Avalanche from a Flurry

Twilight shambled into the dining room carrying a plate of toast.

"Good morning. Though your appearance suggests you would not agree."

Twilight looked up and found Starswirl was the speaker; he and Rockhoof were leaning back in their seats, having finished eating. Mistmane was still picking at some flowers. Spike was halfway through eating his pancakes, at a fairly restrained pace of eating, especially for him.

Twilight plopped down into the seat two away from Starswirl, then addressed the table. "Have you spoken with Flurry Heart in the past half year or so?"

As Mistmane and Rockhoof shook their heads, Spike nodded. "Yeah, she got me too. Rarity told me about it."

Starswirl blinked. "Yes! Those results I mentioned to you the day before yesterday. It was most peculiar." Twilight perked up at that as she spread jam on her toast. "Immediately after I spoke with her, I had a number of insights into crystals and how to modify them. I wrote down a dozen half-finished ideas in a day. And some that weren't so half-finished."

"When was that?" Twilight took a bite.

"Shortly after Hearth's Warming."

Twilight hummed as she chewed. Upon swallowing, she said, "So, right before her visit here. Have you had any other intrusive thoughts besides those?"

Starswirl shrugged. "My mental ward has been more active than usual."

The toast dropped. "You have a mental ward?"

"Yes? It was only prudent for when we faced the sirens. Otherwise they would have seduced us just as easily as the townsponies."

Twilight stood up. "Teach me. But first, just put it on me."

Starswirl closed his eyes. "Give me a minute. I only cast it once, twelve years ago by my memory, and keeping it going is not at all the same as casting it."

After twenty seconds, he stood, faced her, lit his horn, and immediately stopped. "You already have it on, princess! Let's see… I'm node 1, the other pillars 2 through 6… and they… ah! It transmitted from us to the tree, and from it to you and the other elements, back to the tree, and presumably from there to the students, though I would need to examine one to be sure."

Twilight sighed. "Oh."

"What sort of mental effect do you fear?"

"After I spoke with Flurry Heart, I, and most everyone else, didn't get spell ideas. I got other sorts of ideas. Odd, unfamiliar ideas. So, it appears that Sombra made princess Skyla immortal as a practice run for himself, then killed her in various escalating ways. Her ghost is trying to come back, and princess Cadence fended it off from possessing Flurry Heart, and its bits and pieces got attached onto various ponies who spoke with her. Some got on me."

While the four were considering this, she considered. "Also, do any of you recognize this gesture?" Twilight pressed her forehooves together in front of her teats, then brought them up high, then spread them and brought them back to the starting point.

Rockhoof immediately pointed and jiggled his hoof. "That was that anarchist cult, wasn't it?"

Mistmane nodded. "Fertility, too."

Apple Bloom and Applejack trotted in as Twilight finished, "Skyla apparently had her forces perform this gesture. I wonder if she joined that cult. Yes, Apple… Bloom?" She had at the last moment noticed that Apple Bloom was taking the lead.

Apple Bloom hesitantly replied, "Twilight, we need your help."

Twilight took a deep breath while considering how to word it. "Is it that thing that's been going around?"

Apple Bloom shook her head, then shrugged. "Related, but not exactly."

Applejack came up close and said, "I, and I think the rest of us until this thing came up, were somehow kept from ever thinking about… that topic."

Twilight backed away from the table and thought back. Yes, that sounds right. I actively avoided learning about something! That doesn't sound like me. She narrowed her eyes on Starswirl. "Could your mental ward have interfered with natural libido?"

Starswirl perked an eyebrow. "I'm not familiar with that word. It sounds like it might be related to…"

Irate, she clarified, "Is the reason I never wanted dick for the first twenty five years of my life because of your anti-siren protection?"

"What's 'dick'?"

Rockhoof supplied, "Penis. And no, it doesn't have that effect on us."

Apple Bloom joked, "So, you still want dick?"

Rockhoof didn't take it as a joke. "I still want to be with ponies a way their dicks and cunts matter, yes. I don't know about Starswirl or Somnambula, but I've noticed the others of us noticing ponies that way, too."

Twilight, though, suddenly realized something else. "It gave you ideas about crystals and you didn't get any weird ideas. For us, it mostly gave us weird ideas and not so many skills, but that's assuming the spells I was obsessively thinking about didn't came from that too. Makes sense it would have since usually five hours of distracted thinking is not enough to create a functioning transformation like that, even a buggy one. I wonder, though, if we do have the ward up, why it affected us differently?"

Starswirl concentrated. "It appears that… though the mental domination facet of the ward holds firm, your subversion facet was completely destroyed long ago."

Twilight thought back. "Taking things in order… probably Discord broke through. Can you reassemble it?"

"Not without taking the whole spell down and recasting. And that seems unwise under the circumstances."

Twilight sighed. "Quite." After straightening, she told Apple Bloom, "Can you ask Zecora to come here around three in the afternoon? I might need some more vision potion and maybe an alteration to it for later, and I'd like everypony in for a bit of a strategy session afterwards." Her gaze fell on Applejack. "So, you're still blocked from ever thinking about sex?" She nodded. "So it came from somewhere else. Anypony know where Starlight is?"

Spike grimly said, "In her room, alternating extremely excited esoteric exegeses, and athletic sex. All night. While I'm on a kiss moratorium, in the next room over."

"Can you go ask her if she can design a spell to make certain ponies not think about sex that will last for years?"

Starswirl interjected, "I know such a spell. I am sure miss Glimmer could cast it. Are you suggesting that we add this to her tasks?" Rockhoof and Mistmane shared a confused glance.

Twilight nodded. "Yes. And, uh, I can think of another purpose she would have for that spell…" Making Sugar Belle safe from New Leaf since past-him is going to be raising her from just after he got his young daughter pregnant.

Spike got up. "So, should I go get…" Starlight and New Leaf walked in. "… never mind!"

Starlight observed, "I heard you mentioning me, mister Swirl."

Twilight asked Starlight, "Ever since Flurry Heart visited… I remember you said she said something to you that got you ruminating on a particular topic. It appears she had an ancient ghost bothering her, and that was possibly a fragment of the ghost flaking off onto you. Did it also give you the knowledge of any spells?"

Starlight blinked a few times. "An ancient ghost may have given me knowledge? Well, some ideas I've had could have have come from that. Ideas pointing towards some freaky stuff with embryos. Tribe selection! Chimeras to order! Fake alicorns! But maybe that was just after my mind was put on the track of fertility magic and my foal-age spell."

Starswirl jerked to his feet. "You have age-altering magic?"

"It's fake, relax. Polymorphs your shape using the historic resonance, but it's temporary and doesn't give you the health of youth even temporarily."

Starswirl frowned. "May I see it?"

Starlight cast it on him.

Rockhoof coughed. "Uh, are you Stygian's father?"

Spike offered, "More than that. He bonked his own genderswapped mirror universe double."

Starlight counteroffered, "Nah. Just cloned himself."

Starswirl, having been focused on the magic, finally registered what they were saying. "Perhaps closer to that than you think. After the unification, though the old stigma on interbreeding was inverted to the point that families which were pure faced opprobium, we still needed to maintain our primo-stemmaturgical lines in order to be able to raise and lower the sun and moon. So, we developed a number of spells for manipulating genetics, though we did not know the underlying mechanism at the time as you do now. Mixed parents could be guaranteed to produce a foal of one tribe or the other, for instance, though that was found to interfere with any stemmmaturgy. We tried outright cloning, of course, when I was a young stallion. I believe there are… were… a few of my clones running around, and Stygian may be one of the later ones. And like Stygian, they were magically nothing special. It appears that I claimed all of the magic reserved for my exact genotype, so any later clones would not be able to claim it."

Spike goggled. "That's a thing?"

"It normally doesn't come up because every natural genotype is different, and twins… I don't know how that works, but they avoid this issue. It just means exact clones aren't profitable to make, even by roundabout means, such as forcing meiosis to produce the same splits as it did for one child, and selecting the same halves again."

Rockhoof snorted. "Unlike you, I haven't been studying the latest sciences. Does all this mean, when your family tree came to more resemble a net, that wasn't a problem? You had magic to keep it under control?"

"I hadn't mentioned the spells for that, but in principle, yes. But all of that made unconventional arrangements much more… speakable. Which led to a variety of social ills. Removing one harm from incest opened up all the others. Much like how we had to ban even the forms of necromancy that aren't intrinsically evil."

Starlight asked, "I feel like I have these spells on the tip of my horn but I can't quite cast them. Can you write them down for me, please? Maybe then it'll stop bugging me."

After a quiet minute of Starswirl writing, New Leaf offered Mistmane, "Madam, would you like us to witness you in your youth?"

Mistmane replied, "I'm not old; I ritually sacrificed my beauty, and have had to work with stateliness ever since. I am curious what that spell would do to me, though."

New Leaf cast it on her, and she turned into a little filly. A wrinkled mess of a little filly.

Everypony, now seeing her, burst out laughing. Twilight picked her head up and asked, "What? What was it? Oh, hi, Stygian. We were just talking about y… oh." The laughter intensified, and she got up to slink off to bed.

After they released the age spells, Starlight said, "So, anyway, I guess we're off to breakfast with Derpy and family. Have a nice day, all."

~~~~

Sparkler answered the door and smiled. "Hi, grandpa." The odor of muffins intensified. New Leaf gave a tiny hug before moving in.

Derpy bent over and drew a batch of muffins from the oven. New Leaf, putting his scarf on the rack, completely missed that she flagged and winked as she did. Starlight mostly missed it, and though she caught a brief eyeful, it did not seem extraordinary. Sparkler, on the other hoof, had caught the whole thing and was floored. That did not seem like an accident. If it was just a twitch, a very odd one. Is Mom into Starlight?

"Watch it, mommy, you're going to get hair on the muffins!" Dinky exclaimed.

Derpy spun around and the muffin tray nearly went flying. While she caught herself and kept the tray under control, she backed up and bumped the oven door shut, and it swung up and caught the top, fleshy part of her tail in its side.

She emitted a sharp howl of pain; Starlight dashed alongside, already teleporting some snow in from the pile outside. She dumped it onto Derpy's tail, wrapping the affected extremity. "Are you all right?"

Derpy swallowed. "Been better. Ow."

"All right, or head to the doctor?"

"All right. It wasn't the really hot part of the door. Thanks for the ice, though."

Starlight sat next to Derpy where she was lying supine, held the snow in place, and fed her muffins.

Sparkler sat down and spoke to New Leaf, "So… have a muffin and tell the tale?" She began cutting a muffin into octants, buttering, and as she did, stared at her (grand)father expectantly.

The only untaken full-size seat not inconveniently up right next to the two mares on the floor was across the table from them, where he could only see the top of Starlight's head. So he sat down and tipped the chair back a little - no, he couldn't quite go far enough to be able to make eye contact with his older daughter. He came back forward to a moderate tilt and focused on Sparkler. "Where to start, where to start. Derpy's mother. We'd… worked together briefly. Long enough to get to know each other, and well enough to get Ditzy on the way. We were made for each other. But her family didn't approve of her work, so they shipped her off to the weather factory. In defiance, she named her daughter Ditzy Doo, taking on the Doo name."

"What was her work, that they didn't like?"

"… actress."

From his hesitation, Starlight (correctly) imagined that she was in porn, and between that and Derpy's splayed out condition in front of her, her imagination began to play.

Sparkler asked, "Were you an actor, or how did you work with her?"

"Sometimes I acted, sometimes I was… ah, in the crew. It wasn't my talent, but I enjoyed it. I enjoyed her."

Dinky scowled. "Mom? Your family was mean."

Derpy pointedly didn't object to that.

Rinky (for that was how he was thinking of himself again) shrugged. "A bit, but I can really see their point of view. Anyway, fast-forward a few years and your mother's condition had advanced and it wasn't safe for her to be in Cloudsdale anymore - not until she had some physical therapy. So they came back to Ponyville, I found out I had a daughter, we got married."

Sparkler blinked. "You didn't even know?"

Rinky shook his head. "Obviously mine, though."

"Well, yeah. Wait, what did grandma look like?"

"A lot like you. Very much your grandmother's granddaughter. Maybe it's as if you, Starlight, Sugar Belle, and Princess Twilight had a pegasus daughter between them, somehow, it'd be your grandmother."

Sparkler grimaced. "Thanks for that image."

Starlight didn't mind that image.

Dinky suddenly asked, "Wait, I thought you had to be married to have a kid. How did you make mommy if you weren't married?"

Rinky reached across the table and took her hoof in his. "Dinky, getting married is a good idea before you have a foal. It signifies your commitment to the family you are forming. It lets everypony else know that you are serious. It legally binds you together so neither of you can just leave without going to some trouble. It also gives some legal privileges. Many ponies get upset with ponies who have children without getting married. I strongly suggest you get married before having a foal. But it has nothing to do with the actual process."

"What's that, then?"

Rinky swallowed and released her hoof. "I think your mother would like to be the one who tells you that, mare to mare, in private. Isn't that right, Muffin?"

Derpy replied between bites of muffin, still supine on the floor, "Yes." Starlight definitely didn't miss it when her pussy winked that time.

"So anyway, here I was, raising your mother with her mother. Her family hated me. Said I was a disgrace, kept calling your mother by her birth name instead of the name she took for herself. Say… what were you told her name was?"

Sparkler said, "Mom didn't really use her name; she called her 'mama'. But her uncle Tinglespark said she was Mist Hooves."

"Yeah, she hated that name. How's Tinglespark doing?"

"Dead. As are his parents. There was an epidemic in 998."

"Oh. I wondered why I didn't have a confrontation with them already. That answers that. I guess I'm sorry to hear it."

"Thunderlane's fine, and they had another son before passing."

"Yes, I saw. And Thunderlane's hanging out with that bombshell of a mare."

Dinky put in, "She's not a bombshell, she's really…"

Sparkler cut her off. "Bombshell is good. So pretty it knocks stallions out. So, dad, I…"

Derpy choked on her muffin; Rinky cried out, "What did you say?"

Derpy's convulsion made her barrel shift so Starlight's hoof, holding the ice to the base of her tail, grazed against her vulva. They shared an embarrassed glance and Starlight shifted her hoof back slightly.

Sparkler frowned at his extreme reaction. "Oh. I meant, grandpa. You seem too young to be a grandpa."

Rinky said, "Having been petrified for a decade and having been rather young when your mother was born would do that, I suppose. But I am your grandfather."

Sparkler nodded. "Sorry. So, what was grandma's name?"

"Skinema", Rinky Doo said.

"Wait, was she a movie actress?"

Rinky froze. "Er… why do you say that?"

Sparkler cocked an eyebrow. "Because her name has 'cinema' in it?"

"Well, she wanted to be a movie actress. Never made it, though. When she came back to Ponyville, she was taking care of your mother full-time until she got ill herself. We lived off my work as the town's librarian and mage."

"Wait, you were the librarian? Mom never said she grew up in the Golden Oak Library!"

Rinky laughed. "Naw, it was a library, not a house. We did spend a lot of time there, though."

Derpy said, "When things were slow, he'd turn into a little colt and play with me among the stacks."

Rinky was confused by her nonchalance about what led to her impregnation. I didn't realize at the time that a playmate wasn't what she needed. I didn't realize that I was giving her a crush on me… does she still have it to some extent? That would complicate things. Maybe that's why she's so eager to forgive. "What happened to it, by the way? One of the more distinctive landmarks in town and it's just gone."

"Tirek blew it up."

Rinky had heard about the elements and some of their feats from Starlight, but she hadn't mentioned that detail. He sighed wistfully. For all that we didn't live there, that was where your mother and you were conceived, kiddo. But I'm getting ahead of - and behind, I guess, in the case of your mother - myself.

Meanwhile, Starlight's imagination had settled upon turning herself, Derpy, and her daughters into little fillies, and New Leaf tossing out his reformation and fucking all four of them in succession while they hugged and kissed each other.

"And why were you…" Sparkler's mind flashed back to her mother's anatomical reaction to his arrival, then his strong reaction to her calling him 'Dad'. She realized she had to finish the question some way even if it wasn't where she'd been going at first, and said, "…tossed out of town?", understating what had occurred considerably.

Rinky gave her a long glance, but answered, "Like she implied before, when your grandmother died, her family accused me of killing her so I could have your mother all to myself. The mayor said it was beyond ridiculous (and it was), so I wasn't charged. But I'd… worn out my welcome and generally… made myself untrusted in other ways, so nopony stopped them from taking matters into their own hooves when the mayor was out of town for a day."

Dinky, asking the important questions, said, "You can turn into a colt? Show me!"

Rinky coughed. "Well, it has some negative side-effects like reducing self-control, which is one of the main things that got me into trouble…"

Derpy said, "Go ahead. I… don't mind."

Starlight stared down at her in shock, this time not missing her wink at all. Am I not the only one imagining New Leaf fucking every mare in the room?

Rinky considered for several seconds, then reduced his age to the same as Dinky. The two girls awwwed, and he blushed. Then he slipped his head under the table and looked at Derpy and Starlight. "Hey you two. What you got going on down there?"

Starlight coughed sternly. "New Leaf…"

Sparkler's doubts collapsed, and she slowly began crying. So slowly that nopony else noticed before she covered it up by going to the stove to fry some onions as a supplement to their muffins. She heard Starlight extract a promise of total secrecy of what she was going to say, and managed to agree. She heard that Starlight was planning to use time travel to go back and save the Apples and New Leaf, and how Starswirl had validated the method. But she couldn't get over that she was the product of incest, that her mother still was attracted to her own father, and that Starlight was really planning on sending her back in time where she knew he would be raising another little filly… though… if they knew that had worked out, then it was merely an opportunity for him to prove that he was reformed. Which her mother was not helping, flirting, skirting that line of deniability. Her mother, who had later gone on to seek out and impregnate herself with a colt.

Sparkler left without a word and lay down.

Derpy came in a minute later and sat next to her. After another half minute, she said, "I meant to tell you this morning, but I guess you figured it out."

Sparkler nodded.

"I… he could have stopped me. He could have ended the spell and stopped me. But until he did, I was bigger and stronger. I thought I was in control. But I don't think either of us was."

Sparkler swallowed. Derpy almost said more, but didn't. They listened as Starlight and New Leaf figured it was time to go, and Dinky said they could. They called their farewells through the door.