Chapters As Princess Twilight Sparkle’s chariot landed, she contemplated – not for the first time – what kind of effort it would take to move the royal castle from Canterlot to Ponyville. But she quickly reached the same conclusion that she always came to: She loved Ponyville too much to subject it to the likes of Canterlot.
She loved Ponyville for numerous reasons. The first and foremost, of course, was that it was where all of her best friends lived. The second was that even though she had spent a considerably greater quantity of her life living in Canterlot, Ponyville always felt more like home whenever she returned to it. She had to be careful never to voice that sentiment out loud, lest the press make the claim that Equestria’s sole ruler was bad-mouthing Canterlot, which would give the city’s residents reason to feign offense. The first time it had happened was enough.
Another thing she loved about visiting Ponyville was the lack of pomp. She was seated in the Royal Guard’s least ornate chariot, being pulled by only two lightly armored pegasi. No other members of the guard accompanied her and there was no trumpet fanfare to indicate her arrival.
The chariot had landed in the open area next to the Castle of Friendship. Because her visit hadn’t been publicly announced, there were no ponies eagerly waiting to cheer her mere presence or prostrate themselves in front of her. And because the castle was on the edge of town, there weren’t that many ponies around in general. Shoeshine happened to be nearby when the chariot landed, so she gave Twilight a friendly wave hello as the princess disembarked. Twilight waved back, and Shoeshine continued on her way.
Twilight Sparkle took a moment to stop ranking in her head the many reasons she loved Ponyville and vowed that from that point forward, she would never again treat Celestia with subservient reverence. Unless she wanted to get under the former leader’s skin.
She addressed the pegasi attached to her chariot who were now standing at attention. “Thank you. I won’t be needing your assistance for this visit – you’re free to explore the rest of the town and enjoy yourselves. Please return by one o’clock. Dismissed.” She still had to consciously refrain from helping them get unharnessed from the chariot – she hated the conflicted emotions that inevitably appeared on her guards’ faces as they internally battled between telling their princess that she shouldn’t concern herself with aiding them and the realization that by saying so, they would be directly contradicting their princess’s wishes.
She did, however, insist that they leave their armor behind and visit the town as ordinary ponies. They voiced their objections in a militarily acceptable way by asking what would happen if someone came along and stole their unattended armor. She assured them that she would place a spell on it to prevent it from happening.
In reality, she simply set the armor in the chariot with no additional precautions. This was Ponyville. Either nothing would happen to it or, at worst, a foal or two would get into it, find themselves in a series of wacky misunderstandings in which they were expected to perform the Royal Guard’s duties, and ultimately learn a valuable lesson about goofing around with things that didn’t belong to them.
Twilight approached the front door of the castle. She never knew whether she should knock. After all, she had moved out nearly a year ago.
As she stood in one place at the top of the stairs, weighing the pros and cons of knocking versus not knocking, the door opened to reveal Starlight Glimmer.
“Twilight!” she warmly greeted her former teacher and current sovereign. They exchanged a hug. “You’ve grown a couple inches, right?”
“It hasn’t been that long since we last saw each other,” Twilight said as she stepped inside. She paused to do the calculations in her head. “Okay, maybe it has been. How’d you know I was here? My response said I wouldn’t arrive for another hour.”
Starlight closed the door. “I told you I made an interdimensional breakthrough,” she said. “Which meant you wouldn’t be able to sleep and then you’d race through your morning duties. All while claiming that it was because you wanted to be sure you weren’t late. By the way, Sunburst says that’s the most rapidly he’s ever seen the sun rise.”
“It’s a very sensitive mechanism!” Twilight protested. “And that doesn’t explain why you didn’t open the door until this very moment.”
“I saw your chariot through the study’s window.”
“But the study isn’t on that side of the castle.”
“It is now. I’ve been moving rooms around to justify the presence of a huge incongruous castle next to Ponyville now that a princess doesn’t live here. Welcome to the Castle of Friendship slash School of Friendship teachers’ quarters.”
“You know, I’m pretty sure this is technically still my castle.”
“And we have a royal suite sealed off and ready for you anytime you want to stop by. I’ll give you the full tour later, but I’m guessing that right now, you want to see my interdimensional breakthrough.” She gave her a sly grin.
With a smile on her face, Twilight rolled her eyes. “You’re right, naturally,” she said. “Lead the way.”
“Great! It’s just down this hall, past the Friendship Cells.”
“The what ?”
“I already told you, the full tour will be later. Come on!”
“I’ve been studying the addirectional planar properties of the mirror that leads to the human world,” Starlight said as the two entered a small, nearly empty room. “And it turns out those properties can be duplicated in a spell that can be cast on any mirror.”
“Ooh,” said Twilight in an unprincesslike manner, her curiosity clearly piqued. “Does that mean that no matter where I go in Equestria, I could create a portal that would give me convenient access to my human friends?”
“You can,” Starlight said, “although I haven’t figured out yet how to determine where the portal will come out. The first time I tried it, I found myself tumbling through a whiteboard into a meeting about ‘keeping the media from finding out.’ One of the humans chased me back through and turned into an out-of-control pegasus. I had to cast a memory-wiping spell on him and apologize to Rarity for the damage to her ponyquins.”
“You used one of the mirrors at Carousel Boutique?”
“It was convenient! Anyway, after that, I moved my experiments into here. And this is the part I wanted to show you: By making slight modifications to the exotic matter concordance matrix, I can create portals…”
She paused for dramatic effect. Twilight could tell it was for dramatic effect by the spells Starlight was casting to darken the rest of the room, leaving her in a spotlight.
“…to new, unexplored universes!”
“Impressive,” Twilight said as the lighting returned to normal. “And it explains why you have that mirror.” She pointed to the tall object positioned against the wall.
“It was the only one I could easily get.”
“You couldn’t get a hoofheld mirror from somewhere?”
“I wouldn’t be able to walk through that.”
“There’s a mirror over the sink in any of the bathrooms. Or over your dresser in your bedroom.”
“Sure, but who wants to climb over a dresser or a sink all the time?”
“But you had easy access to a fun house mirror.”
Starlight nodded.
“How?”
“So,” Starlight continued, “I applied the spell to this mirror and created a portal to yet another dimension that has alternate versions of all of our friends.”
“Another dimension?” Twilight said. She stepped over to the mirror and placed one of her front hooves against it – the magical energy felt similar to that of the portal to the human world. It was also a testament to how much Twilight trusted her former student that she hadn’t hesitated to touch an experimental surface.
She put her hoof back on the ground and turned to Starlight. “Have you been through?”
“I have,” Starlight said, more tentatively than Twilight expected.
“So? What’s it like?”
“It was… weird. The human world is easy to understand – it’s like Equestria, but everybody’s a tailless monkey. But this world… it was Equestria, and it had you and all our friends, and they were all ponies, but it was… different. Kind of. It’s hard to explain. You should see for yourself.”
“That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement.”
“Maybe you’ll understand it better than I did. Don’t worry – it’s safe. I wouldn’t have told you about it if I didn’t think it was safe for you to go through.”
“You would have kept a revolutionary new spell secret from me?”
“Because we both know you wouldn’t be able to resist trying it yourself. And you’re kind of irreplaceable, you know.”
“Irreplaceable? You said there’s another pony me on the other side of this portal.”
“I do not want that Twilight running Equestria.”
“Again, not a ringing endorsement.”
“Just go see it already.”
Twilight turned toward the mirror. Her curiosity won out over any other emotions her body was trying to experience and she stepped through.
It was different. When she would step through the portal to the human world, her body felt like it was being stretched, but not painfully… which was disconcerting in its own way. In contrast, the journey through this portal felt more like she was being compressed.
As she emerged, she quickly realized that her hooves were no longer touching the ground. She plunged forward onto her face with an undignified “Aagh!”
Twilight Sparkle got back up on her hooves and steadied herself so she could take in her surroundings.
The first thing she saw was a blue pegasus flying directly at her with a baseball bat.
“An evil clone!”
Twilight’s instincts kicked in. She immediately encased herself inside a dome-shaped magical shield.
The shield went up just a moment before Rainbow Dash swung the bat at her head, causing the bat to bounce off the shield and recoil directly into Rainbow’s face. The force of the impact reversed her flight trajectory and she tumbled head over hooves backward through the air, landing several body lengths away.
Twilight took a defensive posture within the dome and quickly looked for any other incoming attacks. When she detected no other impending threats to her body or magic, she untensed her muscles and took stock of where she was.
The first things she saw were six creatures that were unmistakably this world’s version of her and her friends. And Starlight was right – while they were clearly ponies, they were also very different. Most notably, their heads were essentially the same size as all of the other parts of their bodies combined. Larger if you included mane volume. Twilight wondered whether, if compared side-by-side to a pony in her Equestria, their bodies would be smaller or their heads would be larger. The thought occurred to her that with such a large cranial capacity, this entire species of pony might exhibit intelligence higher than hers. She didn’t like that thought.
Next, she looked around at the place she was in. She saw a kitchen, displays filled with cupcakes and breads… she was definitely in some kind of bakery. But the architecture was uneven – right angles were few and far between. Yet the building was clearly ponymade as opposed to being built into some naturally occurring formation, so it had been an intentional decision to make everything look like it was about to collapse at any moment. Twilight wasn’t sure whether the ability to keep an unstable bakery standing upright was a point in favor of or against her hypothesis that these ponies had a higher intelligence.
She turned her attention back to the ponies in the room. Fluttershy, Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, and Rarity. Rainbow Dash was lying motionless on her back, spirals in place of her eyes. None of the others seemed particularly concerned about attending to her.
Twilight then looked up, as Pinkie Pie had climbed to the top of her dome shield.
“See, that’s why I didn’t take that mirror down!” Pinkie said to the others. “In case it decided to spit out another new pony for us to meet!”
Twilight realized that by staying inside her dome, she was being rude. She neutralized the shield, encased Pinkie in her magic, and gently set her down alongside the others.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Twilight Sparkle. I come in peace from another dimension in the spirit of friendship.”
“I must say,” Rarity said, “that’s a much more pleasant introduction than the one our last visitor provided. No panicking or verbalizing her confusion over unfamiliar surroundings. And there’s no need to cover Pinkie’s ears lest she pick up any new words.”
“I learned how to read lips to get ready for this time!”
The native Twilight tentatively stepped forward. “Are you… me?”
The visiting Twilight looked down and back at her own body. Four legs, two wings, and she already knew that she had her magic. The proportions were way off, but all of the usual parts were there. “I’m my universe’s version of you, yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Princess Twilight.” She held out her hoof for a hoofshake.
Instead of reciprocating, the native Twilight’s jaw dropped to the ground. It didn’t have all that far to travel.
After a couple of seconds, she closed her mouth.
“You’re… a princess?” she asked the visiting Twilight, her voice filled with awe.
“…Yeees?” Twilight answered. She placed her hoof back on the ground and hesitantly said, “Are you not a princess here?” She hoped that she hadn’t just altered the timeline by revealing something that hadn’t happened yet. But that Twilight was already an alicorn. That meant she had to be a princess, right?
Applejack stepped forward. “That hasn’t been established yet. If we ever get ourselves into a situation where Twilight’d need to be a princess, I’m sure she’d be one then.” She reached out, took the visiting Twilight’s hoof, and shook it. “Name’s Applejack. Pleased to meet you.”
“I know you are,” Twilight said. Then hastily corrected herself, “I mean, I know that you’re Applejack! You’re all my friends back home. That is to say, I have versions of all of you in my dimension. I mean, there are versions of all of you in my dimension!”
The others simply stared at her.
“Is Rainbow Dash okay?”
As if on cue, Rainbow leapt back up onto her hooves. She looked at the ponies in front of her.
“An evil clone!”
She grabbed the baseball bat and once again launched herself toward the identical purple ponies. This time, she aimed for the native Twilight.
Four other ponies tackled her from the air and pinned her to the ground.
“She isn’t an evil clone!” Applejack said from what was an impressively arranged pile, considering the difficulty of getting four sets of stubby legs onto Rainbow Dash’s body without everybody’s heads getting in each other’s way.
“I’m Twilight Sparkle’s interdimensional counterpart,” the visiting Twilight said.
Rainbow Dash blinked.
“She’s me from the mirror world,” the native Twilight explained.
“Ohhh,” Rainbow said. The others let her stand back up. She put a hoof to her chin and said, “But mirrors show you the opposite of things, right? So that would make her evil! Unless…”
She zipped over and got up face-to-face with the native Twilight.
“…you’ve been evil all this time!” She jabbed her accusingly in the chest.
Pinkie Pie pushed Rainbow aside, then stood in front of the visiting Twilight. “Welcome to Sugarcube Corner!”
“This is Sugarcube Corner?”
“The finest bakery in Ponyville!” Pinkie said. She gestured behind her with a foreleg and all of the walls glittered.
Before Twilight could decide which of her many, many follow-up questions to ask, Pinkie ran over to a cupboard and ran back holding a glass bottle with a rounded base.
“May I interest you in a potion?”
Twilight looked at the bottle. “A potion?”
“We serve only the finest potions at the finest bakery in Ponyville!”
Even more questions raced through Twilight’s brain. She settled on the one most pertinent to the moment.
“What kind of potion?”
“It’s a mystery! Nopony knows what it’ll do!”
She immediately uncapped the bottle and drank the entirety of its contents in one gulp. Within moments, her mane and tail began to emit a steady pink glow. Twilight had to squint in order to look directly at her.
“Hee hee!” Pinkie giggled. “I’m brighter than you!”
It spoke volumes of Twilight’s diplomatic training that she was able to keep her response to herself.
Pinkie ran back to the cupboard, then returned holding six more bottles. She offered one to Twilight.
Twilight held up a hoof. “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself!” She distributed the bottles among her friends and kept the sixth for herself. To Twilight’s mild horror, they all voluntarily drank the potions.
There were six puffs of smoke that quickly vanished to reveal that each of the ponies had transformed. Applejack had become a robot, Rarity had become an octopus, Fluttershy had become a thin guitarist dressed entirely in purple, Rainbow Dash had become a wooden marionette, Pinkie Pie had become a jacket-wearing outlaw sitting on an idling motorcycle, and Twilight Sparkle had become Rarity.
The visiting Twilight stared with wide eyes. It seemed like the most appropriate response.
The Rarity-octopus produced a roll of fabric from some unseen hiding place and covered it in an ultramarine ink she expelled from her own body. Fluttershy began to play a funky riff. Rainbow Dash, with nothing to hold her up, fell over.
Seeing no evidence to the contrary, Twilight said, “So you all drink potions that have unpredictable, transmogrifying effects on your own bodies? That’s something that regularly happens in this dimension?”
Pinkie drove the motorcycle over to where Twilight was standing. “Not so much anymore,” she admitted, her chipper voice incongruous with her vehicle, outfit, and full beard. “It stopped being so important once we found out who was making them.”
“Who was— you were drinking body-altering potions without knowing who was making them? ”
“She turned out to be a real nice pony,” came the robotic voice of Applejack, not addressing what Twilight felt to be the more important question. “Maybe a little clumsy, but everypony makes mistakes.”
“I… I think I need to lie down,” the visiting Twilight said. Twilight-turned-Rarity stepped over, conjured up a fainting couch, then went back to admiring herself and posing in front of a mirror on the other side of the room. “You drink unidentified, potent liquids concocted by a former stranger who you now know still might be making mistakes. That’s a behavior that’s acceptable here. To be performed and emulated.”
“Absolutely!” Pinkie said.
Before Twilight could respond, the front door opened. Twilight turned her head to see that dimension’s version of Spike carrying a stack of envelopes.
“Mail’s here!” he announced.
At least she thought it was Spike.
She heard Rarity squeal in excitement. When she turned her head back to see how an octopus could squeal, she discovered that all six ponies were back to their original selves, now sitting in a straight line near her.
The dragon walked down the line, distributing envelopes to their intended recipients. He gave the final envelope to Twilight, who was at the end of the line. He then looked past the native Twilight to the visiting Twilight, standing just a few paces away.
He turned back to the native Twilight. Then the visiting Twilight. Back. And forth. Back. And forth.
“Nope,” he said. “One is my limit.” With no further comment, he walked out and shut the door behind him.
The visiting Twilight turned to her counterpart. “Was that Spike?” she asked.
“Of course,” the native Twilight said. “What other dragons are there?”
“Does he always sound like that?”
“Yes…” the native Twilight said, clearly confused.
“Sorry. It’s just that where I come from, that isn’t what his voice sounds like. That sounded like Rarity doing her impersonation of him.”
The native Twilight simply shrugged.
“Another question,” the visiting Twilight said. “You all get your mail here?”
“We’re all here pretty much all of the time. So this would be the most logical place for us to receive our mail.”
Before Twilight could say anything else, Fluttershy announced, “I got a letter from Mong!”
In unison, the two Twilights asked, “Who’s Mong?”
“My friend from Crossbones Island,” she explained. “He’s a giant ape…”
She grew dozens of times her original size. The visiting Twilight stumbled backward a couple of steps.
“…about this big, who briefly had a starring role in a Bridleway show. But the pressure of being a famous celebrity got to him, so he grabbed me…”
She acquired a Fluttershy doll, which she held in her foreleg.
“…and carried me up to the top of the tallest skyscraper in Manehattan. Some ponies got into airplanes to force him back down, but before he could hurt any of them, I talked to him, let him know that I understood how he felt, and convinced him to climb down to the ground on his own.”
Applejack stepped forward and weightily proclaimed, “It was beauty stilled the beast.”
Fluttershy shrank down to the size of the others. “I taught him the methods that I use, showing him how to suppress his rage deep inside himself, where it can’t hurt anybody else.” Shadows fell across her face. “Until the day he’s pushed too far.”
The visiting Twilight gulped and turned to the other Twilight. “I’m still trying to figure out how this dimension works,” she said. “When did Fluttershy drink the potion that made her grow?”
“Oh, that wasn’t a potion,” Twilight cheerfully explained. “Fluttershy is always able to do that.”
“You’re able to change size at will?”
“Not all of us. Just Fluttershy.”
The visiting Twilight blinked. It was the only motor function working.
Pinkie Pie held up an envelope of her own. “I got a letter from Good Moussekeeping magazine!”
Rainbow Dash stepped over. “Is that about the recipe contest?”
“It is! I’m too nervous to open it!” Her front hooves began shaking, vibrating so much that the letter popped out of the top of the envelope. Pinkie read it.
“It says that my streusel-topped graham-bottomed cream-filled brownie cupcakes… took first prize! Hooray!”
She jumped into the air, inflated like a balloon, and popped, releasing a spray of confetti and streamers that landed in a pile on the floor.
The native Twilight turned to the visiting Twilight, awaiting her reaction.
“Actually, that isn’t all that different than the Pinkie Pie in my dimension.”
The inhabitants of the unfamiliar dimension continued to open their mail.
The visiting Twilight looked around.
“Wait a second,” she said to anyone who would listen. “Why did you all momentarily stop in the middle of that?”
Applejack stepped over. “It’d been five minutes,” she said. “You can’t get a lot done in five minutes, so sometimes we have to take a break even if things haven’t reached a satisfying conclusion or dramatic moment.”
As the visiting Twilight tried to make sense of that, the native Twilight, who was sitting nearby, let out a groan of annoyance.
“I got another chain letter!” she complained. From the small envelope, she began to remove a chain made of thick metal links. And kept removing it until about seven body lengths of chain were in a coiled pile on the ground. “If I don’t send this on to some other pony, I’ll be cursed with a lifetime of bad luck!”
“Ooh, my cousin-in-law out west has been looking for a chain like that,” Applejack said, walking from one Twilight to the other. “I’ll take care of that for you.”
It was at that point that the visiting Twilight reached her conclusion regarding the overall intelligence of the inhabitants of the dimension she was in.
“Bills,” Rarity said, shuffling through her collection of envelopes. “Insurance advertisements. Unsolicited love letters.” She moved a thick cluster of heart-covered envelopes to the back, then scrutinized the next one, which was festooned with dollar signs. “‘You may already be a winner.’ Darling, I already am a winner. At life.”
Suddenly, a sharp gasp that captured the attention of everyone in the room.
“It’s finally here!” Rarity declared while flaring her wings. She stood on her hind legs and held up an envelope, letting her other mail fall to the floor. “The letter I’ve been waiting for from the Equestrian Academy of Television Crafts and Disciplines!”
Pinkie appeared, looking over Rarity’s right shoulder. “What’s it say?” She then appeared over Rarity’s left shoulder. “What’s it say?” She then appeared directly over Rarity’s head. “What’s it say?”
Rarity opened the envelope and took a moment to read the letter.
“Ladies,” she announced to the room. “I have been selected…”
A small alligator walked in on his two hind legs with a snare drum hanging from his neck. He performed a drumroll.
“…to host this year’s Judys!”
Her five friends cheered and rushed over to surround her in a group hug.
The visiting Twilight knew well enough to wait for the hug to end before asking her question.
“What are the Judys?”
“Darling, you’ve never heard of the Judys? Why, they’re only the premier awards for the field of television!”
Across the room, the lights went dark. A single spotlight shone on a pedestal displaying a golden statuette depicting a pegasus on its hind legs, using its forelegs to hold aloft a wire-frame cube. Fluttershy appeared behind the statuette to model it as it slowly rotated.
“Each year,” Rarity narrated, “performers, producers, and directors from across Equestria gather to celebrate their work on the small screen. But only the best of the best get to take home the coveted Judy trophy.”
The spotlight went out and the focus shifted back to Rarity.
“To create the proper atmosphere of glamour and sophistication, the annual presentation is presided over by a master of ceremonies who exhibits elegance, style, grace, and wit. This year, that host shall be none other than yours truly!”
The sparkles surrounding her dissipated to reveal Rainbow Dash reading the letter. “Wow, Rarity,” she said, “I didn’t know you could tap dance.”
“I dabbled a bit during my vaudeville days,” Rarity said, absentmindedly twirling a hoof in the air, “but I wouldn’t say it’s part of my repertoire…”
Her foreleg slowly froze in place.
“Why would you mention that?”
“It says here you need to perform a big opening number with singing and tap dancing.”
Rarity snatched the letter from Rainbow’s hooves. “They expect me to tap dance?!?”
A fainting couch materialized out of thin air behind Rarity. She lay down on it.
“How will I learn a Judy-worthy tap routine in such a short amount of time?”
The visiting Twilight looked over to see whether the previous fainting couch was still present in the room. It wasn’t. Still, she couldn’t be certain whether the current couch was a new one – after all, the baseball bat, empty potion bottles, and rotating Judy statuette had also mysteriously disappeared from the room as soon as no one was thinking about them anymore.
Rainbow Dash hopped onto the couch. “Don’t worry,” she said. “When it comes to precision movement at a high rate of speed, nopony’s better than me. I’ll teach you that dance in no time!”
Music began to play as Rainbow and Rarity took part in a series of exercises and attempts to master the dance. While that was going on, the visiting Twilight walked over to the native Twilight, who was sitting on the floor off to the side.
“So this dimension has television,” she said. “Along with motorcycles and airplanes.”
“Yours doesn’t?” the native Twilight said. It was as though she couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.
“Nothing quite that technologically advanced,” she said. “Although I’ve been to a world that did have all of those things. You don’t happen to have a portal to a dimension where the dominant species is a form of primate, do you?”
She shook her head. “No. And if we’re so technologically advanced, then why are you the one who’s been to multiple dimensions?”
“That’s just advanced magic. You have magic too, right?”
With a glow of her horn and a poof of magenta smoke, the native Twilight materialized an upside-down top hat on the floor. She reached a hoof in and pulled out Angel.
“Ta-da!”
“I see.”
On the other side of the bakery, a narrow plank was set up across a vat of water. As Rainbow Dash flew overhead with a baseball cap on her head and whistle around her neck, Rarity attempted to tap-dance across the plank. Before she reached the halfway point, her legs got tangled up and she fell in.
The visiting Twilight turned back to the other. “Not that I’m complaining,” she said, “but wasn’t Rainbow Dash accusing one of us of being evil just a few minutes ago? It felt like that never got resolved.”
Applejack walked over and sat down. “That moment’s in the past,” she said. “You shouldn’t go trying to remember every little thing that’s happened in the past. Rainbow Dash is trying to teach Rarity how to dance, and that’s all that’s important right now.”
Twilight suppressed a frustrated groan. She decided that it would be wiser to change the subject. “I suspect that I know what the answer to this will be,” she said, “but in my dimension, Rainbow Dash hasn’t really shown any proclivity for disciplined dancing. I don’t suppose she has a history of doing that here?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” the native Twilight said.
“Nope,” Applejack confirmed. “But if Rarity needs to learn how to dance, then I figure one of us needs to teach her how to dance.”
Fluttershy flew over and sat down on the floor next to Applejack. She said, “It’s what needs to happen, so we’ll make it happen. Even if you wouldn’t normally expect the pony doing it to do it.”
“That’s right!” Pinkie said as she corralled five crabs toward a miniature stage so they could snap their claws in proper time to the music.
The visiting Twilight looked over at Rainbow Dash, who was inexplicably wearing pony-sized crab claws over her front hooves.
“Maybe I need some fresh air,” she said.
“Why?! Why did I go outside? Why did I not realize that if the inside didn’t make any sense…”
Twilight gestured toward the landscape in front of her. When neither Applejack nor the native Twilight responded, she gestured more broadly and forcefully in the futile hope that her point was evident.
“It looks like an ordinary day in Ponyville to me,” the native Twilight said.
The part of Twilight’s brain devoted to sorting and prioritizing, having operated at full throttle ever since she stepped through the mirror, briefly shut down. As a result, she began to spew a rapid series of words that was as close to a run-on sentence as she had ever vocalized.
“Were there sudden, violent tectonic shifts shortly before this town was built? Isn’t an island far from the densely packed center of town a very bad location for a bakery? Why is the water pink? How are there masses of land just floating in midair? Are we on a landmass floating in midair? How does anypony survive when these steep, cliff-adjacent surfaces get slick during the winter? If you have television, then why are there no electrical lines? Why don’t I see a single other pony outside anywhere? What is the function of the patio umbrella sticking out sideways from the cliff edge? Does your language even have the words ‘perpendicular’ or ‘parallel’?”
Twilight’s legs gave out and she collapsed on the ground, nearly hyperventilating. Applejack stepped over, sat down, and placed a gentle hoof on her shoulder.
“Feel better?”
With her face in the grass, Twilight wearily said, “Yes.” She lifted her head and got another glimpse of the scenery. “No.”
“And it’s not true there aren’t any other ponies anywhere. Why, here come Apple Bloom and her friends right now!”
Over the bridge trotted three slightly shorter ponies that Twilight recognized as the Cutie Mark Crusaders. They weren’t all that much smaller than the stubby, big-headed native versions of her friends, but she couldn’t use that information to determine their relative ages. After all, the CMCs in her dimension were way overdue for a growth spurt.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Scootaloo.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Sweetie Belle.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Sweetie Belle’s voice coming from Apple Bloom’s mouth.
Twilight dropped her face into the grass again. A blast of magic left a divot in the place where her horn had been pointed.
“It’s the inconsistency that’s killing me,” she said to herself. “If I knew it was coming, it would make things easier somehow.”
“Why are there two Twilight Sparkles?” asked Sweetie Belle. Or maybe Apple Bloom. Twilight wasn’t looking.
“That one over there is visiting us from another dimension,” Applejack said. “She’s having a rough time adjusting.”
“I’m the normal one!” the native Twilight said.
“That’s what worries me…” the other Twilight moaned to herself.
Applejack lifted her hat, pulled out a pocket watch, and checked it. “Looks like it’s about time for the girls to finish helping.” She turned to the CMCs. “You three wanna see Rarity perform an amazing tap dance number?”
“Yeah!” the three fillies said in unison. With a blur of motion, they raced toward the door before Applejack could even turn around. They zipped past the native Twilight so quickly, it sent her spinning rapidly in place.
A dizzy Twilight Sparkle stumbled over to the one who was still lying face-first in the grass. She collapsed next to her.
“Maybe things here do get a little disorienting from time to time,” she said.
The native Twilight duplicated the visiting Twilight’s position by dropping her face to the ground. The only difference was that in her case, the image of three skittering crabs started floating in a horizontal circle around her head.
The visiting Twilight looked up, saw the imaginary crustaceans, and decided it was better for her brain if she kept staring into the dirt.
Twilight found herself back inside Sugarcube Corner, seated alongside five other ponies. She took in her surroundings and turned to Applejack.
“Five minutes again?”
“Yep.”
“Wow!” Pinkie said, oblivious to their conversation. “Rarity’s doing an amazing job hosting the Judys so far!”
The six ponies were all watching a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. The last four notes of a bold, spectacular musical number came through the speakers. At the center of the screen stood Rarity in a shimmering gold gown, standing on her hind legs with her forelegs spread wide and her front hooves rapidly rotating back and forth.
Twilight didn’t have time to both wonder why she didn’t get to see or hear the musical number whose preparation had been such a big deal five minutes ago and wonder how much time had passed since she was face down in the grass. She focused on wondering about the latter. Only wondering, though. She had come to the conclusion that there was no point in trying to press the inhabitants for answers.
“Thank you! Thank you! You’re all too kind!” Rarity said as she stood behind a microphone. Now she was wearing a blue satin dress. “It is my great honor to welcome you to what I assure you shall be the most glamorous Judys in television history!”
Rainbow Dash grabbed a hoofful of popcorn from a bowl on the floor and shoved it in her mouth. She said, “She sure looks classy up there,” then swallowed and belched.
From the screen, Rarity said, “We have the debonair Finn Tastic with us tonight.” As the audience applauded, the program showed a shot of a dolphin dressed in a velvet jacket lounging in a large glass bowl filled with water. Twilight wondered both whether the dolphin was sapient and what was keeping Rarity from freaking out over fine velvet getting wet. “And I must say, sir,” Rarity continued, “you are the dolphin ition of class.”
Fluttershy collapsed onto her back in a fit of laughter.
After a few seconds and no sign of her stopping, the visiting Twilight asked, “Does she need help?”
Applejack said, “Nah, she’s okay. It’s just something that we went through a while back. You’d understand if you knew what had happened in the past.”
“But you said—” she replied before forcing herself to stop. To herself, she muttered, “It won’t help, Twilight. It’ll only make you angry.”
Rarity said, “And now, it is my pleasure to present the first award of the night: Best Comedy Series!” An unfamiliar unicorn mare walked over while levitating an envelope and a statuette. Rarity reached for the envelope as the shot changed to a split screen showing four different ponies in the audience.
“And the Judy goes to… TackStriver !”
As the sound of the orchestra came from the television, the visiting Twilight said, “Did she just say TackStriver was the best comedy series?”
The native Twilight replied, “Oh, that’s right. If you don’t have television in your dimension, then you wouldn’t know about TackStriver .”
“No, I’m very familiar with TackStriver . It’s a book series about a mare who gets herself out of dangerous situations using her scientific knowledge and engineering skill. It ended a while back – I have the entire collection. But while Money Hunter may have served as comic relief from time to time, the series as a whole was definitely more action and drama than comedy.”
“That’s all true here as well,” the native Twilight said, “but last year, they rebooted the series and turned it into a TV comedy. Oh! I know – I’ll show you.”
She got up and trotted over to the kitchen, leaving the others to watch the awards ceremony. Twilight followed her.
“That’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t have time to watch several episodes of—”
“Don’t worry!” the native Twilight said as she rummaged through the cupboard. She pulled out three similar-looking bottles. “These potions will allow you to experience the entire season in an instant!”
The visiting Twilight took a cautious step back. “I thought you had no control over what your potions did to you.”
“Only sometimes,” the native Twilight said, seemingly contradicting an earlier precedent that may not have been explicitly stated but was certainly implied. “But potions are also useful when we need to accomplish a specific ancillary task and there’s no other easy way to do it. And these potions will show you the entire season of TackStriver with no other effects to your mind or body.”
“Even if that’s true, isn’t that piracy?”
Rainbow Dash came swinging in on a rope, a tricorne hat on her head and a patch over her eye. “Did somepony say—”
“Not that kind of piracy.”
With no warning, the native Twilight shoved the first bottle into the visiting Twilight’s mouth and pushed her head upward, causing her to swallow the entire contents. She quickly repeated the action with the other two bottles.
After gasping for air, the visiting Twilight angrily sputtered, “Why would y—”
At which point her body went rigid and her eyes turned into orange and yellow concentric circles growing and expanding from the center.
After a few seconds, her eyes returned to normal and she staggered backward. “What was that ?!” she exclaimed.
“TackStriver ,” the other Twilight said.
“Yes, I gathered as much,” she said. “I was being rhetorical. Expressing my disbelief that somepony thought it was a good idea to create a series where characters who are known for traveling all over the world spend more than half of the episodes just sitting around the Caladrius Foundation headquarters.”
“What’s wrong with that? I liked it.”
“What’s wrong with that? The show repeatedly disregarded or contradicted established TackStriver canon! F-Stop is Tack’s mortal archnemesis, not some frenemy prankster who pops in on occasion for minor mischief! Thorn Grinder is supposed to be Tack’s boss, but the show acts like Tack is the one who calls all the shots! And when Tack builds something, she does so using the items she has available to her – she doesn’t summon random objects out of nowhere! If she had the magical power to perform those kinds of summoning spells, then why wouldn’t she just summon a blowtorch instead of trying to build one?”
“You do realize that those are all really nitpicky complaints. Yeah, they tweaked the characters’ personalities a little, but it’s a new series – of course they’re not going to adhere to every single bit of canon from the previous one.”
“But you can’t capriciously pick and choose which aspects of a series you’re going to ignore just because that’s what’s convenient for whatever story of the moment you want to tell!”
“It’s a comedy , Twilight! The point is to make jokes! This version isn’t worried about maintaining a series-long narrative – you can’t complain that it’s failed to succeed at something it never intended to do.”
On the other side of the bakery, Pinkie placed the awards ceremony on pause, resulting in a still image of Rarity – now wearing a puffy wine-red gown – making a contorted face as she was stopped mid-word. She and the other three ponies got up and walked over to the perimeter of where the two Twilights stood.
“But it has failed at what it intended to do. If the audience doesn’t understand who the characters are, then it undermines the comedy. When Thorn said that Money Hunter always has her head in the clouds, the joke was referring to all the times she would fly Tack from place to place and provide aerial reconnaissance. But in this series, she’s never more than five meters off the ground – there’s no evidence that she spends any time in the clouds! The show wants to divorce itself from the previous series and do callbacks to it at the same time!”
Rainbow Dash scooped another pile of popcorn into her mouth as the bowl slowly traveled toward Fluttershy. The reason the bowl was slowly moving across the floor was because it was balanced on the back of a small tortoise.
The native Twilight said, “They aren’t callbacks. The show is taking familiar characters and finding new and interesting things for them to do. If you love the characters so much, then don’t you want to see them return so they can do new things?”
“Not when they don’t act like themselves. Those weren’t Tack, Thorn, and Hunter – those were amateurish imitations of the original characters.”
Pinkie set a bucket of caramel corn down on the floor in front of her. She then took a long, translucent, pink twisty straw, stuck it into the bucket, and began sucking the popcorn into her mouth.
“No they weren’t – they were new takes on the original characters. It’s refreshing to see them in new circumstances rather than pigeonholed into the same tired stories they’ve been restricted to for so many years. For example, it’s novel and amusing to see that the scary, evil F-Stop secretly has a soft spot in her heart for cute little ducklings. That wasn’t an imitation – it was unexpected and inventive. Something funny and different for the character to do.”
“But like I said, that’s only funny if you already know that in the original series, F-Stop would never behave like that. In the context of this series, it isn’t a funny surprise – it’s who she normally is. There’s a difference between subverting expectations in a clever way and just having a character act contrary to their personality for the sake of lazy comedy.”
Applejack looked out toward the distance, away from the two Twilights as well as any of the others in the room. “Not since Buckler and Vidalia did two ponies debate so fiercely,” she said.
“Maybe the problem is that you’re trying to psychologically analyze fictional characters,” the native Twilight said. “I think you’re digging way too deep into what you think constitutes proper TackStriver lore.”
“That’s because the previous series had a lot to dig into. It was around long enough, and told enough stories, that its fans grew to love the characters, and cared about them as ponies, as much as they loved the stories told with those characters. Now here’s a new series that takes the characters that so many ponies adore and treats them as little more than conduits for surface-level jokes.”
“Right! Jokes! You keep going on about characters and canon when the entire point of this new series is to be a comedy. And if you’d stop complaining that the show isn’t what it used to be – which is your own personal metric; the show never once endeavored to be that – and actually enjoy it for what it is, you’d see that the show is fun. And the jokes are funny.”
“If it’s only about the jokes, then why didn’t they create some new characters to deliver those jokes? If the show didn’t endeavor to be like its predecessor, then why bring TackStriver into this at all? They could have created a new workplace comedy about agents who hang around a research institute all the time and get into wacky, light high jinks. Hay, they could have even set it in some other division of the Caladrius Foundation if they were so worried about the branding. Instead they tried to leech off of the popularity of the old characters while taking no responsibility to ensure those characters behaved in the way that made them popular in the first place.”
Off to the side, Pinkie Pie said, “Hey, Rainbow Dash! Look at this cake I have!” She showed her a five-tiered, multicolored cake. With a windmill motion of her forelegs, she began reaching behind the cake to eat slices of it while the overall shape of the dessert remained intact.
The visiting Twilight gestured toward the three empty potion bottles. “This series only accomplished two things. One, it alienated the fans who don’t like that the same characters are acting in unfamiliar ways. And two, it confused any potential new viewers because the series never explained the foundation of the setting, as that had already been established in the old series.”
Applejack said to Fluttershy, “After the Judys are over, do you want to go to the Ponyville Playhouse? Big Macintosh will be doing his one-pony mime show.”
Fluttershy said, “I’m sorry, I can’t – that’s the same time Harry will make his debut as Fuzzik in The Prince’s Bride at the sanctuary.”
The native Twilight stood on her hind legs and threw up her forelegs in frustration. “I never thought I’d say this about a Twilight Sparkle, but you’re too analytical! Why don’t you stop asking questions for a minute and just have fun with us?”
The visiting Twilight put a hoof to her own chest in shock, stopped to think for a moment, and then gave a single nod of composed recognition. “Twilight, this isn’t getting either of us anywhere. I never thought I’d say this about alternate-dimension versions of my best friends, but I think it would be for the best if we went our own separate ways and never saw each other again.”
“I agree. The realities that shaped us are clearly very different, and obviously we’re never going to persuade the other into understanding.”
“You’re right about that.” She thought for a moment. “I suppose…” she said with hope in her voice, “this serves as a good example of how even when you find out you don’t have as much in common with a friend as you had expected or desired, you can still respect that those things you find most unfamiliar might be important to them. It shouldn’t preclude the friendship.”
“I guess that’s a valid lesson,” the other Twilight said, “but analyzing life lessons in the context of friendship isn’t really a priority here.”
“That’s it – I’m leaving.”
With no reluctance whatsoever, the visiting Twilight walked to the mirror from which she had initially emerged. Without even checking to see whether it was still penetrable, she stepped through it, back to her home dimension.
The remaining five ponies sat around the room in an uncomfortable silence.
Finally, Pinkie Pie spoke. “So who won?”
The others simply looked at one another.
Rainbow Dash said, “Can I be the winner?”
A trophy poofed into existence beside her. She stood on her hind legs and proudly held it in the air.
As Twilight Sparkle emerged from the mirror, she stumbled over her longer forelegs and wound up performing a rag doll–like somersault into the room, ending up on her back.
“Of course,” she said to the ceiling.
Starlight stepped over and looked straight down at her. “How was it?” she asked. “Weird, right?”
Twilight got back up onto her hooves. “Starlight, how many other ponies know about this mirror?”
Starlight paused for just a moment before answering. “Just you and me,” she said. “I haven’t told anypony else about this mirror yet.”
“Good.” She glanced over at it. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I am going to take this mirror and encase it in a half-meter-thick block of concrete. Then I’m going to cast a spell of undetectability on it and drop it in the fifth-deepest part of the ocean so that nopony will step through it ever again.”
Starlight’s eyebrows went up. “Isn’t that a little… extreme? I know that that new dimension is unsettling, but are you that sure you want to prevent any other ponies in this dimension from ever experiencing it?”
“It’s for their own well-being. Trying to make sense of that world results only in madness.”
With no further discussion, Twilight teleported out of the room.
Leaving behind the pony who had the knowledge to create the portal in the first place.
Starlight looked at the mirror, then shrugged. “She doesn’t need to know about the two-year deal I already signed with the Hass Brothers,” she said.
After all, toy and media franchises were profitable and the content had to come from somewhere .
