Author's Note
The Storm Guard were either my first or second favourite thing out of the movie, the other being Princess Skystar who I found adorable.
Anyway, stupid story. And without any humans! What has happened to me?
Thought experiment
Theo, a Storm Guard, was patrolling.
The capital had fallen without anything more than token resistance. Even those monarchs they’d been warned about had been dealt with without too much fuss. Barely a whimper, in fact. And beyond that it had just been a question of rolling up what few pockets of holdouts had managed to organise themselves, which wasn’t a whole lot.
That’s what preparation and overwhelming surprise can achieve. That’s what planning for a very specific adversary and a very specific style opposition can do for you. That’s what you get for partying when you should be building higher walls and gazing nervously at the savage and dangerous world beyond.
Theo assumed there was a middle ground, but it wasn’t his job to find it. It was his job to patrol, at least until things progressed and the next phase of the King’s plan could be enacted. Whatever that was. Presumably something grandiose and important. Theo was quite curious to see what it might turn out to be.
Commander Tempest was off chasing down that last, errant princess, the one that had managed to slip away from the initial attack and who was presently holding things up in her absence.
Given the Commander’s track record it was more a matter of when and not if she would succeed. All that was left for the Storm Guard to do really was to sit tight, keep an eye on things and wait for her to get back.
Frankly, the whole episode had been a bit of an anticlimax. Theo and his cohorts had gone in expecting if not stiff resistance at least a little bit of a fight, only to find an absence of anything even the least bit threatening.
Disappointing, he supposed, but better than the alternative. Any one you could walk away from.
A bunch of balloons that had managed to escape the attack unmolested caught his eye and he ambled over, chuckling to himself as he snipped the strings and let them loose. That never got old.
Balloons indeed.
Continuing on his route Theo spotted his friend, standing guard over a group of cowed, cowering ponies and so Theo wandered over. Taking five minutes for a little chat wouldn’t be the end of the world, after all, and the Commander wasn’t around to yell at him.
Scary lady. No sense of humour.
His friend saw him approach and gave a nod of greeting which Theo met with a grunt, as was custom. The ponies continued to cower and quiver, failing to understand the subtle nuance of this communication.
Then, still speaking in grunts, they had the following conversation:
“I say Quinten, I have something I’d like you to consider,” said Theo.
“What’s that?” Quinten asked.
“Imagine this: there is a device that is capable of transporting you from one place to another place and doing so technologically and not magically, for the sake of argument.”
This was something that Theo had been going over in his head for most of the day, post fighting.
Patrolling an utterly pacified city was tedious, and Theo was more than capable of keeping his eyes peeled for malcontents while entertaining whimsical scenarios at the same time. He was keen to hear what Quinten’s thoughts on the subject might be.
“There may be some intersect between those two that we’re unaware of,” said Quinten.
“There may indeed but that is beyond the parameters of the hypothetical so it’s not something you need to consider. You just need to imagine a device that is capable of taking you from one place to another place without moving you through the space between,” said Theo.
“Teleportation, then.”
“In a word, yes.”
Quinten took a second to visualise this.
“Okay, I’m imagining it. Now what?”
Setting his spear and shield aside a moment the better to gesticulate, Theo held his hands up to create a canvas on which to paint with his imagination brush.
“Now, consider the following: it transpires that the actual method of operation for this device - instead of moving you from here to there - is that it creates an absolutely perfect copy of you at your chosen destination,” said Theo.
“A copy?”
“Yes. A flawless copy, identical down to the smallest details, utterly impossible to differentiate from the original. Totally perfect. And with a continuance of consciousness. As far as the copy is concerned it stepped into one place and stepped out someplace else. Picturing that?”
“Yes. And what happens to the original?” Quinten asked.
One of the ponies - seeing this odd, grunting conversation and not understanding anything of what was going on - tried to sneak away only to be caught by Quinten and given a firm but non-wounding poke from a spear. That settled the rest of them down.
“Destroyed,” Theo said, once that was done with. Quinten took a second longer to glare the ponies into deeper submission before turning back to his friend.
“Destroyed?” He asked, as though he hadn’t heard properly. Theo nodded.
“A function of the machine. Assume that in order to create this perfect copy at the destination the destruction is required, just hypothetically. Point is, that’s the situation. You step in, and another version of you - functionally identical, not having missed even a second of consciousness - steps out the other end, only it is a copy and the old you no longer exists. Got this?” Theo asked.
Quinten unpicked what Theo had said and then bobbed his head. Not a nod, a bob. Different.
“Got it,” he said.
Having set it all up Theo now lowered his hands for the denouement.
“So here’s the question Quentin: this perfect copy, is it still you?”
“Yes,” said Quentin without a moment’s hesitation.
Theo was profoundly glad that he was wearing the standard-issue Storm Guard mask. It did a good job of hiding his disappointment.
“Oh. That was quick,” he said, broad shoulders slumping.
“I didn’t really see the point in dwelling on it. If it’s exactly like me then who cares? I’m sure I had stuff to be doing wherever it was I ended up. Why else would I be going there?”
Quinten was a simple Storm Guard. Theo should really have remembered that.
“So you’re not at all worried about the original having been destroyed? About being different?” Theo asked. Quinten shrugged.
“You said it was a perfect copy, didn’t you? And there was continuation. Up until the point I was told how the machine worked I wouldn’t even know. And like I said, I’m sure I would have stuff that needed doing. I’m a busy guy.”
Unwilling to write this conversation off, Theo grasped at straws.
“Alright. So what about if the machine didn’t work properly one time and made a copy without destroying the original?” He asked.
“I thought you said that it needed to do that to work,” Quinten said, infuriatingly. Theo let out a particularly disgruntled grunt that made the ponies flinch in fright.
“Just imagine that this one time that didn’t happen. Hypothetically.”
“Then there would be two of me. And wait, is it one of the copies that’s trying to teleport, or the original original? This is getting confusing,” Quinten said, scratching his head with his shield.
“Just the original. Imagine that it’s the first time you’re ever using it and it functions oddly and just copies you,” Theo said.
“Then there would be two of me,” Quinten said, flatly.
This was not working out the way Theo had hoped at all. In his head this would have been rich and fertile philosophical ground. He would have got Quinten’s mind going, sown the seeds of a deeper and more rewarding discussion later.
Instead, just this.
He knew he should have waited until he’d bumped into Leopold. Leopold could talk bollocks with the best of them.
Still unwilling to write the conversation off as a wasted effort, Theo decided instead to jacknife into something else entirely in the vain hope of catching Quinten off-guard.
“Okay, but what about a broom that has its handle replaced, then later its bristles, then later still the whole head. None of its component parts are the parts that they were when the broom first came into your possession. Is that still the same broom?”
“Yes.”
Hopeless. Completely hopeless. Theo picked up his spear and shield again.
“You know Quinten, typically in these sorts of discussions someone supplies reasons for their decisions. It’s rather the point of the exercise,” he said. Quinten shrugged again.
“Reason wilts before force. The most articulate argument in the world isn’t much use when the one making it is being thrown off a cliff and whoever is left standing at the end is the one who gets to tell everyone else what’s right and what’s wrong.”
“My, you’re a minion through-and-through aren’t you, Quinten?”
Quinten stood a little straighter, a little prouder.
“Of course. I come from a long line of minions, each minionier than the last. My father was a minion, his father was a minion before him and so on back down the line. Isn’t your family the same?”
“My parents are bakers, actually,” said Theo.
“Bakers?”
“Hey, don’t think I don’t hear the condescension in your voice there. Dinky little magic-proof shields and sharp sticks are all well and good, Quinten, but they’re not much use if the minions wielding them are insensible with hunger, you know?” Theo said, not-at-all defensively.
“I suppose that’s true.”
“You suppose? Logistics, Quinten! It’s vital! Amateurs study tactics. Veteran study strategy Professionals study logistics!”
“Yes yes, you’ve made your point,” Quinten grumbled. His ear then twitched. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
Theo did indeed hear that. HIs ear twitched as well and the two Storm Guard turned as one, away from the prisoners.
“It’s coming from the gate and lower courtyard. What is that?” Theo asked.
They both listened. Results were inconclusive. Could have been anything, really.
“Probably nothing. You guard them, I’ll go check,” said Theo, who did just that.
There followed ruckus, nadir and the thorough humiliation of the Storm Guard at the technicolour hooves and various other appendages of a depressingly small handful of ruffians. Frankly, the less said about it the better.
Later, disarmed and being overseen by skypirates and even some freshly-freed ponies incongruously wielding swords held in their mouths, the Storm Guard sat in several huddles throughout Canterlot.
Rumour was the King had been petrified and broken into bits. How that was supposed to have happened was unclear, but stranger things had happened. It was suspected to be related to that strange incident with the sun going up and down more times than it should have done not that long ago, along with all the explosions from up in the castle. None of it had sounded good.
Time would tell how this unfortunate situation would resolve itself.
“I say Quentin, what does your ‘might makes right’ ethos have to say about being on the receiving end of a dragon being used as a living weapon?” Theo asked under his breath, holding his hands up before him as one of the guarding ponies growled and brandished their sword.
How effective it would be held in the teeth was also unclear, but not something that Theo wanted to investigate.
“It says shut up, Quinten grumbled.
“That’s fascinating.”
