Perception

"Thank you to all who came," Twilight spoke. "Today I would like to ask about how these friendship moments came about so that I can advance my knowledge in friendship!"

Starlight could not help but expel a sudden burst of air from her nose upon listening to Twilight's lecture, rolling her darkly toned pupils. Leaning forward over the side of an aged oak tree trunk, half her vision could barely make out the scene ahead of her.

Twilight stood on a wooden, thin park bench addressing her friends resting on the pale green grass, with her teeth glinting in the warm sunlight. Beside her on the bench, Starlight noticed a purple, baby dragon that clasping onto a clipboard with difficulty, thanks to his webbed hands and feet. A feathery quilt and paper were accompanying the clipboard, though the quilt was rolling around randomly and clumsily.

It has been a few days since Twilight vacated from the grand capital of Equestria, taking a perambulating stroll through the woody forests and natural reserves back to Ponyville. The scenic route, with all its dense jungles, provided Starlight excellent cover to be at the forefront of shadowing Twilight throughout the journey. But the more Starlight tuned into Twilight's many conversations with her friends, the more she felt that there was a spark racing across her body.

"Oh, I wished you were there to see it for yourself," Applejack said, stepping forth to Twilight's side, tilting her head upwards.

"Ah, I do need to be there," Twilight concurred, bringing her front hoof towards her body. She leaned slightly to the left, trying to bring her eyes to Applejack.

"But you weren't," Pinkie Pie replied, in her characteristic, high-pitched voice that annoyed Starlight ever since she stepped into her old town. "Unless you are suggesting..."

"Time travel?" Rarity interjected, holding her hoof up to drag her mane across the side, winking at Twilight. She rushed ahead and pushed Applejack to the side, to her surprise.

"No!" Twilight Sparkle rejected, her front hoof slamming onto the solid wooden bench, nearly causing the dragon to lose his balance. "We just need to re-enact the events that led to the matter."

Hiding her head under the safety of her tree, the rotating gear in Starlight began turning at an accelerating rate. Her head bowed down onto the shadow of the trunk, Starlight wondered whether it is plausible for her to go back in time to change the way she dealt with the six. Her mind grew a blank upon thinking about any spells that could reverse time, having effectively no idea to attack this problem. Inhaling deeply, she sighed out loud, believing that her potential lead was bringing her to a dead end.

"Who is that?" Pinkie Pie asked, her sensitive ears having picked up something like a faint whisper in the wind.

Starlight froze, her eyeball panning around to her immediate left and right only to find a vast grass plain ahead.

"I'm pretty sure I heard somepony behind that bush over there," Pinkie Pie continued, her sharp vision fixated on a tree behind them.

Starlight could not risk turning her head around the sides of the tree. For all she knew, they were right on her tail. She leaned right onto the rough surface of the tree bark and crossed her hooves. She held her breath, the imaginary, sensory clock in her mind seemingly ticking over at a microscopic rate.

"Oh Pinkie, you were just paranoid," Rainbow Dash reassured her, quickly flying over and placing her hoof onto Pinkie's back, grinning. "Who would sneak up on us? Starlight?"

Starlight's eyebrows shot up, her head jerking back, only to knock into the robust surface of the trunk causing brittle, worn pieces of overgrown chips of wood to drop off, dirtying Starlight's mane. Starlight tried to seek out as much information from the situation as possible, but she could only hear fits of laughter coming from the group.

"STARLIGHT! What are you doing here?" Pinkie Pie declared loudly.

Starlight slowly rotated her eyeballs to her left and right, half-expecting to be caught red-handed in the act of spying on them by Pinkie Pie. But her cautiousness was to be unfounded.

"AHA, just kidding!" Pinkie Pie chuckled, collapsing onto the ground with a thud. "You all should have seen the look on your faces!"

Starlight slid onto the ground like a slithering snake, using the tall grass as a cover.

"PINKIE!" Twilight exclaimed, furious that she got fooled into thinking Starlight was sneaking around. She was genuinely readying her nerves for another confrontation with her, having silently followed Pinkie Pie to the apparent hiding place of Starlight with her horn glowing and warming up.

Careful to limit the ruffling sound of the tall grass being displaced, she tilted her head to the side, finding that the group was directed to the wrong tree just tens of metres away from her current position. Beads of cold sweat dripped down Starlight's face. She had to remain prone until the group left, otherwise there was still a chance that she may be uncovered.

"You know, come everypony, we should head for Sweet Apple Acres to recreate the scene," Twilight said as calmly as she possibly could after Pinkie's baseless sensing of the region. Light was still emerging from the surface of her horn as the group left the scene. The thought of having Starlight creeping up on herself unexpectedly as Pinkie proposed was scary to Twilight's brain.

The group galloped off into the horizon, finally allowing Starlight to have some breathing room. Her craned neck collapsed onto the grass, exhausted, causing her to stare up in the sky and wonder.

"Let's think about this deeply," Starlight said to herself, trying to shift her body position to make her more comfortable on the ground. If she could not time travel in this universe, can she travel to another one?

Starlight closed her eyes, thinking hard while trying to shield her vision from the glaring sun above. Travelling to the past in this timeline would lead to another timeline based on what she did in her time travel escapade. That means the decisions that every pony made throughout her timeline made her timeline unique. Hence, there must be another timeline with every single unique combination of decisions made by each and every pony. Changing the past in her timeline would just lead to another timeline.

The biggest problem remained ingrained on Starlight's perplexed mind. How can she time travel?

Starlight pondered who could possibly be so skilled in their magic study to be able to possess the capability to travel back in time, putting both of her front hooves on her forehead. Only the greatest, the most successful magician she knew could potentially fit the bill. A name popped up in her mind, having appeared as the author of so many of the spell books she had read.

The sight of the building's architecture had never ceased to amaze Starlight.

Starlight walked up onto ornate, smooth marble steps with a spring in her step. She pulled open the gold-glided door handle of the main entrance to reveal a treasure trove of knowledge. It was as crowded as she was last present at this place, with many ponies wandering around the towering bookshelves, or climbing up the attached bookshelf ladders to pick up the volumes they wanted, or have had their eyes glued to the books that they were reading. Trotting along slowly into the main hallway, she could not resist admiring the beauty of the place in complete and utter silence. Her eyes feasted at the grandeur sight.

At least, until her eyes inadvertently caught a glimpse of the self-help section that catalogued all the books in the library in effectively every way in which they can be classified. She made a beeline for the section, before flipping through a heavily worn book catalogue. After turning the pages of the book back and forth, Starlight found a singular book matching what she had in her mind, which prompted her to head off for the book.

Navigating along countless, straight aisles of bookshelves, being careful not to cause any wooden boards to creak by stepping lightly, Starlight found the shelf that it was located on. She climbed up the bookshelf ladder to the very top level of the shelf to find a dusty book marked red on its spine, with no library return slip.

She carried the thickly bound book entitled "The Glossary and History of Starswirl's Spells" down to the ground, glancing around to find a suitable location to devour its contents.

Lying back on a soft sofa designed for casual readers, she read the book line by line, ensuring that she did not miss out anything essential. The language used in the book was exceptionally scientific in nature, enabling Starlight's mind to buckle under the complexity of the content as she continued to painstakingly read every little bit of writing.

Suddenly, a spark flashed into her thought process, opening her mind into the knowledge preached within, like a flash of inspiration. She smiled at her revelation as her eyes stopped moving from left to right, revealing her teeth to the inanimate object she held.

The glossary revealed the reports that Starswirl wrote as he worked on the possibility of time travel in a nutshell. He faithfully describes the existence of a spell that would bring the user into the past for only a short period of time, most likely sufficient to change one juncture in history, and return to the new present.

Starswirl described that if he were to return back to the original present from which he came, he must ensure that the decisions ponies made between the past and the present must be the same. Stopping for a moment, Starlight breathed a sigh of relief; this was something that Starlight failed to take into consideration, until now. Time travel was indeed dangerous if one did not think it through thoroughly.

Continuing, he noted that, if he were to travel back in time without influencing history, a spell must be needed to fix the branch of decisions attuned to the present he came from. This should provide a safety net should things go awry.

Starlight was unaware that her mouth was wide open in amazement as she read through the entire salient section until now. She brought her hooves up to massage her face slightly, trying to alleviate the tension in her jaw muscles.

"Hold on, where are the details for the casting of the spells?" Starlight questioned herself, going back to the start of the section and reading it yet again, wondering whether she missed that part accidentally. After triple checking, she realised that she had already read everything on the subject the book had to offer. With her two hooves supporting her head, Starlight entered a staring competition with the lifeless book, trying to think about where the details of these spells could be archived at.

"Wait...how about the archives of the library?" Starlight wondered silently to herself, pushing herself out of the sofa. She tossed the volume into the book return cart at the side of the reading corner, only to discover how dirty her hooves were after reading that ancient journal. She rubbed her hooves with each other to get rid of the dirt from her hooves before heading to the information counter.

"Sorry, do you know where is the library archives?" Starlight asked the bespectacled librarian at the counter, buried in work and in books, apparently trying to reorganise the library through a new classification code system.

"Oh, it's past that corridor, but you are not allowed to enter the archives section," the librarian said, pointing to the side of the library with her front hoof while yawning.

"I am not?" Starlight thought instinctively, believing that the librarian would never have informed her of the location of the archives section of the library.

After thanking the librarian for exposing the location of the so-called prohibited section of the library, Starlight crept around the back of bookshelves, ensuring that even her shadow was not exposed to the hardworking librarians roaming around the compound. Taking a roundabout route to the corridor, she dashed straight for a pillar that lined the corridor to the archives as gingerly and silently as she could.

Peeking from the side of the elaborately carved pillar, she saw a chained, metallic gate bolted down with a solid lock with a rosette and whirling symbol attached onto the side of the entrance. Two heavily armoured guards stood motionless and attentive to any detail directly in front of them, their eyes still and unwavering.

Leaning her body weight onto the pillar, she began concentrating her energies into her horn to vanish, reappearing behind the separating wall to break an entry into the archives.

Starlight, upon looking at the interior, shook her head profusely at the sight. The archives were not what Starlight had expected. Industrial metal racks filled the room in neat columns, but those was the only objects in the section that could be described as neat. Scrolls were clumsily placed on and around the metal racks, almost as if they were asking to be knocked down onto the carpet. Books were thrown haphazardly on the ground, hoping for a poor pony to trip over it.

The centre of the section stood a lavish lectern that appeared to dominate the entire room. A book stood fixed in place, and seemingly in time on the lectern. The sun's rays poured in from the window, illuminating the book on the lectern. Starlight stepped forward, occasionally turning her back to ensure that the guards' attention were not aroused to the lectern. Opening the dusty manuscript, the book described the colour identification tag on the scroll that Starlight wanted.

Starlight rushed around frantically. Inspecting the metal racks and ancient inscriptions labelling them, she could make no sense of the hieroglyphics that must have been used during the time when Starswirl was active. But the colour coded tags were simple and easy to comprehend, even for the most intellectually dim pony.

Starlight's eyes raced around the layers upon layers of scrolls around the section of the library, until a cyan-red tag alerted Starlight to drop everything she was doing. Her hooves reached out to pull out the scroll, while using her magic to levitate the layers of scrolls above in place until she was done. Grabbing a random open scroll from the carpet floor, she quietly rolled it up and slid it into the former place of the scroll she needed for her plans. After releasing the magical lock on the scrolls above, no sound was emitted from the dangerous pile to garner the attention of the guards outside.

Clasping the scroll tightly in her hooves, she pictured the scene of being at the public park facing the library in her imagination. Her horn shimmered with light, despite being outshone by the radiant orb above, bringing her to safety outside of the library compound, at her old makeshift study corner.

Starlight cracked open the historical scroll to discover the enchanting knowledge she gleaned from it, her eyes wet at the brilliance of Starswirl's intellect. She swiftly opened her travel pack to obtain a quilt to scribble onto the crumpled and yellowing scroll, writing a few additions here and there.

Starlight beamed at the moldy scroll she held high up in the air, knowing that it was the ticket to enact the greatest possible revenge on her nemesis. She stared at the imperfections of the scroll, the tears at the sides of the parchment and the rough scribbles she made on the scroll itself, taking in every possible detail. Without a moment of hesitation, she kissed the scroll, before choking at the bitter taste of olden paper she tasted at the edge of her dry lips.

But the spell was not complete for its function.