Five Colors

by Cynewulf

Rating: teen
Tags: Slice of Life, Alternate Universe, Human, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 3581

Twilight plays a game to pass the time before her last shot at returning home.

Twilight Sparkle has come unstuck in time and place, but she is not alone. Her companion in a strange land tries to keep her spirits up as they race across a continent towards her only shot at returning home.

Commissioned by: Horizon

This story was written as a sequel of sorts to this: Three Letters

Published 2019-06-07 01:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2019-06-07 01:10:01 UTC

Choosing Your Piece of the Color Pie

“Are you going to be okay?” Twilight asked as I yawned for perhaps the thousandth time since Omaha.

“I’ll be fine.”

Truth be told, she was right to ask. When Twilight told me she needed to get to the leyline nexus to go home, I wasn’t expecting to drive across the continent. A crazy young woman showing up at my door, needing a ride—how hard could it be to drive her to the bus station or wherever she was actually going? Very.

“We’ve been driving for… you know, I’m not sure how long.”

I fidgeted in the seat, and with weary hands nudged the steering wheel just a bit. The car lurched--lurch was too strong a word. The most minute adjustments feel like Events when you’re at the wheel in the dark.

Twilight let out what could only be called a squeak, and I steadied the car. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said, too quickly, and I instantly felt like my heart had fallen out somewhere on the way.

“You’re nervous.”

Twilight was quiet, but then nodded. I saw her outline against the car door making barely perceptible movements. “A bit. You’ve been operating these for a very long time, but even a veteran spellcaster can make rookie mistakes. Is there a place we can rest?”

I pursed my lips and stared out at the tiny arc of illuminated street before me. “You remember how to use the map on my phone?”

“Absolutely! It’s really fascinating. I wish it didn’t need to charge so often.”

Couldn't help but chuckle. She’d spent hours reading everything she could find and had killed my battery awhile back, but I’d been able to negotiate her down to leaving my poor phone alone at least every other hour or so. “Go ahead and do a search, like I showed you. The around me bit. Look for lodg—”

“Found one! It’s called ‘Econo Lodge’, which I assume is short for Economy?”

“Yup. Sounds good. Navigate me a course and I’ll follow.”

She mock-saluted me and I smiled.

I dropped Twilight off at the motel and drove across town to the Walmart. We needed food, some toiletries, all that stuff. Also, honestly, I needed a moment to think.

Twilight was a good companion. Honestly, she was just good in general. Paradoxically, it was the raw goodness that made her exhausting sometimes. It was such an awful thing to think, like next-level-of-edge bad, but I still thought it. I liked her goodness. She was kind, she was fairly resourceful, she was optimistic. Charming. Brilliant.

And sometimes I felt kind of monstrous next to her.

It was like lying to a kid, I thought as I pulled into the half-empty Walmart parking lot. It was lying to a kid and then them catching you in the act, and you had to watch as they went through the entire process of losing faith in not just you, but in all the other adults in a way. The myth that was Adults had been cheapened. The gods can bleed. The unicorn, when it shows up in the Beagle novel, ends up being a donkey with a waffle cone on its head. The game was up.

I locked the car and shuffled towards the white light of the Walmart door.

Was there anything in her world like a Walmart parking lot, I wondered? They’re kind of special, honestly. These things are like stepping into an alternate, pocket dimension after midnight. It’s all otherworldly lights behind the trees and the shady guy sitting in his car waiting for something and abandoned buggies listless in the open. Not just here, but all over there’s places like that where the world just goes strange in patches left and right and we all just kind of accept this strangeness because to question it would break kayfabe.

Inside, it was cold but not dark, and just being in the light did wonders for my mood. So did a distraction. On a whim, I found some root beer—Twilight liked it, apparently—and added on an extra favorite of my own: cream soda.

I sat in line and thoughtabout Twilight waiting for me in that two bed. She seemed fine, and maybe she would be fine, but… maybe she wouldn't. We had had a tense moment or two on the road. My attempts at playing the old three-letter game I remembered from childhood had been fun until I fucked it up.

Which wasn’t fair. It hadn't beenme so much as… everything. She needed something to distract her, or cheer her up, or anything.

I looked around and my eyes caught something, and I couldn’t help but smile.

I unloaded the bag on the table when I entered our room and flashed Twilight a smile.

She was on the bed, watching something on my phone, which I’d begrudgingly left her. When she heard the clatter of my keys, she looked up and returned my smile.

“Jeff. Find what you needed?”

“Think I did. I found you some snacks for tomorrow, some root beer—”

“Oh, I wish I still had magic so I could just grab that. Bring me some?”

“Of course. I also found something to wind down with before bed,” I said as I handed her a can.

“That would be?”

“Magic.”

She blinked at me. “Uh, what was that? I thought I heard you say--”

“Magic,” I said again. Ireturned to my haul to pull two plastic boxes out and showed them to her, turning the colorful packaging over so she could see it. It was all meaningless to her now, but I’d found just seeing the whole package had heightened my excitement back in the day. “I used to play, back in high school.”

“Play? As in a game?” She wilted just for a second, and then brightened. “Oh! So a game! That sounds fun.”

“Yeah, I’m too tired to drive, but too wired to sleep yet. Figured it might be better than just sitting around… and I guess I kinda just had a whim and tired-me decided to act on it. Lowered inhibitions from hours of driving.”

She chuckled and held out a hand. “Let me see.”

I gave her a pack, and we opened them up. Sitting across from her, I laid out every card in the box and let her look at them.

It was the art that drew me in, I think. It was that lovely art depicting heroes or monsters, or just beautiful landscapes. For awhile, I was sort of off-and-on again collecting old lands; here and there you’d find some traditionally painted ones that looked old in a way that was hard to describe. They weren’t worth anything, in a purely monetary sense.

I said as much. Twilight smiled down at the cards and said, “I suppose they still meant something, though. I’m rather curious. I was under the impression that magic is fictional here, or at least widely seen as such. How is it that you have conceptions of how it might work with such detail?”

I laid out all of mine and hummed. “You know, I’m not really sure? I’ve thought about that exactly once, I think, in a friend’s basement playing games. It was this long drawn-out marathon gaming weekend, when I had the energy for things like that, and at some point I just wondered aloud how we did it all.”

“And?”

“Somebody suggested we based it off of how we popularly understood science as a system, but I wasn’t sure about that. I remember insisting we ‘understood’ it as… well, we understood it narratively. It didn’t have the strictest rules except perhaps to the invisible contract between the person telling the story and the one listening. I won’t waste your time, and you’ll pay attention. Alright. These are lands.”

“I see that, and I see they are all different colors and depict different settings.”

I nodded. “Right, so… I’m a bit fuzzy on all the lore so forgive me if I’m wrong, but for lore purposes… you are what’s called a planeswalker. You can transport yourself between near-infinite planes of existence at will.”

Twilight let out a little huff and I glanced up to find her with a bemused look—raised eyebrows, as if she wanted to smile but had decided not to. “I wish.”

“Eh. Yeah, sorry.” I looked down. “So… to do magic, you need mana, and to get mana, you ‘tap’ lands. Tapping means you turn the card sidewise, like this. Got that?”

She shook her head and leaned back slightly. “Just a minute. You’re saying you suck the magic out of the land? Like, out of other living things? They’d be nothing but husks afterwards.” She looked like I’d offered her horse steak. “Is that how humans think magic works? That’s really grim, Jeff. Way beyond the pale.”

I bit my lip and shook my head, once hesitantly and then more firmly again. “No, that’s not it. It’s like… uh. Okay, bear with me.”

“I’ll try.”

“It’s more like, you draw your power from it in a non-zero-sum way. Like, you don’t suck all the magic up, see. You can tap the land infinitely more or less. It’s like you call memories of that land, that actual place, and your familiarity with it and what it represents to you is where you draw your magic. The creatures, the spells, they’re all attached to stories. They are stories that you are telling, kind of. Your magic is the byproduct of the engine up here—” I tapped my temple. “—the engine of creation. The imagination. You’re fighting with memories.”

The disgusted look thankfully faded. What replaced it was still a bit bemused. “Funny that you would point to the head for that, but I understand.”

Didn’t know what to make of that, but also was glad to see her happy again. I explained how to play, and she seemed mostly just focused. I’d been so worried about her mental state since we left my house. Maybe I was being condescending about it, or treating her like a child. I wasn’t really sure.

Maybe her distress bothered me, and I leapt to the defense of my own comfort. Maybe her whole situation was so big and kind of hopeless feeling that it couldn’t be met any other way.

We shuffled—she shuffled with my help, because hands weren’t exactly new, but some of the finer points were—and drew.

I went first, and then she put down an Island after drawing and then hummed. “I’m beginning to see how these might work.”

“Yeah, there’s just tons of lines of play.” I grinned into my hand of cards. “I picked blue for you, cause its the cerebral one. You being a smart cookie.”

“That’s the kind of thing Pinkie would say,” she said, and I drew. I read the flavor text and smiled. I’d keep this one in hand for a second.

“You’ve told me a bit about her. Let me see. She’s the one with the bakery, right?”

Twilight hummed. I placed down the second Jackal Pup and turned one of them. She nodded, and tapped the phone a few times until the notepad app recorded her new life total.

“Rarity is the one with the boutique… Applejack’s the farm girl,” I said, watching her as she drew, played another Island, and then raised her eyebrows and unsummoned the second Jackal. “Mm. There’s another.”

“Fluttershy. She lives on the edge of the forest and takes care of animals.”

“Like a vet,” I say.

“Yes, more or less, though she’s not exactly licensed. It’s more pet sitting and advice than surgery and medicine most of the time. She’s been studying, you know. I helped her get some scholarships.”

“Part of me is glad to see that getting into higher education is a bit tricky everywhere.”

Twilight shrugged and held out a hand to signal that it was my turn. “Yes and no. The crown and the bigger universities are rather generous with scholarship. There are many more exclusive and restrictive institutions. But even they offer full scholarships. Law demands that they must offer a few specific kinds. There’s a few scholarships available for earth ponies at Celestia’s School of Magic, actually.”

“Earth ponies. The ones that can’t do magic.”

Twilight shakes her head. “No, it’s not like that.”

I played the Jackal again after dropping a third land. I turned the critter sideways, indicating an attack. “So what is it like?”

“If someone spoke another language, they would still be speaking a language. It’s the same. Some earth ponies can do lovely things with agricultural magic, and there have been many earth ponies who excelled in runelore or materials magic. Also, it’s my turn, and I’m putting down an Illusionary Servant.”

“Can I see it real quick? That’s a new one for me.” She nodded and I spun it around to read. I hummed, and then spun it back around, tapped a mountain, and put down a Lightning Bolt. “That’s three damage, which would let it survive normally with four life, but the servant poofs whenever you play a card at it. That’s why its illusory,” I add.

She stuck her tongue out at me. It was honestly pretty endearing.

We played a few games, but after the second one, something seemed to bother her. Briefly, I considered pressing for what it was, but visions of the other game we played in the car flashed across my mind. No, she’d tell me. She just needed to be ready.

It was somewhere at the start of the third game, where we were one and one, that she brought it up.

“What were the five colors, again?”

I counted off on my fingers. “White, Blue, Green, Red, Black.”

“What do those mean?”

“Well… Red, like what I’ve got. It’s about emotion, it’s freedom and action and chaos. Blue is all about perfection and getting it right, about thinking through problems and solving them. Black is about satisfaction, figuring out what you want and the most efficient way to get it, sometimes at other’s expense. Green is… it’s Chesterton’s fence. Have you heard of—no, you haven’t. Sorry. I’ll explain it later. Green is about preserving what is and letting it grow, about nature and about life and its cycles. White is about peace through order, healing and organizing and maybe being a little too controll-y sometimes.”

She frowned at me. She played, but she frowned at me. “I had a thought, and I’m not sure if I like it. I’m also not sure if it’s fair.”

“Do share,” I said, and waited for any response from the Hand That Held Every Possible Response that she had. She dropped one and I sighed before giving her a wasted goofy reaction and discarding my poor critter.

“I understand blue. I also understand why you picked it for me—it’s the one that requires more planning, where you shape what you draw and try to look ahead for the answers to every question. But it’s red that I’m stuck on.”

“Red. Freedom, passion, emotion, all that stuff. And a bit of chaos.”

She nodded. “Right, and also the color of…” she moved a few cards out of the way to expose the used Lightning Bolt. “This. The first thing you think of when you think emotion or passion is to burn things with fire.”

I blinked down at the card, pulled it up, looked at it.

On it, a wizard of some sort with a staff held their hands towards the red-hued heavens and crimson lightning came hurtling out of the sky.

“In my world, when I thought about passion or emotion, I didn’t think of fire or lightning. My first thought was of song. Singing.”

I nodded slowly. “I mean, I can see that.”

“So why is it fire?”

I noted that she kept playing through all of this. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. On one hand, I was glad to see her able to maintain her composure. On the other hand, I was a bit concerned. How could I not be? From her description, she used to live in paradise and now she was here. By comparison, it would be like Alpha Striking your way into Hell.

“Well,” I stopped and pursed my lips. “Okay. So…”

I picked up the card and flipped it to face her.

“What does it say?”

“Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to target—”

I shook my head. “No, not that. The flavor text, the part below it.”

“It says, ‘The sparkmage shrieked, calling on the rage of the storms of his youth. To his surprise, the sky responded with a fierce energy he'd never thought to see again.’ I’m guessing that’s the sparkmage there, in the picture.”

“Right. When I read that, I see this, I think that this is more than just a destructive energy. This is… It’s passion. It’s an old man remembering how long ago he was young and had energy and could do all kinds of things with magic. But now he’s old, but the world around him still needs that magic, and so he reaches out… and finds that even though the world has moved on, that there’s a part of him that is forever that young man.”

Twilight blinked. “They do say that Starswirl was always surprised that he held onto his magic and mind for as long as he did.”

Score one. “Right. When I think of lightning and fire for passion, I don’t think of destruction… but you’re right, it's there. It’s implicitly there.”

“It’s explicitly there.”

“Okay, fair. But it’s not the only or even the main focus. It’s like… It’s like the wrapping. Like the box these cards came in. It’s an arresting image but it doesn’t convey the entire idea with all of its nuance. It’s a flash. It’s a flash of lightning. Do you think lightning is beautiful?”

She furrowed her brow. “Well. I’ll be honest, I’ve not really thought of it that way, no.” She got a flier over the heads of my fast, small creatures. “When I was young, very young, I was actually a bit afraid of storms. I was until my father gave me one of his old books on meteorology. I read a lot about storms and about lightning, and then I wasn’t quite as afraid.”

“Right, you understood it. But that original fear was a, oh hell, what is it called? It’s, ah. It’s an in-between thing. Like—”

“A liminal experience, perhaps?” Twilight offered, and then sighed with a tired smile. “I’ll put the Wind Drake in front of one and take the other.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the word. Liminal. It’s between one thing and another. It’s a halfway house between awe and terror. You don’t understand it, but it moves you one way or another.”

“You link beauty and fear a little too closely.”

“Aren’t they pretty close? Don’t they tug at the same heart strings, sometimes? Canyons are beautiful because we’re so small and they are so large, but also kinda scary cause they're so deep and we're so small and we can fall down them.”

“I… I suppose they could, but it’s not my first association for a reason.”

I hummed and she sighed.

“I miss magic,” she said after a moment, turns down the way. We’d been grinding this game out for far too long. “I miss real magic. I miss the feel of it, like little pinpricks on my skin and a tingle along my horn. I miss the ease of it, I guess, but I miss the complexity of it. Magic isn’t just a toy or a tool like humans imagine it. It’s… it’s so much more than that, Jeff. It’s what connects you to the world.”

“Like the Force.”

“The what?”

“The—doesn’t matter. Go on. Please?”

“Magic is a connection. Its use is a byproduct of that. If none of us could use it, not a single pony, it would still be so valuable. Earth ponies? Can’t cast spells. But the magic that moves in them is the magic that moves in me. It’s like the ocean of potential. It’s… Remember what you said about lands? You know, about drawing your power from the impressions they left in you? To me, that’s the magic. It lives in those connections to places, yeah, but mostly to other people. To your friends, or to those you met for a just bit, just for a moment and that moment mattered. Maybe it’s that fleeting feeling like a buzz in the back of my brain whenever I know the world is Right.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to explain it. Maybe, when we get where we’re going… Well, I hope you get to see it. Also, it’s your turn.”

I glanced at her array of opposing creatures and my dwindling life point total. “And I’m probably done for,” I said, drawing a card, and then smiling. I laid it down. “Lightning Bolt. I survive one more turn—and you have to stay up and talk more, Sparkmage, so that you can tell me a little bit about the lightnings you called down in your youth.”

She smiled back. “I suppose I can handle that.”

Author's Note

Hey! New story. It's a commission. Nice. The original story by Horizon is one of my favorites.