Twilight lifted the cup of tea to her lips, and that's when everything went wrong.
Now unsure of her surroundings, she took one long, bewildered look around.
"Ah," she said, somehow completely calm despite the circumstances. "I appear to be in a dark, empty, bottomless void of pure abyss and uniformity."
She wasn't wrong. All around her, for what could very well be miles, stretched very intriguing similar darkness, characterized by a distinct lack of form or existence that would normally represent itself in everyday physical objects.
There were a few possible explanations, all of which logically and quietly presented themselves in an ordered way at the front of Twilight's mind. Either she had died, which would explain the deadly calm she felt overriding her emotions and more neurotic sides to her persona, she had been transported to a realm of some kind of inexistence where nothing really was, or she had finally snapped and become a prisoner of her own mind.
Although that last one seemed a little unlikely, as she would have thought her own mind would have...had something in it, not just an empty abyss of nothingness.
"Well," she consoled herself, not trusting the unnerving calm of this realm to fully smother her anxiety, "I'm sure whatever it was that happened will soon fix itself, and I'll be back to normal. Although," she put a hoof to her muzzle, "I guess it wouldn't hurt to test out some alternative methods of escape."
She lit up her horn to try teleporting, focusing on her home town of Ponyville, but that didn't work. Next, she tested if distance-based teleportation worked, and was surprised to find it did, although her appearance a steady five feet to her right could have taken her to the same spot for all she knew. Since Nothing spread out in all directions, it was a little hard to find landmarks when the nearest thing to a constant was the existential crisis she found herself in, although even that seemed strangely dulled by the sense of peace permeating all of nonexistence.
She wasn't really one for necromancy, and she wasn't sure if she even wanted to try resurrecting herself, if she was really dead. Not that she knew any resurrection spells anyway, those had been banned centuries ago by Celestia after a frankly sickening but somehow amusing instance of resurrection abuse when a government official kept getting assassinated only for him to be resurrected by a colleague time and time again. Celestia found out after being to his funeral about thirty times, and after that she had a good laugh, found the assassins, locked up both them and the official, and banned resurrection magic formally for all time.
A good story, if nothing else, Twilight thought.
So getting back from the dead wasn't an option, and she didn't even think she was dead. Death seemed more like something that would just happen and then you didn't exist anymore, but even surrounded by inexistence, she still could think, and just like Decartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.'
"So I can't be nonexistent, because I still have consciousness, and consciousness is the sign of existence," she said to herself. "But that just crosses out that one possibility. What else could it be?"
She thought until she thought her thinking would crack her brain open, but nothing came to mind that would explain her situation. Perhaps Discord might have played a prank on her, or maybe he teamed up with Pinkie and tore the universe apart? Who knew...but one thing was for sure, it sure was boring here in Nothing, or whatever, or whenever, or, nevermind.
So she just kind of sat there in nonexistence, waiting and twiddling her hooves for something to happen. Sat, of course, in the loosest sense of the word, as one can't sit on something one can't see, or nothing one can see, rather.
"This existence jargon is getting extremely annoying to parse correctly," she mused. "I bet given a few years I could come up with an incontrovertibly usable system of language to properly describe oxymorons like this."
But that thought led down some rather annoyingly descriptive and frankly extremely aggravating corridors, so she let it be. She tried to summon a chessboard, and was shocked when the familiar sixty- four squared playing space appeared in front of her, knights, rooks, pawns and the like all dutifully standing in their proper places.
She played a game of chess with herself. Really, now that she looked back in hindsight, that should have been easy to see how that would turn out. She won.
"Athough," she opened her eyes excitedly, "If I can summon things, maybe I could summon Discord here and he can get me out of this space!"
Squeezing her eyes shut, she focused extremely hard. "Discord Discord Discord," she muttered, horn lighting up with magic unimaginable to any outside observer.
She opened her eyes again. "Did it work?" she said to thin air.
"AAAUGH!" said the thin air, which snaked into the form of Discord. "What," he said irritably, "Was that all about?"
He had a helmet on, a leather jacket hanging off his lanky frame, and had a pair of sunglasses in his talon. "I thought I told you to never summon me without giving me three business days' notice!" He then realized where, or nowhere, they were, and looked around. "Although this here noplace seems to be a rather boring area to spend your free time. Do you have a problem?"
"Yes," Twilight said with as much emotion as she could muster beneath the peaceful calm, "I'm stuck here, in this nonexistence plane or whatever the heck it is. I was hoping you could get us out!"
Discord stroked his goatee. "Ah...now I understand. Do you know nowhere we are?" He gestured around at said nowhere.
At Twilight's shake of her head, he continued. "We're stuck in the fourth wall. Lucky for you, I just so happen to have control over much of it. Don't thank me, really. It's the least I can do."
With a snap of his fingers, Twilight was back in her library.
She looked around at the familiar real-life objects.
Shrugging, she took a sip of her tea, only to gag and spit it out.
The tea was cold.
