I did not think this through
The shadow of Twilight's figure quickly slid over the shiny crystal walls, as the sound of the mare's hooves resonated in the hallway. Light from the mid-afternoon Sun shone in from the windows, the polished surface of the castle almost blinding when looked at from the wrong angle. Twilight reached an intersection between corridors, and looked around, making sure she was alone. With a sigh of relief, she turned and began to head down the corridor to her left.
"Hi Twilight," Starlight greeted her.
Twilight jumped back, startled. She would have screamed too, but she lacked any mouth with which to do so at the time.
"Uh, Twilight?" Starlight asked, walking towards the alicorn, now a semi-quivering mass on the ground, hooves covering part of her face. "Is everything alright?"
Shifting back to what at least looked like a sitting position, and keeping her hooves over where her mouth should have been, Twilight looked around for a moment, then nodded affirmatively.
"Are you sure?"
Twilight nodded again.
"Are you suuuuuuure?" Starlight asked again, tilting her head.
The alicorn nodded once more, more vigorously.
Starlight shrugged. "Oh well. Have fun with Rainbow tonight." She walked away in the direction Twilight had come from, taking a right turn at the end of the corridor.
Twilight grimaced at the mention of the pegasus, as far as her condition allowed her to at least, then got back to her hooves and wiped her brow with a hoof, beginning to walk forward again.
"Ah-ha!" Starlight exclaimed, pointing a hoof at Twilight from right in front of her.
The alicorn fell back in shock. Once more, she would have vocalised her surprise had she been allowed to.
Starlight walked back up to her, staring down and rubbing her chin with a hoof. "Huh." She offered a leg to Twilight. "Let me guess, poison joke?"
Twilight nodded, looking to the side, grabbing Starlight's leg to pull herself up.
"I don't know why you decided to run those experiments. Well, at least it's not hard to cure. Need me to lend a hoof?" Starlight asked, as she studied Twilight's face.
Twilight stared to the side, bringing a hoof to her face to cough through her nose.
"Twilight?" asked Starlight, circling around the alicorn to be face to face with her again. "Is there something else?"
The alicorn just looked to the ground, and had she had a tongue she would have likely been biting it slightly in that moment.
Starlight gave a flat expression. "Let me guess, again. You supercharged it, or combined it with magic, or altered the composition, or whatever, and it blew up in your face. How right am I?"
Twilight's silence, albeit a forced one, and the way she suddenly appeared very interested in her own reflection on the floor, told Starlight the answer was 'very'.
The unicorn sighed. "And you've already tried the normal cure, and it didn't work, right?"
Twilight gave the tiniest, most imperceptible nod with her neck.
Starlight sighed again. "I did tell you running experiments on poison joke while Zecora was away was a bad idea, did I not?" She brought a hoof to her temple. "At least tell me it's not permanent."
Twilight snapped back towards her, frantically nodding.
For the third time, Starlight sighed, though in relief. "Are you sure?"
Twilight nodded again.
"Well, guess all you need to do is wait. No kissing with Dash tonight for you I guess," Starlight joked. "Guess that's why it went for your mouth this time."
Twilight gave the mouthless equivalent of a nervous, dismissive laugh.
Starlight, who had begun to walk away, turned back and lifted an eyebrow. "Twilight?"
The alicorn stared back, as a blush slowly spread across her face.
Starlight walked towards her. "Is there something else you aren't telling me?"
Twilight's blush deepened, and she shook her head, denying anything of the sort.
Starlight pressed on, unaffected by the alicorn's attempt at hiding the truth that was plainly visible across her face. "What is it? It can't be just not being able to have dinner with her, I know it'll be awkward but..." Thinking back to what she knew about the upcoming meeting between the two, she tried to recall exactly what Twilight had written down, and a flash of realisation passed through her mind. The unicorn blinked. "Huh. So that's what that thing on the calendar actually meant."
Twilight was intent in trying to set a new record for how much blood could fit in a pony's face before they passed out.
Starlight coughed. "Well, this is awkward. Can't you just tell her that-"
Twilight pointed a hoof to her non-mouth, her eyes enough to convey the 'seriously' she would have spoken at that moment.
"Okay, maybe 'tell' was not the right word. But can't you just, I don't know, write her about it? Why does it have to be today?"
Twilight held up her hooves in front of herself, trying to mime something as she waved them around. She pointed at herself, then made and arc towards the ceiling, then shook her hooves together, and moved them back and forth. One of them then drew a circle in mid-air, and then pointed straight to the ground.
Starlight just stared at her. Tilting her head to the side, she tried to guess, "You... and Rainbow Dash... paddling... camping to go see the Moon?"
Twilight smacked her hoof against her face, looking disappointed, and mildly annoyed, but not surprised.
"Why don't you just use magic?"
The alicorn tapped her horn with her hoof a couple of times.
"Oh, so it did take away that too. Hold on a second." Starlight disappeared in a flash of magic, then reappeared a moment later, quill and parchment held in her telekinesis. "Here you go," she said, levitating the objects forward.
Twilight stared at her, then tapped her horn again.
"Oh. Right." The unicorn moved the quill to where Twilight's mouth should have been, then blinked and blushed slightly. "Sorry. Huh... How's your hoof-writing?"
Twilight snatched the quill away and brought her hoof towards the piece of parchment, held in front of her by Starlight's magic, where she began to scribble something as best as she could.
Once the alicorn had finished writing, Starlight brought the scroll up to her own face. Squinting, she cocked her neck to a side, then said, "Sorry, Twilight, I can't understand any of this."
The way Twilight's eyes and face shot to look towards the sky was more than indicative enough of the groan she would have launched.
Starlight tapped her chin, then lit up. "Let's try this," she said, as she created a band of magical energy and wrapped it around Twilight's head, slipping the quill underneath it so that it was held on the side of her cheek. Turning the scroll around, she moved it towards Twilight once more.
With some minor struggle, the alicorn began to write down on the parchment, then pulled her neck back and nodded.
Starlight turned the scroll back towards herself, and began to read it, with some difficulty. "Oh! You promised her it would be today, and you've been waiting for a lot of time." She stared at Twilight, munching on her lip. "Honestly, Twilight, I get it, but this is the kind of situation where something unexpected comes up and you just have to cancel your plans. It happens with me and Trixie too from time to time, I'm sure Rainbow will understand."
Twilight shook her head, then motioned for the scroll to come back to her.
Starlight did as instructed, and once the alicorn had finished writing she read what she had to say. "You don't think Rainbow should have to wait, it was your mistake, and you want to fix things." She looked at Twilight, then sighed. "Well, okay, I get it. I'll lend you a hoof, okay?"
Twilight nodded, happily smiling. Insofar as her limited facial expressiveness allowed her to.
"Okay, now to get to your laboratory..."
Twilight's eyes shot open, and she began to violently shake her head, but Starlight was too focused on preparing the teleportation spell to notice her. A couple of seconds later, the two disappeared in a flash of light, to reappear several metres below in a room under the castle. The alicorn smacked a hoof against her forehead, soundlessly groaning, as Starlight began to cough slightly on the thin blue mist permeating the room. Sat on a table, a broken flask containing some blue dust saw some of the vapour still rising from its insides, charred sheets of papers around it and signs of a small explosion below it.
Taking a few steps in the other's direction, trying to wave away the mist with her wings, Starlight groaned, "You could have told me it was still here!"
Twilight stared at her, angrily.
Wiping her brow with a wing, Starlight began to reply, then stopped, as her eyes fixated on her new pair of appendages.
Twilight tilted her head to the side.
Starlight kept staring at her wings, twirling around to get a better look at them. Her eyes were wide and starry, her breath short and coming in fast, ragged bursts, like a panting dog.
Having no other option to draw her attention, Twilight walked up to the winged unicorn and tapped her on the shoulder.
Starlight looked back to the alicorn, though her gaze still drifted to her own back. "Yes, Twilight?" she asked, sounding rather distracted.
Twilight shook Starlight, using her other hoof to point at a panel on the wall.
"Oh?" Starlight followed the direction of the alicorn's hoof, clearly not having paid attention to it before. "Oh, yeah, the air depurator, sure." A flash of her horn, and the machine began to buzz, pulling the laboratory's air into its piping system through the grates around the walls and replacing it with clean air from outside. Then, Starlight went back to looking at her wings. "Twilight, I..." she spoke in an almost dreamy tone.
Twilight rolled her eyes.
Looking back and forth between the two of them, the winged unicorn frowned, and stepped forward to stand at Twilight's side. "Are mine smaller?" she asked, comparing the size. Just as she was doing so, her own wings twitched, and grew to equal Twilight's in size. She stood up, excited. "Oh, oh look, Twilight! Do you think they work?"
Her eyelids covering half of her eyes, Twilight's stare was as emotional as the lab equipment around her, and far more threatening.
Starlight gave a few experimental flaps, lifting herself off the ground. "They do!" she gushed.
Twilight began to walk forward towards the other, but before she could pull her back down her wings had a new growth spurt, now around the size of Celestia's.
Starlight's mouth widened in a gasp, her eyes pools of her namesake. "Oh- Oh my, Twilight, I- I need to try these out, I mean- I- Outside, just for a moment, I-" Cutting of her stream of incoherent excitement, she teleported the two out of the room and on the ground just outside the castle. Going higher in the air, she spun around, looking over herself with fluster and admiration. Another growth spurt, and another gasp. The unicorn flew higher and higher, now near the top of Twilight's castle. "Twilight, this... This is amazing!"
Staring at the large pair of wings with a unicorn attached to them, Twilight discovered it was possible to growl through her nose.
Starlight looked back down. "Oh, sorry Twilight. I'm coming, just... Uh, Twilight? How do you, uh, go down, with wings?"
The alicorn planted a hoof on her face once again.
"Twilight?" Starlight yelled, almost terrified, as her wings magically grew once more, each now longer than Celestia's full wingspan by a fair margin. "Twilight!" she yelled again, as the unceasing beating of her new appendages carried her higher and higher, and her attempts to use magic proved futile, her horn suddenly powerless. "Somepony help!" she finally screamed, and anything else she might have said after that was lost. She kept soaring skywards, slowly disappearing from view, safe for the occasional additional growth spurt in her wings making her a little easier to spot. Still, as Twilight walked back into her own castle, she was nothing more than a small dot in the sky, a few curious ponies still staring towards her.
The heavy golden doors shut behind Twilight with a thud, and the alicorn began to quietly, defeatedly walk to her library. Starlight had not helped, but at least the laboratory was usable now. She needed to install a way to activate the depurator without magic, once things settled down again. And at least she didn't need to be stealthy any longer, now that the unicorn was not there anymore and Spike was still-
"Oh, hi Twilight," Spike greeted her, walking down the corridor. "Gabby had something come up so she left and I came back early."
Twilight apathetically stared ahead, too done with existence in its entirety to bother having a reaction. The universe had decided to play games on her, but it would not have its fun. She would not give it the satisfaction.
"Twilight?" Spike asked, getting closer. "What's going on with your face?"
Twilight sat, and began to wave her hooves. She vaguely described a flower's shape in the air, then pushed outwards to mime an explosion. She pointed down, to where her laboratory was, then tapped her horn a couple of times, scrunching up her face in concentration to illustrate her lack of magic.
Spike thoughtfully rubbed his chin with his claws. "Ah... I did not get anything of that, sorry," he said, shrugging.
The alicorn took deep breaths. She didn't need Spike, anyway. She was planning to solve things on her own. She dismissively waved a hoof, then began to walk away.
Spike looked at her, then shrugged again and walked in the opposite direction, heading for a stroll in town. At the door, however, he stopped, something suddenly occurring to him. "Oh, Twilight?" he called, turning around.
Twilight turned back towards him.
"I met Rainbow on my way here, she said she'll be here in half an hour. Though I guess your dinner with her might have some problems now that you're like this. Speaking of that, are you alright? You forgot to write down the 'with' on the calendar. Oh well, I guess now isn't the time to eat anyway, she'll help you fix that thing in the meantime. Well, see you!" He waved, and walked through the doors.
The universe would have its fun, and she was powerless to stop it. Her hooves rushing, her heart pounding, she began to run through the crystal corridors. And as she crashed into a wall after slipping, she pondered how it would likely take her hundreds of tries before she learned how to properly run on the pavements of her home. It did wonders for slowing down intruders though. Still, as she reached the doors to her library, she was confident she'd gotten there faster than if she'd simply walked. Now she just needed to go through the Botany, Magic, and Medicine sections of her library, find a cure for a never seen before extract of poison joke, go to her lab, synthesize it and use it on herself, all without magic, then rush at the door to welcome Rainbow, all of which was perfectly doable in the twenty-something minutes she had left, and there was no way anything was going to go-
"Hello there, Twilight," Rainbow Dash greeted her from atop a desk as the alicorn entered the library, her body splayed over piles of books and her tail swishing from side to side. With a grin, she added, "I know I said it would be tonight, but why wait, right? Lock the doors, let's get to it right here."
One day, she would go to Discord, in his backwards dimension of mayhem, and have a nice chat about the forces that move reality. And then she would politely ask to meet whoever is responsible for ruling creation and pulling its strings, whoever or whatever it is that watches over the cosmos and the mechanisms of physics. And once the draconequus had taken her there, to whichever overdimensional layer those forces reside in, whenever and wherever that might be, she would walk towards them, in any way a purely conceptual being can possibly walk towards another at least, and respectfully bow before them, thanking them for their careful balancing of laws and thoughts that allows reality to function.
And then she would slap them. Because it would feel good, and because eternal damnation was no different from what she was living, so at least she would know what she'd done to earn such suffering.
After remaining frozen in the doorway for a few seconds, Twilight did the only logical thing she could think of. She walked back, shut the door, and began to run away, hooves slipping and sliding on the crystal floor. She rounded a corner, just above the staircase, and took a moment to catch her breath, panting through her nose.
"Playing hard to get, huh?" Rainbow Dash said, floating just above Twilight with a smirk on her lips.
Horrifically startled by the pegasus, who had clearly been taking lessons from Pinkie, Twilight jumped back, her hooves and wings madly flailing around, and began to tumble down the stairs. Her body rolled down the steps, at a thankfully not insignificant speed, and she landed on her back at the bottom of the flight, a second one to her right, her vision waving and stars dancing in front of her eyes.
From above her, to her left, came Rainbow Dash's voice, "Hold still, Twi. I didn't take you for one to do this stuff in a corridor, but if you insist."
Seeing no better way out, Twilight began to roll to her right, ungracefully descending another flight of stairs. She arrived at the bottom, her legs below her this time, and shakily got to her hooves, beginning to gallop away towards the entrance to her laboratory's stairs. At one point, she looked back, and noticing the lack of any blue pegasus on her tail she gave as much of a sigh as she could with only her nose, then turned her head back forward.
"So why exactly are we running?" Rainbow asked from in front of her, casually keeping up with the alicorn's pace while flying backwards.
Twilight tripped on her own tail, and her body was helplessly carried forward, crashing into the pegasus' and sending the both of them rolling on the floor. After a few seconds of motion, the indistinct mass of limbs and colour came to a halt, and Twilight found herself sitting above the other, staring right down between Rainbow's hind legs.
"Well, what are you waiting fo-"
The alicorn jumped back, her wings maniacally flapping to take her as far away from the rainbow-maned mare as possible, in a desperate attempt to emulate Starlight's recent fate. She crashed into a broom closet, something the existence of which she had not even been aware of inside her castle, and found herself sitting on the ground inside it, a bucket on her head and a cloth around her face, various mops and brooms lying on the ground around her. Light returned to her, along with the horrific sight of Rainbow Dash lifting the bucket off of her head, smirking.
"Inside here, then?" the pegasus asked, licking her lips. "Come on, get that thing off and let's get to it," she added, moving a hoof towards the cloth concealing Twilight's mouth, or lack thereof.
Eyes frantically darting around, Twilight spotted the door leading to her laboratory, just a few metres away behind Rainbow Dash. In a last ditch effort to find a solution to her situation, she gave a sudden burst of motion with her wings, pushing herself forward and knocking down the pegasus, then started to run to the door.
"So it's a challenge then," Rainbow playfully hissed from her position on the ground, before jerking back up and immediately flying towards Twilight in a tackle.
The alicorn only had time to open the door and turn back, then the impact happened. The two bodies practically flew down the stairs, without even touching the steps, and crushed into the table just in front of the laboratory's entrance, a cloud of blue dust lifting around them as the broken flask fell to the ground and shattered.
Standing over Twilight, who laid on her back on the floor, the flipped over table on her right, Rainbow looked down. "Twilight?" she asked, noticing the other's lack of a mouth.
Twilight was about to explain the situation, or more precisely try to mime it, when she felt something poking her belly and looked forward, diverting her gaze from Rainbow's face, as her own took on a deep crimson colour.
The pegasus followed the other's gaze, and her breath caught in her throat for a moment. Looking briefly around her surroundings, and noticing the blue dust covering the floor, she said, "Let me guess. Poison joke?"
Twilight quickly nodded, eyes still transfixed on the space between the other's legs.
Rainbow looked back down at Twilight, and brought a hoof to her face, gently stroking her. "Oh, Twilight. You could have just said..." She paused. "Well, okay, not said, but I wouldn't have been mad if you'd just explained."
Twilight blushed, embarrassed.
"Although," Rainbow added with a mischievous grin, repositioning herself. "You do technically owe me something to make it up. So how about we do some research on this?" she asked, giving a nod towards the effects the plant had had on her.
Twilight gulped, as much of a gulp as a mouthless pony could give. But she did not object.
Rainbow chuckled, and aligned herself. She looked to her right for a moment, and flipped a wing, closing the door with a gust of wind. Then she looked back to Twilight, a smile on her face, and whispered, "Ready?"
And for the first time since it had happened to her, in contrast to all her predictions, Twilight, for the entire length of that evening and subsequent night, was incredibly glad that she lacked a mouth, as the whole castle and much of the city would have heard her otherwise.
