Simulation Stimulation

Trixie tossed her mane back out of her face as she trotted up to Starlight’s office. There was a smug smile on her face and a subtle sway in her step that turned the head of more than one of the students at the School of Friendship.

Much to the consternation of several of them, who didn’t notice each other until they’d managed to collide in the hallway.

Counselor Trixie giggled to herself, bouncing in place for a moment outside the office doors, before she raised a hoof and knocked. Her horn glowed briefly as she undid one of the top buttons on her blouse. Perhaps her suit wasn’t as comfortable as her old cloak, but it did have the advantage of being more flexible when she wanted to turn on the Great and Powerful charm.

Starlight opened the door to her office, and blinked at the blue unicorn ineptly posed like a model out of one of the confiscated magazines she absolutely kept in her desk for purely evidentiary purposes. Trixie leaned in and batted her eyes at Starlight, who sighed and put a hoof to the all-too familiar spot between her eyes that suddenly felt like somepony had taken a hammer to her.

“Trixie…”

Do you really want to ask this, Starlight?

No, but why start making good decisions now?

“What are you doing?”

Trixie pulled back, looking around as though she’d just realized how many eyes were on her.

“You, uhm… you asked me to come to your office after the day ended?” Trixie pointed out, tucking her tail down so it wasn’t hiking up the skirt around her hips any more.

“Yes,” Starlight agreed patiently, “because I wanted you to help me with something to use for history class. And I told you that.”

Trixie’s cheeks flushed as she started doing a remarkably good impression of Fluttershy.

“And… ah… I suppose that wasn’t a euphemism for…” She slid a hoof along the tiled floor.

Starlight sighed and shook her head. She picked up Trixie in her aura, hauling her into the office and closing the door behind them. She sat Trixie down before she decided to ask the inevitably agonizing question she had left.

“Do I even want to know why you thought it might be?”

“Well, Sunburst was talking about that ancient poet at lunch….”

“...Trixie, he was talking about the Brontneigh sisters. You’re thinking of Sappone. Who wrote about two thousand years before either of the Brontneigh sisters were even alive.”

“There is a reason Trixie is a guidance counselor, and not a professor!” The younger mare sniffed disdainfully. “So… what did you have in mind?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about the feedback Sunburst got last semester, after the History and Defense of Friendship course,” Starlight explained. “About how our more kinesthetic learners have been having trouble with it. Sunburst has been trying to bring in more artifacts and such, but I had an idea that could make the whole process a lot easier!

“I pulled out my old notes on Starswirl’s time travel spells,” she continued, “and started working with him on making the changes that we’d need for this. I’ve come up with a variant that looks at a historical time and place, pulls the information from that time into the present, and then creates an illusion that the student can do things in. Basically, it puts them in the middle of a historical event, but without the part where they actually travel through time, break causality, and spend the rest of their lives being hunted by slavering hounds that stalk them through time and space!”

Starlight’s horn flared briefly, and there was a muffled canine yelp inside one of her desk drawers before she opened it up to pull out an amulet.

“The only problem is, in order to really test it, I need somebody who doesn’t know anything about the historical event that I’m sending them to. Which means Starswirl, Sunburst, Twilight, and myself are all out.”

“So you picked the friend you had who’s the biggest dunce about history you could think of,” Trixie deadpanned. Starlight giggled nervously, eyes darting from one side to the other.

“I mean, if I’d wanted to do that I’d have just asked Rainbow, but… well… Applejack made it perfectly clear what would happen if I ever did that again after the Strawberry Incident.”

Trixie sighed and rolled her eyes indulgently.

“All right! But you owe Trixie a favor for this. Say, dinner tonight?”

“Sure!” Starlight grinned. “We can hook up with Sunburst, talk about the results, and see if it’s ready just yet! Now, since the spell has to be something we can use without having me there to cast it on everypony, I’ve put it on this amulet,” she explained, continuing on as Trixie huffed mentally.

How can somepony so smart be so incredibly dense? She sighed to herself as Starlight prattled on with some sort of technical magical jargon that would make sense to precisely three unicorns (and one alicorn) in all of Equestria, and Trixie wasn’t one of them. Maybe over dinner, she’d be able to get through to Sunburst that she wanted to get some alone time with the headmare - he was, somehow, usually less oblivious than Starlight was.

“So, do you think you’re ready for a trip to ancient Equestria?” Starlight asked cheerfully, drawing Trixie’s attention back to the present.

“Of course! The Great and Powerful Trixie is always ready to expand the limits of magical knowledge!” She took the amulet from Starlight’s aura and put it over her neck as Starlight nodded and got ready to take some notes.

“All right. Just remember, if you need to get out, just use the safe word.”

Trixie blinked. Maybe ignoring Starlight’s technical talk wasn’t the best idea after all. Unfortunately, before she could say anything, Starlight had charged her horn and zapped the amulet, activating the imprinted spell. The world flashed a bright blue, and Trixie felt the world turn inside out.

When she could see again, she was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Looking around, she saw that she was dressed in the flashy livery of a Unicornian rent collector, at least if her memory of prior Hearth’s Warming pageants was anything to go by. Behind her, she was hauling an empty cart, and ahead of her she could see the smoke from distant chimneys.

“Oh boy,” she whimpered, trying to figure out where - and when - she was.