I, Me

It’s about 3 p.m., and Ponyville is active and vibrant—as it is customary. From the many cheerful creatures in the little town, a group of six best friends stand out—they are the town heroes, the Elements of Harmony, after all. They are gathered in a peaceful park, alongside some other crowds of ponies, to enjoy a casual picnic.

“Twilight! Twilight! Look at what I can do,” said the Element of Laughter. She, then, proceeds to reach for a bottle of ice cream, just so she can dip her hayburger into it.

Twilight Sparkle, relishing on the contrast her friends presented to her personality, assumes the role of the straight man, “You just ruined your hayburger by dipping it into ice cream. What is so special about that, Pinkie?”

“Oh, Twilight, Twilight,” Pinkie says with a mock-condescending tone to her voice, while gesturing a friendly signal of disapproval with her head. “You’re soooo smart, but can’t even appreciate good alchemy? Pfft,” she teased in the same tone, just to raise her voice suddenly and go into an overly-enthusiastic tirade about her little experiment. “You see, dummy, I’ve just created a brand-new taste by combining sweet and non-sweet food! An act of alchemical engineering of the highest degree! I might as well turn water into gold.”

“Well, actually,” Twilight said, while rolling her eyes—enacting an overall exaggerated pantomime. “That wouldn’t even be considered alchemy, since that is an outdated, vague term,” she chuckled, trying her hardest to keep a straight face, “What you might be attempting to refer to is ‘chemistry,’ more specifically food engineering, not alchemy,” she explained, mockingly. “Oh, and bittersweet is already a taste, you can’t just invent it again!”

Twilight isn’t able to contain herself for much longer, bursting into laughter; an act the rest of the group reciprocates.

“Ha, ha. Oh, you two,” Applejack savors the current sense of interpersonal harmony shared by the 6 friends. “Talkin’ with yall always manages to cheer me up after a hard day’s work,” she confided, inspired by the state of quasi-nirvana that exists as the intermissions presented by day-offs. “I’m glad we’ve come so far.”

“You said it, AJ!” exclaimed Rainbow, before taking a bite of one of the many delicacies spread along the picnic mattress. “The Wonderbolts have been eating up a lot of my time lately, and the obligations of not being a civilian anymore can be pretty stressful. It’s good having you guys to keep me sane.”

Twilight looked so proud of herself and her friends; to a degree bordering a sense of ataraxia. “I agree,” she began. “Ever since I came to Ponyville I learned so much, and you all were always there for me,” her friends jocularly rolled their eyes, predicting the friendship lecture that were about to take place. “And I mean It. It may sound cliché, but as long as we have each other-,” Twilight paused for second, distracted by her peripherical vision.

In a corner of her eye, she saw herself—or something resembling her body—stumbling around next to group of fillies, puking profusely while the foals run in terror.

“No,” she whispered in horrific denial.

“Are you ok, Darling?” Rarity inquired, prompted by her friend’s sudden spacing out. The white unicorn comes closer to Twilight, in order to provide grounding comfort.

Twilight redirected her focus to Rarity’s concerned face, attempting to regain control over her own thoughts. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she remarked, still a little frantic.

“Are you sure? You don’t look so good-“ Rainbow Dash tried saying something, but is unexpectedly paralyzed in time by Twilight. All the other ponies in the park suffer the same fate, simultaneously.

Twilight Sparkle, then, breathes slowly in an attempt to calm herself down. Subsequently teleporting away towards the place where she saw her doppelgänger, just to find nothing but more ponies frozen in time. “Where is she?” I can’t let anyone take this away from me-“

Before this Twilight could finish her words, Regular Twilight stumbles into her from behind, which prompts Normal Twilight to fall face-flat into a tree. However, she is able to quickly cast a teleportation spell in place, putting her back in a favorable position; facing the invading Twilight.

Normal starts charging a magic blast, with a crazed look in her eyes. “What are you doing in here, you insane bitch? Did you finally learn how to remove your own Soul Anchor as well?” she said, blinded by rage. “Well, it doesn’t matter. You see, I’ve been practicing. Amoral sociopaths like you are so reckless, you obviously wouldn’t prepare at all-“ suddenly, Normal notices her opponent hasn’t a pair of wings.

“Oh, so it’s just yet another normal act of homicide I’ll have to commit,” the choleric unicorn said, disengaging from her aggressive spell-casting for a second. “I hate this so much.”

“Err…,” Regular Twilight tried to articulate some useful appellation, despite still being dizzy thanks to her previous interdimensional encounter. “Wha-what do you…” she barfs inside her own mouth in middle sentence, barely capable of standing up.

Normal sees the pathetic display, and confirms that her current adversary is not a threat. “Well, I’ve been able to reverse Alpha’s curse, so to speak,” she pauses for a bit and admires the plain populated by ponies playing with each other, proud of herself. “That alicorn cunt thought she could simply break me, like she did to the other Twilights. ‘Well, now you’re free, go have fun!’ my ass,” she looks back to Regular. “This is real,” she points to the Mane 6 frozen in time, “But this world’s Twilight, just like all of Alpha’s hedonistic minions, wasn’t able to appreciate it. Pfft.”

Regular manages to muster some energy, enough to buy her a bit of time questioning the mad-sounding unicorn. “So is that alicorn Twilight not able to travel freely across dimensions, but we can-”

“Yaeh, and she uses us to get more info on ‘Omega’ or whatever. Any smart-ass Twilight, who put in the time to ask Alpha questions, already knows that,” Normal interjected, eager to dismiss Regular’s potential point.

“Oh… In that case…” Regular attempts to delay her deadly fate once again, before getting interrupted.

“Enough. I hate to do this,” said the territorial unicorn, glowing with escalating power. “This doesn’t get easier with practice at all, but that’s a reasonable price to pay,” she aims her horn toward the cross-dimensional duplicate; eyes tearing up a little.

Regular Twilight sees an opportunity, “You don’t have to do this…”

“Shut the fuck up!” interpolated Normal, losing control of her temper. “You don’t understand. I didn’t ask for any of this, but, if I don’t keep killing incursing Twilights, this world will lose all meaning,” she rationalized, painfully. “It’s so hard to maintain this utopian reality. Drinking tea with a passionate friend like Rarity, or helping out Applejack with the farm in the evenings, and having to pretend I didn’t just murder lost souls after each moment,” she imparted, exhausted.

“I…” Regular Twilight, harnessing the few last bits of consciousness and motivation she had left, tried to reason, “I don’t think that is how you should go about doing this… May-maybe I’m just lazy—I mean, I didn’t even get to meet Rarity or Applejack in my world—, but expending so much energy, and getting so tired, in order to defend your ‘perfect world’ sounds… Un-utopian…”

Upon hearing this, Normal Twilight de-escalates her already hesitant attack. “You… You also never met the Mane 6 in your universe, huh?” that had an effect on her, as if an open wound got poked. “Ever since Alpha removed my Soul Anchor, I wondered multiple dimensions—all of each had happy, successful Twilights,” Normal started rumbling. “Ha, ha… For some reason, I believed all the versions of me who came in here were the same… I thought they were all better-off Twilights who lost their worlds and were after mine…” she paused for a minute. “Knowing we were all so similar makes me feel weird…”

“I wonder how many other Twilights are operating under the same presumption,” proposed Regular. “Maybe we could talk to them and-”

“Ha!” mocked Normal. “Are you retarded? I’m not interested in leaving this world behind and going into an adventure with you. Of course, there are others like me out there—an infinite number of them, I bet. The real question is: why would any of them, including me, care enough to abandon a paradise like this? Change demands the application of force, but accepting horror is simply a matter of habituation.

“But…”

“That’s exactly what I mean by ‘hedonistic’ when I refer to the other versions of us. They all contrive stupid strategies and plans, just to ‘combat’ the situation and subsequent existential nausea Alpha put they in; but, in the end, every version of every possible occurrence is been iterated over and over again across the multiverse. If there were any sensible way to ‘defeat’ Alpha, it would’ve already happened—all Twilights like you are doing is masturbating your own egos; seeking desperately for a sense of purpose,” Normal lectured, in an emotionally discorded outburst.

Regular Twilight reflected a bit, trying to find a way to counter Normal’s argument, but she couldn’t think of anything. A dead silence sets a melancholic, fatalistic mood, which seem to dominate the time-frozen environment like a thick mist.

“I am not mentally equipped to commit murder again today,” said Normal, looking down, almost crying. “This isn’t a noble act; this isn’t a promise to help you, nor a change in attitude. I just might kill the next Twilight who comes here. All that I want is to be left alone,” she said, looking away to the group of ponies around the picnic mattress, letting an inarticulate smile slip.

Regular Twilight thinks about an innumerable different statements she could come up with to try and convince her counterpart, but she was also feeling burned out at this point. There is no magical combination of words for that.

“Well,” Regular attempts to speak to Normal, despite of her being autistically engrossed by the ponies she is staring at, “Thank you anyway.” Regular offers before leaving that world—almost without thinking about it; it was like daydreaming about an escape from an overwhelming situation.

Slipping through the cracks of that universe however, her mind couldn’t rest. So many things to consider; so many qualifiers, all of which seemed wrong. In her volatile state of mind, she was floating around in the space between spaces.

A little island appears within this interdimensional nothingness, with two other Twilights in there—one with a cartoony scar in her face and the other wearing a fez hat. They are talking amongst themselves, but Regular could her them as if she was there. Then, suddenly, she was.

“That’s what I’m saying,” one of them was in the middle of making a point. “It is no use. I have talked to a Twilight like that just now. They are all in the same pathetic position, can’t you see it?”

“Uh… are you two also lost?”

“You could say that,” one of the Twilights answered—the with a scar in her eye. She turns to her original interlocutor, “Logically, there’s no reason to even care about this whole Alpha and Omega bullshit to being with. All the dimensions I’ve visited so far have reinforced that to me—they all are incredibly pitiful,” her reasoning goes. “Taking over them would be more productive.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that…” Fez Twilight indecisively remarked; her monotone voice being only barely audible.

Scar becomes overly-enthusiastic, as though she had complete conviction in what she was talking about. “Just listen to me, okay? There seems to be 3 types of Twilights in this multiverse: the ones who capture new universes for them to live in and protect from outside forces; the ones who think there’s some grand narrative to be fulfilled, wasting their lives trying to recruit others to fight Alpha; and the ones who simply go mad and die,” the point was presented very matter-of-factly. “However!” She emphasized, “What if I told you there could be a 4th kind?”

Based on recent evidence, at least one of these categories seemed to be realistic enough, so Regular listened; already in the end of her wits.

“That’s right. You don’t need to spend the rest of your life protecting a poorly-constructed fantasy,” Scar continued, “You just need to ignore all this inter-Twilight drama and focus on the only relevant factor in existence: the power of will.”

Fez looked like she was eager to run away from the loaded interaction. Regular, on the other hand, as someone deprived from control for her entire life, became incrementally interested in the weird Twilight’s rhetoric.

“I’ve been observing this place ever since I learned how to properly hop across worlds. Other Twilights become confuse, come into this cross-dimensional limbo, then leave to pursue one of the aforementioned delusions. Fez Twilight over here was about to do the same, but she was lucky enough to be approached by me.”

“Define lucky,” retorted Fez, unable to project her voice correctly.

“Yaeh, yaeh. Very original,” Scar immediately interjected, establishing control over the situation once again. “Listen, this is the only viable solution to our current conundrum. This multiverse has deemed us ‘failed Twilights,’ and any life we chose to live within its boundaries will be as proponents of such a role, but it mustn’t be this way,” she paused for a second, her voice quality getting weightier. “Any Twilight is, on average, powerful enough to subdue all of Ponyville’s inhabitants, including the Elements of Harmony. If we join forces, we can increase this destructive potential geometrically, until Equestria will be nothing but our plaything—then, by hijacking the Equestrian military, we’ll be able to take on other universes. Our will would be supreme—no more mundane shit or contrived threats to bother us; the satisfaction of our needs would be the only norm. Isn’t that the purpose of life, anyway?”

Regular Twilight slowly grin, picturing such a megalomaniacal prospect in her developmentally-challenged mind. She goes from pathologically apathetic to fervent, thanks to finally having a purpose—be it as macabre as it may. “Will there be any alcohol in this Empire of yours?”

“Fuck yaeh it will. Alcohol, cocaine, Xanax, hentai—any dependence-generating thing your degenerate psyche is able to come up with!”

“Well,” Fez was about to take a position. “You guys seem to share the same aggrandizing convictions. I am not sure if basing your decision-making in such delusions of grandeur is a good idea, statistically speaking.”

“She is about to join arms with us, if you haven’t yet noticed, Fez. A very smart idea, by the way. You should do the same,” Scar, via her intimidatingly-verbose attitude, ensures that her message communicate a sense of persuading urgency. “It would be a shame to take over the anonymous dimension you decide to go to if you refuse my offer, leaving you as an ordinary nobody in my Empire. Now,” she makes the ultimatum, “Is your chance to be part of the Purple Inner Circle. All I need is a yes.”

“Well…” Fez Twilight spoke in her meekly voice. “I guess I’ll join you two. For social animals like us, power is on numbers. So, if I stick with you, I could become a pony to the power of 3—a square, if you will.”

“Yaeh?” Regular vocalized certain confusion on whether the fez-wearing Twilight was going to take a stance or not.

“And it has always been my dream to be a square. It is the most romantic shape, after all…” Fez announced, with the vague suggestion of trying to come across as clever.

“Wouldn’t that be a triangle, though? Like, in a love triangle?” Regular Twilight attempted to make sense of Fez’s incoherent mumbling.

Fez express chock upon hearing the explanation. “Oh no,” she went even deeper on the tangent, “I screwed it up. I was going so well—I even met two new ponies today. I can’t believe my poor mathematical reasoning lend me such embarrassing failure. My dad was right about me-“

“Hey,” Scar interrupted, resolutely. “I know how to fix your math, and ‘lend you success’”

“You do?” Fez asked, sounding like a foal whose fit of crying was just barely averted.

“Of course I do!” Scar continued, “We can all go to an Equestria’s Ponyville, defeat its Elements of Harmony, and then make a bunch of new friends through the magic of forced labor and assimilation. That would be so algebraic and shit.”

“Hmm,” Regular sounded genuinely convinced by such logic. “That is some flawless reasoning right there, if you ask me.”

Fez Twilight thought for a few moments, pacing around in the same place nervously. Then she looks directly to Scar’s eyes, awkwardly shaking her head up and down as to show she is interested.

“It’s settled then,” Scar grins.