Unseen

After what seemed like hours of flying, the carriage  dropped me off in some forest which I did not recognize. It was certainly not Everfree Forest, because it was not dark and gloomy in the slightest. I looked around, then I saw it. On one of the biggest trees I had seen in my entire life was a small door. I entered. The inside of the tree was completely hollowed out, and replaced with a set of stairs. I  suddenly realized that the inside of the tree was later than the outside. I gasped, went outside, and looked around. The tree was enchanted in some way which normal unicorns could not achieve. I went upstairs, and my sister greeted me with a hug. "My god, the last time I saw you was when you were just a small foal!" It felt very awkward being simultaneous invisible and being hugged by a person you couldn't for the life of you remember. "...and it still is, seeing you are invisible." I looked at my sister. She was a lavender-magenta purple unicorn, slightly older than me, with a mane style that made her look somewhat "in-charge." "Why are you a unicorn?"

    She looked up in surprise, and said, "Mom was a unicorn and Dad was a pegasus."

    "That explains it." I paused. "By the way, how did you grab me into a bear hug even though I was invisible?"

    "Well... since we are a very special family, we can read each other's minds."

    "Two, er, three things about that. One: that's really creepy. Two: why can't I do it? Three: How come you can't use it to read our dad's or mom's mind and find where they are?"

    "My my, you are the curious type. One: yes. Two: you can. Three: it only works in close range."

    I smiled. "Really? How?"

    "Just think about it."

    "What? How should I know?" I indignantly replied.

    "You misunderstand. 'Think about it' as in 'think about reading my mind.'"

    I blushed. "Oh."

    I thought about it, and a word flashed across my mind.

    APPLE

    "Uh, apple?"

    "Close, it was 'banana.'" I frowned. "That was really good for a first try." Star Beam smiled warmly. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

MMM... CHEESE

"What? 'Mmm... Cheese?"

    I opened my eyes. Star was eating a piece of cheese. She paused, then chuckled. "I'm eating cheese, actually. Good job!"

    Happy I had gotten the hang of it, I concentrated to see if I could do it again.

WOULD YOU QUIT IT

I chuckled.

FINE, I thought back.

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    "So. What exactly are we going to do about my invisibility? I think we are underreacting slightly. "

    "Well, I'm not completely sure... This is nothing like I've seen before."

    "What? From the way you do and speak about things, it seems like you know... Everything..."

   "Well, I do know a lot... could you explain to me exactly what happened?" I explained the strange night awakening and the dark figure. "What did the figure look like?" I thought for a bit. "I couldn't see its face... The moonlight was bright, but the figure was in the shadow of another house."

    "Ah, I see..." Star Beam reminded me of someone, but I just couldn't put my hoof on it. "I think..."

    "Therefore you are..."

    "Quiet."

    "Okay, sheesh."

    "I think this could be some kind of curse." She paused for a minute, then inhaled sharply. "No... it can't be..." Star Beam widened her eyes and thought. "No... No! This is bad! This is really bad! We've got to get out of here, quick!" She grabbed me by the hoof and dragged me to a  small metal box. We went inside. Star Beam frantically pressed buttons and turned dials, and the whole box started shaking. "What's happening?!" I shouted over the ruckus. I couldn't even hear myself.

WHAT'S HAPPENING?

NO TIME TO EXPLAIN NOW, I NEED TO GET THIS THING MOVING!

I held on to one of the the well placed handles as the box seemed to toss and turn and move at a very fast speed.

"aaaaaa." I screamed muffledly over the ruckus, as my face was stuck on  one of the walls. Suddenly, the box stopped moving with a jerk. Pulling my head off the wall, I looked around. She was still twisting and turning various dials. "Where are we?" Without saying anything, Star Beam opened the door and I went outside. We were still in the forest, but the extra-large tree was nowhere in sight. I looked around, searching for the treehouse. I saw a humungous cloud of smoke in the distance, next to a mountain. Then I got a sickly feeling in my stomach. That mountain was the same one which the carriage ponies had landed on. The mountain next to the treehouse.

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    "What was that?! Who is responsible for this?!?"

    "Calm down, will you? Nothing in there was important. All our important stuff is in our own dimension." I rolled my eyes. "How convenient. Our family has our own dimension, too."

    "Yup. It actually works very similarly to radio waves. Think about it." Not meaning to make the same mistake twice, I tried to access our "special dimension." I was able to access anything in the dimension and pull it out. I still cannot explain how it works, but I was but a spirit, able to control things with my mind. My body stayed back in my native dimension. I looked around the new dimension and found a collection of various items.

    "Whoa..." All this stuff was very overwhelming, and I was starting to wonder whether I was dreaming or not. I pinched myself using the impossible physics of our universe a few times, only then realizing how stupid of an action that was.

    "So back to the point of: who is behind this?" Star Beam immediately replied, "The same pony who separated us..."

    "Well, who is this pony?"

    "He is the almost the last one of his kind... His name is Oraceus." She spoke with loathing in her voice like I had never heard before. Even though I had only seen her in person for about half an hour. "Wait... You mean that he isn't a pony?"

    "He is, but I mean, to have these powers... The only other ponies that have the powers he has are us. You and me, Sun Bolt. And Mom and Dad, if they're still alive."

    "Well, what can we do about it?"

    "That's actually not the main problem at the moment," Star Beam replied. "You have to remember, you're invisible."

    She rolled her eyes. "We need to avoid Oraceus while trying to restore you back to normal."

    "How?"

    "I think we should talk about it tommorow."

    It was getting dark, and we needed to rest in our little metal box, even if we did have magical powers that weren't those of a regular unicorn.

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Being woken up by an alarm in the middle of the night isn't fun. I swung my hoof around, forgetting that it wasn't my clock that was making the alarm. I stood up. "Good morning, sleepyhead!" Star Beam was poring through books for some reason. I groggily looked around. "What time is it?"

    Star Beam thought and said, "Eh, maybe 4:30 or so?" She went back to her books. "What's happening right now?"

    "We're kinda traveling through space right now." I flopped my head onto a table. "Should I think about that, too?" She rolled her eyes.

    "No, we need the TaSTImV to do that, silly."

    "What? Tasty?" Star Beam facehoofed for the first time in front of me. Quite surprising. That she hadn't done that more. "No, T-a-S-T-I-m-V. Time and Space Trans-Intermolecular Vehicle."

    "Cool. So this box has its own little funky acronym? And man, that's a mouthful..."

    "Well, yeah."

    "And where we going?"

Star paused. "Absolutely no clue. Does it look like I know how to operate this thing? I only know the fundamentals, nothing else..." True, she did seem like she was pushing and pulling buttons at random... Wait...

    "WHAT?! Don't you think you might accidentally press the self-destruct button?!"

    Star Beam rolled her eyes. "Our parents weren't stupid enough to put a SELF DESTRUCT button in the TaSTImV."

    "Oh. So that's cool. Not only can this thing fly around in the sky, teleport through space AND time, it was also built by kin. That is absolutely AMAZING."

    I giggled to myself. "Heeheehee... What next... A black sphere with no physical properties... Designed to travel through a place where time and space don't exist? Outside the universe? BAHAHAHAHA!" Star Beam gave me a funny look. "Actually, that is a good idea..." Star Beam pondered my incoherent rant. "You know who I think can help?" Star Beam replied, "Yup. Princess Celestia."

    I sputtered. "Wha... what? How did you know?" She rolled her eyes and pointed a hoof at her head. "Right. Mind-reading."

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    Being a sun-raising princess and all, Princess Celestia was surprisingly easy to contact. In her private study, we were sitting down.

    She was in the midst of analyzing my condition, with a bit if help finding out where. Actually, since her magic aura was around me, it must have looked like a pegasus-shaped aura around nothing. Which likely looked quite amusing.

    Princess Celestia widened her eyes after a few minutes of her analyzation, and awkwardly informed us, "This... Is nothing I have encountered before... This is thousands of years old. Before paper! This is one of the earliest spells ever created..."

    "But aren't spells reversible?" Princess Celestia shook her head. "Not if you don't know them."

    "You're saying, that we need to first find out who cursed me and why, then we need to somehow, likely impossibly, convince him to lift the spell?"

    "Somewhat along the lines of that." I opened my mouth to begin speaking, but the Princess raised her hoof. She got out a box. She silently gave it to me. I opened it. Inside was a small pouch.

    "Uh, excuse me, princess, but, what's this?"

    Her next words were very cryptic. "Open it when the time comes. You will know when it is time."

    The pouch had a triangle with a star in it embossed on it.