The Dream-Armageddon of Nihilist [remember to insert cool made up name here]

by Equimorto

Rating: teen
Tags: Sugarcoat, Random, Twilight Sparkle, Drama, Comedy, Other, Equestria Girls, Sunset Shimmer
Length: 6223

Uncontrolled magic is ripping through the fabric of reality, countless lives and the state of the world are at stake, and it's up to a teenager with mental health issues to fix everything. It seems like this may be a yearly occurrence at this point.

The world is in danger, again. Magic is to blame again. It's up to a teenage girl massively out of her depth to fix everything, again. It really feels like it's starting to become a worrying pattern, although Sugarcoat is far too preoccupied with far more pressing matters to worry about that. She'll have to make a decision, and getting there will involve learning how magic works, a lot of details she could have done without, and that if you scream into the void hard enough eventually the void screams back.

An entry in Imposing Sovereigns IV, under the prompt Sugarcoat / Unorthodoxy, and the 100th Sugarcoat story on the site.

Inspired by Oversaturation, Mirror Match Inc., and Machina Cor Armageddon.

Pre-read by Petrichord.

Published 2023-11-26 17:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-11-26 17:20:01 UTC

ashluuecntrdhoreseieda

All things are constantly ending, insofar as the process of them existing implies the fact that said existence inevitably leads to its own conclusion through its prosecution. This is a fact as technically true as it is generally useless. To live is to die, and yet it is both redundant to state as much given there is no life without death and reductive to ignore the process for the sake of the ending. The revelation that living is intrinsically tied to dying is not a historically novel one and neither is it a deep one. It is at most the stuff particularly moody teenagers may choose to shape their personality around, among a number of other seemingly deep platitudes that occur to a mind old enough to break out from the shell of childhood's innocence and reflect on the world yet still too young to appreciate its own careless crippling stupidity. Such is the inevitable process of growing up. The teenager cringes at the child's purity, the adult at the teenager's pretentiousness.

Sugarcoat was exactly at that point in life where living in an adult body tricks the mind into thinking it isn't still overgrown with excessive neural pathways it'll trim in a few more years and critically lacking in both experience and emotional development. She was also the exact sort of person that would gladly adopt the type of surface level nihilism said kind of overgrown kids are fond of, as it was a perfect fit for her abrasive personality, her smug contrarian devil's advocate 'technically correct' attitude, and her latent depression. All of that was fine, and even expected from a girl her age, doubly so one coming from a high school that up until not too long before could have been classified as a torture camp if anyone took mental health seriously.

Sugarcoat was also, at that moment, tasked with deciding the fate of a significant number of lives. That was not fine. Not only are teenagers unfit for that kind of thing, the knowledge that their actions suddenly do have deep long reaching irreversible consequences tends to make them into either panicky creatures or paralysed nervous wrecks, and sometimes both. Sugarcoat would have probably ended up the second kind, though she would have handled it with some pretence of grace, as she was still a Crystal Prep student and pretentiousness was a necessary trait of all those who went there and came out alive. She would have slipped into inaction, but it would have been a gradual and measured process, one that may even have fooled others into failing to realise something was wrong until it was too late. And then, ideally, it wouldn't have been her problem anymore. Assuming the afterlife didn't exist. Sugarcoat did not believe the afterlife existed, and she put a lot of effort into pretending that belief made her cool instead of filling her with existential dread and fear of death.

Sugarcoat would have slowly and gracefully slipped into inaction, had she still had a body at that moment. Unfortunately for her, she did not. That was not in itself odd once one considered the place she happened to be in, but it was certainly odd for her to be there in the first place, and quite unexpected on top of it. The understandable confusion derived from her position and shock at her lack of a body meant Sugarcoat ended up going the first route over the second, and she very much began to panic. And being that she did not have a body to express that panic through with all a series of jerks and jitters and twitches, she went ahead and showcased it in the most reasonable of ways under her conditions.

Sugarcoat screamed. Sugarcoat screamed into the void, literally and not metaphorically for once, a fact which she would have had all the reasons to brag about in the future if she'd been lucid enough to appreciate it then. Many of her peers wished they could do the same, though under better circumstances. It certainly was a great tool to relieve stress. Being that they could not, however, actually scream into the void, but merely empathise with the abstract concept of the act, the void had remained undisturbed for all its timeless eternity. Up until the moment Sugarcoat had brought change onto it, and that change was her screaming. Continuous screaming. Lacking a body, it turned out, meant a lack of sore throats and breathing pauses.

Given both the intensity and length of the screaming and the peace it had breached, it was quite reasonable and understandable for the void to take issue with Sugarcoat's actions. So it did what any sensible entity would do in its incorporeal position. The void screamed back. "Will you cut that out?"

Sugarcoat did shut up at that, and for a first, brief time, the void knew the meaning of happiness. Then her shock faded just enough for her to talk again. "Who are you?"

"Nobody," said the void.

That wasn't even on the podium as far as the strangest things she'd had to deal with that day went, so Sugarcoat took the answer without issue and moved along. "Where am I?"

"Nowhere," said the void. Then, deciding it was best to play it safe, it added, "The nowhere. The place that isn't, by definition."

"What happened?"

Sugarcoat knew what happened, mostly, but it was a confusing and jumbled mess. Half of it was incomplete and fragmented but linear information, which she was fairly certain she could trace to her own memory and deductions. The other was a tangle of extraneous notions and concepts that simply was in her. She knew things, insofar as she could perceive knowledge of them, but she could not visualise them or make orderly sense of them. She had truth yet no way to fit it anywhere.

The voice of the void was there to help her make sense of it. Half because there had been nothing in there before her presence and what was there now was a reflection of her, half because doing so would mean Sugarcoat would hopefully leave and leave the void alone again. "It all starts with an accident." Most things did. Sugarcoat occasionally wondered if her own life had too.

A flash of information. Data. Image and sound like a cross between a memory and a video, and yet interwoven with sheer knowledge pouring into her consciousness like strings of a file being written onto a disk. A disk has no knowledge of its contents in the way the person who stored it there intends it. It's an inanimate object, incapable of comprehending magnetically inscribed ones and zeros as words or colours and much less able to understand the meaning those things may possess. Sugarcoat was at once disk and user, unaware of the knowledge she was made to contain until the forced, conscious act of witnessing it.

Parts of it she instantly understood in the way one knows one's own memories. Other parts weren't immediately clear, but the knowledge unravelled itself to provide an explanation. The two different streams alternated to provide a comprehensive but fragmented retelling of what had happened. Ideally, they would have flowed simultaneously, but even physically removed from her body her human mind wasn't built for that kind of thing. It bothered her to know that. She'd been walking home from the mall. Somewhere else on that side of town, the local group of magical girls was dealing with a rogue event. Sugarcoat learned then that it had been Twilight's actions, and Sunset's before, that had caused magic to seep into her world.

On the surface, it seemed to be a regular Saturday. Magical accidents were routine at that point, and Sugarcoat had been legitimately impressed at the town's ability to accept that and move on despite them all lacking her deep detached totally cool outlook on life. She'd pinned it on most people being stupid. It was a shame Cadence hadn't gotten to provide as much psychological support as she'd wished to under Abacus's tenure, or Sugarcoat and about half of her classmates would have probably recognised how their own mental frameworks did match depression's way of convincing people they alone see the truth of the world's conditions and understand the suffering of living. Not Sunny Flare though. Sunny Flare wasn't depressed, she really was just that egocentric.

The exact details of the magical accident weren't deemed important. In terms of storing and transferring information, their exclusion made things easier and faster. In terms of viewing it through the lens of human perception, Sugarcoat found the scene to be weirdly smudged, like that time she'd tried to wear a sleeping eye mask and it had been too tight and she'd seen everything as blurred splotches for half an hour after waking up. One detail was deemed important though, and it shone through the scene with crystal clarity despite not being in any way a visible thing.

Something was wrong. Something was different from the usual. Suddenly having a whole frame of reference for that sort of thing shoved into her just so she could comparatively understand why that one particular instance was a problem was a bit of a traumatic experience for Sugarcoat, but she'd dealt with tests being scheduled less than a day in advance, so she managed. Whatever form the magical anomaly was manifesting as didn't matter, but what did matter was that the magic feeding it wasn't any random wisp of the many that had been accidentally released into the world. It was a tear. A rip, a small one, torn between her world and Sunset's, possibly by one of those wisps. Magic was actively flowing through it. Also Sunset was a horse alien thingy. That explained Twilight's wings. Somehow.

As the girls fought against the warped physical manifestation of magic's influence, the tear itself kept feeding into that manifestation. The commotion resulting from the clash only agitated the rip, widening it further, which led to more power flowing through it, a more warped manifestation of said power, greater struggle, a wider wound between realities, so on and so forth. Not as far from there as she'd been before, Sugarcoat kept walking towards her house.

Sugarcoat didn't like driving. She had a licence because it was socially expected of her to have one, but driving made her nervous and being nervous made her aware of the fragility of her own façade of superiority, and she couldn't have that. She didn't like buses either. They were needlessly expensive and exposed her to too much unwanted information from people convinced that plastic seats and metal poles provided any kind of sound insulation. Sugarcoat liked walking, because it was a socially acceptable form of isolation and because it let her get away with eating as many sweets as she did. Sugarcoat was really starting to regret her preferences.

The fight moved as it grew in intensity. The tear widened. Sugarcoat walked. The girls prepared to do what they believed would put an end to the confrontation by shooting the problem with rainbows and letting magic sort itself out, which was apparently the accepted standard procedure for such things. Past Sugarcoat was doing that thing where she got too absorbed in her own thoughts and fantasies to notice anything around her all too well, which she did because she felt a need to criticise everything around her she did notice and apparently other people took issue with that. Present Sugarcoat wondered how she'd made it that long without being run over by a car.

The girls shot their rainbow laser thingy. Sugarcoat turned a corner down the road, just in time to see Applejack was the one they were channelling the beam through. Apparently they took turns with that. The magic reached the problem. She never got a chance to have a good look at it. The disproportionate sudden influx of energy from the opposite direction tore the hole in reality wide open, and though Harmony did mend the wound the resulting initial magical surge still had to go somewhere, and, much like electricity, magic naturally chose the easiest path to travel through. That happened to be somewhere suitable to transport and contain magic, but not yet saturated with it. Sugarcoat was the equivalent of a lightning rod, and it all happened too fast for anyone to react.

Sugarcoat was in the void. She still felt like screaming, but at least she understood what was happening. It would be angry screaming instead of confused screaming. She was missing out on some perfectly wasteable time contemplating the cold uncaring nature of the universe as an excuse to delay her responsibilities. But screaming wouldn't get her out of there, and she liked to think of herself as pragmatic if nothing else. Being efficient meant people were more willing to put up with her attitude. "So I should be able to just go back to normal, right? I'm having a temporary out of body experience after a high influx of magic, but my body still exists and I can simply allow it to discharge and go on about my day."

"Actually, there are-"

"I'm not doing the whole out of control transformation thing. I don't have it nearly as bad as Twilight or Sunset did and I didn't get here intentionally. I'm going to let the magic go, head home, eat snickerdoodles, and bottle up my emotions until I'm halfway through my thirties wondering why I'm so deeply dissatisfied despite my high paying job; and then it'll be my therapist's problem. I am not giving CHS students the satisfaction of saving my life a second time, and I'd much rather be doing something else right now. I've already wasted more time than necessary, so let me go. Or point me to the way out. Or explain what internal realisation I need to achieve to be free." Sugarcoat wasn't actually sure how one was supposed to leave the void, but she figured there were only so many possible alternatives.

"Oh, no, actually, that's not the problem. It's about the other thing. You know, the one you forced yourself to forget about in sheer terror."

And suddenly Sugarcoat remembered. Technically, she'd possessed the knowledge all throughout, but as she'd properly examined the how at the origin of her situation she'd deliberately chosen to turn a metaphorical blind eye to that other major detail, and in a largely metaphorical place like the one she was in that had some very real consequences. "Oh, right. That." Sugarcoat turned to stare at the stalls and the audience therein. Those were also metaphorical, but her brain was too used to physical space to visualise things as pure concepts, so it still all kinda looked like she was on a stage with rows of seats looking down on her. She was bothered that her mind was incapable of working on a more abstract level, because it wounded her pride and because the results were threatening to give her another panic attack.

Sugarcoat unravelled the other bit of knowledge she'd been made to carry. Magic had had consequences on her world. Consequences other than high school students sprouting horsewings and toasters gaining sentience and evil hypnotic singers with uncomfortably sexual vibes. She'd learned about the Dazzlings along the way. Apparently the exact shape of the creature that had brought about the situation she was in was superfluous information, but Adagio wearing spiked boots and stroking people's chins wasn't. Sugarcoat did not have a high opinion of the void, or Harmony, or whatever even higher force was actually responsible for deciding on details like that.

Right. Magic infiltration and its consequences. Magic was, inherently if unsurprisingly, tied to life. One could even suppose magic was life, and perhaps life was magic, though that was uncomfortably close to unscientific superstition for Sugarcoat's tastes. She could only accept so many of her beliefs being challenged at once. Regardless, magic did manifest into her world as life. It altered life, it imbued life, and unseen and unnoticed by everyone else it created life. Staring back at her as much as anything could in a place where eyes weren't real, perhaps staring all the more intently as a result of being literal souls peering towards her own, were all those lives born in secret from the magic that had entered her world.

They weren't really alive in the way animals or even plants were, and they weren't perceivable as those were either, but they were indisputably alive nonetheless. The simplest analogue may have been fays in the modern pop fantasy conception of them. The closest analogue was likely some highly complicated phenomenon theorised by physics too advanced for her to properly understand them, so Sugarcoat was willing to go with the more superstitious option for the sake of time and clarity. Alternatively they could have been compared to eldritch horrors existing just outside the edge of human perception, but it wouldn't have been polite to think that to their faces.

They were simple, instinctual creatures, which had woven themselves as part of a layer of reality that had only come to be in her world thanks to magic spreading through it. It functioned a bit like spacetime did to her understanding, which she was adamant was better than most people's. As one would for example be bent by mass and result in gravity, the other would be influenced by and react to magic. It was a board for it to bounce against, a network connecting different elements of the physical world in non-physical ways. It was the reason something like the geodes Twilight's friend group used had come to be. Those creatures before her inhabited and moved through that layer, and though they were simple there was thought to them. Emotion. Mischief and hope and sympathy. There was nothing complex, but there was life.

That life was in danger. Once more, from the top. Sugarcoat was walking home. Sunset and her friends were fighting a rogue magical manifestation powered by a tear in the border between the worlds. Viewed from within the layer of magic permeating reality, the tear looked like a giant beacon of light, one that only grew brighter as the fight went on and the hole grew larger. One the simple beings within that dimension were drawn to, to feed and feel warm and feel good. Sugarcoat turned the corner. Magic hit the hole from the other side and blew it wide open, and the resulting discharge found her as the closest, most inviting thing to hit. The wave dragged every nearby fay along, and given they weren't constrained by physical limitations that had happened to be a lot of them, possibly most of the ones existing in her world in the first place.

Harmony hadn't closed the hole between the worlds. Not yet. Nothing had happened yet. Sugarcoat had been hit by the wave of magic and all it carried, and that was when things had stopped. The void was timeless, after all, and she had a decision to make. The world outside was still stuck at the instant magic had fully connected with her. Was it actually stuck, or was it merely how she perceived it as time stretched out for her while she was overfilled with energy? Logic told her it was the second, but something else gave her the feeling it could be the first, and that scared her.

"They have elected you as their queen." Sugarcoat felt a nonexistent crown weigh on her nonexistent head, and the emotional toll of it was too great for her to bother with figuring out the how of it all. To them she was a being more complex than anything they'd ever interacted with, and so full of magic at that moment she looked like a star. It made sense that they would treat her with reverence. They weren't supposed to be inside a human mind, and they'd only ended up there by mistake.

The voice of the void spoke. Her voice. "Now it's time to decide."

Her own voice, from the void, answered back. It came from nowhere, yet it came opposite the first. "What will you do?"

Sugarcoat sat bent over in the middle of the two. "Is any of this real?"

"Does it matter?"

"You have the power to make it real. You have the power to make it not real. The choice is yours."

A flash of images. The sparks of Harmony Twilight had captured. The portion of Magic that had corrupted Sunset. The geodes they had found. Drops of water compared to a torrent gushing from an open wound between realities.

"And the responsibility of the consequences with it."

"I didn't ask for this."

"Life seldom cares what people ask for."

"What matters is that you understand the consequences of your decision, whatever those may be."

Pain. A lacerating, all encompassing pain, like fire burning every part of everything. Everything going white, and then cold emptiness following in its wake. Too many lights to count snuffed out like matchsticks doused in water. Carnage without sense or reason or understanding, but filled with suffering.

Light. Warm, welcoming, all encompassing. Blinding. Too warm. Boiling metal dripping through her soul, eating at her sanity and restraint. Laws and wills bending at her whim. Hunger and blindness and splendour. The beating of her heart pumping blood through the earth. The feeling of every leaf on every tree, every blade of grass, every branch swaying in the wind. Loss.

Her old life. Simple. Unchanged. Pleasant in its comforting familiarity, in its well known troubles. Pain, outside of her reach, outside of her thought, yet indelibly there.

"Why me?" she asked. She knew the answer was chance.

"You can let go of the magic. You can go back to what you had before, and nothing will have changed for you."

"But they are in you now, woven into you, and removing them will mean killing them."

"The world will heal. More will take their place. No one will know, and no one will suffer for it."

"But the pain will remain."

"You can keep the magic. You can become something new. Something great. You will save them. But you will be responsible for all that you do with your power."

"I'm not ready."

"You can let go of the magic, but you will be responsible for all that you could have saved and chose not to."

"No one will know. No one will blame you. Some may even argue inaction is not a choice."

"But not me."

"You could forget."

"But I haven't."

"So you must make a choice."

Crying sounds like music in the void. Notes of emotion melting into each other and resonating through the nowhere. Without a body, there's no holding tears back, but there's no sobbing either. It becomes a pulsing melody that flows out unrestricted and uncontrolled, yet does not impede on anything else. It's a shameless exposure, but it's liberating, in a way.

"I'm not the right person for this. Not that I think anyone else would be. I don't think anyone should have to go through this, but at least some people might be able to let go of it all without guilt. Some people would do horrible things. I don't want that to happen, and yet I would have loved for someone else to be in my place."

Her old life. One of the best students in one of the best schools. A success after the other without even needing that much effort.

Solitude. Chasing meaningless goalposts for the sake of having something to do. Always a moment away from sinking at a wrong move.

Friends. She had friends out there. Sugarcoat regretted not talking more with them almost as much as she regretted some of the things she'd said when she had.

"I don't know what to do. I don't know what's right to do, I don't know if I can do it, I don't know what I want to do. I don't trust myself." She'd always been good at finding problems in things as she got to know them, and she knew nothing better than herself. "I didn't even have a plan for what to do with my life. I was going to go to some random well regarded university and get a degree in something I'm good at and hope I'd stumble my way into a stable job; and if that happened I would probably keep at it until I retired. I hoped if I kept pretending long enough people wouldn't notice that I didn't know where I was going."

"Will you go and change that now, and take charge of things?"

"Will you turn back and let it go to spare the world your mistakes?"

"How much of this is real?"

"Does it matter?"

"You have the power to make it real. You have the power to make it not real."

"You ask for an alternative?"

Sugarcoat accidentally stumbled upon a cursed magical artefact still drawing power directly from Equestria. Sugarcoat was chosen by the fays to be their queen on a whim. Sugarcoat was the sacrificial victim of a cult trying to bring Equestrian horrors into her world. Sugarcoat was there by mistake as a portal opened, a mirror shattered, a prophecy was fulfilled, an accident happened. Sugarcoat was in the wrong place at the right time. Sugarcoat was at the centre of something great and terrible that wasn't supposed to happen.

Sugarcoat had enough magic in her to rewrite the world around her. "In the end, I chose the truth where the most lives hang in the balance." She smiled a little at that.

"Will you take your crown from fate's hands and bear the responsibility it brings?"

"Will you turn back and bear the weight of everything you could have prevented?"

"I never wanted to hurt anyone. I never wanted to make mistakes. I never want to make mistakes." Even in the void, her voice found a way to crack. "I don't want to be seen. If others see their own flaws, they won't notice mine. If others hate me they won't be disappointed in me. If I hurt others with the truth I'm still in the right."

"Are you willing to become unjudgeable to anyone but yourself?"

"Are you willing to hide your mistakes from the world?"

"I don't want to choose. I don't want to have to choose." Sugarcoat was screaming again, beyond her words, from deep in her soul. "I just want to go back."

Clarity. The music stopped.

Sugarcoat stood up again. "I've decided."

The void looked upon her, and it smiled, or so was how it felt. "Are you ready to go back to your world?"

Sugarcoat looked at the exit in front of her. It looked like the glowing outline of a door. She'd have preferred something more mystical, even as jaded as she was. "One last question. Who got to decide what I did and didn't need to know?"

"There's no one here. There was no one else here before you, and everything here came from there. I'm just how you processed going through too much information to hold it all in. So it was you."

There was a beat of silence, and then a long, resigned, drawn out sigh. And then the void was void again.

Sugarcoat sat snugly in the diner's cushioned seat, looking out the window while sipping through a straw on a milkshake with enough sugar in it to make one assume Pinkie had stopped being just a waitress there. She was really sipping on that milkshake. People would have found it weird how into it she was if they'd looked at her. Then she stopped, the blissful expression drained from her face, she sighed, and she looked towards the entrance just a moment before two aliens stepped through.

Sunset and Twilight, the one without glasses, scanned the room for a second and marched towards her as soon as they spotted her. "Welcome Sun and Stars," she greeted them with a hint of a smirk once they were close enough, then she got another quick straw suck in as they sat down with sighs of their own.

Sunset, ever the short tempered one but also the only one to at least know Sugarcoat in passing, spoke first. "Will you tell us what actually happened?"

Twilight, who was there for reasons she would explain herself soon and who wasn't the human Twilight because even if that one knew Sugarcoat she didn't really have all that much interest in seeing her again and also didn't know all that much about magic, spoke next. "We felt the resulting energy waves in Equestria. Nothing seems wrong, but we haven't had a disturbance in the astral plane this big since I ascended, and I did that within the plane itself."

"I also ascended within the astral plane, so I think that may be a part of it. The barrier between our worlds seems to be weaker there," Sugarcoat explained.

"This world has an astral plane?" Sunset looked confused and offended. The kind of expression a know it all has when presented with opposing evidence. Sunset had been humbled many times, but she was still the leading and only expert on magic on that side of the mirror and one of the top experts on the other, and being so suddenly unprepared on the matter was a new and most dislikeable sensation for her. "Since when?"

That expression did bring Sugarcoat a little joy. Guilty joy, but joy nonetheless. "Get with the times, Sunset. It's where all the fays live."

Sunset's next, even more bothered reply never came. Twilight had spent the last few lines running abstract calculations in her head, and the shock on her face as she spoke was far different from the kind Sunset had worn. "For something to be felt that strongly even in Equestria... Even if the difference in magical density means the same kind of event results in bigger waves on this side, the amount of energy required for something like that is-"

"Bigger than anything this world has ever seen before, yes," Sugarcoat confirmed her speculation. "Bigger than you channelling Harmony here or my Twilight weakening the border between realities."

Twilight's hand hung awkwardly in the air as she regretted lacking her double's signature glasses and missing out on a chance to adjust them as the news settled in. "How?"

"A hole between the worlds." Sugarcoat was looking at the table, but she glanced up at Sunset, anticipating her question. "Not like the ones Twilight opened. Those were physical, and while they did leak magic it wasn't really comparable. This one was on the astral plane, trickling out magic. Things happened and the hole got a little larger, and then a lot larger before it was closed." She turned to Twilight. "All that power had to go somewhere."

"Why you?" Sunset asked.

Sugarcoat smiled at her, and stayed silent for a moment. "The fays chose me as their queen."

Sunset crossed her arms and did something between a frown and a pout, but she didn't say anything.

Twilight swallowed and took a deep breath, contemplating the situation. "You kept the magic, didn't you? That... I'm impressed at how stable you are." She wasn't sure how to approach the conversation anymore. It was less like walking on eggshells and more like she and everyone else were one giant eggshell, and Sugarcoat appeared to her understanding as a precariously balanced hammer with a bomb strapped to it just in case it missed.

But she seemed to take the words well. "Thanks. It took a while to get it right, but I'm trying my best."

Sunset blinked at that. Underneath her emotions she'd been running much the same rough calculations Twilight had been, and she knew for a fact something didn't add up. The other Twilight and her hadn't been stable to begin with, but Sugarcoat wasn't exactly a pillar of Zen, and with that much energy involved... Her face dropped. "No." She could have. "You didn't."

"I did." Sugarcoat looked at Sunset with a tilt to her head and an understated smile. Then, as Sunset was thinking through it, she went, "Thirteen. Blue. Yes. One time you accidentally hurt your horn while levitating hot tea in front of Celestia."

Sunset dropped back against her seat, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. Twilight looked between the two of them, still confused, but starting to get an idea. Sunset took a deep breath, held it, and let it out, then she straightened herself and her expression. "How many times so far?"

"A few." Sugarcoat looked into her glass, suddenly very much looking like she wasn't enjoying herself at all. "Double digits. I also took about a month after it happened to figure things out properly." There was a slight quiver in her shoulders. "I'm trying not to overdo it."

"The event was..." A few days before at most. Realisation dawned on Twilight's face. "Oh. Oh, of course, that does make sense." She blinked. "How do you even manage that much information? It should be ripping your head apart."

"That's what the fays are for." Sugarcoat explained it like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was nice to be answering questions she knew the exact answer to, even if it took being the one responsible for it for that to happen, and her expression softened a bit. "It's getting a bit crowded in here, but they're nice."

Twilight smiled a little contrite smile at Sugarcoat. She was still dangerous, but she seemed well meaning. "You know, I've actually wanted to try something similar to what you're doing, but I don't really have the means for time manipulation on that scale. Do you think we-"

Sugarcoat gave her a thumbs up while still looking down to her glass. Then she too took a deep breath and sat straight again, and after a few more moments she smiled a little. "Yeah. I'm cool with helping out with some experiments, it would probably help me figure things out too. Make sure the other Twilight is involved as well. She's smart and I miss her." She sucked on her straw a little again, and Twilight finally noticed the glass wasn't getting any emptier.

Sunset looked at Sugarcoat, really looked at her, knowing everything she'd just learned. Then she looked just a little lower. "Oh of co-"

"Don't you berate me, Shimmer. I've seen what you'd do."

That got Sunset to shut up immediately, and purse her lips in that embarrassed way reserved for being found guilty of victimless crimes of moral character. Twilight picked the conversation up from there. "Why did you decide to go this way?"

Sugarcoat sat with her arms resting on the table, crossed, hands on the insides of her elbows. She looked back and to the side as she answered. "I wouldn't have been able to forgive myself for everything I could have helped with if I let go, and I figured this was a good way to keep me in check. There's not a single person I would trust with this, not even myself, but there's no one I'd trust better at pointing out mistakes." She idly ran her finger around the rim of her glass. "I am my own worst critic after all." She smiled to herself.

Sunset looked at her still. "Well. I suppose it could have been worse. You seem like a decent enough girl. Try not to mess up our world."

"My world." Sugarcoat's smile grew, and she closed her eyes and drank some more of her milkshake, and for a moment she looked positively giddy.

Twilight's smile grew a little more nervous. Sunset drummed her fingers on the table, then stretched her shoulders and her neck. "Alright then. Good luck, and I'll try to keep an eye on you. I suppose we should go tell my Twilight the news." She began to stand up. "Any advice for the future?" she jokingly asked.

Sugarcoat looked up at her, and then her expression dropped into dead seriousness. "Don't trust Sweetie Belle's cookies."

Sunset looked at her in surprise, blinked, and nodded. The fact that Twilight had visibly cringed hearing that told her she didn't want to find out more. She walked out past the table and a couple steps away, and turned to wait for Twilight.

Twilight stood up as well. "I know it can be hard. I've got my share of responsibilities back home too. If you ever need some help-"

"Sunset's diary." Sugarcoat nodded. "Thank you. See you around." Twilight wasn't sure if that was meant to be a wish or a prophecy. Regardless, she smiled, stepped out, and walked with Sunset out of the diner.

Sugarcoat stared at the table and then took a long hard sip from her milkshake. Then she all but collapsed against her seat, looked up at the ceiling, and took one final deep breath in for the day. Then, slowly, she began to smile, and she was still smiling when she sat straight again.

And then Sugarcoat screamed into the void.