The dull thud of the double doors hung in the expanse of the throne room, signifying that court was closed for the day. Settling back on the throne she was still growing into, Twilight closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, smelling the throne room’s air. It was probably just her imagination, but she thought the room smelled big. A bit warm from the sunlight, a lot of different scents from all corners of the room, but all of them quite faint since they diluted each other so much.
If she was overthinking it, well, overthinking was her way of unwinding. She was almost used to being a princess by now, but she still had her habits. How many did Celestia have, she wondered…
She opened her eyes and looked to her right, where Raven was standing. Court might be closed, but there was still much to be done before nightfall. “How are the RSVPs coming?” she asked.
“Ninety-five percent of them were accounted for this morning, Your Highness,” Raven replied.
“Pretty please with sugar on top stop ‘Your Highness’ing me.”
As always, Raven ignored her. “The rest probably arrived in the mail today. I’ll let you know once the post office lets me know.”
“Great.” A few thaumatic twists, and a scroll poofed into existence before Twilight. In the box next to the item labelled Raven’s checklist, she drew a single downward slash: half a check, so almost complete, but not quite. Delegation might not have been fulfilling, but at least it let her get satisfyingly meta with her checklists.
Tomorrow was the first anniversary of her coronation. For her part, Twilight didn’t care all that much; it was just a year of being the Princess of Equestria, no biggie. But tradition said it was important, and the public at large agreed with tradition, so tradition needed to be appeased. Tradition also said her celebration needed to be big and dramatic and grandiose, but Twilight wasn’t a pushover. She scaled it down as much as she dared, carefully picking the guests and food to add as little work to the castle’s staff as possible. Her friends would be attending, of course, some of their friends and family, and some Canterlotian bigwigs who had helped her adjust and so were good ponies, even if they weren’t close enough to be friends yet. Exclusivity would make an adequate substitute for grandiosity, she decided. Making the party relatively quiet was a nice plus. But even with less than fifty people attending, there was still plenty of work to be done.
Hence, her checklist. Next up: “Do you know where Fancy Pants is?” she asked as she climbed down from the throne. (Dang it ached. Even with their longer legs, how did Celestia and Luna do it every day?)
Raven’s ear twitched once as she thought. She didn’t even need to look at her watch. “He’ll be here in three… two… one…”
One of the side doors opened and Fancy entered, right on the dot. He cleared his throat as he approached the foot of the throne. “Twilight,” he said, giving her a small nod. He telekinetically pulled a small scroll from one of his jacket pockets. “Every item on my list has been completed. Would you like to go over them individually?”
“No, thank you,” Twilight forced herself to say. That sweet, sweet itemization… “Except for the cupcakes-”
“We have almost four hundred and fifty tins ready for Dame Pie to use tomorrow and enough flour to feed an army. That’s not an exaggeration, I must add, although it’d be a very small army.”
“Perfect.” And so Fancy Pants received the coveted full checkmark, worthy of showers of confetti. Twilight almost thought about trying it before realizing she was getting sidetracked. Next pony on the list: the castle’s head chef, wherever he was. “Do you know where-”
The hairs of Twilight’s coat suddenly stood on end as the air charged with static, but, bizarrely, there was no flux of magic. The formerly relaxed atmosphere of the room turned tense in an instant as everypony felt it. Within seconds, the civilians had been shuffled next to Twilight as the guards formed a ring around them, pikes pointing outward. Twilight threw up a shield around the ring for extra protection and began turning on the spot, looking for the source of the static. “Everypony stay calm,” she said above the mutterings of the ponies. “Don’t panic. We can-”
An orb of electricity sprang into being in the center of the throne room. The circle quickly shifted to surround it, the guards pointing their pikes inward at it. A few were spared to escort the civilians out; Twilight stood her ground and readied her magic. The unicorn guards in her contingent took up certain spots around the ring, right at the nodes for a proper magic circle to increase the strength of any shield tenfold. If they had the time to set it up.
The orb suddenly doubled in brightness, doubled again, doubled again. Twilight had to put up a hoof to block the light. One final flash, and it was gone. When she lowered her leg and saw what was left behind, Twilight couldn’t hold back a gasp.
The pony before her was probably an earth mare, but it was hard to tell, they were such a hideous amalgamation of technology and flesh. These days, arcane prosthetics could serve as a fashion statement, look fairly close in appearance to whatever they were replacing, or at least be unobtrusive. This pony, though? Her body seemed to revel in looking as uncomfortably disjointed as possible. Two of her legs had been removed and given mechanical replacements — replacements that were twice as long as they should’ve been and had three times as many joints as normal. Armored panels were affixed haphazardly all over her body, from her shoulders to her ribcage to her haunches, and served as hubs for cables that snaked out and burrowed under her deep violet coat. Her mane consisted entirely of thin strands of wire, standing on end and feeling through the air like antennae. One of her eyes was hard and metal, its gaze darting around like a fly as its “iris” shifted nauseatingly through every color; the skin around it was raw where hair refused to grow. Glowing lines traced out patterns all along her coat, a bizarre combination of sweeping runic shapes and angular, almost diagrammatic pathways. An ear was gone, replaced with some kind of socket or port in a metal plate that dug below the skin.
The pony raised her head and looked straight at Twilight, sending a cold chill down her spine. Immediately, the unicorn guards began casting, readying the magic circle. Unfortunately, impromptu circles like this took a while to properly set up — several minutes, even for the best ponies — so it was up to Twilight to stall this pony until then.
“Remember me?” the pony rasped. Her words were laced with tinny distortion, like they were coming from a last-century jukebox. “Who am I kidding, of course you don’t.” Her giggle was a thousand different variations of claws on a blackboard at once. She grinned, revealing gums laced with metallic veins holding too-white teeth. “Because you’re not the Twilight that defeated me, are you? No, you don’t have even one percent of her experience. Definitely no Princess Welchia to help you now.”
Twilight’s mind was off like a shot. The pony’s prosthetics looked technological, not magical. If a Twilight with a hundred times her experience had defeated her at some point, at the very least, that Twilight had either been alive for over two thousand years or leading Equestria for over a hundred, depending on what “experience” meant. Ergo: time travel. This pony was a big-shot villain from the future, probably come back to set wrong what had once gone right. Twilight covered her thoughts by stalling in the least obvious way: “Princess Who?”
The pony’s laugh keened through the air. “That is just the best thing you’ve ever said! Even better than-” Her voice suddenly shifted to one that wasn’t quite Twilight’s, this one as clear as day. “‘No, please! Don’t kill them! I’ll do anything!’” Little bits of background noise told Twilight it was a recording with such high fidelity it was practically the real thing. The pony’s voice snapped back to her original sound when she said, “Of course, you were just stalling, then, but-” Her leer was sickeningly wide. “-I can pretend, can’t I?”
Already, Twilight was putting together a profile of the pony. If she was half as shallow as she seemed, it wasn’t that hard. Sociopathic. Murderous. Probably enraptured with her own ego. Which meant she would gloat. And since Twilight still lacked crucial information on her… “Listen,” she said, gathering her magic, “I don’t know who you are, so explain yourself.”
“Heh. I?” The pony held her head high; subdermal conduits made lines under her coat bulge out like swollen veins. “I am Voyager, the next step in equine evolution. I’m the apex predator even you couldn’t stop. You and Welchia almost had me cornered, I’ll admit, but time travel tech is a wonderful thing, don’t you think? Press a few buttons, and hey presto!” She posed like a runway model. “Here I am! Now-” She ran her tongue over her teeth and grinned. “You’re a smart mare. Take a stab at why you think I’m here, why don’tcha?”
Twilight’s gaze flicked over her shoulder. A unicorn guard was in position across from her, sweating as he pushed magic into his horn. When he saw her looking at him, he jerkily shook his head. Not ready, not quite yet. She kept stalling. “You’re going to take me out when I’m at my weakest,” she said slowly. “Keep me from existing in the future.”
“Oh, so close!” Voyager tsked. “You missed one thing, though. Tomorrow is going to be the best day of your life. You told me yourself. So what better time to ruin you than now?”
Tomorrow was the best day of her life? How? It’d have to be pretty dang great to beat the day she moved to Ponyville. Or the day she was let into the restricted section of the Canterlot archives. Or the day she started the School of Friendship. Or the day the library finally let her check out more than a dozen books at a time. Or- any one of a large number of days in the past five years. Granted, that wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, but technically, neither were quantum fluctuations turning every pony in Equestria into an alicorn at once.
Something was up. Even more than usual.
Voyager’s voice jarred Twilight from her thoughts. “So. Let’s see who’s better. My tech or your magic.” One of her biological legs twitched and glowing lines on her coat began humming. “Say your-”
The thaumic currents in the room suddenly shifted, twisting around each other like water in a whirlpool, diving off in some four-dimensional direction and smashing the strands of the magic circle to bits. A ball of light, maybe an inch across, formed in the air, before rapidly increasing in size and dissolving. Where it had been, a beige, bespectacled, black-maned unicorn stood, sparks still falling from his horn. He was impeccably dressed in an absolutely dapper suit and tie; shame about the bloodstains all over. He spared a moment to look around himself and nodded. “Ah. The spell worked,” he said in the detached voice of somepony noting that his third-favorite chips were back in stock. “Excellent.”
“Who’s this weirdo?” Voyager asked, glancing at Twilight.
The unicorn gave her a single brief look. “I could say the same of you.” He turned to Twilight and bowed. “Greetings, Your Highness. In the name of scientific inquiry, I’ll make this brief. My name is Diachrony and I’m here to kill you to study its effects on the nation.”
“That’s- I- What?” As much as Twilight appreciated how frank and to-the-point he was, that just wasn’t the sort of information you just dropped on somepony like that. Not without some sort of warning. Even the guards, already starting the circle up again, looked shocked.
“Uffh. How I loathe these explanations.” Diachrony pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “Twenty-five years in the future, your reign is so jarringly peaceful! Excellent for the little mare, I presume, but hardly the sort of thing that produces good interpersonal data! I’m merely here to shake up the stagnation of civilization, and what better time than your anniversary, when you’re in the middle of the public eye? You said so yourself how important it was to you. Apologies, truly.” He shrugged. “But it’s for science. I think you, of all ponies, understand.”
First, Twilight filed the second suspicious reference to her anniversary away. Next, she examined what he was saying. It wasn’t hard to make a stab at what he was, but really? “You’re a mad… sociologist?” she asked.
A few guards snickered and Diachrony bristled. “As I’ve said before, Milady,” he said testily, “my science may involve studying ponies and critical reasoning with fuzzy data rather than brute-forcing equations and banging atoms together, but that hardly means I’m not a legitimate mad scientist! You saw what I did with those affluent unicorn college students, right? The fifth group, I mean, not the others. Wait, I suppose you-”
“Ha! That is so cute!” Voyager clapped him hard on the back. “Ooo, whatcha gonna do?” she sneered. “Conduct surveys and speculate on how to destroy the world?”
“All great genocides begin with speculation,” sniffed Diachrony. “I’m not some savage, knocking off people at random without a care for demographics. I suppose you are the ‘rar, smash, kill everything’ sort of hooligan?”
“Oh, you say that like it’s a bad thing.” Voyager gazed into the distance, smiling at some treasured memory. “Real screams have a timbre no acting can match. It’s really quite something.”
Diachrony sighed. “How disappointingly banal,” he muttered, pushing his glasses up. “I already know which of your buttons to push. For starters, your father was right about you.”
Voyager spasmed and her mechanical parts made a wide range of most unhealthy sounds. Before anyone could blink, she’d pinned Diachrony to the floor by his neck, pressing down with one of her mechanical legs. A panel opened up and some sort of small laser slid out, emitting a high-pitched buzz as it aimed right between Diachrony’s eyes. “Who told you that?” Voyager snarled. Her voice was nearly unintelligible beneath intense static distortion, but Twilight could hear some actual fear in there. “How did you know that?”
“It’s the most basic of patterns, really,” Diachrony said in a clear Lecturing Voice that was utterly uninterested at the prospect of near-certain death. “Let’s start with your drive. Your obsession with-”
With the two villains occupied in each other, Twilight risked waving Raven and one of her guards over. “Find Spike,” she hissed quickly to Raven. “Tell him to send a message to Starlight: villains in Canterlot, get the girls. He should be in his room.”
“A-at once, Your Highness.” Raven was off like a shot.
“Rouse the barracks, get the rest of the Guard,” she whispered to the guard. “Tell them to put up a shield around the throne room, no one in or out except my friends.”
“Yes’m.” And he was gone, too.
Twilight turned back to the other guards, who were glancing furtively between her and the villainous duo. She reached out with her magic and grabbed the framework of the circle, jerking it forward, backward, left, right, up down. If she could get the circle formed more quickly…
Diachrony was still talking. In spite of the hoof on his neck, he’d barely even stopped for breath. “-so dreadfully typical of your type,” he said disdainfully. “I suppose you want to make the term ‘bloodbath’ literal, don’t you?” He squinted up at her like he was frowning at an outlier on a graph. “Perhaps you probably already have.”
“Huh. I thought about it. Just never got around.” Sometime in the past minute, Voyager had flipped from ready to kill Diachrony to hanging off his every word. “Maybe you are worth something.” She stepped off him and offered her hoof. “I was thinking of making Equestria like me. Wanna study it?”
“I suppose.” Not taking the proffered hoof, Diachrony got to his feet, then looked Voyager up and down, then started nodding and smiling. “Yes, yes, mass enforcement of the singularity would be wonderful! Such a radical paradigm shift would be a dream to me! And not the kind Princess Moondog can interfere with, either! Yes, that would be wonderful.” He turned to Twilight, his horn glowing. “Just let me kill Twilight, and we can be on our way.”
“Whoa, hey, what?” Voyager smacked Diachrony’s horn to disrupt his magic. “No, nooooo, YOU get to kill her? Puh-leaze, you’re not the one whose entire life’s work was ruined. I’m the gal who gets to kill an alicorn.”
“I beg your pardon?” squawked Diachrony. “She hasn’t ruined my life’s work, she is my life’s work!”
“Then your life’s work is a big, steaming pile of compost.”
Diachrony’s ears went straight up and he sucked a breath in through his nose. Drawing himself up to his (not very impressive) full height, he straightened his tie, raised a hoof, and declared, “Listen here, you little stot-”
That was when another maelstrom of magic gathered and spat out another pony. This one was a shrivelled, completely colorless pegasus in a tattered black robe, holding a skull-topped staff made from several bound-together femurs. Runic scars were branded across every square inch of her body. She was oozing necromantic energies so intensely that even the pegasi and earth pony guards flinched away from it, let alone the unicorns; yet again, the circle was disrupted. The necromancer raised her head, revealing eyes that burned pus-yellow. “Princess Twilight!” she bellowed in a voice that made no sound but everyone heard anyway. “As Rigor Mortis, Speaker for the Dead, this I decree! You ruined my greatest day, so I’m ruining yours before it even happens! Your anniversary will never come!”
“Again?” Twilight muttered.
“And when I’m through with you, I’ll find Amanita, and-”
“Whoa, hey.” Voyager wrenched Mortis’s head around to look her in the eye. “I know you think you’re all that, but no way are you going to cap her. We all know that’s my job.”
“You would stop me?” Mortis wrenched her head from Voyager’s grip. “You have no right! Twilight is mine!”
“Yeah, no. I was here first. Gimme one good reason why you get to kill her.”
“Because she killed me!” Mortis ripped up her robe to reveal a gaping chest wound, complete with ribs sticking out. “I was supposed to live another few centuries before my lichdom was complete, and now I can’t even enjoy the wind on my face! She needs to pay!”
“It’s my invoice she’s paying,” said Diachrony. “I confronted her before any of you layabouts ever did!”
“‘Layabouts’? Holy Moondog, do you hear yourself?” asked Voyager, snickering. “You sound worse than my great-grandpa. I’m her ultimate enemy, so you two both need to-”
“She wiped me from the history books to hide me!” Mortis yelled. “That’s how scared she was of me! You think an emotionless egghead and half a battery have a better claim to her than me?”
“Would you please use your inside voice, at least?” asked Diachrony, rubbing his forehead.
“This IS my inside voice! Would you like to hear my outside voice?!”
One of the guards pointed at the trio and made a Face. Twilight nodded.
“Oh, frak this!” Voyager stepped forward, aiming her ray-gunned leg at Twilight. “I don’t have to listen to-”
“No!” Diachrony and Mortis yanked her back, Mortis cuffing her over the head. “Two out of three ponies agree,” Diachrony panted, “that you are not the one who’s going to kill Twilight!”
“Two outta three ponies say you’re not gonna kill her, either!” snapped Voyager. “Just accept that-”
“Oh. My. Me,” gasped Discord, unusually quiet. “This is wonderful.”
Right. If it was anyone’s fault… “Thank you, Discord,” Twilight said the same way a farmer would thank a pegasus for the spectacular drought. “Thank you so much.” She wiped some of the confetti from his teleportation off her face.
“Hmm?” Discord swallowed his popcorn. “Oh, you think I’m responsible for this? I wish I was, but no. I just felt the most glorious fountain of chaos energies and had to take a look. It’s only been in existence for two minutes and it’s already surpassed my expectations!” He glanced at his popcorn bucket, then shook his head. “No. Not that old cliché. This needs something special.” He pulled a bottle of 947 White Horse from offpage, cheerfully dumped the wine all over the floor, and took a bite of the bottle like it was a popsicle.
Twilight was about to ask if it was going to get worse when she stopped herself. Yes, yes it would. In fact, simply thinking it was probably enough to-
Orange runes smelling of sulfur and rotten eggs spilled across the ground as time performed the twist for the umpteen bazillionth time. The floor rippled like liquid glass as a vaguely equine shape with the texture of oil forced itself out. The oil flowed, ruffled, and collapsed into the form of something that might’ve been a zebra. Most zebras, though, didn’t have stripes that constantly shifted. Or a complete lack of a shadow. Or serrated fangs that dripped venom. Or leathery-steel wings. Or ashen, diamond-pupiled eyes with orange sclerae. To complete the ensemble, a forked tongue flicked out of her mouth. She paused, like she was reading the air, then… She didn’t “turn” towards Twilight so much as “instantaneously was facing” towards Twilight. She opened her mouth.
“A zebra?” Diachrony yelled. “But that’ll disrupt the demographics of this meeting! Now I’ll have to-”
As he continued ranting, the zebra glanced towards the array of villains and looked like she’d been smashed in the face with an invisible frying pan. She coughed, her ears already folded back. “Je... huu ni wakati mbaya?” she asked meekly in layered, reverberating Zebran. «Is… Is this a bad time?»
“That depends,” Twilight said flatly. “Are you here to ruin my first anniversary before it happens because it’s the greatest day of my life and I ruined your life some time in the future to prevent you from, I don’t know, destroying Equestria or something? Like everyone else?” She tried to keep her voice calm, she really did, but when you had this many people squabbling over who got to kill you, controlling your temper was a bit secondary.
«Destroying Chaidamu, actually, but. Yes.» Cough, awkward wing-rustle. «Look, this isn’t speciesist, I promise I’ll go after Summerslight next! Wait, do you know who Summerslight is yet?»
“No. And don’t tell me, because this is a bad time.”
«Phooey. And I don’t have the ingredients to pop around to when it’s not a bad time. Oh, maybe you could help me!» the zebra said brightly. «For starters, I need the blood of a freshly-killed virgin. Any age will do, so foal’s blood is fine. I’m Shetani Mpya, by the way.»
“Listen,” said Diachrony, “I don’t know what you’re playing at, looking like that, but you can’t just introduce all those extra variables into this gathering!”
«What?» Shetani blinked demon-owlishly at him. «I didn’t do anything. What are you talking about?»
Diachrony was wheezing like he’d just run a marathon as he wiped a river of sweat from his brow. “I- am talking about-”
And that was when Twilight felt another flux of magic and what was probably a griffon zapped in, screaming about cursed counterfeits. Of course. Because nothing was ever simple around here. She just wanted to make some checklists. Was that so hard? But apparently, her checklisting led to tomorrow being the greatest day ever, which made it a target across all of time and space. Was it even worth trying to fix this? Even the guards didn’t look like they were trying that hard anymore, and whatever their actual skill, they at least looked like they were trying before they got dropkicked into the next time zone. Discord would probably stop anything remotely effective she did, anyway. Maybe she should just seal off the throne room until the villains teleporting in crushed each other to death as more and more piled in. Yeah. That was good. She’d set it up herself.
She was readying the spell when somepony behind her laughed. “Okay, that’s enough.” A lavender shield, stronger and sturdier and more energized than anything Twilight could make, snapped up around the bickering villains, preventing them from leaving and muffling their arguments. She spun around; no one was there.
“I’m sorry,” the voice said again, “but I had to watch them.” The air began shedding lavender sparks, slowly revealing a shape twice as tall as Twilight herself. “Just for a little. You’ll understand.”
When the figure’s invisibility was completely gone, Twilight was looking at herself.
An older version, to be sure. This Twilight was taller than even Celestia (if only by a few inches) and had the flowy mane and everything. Age hadn’t just been kind to her, it’d sent her flowers and serenaded her; she had the kind of graceful, smooth body sculptors spent their entire lives trying to carve. But she wasn’t wearing any regalia or anything to mark her as a princess. She watched the villains argue within the shield a nostalgic smile on her face.
“Um,” said Twilight. “Hi?”
Future Twilight looked down at Twilight in exactly the same way any pony would look down at any other. “Hello, Princess Twilight,” she said, bowing. “As this is your Equestria, just call me Sparkle.”
Twilight looked at Sparkle, then at the shield. Switches engaged in her head and she didn’t like the machine they started. “You knew,” she said accusingly.
“Of course!” said Sparkle cheerfully. (Discord gave a little squee of nerd glee.) “Why do you think I’m here? And trust me…” She glanced at the shield and giggled as a war-tattooed hippogriff spawned in. “It’s much more fun the second time around.”
“Explain.” Even after just a year of princessing, Twilight had her authoritative voice down pat.
Unfortunately, Sparkle was immune to it, thanks to her much-more-than-a-year of princessing. When she spoke, her voice was breezy and casual. “One of the… unfortunate things about advancing magical theory is that spells that were once difficult become easier to cast. One of those spells was time travel. I realized, with help from my future self, that it would only be a matter of time, ha ha, until a defeated villain managed to go back in time to try to stop me before I could stop them. Not only that, but it would probably happen more than once. I couldn’t control any of that. But I could maybe nudge them all towards picking the same day to interfere.”
Sparkle took a seat as she watched an armored minotaur arrive. “Because, see, here’s the thing about most villains. They never understand friendship as much as they think they do. Oh, sure, they might claim to share power, but the second you tell them only one of them can, say, kill their shared archnemesis, the backstabbing starts. If they could all actually be friends and work together, they’d wipe the floor with us.”
“Us?” Twilight raised an eyebrow.
“Well. Mostly you. I’m thirty times older than you, don’t look at me like that! But, yes, us. If they realize they don’t have to be the one to destroy you as long as you get destroyed. Which will never happen.”
Deep breaths, Twilight told herself. Deep breaths. She put a hoof on her chest and breathed in, out, in, out. Too much was happening too fast. No, it didn’t matter that it was under control, because she was still in panic mode and having trouble getting out of it. (As if to prove her point, a skeletal Abyssinian appeared inside the shield.) She stalled by asking the least important question she could think of. “So did you invite Discord or not?”
“Eh…” Sparkle wiggled her hoof. “I thought about it, just to be nice, but then I figured he’d notice the fourth-greatest chaos this side of the Big Bang anyway.”
Discord’s voice was downright tender. “It’s just so…” Sniff. “…beautiful.” He blew his nose with Sparkle’s tail.
The throne room doors burst open; Raven slid across the floor and came to a stop right next to Twilight. “Spike sent the message,” she said. “Ms. Glimmer’s already gathering your friends, Your Highness.” Then she finally registered Sparkle’s presence. “And, um, your highness,” she said, gawking up.
“Hello, Raven.” Sparkle gave a little bow to her. “It’s good to see you again.”
Raven blinked twice, then turned to Twilight, her smile broad and detached. “Can I go get a drink, Your Highness? Don’t ask for me back later tonight, because it’ll be alcoholic.”
“Your methodologies don’t properly account for confounding variables,” Diachrony snapped through gritted teeth. “If you don’t account for confounding variables, how in the blazes can you be sure your genocide is the reason for the deaths?”
«It works for me,» Shetani said defensively. «You can do things in different ways, you know. Stop datashaming.»
“So alcoholic.”
“I’ve already conquered death,” sneered Voyager. “My mind’s been copied and backed up. If I die, that version of me will live on.”
“That’s not immortality!” roared Mortis. “If you die, you die! That other version of you gets to live, not this version! This version dies! I am truly immortal!”
“Maybe it’ll just be ethanol straight!” Raven was still smiling.
Twilight looked up at Sparkle, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, this is your kingdom. We can handle them-” She pointed at the shield. “-even though we won’t need to.”
What the heck. Twilight knew she needed a drink right now. Unfortunately, she couldn’t go get one until it was all sorted out. Such was the bane of princesshood. “Sure. Go right ahead.” She waved Raven away. “And drink some extra for me, would you?”
Raven leaned forward in a bow so half-assed it was practically a mule. “Absolutely, Your Highness.”
Discord slithered over to perch on the air above her shoulder. “What sort of chaos juice do you like? Wine?” Discord scooped some of the wine off the floor, shook out the detritus, and dumped it into a glass-shaped section of air. “I’ve got wine.”
“Wine. Gimme.” Raven chugged it down in seconds. Smacking her lips like a sommelier, she stared off into the distance. “Tastes good,” she said eventually. “Not alcoholic enough. To the bar!” She marched out of the room with a pomp and circumstance usually reserved for treaties that ended centuries of war.
“In fact,” Twilight said to the room at large, “you’re all dismissed! I and I have this under control! Go unwind! Be free of the duties of princesshood! Remain blissfully untouched by all the possible ways your life can be made interesting! Stay unbound from being so influential in the history of the world that people come back in time to change it for the worse! Or better! I don’t know who’s in there! It could be aaanyyyooone!”
The guards gave each other Looks and slowly edged out of the room, treating Twilight the same way you would a malfunctioning thaumatic reactor.
“Huh,” said Sparkle. “So that’s what going Twilinanas looks like.”
“I-” Twilight massaged her forehead. “You know what I’m going through. A party of future villains interrupted my checklisting, my future self masterminded it all, and I still have to deal with my anniversary tomorrow. I think I’m entitled to a big ol’ cluster of Twilinanas.” She eyed the throne room doors. “Especially since I still can’t get Raven to stop ‘Your Higness’ing me!”
“You’ll grow into it,” said Sparkle. “Remember, she’s not saying it because she has to, she’s saying it because she wants to, because she respects you. But if you really want her to stop…” She crouched down and whispered so softly Twilight could barely feel any breath against her ear. “Triple dog dare her to stop.”
Twilight gasped at such a shocking answer, putting a hoof to her mouth. “But triple dog daring without doing the regular double, let alone the regular triple, is a serious breach of etiquette!”
“Which is why it’ll work.” Sparkle nudged Twilight lightly with a wing. “Remember, Raven served Celestia for a long time and saw her as the regal ideal ever since she was a filly. Your position comes with over a millennium of baggage that she’s having trouble ignoring. Do something as un-Celestia-like as you can, and Raven will stop treating you like Celestia. Trust me.”
“Hmm. How long does it take her?” Twilight asked.
“A little under two weeks,” said Sparkle.
“Good.” At least something would go right.
They watched the still-growing crowd of villains argue among themselves. Astonishingly, things weren’t violent yet, although they were getting close. Everyone seemed more concerned with braggadocio, pointing out how they were obviously more powerful and more clever than everyone else in there. Exactly how fragile were their egos?
Yet another time portal spat out a unicorn with bio-mechanical wings, and Sparkle stood up. “That should be all of them,” she said. “I’m sorry for dumping this on you, really but now I’ll handle them in my time.”
“Wait!” Discord pounced, wrapping his entire body around Sparkle in a hug. Tears were rivering up his cheeks. “Thank you for this wonderful daaaa-ha-ha-haaaay!” he sobbed.
“Just wait a thousand years, when I’m on the receiving end of this,” said Sparkle, patting him on the shoulder.
“I don’t suppose I could convince you to stay, spend some time with my- your- our friends?” asked Twilight. She needed someone to share the craziness with besides Discord.
Her horn glowing, Sparkle shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I wouldn’t want to get between you and them. Farewell, Princess Twilight.”
She, her shield, and the people inside it all vanished in a cloud of magenta radiance, leaving Twilight and Discord alone in the throne room. Within the perimeter of her shield, the floor was about as wrecked as you could imagine, short of a bomb going off, from the villains’ ego flexing. Heat-burned, acid-burned, mace-scarred, time-flux-distorted, smashed, the works. The castle’s maintenance crew would need a huge apology.
Right then, space was pushed aside as Starlight and the rest of the Elements teleported in. “Twilight!” gasped Starlight. “I got your mess-” She blinked at the destroyed floor. At the spells still hanging in the air. At Discord, dabbing his wet eyes with a marble tile. “…Huh.”
“I told you something would happen on the day of her anniversary!” Rainbow yelled to Starlight. “I told you!”
“It’s not her anniversary yet!” said Starlight. “It’s the day before!”
“Close enough!”
Starlight rolled her eyes. “Long story?” she asked Twilight.
“Only if you think five thousand, nine hundred and ten words is long,” said Discord. “Still a bit wordy, in my opinion.” And he was gone.
“Applejack?” Twilight said. “We’ll need some of your strong cider at the party tomorrow.”
