning from ear to ear. “I don’t know what the heck is going on, but that is so cool. You, you’re like an X-Mare.”

The sphere broke and the cup and water fell to the ground, continuing on their route like they hadn’t stopped. Now that she wasn’t under attack, Starlight couldn’t help but agree that freezing time like that was cool. It gave her headaches, but, yeah, it was cool. “Then I need some villains to fight and some ponies to punch.”

“Aren’t you the, um, the protégé of the Princess of Friendship? Where does punching ponies come into that?”

“Ask her. We punched for a bit, and now we’re friends.” Starlight frowned a bit as she thought. “Actually, whenever there’s been a bad guy in the past few years who’s posed a threat to an area greater than a town, she’s punched them and that seems to work.”

Sunburst cocked his head and flicked his ears. “…You know, you’re right. Maybe Princess Twilight just, just loves and tolerates the crap out of them.”

“That is what the Elements of Harmony do, I guess.”

Silence.

“So what’re we gonna do now?” Starlight asked. “If time’s breaking, can we do anything about it? Or are we just going to sit and wait for the end?”

“Um, hypothetically, we, we might be able to fix it.”

Starlight blinked. “Seriously?”

“It’s, it’s a guess,” Sunburst said quickly. “If, if we can apply a large dosage of chronons to the Neigher-Joy field, we can close the fracture and get time running at a constant rate again. M-maybe.”

Blah blah technobabble blah. All that mattered to Starlight was that they could fix time. (Which was still a lot to wrap her head around.) “So what do we need?”

“Well, um,” Sunburst said, pushing his glasses up, “what we really need is somepony who, uh, who knows time forwards and backwards so, so they can help us. My, my first, and really, um, only choice would be my colleagues, but they’re, uh, kinda… indisposed.” He shuddered and whispered, “Celestia, I hope they’re okay. Anyway, I don’t have any other options, so, uh, I really really hope you know somepony who’s good with time.”

Against all odds, Starlight did. A certain brown, spikey-maned pony. “Actually…”

4 - Citation Needed

Ponyville, October 9
10:46 PM — 2 hours after the Fracture in Time

Starlight and Sunburst got lucky. Monarch wasn’t watching Sunburst’s rented apartment or the trains, and after picking up all of his notes that they could, they managed to grab a late, late train to Ponyville. By the time they’d reached Ponyville, it was long past dark and the two of them had to light their horns to find their way.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Sunburst as they walked down the street. He ran a hoof through his mane. “I’ve never heard of this… what’s his name again? Doctor… Who?”

“No, Whooves. Doctor Whooves.”

Sunburst cocked his head in thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope. Doesn’t ring a, ring a bell.”

“Doctor Time Turner Whooves?”

“…Nope, still noth-” Time stopped for a second and Starlight’s brain skipped a beat. “-ing.” Sunburst frowned at Starlight. “You, you’ve got that look. Stutter?”

Starlight sighed and rubbed her forehead. “Yeah. It’s not going to get better, is it?” Time had stuttered twice during the train ride back, and she was finding it hard to adjust to.

“Not unless we can fix time.”

The absurdity of that statement was inversely proportional to what Starlight thought was the likelihood of them actually doing it.

Starlight led them to a blue, somewhat boxy house on the edge of town. Surprisingly, behind the drawn curtains in the window, the lights were on. Sunburst mashed his muzzle up against the glass, trying to squint through the gap in the curtain. “Is he always up this late?”

“Not as far as I know,” Starlight said. Knocking on the door, she said, “Hey! Doc?” She didn’t yell yet; she didn’t want to wake up anypony else.

“Be with you in just a moment!” the Doctor hollered back. “I’ve got- Never mind, right there!” A few seconds later, a very tired-looking Doctor yanked the door open. His mane was rumpled and he wasn’t standing as tall as he could’ve been. “Apologies,” he muttered, “but one of my inventions started going haywire a few hours ago, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s going on. Anyway…” He took a deep breath and straightened his legs. “How can I help you, Starlight and, uh…” He lowered an ear and frowned at Sunburst.

Sunburst half-grinned awkwardly. “I’m, uh, I’m Sunburst,” he said quietly, “and I’m a friend of Starlight’s, and we broke time, and we might need your help to fix it.”

The Doctor blinked. “I think we might need some tea.”

Several minutes later, the trio was ensconced in the Doctor’s lab with some tea. Starlight remained silent as Sunburst explained what he could and the Doctor pored over Sunburst’s notes. “…s-so, um, I think the Neigher-Joy field is breaking down,” said Sunburst, “and time’s stuttering, and it’s going to end if we don’t, um, do something about it. Yyyyyyeah.”

To his credit, the Doctor took it much better than Starlight. No “wait, what?”s going on. “Yes, that is… a rather severe problem,” he said. “Give a moment, and I’ll be done with-”

Then he frowned. “Hang on. These…” He began flipping through the pages, taking a quick look at each one. “Hang on hang on haaaaaang ooooooooon…” He went silent for a moment as he stared a page. “These are my equations.”

“Wait, what?” Sunburst said, sitting up straight and pushing up his glasses. “You mea-”

“I don’t mean plagiarized,” said the Doctor. He started scanning each and every sheet of paper. “I mean, I came up with these eight years ago. Some of the derivations are different and they use different letters for the variables, but…” He ran his hoof down a particularly complex set of equations, his lips moving soundlessly. “Yes, I had these exact equations eight years ago. I-”

He flicked to another sheet and examined it. When he spoke again, he sounded both outraged and ecstatic. “I had these models down pat! That hadn’t been a mistake, I was right all along!”

Starlight and Sunburst looked at each other. “What do you mean, you were right?” asked Starlight.

“Long story,” said the Doctor, “but I was developing my own theory of this when I thought I found an early mistake that invalidated everything. From the looks of things, my model was essentially identical to yours. Although I called the particles…” He cringed and his voice dropped to a whisper. “…timeons.”

Starlight and Sunburst both blinked. Sunburst coughed, and Starlight said, “Just when I thought you couldn’t get dorkier than ‘chronons’…”

“But but buuuuuuut…” muttered the Doctor, “that means…” He darted over to a table and picked up a strange device that looked like a tape recorder with a hose attached. “If I was right,” he said, pulling it back over to Starlight and Sunburst, “then this should be work, and I sho-”

Time chose that moment to stutter. Once it started up again, the thing suddenly let out an earsplitting ringing sound; everypony jumped and clamped their hooves over their ears. Eventually, it stopped, and the Doctor groaned. “Gah. Apologies. It’s been doing that at random for hours, now, and-”

“Time just froze for a second,” interrupted Starlight. “Those stutters Sunburst was talking about.”

“We don’t know when they come,” said Sunburst. “They just happen.”

The Doctor barely seemed to be listening. “So… this is working properly, it’s time that isn’t!” He grinned. He stopped when he saw Starlight’s and Sunburst’s mortified looks and coughed. “Although, ah, that’s not… very good, is it? Ah, no.” He looked at the hose and pursed his lips. “Let me try something for a quick second.”

Before either Starlight or Sunburst could say anything, the Doctor had picked up the end of the hose in his teeth. He pointed it at himself. Nothing. “Ah-hah.” He pointed the hose at Sunburst. The device started making small, sporadic dinging noises. “Ah-hah.” He pointed it at Starlight. The device started dinging like a downpour of hail on a metal roof. “Ah-haaaaaah…”

Starlight wasn’t sure why, but she took a few steps back. “Uh… just what does that do? Why’s it dinging?”

The Doctor grinned, let the hose drop, and propped the device up with a hoof. “This is my own invention, the Timelike Anomaly, Resonance, Disruption, and Interference Sensor. It detects non-background production or density of chronons, symptomatic of time travel — point of fact, magical or scientific — or other forms of mucking about with time, and stutters would naturally have all sorts of messy chronon production that I haven’t calibrated for.”

Starlight blinked and coughed. “Equestrian, please?”

“This is my timey-wimey detector. It goes ding when there’s stuff.” The Doctor looked down at the dinging-like-mad timey-wimey detector and frowned. “And great whickering stallions, do you have a lot of stuff. What in Celestia’s name happened to you?”

“Serene was in the machine when it broke, and I was trying to get her out. I was right at the door.”

The Doctor bit his lip, nudged the hose of the timey-wimey detector away from Starlight, and flipped back a few pages to a rough diagram of the time machine. “So you were within…” He traced his hoof along a line. “…thirty feet or so of the core, yes?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Then I have at least an inkling of what happened,” said the Doctor, looking up at her. “Your proximity to the core at the moment of fracturing resulted in an extreme dosage of chronon radiation, effectively separating your Neigher-Joy field from the rest of the world’s.”

Starlight blinked.

“Your timeline’s all wibbly-wobbly relative to the world’s.” He tapped his chin for a moment. “How can I… Ah, got it! Be back in just a moment!” He raced into the kitchen.

Sunburst coughed. “Is he, um, always like this?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

The Doctor walked back in, balancing three cups on his back, one of which was full of water. He quickly brushed a bunch of fragile-looking things off of a table and set the cups down on it. “Right! So,” he said, rubbing his hooves together, “pretend water flow represents the chronon emission/absorption rate. It’s actually nothing like that, but pretend it’s like that.”

Already a bit lost, Starlight opened her mouth, but the Doctor quickly waved her down. “It’ll make more sense in a second, bear with me. Normally, time flows at the same rate for everything, because everything’s getting the same chronons.” He worked his hoof into the handle in the water cup and poured it into one of the empty ones. “You, however, received such an excess of chronons that you effectively are outside.” He poured the water into an empty cup again, but this time, he moved the other empty cup halfway under the stream, splitting the water half and half between the two cups. Setting the half-full cups next to each other, the Doctor tapped them once each. “This is the universal Neigher-Joy field. And this is you. Two entirely separate sources of chronons.”

Sunburst looked satisfied, but Starlight just nodded slowly. She kind of got it, but didn’t want to say so in case the Doctor wanted to keep going and she’d start floundering under all the information.

The Doctor being the Doctor, he kept going anyway. “Of course, that would also imply- Hang on hang on haaaang oooon…” He frowned. “Are you still active within these stutters? You still move while everything’s frozen?”

Starlight twitched. “Y-yeah, actually. How’d you know that?”

“Quite simple, really. Separated from the Neigher-Joy field, you run on an entirely separate supply of chronons, the one you received from the fracture. Basically, you’re on your own timeline, completely distinct from this one, that just happens to intersect with it. When time in the world at large stops due to a halt in chronon production, the chronons you’ve stored up allow you to keep moving. Hypothetically, you could dose a, quote-unquote-” The Doctor even air quotes. “-‘normal’ pony with your chronons to allow them to keep moving as well.”

“I’ve, um, actually already done that,” said Starlight. “During a few stutters, I’ve unfrozen Sunburst.”

The Doctor boggled. “Really? Already? Fascinating! I suppose, being a unicorn, manipulating chronons might not be that dissimilar from manipulating magic.”

Sunburst sat up straight. “Hang on. If, if she’s not on ‘our’ time, then why’s she still, still moving through time? She’s not absorbing chronons, is she?”

“Correct,” the Doctor said with a nod. “As of right now, Starlight is no longer passively absorbing chronons from the Neigher-Joy field, and her passage through time is dependent on what limited supply she absorbed from the fracture. Based on these numbers, I’m guessing she has a decade of time left.”

More technobabble that flew over Starlight’s head. But not Sunburst’s. “That sounds bad,” he said.

The Doctor kept rambling, like he hadn’t heard Sunburst. “But you can replenish them in a variety of ways. Say, actively absorbing them from the environment, although that would cause time to temporarily stop within the affected region. And your free manipulation of chronons would allow all sorts of nifty abilities due to differing time rates between yourself and the world.”

Starlight cocked her head. “That… doesn’t sound that bad, actually.”

“But if you did run out of chronons, you would decohere across spacetime and be unable to exist at any individual point, in any given instant, in any given timeline.”

“Scratch that.”

“Although…” The Doctor looked up and tapped his chin. “Hypothetically speaking, if you weren’t driven to insanity by such a hellish existence, you might be able to draw yourself back together and, separated from the Neigher-Joy field, become omnipotent well beyond even Discord’s stature, since you would exist in all places, at all times, in all timelines, and-”

“Considering it’d require me to get splattered across the history of the universe first, I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Apologies. The Neigher-Joy field and its implications are just so fascinating.”

Sunburst cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “Speaking of, um, of implications, does this mean you can help us? It’s kind of, uh, important that we fix the Neigher-Joy field.”

The Doctor sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. “That I’m not sure of. Maybe, but I’d need some time to be certain of that, and it would be extremely complicated. It’d probably just be simpler to go back before you started the machine and stop whoever broke it.”

“Can’t do that,” said Sunburst quickly. “Paradoxes cause destructive interference within the Neigher-Joy field that get pushed away. They are, at best, purely hypothetical.”

“McFlier cascades are supposed to be hypothetical, too, you know.”

Sunburst twitched, looked away, and folded his ears back. “But we ran the numbers,” he muttered. “Paradoxes can’t happen.”

“I won’t say my running of the numbers confirmed paradoxes,” said the Doctor, “-or should that be paradoces?- but I never saw anything that explicitly disproved them, either.” He tapped his chin. “Then again, I never got as far as you did…”

Starlight wanted to chime in with her own experience with “paradoxes”. But the Doctor didn’t know of her past experience with time travel, and she wasn’t sure she was comfortable telling him just yet. The situation wasn’t that desperate. Yet. She held her tongue.

“Well, one way or another,” said Sunburst, “going back at all, that’s, that isn’t happening. Unless you happen to, to have an old time machine lying around,” he added sarcastically.

“If these equations are correct,” the Doctor said, “I think I do.”

Sunburst blinked. “…OH, COME ON!”

5 - Perfect Place to Hide Something

Everfree Forest, October 9
11:21 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time

“Ridiculous,” Sunburst muttered as he climbed over a log. “Absolutely fricking ridiculous. If not for Princess Twilight, Ponyville, it, it’d barely be anything. So how’s it got not just the Princess, but all six Elements of Harmony, is right next to the Everfree, is home to the first flier to break the sound barrier, suffers all manner of monster attacks with no lasting damage, and has a sunblasted privately-funded time machine sitting right outside its borders?”

Starlight and the Doctor exchanged glances. Eventually, the Doctor said, “Ponyville is a very odd place, to put it lightly.”

“But… but you live out here,” said Sunburst. “How, how could you even begin to build a time machine? You’re miles from… from anywhere!”

“With patience and great difficulty, let me assure you. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to acquire proper copper-clad neighobium conduits on a timekeeper’s budget?”

“That, that’s not what I… forget it.”

Trotting through the Everfree Forest in the middle of the night, horn alit, was most definitely not something Starlight wanted to be doing. But they didn’t have much of a choice; the Everfree was where the Doctor said his time machine was. “It keeps inquisitive eyes away, unless they’re serious,” he’d said. “It’s the perfect place to hide something.”

Well, Starlight couldn’t deny that. In spite of the light she and Sunburst were giving off, she could barely see five feet in front of her; the darkness inside the forest felt thicker than the darkness outside. If not for the Doctor leading the way, she would’ve been completely lost. Especially with the sounds. The Everfree was loud at night. She didn’t see anything making noise, but she kept feeling like there something lurking just outside her ball of light. The Everfree wasn’t a nice place.

“How much longer?” Sunburst asked as he pushed aside a bramble. “It’s, I don’t want to be walking a lot, an-”

“Almost there,” the Doctor said, not even thinking about looking back. He was walking so fast, he was almost outside the perimeter of light. “It should be right he-”

A metal wall loomed ahead and the Doctor had to stop short to not slam into it. “-re.” He frowned. “Or what’s left of it, anyway.”

Even in the dark, Starlight could see that the building had seen better days. It was rusty, overgrown, and looked on the verge of falling apart. It was a hulk, a shell, and Starlight was amazed it was still standing. “Did… did you build this yourself?” Starlight asked. “How?”

“Patience, persistence, and an awful lot of blowtorches,” said the Doctor. “Still use it as a lab every now and again, when I need to put some distance between my experiments and Ponyville. Door’s just a few feet to the right.”

Starlight took a few steps to one side and, sure enough, her light illuminated a door set into the wall. “Now,” said the Doctor, “we ju-” Then he groaned and planted his hoof in his face. “Oh, blast it. I left my key at home.”

“You- your key?” said Sunburst. “You forgot your key?”

“Just go and rub it in,” said the Doctor. “I’ve got a spare, but it’s on the other side of the building.”

Sunburst snorted and blew a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Well, come on,” he grumbled. “Let’s, let’s go get it.”

“I’ll stay here,” said Starlight. “It’ll be easier for you to find the exit that way.”

“Sure, whatever,” mumbled Sunburst. “Come on, Doc.” He began following the wall without waiting for a response.

“Be back in a few,” the Doctor whispered to Starlight. He immediately set off after Sunburst with a, “Wait up, would you?”

And so Starlight was alone in the dark in the Everfree next to a strange building. Just super.

Out of curiosity, she tried the knob. It’d be a shame if they went all the way around to get a key when- No, the door was locked. Good to check, though.

A stick snapped in the woods. Starlight whirled around, brightening her horn. Nothing. She took one, then two, then three steps out, scanning the forest. Still nothing. Jumping at shadows. (This being the Everfree, though, Starlight wouldn’t be surprised if even the shadows had teeth.)

A sudden headache erupted, so sudden Starlight had to brace herself against a tree. It wasn’t particularly strong, just surprising. Then, just as suddenly, it vanished. It happened so quickly, Starlight barely had any time to think about it. Just what had caused it? It probably wasn’t natural, Starlight was sure of th-

From the other side of the door came a thump and a grunt, as if someone had just run into the door. Starlight’s ears went up and she trotted to the door. “Hey!” she called out, knocking three times. “Somepony in there?”

She thought she heard something. Like someone was about to speak, but cut themselves off before they could really get underway. Then the creaks of that same someone stepping on some old floorboards. “I can hear you,” Starlight said loudly. She knocked again. “Come on, open up. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Something crashed inside. The lock clicked, but the door didn’t open. Starlight tried the knob again. The door slid open with a rusty groan. Somehow, the inside managed to be darker than the outside. Starlight pushed a little more light into her horn. “Okay,” she said, walking into the room, “who’s in here? I won’t hurt you.”

Just outside the edges of the light, someone moved. They took a few hesitant steps into the light, and Starlight was so shocked she almost lost control of the spell.

The pony was Starlight.

An exact copy of herself stood before her, staring at her, jaw agape.

Neither of them said anything. They simply stared at each other. Another headache came on, Starlight blinked, and her double was gone. No teleportation, no running away, just gone as if she’d never been there in the first place.

Starlight pushed more light out of her horn and looked around. Her double was nowhere to be seen, and there was nowhere she could hide.

“Okaaay,” muttered Starlight as she exited the room again, “that w-”

She banged hard into the door. Somehow, it’d closed again. She took a few steps back, grunted, and rubbed her nose. Of all the stupid things she could’ve done, she had to run into a door? Ludicrous.

Someone trotted up to the outside of the door. “Hey!” Knock knock knock. “Somepony in there?”

The voice made Starlight freeze.

It was her voice.

She opened her mouth to yell something out, but she clamped her jaw shut and took a few steps back. The floor creaked beneath her hooves.

“I can hear you,” the pony with her voice said. Knock knock. “Come on, open up. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Starlight darted a few yards back, tumbling over a table she couldn’t see in the dark. As she got back on her hooves, she flicked the lock open with magic. The pony outside, a unicorn, walked into the room and said, “Okay, who’s in here? I won’t hurt you.”

Just outside the edges of the light, Starlight kneaded her hooves against the floor and swallowed. Really, there was nothing to it. She stepped into the light and got a good look at the pony from outside.

The pony was Starlight.

An exact copy of herself stood before her, staring at her, jaw agape.

Neither of them said anything. They simply stared at each other. Another headache came on, Starlight blinked, and her double was gone. No teleportation, no running away, just gone as if she’d never been there in the first place.

No way. No way. That did not just happen. How… how was that even possible? Time travel didn’t just happen like that. It required magic, or a machine, or… or something. It wasn’t spontaneous. Right? Or was time so screwed up that stuff like that was happening?

She stopped herself. Now was not the time to be thinking of that.

She brightened her light. The room was extremely basic, not much more than metal sheets welded onto load-bearing columns. There was barely even a properly floor; no carpeting or anything like that, just a lot of old, old floorboards. There were a few tables around, all of them with some scientific-looking whatnots and doodads. No dust; evidently, the Doctor did come out here.

“-ust think it’s, it’s kind of unreasonable to not bring a key!” Sunburst said from outside. “It’s, I mean, really.”

“Hush,” said the Doctor. “Like you’ve never forgotten anything.”

“Not like this! I mean, it’s- Where’s Starlight?”

“In here!” hollered Starlight.

The Doctor poked his head into the room, then looked at the key dangling from his hoof. He shrugged. “Ah, well.” He hit a switch on the wall and groaned when nothing happened. “Not again… Conflabbed wiring…” He patted his way along the wall to a wiring box and opened it up. “Give us a light here, would you?”

Sunburst followed the Doctor to the wiring box, still staring at the door. As the Doctor began fiddling with the wires inside, Sunburst asked, “S-so, uh, how’d you get in here?”

“W-well…” How exactly could she explain this? It was just so weird. “Um, not that long after you left, I suddenly got this headache, and…” She swallowed. “There was someone inside, and they unlocked the door. I went inside, and that someone was me. Then the other version of me vanished, and the door was closed and locked again, and…” She swallowed again. “I think I jumped back a few moments in time somehow.”

Sunburst blinked a few times. “Okay, uh, the, uh, fracture might, might be worse than we thought.”

“Temporary duplicative chronon emission,” said the Doctor, his head still in the wiring. “The Neigher-Joy field briefly emits chronons in the exact same manner, causing the same events to happen again. Starlight, separate from the timeline, sees it happen and slips through the cracks between the loop. You and I, in the timeline, get severe déjà vu, but don’t actually remember the loop. Simple!”

“Not re-”

Something sparked, and the light gems in the ceiling flared to life. “There we go!” the Doctor said, standing up. “Power’s back. Should be all set to go once we make a few adjustments to the machine itself.”

“So, uh,” Sunburst said as they followed the Doctor further into the building, “exactly why do you have a functioning time machine and haven’t, uh, like, said anything? It’s, it’s kinda strange.”

“To be honest, I thought it wasn’t working,” the Doctor said. “I turned it on for the first time to test it, and as I was recording things for posterity, it kind of buzzed a bit, sparked, then shut down. When I started doing maintenance, I found that several key components had shattered. I thought they’d overloaded and I’d made a mistake somewhere, but if you were right, then they shouldn’t have shattered, and everything should be good to go once we make a few adjustments.”

Sunburst snorted and pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “And, and you just let it sit here? Didn’t try to fix it or anything?”

“Technically, I did,” said the Doctor. “But then I reviewed my notes. I didn’t want to start it up just to break it again, see. At first, I couldn’t find anything wrong. I kept going back and back and back, trying to find my mistake. The one I found — thought I’d found — it was right near the beginning, meaning I was much, much farther off than I’d feared. I tried correcting myself, but, ah…” He rubbed the back of his neck and coughed. “I… got distracted by other things and never got around to finishing the theory.”

“Ooo. Harsh,” said Sunburst. He sounded a bit less skeptical.

The Doctor nodded glumly. “Indeed. Plenty of bits and plenty of time right down the drain. I never got to correcting the time machine. But it wasn’t all bad, at least. The complex I’d built to house the machine was relatively sturdy, and…” He flipped another switch, illuminating another set of light gems. “The crystal generator I’d procured proved quite useful, as you can see.”

“But… if you were right…” Starlight said slowly, “why’d it break in the first place?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Haven’t the faintest idea. We’ll have to find out later, when- Ah, here we are!” He entered a particularly dark room and flipped yet another switch.

The light revealed a time machine.

After seeing the Streamhaven machine, there was no mistaking it for anything else. It was cruder, to be sure, but it had all the elements. There was the circular corridor. The pincushion core. The entryway into the corridor. The complicated gauges. Everything. Even old, even with plants growing through the floor and stars shining through the holes in the ceiling, it looked magnificent. Starlight gasped in astonishment, and even Sunburst quieted down a bit.

“You two wait here,” the Doctor said. “I’ll have the machine started up in just a jiffy.” He was off like a shot, running around the corridor to the other side of the room.

After a moment, Sunburst coughed. “Um, just so you two know, I…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t think I’ll be going back with you. It’s, I just don’t think what you’re trying to do is possible. All the math says it isn’t, and… well, yeah.” He spoke loud enough for the Doctor to hear.

“Wait, what?” asked Starlight, turning on Sunburst. “So you’re just gonna stay here and not even try?”

“N-not really, no,” mumbled Sunburst. “It’s, I mean, I really don’t think we should, we should bother with this. I doubt it’ll do anything. If, um, if you want to go and try, I, I’m not going to stop you, but, but I’ll, I’ll just stay here with my notes and, and try to think this over, now that I’ve got a, uh, quiet moment.”

“But-” Then Starlight cut herself off. Sunburst had a point. She still thought they could change things, but if they couldn’t, there wasn’t any harm in him staying. He wasn’t a physical pony, and he could barely cast magic. She didn’t like to admit it, but having Sunburst come along would probably only be a liability. “Sorry,” she said. “That’s okay. You go and… do your thing or… or whatever.”

“Go out the door, take a right,” said the Doctor from the other side of the room. “Second door on your left, decent room with tables and pencils and paper and room to pace. Use it myself a lot.”

“Alllllllright then,” said Sunburst. “Guess I’ll, um, see you around. Eventually. Heck, if it doesn’t work, it might not even be a minute!” He laughed nervously and turned to the door.

An idea jolted Starlight’s mind and she dove for Sunburst, tackling him in a hug. “If we… if we succeed,” Starlight whispered, “you, you won’t exist anymore. So I-” She squeezed him. “I at least want your last memory of me to be a good one.”

“Whoa, hey, easy,” said Sunburst, trying to pull Starlight off him. “It’s, I’ll be okay. It’s not like you’ll be erasing me from all time.”

“But…” Starlight let Sunburst go. “I mean you you. The version of you I’ve been with for the past few hours. That you will be gone.”

“…Ah.” Sunburst pushed his glasses up. “W-well, um, I, I- I think- I’ll still be okay. I mean, chased by soldiers, seeing one of the greatest things I’ve done explode, trotting way out here in the middle of the night?” He laughed nervously. “Those are a few hours I could live without.”

“But, Sunb-”

Sunburst put a hoof on Starlight’s mouth and sighed. “Look. Starlight. When, when you get into alternate timelines like that, it’s, things get really uncomfortable really fast. Just do what the best scientists do.”

Starlight pushed Sunburst’s hoof away. “And that is?”

“Don’t think about it,” Sunburst said with a grin. “Really, it’s, that’s all you can do. Bad stuff happens. There’s nothing you can do about it. So don’t think about it. Besides…” He nodded at the time machine. “If, if you’re right, saving the world’s more important than my past few hours.”

Starlight swallowed. She still didn’t like the idea. But, well, Sunburst had a point. There was no way around it, not if this was going to work. “Alright,” she said quietly. She tentatively waved. “Be seeing you.”

“Tell me all about it if I’m not me!” said Sunburst with far too much cheer. And then he was gone.

Before Starlight could dive into the river of self-pity, the Doctor called out again. “Beg pardon, Starlight, but could you flip that lever right next to the time machine entrance? The timeon- the chronon conduit needs to be active for this next bit.”

“What? Uh, sure,” said Starlight. She stared at the door for another second, then walked over to the only lever she could see and pushed it forward. For a second, nothing happened.

Then, with an electric hum, it was like the world turned over. Starlight staggered as her head spun and she braced herself against the time machine. She began taking deep breaths, and the ground began to stabilize.

“Ah! Perfect!” said the Doctor. “Everything’s… yes, everything’s quite stable. Give me a few seconds to make some last-minute adjustments and set the time.”

“Sometime before 5 PM,” yelled Starlight, tilting her head back and forth. “The train to Streamhaven takes an hour and a half to get there, and we need some time to get out of here.”

“Right, right. On it.”

Starlight took a deep breath, and the ground finally settled down. She took a few steps away from the corridor and looked at the core. Active, the core had the same fishbowl-without-a-fishbowl effect the Streamhaven core had. In fact, it looked almost exactly like the Streamhaven core, now.

It worked. Everything was fine. All they had to do was walk through th-

“Hey. Starry.”

Starlight’s blood ran cold. She knew that voice. But it’d changed; where once it had been light, easy, almost bouncy, it now had an audible undercurrent of hardness and stress. Starlight wasn’t sure she’d know the pony, not as they had been.

Starlight turned around to see Serene standing in the doorway, grinning.

Whatever had happened to her since she’d gone through the time machine, she’d become worn. Her coat and mane had lost some of their luster. She was thin, scrawny. She had bags under her eyes and her stance was tense. Her smile had a trace of bitterness in it. Her eyes, formerly bright, looked cold.

Starlight and Serene stared at each other for a few moments. Then Serene said, “Won’t work.”

“What?”

“I know what you’re doing. And it won’t work.”

Starlight almost asked Serene how she knew, but that didn’t seem all that important. “Of course it will. All I need to do is-”

“Maybe,” interrupted Serene. “But you won’t. Oh, you’ll try. But you won’t. You can’t.” Her smile dropped. “Believe me,” she whispered, “I’ve tried.”

“How?” Starlight asked. “Serene, what happened to you?”

And the smile was back. “You’ll see. Just not yet.”

“All set!” the Doctor called from the other side of the machine. He came running around the corridor and slid to a halt next to Starlight. “Got everything working again,” he said. “Assuming I was right the first time, it should work now, but even if it doesn’t, at least we won’t die horribly, and who’s she?”

“Nopony of consequence,” said Serene. “You’ll see.”

“Serene, what’re you doing here?” asked Starlight. “Where’s Sunburst?”

“He’s alright,” said Serene. “Besides, he didn’t want to go back anyway. You’d be causing a paradox, remember? And he knows you can’t cause paradoxes, ‘cause he’s smart like that. He knows this is pointless, too.”

There was just something about the way Serene was talking that rubbed Starlight the wrong way. She was too calm and, well, serene about everything. It was creepy, the way she just kept smiling through the whole deal.

“He’ll be fine,” said Serene. “You need to get going. And I mean need.”

The Doctor bit his lip. “Ah, Starlight, I don’t mean to be rude, and, yes, I do know we have a time machine, so time isn’t an issue on our end, but if we’re going to leave, can we do it soon and not waffle about? This conversation isn’t going anywhere, and I feel more than a bit lost.”

“He’s right,” Serene said. She waved a hoof at the door. “Go on.”

Starlight looked at Serene. At the time machine door. At the Doctor. All of a sudden, doubts nagged at her. What did Serene know? How? How was she back? If Starlight went through that machine, was she making some terrible mistake?

Only one way to find out. Even if she couldn’t fix time, she had to try.

“I’m coming,” Starlight said to the Doctor. Turning her back on Serene, she entered the time machine.

6 - Back Again

Something about the corridor of the time machine didn’t feel right. It made Starlight’s skin crawl and every step she took was like she was forcing herself to walk through mud. Everything was silent, even the footsteps of herself and the Doctor, except for a few distorted voices muttering things Starlight couldn’t make out and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Flickering, indistinct, three-dimensional silhouettes, almost like ghosts, ran or walked up and down the corridor, passing through her like she was nothing. She didn’t feel anything.

After a while, Starlight was convinced that she’d gone more than a full circle around. She couldn’t say why, but she was positive the corridor was longer than it should have been. She knew for a fact that it hadn’t been a minute, but it felt like she’d been walking the path for hours, around and around in circles, chasing her own tail.

Then, finally, the second doorway came into view. Starlight sprinted the last few yards and-

Everfree Forest, October 9
9:42 AM — 10 hours until the Fracture in Time

-stumbled out of the time machine and collapsed onto the ground. The sweet, sweet ground, with its struggling plants and its dirt and wow it was bright out. Starlight immediately clamped her eyes shut. They screamed and burned and-

It was bright out. It was the middle of the night when they’d left. Starlight opened one of her eyes just enough to look through a hole in the ceiling. Sunlight pierced through, shafting down to the ground.

They’d done it.

The Doctor was whooping it up, prancing about like a colt. “Ha ha! Success! Justification! I’d had it all along! It works! It works it works it works! Yes!” He pumped a hoof into the air. When he dropped to the ground, he was grinning broadly. “This,” he whispered excitedly, “might just be the finest moment of my life. A life filled with fine moments.” He laughed again.

“Even if it isn’t,” said Starlight, grinning a little herself, “it’s way up there.” She squinted up at the hole in the ceiling. It seemed awfully bright. “Uh, Doc, where- when are we?”

“Almost fourteen hours back,” said the Doctor, still jumping about like a ninny. He settled down for a moment. “We need some sleep. You and I both have been up for a while, now, and we don’t want to fall asleep while saving the world, do we?” He laughed.

“I guess not,” said Starlight. “You don’t happen to have beds here, do you?”

The Doctor snorted. “You wound me. Of course there’d be nights where I’d be on a roll and want to be here next morning. I do have a bed. Several, point of fact! In case I ever invited other scientists over.” He frowned and tapped his chin. “Never actually did, though…”

“Considering this place was just built to make a time machine, you sure planned for an awful lot.”

“A good scientist always does. Now come on. The beds ought to still be clean.”

Everfree Forest, October 9
10:04 AM — 10 hours until the Fracture in Time

Starlight couldn’t sleep. She’d set a time-delayed alarm spell, she’d blocked the light from the room, she had a comfortable-ish and clean-ish bed, she was tired, but she couldn’t sleep.

Everything was just moving too fast. The first time machine incident had just been, what, three hours ago? (Along her personal timeline.) It felt like much longer than that. The idea of time breaking down still scared her, especially now that she’d seen its effects firsthoof. And if Sunburst was right, it was only going to get worse and worse.

She and the Doctor were back here to fix that, but could they? She’d been so certain before, but now, with nothing to do but sit and wait and think, she wasn’t so sure. Sunburst had said they couldn’t, and he knew what he was talking about. Serene had said they couldn’t, and she had ponies working for her who knew what they were talking about. And yet she’d seen her own changes, so… She wasn’t sure. No matter which way she tried to take her arguments, she couldn’t find a definite answer.

And if they were going to succeed… Sunburst. Starlight didn’t care how much he brushed it off, that version of Sunburst was going to be gone. Simply vanishing into the ether of time wasn’t something you should be able to just brush off. Would he even notice? Or would he simply be gone? Would his memories start vanishing first? Starlight shuddered; the thought of your memories slowly vanishing, of having your identity stripped away because you didn’t exist anymore, was almost enough for her to wish she’d fail. Almost.

And Serene. The new Serene, the one she’d seen right before going into the time machine. What was up with her? Why was she being so enigmatic? Where’d she gone to? How had she gotten back? Had she even gone anywhere? She’d gone through the time machine after it’d malfunctioned, so… maybe not. But Starlight was sure she had; she’d changed too much over the space of a few hours for nothing to have happened. The machine had been set for… Starlight wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was something small, like five minutes. No way it had only been five minutes. Just what had happened?

The worst thing was her complete inability to do anything. All she could do was sit and wait until it was time for her to get up and leave. Starlight liked doing things; sitting and waiting wasn’t something she was good at. But it was all she could do. She rolled over and tried counting sheep, but time began stuttering whenever they’d clear the fence, and she’d go back to the whole mess.

Starlight dozed off eventually, but it came in fits and starts.

Train to Streamhaven, October 9
5:36 PM — 3 hours until the Fracture in Time

Starlight stared out the window as the train approached Streamhaven. She hadn’t taken her eyes from the window ever since they’d left Ponyville over an hour earlier. Her mind was still running around in circles.

Hypothetically, she could’ve contact her and the Doctor’s past selves and gotten them to help. But that just seemed… weird to her. Like she shouldn’t do it. She couldn’t say why, no matter how much she thought of it. The Doctor hadn’t suggested it, either, but did he have a reason, or was he just following her lead? It was hard to tell.

So, after a halfway-decent day’s rest, the two of them had sort of snuck from the Everfree to the train station, avoiding detection if at all possible. Which was a bit difficult when Pinkie Pie bounced up from out of nowhere and asked what they were doing, hiding in those bushes, but the Doctor managed to shoo her away with some talk of a party on the other side of town. Still, at least they’d made it to the station relatively unobserved by anypony who might see them leave and later see them still in Ponyville.

Once they’d boarded the train, each one of them went to their own devices. The Doctor stole a few (dozen) napkins from the dining car and started scribbling equations down on them. Starlight looked out the window. She’d slept, but it’d done absolutely nothing to help her get her feelings in order. Hopefully, a quiet train ride would do exactly that.

But now, an hour and a half later, she still wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Hopeful, anxious, definitely. But there was something more than that, som-

“Starlight?”

The Doctor’s voice made Starlight almost jump out of her seat, after the two of them had been silent for so long. “Uh, yeah?”

“What’s wrong?” The Doctor’s expression was of vague concern; even that was more than Starlight was expecting.

“Uh, uh, nothing, nothing,” Starlight said quickly. She tried to change the subject. “Look, I’m, I’m sorry for dragging you into this, a-”

“Are you mad?” the Doctor asked, breaking into a huge grin. “I’m going to help save the world and I’ve already gotten confirmation that one of the things I’ve been working on for a good portion of my life actually works perfectly! This is just splendid! Why are you apologizing?”

“Well, there’s the tiny matter of getting chased by soldiers employed by a tech company.”

“Oh, hush,” the Doctor said, waving a hoof dismissively. “There’s got to be some danger.” He grinned again. “Actually, saving the world with no danger would be a bit dull, don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to go on the sorts of adventures Twilight and her friends have, putting their lives on the line…” He sighed. “But I’ve never found the time, and I’m not sure I’d be able to drag myself away from my work, anyway.”

The only thing Starlight could say was, “Hmm.” She turned back to the window. At least someone was feeling upbeat about this. As the train began slowing into the station, she wondered how he’d feel when he actually had crossbows pointed at his f-

“Seriously, Starlight,” the Doctor said, his voice more serious, “what’s wrong?”

“Well, I’m…” Starlight sighed. No use in hiding it now. “What if we’re wrong? What if we can’t stop it all?” She tore her gaze away from the window. “I want to be able to fix this now, not throw some answer together later. It’s easier that way. But… but what if we can’t?”

The Doctor paused, chewing his lip. Eventually, he said, “Can’t say anything about that, I’m afraid. Really, we don’t know enough about time travel yet to go one way or another, most unfortunately. And as delightful as blazing new territory is, I agree, I’d rather not do it with Equestria on the line. But even if it doesn’t work, well, we tried, didn’t we?” He shrugged. “Honestly, trying and failing is better than not trying at all.”

Starlight sighed and hung her head. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

The whistle blew, the train came to a complete halt, and the Doctor said, “Plus, this is hardly the only option available, isn’t it? This is just the first one we’ve tried.”

Starlight’s spirits went up a notch. Well, more like a quarter of a notch. But they still went up. “True.”

The two ponies left the station and headed over to Streamhaven University with barely any resistance. But of course they wouldn’t encounter any; nothing had happened yet. They were just two ponies, a bit unfamiliar to the ponies of Streamhaven, with nothing unusual about them, and definitely not time travelers, because that would be absurd, right? Starlight remembered the route she and Sunburst had taken out and quickly brought the Doctor to the failsafe room’s door. The whole while, the only other ponies they encountered were a receptionist, who barely looked up at them, and a janitor, who nodded at them but assumed they were meant to be there and kept whistling and mopping.

It was strange, approaching the failsafe room from this angle. The door looked sturdy, definitely too strong for her to knock down, and a keypad pulsed on the wall next to it. When the Doctor looked expectantly at her, Starlight rolled her shoulders. “Okay,” she muttered to herself, “I think I got this. Zero… one one… two… two.”

Beebeep! With a click, the door opened an inch. Starlight sighed in relief, almost wilting. At least something was definitely going right; she was afraid Sunburst’s code had been revoked already.

The Doctor zipped in before Starlight . “Great whickering stallions,” he murmured, “this is quite the setup. Wish I had this sort of budget. Ah, well. You can’t always get what you want.” He squinted at one of the crystals. “Wonder what, specifically, they do.” He raised a hoof towards the glass.

“Don’t touch it!” screamed Starlight.

The Doctor yelped, jumped several feet in the air, and fell to the ground in a tumble. As he rubbed his mane, he glared up at Starlight. “An explanation would be nice,” he muttered.

“Those keep the time machine stable,” Starlight hissed. “Those breaking is what caused the problem in the first place.”

The Doctor blinked. “Ah. So sorry.” In spite of how short his apology was, it at least sounded sincere. He pushed himself away from the racks and slowly got to his hooves.

“No, it’s, I’m sorry,” Starlight replied. She rubbed the back of her neck and looked away, ears back. “I just, I don’t want to come back and end up being the cause of it all, so… freakout. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” the Doctor said. “But we’re here, so… wait?”

“Yeah. Now we’ve just got to wait, what, two and a half hours?” Starlight smiled unconvincingly. “It can’t be that bad, right?”

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:10 PM — 7 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Waiting sucked all sorts of ridiculously obscene unmentionables. Starlight had paced back and forth so much she was certain she was wearing a rut into the metal floor.

“What time is it now?” she asked the Doctor for the umpteen bazillionth time.

“8:11,” the Doctor answered promptly. How he managed to keep track of time so accurately without a watch, Starlight was sure she’d never know.

She groaned. Six minutes to go, if she was remembering it correctly. It felt like it’d be an eternity. “This sounds terrible, but I wish the time apocalypse would just hurry up and get here already.”

“‘Time apocalypse’ is a bit wordy,” muttered the Doctor. “Perhaps we should come up with something else.”

“Time itself is about to break, you’re worried about what we call it?”

The Doctor shrugged. “It isn’t like I can do much else, is it? And if we’re going to survive and talk about this later, we’ll to refer to it as something besides, ‘that one time we broke time’.

Starlight rolled her eyes. “I don’t see why we ha-”

“And ‘time apocalypse’ doesn’t sound quite as… punchy as, say, ‘zombie apocalypse’. But we-” The Doctor’s ears went straight up, and he grinned broadly. “Time crash! That sounds brilliant! It’s clean, it’s concise, and it quickly gets across what went wrong. In a sense. It’s not perfect, I’ll grant you that, but it’s much better than ‘time apocalypse’.”

“Okay, it is, but I don’t see what the big deal is in-”

“You think this is going to work, don’t you?”

Starlight blinked. “Well, yeah, bu-”

“Then,” the Doctor said, poking her in the chest, “after we save the world, we shall need some way to refer to this incident. We want to talk about it, don’t we? And ‘time apocalypse’ is all… blegh.” He made a face. “It rolls off the tongue absolutely horribly! ‘Time crash’, on the other hoof…” He smiled to himself and nodded. “Ho ho, now there’s a memorable phrase! It’s perfectly short, and yet it’s surprisingly accurate as to what went wrong, while ‘time apocalypse’ is a bit vague as to the what, and that’s quite important, because-”

As the Doctor kept prattling, Starlight’s mind drifted. You think this is going to work, don’t you? But did she? If she secretly didn’t, that, well, that’d explain a lot. Why she wanted to stay out of sight, why she felt so lost doing this. But why would she think that? She reminded herself for what felt like the thousandth time that she’d seen changes in the timeline happen. Was it because of what Serene had said? Was it because, ultimately, the changes hadn’t stuck? Was it-

Interrupting both her thoughts and the Doctor’s rambles, the door opened. The two ponies beyond, undoubtedly the saboteurs, stopped walking and stared at Starlight and the Doctor. Starlight and the Doctor stared at them.

After a moment of silence, the Doctor coughed. “This is a new one,” he muttered.

“Starry?” asked Serene.

7 - The Secret History of Time Travel

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:13 PM — 4 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Starlight stared at Serene.

Serene stared at Starlight.

“Serene, what- what’re you doing here?” Starlight asked quietly.

“I’m just making sure the pieces fall into place,” said Serene. “They have to. What’re you doing here?”

“Pieces- fall-” stammered Starlight. “What are you talking about?”

“Tail-chasing,” said Serene. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“You’ve barely answered mine!”

Next to Starlight, the Doctor shifted his hooves and looked back and forth between Serene and the Monarch soldier behind her. He coughed. “Starlight, ah, I believe you should wrap this up soon.”

Starlight groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Alright, look, Serene,” she said. “Somepony’s going to break the time machine and time itself. I’m here to try and stop them. That answer your question?”

Serene shrugged. “Close enough.”

Maybe Starlight was just being paranoid, but something about Serene was really rubbing her the wrong way, even more than in the Everfree. She was even more relaxed than she had been, even though she knew what was coming. She was being evasive. She was being cryptic. She was hiding something.

And there was no way her coming here, now was a coincidence.

“8:14, Starlight,” the Doctor whispered.

“Okay,” Starlight said, “I answered your question. You answer mine, and you better answer it straight, or so help me, I’ll…” She hoped some threat would pop up, but nothing did. She just finished off her sentence with a growl.

Serene wasn’t threatened in the slightest. “I’m doing the things that need doing.”

“Talk straight!” yelled Starlight. Her horn started glowing brightly. “What! Are! You! Doing!”

The Monarch soldier’s own horn started glowing, but Serene waved him down. Instead of becoming intimidated, she just rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, “I’m destroying the time machine.”

Starlight’s magic faltered and her horn went out in shock. “W-what?” she whispered.

“What?” asked the Doctor.

“Destroying,” Serene said slowly. “The. Time. Machine. It broke because it was sabotaged. Somepony had to be the saboteur. I’m that somepony. Doy.”

Starlight blinked. No. This couldn’t be possible. It just- No. Serene wasn’t that stupid. Surely she realized- No. “But- but why?”

“You can’t change the past, Starry,” Serene said, shrugging. “The time machine had to break. I’m making sure it breaks. Everything’s going to happen the way it should.”

Starlight’s mind stopped working and split in two. One side went: No. No. No. No. No. It couldn’t have been Serene. Serene didn’t even know why she was breaking the machine, right? Why was she so certain it had to break? To fix the whole mess, all she had to do was not break it.

The other side was a bit more pragmatic. Starlight lowered her head, pawed at the ground, and ignited her horn. “Well, then,” she said, “I’m making sure it doesn’t break.”

Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Really.”

In the space of an instant, Starlight found herself forced up on her back legs and pinned against one of the racks, feeling like seven layers of crap had just gotten kicked out of her. Serene was pressing a hoof up into her throat and smirking nastily. “I’ve been chronon-active a lot longer than you, Starry,” she whispered. “You don’t know how this works.”

Behind her, Starlight saw the Doctor move, but the Monarch trooper tackled him and wrestled him to the ground. The Doctor put up as best a fight he could, but research hadn’t done anything for his strength, earth pony or not. “Starlight,” he gasped, “you-” The trooper smashed his head into the ground.

Those few words were enough for Starlight, somehow. She teleported out of Serene’s grasp to a space behind her on the other side of the room. And yet, somehow, Serene was on top of her before she could move, slamming her head down into the floor. The room started tilting and stars filled Starlight’s vision.

“Sorry about this,” said Serene, not sounding very convincing, “but it’s necessary.”

Starlight blinked, tried to clear her vision. She started hearing the sounds of smashing glass and shattering crystals. She struggled to her hooves and shook her head. That got her sight settled down enough to see Serene driving her hooves through the glass and crystals of the racks at random.

“Serene!” yelled Starlight, trying to stand up. “Stop it!”

“Can’t!” yelled Serene. “Ouroboros, Starry! Ouroboros!” She smashed another set of glass and crystals, and something sparked. Alarms began sounding.

Starlight’s stomach suddenly turned over. Serene dropped to her knees, coughing and gagging. The Doctor and the trooper didn’t seem to be affected, and kept wrestling on the floor.

Then Starlight’s head was crushed in a vice and everything stopped. Silence reigned. The Doctor and the trooper froze. A few bouncing crystal and glass shards hung in the air.

The fracture.

Starlight shook her head and the worst of the headache began receding. Serene was not only still moving, but already up, grinning with… satisfaction? She looked on the verge of laughter.

“What did you do?!” bellowed Starlight. She lunged, but Serene danced out of range with an unnatural speed. Starlight stumbled and fell to the floor.

“Made sure I didn’t cause a paradox,” Serene said. She planted a hoof on Starlight’s neck and back. “You never had a chance.”

Starlight wriggled. No give. She teleported out from under Serene’s hooves and slung off a blast of magic at Serene. But Serene had already moved behind another rack, and Starlight missed by a mile.

“I was going to make you an offer,” Serene said, sidling back into view. “But if you’re here, plan A is shot. Of course…” A grin crept onto her face, one that made Starlight’s blood run cold. “Now I know where you and Sunny are going to be. See you there.” She saluted, then just… vanished. It wasn’t teleportation, she was just gone.

Starlight ripped her mind from Serene. She was gone, and Starlight had to focus on the now. Okay, she thought. That didn’t work. And now Serene’s going to get Sunburst. That’s why she was at the other time machine. How’d she know to go there? Can’t worry about that now. Gotta-

The Doctor. She had to get him out of here. She looked back down at him and the trooper grappling on the ground. There was no way she could unfreeze just the Doctor… but maybe…

First, she opened a set of doors opposite the entrance. They were locked, and Sunburst’s keycode had stopped working for some reason, but it didn’t take long for her magic to open it. Then she laid a hoof each on the two ponies and willed them moving again. A quarter of a second later, she’d telekinetically grabbed the trooper and flung him through the door before he could react. As he went sliding across the floor, she tried to reverse the process, pulling his chronons back out. It couldn’t be that different from freezing ponies in normal time, right?

It wasn’t. The soldier stopped moving and didn’t start up again. Just in case, Starlight closed the doors; once the stutter ended, he’d be stuck in there for a little while. Good enough.

The newly mobile Doctor was already in scientific mode and staring at one of the hovering crystal shards. He delicately poked at it; it moved slowly aside for a few seconds, then reality flickered and it was back where it had been. “Fascinating,” he muttered. “Utterly fascinating.”

“Yep,” Starlight mumbled. Of course, he’d focus on that, and not the fact that she’d thrown his attacker into a maintenance ar-

She blinked and whirled back on the door, agape. That was where she and Sunburst were going to be. She hadn’t thought of it back then, but why would an invading soldier take the time to close the door behind him?

He hadn’t. She had.

Starlight felt sick. She’d already been back. She hadn’t changed it before. She couldn’t change it now. She’d never been able to.

She glanced at a certain section of wall, right next to one of the racks. It was intact. Starlight swallowed guiltily — she was practically betraying her own philosophy — and blasted a hole in it. Behind it was a narrow crawlspace.

The Doctor’s attention was diverted from the shard. He coughed. “Ah, Starlight… what’re you doing?”

“Making sure Sunburst and I escape,” Starlight said.

“Sunburst and y-? Ah. Timey-wimey.” The Doctor coughed again. “I… suppose we should get going, then?”

Starlight nodded. “There’s only a few moments before time starts up again.”

It was surreal, walking through the halls again at the same time in the same circumstances. Starlight tried to confirm to herself that, yes, she was here, but she was also back there, but her adrenaline was running too high and it just made her head hurt even more. All she’d th-

“So what do you think?” asked the Doctor. “Stairs or elevator?”

“Uh, what?” Starlight asked, trying to get her train of thought back on track. “Oh, um…” A memory of a mare saying a certain something drifted vaguely through her mind. “Elevator.”

The Doctor looked a bit nervous. “Positive? Because I-”

“Elevator,” Starlight said solidly. “Definitely.”

“Alright,” the Doctor said. He took a nervous step back. “You’re the one who’s been here, after all.”

The elevator was close by, and they reached it just as time started running again, not passing a single Monarch soldier. Starlight thanked her luck. The doors opened the moment the Doctor pushed the call button. He darted inside, flattened himself against one of the side walls, and jabbed the button for the top floor. Which, thank goodness, had been the floor Starlight was going to suggest.

“Get back,” the Doctor hissed. He pointed at the wall opposite his. “We don’t want them to see you. Keep out of sight!”

Starlight sighed — it wasn’t going to change anything — but did as he said.

And right at that moment, a soldier exited from a side hallway. She wasn’t looking at the elevator, instead focusing on the hallway to the failsafe room. But then, that was where Starlight and Sunburst were supposed to come from, not the service elevator, and they didn’t have enough time to have gotten down here already. (Starlight guessed they were just going into hiding behind the racks.)

The soldier stood in place, looking down the hall. The elevator doors didn’t close.

The Doctor hammered on the “Door Close” button. “Come on, come on…” he whispered. “Move, you blasted bucket of bolts!”

And then, just as the doors started closing, Starlight deliberately stepped into view in the elevator and coughed.

The soldier’s head snapped to the elevator and she twitched. The doors met, and Starlight distantly heard her saying, “Target spotted in the service elevator! Withdraw!”

The Doctor was livid. “Just… just what in the blazes was that? You just-”

“-made sure Sunburst and I escape,” Starlight said flatly.

“…More timey-wimey?”

Starlight nodded. “Too timey-wimey. It’s making my head hurt.” She rubbed her forehead. “I can’t escape unless they see me, they can’t see me unless I go back in the future, I can’t go back in the future unless I escape. I feel like I’m chasing my own tail.”

Not just chasing her own tail. Eating it.

Ouroboros.

Maybe Serene wasn’t as crazy as she sounded.

“That’s all well and good-” The Doctor still looked a bit miffed. “-but now they know we’re in the service elevator, and… you do know there’s a limited number of exit points, yeah? They’ll have us pinned and-”

“And in a few minutes,” Starlight said, “another, much longer stutter’s going to come, and they’ll be frozen, and we’ll be fine.”

“Ah.” The Doctor looked away and rubbed the side of his leg. “This is quite the complex day, isn’t it?”

“Eeyup.”

The elevator reached the top floor, dinged, and opened and closed its doors without the passengers leaving. Somehow, they’d wordlessly agreed to wait in the elevator until the stutter hit. They both focused on the walls instead of each other. Talking wouldn’t do anything.

Starlight put an ear on the doors and listened closely. For a while, it was silent, but then she heard ponies gathering around outside. All of a sudden, she started panicking. What if they opened the elevator before the stutter hit? Of course they could open it. Elevators w-

Her head throbbed as the stutter hit. Why couldn’t she have that kind of luck when actually trying big things? She unfroze the Doctor and pried the doors open. On the other side was a squad of Monarch troopers, all watching the elevator, all frozen.

The Doctor took a moment to stare at the soldiers as Starlight looked at a nearby map to find the stairs to the roof. He waved a hoof in front of one of them. No response, naturally. “You know,” he said, doing the same to another, “in a less dire situation, this might actually be quite fun.”

“Yeah,” said Starlight. Whatever. She just wanted to leave. “Roof’s this way.”

It was barely any time at all before they went up to the roof and Starlight had levitated them down to the ground. The Doctor’s jaw dropped as he saw the sky, but Starlight was already thinking. “Okay,” she said, “our first try’s bunk. What do you think we should do?”

“Well,” the Doctor said, tearing his gaze away from the sky, “ideally, I’d want to take a look at your friend’s notes first, make a few last conclusions. He went in some directions that I didn’t, and I didn’t take in as much as I’d like.”

“Is it okay if you only do it for twenty minutes or so?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“I know just the place right near here.”

Sunburst’s Streamhaven Apartment, October 9
8:39 PM — 22 minutes after the Fracture in Time

With the two of them aiming for Sunburst’s apartment, they reached it just before the stutter collapsed. Unlocking it was easy, and soon the Doctor was examining Sunburst’s notes in the living room as Starlight paced, trying to wrestle her thoughts into submission.

She found herself telling the Doctor to not take any of the physical notes; Sunburst would need to take them to him in a couple hours. She kept glancing at the clock, making sure they had enough time to get out before she and Sunburst came back. She kept telling herself that you could change things, and yet she was devoted to making sure that she wasn’t changing her own timeline at all.

Maybe it was what she’d just seen down at the university, her own attempt foiled. Maybe she was getting stressed out and paranoid. Maybe seeing Serene so unflappable while causing the eventual end of time had rattled her. Maybe it was actually being back at her own events that had changed her, rather than being in some place she’d never been to for some event she’d never seen. Maybe one of a thousand different things. Whatever the cause, Starlight couldn’t shake a nagging feeling: keep the timeline straight.

For all her former confidence, now, the idea of things changing haunted her, like it shouldn’t happen. It kept poking at her, demanding she keep track of time so she could be away before her other self arrived. It told her she couldn’t try to contact herself. Couldn’t try to do anything that’d change her own course. It was one thing to try to change history for the better by stopping the fracture; it was another to do anything that might cause her past self to not enter the time machine. Better to just leave it be. The past was set, and that was that.

Was this what Serene was feeling?

The Doctor spoke up. He sounded down. “I think I’ve seen enough, and, ah…” He swallowed. “Yeah, we never had a chance. Paradoxes are impossible and self-defeating.”

“Great,” muttered Starlight.

“Although great whickering stallions, are these comprehensive.” The Doctor started talking fast again. “They cover far more than mine ever did. Boundary cases, to be sure, but I cannot believe I forgot about those. Did you know, these imply that if-”

“Uh-huh. And do you have any ideas on how to fix the fracture?”

The Doctor looked down at the notes again. “The beginnings of one. Dose the Neigher-Joy field with chronons and stitch it back together, in laymare’s terms.”

Hadn’t something like that been Sunburst’s initial idea? Starlight was sure it was. That was a good sign. He and the Doctor were thinking on the same page.

“The specifics elude me at the moment, I’ll admit,” the Doctor continued, “but I’ve barely had any time to think, and these circumstances are rather dodgy. I say we meet Sunburst back in the Everfree so the three of us can put our heads together and try to come up with something more solid.”

“Three of us?” Starlight asked. “I’d be barely any help at all. I don’t know anything about chronodynamics or whatever.”

The Doctor waggled a hoof at her. “There’s a saying I’ve heard: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. You are the pony we’ll explain it simply to. If you can get a decent handle on it, we’re on the right track and Sunburst and I most likely understand it.”

That was actually something Twilight said from time to time. And she could explain magic simply if you reminded her not to use big words, so she definitely understood magic. Starlight felt a bit less down; at least she wouldn’t be completely useless.

“Shame to have to through all that forest yet again,” the Doctor said, “but that’s where Sunburst is.” He smiled. “Still, our trip there was uneventful the first time around, so we’ll be safe the next time, right?”

Starlight swallowed. “Not exactly,” she said quietly. “I… I think Serene’s going to try to kill him.”

8 - Falling Into Place

Train to Ponyville, October 9
10:13 PM — 2 hours after the Fracture in Time

Starlight knew for a fact that her past self was on the other side of the train, less than fifty feet away from her current self. And yet, for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to just… walk up and talk to her.

Maybe it’d all make sense once her other self had gone through the time machine and she didn’t have to worry about screwing up the timeline. Paradoxes looked strange and menacing all of a sudden, and now that she had a real, tangible, potentially harmful effect on herself that could be pointed at to indicate her meddling with time, rather than simply saving Equestria, she felt like she was walking on eggshells. All the confidence she’d once had was gone.

She couldn’t tell what the Doctor was thinking. He was pacing back and forth, muttering under his breath, but it seemed to be science type stuff, like he was just voicing his thoughts. Whatever he was thinking, he was deep in it and barely paid any attention to anything else going on around.

“…but where would we get chronons?” muttered the Doctor. “We don’t have anything to harvest them with. Not yet, anyway.” He spoke up absent-mindedly. “Maybe you could get those.”

Starlight twitched in surprise. “What?”

“Oh, just looking down avenues,” said the Doctor, waving a hoof. “But a lot of them need chronons, and at the moment, you’re our best chance for getting them.”

Any other moment, and Starlight would’ve asked, “How?” But she wasn’t in the mood. “‘Kay,” she said and went back to staring out the window.

The Doctor sighed. “Listen, Starlight,” he said, taking a seat next to her, “this is but a minor setback. We’re still alive. We’re still safe. We’ve only exhausted a single possible solution, and it was a rather specific one at that. And, technically, we haven’t even wasted any time yet, since we haven’t caught up to the-” He made air quotes with his hooves. “-‘present’. So let’s just keep on moving, shall we?”

Which was easy for him to say. Starlight had been so sure that this would work, and now… But he had a point. All they had to do was pick up Sunburst and they could get back to figuring out something else. There was still a lot of ground to cover. “Sure.” Still, with Serene blitzing around like she’d been, it was a bit tricky to say how hard that’d actually be.

Speaking of which… “And, uh, Doc?” she asked. “Sorry to change the subject so quickly, but you saw Serene doing that… that thing that wasn’t teleporting but kind of was, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you think she’s doing that? She got dosed with chronons, too, but she’s just an earth pony.”

“Well, based on what she said, it sounded like she’d had her powers longer than you, so…” The Doctor shrugged. “My guess? She’s got more experience, so she knows how to vary the rate at which she moves through time. If she speeds up her chronon consumption, time slows down relative to her and she speeds up relative to us. Cue the appearance of so-called super speed, bordering on teleportation.” He grinned. “Spectacular, isn’t it? How changing a single variable in the equations of the universe can have such shocking consequences.”

Starlight grunted and turned to the window again.

“Well, I think it’s spectacular,” the Doctor huffed.

Everfree Forest, October 9
11:19 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time

Once the two of them got back to Ponyville, they skulked about until their original selves had left for the Everfree. The Doctor promptly went to his lab, apologized again for being unable to help, and started studying.

Starlight followed the group into the forest, trying to keep as quiet as possible. Nopony looked back — of course they wouldn’t, they hadn’t the first time — so it must’ve worked. Seeing herself, Sunburst, and the Doctor go through the motions she’d already seen was trippy; there was a knowledge between knowing everything she was currently seeing had already happened before and actually witnessing something happen again. She began mouthing everypony’s words to herself. Word for word, she got it right. Surreal.

Sunburst and the Doctor left. Starlight knew what was coming next: the brief time-loopy thing. She stared off to one side, got a headache, and her future self appeared from thin air as time skipped back. She looked at her future self, then looked at her past self going through the actions that would lead to her meeting her past self. Her present self’s future past self? Sweet Celestia, she’d barely thought about it for two seconds and she was already confused.

“This,” she muttered, “is too weird.”

“Tell me about it,” her future self responded.

She skulked quietly behind the group as they went to the time machine corridor, keeping her horn as dim as possible. Serene was nowhere to be seen. A thought crept into the pit of her stomach; was Serene letting her get here unopposed to find Sunburst? She might not’ve known how Starlight and the Doctor came back and lied about it to get Starlight to go to protect Sunburst so she could follow. But that seemed a bit much for Serene to come up right on the spot upon seeing Starlight in the past. Maybe not. Maybe she did know they’d come to the past here. But how?

Well, one way or another, Starlight had to try to get Sunburst out. As she heard herself saying her last goodbyes to Sunburst, she fell into a particularly shadowy corner out of sight of the time machine room and waited.

“Tell me all about it if I’m not me!” called Sunburst. He took a few steps down the hall, then, out of sight of the time machine room, stopped and turned back, biting his lip. His legs twitched. He sighed and turned around again, heading for the room the Doctor had mentioned.

Starlight broke from her hiding place, pinned Sunburst against the wall, and threw a hoof over his mouth. Right as he started struggling, Starlight put a hoof to her own mouth in a shhh gesture. “Quiet,” she whispered.

Sunburst stopped struggling, blinked, and nodded. Starlight released him and whispered, “It…” She swallowed. “It didn’t work.”

“Oh,” murmured Sunburst. “Sorry.”

“And Serene’s the one who broke the time machine.”

Sunburst’s jaw dropped. “Serene? But- but she’s the one who- How, where’d she go? How’d she get back here? H-” Before Starlight could say that he was behaving the way she had at Streamhaven University when he told her to stop talk, he cut himself off. “Later. So wh-”

“And…” Starlight looked down the hall, away from the time machine. Empty. She pulled Sunburst down it. “And I think she’s going to try and kill us.”

“…Uh.” As he got his hooves under himself, Sunburst blinked once. Twice. “If, if you say so,” he said. It was a “you know this better than me, I have to trust you” statement that didn’t want any more clarification at the moment, not a skeptical “uh-huh, sure” one.

“She’s here right now,” Starlight continued, “so there’s probably Monarch soldi-”

“What? Serene’s working with Monarch?!”

“Um, yeah. Forgot to mention that.”

Sunburst bit his lip and pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “Hoo boy. This, this is bad.”

“So we need to move,” said Starlight, “before she finishes talking with me-”

Sunburst opened his mouth.

“Timey-wimey stuff. She was here before I left,” said Starlight.

Sunburst closed his mouth.

“-and she starts looking for you,” finished Starlight. “I don’t know what’s going on with her, but it c-”

Sunburst suddenly planted his hoof in Starlight’s mouth and tilted an ear down the hall. Starlight turned her own ears and strained. Nothing.

After a moment, Sunburst released Starlight and backed away, rubbing the back of his neck. “S-sorry,” he muttered, flicking his tail, “I, I just, I thought I heard something.”

“That’s alright,” said Starlight. “We’re all on edge.”

They crept blindly down the hall, their footsteps muffled by a spell of Starlight’s. Unfortunately, they couldn’t do anything about the dark without giving away their position, so they had to rely on their (rather poor) night vision. Several times, Starlight bumped her hoof on a protruding something and had to bite back a scream to keep her spell going. Hearing their enemies wasn’t much of an option; the building, amateurishly built as it was, creaked and groaned almost constantly, obscuring the sounds made by anypony else.

Starlight wasn’t sure where they were going; the only exit she knew of was in the other direction. But that was where Serene and Monarch would most likely come in, and the Doctor would build in other exits, right? Hopefully. Or they might be going straight into a dead end. Yay.

It came slowly out of the gloom at the end of the hall: a door haphazardly marked “Exit”. Yessss. Starlight tapped Sunburst on the shoulder and pointed. He nodded and whispered, “Should we, should we check outside first?”

“Good idea. I’ll do that.” Starlight cautiously jiggled the knob. Locked, but it unlocked from the inside. Another spell kept the hinges from squeaking as she pushed it open a few inches. Once she had a large enough gap, Starlight poked her head out the door and scanned the Everfree as best she could. It was dark, but from what little she could see, there weren’t any soldiers out there. She cocked an ear. No sounds except those of the forest. “Okay,” she said, “I think we’re g-”

Sunburst suddenly screamed in pain. Starlight whirled around. Sunburst was leaning against the wall, breathing through clenched teeth. He was holding one of his rear legs off the ground; it had an arrow sticking out of it. At the other end of the hallway, almost out of sight in the darkness, a Monarch soldier was recocking his crossbow harness.

Starlight was halfway down the hall before she knew it. He was not going to get away with that. The soldier turned his crossbow on her, but in the space of a few seconds, she’d frozen him in time to keep him from yelling out, body-slammed him into the wall hard enough to dent his helmet, and encased him in a crystal prison. For the next few minutes, he wouldn’t be going anywhere.

She was at Sunburst’s side in an instant. “How bad is it?” she asked. She alternated between looking at the bolt (and cringing) and looking around to be sure no other soldiers were sneaking up on them.

“It’s- it’s pretty bad,” Sunburst said through gritted teeth. “But- but m-maybe I can…” He delicately set his hoof on the ground, put a little bit of weight on it, and collapsed with a muffled scream. “No,” he hissed. “Can’t really walk, not like, not like this. Maybe I, I sh-”

“I’ll carry you,” Starlight blurted. “I can do it. I’ll get you back to Ponyville, and… and…” Truth be told, she wasn’t sure what they’d do then. It wasn’t like Serene would give up looking for them just because she couldn’t find them here, and Ponyville was the next logical place to look. It was still better than the middle of the Everfree.

Sunburst frowned up at her. “I’ll slow you down,” he said slowly.

“I don’t care! I’m not leaving you alone out here!”

“Fine. But don’t, don’t do anything stupid for me, okay?”

“No promises.” Starlight picked Sunburst up in her magic and set off into the Everfree.

She ran into problems almost immediately. Ponies were floppy and irregularly shaped, and Sunburst was no different. Starlight had to be extra careful to keep him from banging into trees, branches, bushes, and every single little bit of undergrowth out there. He did his best to help, pulling his legs up and moving his head aside, but he could only do so much. Even as they avoided injuring Sunburst more, they still made enough noise for Starlight to wince. She would’ve silenced them, but she couldn’t run a silencing spell and hold up somepony as bulky as Sunburst at the same time.

Her horn started aching from the strain. It wasn’t that bad, but she’d rather it didn’t, not in the dark like this. Starlight lightly set Sunburst on the ground and let him lean against her. “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “Just taking a break. What about you?”

Sunburst moved his leg slightly and winced. “Well,” he muttered, “it’s, it isn’t any, any worse.”

“That’s something.” Starlight found herself wishing that time would stutter again. She could get Sunburst out without any risk of getting caught, and… But, no, time kept moving. Shame.

“You, you won’t be long, will you?” asked Sunburst. “It’s just, we’re kinda-”

“No.” Starlight took a deep breath in, let a deep breath out. “Let’s g-”

“Don’t move.”

Starlight yelped and threw up a shield. She looked wildly around her, but couldn’t see anything in the dark. Sunburst had gone stiff, his hurt leg held off the ground, and was holding his breath. “Who’s there?” Starlight asked.

Several Monarch soldiers took a few steps forward out of the dark, night-vision goggles perched on their foreheads. Their crossbows were pointed at the pair, and the unicorns’ horns were glowing, but none of them attacked. Starlight looked around. More soldiers, all with night-vision goggles. They were surrounded.

Sunburst gulped. “Well, um, okay,” he whispered.

Starlight swallowed. She couldn’t freeze all of them at once, and she wasn’t sure she could freeze any of them while still keeping the focus to maintain the shield. And in the chaotic environment of the forest, teleporting was right out unless they wanted to end up in a tree. She wasn’t even sure she could teleport two ponies at once.

As if they knew what she was thinking, one of the soldiers spoke up. “Don’t try anything,” she said flatly. And that was it.

That didn’t stop Starlight from thinking, though. She had ideas. Plenty of them. Loads of them. But they all required to her shift her attention from the shield, which would drop it, which would alert the soldiers, which… She didn’t want to think about that. Every time she came up with a plan, it got shot down by her simple inability to keep the shield up for long enough. Dangit dangit dangit.

And then Serene strode out between two soldiers. She was still grinning that detached, insufferably smug grin. “Yo,” she said. “This is the you that failed, and not the you that’s going to fail, right?”

It took Starlight a moment to parse the sentence. “Yeah,” she said.

“Heh. Told you,” said Serene. Her grin dropped and her voice grew a bit more serious. “Look. Starry. Sunny. This really isn’t what it looks like.”

Sunburst spoke up. “Looks pretty clear to-” His leg twitched and he gasped. “-to me.”

“Context is everything,” Serene said, waving a hoof dismissively. “I wanted you…” She cast her gaze around the clearing. “How did I want them, fillies and gentlecolts?”

“Alive, ma’am!” chorused the soldiers.

Starlight and Sunburst exchanged glances. Serene wasn’t just a part of Monarch, but she was leading a squad of soldiers? What had happened to her?

“My ponies were never aiming to kill, you two,” Serene said, “but a bolt aimed for the leg doesn’t look much different from a bolt aimed for the heart. So, really sorry about that.” (Starlight rolled her eyes.) “But I need your help.”

“Help?” Starlight asked. Serene seemed honest, but she still didn’t let her shield down. “What do you need our help for?”

“Loooong story,” said Serene. She chuckled. “Can’t do it here. We’ll need to talk elsewhere. Which means you need to come with us. Which means this-” She stepped forward and lightly rapped Starlight’s shield. “-needs to come down. Promise, cross my heart, that you won’t be hurt if you come quietly.” She drew an X across her chest.

Okay. That was… something, but those crossbows weren’t slackening and those unicorns weren’t dimming their horns. Serene still seemed honest, but she had one heck of an upper hoof. Starlight couldn’t see any way out that didn’t put herself and Sunburst in serious risk. She glanced at Sunburst. “What do you think?” she whispered.

Sunburst grunted. “Can’t get any, get any worse, can it?” he mumbled. He cracked a grin, then winced as his leg twitched again. “I, I mean, it’s, it’s only a matter of time before your shield falls and they-” He blinked and started talking quickly. “It’s, I mean, a long matter, don’t, don’t get me wrong, but, ah, that’ll just, um, drag things out before we’re going, going with them anyway.”

Which, unfortunately, was what Starlight herself had been thinking. It took only a few more moments for her to make her decision. She dropped her shield and swallowed. Hopefully, they’d want to talk right now instead of blasting her immediately. Ha ha, yeah, right. “Um, hey,” she said. “Do you think we can-”

The knockout bolt hit her right in the face.

9 - Down, but Not Out

Monarch HQ, October 10
10:34 AM — 14 hours after the Fracture in Time

Considering her last experience had been getting shot in the face, Starlight felt spectacular.

But then, it was the closest thing to a good night’s sleep she’d had in, what, two days? It was hard to say with her jumping back. Still, once she was put to sleep, she stayed asleep, and she felt surprisingly good. The bed was comfy enough, the sheets were a bit scratchy but not too bad, a-

Bed? Sheets? Starlight cracked her eyes open a millimeter. Soft white light dripped from a lamp on the ceiling; bright enough to see by, but not enough to blind somepony who was just waking up. Starlight opened her eyes a bit more. She was in what looked suspiciously like a hospital room, but considering her last conscious experience, it was probably safer to say “medical ward”. Hospitals were public; this was almost definitely private. It was small, with only three other beds. Two were empty. The last held Sunburst, who was still asleep. He was covered with sheets, so Starlight couldn’t see his leg, but his chest was rising up and down easily.

The room itself was that kind of brightly drab of hospital/medical ward rooms everywhere. Sterile and functional, but not much else. It had all the essentials: heartbeat monitor (none attached to anypony), stands for IV bags (none holding any, and one carrying Sunburst’s lab coat), curtains (all stowed), the works. The biggest difference was the stylized M of the Monarch logo plastered around a number of things. Starlight suspected she’d start seeing that logo even more in the near future. No windows, unfortunately.

Still lying down, she rolled her shoulders. She waited for the pain to come, some kind of magical backlash, but nothing happened. She waited. Nothing happened. She waited. Nothing happened. She stopped waiting; nothing would continue to happen, and she’d feel fine. Good. Apparently, Serene had been telling the truth about keeping her and Sunburst safe.

The thought made Starlight twitch all over, as if- No, she wasn’t strapped down into the bed. The thought was silly, but she thought it anyway. For all she claimed about keeping them safe, Serene was being awfully aggressive about it. Starlight suspected the door out was locked, but didn’t feel like getting up to try it. Not yet. Even if Monarch had assaulted her, the fact that they’d taken her to someplace to get looked at made it feel like trying to escape would be in poor taste.

Which left one thing to do. “Sunburst?”

“Unnffh.”

So Sunburst was asleep. Great. And she was left sitting there all al-

The door swung open and a nurse walked in, a clipboard tucked under her wing. Her nametag marked her as Femora. “I noticed you were up,” she chirped. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to examine you a bit and be sure you’re in tip-top shape.”

Well, it wasn’t like Starlight had anything better to do. “Sure,” she said. She tried to push her sheets aside with magic, but flinched as she felt the slight buzz of a restrictor ring on her horn she hadn’t notice. Of course.

As Starlight kicked the sheets off, Femora cringed and smiled at the same time. “Yeah, sorry. That had to go on to keep any feedback from coming back out and doing… bad things. That magic can knock somepony out like that-” She stomped on the floor with one of her rear hooves. “-but it’s not perfect yet. If you’re all good to go when we’re done, we can take that off.”

Which meant, Starlight suspected, that no matter how good she actually was, they’d find some way of making sure it stayed on. Probably through some medical-sounding gibberish mixed with random arcane terms that was actually a steaming load, but she didn’t have the knowledge to disprove. Still, it was better than being cooped up in a cell. “I’ll live,” Starlight said. “What do you need me to do?”

Femora set the clipboard on a table and began running down it. “Well, first…”

They went through basic physical motions, for the most part. At one point, Femora pulled out a stethoscope and had Starlight breathe in and out, and another time, she pulled out some kind of magical pokey thing that made Starlight’s hair stand on end, but never anything that exertive. It was a short list, and it looked like Femora was skipping down it. Maybe she just wanted to get it over with, maybe she was going through some flowchart type thing. If the patient does this, go here. If not, go there. EIther way, it was over quickly. Femora frowned the frown of somepony looking at a desireable, but very unexpected, result. “Hmm,” said Femora. “Even if they’re not perfect, they’re getting close. I don’t see any side effects.”

“Great,” said Starlight. “And him?” She pointed at Sunburst.

But Femora waved her off. “He should be up in less than half an hour, don’t you worry your tail. Actually, you got up early.”

If time was still stuttering, Starlight realized, then every now and then her own clock would jump forward a bit relative to the world. Time would stop, and she’d keep going. (Unconscious, but still.)

“So you might just be hardy,” continued Femora. She paused and bit her lip. “I hope he doesn’t react badly.” Before Starlight could react, Femora had moved on. “I’ll stop by in a few, see how you and he’re doing, okay? Okay. Oh, and…” She slipped a band with a single glowing gem over the base of her hoof and tapped it to the restrictor ring. The ring popped off Starlight’s horn and dropped to the floor.

“Don’t need this anymore,” Femora said brightly, scooping the ring into a pocket. “You’re right as rain. Somepony will be by to talk to you in a bit. Be seeing you!” And she was gone.

Well, um, okay. They must really trust her, which was odd for ponies that had been shooting at her less than twelve hours ago. (Was it twelve hours ago? Starlight looked at a clock on the wall. More or less.) Serene at work, maybe. Just how much was she pulling strings?

And then there was the matter of the nurse. More precisely, the way she acted. From talking about the bolts, she obviously knew how Starlight and Sunburst had come here, but Starlight didn’t think her demeanor was faked at all. Which meant that, in spite of the two of them being prisoners, Femora didn’t actually care at all about that. That was one trusting nurse.

She’d said somepony was coming here to talk to her. Now, all Starlight could do was wait. At least it wasn’t a cell. And maybe… “Sunburst?”

He waved a hoof halfheartedly. “Unnffh.”

“Are you… are you feeling okay?”

Sunburst raised his head and blinked blearily at Starlight. He looked really strange without his glasses. “No. ‘M tryin’ t’sleep an’ y’r wakin’ m’up,” he slurred. He dropped back down to the pillow.

Well, okay. If that was the first thing about him that came to mind, that was probably a good sign. But… “Anything else?”

“UNNFFH!”

“Sorry. I’ll let you sleep.”

But like Femora had said, it wasn’t that much longer before Sunburst was up. He had his own restrictor ring clamped on his horn, so it took him a little while to find his glasses on a bedside table. The moment he had them on, he pointed at Starlight’s horn. “You don’t-”

“A nurse came in, took a look at me, and took my ring off,” Starlight said. “Something about feedback and keeping it contained.”

Sunburst blinked. “Oh.” He started staring at the ceiling and muttering to himself. “Well, actually, that, that makes sense… Hypothetically, if, if that magic knocked a pony out by, by traveling along their, along their nerves, then, then maybe, once it reached the brain, it, it might cause a-”

Starlight didn’t want to listen to any more random arcane ramblings. She got enough of that from Twilight. Time for a subject change. “So how’s the leg feel?”

“Better than it, than it should,” said Sunburst. A few kicks got him out from under the sheets. His wounded leg was bandaged and had a sort of shoe splint to immobilize it and allow him to put weight on it without putting weight on the actual leg. “Still stings a little, but that’s, you know, that’s to be expected.” He slid out of bed, keeping his bad leg up. After a second, he delicately put it down on the floor, then shifted his weight a little. He inhaled sharply, but stayed up. “Smarts,” he said through clenched teeth, “but I, I can walk if I need to. I think.” He took a few steps around the room. He gasped slightly every time his hoof hit the ground, but only slightly. Climbing back into bed, he said, “Could be better, but it, it ought to be a lot worse.”

“Hnng.” Starlight wasn’t convinced Monarch didn’t have some ulterior motive in keeping them alive. They’d been willing to use force earlier, after all.

“So…” Sunburst wiggled a little to get under the sheets more. “Where are we?”

“No idea,” said Starlight. “Some Monarch building, I’m guessing.”

“Yeah. They, they do love their logos. Probably back in, back in Streamhaven, then.”

“Maybe, b-” And then Starlight realized something. “Where do you think the Doctor is?”

“I, I…” Sunburst pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “I… don’t know. Was, was he okay when you left him?”

Starlight nodded. “Back in his home in Ponyville. Do you think they got him? They knocked us out, why wouldn’t they do the same for him?”

“Dunno,” Sunburst said. “It’s… it’s not like he’d have to come here, is it?”

“No.”

Silence.

Sunburst coughed. “What happened with the, with the time machine? In the past, I mean. At Streamhaven.”

Bad memories came rushing back, and Starlight slouched. “I don’t know,” she muttered, rubbing her forehead. “We were there at the time, Serene came, and she destroyed those crystals. She kept talking cryptically, about how pieces were falling into place or something and she had to do it. It was… she was weird, Sunburst. She’s definitely not the Serene you knew.”

“Oh.” Sunburst twirled a lock of hair around a hoof, biting his lip. “And you didn’t, you didn’t get a chance to ask her about what she was doing, right?”

“Right. And I don’t think I’d’ve gotten a straight answer if I had.”

“Oh.” Sunburst paused. “Is… This is probably a bad…” He bit his lip again and looked away.

Starlight took a guess. “Yes, Sunburst, you told me so.”

“Well, it’s, I, I didn’t want to put it like that…”

“No, you’re fine. It’s just… Well, you did. But don’t worry about it.” Starlight fell onto her bed stared at the ceiling. Her thoughts were flipflopping again. Okay, so changing the past with the machine didn’t work. She could accept that, now. It didn’t seem so strange. But, for what felt like the bazillionth time, she’d seen herself change the past. She should’ve tried to change something when she was back with the Doctor. It would’ve provided an answer, one way or another. It would’ve given her closure, it-

The door to the room opened again. Femora entered the room, still smiling, but flanked by two guards, both unicorns, and Starlight was sure she saw more outside. “Hello there!” Femora said to Sunburst, far too brightly for somepony in her situation. “I saw you were up. If you don’t mind, I’d like to perform a quick checkup. And I’m sorry,” she said to Starlight, “but these two gentlecolts are here for you.” She waved a hoof at the guards.

Sunburst twitched and pushed his glasses up, and Starlight took a few steps away from the door. “Whoa, hey, here for what?” she asked.

“Just to escort you to your next location,” Femora said. “The bossmare wants to speak with you, and…” She tutted. “You do not keep the CEO of Monarch waiting.”

Starlight and Sunburst exchanged glances. It didn’t take long for Starlight to think; she didn’t have a whole lot of options. “And I need guards why?” she asked.

“Just to make sure you don’t try to break out,” said Femora. (How could she be so cheerful about this?) “You’ve caused…” She clicked her tongue. “-quite a bit of problems for us.” She leaned in close to Starlight and stage whispered, as if she were sharing a secret, “Let’s keep those to a minimum, shall we?”

Of course. Starlight sighed and muttered to Sunburst, “Be seeing you.” With the guards at her sides, she left the room, where she was boxed in by another pair of guards. The first two didn’t say a word; they just started walking down the hall. Starlight thought it best to follow them.

Before they were out of sight of the door, Femora hollered out, “Don’t worry, it won’t be long. Miss Serene’s very to-the-point!”

10 - Face to Face

Monarch HQ, October 10
10:52 AM — 15 hours after the Fracture in Time

Given the building’s overall modernity, the walls of the facility proper were less sterile than Starlight had expected. No bare chrome surfaces here. A few paintings and pictures dotted the walls here and there. Hardly an art gallery, but at least it felt a bit welcoming for the ponies working there. And there were ponies; Starlight didn’t know what they were doing, but she passed plenty of ponies. Running here, walking there, carrying this, drinking or eating that. It looked a lot like any other office job. Except for the fact that nopony spared a second glance for the prisoner under armed escort.

Starlight’s guards (all four of them, one on each corner) were silent, no matter how much she pestered them. They kept looking straight and walking on. Every now and then, she’d get a “be quiet” nudge, but it was always light. Eventually, she just gave up. Escape never crossed her mind; there was no way she could hope to get out, not in the middle of a building she didn’t know the layout of with undoubtedly more armed guards patrolling it. Tough luck.

It wasn’t long before they reached a solid-looking door flanked by two more guards in a more deserted part of the building. One of them opened the door to reveal a room that reminded Starlight of nothing more than an interrogation chamber. Stark walls, ceiling, and floor, very brightly lit, no furniture except for a table and two chairs right in the center. All that was missing was a one-way mirror.

Serene was sitting in the far chair already, still with that infuriating grin. She waved Starlight over. “C’mon in! You wanna talk, don’tcha?”

One of Starlight’s guards lightly nudged her. Not seeing any other option, Starlight entered the room. As she sat down in the empty chair (no restraints), the door boomed shut behind her and clicked as the lock engaged.

Starlight looked at Serene.

Serene looked at Starlight.

Starlight decided to break the ice. “Hey, Serene.” It was all she could say.

Serene didn’t lose her smile. In fact it went up a few notches, from “smug and in control” to “almost friendly”. “Hey, Starry,” she said. “Long time. No see.”

“It hasn’t even been a day for me,” said Starlight. “And don’t call me Starry.”

Serene laughed. “Whatever you say, Starry. And I know! Only a day, right? Ain’t like that for me. Not at all. I mean, when do you think I went when Promenade fell apart?”

Starlight pushed the tip of her hoof into the table and swiveled it back and forth. “I… I don’t know.”

Serene’s grin dropped. “I saw the End of Time, Starlight,” she said quietly. “It’s not a time meant for mortals. It’s… indescribable. It should not be.” She looked off into the distance. “Timelines overlap and collide. Events are caught in loops, repeating over and over and over. Events happen before the actions that cause them. And… and there are… things that exist between seconds. They didn’t like me. I… I’m lucky to be alive.”

She swallowed and twitched, like she was pulling herself back together. “I found a way back. Followed notes from myself, actually. Directed me to that time machine. Don’t know whose it is. Never tried finding out. Doesn’t matter. But I couldn’t come back to now, not after seeing that. I needed to prepare. So I went back further.”

She leaned back in her chair. “It’s only been a few hours for you, Starry, but for me, it’s been seven years.”

Seven years. Seven years, living the same thing over again. Some of the most turbulent seven years in Equestria’s history, to boot. It was hard for Starlight to wrap her mind around it: that Serene, who she’d only missed for a few hours, had missed her for years. Knowledge of time travel, having done it herself, didn’t make it any easier. “What did you do with that time?” asked Starlight

“Founded Monarch,” Serene said. “Made investments based on future knowledge. Grew fast. Attracted the best scientists I could. We need all the time we can get if we’re going to find a way to fix the fracture.”

“Fix it?” Starlight scoffed. “You’re the one who caused it!”

“Oh, boy. We got an amateur over here.” Serene leaned forward. “Remember how I said paradoxes can’t happen? How any attempt to change the past will only make it happen?”

“That doesn’t mean you need to-”

“Think about what that means. If I didn’t break the time machine, somepony else would have. It had to break, if all of this was going to happen. I can’t go forward if it doesn’t break. I can’t found Monarch if I don’t go forward. The machine doesn’t get funded if I don’t found Monarch. But the machine got funded. Ergo, it breaks. And I’d rather be active than pulled along by the current, so…” Serene shrugged. “Yeah. I broke it. It was going to break, anyway.”

Which struck Starlight as an incredibly flimsy, even petty, justification. To avoid all this, all she had to do was not break the machine. Breaking the machine because it was supposedly “going to” break was like justifying murder because everypony dies eventually, right? Serene was just casting blame off of herself. Not even on anypony in particular; she was just saying, “The universe said so.” It was like she was implying there was something forcing her to do it.

“Look, we’ve still got a time machine,” said Starlight. “It’s simple, we can fix this.”

Serene started frowning, almost snarling. “No, you can’t.”

“But all we need to do,” Starlight said, “is something that’ll keep you fr-”

Serene slammed her hooves on the table. “YOU CAN’T!” she screamed, standing up from her chair. Her voice, formerly rock-solid and assured, was suddenly quavering. “You really think I haven’t tried to change things? To warn ponies? I’ve tried, believe me! Even after I founded Monarch! I’ve tried over and over and over and over and nothing ever works! I’d give both left hooves to be able to change the past! But you CAN’T!” She dropped back down. Her breaths were sounding like sobs. “I tried to tell the Royal Guard about Nightmare Moon. I got funny looks. I tried to tell them about Discord. I got funny looks. I tried to tell them about the Changeling Invasion. I got funny looks.” She looked up at Starlight, blinking a lot. Her voice was flat. “I knew they were coming. I did everything I could to tell the best ponies how to stop it. Net result? Jack squat. After that, I… I gave up. Except for one time. You remember Tirek?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember how terrified you were of him? How helpless he made you feel?”

“Yeah.”

“I was determined I wouldn’t go through that again. A few weeks before it happened, I marched right into the throne room and demanded an audience with Celestia. The guards wanted to know my business. I told them about the psychotic centaur that would escape Tartarus and steal magic from ponies. You know what they did? Go on. Guess.”

Starlight didn’t answer.

“Guess,” hissed Serene.

Starlight cringed backwards. “They… didn’t believe you?” she whispered.

Serene laughed hollowly. “Even better. I was thrown out of the palace. I tried again, and was thrown out again. I tried one last time, and got myself slapped with a restraining order and told I’d be chucked in an asylum if I ever showed my face around there again. And then… And then he arrived. You think it was bad the first time? Try going through it again, knowing it’s coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

When she spoke again, her voice was even flatter. “And then, grasping at the last straw, I said to myself, those’re big things. Things you never had much agency in to begin with. Change something smaller. Something personal. Something that won’t matter much to Equestria at large. And you know what? I had just the thing.” She started staring off into the distance. “Two years ago, it was near Hearth’s Warming, and I was out shopping. I saw this filly bolt out into the street and nearly get run over by a carriage. She was alright, but… Well, I’ve never liked seeing kids in danger. I’d stop her from running out. It was easy. It was simple. If I could do that, I could stop the first experiment.”

Her eyes started growing watery and she started blinking a lot. “On the right day, I found the street. I kept my head down so I wouldn’t be recognized. And… and I found her. She was unsupervised, nopony paying attention to her. Perfect, I thought. I… I walked up to her, and…” She rubbed her eyes with a hoof. “She was alone. A stranger walked right up to her. She panicked. She… bolted out into the street… and nearly got run over by a carriage.”

Tears started flowing from Serene’s eyes and she buried her face in her hooves. “Th-the one thing I t-told myself I’d d-definitely fix. I-if I could ch-change that, I c-could stop time f-from ending. B-but I couldn’t. Just one change. One. A-and I couldn’t d-do it.”

In spite of her situation, Starlight couldn’t help but feel pity for Serene. She’d never seen a pony so utterly broken before. She looked back on everything that had happened to Equestria over the past seven years and tried to imagine changing any one thing. Her mind said it was easy. But that was what Serene had thought, wasn’t it? But if she’d genuinely tried and failed… It’d be enough to drive anyone to despair. She couldn’t help it. She reached out her hoof to comfort Serene.

Time ending is her fault. Serene may have not been able to convince anyone of the coming disasters, but she made this one. She chose to break those crystals. This is all her fault.

Starlight withdrew her hoof.

Look at her. Even if she’s wrong, she’s still crushed. The only thing that keeps her going is the belief that she can fix the End after it happens. As far as she knows, she’s got the weight of the world on her shoulders. Could you handle it?

Starlight reached out her hoof.

She chose to capture you and Sunburst rather than explain things. She sent assault teams after you. She hasn’t tried to fully explain herself to anyone or present proof. She’s so wrapped up in herself that she shuts out other avenues of possibility.

Starlight withdrew her hoof.

She doesn’t think any of that would work, and she has good reason to. How many others could know the kind of work she’s doing? There aren’t that many other avenues of possibility to look at.

Starlight didn’t reach out.

Instead, she took a deep breath and quietly said, “You can change things.”

Wiping her eyes, Serene sat up straight and muttered, “Haven’t you been listening? You can’t.”

“You can. I’ve seen it.”

Serene blinked several times. For a moment, they seemed to brighten, back to what they’d once been. “H-how?”

Deep breath in. “Several months ago,” said Starlight, “with the assistance of… an external power source, I went back in time to…” She stopped herself and chewed her lip. This was too personal. Why had she taken this route again?

But, somehow, Serene leaped to her rescue. “Do something personal,” Serene said. She waved a hoof. “Details? Don’t matter.”

Starlight nodded. “I… wanted to change something in my favor. And… and when I came back to the present, things were… different. Not in the way I’d wanted, but they were different.”

Serene was staring at her like a kid in a candy store. “You… you swear it? You saw it change?”

Starlight nodded again.

Serene looked distant. Haunted. Like Starlight had explained the meaning of life to her and she was still absorbing it. “Did… did it stick?”

“What?”

And it was gone. Serene’s cynical look was back. “Did it stick? Are we living in the changed timeline now?”

“W-well… no. Princess Twilight changed it back and convinced me to just leave it be.”

After a pause, Serene laughed bitterly. “Shoulda seen that coming. What good is changing the past if the changes don’t stick? You never had a chance. No matter how many changes you make, they’ll all be undone. Always.”

But… Starlight had seen the changes. You couldn’t just sweep all that under the rug. Twilight had undone them, true, but if she hadn’t, if she hadn’t managed to persuade Starlight to stop, they’d still be there. Right? Time didn’t manipulate Twilight’s decisions, she’d made them herself.

“I know that look, and you’re wrong,” hissed Serene. “You’ve seen it yourself. You can’t change time. The End will come, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

Serene sounded so animalistic, Starlight scooched back an inch in her chair. “So what’s your goal?” she asked, desperate to steer away from this topic. “If you can’t stop time from ending, then-”

“We fix it after it happens,” said Serene. “Most ponies, they stop when the End comes. You and me? We don’t, not with our excess chronons. Take the basic idea, automate it, boom: stutterproofed buildings, where everypony inside can keep going where the outside stops. A lifeboat in the storm of time. We get the best scientists we can, we find a way to fix the fracture, we stitch the Neigher-Joy fi-”

“So we both want to fix the fracture!” said Starlight. “But then-”

“-why are you fighting me?”

It was like Serene had ripped the words from out of her mouth. That had been almost the exact same question Starlight was going to ask. After all, if their goals were the same, then fighting was stupid. She’d hoped it’d shock Serene into agreeing with her.

She didn’t like it when it was turned around on her.

“Starlight,” Serene said. Her voice had softened considerably. “I know it’s hard for you to accept this. Maybe the big picture is just too big for you. But for the last time, we can’t stop time from ending. You can’t change the past, and for me, it is the past. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fix it later. The only difference between you and me? I’m not chasing a pipedream. So, please. Work with me. Please.”

Starlight stared at a spot on the table. Maybe it’d be easier to just give in. Serene knew what she was talking about, right? After all, she’d been trying to change the past for years; Starlight herself had only done it twice. But those were both failures. If she agreed, she wouldn’t have to run anymore. If nothing else, maybe she could get Twilight to persuade Serene otherwise once she got back from Griffonstone.

But her own experiences with change kept nagging at her. If she hadn’t seen it herself, she’d’ve already agreed to Serene’s pleas. But she had, so she didn’t.

Serene was still talking. “If we’re going to find a way to fix the fracture, we need smart ponies. I’m already working on persuading the scientists, but you shouldn’t discount yourself just because you’re not a chronodynamicist. You’re smart. You’re the only other chronon-active pony we’ve got. You’d be a great asset to us. And you’d be helping to save the world.” Serene grinned, and the chill that’d been there for so long was gone. “You wanna help save the world, don’tcha?”

Starlight drew in a breath and said quietly, “I… I need some time to think it over.”

“How long? A few days?”

“S-something like that,” said Starlight.

“Try to make it quick,” said Serene, “but take your time. I’ll be ready for your answer at any point.” She banged a hoof on the table twice; the door opened and two guards walked into the room. Starlight slowly stood up and walked between them, ready to be escorted back to her cell.

“Starry?”

Starlight halted and turned around.

“If you say no,” Serene said, her voice hard, “do not oppose us. You will do nothing but slow our own solution to the fracture. I won’t like it, but if you keep it up, I will make sure you stop.” Her voice dropped a notch. “By any means necessary.”

Starlight twitched. There was something in Serene’s voice that said she wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. And after getting attacked at Streamhaven University, it was even harder to doubt. “Okay,” she said quietly. She turned forward and left the room, her guards following.

11 - I'll Come Back for You

Monarch HQ, October 10
11:32 AM — 15 hours after the Fracture in Time

Back in the medical ward, Starlight paced back and forth. Sunburst was talking to Serene, and she was restless.

Everything — everything that had happened so far was because Serene had gone back in time from the End of Time. Including Serene going to the End of Time. It was… confusing. And, Starlight realized, kind of disturbing. It implied there was only one possible option for anything. Only one timeline. No free will. If the past was set, that meant the future was set, because the future was the past of the future plus one second.

Suddenly Serene’s disconnected disposition made a lot more sense. You couldn’t fight the current, so why bother?

But Starlight pushed that thought to the back of her head. She had to think about now. And now… she didn’t have a whole lot of options. She was effectively a prisoner here; she didn’t know how long they were going to keep her in the medical ward. She’d tried teleporting — just a quick blip to the other side of the room — but no dice. The room was teleport-proofed, and probably the whole building, too.

Serene had said she’d let Starlight choose. But Starlight suspected she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Whenever Starlight turned down the offer, Serene would probably keep squeezing until she caved. Which, honestly, wasn’t that bad of an option, but it meant just accepting the End of Time was coming and doing nothing to stop it. The idea of letting such a huge disaster happen left Starlight with a bad taste in her mouth.

She could wait for Twilight to get back and come looking for her. But that, too, meant giving up. Starlight was studying under the Princess of Friendship, surely she could persuade Serene, right? It was hard to say; she was better about it now than she had been a few months ago, but Starlight wasn’t much of a ponies pony. She might bet a few bits on it, but not a lot.

Her train of thought was interrupted by Sunburst being pushed back into the room. He stumbled a little on his bad leg, then hobbled back to the bed. He flopped down and kept his leg out straight, but he looked more thoughtful than in pain.

“I’m guessing she said the same things to you as she did to me, right?” asked Starlight. “Can’t change the past, something about a filly, End of Time is coming, join her?”

Sunburst cocked his head for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, that,” he said, “that sounds about right.” He licked his lips. “Heck of a thing, ain’t it? I mean…”

“Yeah,” Starlight said. She went back to pacing. “What do you think?”

“I, I don’t know, to be honest,” said Sunburst. “I tried to convince her that, that with a bit of work, we could fix the Fracture now, but…” He sighed. “It’s, it’s just, I don’t see the point in waiting until after it passes to try. Yeah, she, she said it was her past, but…” He made a small noise of frustration.

“And she’s really got us in a bind, hasn’t she? Ten to one says she’ll keep us here until we agree.” Although, if she did, how would Twilight react?

Sunburst coughed. “The Serere I knew wouldn’t do that, but, but, well… Yeah.” He swallowed.

“Yeah.” As she kept pacing, Starlight glared on the ground. If she weren’t being held hostage, she might be able to think better, more fairly. Right now, without hearing any sob stories, she wanted to oppose Serene simply on principle, even though she knew Serene was probably right.

“You alright?” asked Sunburst.

“Not really.” Starlight snorted and flicked her tail. “I don’t like being cooped up.”

“Probably my fault,” whispered Sunburst. He looked away from Starlight and folded his ears back. “It’s, if I hadn’t, we-”

“It’s not your fault,” Starlight said quickly. “You had no way of knowing that soldier was there. I mean, yeah, it would’ve been a bit easier if you’d had four good legs, and we might’ve gotten away, but that’s past, and we’ll never…” An idea popped into Starlight’s head and her voice trailed off.

“If…?” Sunburst asked.

A grin crept its way onto Starlight’s face. “I know how to safely get us out of here,” she whispered.

“Um, Serene’s going to, she’s gonna have-”

“Not that. We’ll-” Starlight glanced at the door, then sat on the bed next to Sunburst and dropped her voice down to a whisper. “We’ll never be captured in the first place. Star Swirl’s time travel spell.”

Sunburst started blinking a lot. “Starlight-”

“It’s not teleportation, and I’m not sure it’s blockable.”

“Starlight-”

“I’ve already seen it change things, I know it can change things-”

“Starlight-”

“-so I’ll just go back and take out that stallion-”

“Starlight!-”

“-before he can shoot you. From there, it’ll be-”

“Starlight!” hissed Sunburst. “That’s, that’s absurd. Do you really think-”

“Yes, I think,” Starlight hissed back. “What’s the big deal?”

“Well, it’s…” Sunburst thumped his head a few times. “You already tried to change the past, and it, it didn’t work. So…”

“I don’t think Star Swirl’s spell and your machine work by the same rules. I might not’ve changed things now, but when I went back all that while ago, I did change things. They didn’t stick, but it’s gotta mean something that I could change the past then.”

“Well, that’s, you’ve got a point there, but, uh…” Sunburst pushed his glasses up his muzzle and laughed nervously. “The, uh, the last time you did that, you kinda, uh, destroyed Equestria. Like, several times.”

Starlight snorted. “That was almost two decades of changes, Sunburst. This is barely half a day, if that. Besides, time itself is going to end eventually. That’s going to take the whole universe down with it, and that’s a bit of a difference, isn’t it?”

“I, I guess.”

Her voice softening a bit, Starlight said, “Sunburst. It’ll be okay. And if Serene’s trying to keep us alive, then she’s got to be careful, and, well, we can’t be much worse off than we are already, right? Besides, if it doesn’t work, I’ll be back here immediately when the spell runs out.”

Sunburst looked around the room and coughed. “I, I guess. But if you’re sure about doing this, then I, I don’t think I can come with you. It’s…” He hefted his bandaged leg and grinned sheepishly.

“No, no,” Starlight said quickly, “that’s fine, but…” She swallowed, then reached out and hugged him. “This might be the last time you talk with me,” she said quietly, squeezing. “Rewriting history and all.”

Sunburst squeezed back. “It’s not like the other me will miss much, is it?” he asked.

“No.”

They sat like that for a few more moments, holding each other, then released and drew back. “Be safe, okay?” said Sunburst.

“I will.” Starlight’s horn lit up as she concentrated on the space and time she wanted to be, then there was a flash of light and she was gone.

Everfree Forest, October 9
11:25 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time

The spell vomited Starlight up in the Everfree. The time machine room in the Doctor’s lab, to be precise, just after she and the Doctor had left through the machine. Serene was nowhere to be seen.

Starlight blinked a little, trying to help her eyes adjust to the dark. It just barely worked; she decided to chance it and start moving. She had to go sometime, right?

She moved slowly, trying to recall where she and Sunburst had headed. She didn’t light her horn up, not wanting to risk exposing herself to Monarch soldiers. There was at least one of them in here, after all. Maybe she’d hear them.

“-eally don’t think we should split up.”

Yeah, she’d hear them.

“Oh, come on. They’re civvies. How bad could they be?”

The soldiers, wherever they were, were talking quietly. Just loud enough for Starlight to overhear them, just quiet enough to make it hard to tell where the sound was coming from. But one of them would be the one who snuck up on her and Sunburst. Hopefully, she’d find whoever it was before they found her. Or the other her.

“One of them’s chronon-active, and they both escaped Streamhaven wi-”

“Oh, come on. They got out during a stutter. That’s completely out of our control. An army couldn’t’ve kept them in then.”

The second one had a point, Starlight thought, but splitting up was pretty much always a bad idea. The whole reason you had a partner in situations like this was so they could cover your back (or you cover theirs).

“And Serene s-”

“Look, we’ll cover more ground this way. You want to get this over with or not?”

“…Yeah.”

“So you go that way, I’ll go this way, and we’ll get it all done in half the time.”

“If this goes wrong, I’m blaming you.”

“And if they get away because you’re standing here arguing with me, I’m blaming you.”

With that, Starlight heard the faint clip-clopping of hooves. Two sets, one quickly fading away, the other growing louder. The other was probably the one who snuck up on her. Starlight ducked into a side room as the pony walked past. He wasn’t looking around very intently, just skimming the hallway kind of at random. Soon, he’d past her room without giving it a second glance.

Then she heard him whisper, “There you are.”

Taking a risk, Starlight poked her head out of the room. The soldier was almost around a corner, looking down another hallway. She silenced her hoofsteps with a spell and scurried behind him. She saw herself looking out a door, with Sunburst behind her on his tiptoes. The soldier was drawing a bead on Sunburst.

This was it. This was what she’d come back for. But for a second, Starlight froze. Paradoxes didn’t exist. They couldn’t. That was what made them paradoxes. So what if-

The “save Sunburst” part of her brain dropkicked the “avoid paradoxes” part over the horizon. Right before he loosed the bolt, Starlight hit the trooper with a crystal prison spell. She tensed up, waiting for it to miss. Nope. Magic crystallized around the trooper, trapping him in place.

That had not happened before. Time was changed. Starlight tensed again, waiting for a paradox to sweep reality and do timey-wimey things.

Nothing happened.

Well, technically something did happen, but it was the perfectly mundane something of Sunburst hearing the sound and spinning around. When he saw the Starlight standing in the hall, his jaw dropped and he looked over his shoulder, at the Starlight still looking out the door (past Starlight). He swallowed and tapped her on the shoulder. “Um, uh, Starlight?” he whispered.

“What?” past Starlight asked. “I think we’re good out there-” She turned around to talk to Sunburst. “-is something wrooooooo…” She saw Starlight and started blinking a lot.

For the first time, Starlight wondered just what would happen when the time spell ended. Would she just vanish, overwritten by her alternate-present self? Would her alternate-present self vanish, overwritten by her current self? Would two versions of her exist at the same time? Would she go back to her ow- Wait, that last one was actually impossible; she’d gone to the changed timeline that one time.

Whatever. For now, she just had to keep past herself and past Sunburst from running into Monarch. She didn’t know how long she had, so she talked quickly. “Listen,” she said, “there’s Monarch soldiers out there with night-vision goggles. If you go out that door and straight to Ponyville, you’ll run into them.”

Past Starlight opened her mouth, then blinked and rubbed her head. “But if we never meet them,” she muttered, “I only know that because you told me, but I’m you, so I only know that because I told me, and-”

Starlight didn’t feel the need to correct past Starlight. She did, however, feel the need to tell them to move it. “You’ll work it out later, trust me,” she said. “Just get going. Take another route to Ponyville, and you’ll be fine.” She realized, with some dismay, that they wouldn’t necessarily be fine. Things could easily go very, very wrong.

“Um, uh, listen,” Sunburst said to past Starlight, “she’s, she’s right.” He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “We, uh, we can’t stay here. I say we go out that, out that door, around to the other side of the building, and-”

“Make it up as you go,” hissed Starlight. “Just move. More soldiers are coming.”

“Hem. Right. Sorry.” Sunburst nudged past Starlight. “Come on.” He whisked out the door.

Right before she left, past Starlight turned to Starlight. “I know I don’t need to say this,” she said quickly, “but thanks.” And then she was gone.

Before she could do anything else, Starlight began to feel a slight pressure as the time spell began running down. As static began to collect on her fur, she considered chasing after them. But really, what was the point? They were away, she’d be away when she got back. She and Sunburst were safe, and all they had to do was get to the Doctor. It couldn’t be that hard, right?

The air started buzzing.

Right?

The time spell collapsed and Starlight was gone.

12 - Ouroboros Vomit

Everfree Forest, October 9
11:46 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time

Starlight tripped. Which was quite impressive, considering she was traveling through a void where time and space were essentially meaningless.

“Starlight!” Sunburst hissed. “Come on!” Which was also quite impressive, considering he wasn’t traveling through said void.

As she lay there on the ground (which was equally impressive), the idea that something wasn’t right ran through Starlight’s head. Sho-

“Come on!” Sunburst lightly kicked her in the head. “What’s with you?”

Starlight slowly got to her feet. She wasn’t back in the medical ward or in whatever not-place she travelled through when travelling through time. She was in the Everfree, right next to the Doctor’s lab, and from the sounds of things, it was right after she’d seen herself come back and-

Wait. Seen herself come back? She’d been the one who came back.

Sunburst smacked her again. “Starlight, you, you’re looking weird all of a sudden. We, we’ve gotta move.” He flicked his tail and trotted off, sticking to the wall of the building.

Starlight followed (vaguely noting that they were traveling much faster than they had when Sunburst’s leg was busted), but her mind was a million miles away. She thought back, combing through her memories. Something was wrong. How had she gotten here? A few seconds ago, she’d started walking. Okay. Before that, she’d tripped. Okay. Before that, her future self had-

No. That was wrong. She’d been the one to come back, not the one here, right? She thought back further. Yes, she remembered being in the medical ward with Sunburst, talking about going back. She thought forward a bit. She’d gone back in time. Okay. She’d stopped that soldier. Okay. She’d told herself and Sunburst to avoid Monarch. Okay. The time travel spell had ended. Okay. She’d tripped. Okay.

No, wait, not okay. She distinctly remembered her being here from two perspectives. She thought back again, focusing on the specific memories, and-

She had two different sets of memories from the last minute. One from the Starlight who hadn’t time travelled, and one from the one who had. That was weird enough, but the really weird thing was that they were both perfectly clear. One wasn’t trying to “overtake” or “crowd out” the other. It was like she both simultaneously.

Somehow, this was making her head hurt more than any other time travel shenanigans.

After a few moments of trotting through the forest, Sunburst looked back over his shoulder and frowned. “Something’s up,” he said. “What is it?”

Starlight opened her mouth to tell Sunburst. No, wait, he’d think she was being weird. She closed it. No, wait, he deserved to know. She opened it. No, wait, he’d th- Starlight started talking before her brain caught up with her mouth. “Sunburst, I… I just went back in time and saved us.”

“And… and what’s the problem with that? You’ve already traveled through time with magic.”

“No, I mean I went back.”

Sunburst cocked his head. “Yyyyyeah, that’s what I said.”

“No! It’s…” Starlight kneaded her forehead. “This version of me went back in time. I remember it happening from the perspective of the one going back.”

“Ooooooooh.” Then Sunburst blinked and frowned. “Wait, what? But-”

“I know. And… this isn’t the way it happened the first time.”

Sunburst blinked again and stumbled on a log. “Uh… what? Starlight, y-”

“Last time,” said Starlight, “I never came back. That soldier shot you in the leg. We got captured by Serene — she’s the founder of Monarch — a-”

“Serene’s the FOUNDER of Monarch?”

Starlight sighed. “Let me start at the beginning.”

As the two of them walked through the Everfree, Starlight told Sunburst everything. Their capture by Monarch. Their imprisonment in the Monarch building. Serene’s involvement in everything. Her decision to go back. Her arrival at now.

“…and I thought the time spell would just take me back to when I left in the changed future,” she finished, “not leave me… here.”

“Huh.” Sunburst cocked his head and flicked his ears. “That’s, that’s rea-”

Mid-sentence, a thought hit Starlight like a ton of bricks and her blood ran cold. “What happened to the future?” she whispered. “My old present? Did I just kill them all?”

“Well, no, you,” said Sunburst, “they don’t exist yet. The future hasn’t happened, so-”

“We’re in the middle of a fiasco involving time travel, and you’re saying the future hasn’t happened yet?”

“Well, okay,” said Sunburst, pushing up his glasses, “it, it’s more complicated than just plain death. Those ponies, they, they will exist eventually, just, you know, different versions of them.”

“But what about the ones I talked to? Those versions? What about the me in the past I… I replaced or merged with or whatever?”

Sunburst sighed. “Starlight. You changed the timeline. Yes, versions of, of ponies are gone. But those particular ponies are still alive, just, just not those specific iterations. You can’t do anything about it. So stop worrying. Please. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.”

Starlight flicked her ears and stared at the ground. Easy for him to say. He hadn’t been there. He hadn’t talked to somepony who knew things from a timeline that didn’t exist anymore. If he’d seen the timeline, he’d see things differently, Starlight was certain. It was kind of hard to judge him, though; this was an incredibly abstract concept. Honestly, she was having trouble believing it herself, and she had seen it.

“Oh, and the term’s quantum suicide.”

Starlight looked up. “What?”

“When the effects of, of quantum theory, particularly within the, uh, the many-worlds interpretation, cause an alternate version of yourself to die while you survive, it’s, it’s called quantum suicide. And you, your continued survival is quantum immortality.”

Starlight blinked. “Scientists already have a term for that? Just wh-”

Sunburst laughed nervously and pushed his glasses up. “W-well, not in the way you’re thinking. See, it’s, it’s from a thought experiment, and- You’ve heard of Haflinger’s Cat, right? Cat’s both alive and dead until you open the box?”

“Yeah?”

“Okay, so there’s a fifty percent chance the cat’s alive once you open the box. Now do it again with the same cat. The probability that the cat will survive both is only twenty-five percent, because they’re independent events, and the odds of both is fifty percent, and when you mul-”

“Sunburst. I don’t need an education in probability theory.”

“Hem. Right. Now, the probability that the cat keeps surviving keeps, it keeps dropping. Specifically, the probability of the cat surviving n boxes is one over two to the nth power, be-”

“Sunburst!” yelled Starlight.

“Sorry, sorry. Now, that’s true for a single universe.” Sunburst suddenly broke out in a massive grin. “BUUUUUUUUUUT…”

He paused for effect. Starlight let him have it. Sunburst sometimes liked to go dramatic with his explanations.

“But if you assume the many-worlds interpretation is correct,” said Sunburst, not dropping his grin, “then there absolutely must be a universe out there where the cat survives every single box it’s put into, because there is always a chance, no matter how slim, of the cat surviving.” He wiggled a hoof at Starlight. “That cat that always survives? It has quantum immortality. And when one of its other versions dies, it undergoes quantum suicide.”

“So… so when the time spell collapsed, and I stayed here…” Starlight stared at where she’d come out. “Did I commit quantum suicide?”

“Well, no. Not exactly. It’s, I don’t think so. You can remember you saving me from a perspective that isn’t you saving me, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you might be in, uh, be in a quantum superposition of the two different timelines. I don’t know, we’ll have to get the Doctor’s opinion.”

“A quantum what?”

Sunburst groaned. “Sun and stars, I never thought I’d miss undergrads. Sorry, it’s, I forget you don’t know these things. Basically, you, you’re both the come-from-future Starlight and already-in-present Starlight at the same time.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Because of quantum.”

Starlight raised an eyebrow.

“Quantum physics is weird, Starlight,” said Sunburst defensively. “It’s hard to explain this if, if you’ve never taken a single course on it. Trust me, when you study it, it, it all makes sense. Usually.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Starlight and Sunburst walked through the forest for a few more moments before she asked, “So… every time a crossbow bolt missed my head by a millimeter… did some other version of me die?”

“Oh, sure,” Sunburst said with far too much nonchalance. “If there was a, a chance of you dying, then yeah, definitely. In the many-worlds interpretation, anyway.”

Starlight’s voice was very quiet as she said, “…Oh.” All of a sudden, luck looked like some kind of sick joke. She might’ve lived, but only because nine other versions of herself died in alternate timelines. Super. Just plain super.

Sunburst picked up on it. “Don’t, don’t worry about it, Starlight,” he said. “It, that sort of thing happens all the time.”

The bottom dropped out of Starlight’s stomach. “What?”

“Well, it has to,” Sunburst replied, still sounding way too calm. “I mean, if, if there’s a chance, no matter how tiny, that, that a meteor will fall from the sky and, and squish us flat-” (Starlight looked up purely on reflex and tensed, ready to cover her head.) “-then, in some timeline, it, it will.”

“So,” Starlight said slowly, “you’re saying that, that no matter what I do, some alternate-timeline me is going to die?”

“Yeah.” Sunburst looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

“…No, Sunburst, somehow, the fact that my mere continued existence may be constantly killing off versions of myself in alternate universes is NOT making things any better.”

Sunburst just shrugged. “Then go with the Clopenhagen interpretation. No alternate universes. Or at least, at least not from quantum physics. Clean slate and no quantum suicides.”

Starlight snorted. She still didn’t like the idea of it.

The two of them continued through the forest for a little while longer before Sunburst coughed and said, “S-so, um, now what? It, it sounds like we weren’t in that bad of a position back there.”

“Not really,” admitted Starlight, “but now we’ve got leverage. If we get to the Doctor, maybe we can make a plan of some kind and show that plan to Serene. Then once she knows we’ll have something that can work, she’ll probably let us go and use the thing when the time comes.”

“There, there’s more ‘maybes’ and ‘probablies’ in there then I’m comfortable with.”

“At the very least, we’re not prisoners.”

Sunburst nodded. “True.”

But really, Starlight was running in the dark. Metaphorically and literally. She’d only come back because she didn’t like being pinched, but now that she wasn’t being pinched, she didn’t have any idea of what to do. Only a vague hope that Sunburst and the Doctor could work together and find something. Although, if they contacted Serene of their own free will, then maybe…

Sunburst spoke up again. “You think the Doctor’s got a way to fix things?”

“Probably. He was talking about giving the Neigher-Joy field with lots of chronons, and wasn’t that what you were suggesting? So I figure that if two smart ponies each come up with the same idea on their own, they’ve gotta be on the right path.”

“It’s, it’s not like we’ll just have a plan the moment we get there.”

“Of course not. But it’s on the way, right? Yeah, I know it’s only like one percent, but it’s one percent further than we were before. Besi-”

There was no warning. No pressure, no headaches, nothing. In a rush of wind, Serene suddenly appeared out of thin air in front of them. She was breathing heavily and her clothes were riddled with tiny tears, as if she’d been galloping heavily through the forest for hours. Dirt stained her all over, and she was staring at Starlight and Sunburst with something resembling both rage and fear. “What. Did. You. Do?” she hissed.

Starlight was suddenly aware of how loudly she and Sunburst had been talking.

13 - Unto the Breach

Everfree Forest, October 9
11:58 PM — 3 hours after the Fracture in Time

“You did something,” Serene said flatly. “What?”

Starlight took a step back. “I-I don’t know wh-”

“Yeah, you do,” growled Serene. “I don’t know how, but-” She rubbed her head. “I’m seeing things. I’m remembering things that never happened. I… I remember capturing you, plain as day. You-” She pointed at Sunburst, who twitched and backed up. “-had an arrow sticking out of you leg. But…” She shook her head and glared at Starlight. “Something happened. Right now, everything that’s happening is happening because of you or me. It wasn’t me. So it was you. I’ve been dilating time for hours to search this blasted forest and find you. Because I need to know: What. Did. You. Do?”

Starlight’s mind raced for half a moment before she realized nothing she could come up with would be convincing. Of course, knowing Serene, the truth probably wouldn’t be convincing either. “I went back in time and changed the past.”

Serene stared at her for a moment before getting overtaken by the shakes. It looked like she was laughing silently. “No,” she said softly, “no, no, no. That’s impossible, you ca-”

“You told me this already,” said Starlight. “You told me about the filly.”

Serene froze. Her jaw dropped a little. She blinked. Twice. Thrice. Then she whispered, “The filly?”

Starlight nodded. “With the carriage. Hearth’s Warming.”

Serene blinked again. Her eyes were distant, as if her mind was a million miles away. “I…” she muttered. “I never… I’d know, I…” Her eyes narrowed. “How?” she asked. “How’d you do it?”

“Star Swirl’s time travel spell. I used it, I came back to a point where I hadn’t been before, kept you from capturing us. Then it ran out, and I… I sorta…”

“She’s both future Starlight,” said Sunburst, “and present Starlight at the same time. A living quantum superposition. Maybe. I think. It’s, I don’t know.”

Serene blinked yet again, then started pacing. “How?” she growled. “How did I miss this? This shouldn’t be possible.”

“I don’t know either,” said Starlight. And if she was being honest with herself, if she hadn’t seen herself change time all those moons ago, she probably wouldn’t have tried it. But Serene didn’t need to know that. “Maybe… maybe it’s because the method of time travel is different?”

“That shouldn’t have mattered,” said Serene, “because the Neigher-Joy field can’t interfere with itself, an-”

“THAT’S IT!”

Starlight and Serene looked at Sunburst. He had the largest grin possible painted on his face and he looked like he was about to explode.

“What’s it, Sunny?” asked Serene quietly. “Small words, remember.”

“Okay, okay,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up, “it’s, this is, this is good. Real good.” He clapped his front hooves together. “Why can’t time paradoxes happen?”

Serene rolled her eyes. “Because the Neigher-Joy field can’t interfere with itself. Like I’ve been saying.”

“Right, right. Now, what’s special about, about you and Starlight?”

“We got dosed with chronon radiation.”

“Which meeeeaaaans…”

Serene scowled and cocked her head. “Sunny, I’m in no mood for this. Spit it out.”

“Sorry,” Sunburst said quickly, taking a step back. “It’s just, I thought, sorry.” He swallowed. “Which means that you and Starlight aren’t in the Neigher-Joy field.” He pointed at Starlight. “When she went back in time just now, she was only using her own magic, so the Neigher-Joy field had nothing to do with her return. She could, she could do whatever she wanted without having to worry about paradoxes because the, uh, the Neigher-Joy field wasn’t interfering with itself. She couldn’t change things earlier, at, at the core, you couldn’t change things, because your going back then was, it was dependent on the time machine core, which was in the Neigher-Joy field. But since Starlight’s magic, it comes from her, and she’s not in the, in the Neigher-Joy field, so it…”

Starlight got the gist and began tuning Sunburst out. That… that actually made sense. A lot of it. She and Serene were the only chronon-active ponies in the world, after all, and Serene wasn’t a unicorn. She was the only pony in the world in a position to change the timeline, and this was the first time she’d thought about it. Serene probably would’ve ignored magical versions of time travel because of her experience studying it in Project Promenade, so the idea never would’ve come up.

Starlight examined Serene. She looked some combination of confused and thoughtful. Like she’d realized the implications of everything and was following them to a conclusion. Starlight wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. They were technically on the same side — they both wanted to close the Fracture — but their methods couldn’t be more opposed to each other.

Sunburst was still talking. “-and Star Swirl’s spell works by temporarily displacing you in the Neigher-Joy field, but, but you come back because your point of origin, it, it yanks you back when the magic runs out. But Starlight changed time, so she didn’t have a point of origin, not anymore, so she decohered when the magic ran out instead of going back, and, and due to what I think are quantum effects similar to entanglement, she merged with the version from the changed timeline, and-”

Serene suddenly coughed. “Starlight… why’d you come here?”

“Huh?” asked Starlight. “Well, I, I wanted to make sure Sunburst and I were safe, so-”

“That’s not what I meant. You came back certain you could change things,” whispered Serene, “and you DIDN’T TRY TO FIX THE FRACTURE THAT CAUSED THIS MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE?” She slapped Starlight in the face, too fast for her to dodge. “Idiot,” she growled.

“Sorry!” yelped Starlight, taking a step back. “I wasn’t thinking! I just-”

“You weren’t thinking.” Serene rolled her eyes. “Well, of course you weren’t, why should you start then?”

Starlight switched gears, folded her ears back, and took a step forward. “Look,” she snapped, “I’d already tried that and it didn’t work.”

“Yeah, and because Star Swirl’s spell is one-time use, you just ruined our best chance at fixing this mess. Way to go, Starry! You real-”

“Um…” Sunburst coughed. “Actually, I think…” He looked away. “It, it’s stupid,” he muttered, “but…”

“Sunburst,” Starlight began.

Sunburst started talking again before she could say anything more. “Technically, yes. Starlight, she has used Star Swirl’s spell. But if she’s in a, a quantum superposition of a version of herself that hasn’t, she also hasn’t used the spell at the same time. She… Hypothetically, she, she might be able to use it again. Maybe. Possibly. I don’t know.” He grinned halfheartedly and looked away again.

Starlight and Serene stared at Sunburst. Starlight blinked. “What?”

“Gah!” Sunburst threw up his hooves. “Starlight. Let’s just assume you’re in a quantum superposition. You are two versions of yourself at the same time. You used the time travel spell, yes. But that’s just one version. The other version didn’t. At the same time, you did not use the time travel spell. You both did and didn’t. But the didn’t means you still can. In short: you can use the spell again.” He dropped to his rump and crossed his forelegs, scowling at the two of them. “That make sense?”

Starlight had barely given it any thought (except that, yes, that explanation did make sense) when Serene whipped her head towards her. “Do it.”

“W-what?”

“Do it!” yelled Serene. “Take us back! We have a one-in-a-million chance to fix the Fracture before it happens, and you’re just standing around with that moronic look on your face!”

“Serene, don’t you think-”

“I’ve been thinking for seven years, Starry! Seven years, I’ve been thinking about this! The one thing that always comes up is that if I could stop the Fracture from starting, I would!”

“Well, it’s- I don’t know-”

“You’ve already tried it! It didn’t work then because things were different then! Please! I just want to end this stupid thing and the one pony who can do anything about it is sitting there hemming and hawing and I want to-” Serene cut herself short and glared fiercely at Starlight. “You don’t want to know.”

“She, she’s got a point,” mumbled Sunburst. “There’s really no reason to not do it now. Might as well just, just get it over with, you know?”

Starlight didn’t know. Everything was happening too fast, and she wanted some time to just think. But Serene was glaring at her, nostrils flared, with an “I don’t want to wait a single second longer” face. Trying to stall for a little, Starlight grabbed at the last straw. “But what if we try to change things and it doesn’t work? I mean-”

“We’ll still have changed the, changed the past,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up his muzzle, “so you’ll still decohere, and you’ll still be in a superposition with a version of yourself who hasn’t, hasn’t used the spell, so we’ll just go back a little further and try again.”

And, of course, there was an incredibly simple reason why that wouldn’t work. But Starlight had suspected there would be, and she’d mostly used the time to assemble her thoughts on going back.

Yeah. Might as well do it now. She’d heard the idea, she suspected it would work, and there was pretty much no way she was not going to do it eventually. Sunburst’s explanation had even said she could try again if she failed. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it. Right now. Failsafe room at the time of the Fracture. We’ll talk you out of breaking the machine.”

Serene grinned a devil-may-care grin, and for an instant, Starlight was reminded of the original Serene. “Alright,” she said. “You coming with us, Sunny?”

“Well, it’s, I might as well,” said Sunburst, batting at his ear. “It, it’ll help your past self to not do things if, if I’m there, too, probably.”

“Nice. Let’s go. Hooves crossed, amIright?”

She was definitely right. Starlight called on her magic again, trying to bring forth the spell. For a single second, she was terrified it wouldn’t work, that Sunburst had been wrong.

Then the spell clicked and they were gone.

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:12 PM — 5 minutes until the Fracture in Time

“-while ‘time apocalypse’,” said the Doctor, “is a bit vague as to the… the, um…”

The spell deposited Starlight, Serene, and Sunburst right in the middle of the failsafe room. Starlight remembered the Doctor’s little speech; this was right before Serene — Past Serene — entered the failsafe room and broke the time machine. As the trio gathered themselves up, they stared at Past Starlight and the Doctor, who stared back.

Nopony said anything for a moment. Then the Doctor coughed and muttered, “This is a new one.”

Serene smiled, one of the more genuine smiles Starlight had seen on her since the whole thing started. “Hi there! We’re gonna save the world.”

“That’s, um, that’s what we’re doing,” said Past Starlight.

“It won’t work,” Serene said, waving a hoof. “You’re doing it wrong.”

Past Starlight’s eyes narrowed. “And just how are-”

The door opened, and in walked Past Serene and the Monarch soldier. Past Serene actually tripped when she saw who was in the room. She looked between everypony, slightly agape. “Just what in-”

“Listen,” Serene said calmly, stepping forward, “you don’t want to do this.”

Past Serene blinked. “But… but this…” She looked around the room. “This is…”

“I’m from the future.” Serene grinned. “You don’t want to do this. It’ll keep the Fracture from happening.”

“Even-”

“Yes, even in spite of everything you’ve done and seen.”

“There’s a variable that, that you didn’t account for,” said Sunburst. “Magical time travel and mechanical time travel, they, they work differently.”

“But…” Past Serene chewed her lip and looked back and forth between Serene and Sunburst. “You’re sure?”

Serene froze. Starlight could imagine what was going on in her head: technically, she wasn’t sure. She was just going on with a wing and a prayer. If she was wrong, Past Serene would… Starlight wasn’t sure what she would do, but it couldn’t be anything good. Serene was staking an awful lot on things going right if she said, “Yes.”

She still said, “Yes.”

Past Serene opened her mouth. Closed it. The Monarch soldier next to her shuffled his hooves. Past Starlight looked at Starlight in confusion. Starlight just shrugged and muttered to her, “It’ll all make sense eventually.” She didn’t add, Hopefully.

“Positive?” asked Past Serene.

A dim light, slowly glowing brighter, began shining around Starlight, Serene, and Sunburst. The spell was nearing its end.

“Of course,” said Serene.

“Trust us,” piped up Sunburst. “We’re from the future.”

“She already said that.” Still staring at the rack, Past Serene raised her hoof, then lowered it. Scowling, she said, “All right. But you better be right about this.”

“Of course I’m right,” said Serene as the light built up. “I’m the same as you, but smarter.”

The time spell collapsed.

14 - What Goes Around

Streamhaven, October 9
8:16 PM

“Here go-” Serene stopped walking and blinked.

Her head still throbbing, Starlight looked around in a panic. For a second, she didn’t know where she was or what was going on. She was in a large, circular room, sterile white from-

Wait. This… this was the original Streamhaven time machine. From the looks of things, Serene hadn’t yet gone into the time machine to go forward, although she had gone two minutes into the past. Okay. So far, so good.

But… but they’d been in the down in the failsafe racks. Her future self, anyway. Her other future self. Shouldn’t she be in there when she superposed or whatever? Why was she in this version of herself and not her future self? That one was the closest. Both spatially and chronologically. Unless her future self wasn’t actually down there. But why wouldn’t she be down there? That would imp-

The answer hit her like a ton of bricks. She wasn’t down in the failsafe racks. Which meant she hadn’t traveled back. Which meant the Fracture never happened.

Maybe.

With everypony’s focus on Serene, Starlight picked Sunburst out of the crowd. He found her, and they just stared at each other, dumbstruck. Then, as if they were thinking the same thing, they simultaneously turned to look at Serene.

She was looking back and forth between, and the best word Starlight could come up with was “haunted”. Her eyes were distant and her entire body was subtly tense. It almost looked like she’d gone into shock.

“Ma’am?” asked one of the scientists. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Serene said, a touch too quickly. “I just… really realized what a Big Deal this is. I mean, really realized, to the point of, wow, time travel is actually a thing and I’m doing it and I already did it and I mean holy crap.” She grinned. Starlight suspected it was forced, but she couldn’t tell. “Sorry.” She turned back to the airlock. “Welp. Here goes nothing. Again.” She stepped into the airlock. The door closed behind her. She took a few steps down the corridor.

Nothing else happened.

She took a few more steps.

Nothing else happened.

Serene vanished down the corridor.

Nothing else happened.

Starlight and Sunburst exchanged glances. The time machine had first broken right after Serene had entered the corridor. Right now, it hadn’t. Good sign? Bad sign? Starlight was leaning towards “good”, but she wasn’t going to make any assumptions until Serene came back out. It had been five minutes, right? She started counting under her breath. One one-thousand, two one-thousand…

At around six hundred seventeen one-thousand, the airlock door hissed open and Serene stepped out, looking none the worse for wear. Maybe slightly rattled, but only because Starlight was looking for it. She looked at Sunburst and quirked a quick half-smile. “Guess who’s back?” she said.

The cheering that came from the scientists wasn’t quite as ballistic as it had been when Serene had come from two minutes in the future, but it was still loud. Serene was waving her hooves, pointing at a watch on her fetlock and a nearby clock, but nopony was paying any attention to her.

Starlight slipped out of the crowd and made her way to Sunburst. “Are we… are we clear?” she whispered to him.

“I, I think so,” said Sunburst, pushing his glasses up. “If, if something were going to happen, it, it would’ve happened by now. I think.”

Starlight chewed her lip. Thinking it was okay was a bit more of a chance than she wanted to take, but for now, it was all they had.

“All right, all right!” Serene yelled, waving her hooves. “Settle down!” Once she had a semblance of silence, she clapped her hooves together and rubbed them. “So. It works. Awesome, right?” (A restrained cheer.) “But we gotta get to data processing, and this baby draws a lotta power, so let’s wrap up here quickly and get it all shut down.” She sidled over to Sunburst and began pulling him towards the exit. “Hate to leave you, but Sunny and I need a beer to celebrate. You guys want one once you’re done, shoot me the receipt, and I’ll see how I can justify it as a business expense.”

A groan came from the scientists, but they started doing what Starlight assumed was the shutdown procedure. Starlight trotted up to the exit and Sunburst wiggled out of Serene’s grip. She wasn’t restraining him, just pulling him away from the crowd. “Um, Serene, no, no offense, but… why, why do you think we need to head to the bar right now? I’m just fine. It’s, I don’t think that… that anything’s going to, y’know, happen.”

For a moment, Serene suddenly switched back to Monarch Serene. The one who’d devoted everything to saving the world. The one who wouldn’t let anything stand in her way. “Maybe,” she said quietly, steel in her voice. “Still, it’s all very, very overwhelming, and we need a beer, don’t we, Sunny?” She grinned hollowly.

Sunburst gulped and took a step back. “Um, uh, o-okay, y-yeah.”

“You too, Starry.”

Starlight’s opinion was pretty much the opposite of Sunburst’s. “Yeah. You know what? A beer sounds really good right now.”

Streamhaven, October 9
8:37 PM

Starlight, Sunburst, and Serene were sitting around a table in the bar in perhaps the most awkward silence in the history of awkward silences, which was saying a lot.

Nopony really wanted to look at each other, so they just stared down into their glasses. Every once in a while, one of them would look up, look at the pony on their right for a second, look at the pony on their left for a second, look back down. It didn’t matter which pony it was, it was always those actions for those durations in that order. Sometimes, the stars would align and two of the ponies would be looking at each other at the same time. They’d hold their gaze for maybe two seconds, blink, and look away with such force you’d think they were reacting to a flashbang grenade going off while it was perched on their muzzle.

Serene took another swig of beer and coughed. “Sorry I tried to beat you guys up and force you to work in my ‘survive the End of Time’ program thing in an alternate timeline that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Silence. Because, really, what are you supposed to say to that?

Serene coughed again. “It… it doesn’t exist anymore, right?” She looked up at Sunburst. “I mean, everything worked this time around, so we never had anything happen to break time in the first place. Right?” Her voice was strained, desperate. It was clear what she was asking for. She didn’t want to go through it all again.

“It, it shouldn’t,” muttered Sunburst. He didn’t tear his gaze from his glass. “You’re right. Nothing, um, happened to break time. And did, did you look around as we were coming here?” He raised his head and switched between staring at Starlight and staring at Serene. “Monarch doesn’t, doesn’t exist anymore. You founded Monarch when you went back in time, so if Monarch doesn’t exist, you didn’t go back in time. Haven’t gone. Won’t go. Will not have gone.” He grunted and thudded his head on the table. “Someone really needs to make tenses for time travel.”

“Wait, wasn’t the physics building built from a donation from Monarch?” asked Starlight. She finally looked up, too. “So how did-”

“Royal grant. I checked,” said Sunburst. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “Best guess, when the time spell collapsed and the timeline, uh, reshuffled, it fell into a, a state of lowest energy that is essentially the original timeline without any changes caused by, uh, Monarch or Serene’s own travels, due to the original timeline already being a state of lowest, lowest energy that is now unobtainable due to Serene not going back in time.”

Starlight and Serene both blinked at him. “Equestrian, please?” said Starlight flatly.

Sunburst rolled his eyes. “Blah blah timey-wimey stuff blah the timeline’s the same as it was before, only without Monarch, due to Reasons. Serene, what do you remember about this? The, the new timeline, I mean. Don’t you have memories of it? You’re the only one who was here.”

Serene released a bitter, barking laugh. “Sunny, I’ve got three different sets of memories for the past seven years. My first time through the original timeline, my second time through it, and my time through this one. Working it all out’s gonna be kinda tricky.”

“Can, can you try?”

“Fine, just… Gimme a sec.” Serene took a few deep breaths and closed her eyes. After a few seconds, she said, “Okay, best I can tell, whenever I had Monarch invest in something in Streamhaven in the original timeline, in this one, some other company or some rich guy just happened to step in and do pretty much the same thing.”

“Okay, yeah, that, that sounds like what I was thinking of.”

More awkward silence.

“So now what?” asked Starlight. “We’re not on bad terms anymore, so what do we do?”

Serene shrugged. “Keep quiet. You think anypony’s gonna believe us? Just… try to be like it was before, I guess.” She snorted. “Probably impossible, but hey. Let’s dream.” She took a long drink from her bottle. “It’ll be the least stressful time I’ve had in seven years,” she muttered.

Starlight reached out and put a hoof on Serene’s. “Then that means it can only go up, right?” she asked. “And if you ever want to talk about mistakes you’ve made in pasts that don’t exist, feel free to write me a letter. I…” She paused. How much to say about her first time travel forays? She couldn’t just dump it all on Serene now. She decided to go for hinting at it. “I’ve got a lot to tell you, if you’re willing to listen. Just not right now.”

For a second, Serene didn’t say or do anything. Then she pulled her hoof out and patted Starlight’s. She smiled. It was probably the most genuine smile Starlight had seen on her. It wasn’t generically cheerful and it wasn’t a mask. It was subdued and warm. “Thanks. I might just take you up on that offer.”

After a moment, Sunburst coughed. “So what about the, uh, the experiments? We, we’ve seen how dangerous they can be, but, uh…” He twisted a lock of his mane around a hoof.

Serene grunted. “Can’t really stop them,” she said. “Can you imagine? ‘Hey, we totally can’t do these anymore, we might break time. I saw it. Well, no, it’s not broken now, we fixed it and it never broke in the first place. Yes, in spite of paradoxes and changing the past being impossible. Totally. Honest. Why do you have that straitjacket?’” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “All they’ve seen is that it works perfectly. Kinda hard to abort after that. Guess I’ll pretend to have a freakout on what if the failsafe fails and at least double up on that. Keep the rest of the experiments running as usual and come crying to you if something Goes Horribly Wrong.”

Sunburst coughed. “In, in that case, I, I might know somepony who, who’d gladly join you.” He paused. “Well, um, kind of. It’s, it’s complicated.”

“Lemme guess,” Serene sighed. “You met him in the original timeline after it all went down, got real friendly with him, but now that it’s all reset, he doesn’t know you, even though you know him.”

“M-more or less,” Sunburst said, pushing his glasses up his muzzle.

“Great. I knew this was gonna happen, but…” Serene sighed again and took a gulp of beer. Slamming the bottle down on the table, she muttered, “Fucking time travel.”

Epilogue - A Lesson

Twilight winced as she pushed open the front door to her castle and it creaked like mad. (How could crystal creak?) It was one in the morning and the last thing she wanted to do was wake up Spike or Starlight.

The trip to Griffonstone had been exciting and had gone flawlessly, but it had also been draining and the last meeting had gone on several hours longer than Twilight had been planning on. She’d missed the last train out, and now her wings were aching and her magic was nearly spent and her bones were on fire and she wanted nothing more than to hug her mattress for the next few dozen hours.

A last-gasp spell kept the hinges from creaking again. Twilight tiptoed down the hall, trying to not make any noise. She stopped by Spike’s room and poked her head in. He was snoring peacefully. Good. She stopped by Starlight’s room, just in case she was back from her thing with Sunburst. Starlight was sleeping peacefully. Good.

In her own room, Twilight sighed with relief as she finally got the saddlebags off her aching back. She rolled her shoulders a few times, trying to work out any kinks so they wouldn’t build up as she slept. It felt so good.

But right before Twilight climbed into bed, she noticed something new on her nightstand. She ignited her horn; it was a small stack of parchment, each piece covered in Starlight’s writing. Her friendship report. It was almost enough to drive the weariness away, but Twilight was much too beat to actually read the whole thing through.

Well, at least she could see the title, get an idea of what Starlight had learned. Twilight brightened her horn and squinted at the big letters up top.

Avoiding Peer Pressure and Making Your Own Path

—OR—

How Equestria Nearly Got Destroyed Through Time Travel Again
and it Genuinely Totally Wasn’t My Fault This Time (Honest)

Twilight blinked at the second title, then shrugged and chuckled. “From anypony else,” she muttered as she released her spell and toppled into bed, “that might seem suspicious.”