Avalanche from a Flurry

Star Swirl walked from the train station towards Twilight's castle. He was somewhat surprised when Twilight landed alongside him; he nodded to her. "Princess Twilight. It is nice to see you well."

"And nice to see you as well. What brings you here?"

"Starlight Glimmer had a proposal for me to look over."

"A… proposal."

"An intriguing time travel safety scheme that does not necessarily render it entirely useless. It appears valid."

Twilight blinked. "Really? I must confess, that was not the response we were expecting."

He nodded curtly. "Quite safe. The only question is whether it is actually useful. As you know, the method does leave open the possibility that it doesn't do anything. That raises the question of whether it ever does anything at all."

She nodded. "Yes, there is that."

"So, we will do the check right away. Would you like to be there?"

"I would love to, but I have some extremely urgent business to take care of before I can attend to that. I'll be by the castle later. Love to talk with you then!" She turned to fly off to Zecora's hut, but stopped and turned back to him. "One last thing… have you noticed anything odd lately?"

He slowed down, and looked aside at some passing ponies. Carefully, he said, "There was one odd thing, so odd I was going to mention it to you during my visit anyway. I was thinking about some work I did last year, and thought I ought to have published it. So I fetched it, and I could not find the completed version at all. I could have sworn I had finished it up. I spent a day looking for it. But in the end I found that there was no room in my journal, no days when I might have done that. So I gave up, wrote it down again, didn't even really need to clean it up, and published it. I have no idea where I got the time to finish it before, and then on top of that to lose it. I begin to suspect that I imagined finishing it. But when I wrote it down, I wrote down with substantial new progress. Imagining doing work does not usually solve problems."

"I suppose it could have come to you in a dream, and you dreamed you had already written it up?"

He sighed. "Perhaps. It would be not be the first time I derived a spell matrix in my head, but it would be the first time I derived a spell matrix in my sleep. Sleep tends to produce concepts, not numbers. I had been thinking about it lately, but was just going over the solution I already had. That's how I could simply write it down, you see."

Twilight said, "That is odd. Nothing else? Okay, thank you." She flew off; he noticed with a slight eyebrow raise that while recovering her legs from the takeoff spring, she simultaneously flicked her tail and had her legs spread wide, effectively presenting to him. Perhaps she could use a refresher on take-offs, if she's doing that. Ah well.

Twilight didn't look behind her as she flew off. Too bad he doesn't seem to be affected. Our kids would have been epic, and I don't think I could land him any other way.

Starlight finished bundling the scrolls up just as Starswirl arrived in the library. He greeted her somewhat stiffly. "Starlight. Shall we get started?"

"Absolutely!"

They conferred over the details of the method on their way to the Apple farm. Upon arrival, Starlight took the lead and knocked. Momentarily, Applejack opened it and asked, "Hey, Starlight… and Starswirl?! is there something wrong with the forest?"

Starlight shook her head. "Nothing so drastic. I'd like to talk to the whole family."

Applejack blinked. "Sure. Come in!"

The pair knocked the mud off their hooves and trotted in. Starlight greeted, "Hello Applebloom, Granny Smith, Big Mac, Sugar Belle." She gestured back to Starswirl, "We would like to see if we can save your parents. It will make an excellent case for the feasibility of helpful time manipulation."

Applejack was about to object, but Big Mac said, "Ah was wondering when you'd get around to asking."

Starswirl gasped and reared up, stuffed his hooves over his ears, ran back out of the house on his hind two legs, and began casting.

As the Apples watched him go, Starlight explained, "The particular way we're doing this requires him not to get any information about whether the time loop occurred until we've decided it worked out fine. That came a little close to confirming that it did, but it wasn't entirely clear."

Applejack held up a hoof. "Yeah, what did that mean, Big Mac?"

Big Macintosh gestured out the door to where Starswirl had gone. "Is it okay to say?"

Starlight thought. "Best to give him a minute to get it set up. We really didn't expect that you'd already know."

Applejack grew insistent. "Big Mac, what are you talking about?"

Granny Smith, apparently not having heard Starlight's admonition, said, "Starlight here delivered all three of you… one way or another."

Applejack thundered, "What?"

Big Mac clarified, "She helped momma deliver the two of us, and while you were in Manehattan, Starlight here showed up carrying Apple Bloom as a baby and saying how there was a time travel accident, and ma and pa were in the future but you belonged in that time."

Applejack turned to look at Starlight, then rounded back on him. "You said that some folks found mama mauled near the woods, and dragged her into a hospital, where they tried to save her and eventually she died and they managed to save Apple Bloom just in time and then some government unicorn finally got around to tracking down her family and it was us."

"Eeenope. You guessed that must've been it and ah didn't say no."

"Then why in tarnation did you keep acting like they were dead, if you were expecting her to come and save them?"

Applebloom cut in to suggest, "They were gone for a long time, and they missed a lot of our lives, and we had to grow up without them. It's sad. Hay, I never met them!"

"Eeeyup. Never said they were dead. Still sad. Never said anything 'cause she asked us not to."

Starlight facehoofed. "What? Why? I'm tempted to just tell him to ditch this timeline and try again, this is already sounding so stupid."

"But we've known for decades."

"And if… uuugh. I think you may be right, we may be stuck with this loop. All right, to help keep our safety margins as wide as possible, don't tell me anything else about what I did in the past."

Apple Bloom squinted. "What? Why would that help?"

"Any acausal information causes a resonance. If everything happens for a good reason, that's fine. But every time I do something just to make sure that it happens the way you saw it happen? That threatens to break the timeline. We have a safety margin of around a thousand nats, which may sound like a lot, but it can run out quick if you begin telling me details of what I was supposed to do. Ugh. We may have already burned through that just with what you've told me." After a few moments, she amended, "Probably less than a quarter, though. On the other hoof, if there turns out to be a good reason for me to go be your obstetrician, that we could have discovered without my doing so, then it becomes an attractor and we get it for virtually free. Can any of you think of one?"

She was met with silence.

Applejack eventually said, "That don't make a lick of sense. You want us not to tell you anything about what you did in the past?" She glared at Big Mac and added, "Not that I actually know anything."

Starlight replied, "Right. It's not due to considerations of free will, but you can imagine it was. Think about how annoying it would be to just have to go do something, to be forced into it."

Apple Bloom objected, "But what if it's helpful and would save trouble?"

"Just don't take choices from me. You can tell me any background facts you know about. Like, if you know your parents were petrified by a cockatrice, feel free to tell me. If you know that I petrified them like a cockatrice, don't tell me."

Applejack growled. "Is there any particular reason you decided to do this today?"

Starlight blinked. "What was special about today?"

"Twilight rampaging around asking these questions, sending Apple Bloom running off, then she comes back looking like she'd just fallen off of Cloudsdale…" She narrowed her eyes, then widened them. "You had no idea, did you."

Starlight shook her head. "No, I didn't. What's up with her?"

Apple Bloom said, "I can hook you up with the cure, if you need it. Probably do."

Applejack looked over to her. "Zecora made one?"

"Twilight figured it out without her."

"Glad to hear that's all over."

Apple Bloom shivered. "Yeah."

Starlight sighed. "All right. So, since it appears that we're going ahead with this, we need to pick a place that I will have been storing your parents in the mean time."

Sugar Belle put in, "What about my Dad? And my original parents, for that matter?"

"I was definitely thinking of saving your Dad. I miss him too. As for your biological parents… I wouldn't know where to look for them. New Leaf never said where he found you. I suppose we could ask him, after. I'll have to work out the math on whether that cuts into our safety margin."

"You could go back to when they were still alive and cast the parent-finding spell again."

"I don't know how to cast that. It returned garbage when I cast it on you."

"I thought that meant they were dead."

"No, if I'd cast it right, it would have just said so. It's a really, really hard spell. Divination is not my forte, and it's a high level one. On the other hoof, maybe it returned garbage because by the time I cast it, I had already taken them into the future, and it didn't know how to report that. Silly spell designers, leaving a gaping hole like that open. Okay, I guess it's worth a shot."

Sugar Belle said, "And if it doesn't work, well, I never knew them, so no great loss." Big Mac put a foreleg around her.

"So, back on track! Where should I have been storing your parents, petrified, all these years? Let's pick a good place, firmly decide I will have put them there, then we can look."

Applejack buried her face in her hooves. "This is making my head hurt."

Big Macintosh said, "There's a mound of rocks out near the Everfree. They could be under it."

Starlight thought for a moment. "That sounds like a good place. All right. We'll go there and open it up and see if they're at the bottom. I am already firmly planning to put them there."

So, all of them but Granny Smith headed out. The pile of rocks shrank rapidly under their careful efforts. Mainly Starlight's efforts at first. Near the end, Starlight said, "Okay, I can't look at what they look like or I'll be forced into it. I'll face away, you get them completely uncovered so it's safe for me to turn them back, and then I'll un-petrify them without looking. It might even be prudent for me to simply run away afterwards until you've explained to them the rules about what they shouldn't tell me. But do feel free to tell me when you find them, or your progress in uncovering them. That's safe enough."

The three siblings nodded. Starlight moved to the edge of her range on the de-petrification spell and waited.

Apple Bloom heaved a hoof-sized stone off the pile and found a stallion's face. "He's here! Wow. My dad!"

Applejack came alongside. "Huh. Looks like he was under some kind of attack. Straining. Uh, Starlight said that much was okay to tell her, right? Not her choice."

"Eenope. She'd have to wait for him to look like that."

Applejack grunted in chagrin, then looked over her shoulder. "Don't think she heard, anyway."

Big Mac and Applejack braced against another boulder and heaved, moving a large stone off the pile.

Apple Bloom peeked down through the new opening around her father's back. Quietly enough Starlight would have a hard time hearing, she said, "It looks wide open down there under this large boulder. You know, we might not need to clear away any more rocks. I can slip down and check if anything is resting on them."

Applejack and Big Mac, breathing heavily, nodded in assent to her plan.

Apple Bloom wriggled into the space hindquarters first, and found there was a stone under her father she could brace herself on. She used it to climb down onto a clay surface. Coming onto all fours, she found that she had enough room to turn around. Her eyes took a minute to adjust to the light, so she closed her eyes and carefully stepped around her father's side, to check for any rocks leaning on him. Where's my mother? She's not on his right, she's not on his left… Her hoof ran across an oddly placed pillar of stone next to his shoulder. She felt it a bit more and realized it was a hoof.

She lowered her head to get out of the direct light from outside, then opened her eyes and looked. As she'd begun to suspect, her mother was under him, hooves up. Apple Bloom's face was about a hoof-width from her mother's vulva. She gulped. Not under attack by timberwolves, apparently. Heh.

She continued her circuit. As she proceeded around to her father's side again, she saw that her mother was deep-throating him, the medial ring visible as a ridge in her under-suction cheeks. She gulped harder. Wow, mom doesn't seem to be even exerting herself.

Applejack called down, "Looking clear?"

Apple Bloom snapped out of it. "I just got my eyes adjusted. Give me a minute."

Apple Bloom began quivering. She turned her head nearly upside-down to see her mother's face more clearly, wanting to see her like this more, never to be seen that way again. Upon righting her head, she saw a bit of strange irregularity on her father's cock. Dirt.

She suddenly realized she had used her father's cock as a ladder. She stood there, paralyzed. That happened. I ought to be feeling disgusted by this. I ought to just call up and ask to be pulled up.

Sugar Belle called down, "Do you need a light?"

That got Apple Bloom moving. "No! Not at all!" She jumped to the opening and stuck her hooves up. "Pull me out. All clear. Just, they're dirty. Starlight, can you clean them off in the process?"

Starlight called back, "The de-petrification spell includes a cleaning step."

"Oh, good. Well, how about we step off the stones and then you can go for it? It… might be prudent to hold them in place until they've been aware for a few seconds. It's a bit tight in there."

Starlight nodded, and her horn glowed.