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Chapters

Prologue
Chapter 2: Narrative Convenience
Chapter 3: Twilight Sparkle's 'Worst Possible Thing'
Chapter 4: Promontory, Utah
Chapter 5: The Veil Is Lifted
Chapter 6: The Direct Approach
Chapter 7: Glitch
Chapter 8: The Power of Love
Chapter 9: Double Team
Epilogue, Credits & Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Tempo Rubato

Prologue

Thought Experiments 3:

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Prologue

“Wait, this is your favorite song?” Rainbow Dash asked Twilight from her position near the ceiling of Rarity’s bedroom. In her hooves was an Ancient CD entitled Chicago IX: Greatest Hits.

The six ponies had gathered together at the dressmaker’s for a slumber party. It was five months before the Second Pony-Dragon War had broken out, and long before Vinyl Scratch had gotten stuck in any of their dreams.

“Yes,” said Twilight Sparkle to Dash’s question, nodding her head. She was lying down on top of her sleeping bag. In front of her was a pile of dozens of other CDs, seemingly ordinary objects made extraordinary by the fact that they came from another time and place.

“But you just said you don’t know what it means!” the pegasus protested, her wings beating against the air. “How can a pony who overthinks everything like a song she doesn’t understand?”

Twilight shrugged. “I just do.”

“And what kind of rhyme is ‘ix’ and ‘hits’?” Rainbow said with a smile.

“It’s pronounced ‘nine’, not ‘ix’,” Twilight replied, utterly failing to get that the pegasus was joking. “Look, I just like what I like!” she added, hoping to end the discussion.

“Apple Jacks!” exclaimed Pinkie Pie.

“Don’t drag me into this!” protested the farmer pony.

“No, not you, Applejack!” explained Pinkie. “I meant Apple...You know what, forget it.”

“We’ve all said what our favorite Ancient songs were, Rainbow,” said Twilight. “What’s yours?”

The pegasus crossed her forelimbs and looked up at the ceiling. “I haven’t got one.”

“Really?” asked Rarity from atop her bed. “I would have bet bits that you would have picked one of the pieces on that sports collection over there. If I were a betting mare, that is.”

“Yeah, those songs are alright—I’ll probably add one or two of them to my tryout music for the Wonderbolts. I’m not going to pick out a favorite though, because Jeff was a sexist.”

“What?!” Rarity cried, rising to her hooves. “Jeffrey was a perfect gentle-Ancient, and I won’t stand to hear you attacking his sterling reputation, or his taste in music!”

“But you did just stand up!” exclaimed Pinkie with a grin, which caused the white unicorn to roll her eyes.

“If he’s such a ‘gentle-Ancient’,” said Rainbow Dash, “then why are the tough songs only sung by stallion-Ancients? All the mare-Ancient songs are so pathetic!” She dropped down onto her hind hooves and put the back of one wrist to her forehead. “‘Oh, help me!’ those singers keep saying, ‘I can’t live without a male in my life. I am so weak and defenseless! Even if my special somepony is a jerk, I’ll never leave him.’ Pathetic!”

“Well, there’s—” began Twilight.

“And songs just using mare-Ancients as backup singers don’t count!”

“Oh. Never mind then.”

The others took a few seconds to try to think of a song in Pinkie’s collection of Ancient CDs that did not fit this pattern. The longer they tried, the darker the smirk on the pegasus’ face got.

“I think I know a song that’s not like that,” volunteered the other pegasus in the room, the one the others had nearly forgotten about. Fluttershy poked through the pile of discs, and finally pulled one out. It had the unwieldy title of Now That’s What I Call Classic Rock Hits. It had been ignored by the other ponies because it mostly contained songs that were duplicated on other CDs in the collection (like “25 or 6 to 4”), and because the ones that were left had titles that were either uninspiring (“Locomotive Breath”) or incomprehensible (“Paradise by the Dashboard Light”).

Twilight levitated the silvery disc out of the case and into the Equestria Acoustics Singalong CD player/karaoke machine, playing the track that Fluttershy indicated: “Crazy On You”, by Heart.

The song began with an intricate acoustic guitar solo in a vaguely folk flavor, which wound down into a sweet end, before switching to the fast and intense riff that dominated the rest of the song.

Rainbow Dash listened intently, listened again with a big grin on her face, and then concluded that she did indeed now have a favorite song.

The reaction of Twilight and Rarity was quite the opposite: they started by liking the instrumentals and the passion of the singing, but then began to get more and more uncomfortable as it became obvious that “passion” was precisely what this song was about.

Fluttershy and Applejack on the other hoof were able to listen to the song without showing much of a reaction.

Pinkie—as with every other song they had heard that night—declared that it was the “best song ever!”

“Argh!” exclaimed Vinyl Scratch, as she, Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie used the song to plunge into Rainbow Dash’s subconscious. “Why can’t any of you like something that isn’t terrifically foreboding?”

Author's Note

For those who might have missed it, Rainbow Dash just dropped the name of the Ancient that she and the other Elements visited, the one who gave out those presents (the javelin to her, the CDs to Pinkie Pie, and so on). You just had to wade through ten stories to get that tidbit. At this rate you might get a clue as to his motivations in time for the 30th Anniversary movie of the TV show.

Chapter 2: Narrative Convenience

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Chapter 2: Narrative Convenience

Twilight and Pinkie walked on either side of Vinyl down the main street of Ponyville that afternoon. The conclusion of the competition had been postponed one week while the near-fatal accident was being investigated.

None of the three ponies said anything. They just walked around the square, past performing piano players. Lots and lots and lots of performing piano players.

And then they walked around...some more.

Alright, I was going to hold back on this flashback until they had gone to sleep for the night, but if they’ve decided to move to Boringsville, I’ll just have that scene happen right now!

Earlier that day, in the section of the Unicorn Range that was directly under Cloudsdale at the time, a lone figure was contemplating her miserable life...

Pinkie Pie looked very carefully around herself before finally stopping and nodding. “OK, we’re definitely not being watched anymore,” she told Twilight and Vinyl. “She must be following somepony else.”

Twilight nodded in satisfaction. “See, I told you if we just walked and said nothing for long enough, that Rai—”

She was interrupted by a pink hoof to her mouth. “Don’t say her name out loud!” Pinkie stage-whispered. “That will get her attention for sure!” She removed the hoof.

“I told you,” Twilight repeated in a quieter tone, “if we were boring for long enough, that...she would switch her attention away from us. Now we can try to figure out what she’s up to.”

“Well, she’s telling a story about herself,” Pinkie replied, “only Vinyl is taking her place.”

Twilight nodded. “I got that from the Best Young Musicians Competition, Cloudsdale, and the whole ‘Visual Music-boom’ thing.”

Pinkie Pie tapped Vinyl’s shoulder sympathetically. “Only, it’s too bad that it’s just for show. Da...that one pony can use it to blow stuff up!”

“It’s a lot more than it seems,” confided Vinyl, looking carefully around to make sure that no other ponies were close enough to overhear. “The reason I was able to play as fast as I did was because I was somehow able to mess with the flow of Time. I stopped it, and even reversed it, so that Fluttershy could set up that net that saved you. I just wonder...”

“STOP!” ordered a panicked Twilight, freezing in her tracks.

The other two obediently stopped walking.

“What is it, Twilight?” Vinyl asked with a mischievous grin.

Pinkie, on the other hoof, looked like she was approaching Twilight’s degree of apprehension.

“Alright, first of all: Fluttershy.” Sitting back, Twilight reached up and grabbed a tiny imaginary pony with her forehooves. She carefully moved that figment off to one side. “I’m putting her here, so that we can come back to her. Don’t let me forget.”

The other two ponies looked at her oddly. Obviously, they had never taken Iron Will’s seminar on Organizing Your Thoughts Through Mental Imagery.

“Now for the important part: manipulating Time.” She took the time to clear her throat. “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR APPLE-BUCKING MIND?!?!?”

This got the attention of everypony in Ponyville. Then they saw that the outburst had come from Twilight Sparkle.

As one, the crowd shrugged and got back to their daily activities.

“You don’t mess with Time!” she insisted in a fierce whisper.

“Funny you should say that,” Pinkie said with a wink, “because I seem to remember one episode—”

“Yes, and that was one time!” Twilight quickly replied. “That’s the important thing. Time spells can only be cast once per lifetime for a reason! Vinyl, how many times did you go back and forth through the three minutes it normally takes to play that piece of music? Twice? Three times?”

“Hmm...” pondered Vinyl, “...once...twice...yes. It was three times.”

“Good, only three times,” Twilight replied with relief. “That’s the reason the universe survived so we could have this conversation.”

“What, seriously?” asked Vinyl.

“Yes, seriously. Princess Celestia knows all about Time, and what happens when you mess with it. When I was a filly, and I accompanied her to a demonstration of the first ‘portable’ reel-to-reel tape recorder—seriously, it was bigger than I was—the tape broke after the fifth time it was rewound. I’ll never forget what the Princess said as we left the room: ‘Time is just like that tape, Dear Student. Never forget that.’ And I never did! Sure, I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, but I made sure to memorize it, and right after I had my own run-in with time travel, I finally understood! There’s one rule and one rule only about traveling back and forth over the same spot in time: Don’t. Do. It.”

“You sound exactly like Fluttershy,” said Vinyl with a smirk.

Twilight’s response to this was to grab the imaginary pony and yank her into position front and center. If she was a real pony, she probably would have sent her chiropractor bill to the unicorn. “OK, now we can talk about Fluttershy. Do you know why her cutie mark is different?”

“No, but I can make an educated guess: it’s a musical joke. ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ is a famous fast piece of music. Musicians like playing it slow to emphasize something as being extra slow.” Vinyl then told them what the pale yellow pegasus had done during the time-altered parts of the concert.

“So she can alter Time as well?” Twilight asked in exasperation.

“Not exactly,” Vinyl replied. “She was always in lockstep with me. I think she just had the ability to follow me around when I slowed and stopped Time, or, rather, her other personality has that ability. But not when I went into reverse—she was affected then the same as everypony else. You know,” she added wistfully, “I’ve wondered sometimes how that one blue pegasus can go as fast as she does—have you ever considered that maybe she can mess with Time, like for real?”

With a sigh, Pinkie’s mane deflated, and the sudden darkening of her coat and mane made it look like she had just walked into a nonexistent shadow. “No,” the pony said very seriously. “She can’t mess with Time. Trust me on this.”

“Pinkamena?” Vinyl said in shock.

“Yes. Pinkamena,” the pony replied with some annoyance. “When you freed Pinkie, you got me, too. We’re a package deal. And sometimes I want to come out and say something. Is that OK with you?” She imbued that last sentence with as much sarcasm as she could muster, which was quite a lot.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Vinyl insisted, forelimbs raised defensively. “I just didn’t know you looked different as well as sounded different. Speaking of which, can Pinkie—“

“No,” Pinkamena cut her off, “Pinkie doesn’t mess with Time, either. No matter what you might think. Like Twilight said, doing that is very dangerous.”

“Well at least this is a dream,” concluded Vinyl, “and I’m betting that the ‘almighty she’ doesn’t know about that ‘destroying the whole of Time’ thing.”

Twilight sighed. “No, thanks to you saying that, we will have to deal with precisely that danger.”

“What?” asked Vinyl incredulously. “But Pinkie said she isn’t even listening in on this conversation!”

“She doesn’t have to,” replied Pinkamena. “Narrative convenience.”

Twilight nodded in agreement.

The white unicorn looked back and forth between the other two ponies (three if you counted the extra one in Pinkamena’s head). “This is one of those ‘Etheric Trope’ things I don’t get, isn’t it?” Vinyl finally asked.

“Yes, it’s important to remember that we are operating under the laws of narrative convenience now,” said Twilight. “Not like in our waking lives, when I could depend on the laws of Physics and Magic to always save the day.” She chose to ignore Pinkamena rolling her eyes at this remark.

“Well what now?” Vinyl Scratch asked.

“We take stock of where we are,” said Pinkamena. “We are in an adventure story, and this very square will be the location of the climactic battle between Good—that’s you—and Evil—the character she’s probably setting up right now instead of following us around.”

“Here? How can you possibly tell?” asked Vinyl.

“Take a look around you,” Pinkamena said with a wave of one hoof. “Every restaurant, every shop, every street corner. I even peeked in a couple of houses, and they all have them. The one thing Ponyville has only four of in the waking world.”

Vinyl glanced around. “Pianos?”

Twilight groaned. “How did I not see them before!” she exclaimed. “A battle between Good and Evil...you don’t suppose...?”

“What Twilight?” asked Vinyl.

“Well back when Sonic Rainbooms were really hard for her to pull off, I had this question I always wanted to ask, but I didn’t because I thought it would be a little rude to you, Pinkamena.”

“It’s alright,” Pinkamena said. “What was the question?”

“Well, if her first Sonic Rainboom did all of those incredible things to the five of us, including bringing Pinkie into existence, what did her second one give birth to?”

“...Then you accept my bargain?” the sinister floating sphere of blue light asked. “And the consequences?”

“Yes!” the desperate figure cried. “I would give everything I have for that kind of power!”

“And so you shall!” the sphere intoned, before floating over the figure’s head and contracting itself into her brain.

The figure grabbed her head and screamed, a scream that soon split into two separate voices.

“Finally!” they cried. “Vengeance shall be ours!”

Chapter 3: Twilight Sparkle's 'Worst Possible Thing'

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Chapter 3: Twilight Sparkle’s ‘Worst Possible Thing’

The next morning’s peaceful tranquility was shattered by the sounds of roars and screams.

The screams were from ponies. The roars were something else altogether.

Vinyl Scratch raced out of Carousel Boutique, where she had been spending the night in Rarity’s guest bedroom. “What’s going on?!” she exclaimed.

She was answered by a roar. A roar coming from a...

“Giant-sized manticore,” explained Pinkie Pie casually, having appeared out of nowhere.

It truly was that, a manticore the size of a three-story building. I think Twilight would probably give a lecture at this point of how its legs needed to be bigger to support its weight or something like that, but she’s not here, and the monster stubbornly refused to obey the Box-Ball Law or whatever it’s called.

“By the way,” Pinkie continued, “how was your sleep?”

“My—”

She was interrupted by a roar.

“My sleep?” Vinyl repeated a second later. “Wait, weren’t we just talking a—” (roar) “—second ago? How did I get—?” (Roar.)

“It was a trick question, silly!” said Pinkie. (Roar.) “You can’t remember sleeping when you’re in a dream!” She looked up rather significantly as she said those last words.

Pinkie’s weird. Oh, and roar.

“So what should I do?” Vinyl asked, craning her neck to follow the monster’s rampage a couple blocks away. (Roar.) There was something definitely off about the creature: it wouldn’t make any sounds as it walked, and then suddenly there would be a loud “crunch!”, like it had to be reminded from time to time that it was supposed to stomp like a rampaging beast.

“I think the problem’s being handled as we speak,” answered Pinkie. (Roar.) “I saw this strangely familiar yellow blur racing up from the Everfree.”

Roar.

“Hi, Vinyl. Hi, Pinkie,” said Twilight, walking up to join them.

Roar.

“Well, don’t you think we should do something?” Vinyl asked her.

Roar.

“About that?” she said, gesturing over her shoulder. Right on cue, the manticore roared once again.

“Yes!” Vinyl cried out.

“It’s a fake.”

(Roar?)

“What! Why do you think that?” the DJ demanded.

(Roar!)

“That roar, which you have been hearing repeated every five seconds—” (Another accusing glance at the sky! What do they mean when they do that?) “—is not what a manticore is supposed to sound like, not even a magically enlarged manticore. Do you know what that sound actually is?”

Vinyl listened to the next roar. “A resin-covered glove rubbed along the loosened strings of a double bass, with the sound then recorded and played back at a slowed-down speed?”

Twilight gave her a look.

“What?” Vinyl asked. “I got bored visiting Tavi one day.”

“Well I suppose that’s a right answer,” said Twilight reluctantly, “but not the answer I was looking for.” She looked over at Pinkie, who was hopping up and down and waving one hoof in the air.

“Me! Me! Pick me!”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Yes, Pinkie?”

“It’s the roar of Madragon, from Dashie’s favorite etheric show.”

“Yes, that’s the answer I was looking for,” said Twilight, nodding. “Also, it doesn’t have a shadow. Therefore, it’s an illusion. I’ve been looking for who’s responsible, and why, but I haven’t had any luck.”

Meanwhile, the sounds of screams from the inhabitants of Ponyville had changed to “ooh”s and “aah”s. In the main square, the monster had stopped its rampage, and was now slowly turning in a circle as its eyes watched the yellow blur racing around it. Every few seconds, it would lash down with its stinger, but it would always miss.

“How can I help?” asked Vinyl.

“Help?” asked Twilight. “No, you’ve got it reversed. You’re supposed to tell me how I can help you.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re the main character,” said Pinkie Pie.

“Me?” asked Vinyl incredulously. “No way. You’re the main characters, and always have been. I’m just a background pony.”

“How can you say that?” replied Twilight incredulously. “I’m sure you’ve led an exciting life. The things I’ve seen you do—”

“Yes,” interrupted Vinyl, “and all of those things I’ve done in support of you six, or the Princesses. Away from you, I’m like everypony else. I’m nopony.” She dropped her head.

Only to immediately have it raised by Twilight’s hoof. “What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “Are you forgetting that you saved Princess Celestia’s life? Twice?”

“No, Twilight,” Vinyl said firmly. “I was an instrument, a living microscope, that other ponies used to save the Princess. Don’t worry about me. I’ve known the truth for years about myself. Every concert I have given, every bit of entertainment I have ever done, served one purpose: to be the background music to accompany important doings by important ponies. Trust me, it’s a lot better than the fate that was originally planned for me.”

“And what about these powers of yours?” asked Twilight.

You told her about your powers, Vinyl? Don’t you know anything about secret identities?

“Yeah, what about those powers? When you were all falling to your deaths back in Cloudsdale, who was saving the day? Not me. It was literally physically impossible for me to save you. Fluttershy’s the real hero, the same hero who is busy saving Ponyville right now. Face it, she’s the Green Flashlight, and I’m just her rechargeable power pack.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” said Twilight. Then she looked around. “The roaring’s stopped, the manticore’s gone, and Pinkie has disappeared. We’ve got to go, but this conversation is not finished.”

Vinyl shrugged before following Twilight to the last spot where the monster had been seen.

There was no trace of the monster, which is about what you might expect given that it was an illusion. Fluttershy was found hiding under an overturned fruit cart, just how she was always found following the defeat of a hideous monster by the mysterious Yellow Flash.

Twilight cast a few spells, then headed back to the library, followed by Vinyl. “I picked up a very unusual glamour from that area,” she said. Seeing the confused expressions on their faces, she explained that it was the residue left over from a spell, which could be studied to learn various technical details and blah, blah, blah, Twilight lecture mode. “It almost seemed familiar,” she added.

At that moment, she opened the door, and in the next moment she froze in shock.

“My books...” she whispered.

Every book—every single solitary book in Twilight’s library—had been turned to stone.

The librarian raced up to a shelf and tried to use her magic to remove a volume, but they were all joined together. She then turned to a particularly thick book that was resting open on a table. The top pages could be read, but there was no way to flip to see any others.

“Who...who would do something so incredibly unfair?” Twilight asked in horror.

“Um...hello, Twilight,” the faint voice of Fluttershy said from the door behind them. “I was wondering if I could borrow...a...book?” She walked past the two ponies in the doorway to the center of the main room, looking around herself in growing fear.

With an audible “THUNK!”, Time ground to a halt.

Vinyl looked around wide-eyed at her blood-red surroundings.

“You ponies are all in incredible danger,” said Fluttershy. No, said Fluttershy’s other self, the one with the creepy eyes.

“Who are you?” Vinyl asked. “What are you?”

The creature in Fluttershy’s body sighed. “You may call me Lux,” she said. “I am a faerie.”

“The beings that live in the Dimension of Magic?” asked Vinyl. “Like the Nightmare? And Waking Terror?”

“The same,” replied Lux.

“Then you are in Fluttershy’s body for the same reason those two needed physical bodies,” realized Vinyl, “because the laws of this dimension would sooner or later tear you to pieces otherwise.”

“That is correct. Fluttershy became my host when your first Music-boom tore a temporary hole in the veil between our two realms. It appears that your second Boom yesterday opened a second hole, and another of my kind has escaped.”

“How can you tell?” asked Vinyl.

“We can recognize our own type of magic. And I know this type very well. It is the work of my sister, Umber.” The tone she invested in the name of her sibling made it obvious that the two of them didn’t get along so well. “She was always jealous of me, and of my accomplishments, and eventually it drove her mad.”

“Yeah, I noticed that madness seems to be a sort of occupational hazard for you guys,” Vinyl said flippantly, before slapping her hooves over her mouth. You know on second thought, it didn’t really sound like Vinyl speaking. Huh, weird.

Vinyl Scratch slapped DJ Pon-3, her mental alter ego, into the mental “time out” box, for speaking out of turn.

Lux gave her a long cold stare before continuing. “I was fleeing for my life when I fell into Equestria,” she said. “Fleeing...from her. And now she’s here; here to pursue her mad vendetta against me, even if it means destroying Ponyville to do it.”

“Wait, if your sister is here in Equestria, then that means she must have a host of her own, right?” asked Vinyl. “Do you faeries have any vulnerabilities when you’re stuck in a host body? Something we can use against her?”

“Our hosts are our vulnerabilities, but we can change hosts at any time. Having permission helps, but Umber is probably strong enough to take over most anypony. Or any other creature, had she the inclination.”

“Hmm, that’s not good. Just out of curiosity, what is Fluttershy getting out of this deal? I mean, does she have any privacy left whatsoever?”

“Of course I leave her her privacy,” Lux answered. “In me she has a friend, one who will never judge her for her lack of seriousness.”

“Wait, lack of seriousness?”

Whoops, lost track of my sidekick character for a second there.

“Err...lack of cruelty,” Lux answered. “Yes, that’s what I meant to say. And I gave her the ability to understand animals, so she would be able to support herself and finally move out her mother’s house.”

A respectful moment of silence, please, in honor of Fluttershy’s terrifying mother.

...

Moving on!

“That illusion I found outside,” Lux continued, “an illusion powerful enough to smash buildings and set them aflame with fire breath—that was almost certainly Umber’s gift to her host, which is why I wasn’t able to detect her before I came here. Now, how are we going to defeat her?”

“How come everypony thinks that I have all the answers?” protested Vinyl Scratch.

“Because I have nothing capable of countering her power. You are the most powerful pony in this town, perhaps in the whole world. You just need to figure out how to harness your abilities.”

Vinyl sighed deeply. “I’ll...I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s all I can ask,” said Lux, as she restarted Time and became Fluttershy again.

Pinkie Pie had walked away from the conversation between Twilight and Vinyl as soon as it had started to get awkward. “Yelling ponies always give me a tummy ache,” she told me once.

She sought out the ponies of the fire department, who were battling a monster-started blaze at her own Sugar Cube Corner. She seemed to be taking the potential loss of her home awfully lightly.

“That’s because it’s not my real home, just my dream home,” she commented.

Whatever.

In a few minutes, she put together a portable kitchen, and started feeding the fire ponies as they went on break.

One of them, an orange pegasus with a striped red and yellow mane, caught her attention. “Hey!” Pinkie called out. “You look kinda like Rainbow Dash!”

“You mean Fire Boom?” the firemare asked. “I’m her older sister, Fire Bane. Well, one of her older sisters.”

“Is that her real name?” Pinkie said with a huge grin. “I am so going to have fun with that!”

“Boom never told me that she knew any Ponyville ponies,” Fire Bane said, “she spends all her time in Canterlot.”

“Oh?” asked Pinkie Pie. “And what does she do there? Not that I don’t know, being a friend of hers and all.”

Fire Bane gave her a look. “Well the last I heard, she was leading a dance band. ‘Fire Boom and the Boomerangs’. Just like Mother planned for her.”

“Your mother wanted her to lead a band?” Pinkie asked.

“Mother wanted her to be a drummer. The last generation’s drummer hadn’t done a good enough job, so she assigned Boom at birth to surpass her. And so she did.”

Pinkie Pie gave her a rather horrified look at this news. “She picked out occupations for all of you?”

“Yup!” said Fire Bane proudly. “I was third, so I got to be the fire pony.”

“And which one gets to join the Wonderbolts?”

“None of them,” Bane said rather harshly. “The Wonderbolts are merely entertainers.”

“So are drummers,” protested Pinkie.

“Boom’s the eighth daughter. The good jobs are given to the elder sisters, like me. And the first of each generation of my family gets to be a true soldier and hero: the one and only Firefly!”

“Oh, I know Firefly!” exclaimed the pink pony. “She was a great hero twenty years ago!”

“That was my mother, Firefly IV. Firefly V is in the royal guard.”

“She doesn’t even get her own name?”

“None of us do. If you have your own name, then you might start questioning the Grand Plan of the Fireflies. Keeping the same names from generation to generation is how we guarantee that our family is the greatest ever!”

Pinkie started to back away in horror. “Right...If you happen to see, um, ‘Fire Boom V’—or whatever number she’s up to—before I do, be sure to give her my regards. We’ll have a party sometime, and she can bring her drums.”

~ ~ ~

“Wow,” said Pinkie once she was out of earshot, “and I thought Pinkamena had it rough!”

Chapter 4: Promontory, Utah

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Chapter 4: Promontory, Utah

Vinyl looked out the window of Twilight Sparkle’s house. Seeing Pinkie Pie walking by, she caught her attention with a wave. She let the pink pony in, then turned to face the others. “Well, everypony appears to have gotten back to their regular business,” she commented. “I guess we’re not going to get a follow-up attack from our mystery villain.”

“I think she’s done quite enough already!” Twilight exclaimed with a hoof-wave at her now-useless books, her voice quite a bit louder than she intended.

Vinyl cringed. “Well, if I’m in, um, charge, then I think we should take the fight to her...or him...or it. Where do villains in comic books usually hang out?”

“You know who would totally be able to answer that question?” asked Pinkie. “Spi—”

“Oh, comic book villains are always in their evil lairs,” said a familiar voice. “My favorites are the repossessed castles hidden in the calderas of about-to-explode volcanos.”

“Spike!” Twilight exclaimed in sudden joy. She turned towards the voice, forehooves open for a hug.

A nervous Spike held back. “Uh, hello...Twilight Sparkle,” he said. Carefully, he edged his way around her, until he got a good look at her cutie mark. Then he sighed dramatically, wiping some imaginary sweat from his brow. “Ah...glad to meet you!” he exclaimed, holding out a claw.

Twilight shook hooves with him, a very confused look on her face.

Vinyl meanwhile was grinning like an idiot.

Spike started walking around the room, arching his head up to take in the high ceiling. “It’s the same tree,” he said in a tone of wonder. Racing up to the window, he took in the sight. “And the sun’s out!”

“Yup!” Vinyl said with that same grin. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Twilight walked over to Pinkie. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked.

“Now where’s the fun in that?” Pinkie replied. Then she turned her attention to trying to open a box of Cracker Jacks she just happened to have on her.

It’s not a very easy thing to do without thumbs.

Oh by the way, I had completely given up on trying to follow the conversation by this point. They go on with this craziness for another couple of minutes, so skip ahead if you want to get to something that makes any sense.

“So who was it?” asked Spike.

Who was what? See, craziness!

“Twilight,” answered Vinyl.

“It’s like we’ve wandered into the last act of a mystery,” Twilight whispered to Pinkie, “and I have no idea who...wait, did she just say ‘Twilight’?”

“Twilight Sparkle?” Spike asked incredulously. “But...how could...how’d you wake her up?”

“Wake...me...” Twilight’s eyes boggled. “But that would mean...but that’s...you’re the Spike from two dreams ago? You were just a character I made up, based on the Spike I knew, to be Vinyl’s sidekick. How did you develop free will? How did you figure out the dream business before anypony else? And how can you possibly be here, in this dream?”

Vinyl closed one eye as she tried to remember the answer to Spike’s question. “I...think I drop-kicked her down a well or something.”

“Awesome!” exclaimed Spike, also ignoring Twilight. He then gestured to Vinyl to bend her head down close to his. “So,” he asked quietly, “is she still, well...” He then made the gesture for “she’s crazy” next to his head.

“Hey!” exclaimed Twilight. “You can’t use that on me! I taught you that gesture!”

“You taught me?” asked Spike. “Nu-uh! It was...” His claw, which was pointing at Vinyl, suddenly dropped. “Wait, that part was true?” He turned to face Twilight. “I’m really supposed to be your dragon?” A light of realization dawned in his eyes. “No, Real Spike is your dragon. I’m...your creation!”

Twilight stepped back in shock, only to be stopped by Pinkie’s hoof around her shoulder.

“Wow!” Pinkie exclaimed. “Pinkamena totally didn’t think you had it in you! You see, Dashie and Pinkamena had a bet. Dashie thought you had an imaginary friend as a foal, while Pinkamena—well, I know you’re all smart and magical and stuff—but she not only said you didn’t have one, but that you’d never have one, because you didn’t have the right personality or imagination to make one! But you sure proved us wrong!”

“Um, what about Smarty Pants?” asked Fluttershy.

“Um,” Pinkie said nervously, “I thought we promised Princess Celestia never to mention Smarty Pants again. You know, to keep Twilight sane and all?”

Twilight sputtered, looking back and forth between Pinkie Pie and Spike. “I...you...but...where was he between then and now?”

Spike got an empty look in his eyes for a second. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a small voice. He quickly got excited again, though, as he thought about why he was currently here. “Now that I’m here, though, I can be your comic book expert! Nopony other than Rainbow Dash knows more about comic books than I do!” He looked up at the other ponies for a few seconds. “Where is she, by the way?”

Without a word, a sardonic Vinyl Scratch pointed up at the ceiling.

The dragon’s eyes slowly followed the hoof up, then dwelled on the wood grain for a few seconds. “Oh!” he finally exclaimed. “This is going to be fun!”

“No it’s not,” whimpered Fluttershy. “What if Umber takes you over?”

“‘Umber’?” asked Twilight.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Vinyl.

“Is Umber the Dragon Emperor?” asked Spike. “Oh no!” he suddenly exclaimed. “He can take over dragons!”

“No, Umber is not the Dragon Emperor,” corrected the DJ mare. “Although, he can take over dragons.”

“Do you know what this means?” asked Spike, as he began to race around in circles.

“Calm down, Spike!” exclaimed Twilight. She used her magic to lift him up in the air.

“But you don’t get it!” Spike pleaded with her. “I’m a plot device! He’s going to take me over at the worst possible moment! I don’t want to lose my free will!!” By this point, he had grabbed Twilight by her imaginary lapels and started shaking her.

“It’s okay, Spike,” Pinkie Pie said, sticking her head between Spike’s and Twilight’s. “All you have to do is roast your own eyeb—”

Twilight quickly put a hoof up to Pinkie’s mouth. “We are not putting my Spike through that, if we can at all help it.” She shuddered on remembering how Waking Terror freed herself from draconic possession in Pinkie’s dream.

“Maybe you can do something to protect me, Pinkie!” exclaimed Spike.

“Hmm...” Pinkie pondered. “Yeah, I think there is something I can do, or rather...you can do!”

“Me?” asked Spike.

“Yeah, we’ll cast the Dragon Mind Shield spell!”

Before she had even finished speaking the sentence, and without breaking eye contact with Spike, one of Pinkie’s hooves shot out to keep a startled Twilight from opening her mouth.

“That’s a great idea!” Spike exclaimed. “Do you think it’s in Bigby’s Book of Non-Unicorn Magic?”

Pinkie glanced back at the petrified bookcase. “Yeah, but I remember the important parts.”

“Don’t worry about it!” exclaimed Spike. “That book’s upstairs. Let me go get it for you.” He walked swiftly over to the bottom of the long dark staircase, and the gulped. “Ah...would somepony mind going up there with me? I, um...well...I don’t want to go up there alone.”

“That’s alright,” said Vinyl, “I’ll go up with you.”

~ ~ ~

“There’s no such thing as a Dragon Mind Shield spell,” Twilight said quietly as soon as the dragon was out of earshot. She then turned to the pony beside her, and started slightly to see that it was Pinkamena.

“No such thing as a Real Dragon Mind Shield spell,” Pinkamena said with an eye roll. “The imaginary kind works on completely different principles. As long as you don’t give him reason to doubt it, Pinkie’s ‘spell’ should do well enough.”

The two of them stared up at the stairwell, waiting for Spike and Vinyl to come back down.

A full minute passed.

“They’re sure taking a while,” Twilight said.

“Yup,” said Pinkamena.

Another minute passed.

“Wait a minute,” Twilight said, “in my dream you were Pinkamena, not Pinkie. If this Spike only remembers the life I created for him in my dream, how did he know who Pinkie was?”

Pinkamena rolled her eyes again. “‘Everypony knows Pinkie,’” she said, making air quotes with her hooves.

“But that doesn’t explain anything!”

“Don’t blame me,” said Pinkamena. “It’s somebody’s idea of a running joke.” And she gestured at a different part of the ceiling.

[Heh.]

“You know, I’m beginning to suspect that Pinkie’s primary reason for letting you out is for eye rolling,” Twilight joked.

“Well I have had a lot of practice,” Pinkamena replied with a smirk.

~ ~ ~

Finally, Vinyl Scratch and Spike descended the staircase. “...And everything else you think you remember about me, just substitute Twilight instead,” the DJ said.

“OK,” said Spike. “Wait, do you mean the time with the ‘hen demon’ and the cold omelet balanced above Princess Celestia’s bedroom door was—”

“Oh, we don’t have time for those sorts of memories now!” Twilight quickly interrupted. “Do we...Pinkie?”

She had only looked away for a second, but in place of Pinkamena was now Pinkie Pie, struggling to put on a grass skirt. “Twilight Sparkle!” she said in a disapproving tone. “You turned your head too fast! I’m not a magic worker, you know!” She had managed to get one hoof stuck under the waistband, and her ear stuck between a couple of fronds. “Now let’s try that again.”

With a collective sigh, the other ponies and dragon obediently looked away for two seconds and looked back, to see Pinkie in a complete witch doctor costume: grass skirt in place, her face covered by a fierce wooden mask of Zecora’s (big enough to reach from high above her head all the way down to the ground), and an adorable little pink plastic spear hooked under one upraised hoof. “I’d like to see Standards and Practices say something bad about this!” she bragged.

“Why are you dressed like that?” asked Spike.

“To cast the spell, of course! Give me the book.”

The dragon handed it over.

Pinkie tried to grab the book, her little tongue poking out of the mask’s mouth in frustration, but it was no use—the thing was just too wide for her to reach her hooves around. With an exasperated whinny, she quickly swung her head first up and then down, to embed the pointed chin of the mask in the floor, then walked out to claim Bigby’s tome. Flopping down to her stomach, she started flipping through the pages, her legs kicking idly behind her.

Squiggles and blurs were all she could see on the paper, proof—if she needed it—that she was in a dream. After stopping at a random spot, she sprung back up.

As she popped the mask back out of the floor and put it on, the lights in the room dimmed themselves.

“Oo, ee, oo-ah-ah!” she intoned, hopping on alternate hooves in a circle around Spike.

Vinyl Scratch resisted the urge to sigh. The witch doctor getup really should have made it obvious.

Spike on the other hand had his eyes wide, and his claws held up to his mouth in excitement.

Pinkie remained frozen on one hoof, thinking.

“Ting. Tang. Walla-walla. Bing-bang,” Vinyl prompted dully.

“Oh yeah! Ting, tang walla-walla bing-bang!” And, reaching the end of her spell, she slapped a tinfoil hat on Spike’s head—never mind the fact that she shouldn’t have been able to reach him around the mask—before singing the words “Dragon...mind...shield...spell!” with her front legs flung to either side.

“That’s perfect!” exclaimed Spike, before running forward to hug the befronded pony. “Thanks, Pinkie!”

“Aw, he’s cute,” Pinkie joked. “Can we keep him?”

Author's Note

Let's see how many of you get the title.

Chapter 5: The Veil Is Lifted

Accelerando

Chapter 5: The Veil Is Lifted

Ugh, this story is going nowhere fast.

That’s it, I’m skipping ahead.

A week had passed, no obvious supervillain lairs had presented themselves, and the Best Young Musician Competition was ready to start up again. Thanks to all the publicity from that Visual Music-Boom, the contest had been moved to Vinyl’s home town of Ponyville.

(Not to mention lowering the chances that the BYMC Committee would be slapped with an even bigger lawsuit than they were already dealing with.)

This was the reason, of course, why there were so many pianos in Ponyville, for use by the competitors.

“Wait, I thought that the whole competition was supposed to be in Cloudsdale before the accident changed everything. So how come the pianos were in Ponyville just a few hours later?”

Shut up, Pinkie.

“Oops! Forget I even said anything.”

~ ~ ~

Alright, how many ponies am I missing at this point...Applejack and Rarity? And maybe that one pony, Octavia...Nah, I don’t know her that well—sorry, Vinyl.

Right, so Applejack pulled her cart into town early that morning, in hopes of selling “apples and apple accessories” to all the hungry ponies. (I never get tired of that joke.)

“You’re welcome.”

“Vinyl Scratch,” a nervous Applejack asked upon seeing the musician, “could I ask you somethin’?”

“Sure thing,” Vinyl said, heading for the cart.

The two ponies were the only ones occupying the street corner at the edge of town.

“I’m not keepin’ you or anythin’?” Applejack asked.

“No,” answered Vinyl. “Technically, my part in the competition is finished, but there’s a tradition of ponies being asked to do encore performances afterwards and, well...”

“...You figure there’s no way they won’t ask ya?” the earth pony asked with a smirk.

Vinyl shrugged good-naturedly. “Yeah. So what did you want to ask me?”

“We’re, uh...This is gonna sound a mite bit awkward, but...are we best friends?”

Huh. That wasn’t what I was expecting her to say.

Vinyl stepped back and bit her lip as she pondered her words. “Yes,” she answered cautiously. “Under the circumstances, I guess all six of us are best friends.”

Applejack furrowed her brow. “‘Under the...’” She trailed off, her bewilderment turning to mild annoyance. “Look, are you an Element of Harmony, or aren’t you?”

Vinyl clearly looked uncomfortable with this question. “Well, there’s six elements, right?” she asked.

“Right,” answered Applejack.

“And you, Twilight, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Rarity are five of them, right?”

“Also right.”

“So...I’m the Element of Loyalty?” Vinyl Scratch said this like she really wasn’t sure if it were true or not.

“Right,” Applejack said in relief. “You were there with us when we went into the Everfree to face down Nightmare Moon. We found out you were Loyalty when you went across that...”

Applejack’s confusion was suddenly back in full force. She leaned forward and looked intently at Vinyl’s back, like she was looking for a pack that she was sure had to be there.

“Applejack, are you OK?” Vinyl asked, resting a reassuring hoof on the farmer’s shoulder.

“It’s the darnedest thing,” the earth pony said, her eyes unfocused. “I woke up this morning with a funny taste in my mouth.”

Vinyl suddenly jerked back with a strange look of recognition.

In a flash, Vinyl remembered these were the exact words she had used on Applejack back in Twilight’s dream, when she was trying to get her to wake up.

“Like maybe you weren’t the same pony you were the night before?” Vinyl asked hopefully.

Applejack suddenly reached out and pulled the musician pony close. “How did you know that?!” she demanded.

You know, all this pony weirdness is starting to get on my nerves. It’s like they think this is a soap opera or something. I swear, if Rarity has a carriage accident and loses her memory...

That reminds me...

“Applejack, there you are!” the persnickety fashion mare exclaimed as she cut in front of Vinyl. “I simply must have a cruller, or I will die!”

Yeah, I don’t like writing for Rarity.

“Hold yer horses, Rares, I’ve got your cruller right here, just like always.”

“Thank you,” Rarity said curtly, as she took the fancy donut with her magic at the same time as she paid for it.

“Oh, you’ve got one of Twilight’s books,” observed Vinyl, pointing one hoof at the corner of a thin book poking out of Rarity’s saddlebags.

That’s one of the things I skipped over when I jumped forward a week: Twilight reacted to having all the library books glued together by asking everypony with a book checked out from her to turn them in by noon today, or she’d go crazy from reading withdrawal. Well, she might not have used those exact words, but you and I both know that’s what she meant.

Rarity carefully tucked the book in and arranged the flap of her bag so it was perfectly aligned. “Now be honest,” she asked Vinyl and Applejack, “what do you think of my dressup-thingee?”

“Rarity calls them ensembles, not ‘dressup-thingees’.”

Yeah, I know, Pinkie, but I don’t like speaking Fancy if I can at all help it.

Now then...I have to describe what Rarity’s wearing?

Pinfeathers.

No, wait—snerk—I’ve got this.

Rarity, in honor of this being Shetland Day, was dressed in...a plaid kilt. And not the kinda-good red and black plaid. Oh no. Rarity was decked out in bright yellow and black. She looked like a road sign had picked a fight with a dark and stormy night—and got whupped.

“Wow!” the Element of Honesty exclaimed in astonishment.

“What?” Rarity asked nervously. “Is there a pleat out of place?”

“No...nothin’ like that, Sugar,” Applejack replied.

“So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s...wrong, I guess,” Applejack said, rubbing the back of her head with a hoof. “It’s just...striking, is all.”

“‘Striking’.” Rarity repeated dubiously.

“It’s also doing a good job at directing traffic,” Pinkie Pie commented as she bounced past.

“Now what’s that supposed to mea...” Rarity started to say, before she looked back at her...ensemble.

She sure looked surprised, considering that she’s the one who picked out that getup a couple hours ago. Come on, Rarity, you’re not going to start fighting my absolute control over you now, are you?

“Ooh!” Pinkie exclaimed as she backpedaled into the scene. “Rarity’s eyes look like a pair of maracas!”

I would have said a pair of dice myself. Snake-eyes!

So then, um...Hold on, my eyes just crossed or something. Weird.

Anyway, the sight-reading contest was about to start back up, so Vinyl and Pinkie left Applejack behind to continue her sales, and then they went over to join Twilight, Spike and Fluttershy outside the library tree, leaving behind an empty street corner.

~ ~ ~

Twilight was not paying much attention to the music being played by the competitors before her. Instead, with Spike’s help, she was cataloging the books that her fellow ponies had all turned in at 11:59 precisely. Her big frustration was that there was exactly one book missing: The Complete Dream Book, by Hollow Way. This was made a lot worse by the fact that this was the only book that had no borrower name noted in her records, so she had no pony to pester to get it back.

Eventually, she gave up and turned to trying to find out if the pony who summoned the fake monster and froze her books a week earlier was lurking in the crowd. She did this by quietly scanning the crowd for the mystery pony’s unique magical signature. A few minutes of this failed to turn up anything. This didn’t mean that the pony wasn’t around—just that she or he wasn’t actively casting anything.

That plan having failed to turn up anything, Twilight next turned to looking for anypony who looked suspicious.

She did this through the rest of the competition, which was taking place in the Town Square, the Town Hall not being big enough for the number of ponies that wanted to watch. I’m going to spare telling you much about how that competition went. That one piece of music everypony was required to play was still physically impossible, and several of the competitors had to be dragged out of the square in tears.

Once the last performer was finished, the three judges went off to compile their scores, as if there was any doubt under the circumstances who would win.

(I’ll give you a hint: it was the performer from a week ago who generated an entirely new force of nature the moment she finished playing.)

Meanwhile, an obvious suspect had finally presented itself to Twilight, in the form of a cloaked pegasus hovering over the other side of the street from her. The pegasus was diminutive in size, but made up for that with the pair of large cream-colored wings that stuck out of holes in the dark gray cloak.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Twilight addressed the pony as she made her approach. “I was wondering if you could answer a few questions? Like maybe who—”

Twilight was interrupted by Fluttershy putting a wing over her shoulder to turn her away.

“Twilight,” the pegasus said, quietly but insistently, “could you please maybe ask somepony else those questions and let this pony go?”

Twilight turned to face Fluttershy and looked at her intently. She had to be sure that it was Fluttershy asking her this, and not Lux, because she didn’t entirely trust the faery. “But Fluttershy...?” she began to ask, before she saw from the look in her friend’s face that the question she wanted to ask would not be getting an answer. “All right,” she said with a sigh, “I’ll trust you. I promise you that she’s off my suspect list, whoever she is.”

Hearing this, Fluttershy nodded to herself, and then walked back into the crowd.

Spike, silently watching this exchange, looked back over at the mystery pegasus, and saw her start flying up the street.

Well, I made no promises, he thought to himself, and she’s most definitely on my suspect list.

The mystery mare made her way through the street fair, hovering down from time to time to examine the wares being offered by the street vendors before returning to standard pegasus elevation, and doubling back and forth several times, but always returning to the same spot. Finally, when it seemed like the majority of ponies were looking towards the bandstand, she ducked into an alley.

Waiting there for her was Fluttershy, who had taken another street to reach the exact same spot.

Spike, who had been tailing her this whole time, darted over to the entrance of the alley and peeked in. He saw that there was no way for him to sneak any further in without being spotted, but unfortunately the two pegasi were far enough in that he couldn’t overhear them from his chosen spot.

What he was able to observe was that they were having a spirited conversation in hushed tones, with Fluttershy wilting under the words of the cloaked pony.

“Colts and gentlemares!” announced an amplified voice from behind the dragon. “We have the results of the competition.”

Spike turned to see Mayor Mare in a gray cloak walking out into the center of Town Square, stopping at the base of the acrobat statue. Gathered around that statue were Vinyl and the other competitors, plus the first, second and third place trophies for the competition. He was puzzled to see that there was no obvious means by which the earth pony’s voice was being made so everypony could hear it.

“I could tell you the third and second place finishers,” she said with a cold little smile, “but I doubt anypony cares.”

Spike frowned. He started to cross the street to get a closer look, but saw that Twilight and Pinkie were already moving to do just that. He began to make his way back to the mouth of the alley, but at that moment the mysterious pegasus flew out and soared over his head to land beside the mayor. It was now clear that they were wearing the exact same type of robe.

Fluttershy walked out of the alley, her head bowed. For a moment, she locked eyes with Spike, but quickly turned away from his look of quiet accusation. They joined Twilight and Pinkie without another word.

“First place goes to the pony of the hour, the valiant Vinyl Scratch!” the mayor announced mockingly.

Vinyl looked at the award, then looked around. When she saw that nopony was stepping forward to give her the prize, she reluctantly stepped forward and picked it up with her magic to hold over her head.

There was a polite smattering of applause, which quickly faded out.

“In honor of her victory, the committee requests an encore performance.” The mayor swung a hoof out to point at two instruments beside herself: One was an ordinary upright harp, the other a strange-looking instrument resembling a piano, but with two keyboards and no pedals.

After a moment, Vinyl recognized it as a harpsichord—an instrument exclusive to dragons. Her trouble in recognizing it had come from the fact that she had never seen one small enough to be played by a pony.

Vinyl looked back at the mayor, only to be met by an imperious stare and a forehoof pointing at her assigned instrument. Holding back her obvious complaints, the reluctant unicorn took her place at the harpsichord’s bench.

“Miss Scratch will be accompanied by the former harpist for the Cloudsdale Quartet, Parula.”

On hearing her cue, the mystery pony lowered the hood of her cloak with her wings, revealing a long, dark-blue mane that covered one eye just like Fluttershy’s manestyle. She settled behind the harp with a look of contempt for Vinyl.

Vinyl looked nervously at the mayor. “Is there anything in particular you’d like us to play?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the mayor with an entirely new voice, although one that was dreadfully familiar to most of the ponies hearing it. “I’d like you to perform a piece of my own composition.”

With a burst of white light, the pony’s cloak was replaced by a purple cape and hat, and her form turned from that of a tan earth pony to that of a bright blue unicorn. “The Great and Powerful Trixie calls it: ‘Music to Level Ponyville With’!”

Author's Note

Yes, it has been forever, hasn't it?

I had run up against the twin obstacles of a massive unsuspected plothole and the realization that I had just finished writing the last good part of this story.

Well, I've worked out the first problem, and I think I have the second one beat as well, but I guess you'll be the judge of that.

Chapter 6: The Direct Approach

Accelerando

Chapter 6: The Direct Approach

Before anypony had a chance to react, Parula, the cloaked pegasus, began playing the harp with her wingfeathers. As the notes came out in a disturbingly familiar backward way, the air took on a bluish tint, and a spherical shell of charcoal-colored magic sprang into being, centered upon the group.

Actually, as Twilight was very careful to verify, it was centered specifically on Trixie. It included herself, Pinkie Pie, Trixie, Parula, Vinyl Scratch, Spike and Fluttershy, but excluded Vinyl’s fellow musical performers.

Outside of the sphere, Twilight saw that time had ground to a halt. Dimly visible were ponies in the first moments of shock, parents racing to protect the students standing within easy range of the “deranged unicorn’s” magic.

Twilight was well aware of how the other two breeds tended to feel about unicorn magical duels, and it didn’t take an idiot to see Twilight Sparkle and The Great and Powerful Trixie in the same place at the same time and not reach the obvious conclusion about what was going to happen next.

“You will find that you are all immobilized from the neck down,” Trixie said as she strolled between them, a fat smile of satisfaction on her lips. “Do not give me cause to ask Parula to extend that effect to your tongues as well.” She walked right up to her rival’s face and leaned in close, grinning. Judging by her twitching face, Twilight was only just barely holding back on the urge to wipe that smile off with the unicorn equivalent of a lightning bolt. “I suppose, Twilight, that you could get in one good blast right now,” Trixie told her, “before you are frozen up entirely. Assuming I survive, that would free me up to do anything I wanted to do to your friends.” She stepped back and closed her eyes, her head raised high as a target. “Surely you realize that I am completely out of your league now,” she said with utter confidence.

As Trixie had expected, Twilight failed to even try to attack her, instead choosing to look right through her with slightly narrowed eyes.

Vinyl, meanwhile, turned to the still-playing harpist beside her. “You can do all that?” she asked in shock.

Parula opened her mouth to answer, but closed it on seeing Trixie raising a hoof to get her attention.

“There is a good deal that Lux did not care to learn about the abilities she accidentally bestowed upon you, Vinyl Scratch,” Trixie answered. Or Umber, rather, judging from the solid blue eyes and the sudden added resonance in her voice.

With a blink and an annoyed shake of her head, Umber became Trixie once again. “I was getting to that,” she mumbled under her breath. “Well, I suppose it is now obvious to all how we are doing this,” she said calmly. “So let me proceed to the why. You...humiliated me, Twilight Sparkle. ” She proceeded to walk slowly around her rival, her eyes wandering seemingly anywhere but Twilight’s face. “You made me look the fool before a gaggle of inbred country rubes by your use of an over-the-top display of raw magical power. Well now the tables are turned. Your town idiots got my wagon destroyed? Then in return I will destroy your town. You brought my illustrious and storied career to a premature end? Then I will make you my personal slave. At my command, you will perform every demeaning and demoralizing act I tell you to, for the rest of your life. Each time you fail to obey me, each time you so much as think of resisting me—even for a moment—I will demonstrate a new level of cruelty in the ways that I can use my absolute control of Time to hurt your friends.”

“Gee, Trixie,” said Pinkie Pie in what at least appeared to be complete innocence, “if you like Twilight so much, why don’t you give her some flowers instead of making her your slave? Didn’t they teach you about that on Hearts and Hooves Day in Magical Kindergarten?”

Trixie turned away to hide her furious blush. “S-silence her!” she ordered, waving a hoof in Parula’s direction.

Note to self, thought Twilight in annoyance, sit Rainbow Dash down for a long talk about what exactly she thinks is going on between me and Trixie. That’s assuming I remember anything after this dream ends, of course.

After she had composed herself, Trixie whirled around—to best allow her cape to flare behind her—and strode over to the now-frozen Pinkie Pie. With her magic, she tipped the pink pony at a steep angle, then signaled her partner to once again freeze her in place, poised so that she would fall to her side the moment Time was restarted. For good measure, she then poofed an anvil into existence at the exact spot where Pinkie’s head would end up landing. “Something like that, for example,” she said with a smirk.

Twilight stood and thought for a few moments.

Since this was a dream, Twilight realized that Ponyville was pretty much expendable. Vinyl and the other dreamers, on the other hoof, were not—the Dragon Emperor’s spell ensured that whatever harm befell them in a dream affected their sleeping bodies in the real world. It would be very hard to protect all of them in the midst of the chaos generated by destroying the town, which meant that Twilight didn’t want the town to be leveled, no matter how fake it was. Also, it was safe to bet that the Trixie of this dream was the creation of the Dragon Emperor. Or, at the very least, created by Rainbow Dash under the unknowing influence of the Emperor. That meant that playing by her rules would be a very bad thing to do under the circumstances.

“Alright, you win,” Twilight said with a grin. “You can skip destroying Ponyville, and I will become your slave.”

Ah come on, Twilight! You’re ruining all my fun, here!

“Well, I can’t allow that,” said Trixie lightly. “You see,” she explained, “the chaos that will be generated from leveling Ponyville is absolutely vital to our plans. The Princess would never allow her favorite student to just disappear from the face of Equestria without an explanation. Ah, but if the town were to be destroyed in a ‘freak magical accident’...Well, tell me, Miss Sparkle, surely she wouldn’t be too surprised, would she?” Trixie chuckled at her own cleverness.

Twilight’s jaw dropped open in shock at how casually the pony before her was contemplating mass murder.

“Besides, I made a bargain with Umber,” Trixie continued with a pout. “Phenomenal temporal power, in return for the opportunity to kill Lux. So, any questions?”

“I...I...I...” Twilight said, too stunned by Trixie’s plan to be able to speak coherently.

Actually, Twilight was more shocked by how incredibly out of character the Trixie of this dream was. Was Rainbow that hung up over what happened to her at the magic show? she asked herself. And are comic book supervillains really this awful? Or am I facing the Dragon Emperor himself? And if that is the case, how come the character Trixie is playing is so familiar?

“Mother, how could you be a part of something so awful?”

All eyes looked in surprise at Fluttershy.

“Parula is your mother?” asked Spike.

“The earthbound ponies are worthless mewling scum,” growled Parula, her words coming out something like a song as they matched the cadence of her continuing performance. “And Fluttershy here, by deciding to live among them, has proved herself unworthy of the Wheatstraw family name. Just like I always knew she would. You have never failed to live down to the reputation of your Tartarus-destined earth pony father, may his bones petrify in the lands of the dragons! Marrying him was the second-worst mistake of my life, second only to giving birth to you!”

Two things immediately occurred to the ponies hearing this outburst: first, that Parula was a crazypony, and second, that it now became a lot clearer why Fluttershy was as messed up as she was.

Vinyl didn’t know about the others, but she had absolutely no idea if this insane pony before her was truly Fluttershy’s mother, or merely a figment invented by Rainbow Dash.

On the one hoof, she thought, Rainbow has known Fluttershy long enough to have maybe met Parula. On the second hoof, there’s no possible way, Fluttershy being Fluttershy, that she would have told anypony about having a mother straight out of a novel by Kickins, so Rainbow’s the only one who might know for sure. And on the third hoof, I was at Sugarcube Corner on the day that that Rainbow had her Daring Do fanfic reading. Which means that all bets are officially off the table.

“Hey, isn’t ‘Wheatstraw’ an earth pony name?” asked Spike.

For his insolence, he was tossed out of the bubble.

“Everypony knows that ‘wheatstraw’ is the name of one of the colors of the sky during dusk and dawn,” Parula explained, more to the voices in her head than to any actual ponies listening. “It was those mudhooves who stole the name for one of their weeds.”

As she was watching all of this in shocked fascination, Twilight Sparkle noticed Vinyl Scratch’s hoof wobbling slightly as it hovered over the keys of the harpsichord. Twilight nodded to the musician to show that she noticed.

Knowing now that Parula and Trixie’s control of Time was not absolute, Twilight decided to take the Pinkie Pie tack. After theatrically clearing her throat to attract attention, she said, “I’ve got a question: If you’re really the Great and Powerful Trixie, what happened to talking about yourself in the third pony?” She then turned her head and looked at Trixie, her eyes unfocused and her mouth agape.

Trixie facehooved. “That was an act, you sawdust-stuffed imbecile! A part of my stage persona, not who I really am! Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering that nopony else in Hicksville here was able to figure that out, either.”

“So this is about the fact that your magic’s fake, right?” asked Twilight, blinking rapidly and smiling vapidly. “Because, you know, you could be a lot more entertaining if you stuck with the illusions and stopped with the ‘The Great and Pow-er-ful Trixie is the greatest unicorn of ALL TIME’ garbage.” Her impression, while almost perfect, had still managed to sound as dumb as possible.

“You dare to mock me?!” screamed Trixie. “I will make you beg for mercy for your arrogance! And when you come crawling to me on all four knees looking up to me for forgiveness, I will look down at you, and whisper ‘Neigh.’”

~ ~ ~

Vinyl Scratch, seeing that Parula was distracted by the drama, brought her hooves down on the keys to activate her magic, only to discover that the harpsichord made no sound. A few experimental taps confirmed her suspicions: somepony had snapped the steel strings.

So she did the next best thing, and used her magic to chuck a rock at Parula’s wings.

Chapter 7: Glitch

Accelerando

Chapter 7: Glitch

The time barrier surrounding the six ponies suddenly dropped, accompanied by the “clonk!” of something hitting a heavy metal object.

“You know, it’s not very nice to drop a pony’s head onto an anvil,” Pinkie Pie said with a pout.

“What?!” exclaimed Trixie, turning her head to see the pink pony standing between her and Twilight. She turned back to look at the anvil, only to see a pink-frosted cupcake sitting atop it at the exact angle that the magician had placed Pinkie’s head. “How?!” she exclaimed, turning back to face the earth pony. She had no idea where the pink wire-rim spectacles and matching lab coat suddenly came from.

“What, you haven’t heard of ze Law of ze Conzervation of Pink?” Professor Pinkie asked in astonishment, with a Germane accent to rival that of Photo Finish. Seeing Trixie frozen in shock, Pinkie quickly leaned forward and kissed the unicorn.

Trixie’s eyes looked like they were going to fall right out of her head. “Why?!” she screamed, before scrubbing at her lips with the side of one foreleg.

“I wanted to know what you tasted like!” answered Pinkie (back as herself), lightly licking her lips. “You need to bathe more,” she added in a loud whisper.

Trixie staggered away for a moment, then regained control of herself and wheeled on Parula. “Start playing!” she ordered. “Sugar Cube Corner’s going to be our first target!”

“I find it interesting that Trixie knows where we live,” Pinkamena observed to Twilight in a low voice. “Especially considering that she didn’t meet us during her previous visit. Either she’s done her homework, or she’s not who she says she is.”

Twilight blinked, then suddenly reared up, like she had just seen a ghost.

Twilight really shouldn’t have been surprised that Pinkie was able to easily escape being hurt by Trixie’s rather cruel prank. After all, she was just taking advantage of dream logic, as described in Hollow Way’s Complete Dream Book. Rule #7 of that book was “You can get away with anything, just so long as it’s funny.”

No, what made Twilight so suddenly nervous was the realization that faced with the same situation in the waking world, Pinkie probably would have successfully pulled the exact same stunt.

Meaning that, at least for Pinkie, dream logic worked in the real world.

Combining this with Pinkie’s frequent remarks directed towards the so-called “viewers” of “the show” led to some extremely disturbing possibilities.

“Y-yeah,” Twilight said, collecting her wits, “I was thinking along the same lines.”

What, that Trixie isn’t Trixie? These ponies are really making this story a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

~ ~ ~

As soon as the bubble went down, Vinyl raced for the next nearest keyboard instrument, which also happened to be a harpsichord. She played a few notes to make sure that this one worked, and not a moment too soon, because Parula had just begun playing a piece that was completely unknown to her. There was nothing notable about the melody as of yet, but nevertheless Vinyl felt a shiver run down her spine just hearing it.

The now-familiar blue glow began to brighten around the bodies of Parula and Trixie, the latter of which was trotting towards Sugar Cube Corner. The pegasus’ movements became faster and faster as she played, and Trixie’s gallop accelerated in lockstep.

“Vinyl!” cried Lux. “Focus on me, then play something, anything, so long as it matches Parula’s tempo!”

With a little mental effort, Vinyl found that she could now see out of Fluttershy/Lux’s eyes. This would certainly make coordinating their actions much easier.

Vinyl improvised an accompaniment for the unknown piece being played by Parula, and soon got herself in sync with the pegasus before pulling ahead. This allowed the motions of a red-glowing Fluttershy to be sped up enough to catch up with Trixie and to attempt a tackle.

The harpist slowed down her playing, and a blue beam shot out of her eyes to envelop Vinyl. The momentum of the unicorn’s hooves vanished, and she found that trying to regain her former tempo felt like swimming through molasses. As this was happening, Fluttershy’s wingbeats came more and more to resemble a slow-motion nature film. Trixie turned around and lowered her head for a magical attack.

After continuing to fight the slowing effect for a few seconds, Vinyl closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to figure out what her foe was doing to her and how to counteract it. The blue field began to waver as the unicorn’s brow furrowed, and then, with a grunt from Vinyl, it broke apart entirely as her musical accompaniment accelerated to match Parula’s melody. Opening her eyes, Vinyl then extended her own Time field around the pegasus, using pure force of will to slow the harpist’s movements. Across town, a stream of fire shot out of the slowed Trixie’s horn—fast, but not too fast for Fluttershy to dodge. Vinyl tried to speed up even more, to set Fluttershy up to make a knockout blow, when the next key she tried to press fell down without producing the expected note.

Instead, the instrument produced a quick series of loud snapping sounds, ending with the middle of the instrument breaking in half; the wires had all been cut. Visible for just a moment in this mess was a small white creature enveloped in a blue glow, both of which then raced out of sight.

~ ~ ~

Twilight looked on in horror at the pile of kindling that once was a very expensive musical instrument. Looking further off at the space in front of Sugar Cube Corner, she saw Fluttershy trying to defend herself from a series of rapid attacks against an impossibly fast enemy, getting blasted by energy beams again and again. And then suddenly she was a blur as well. Twilight looked around, and saw that Vinyl Scratch was playing at a piano now, her forelegs moving too fast to be seen clearly. Alongside the piano was Spike, hopping up and down and pointing at yet another blur moving underneath the piano. Vinyl looked at the dragon while still playing, concentrated, and managed to project a red beam that enveloped him, causing him to become a blur as well. The new purple blur then got into a fight with the white blur.

“Who’s—?” Twilight started to ask Pinkie.

“Angel of course,” Pinkie Pie answered. “Who else do you know who’s convinced that the bunny is a ‘menace to all ponykind’?”

What? He is a menace to all ponykind!

“Alright,” Twilight said with a nod, “we need to collect Applejack and...” She looked around herself for a moment, but failed to come up with a name. “Just Applejack, then. We’ll go to Sweet Apple Acres to wait this fight out.”

“Uh, don’t you think we should get Vinyl’s opinion first?”

“She’s moving too fast now for us to have an intelligible conversation,” answered Twilight, “and if she slows down to talk, it will put Fluttershy in danger. Besides, I want us as far away as possible before somepony starts challenging the Law of Cause and Effect.”

At that precise instant, Sugar Cube Corner collapsed into rubble. Fluttershy and Trixie, who were still a dozen lengths away at the time, watched on in shock as another Fluttershy and Trixie stumbled out of the wreckage. The original pair resumed their fight, their blows striking faster and faster until the two blurs suddenly disappeared in a loud “pop!” as they suddenly traveled back in time. The new pair of ponies meanwhile continued their brawl in the direction of City Hall. There was another “pop!” and City Hall exploded.

“Run for it!” urged Twilight Sparkle in panic.

The epic fight became more and more violent, as Fluttershy and Trixie learned new ways of using acceleration and deceleration to destabilize structures, and as Vinyl and Parula learned new ways of manipulating time and each other.

Applejack had been organizing the evacuation of Ponyville along the Northern Road. She had returned to the Post Office building, only to find it deserted. As she turned to leave, Fluttershy and Trixie crashed out of a window to land next to her. Both of their eyes were solid colors, and they looked upon each other with expressions of pure rage, something that Applejack found deeply disturbing on the face of her close friend.

With simultaneous cries of frustration, the two rushed at each other, passing on either side of the apple farmer and circling around. With a “pop!”, they suddenly appeared on opposite sides from each other. They popped to switch positions, then popped to switch again.

Applejack suddenly felt very dizzy. There was another “pop!”, and all three of them were suddenly inside the library. Fluttershy used her wings to launch a forehoof vault over Applejack and attempt a buck at Trixie’s head, but the unicorn popped out of the way at the last moment. Dragged along with her were a couple of chairs.

Applejack desperately tried to escape, but she found herself being pulled back and forth as the two fighting ponies’ expanding time fields kept pulling at her.

She reached for the door.

And reached.

She discovered that she was locked into a loop that she could not break out of, raising and lowering her hoof over and over and over again. The tugging at either side grew greater and greater, and she felt like she was about to be ripped in half by the building forces around her.

Suddenly the universe sped past her for the space of a half-second, and she found herself standing before Twilight Sparkle just outside the window looking into the tree.

“Applejack!” Twilight exclaimed.

Applejack raised her hoof one last time, and then collapsed.

~ ~ ~

With another teleport, Twilight got Applejack away from the library. It was just in time: with a tremendous roar, the entire tree was consumed by an immense fireball which then dissipated at an unnaturally fast rate as the two time-shifted ponies moved on to demolish another building. As the flash of light faded, Twilight saw that there was nothing left of her house in Ponyville—not even ashes—with one exception: the frozen mass of books was completely intact.

Twilight made sure that Applejack’s condition was stable, then looked eagerly at what was left of her home.

Heedless of danger, the unicorn ran across the blasted floor to examine the books up close.

“They’re not petrified—they’ve been frozen in time!” she exclaimed. “I wonder if I can figure out how Trixie did it...”

“Don’t worry, Fluttershy!” an unseen voice exclaimed from above the town square. “We’ll save you!”

Zooming out of a cloud came the head of Ponyville’s weatherponies, Cloud Kicker, accompanied by the rest of her crew. Living up to her name, she flipped around at the last moment of her dive to buck a startled Umber in the side. Unfortunately, the unearthly pony proved tougher to knock over than a cumulous. A second later, Cloud just managed to dodge a magical bolt shot by the unicorn.

Vinyl Scratch watched in awe through Lux’s eyes as the other pegasi swooped around Umber. A cream-colored mare with a mane that reminded her of spumoni dive-bombed like she was trying for a head-butt, but it turned out she was only a distraction so that a white-coated, blue-maned mare could zap Umber by bucking an electrically charged cloud she had created. A blue-green mare pushed a thick cloud over the unicorn’s head, momentarily blinding her and giving several pegasi the chance to buck her.

During all of this, the team of weather ponies demonstrated an incredible ability to change directions in mid-air with but a thought, and seemed to have a collective sixth sense that kept them from colliding with each other as they made their erratic way around the wildly bucking and magic-shooting unicorn.

This was precisely the sort of thing that the blind pony couldn’t witness in her waking life, where the pegasi performed their moves too high in the atmosphere for her to feel with her advanced sense of touch. She wished that she had asked Rainbow Dash to introduce her to her team before this dream trap business had ever started.

Unfortunately for the pegasi, Umber had finally recovered from her shock at the unexpected attack, and was ready to fight back. She popped out of the obscuring cloud, and bucked a surprised Merry May to the ground as the green pegasus passed her new location. She then popped into mid-air, a couple of hooveswidths above Cloud Kicker’s back. Somehow using her magic to accelerate her fall, she forced the pegasus to crash into the pavement, jumping off at just the right moment and using another “pop!” to drain off her downward momentum so she wouldn’t hurt herself like she did her victim.

The weatherponies all froze in place, horrified by what they had just witnessed. Their goal to this point had merely been to knock “Trixie” unconscious, but here lay their semi-conscious captain, the victim of several broken ribs and a dislocated wing at the very least.

“Well, well, well,” Umber said with a sinister smile as she slowly walked in a circle around the prone pony. “I had no idea you mortals were so fragile.”

“Come on!” Lux muttered under her breath. “This is the perfect moment for me to take her out!” She tried to urge Vinyl to speed up her playing, but instead found that her movements were coming slower and slower.

Vinyl, you see, was just as shocked as the weather team by the brutality of Umber’s attack, and was probably also cursing herself for not acting to prevent it.

“Alright, lady,” Medley snarled, “the rubber horseshoes are officially off!”

The five remaining airborne pegasi accelerated downward towards Umber, forehooves together.

“Full speed, Parula!” the disguised faerie ordered.

The attacking pegasi seemed to lurch backwards, their apparent speed relative to Umber and Lux reduced to less than a snail’s pace.

Umber walked up to the closest of the attacking pegasi, Rainbowshine, whose hooves were nearly touching the possessed unicorn’s head. Rearing on her hind legs, she punched the pegasus hard in the face with her hoof. She then dropped to her hooves and walked away, as behind her the side of Rainbowshine’s face slowly erupted into a spider’s web of busted blood vessels.

Walking up to Cloud Kicker’s prone body, Umber put a hoof to her head in thought. “I wonder...” she said to herself in her unnatural voice. “Let’s try some back-and-forth, Parula.”

In an instant, Umber dropped back into normal time, as five pegasi painfully converged on the empty spot where she once stood, their finely tuned reflexes finally betraying them. Paying no attention to them, Umber prodded Cloud Kicker in the ribs until the captain awakened with a moan. “See if you can get out of this,” Umber said with a sinister smile. She then popped to Cloud Kicker’s other side, her eyes fixed on those of the pegasus. Before the other weatherponies could reach her, she popped to another side of Cloud Kicker, and an instant later popped to another spot, and then another. Faster and faster she moved forward and backward through Time, each move leaving a stronger and stronger after-image of her blue time magic. Within seconds, these images formed a solid ring of glowing light around the pegasus, and the blue began to seep into the space inside of it, changing the color of Cloud Kicker’s coat. A dome of blue light sealed her in.

“Get out of there!” screamed Lux as she suddenly realized what Umber was doing.

Gritting her teeth, Cloud Kicker forced herself to her forehooves then looked back in shock at her immobile flank.

The other pegasi began dive-bombing the blue glowing shell, bucking it, even sending lightning bolts against it, all to no avail. None were more vigorous in their assaults against the barrier than Blossomforth.

Vinyl Scratch shook her head to clear it of her stupor. “What do I do?” she asked Lux.

“I don’t...I don’t know!” replied Lux.

Cloud Kicker beat down with her powerful wings, managing to lift her partially-paralyzed body into the air. She tried to fly through the barrier, but found herself pushed back down. Gritting her teeth and straining her muscles, she tried to escape once again, but all she managed was a small hop before being pulled back down. Her body then bounced off the ground and back up to bounce back down, a motion which began to repeat, faster and faster. Realizing that she could no longer control her actions, the pegasus captain opened her mouth to scream, but even that sound was put on a permanent loop.

“Oh no!” Pinkie exclaimed as she watched all of this from a couple blocks away. “A glitch! That means—”

Cloud Kicker’s stuttering had become so fast that she appeared to be a blur. Her voice suddenly cut out, and then her tail disappeared, followed quickly by her wings, her mane, and all the color in her coat, leaving her looking like a featureless ponyquin. And then she was gone. There was an odd sort of after-image that appeared on the inner eyelids of the ponies who were watching at that moment: the mysterious phrase “Incidental Pegasus #2”, written in a plain black font and floating in mid-air. And then even that was gone, and no trace remained that Cloud Kicker the pegasus had ever existed. The spot on the ground where she had stood was puckered inward and slightly upward, like the entire universe had contracted inwards as she had been erased.

As soon as Umber came to a halt, Blossomforth rushed to the place where her friend had once stood, looking about herself wildly. “Cloudy? Cloudy!” Her legs giving out, she raised her eyes to the heavens as she cried “Nooooo!” at the top of her voice.

You know, usually, I try never to put one of those “Big No’s” in my stories, because it seems really lame. But this time, I dunno, it’s like she’s screaming it right at me—like she knows I’m the writer and she hates what I’ve done to the most important mare in her life.

Because I did kind of do that.

And this story is really getting out of hoof. I mean, what happened to Cloud Kicker just then was brutal. I just wanted to write a fun story. Big stakes, yeah, and ponies getting hurt, but this seems kinda sadistic.

I don’t know if I still want to keep telling this story. Not if it’s gonna keep getting darker.

Rainbow Dash.

Huh? Who said that?

Rainbow Dash, you can’t stop the story now.

Is that...Umber? I stopped the story, so you shouldn’t be talking. And stop using that voice—it’s creeping me out.

Rainbow Dash, do you know what a pony who doesn’t finish a story is called? That pony is called a quitter. Are you a quitter?

Well, no, but this is just a story!

Was Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone just a story?

This is nothing like that! I’m no F. S. Braveheart. This is just for fun, and with that last part, it’s not fun anymore.

But you need to finish it. You owe it to your characters. You owe it to yourself. This is your story, isn’t it?

I’m beginning to wonder about that.

You can do anything in this story that you want. And besides, that’s not really Cloud Kicker who just got erased. Is that what you’re upset about, that you secretly wanted to hurt your friend?

No, of course not! I know this isn’t real!

Then what’s stopping you from continuing?

I...I don’t know if...

What happens next, Rainbow?

Next? Well, I guess I get to give you a villainous monologue next. Something like...

“Lux, you fool,” Umber exclaimed, “you’ve given me the means to become all powerful! There is no pony who will not surrender to the fae capable of erasing them! I know that with but a little additional effort, I could remove Ponyville, Equestria, perhaps this entire universe from existence, merely by traveling back and forth in time! With this slave body, I will conquer the multiverse!”

“NEVER!” screamed Lux and Fluttershy in unison. Lux/Fluttershy lurched forward towards Umber/Trixie, but then stopped suddenly like she had run into an invisible wall. Lux’s blood red spirit flew out of Fluttershy’s body and right through Trixie’s, taking Umber’s midnight blue spirit with it, leaving Trixie gasping in relief. The two semi-transparent ponies with butterfly wings tumbled down the street, growing brighter and brighter, stopping at last at the pile of frozen books. Peeking around that pile at them in horror was Twilight Sparkle.

She had just been celebrating her successful decipherment of the freezing spell when she noticed the two fae approaching.

If they’re out of their host bodies, realized Twilight, then that means they are exposed to the laws of a universe where they’re physically impossible!

Twilight tried to flee, but at that moment both faeries were converted to pure magic, annihilating any normal matter within thirty ponylengths in all directions.

Under normal circumstances, Twilight probably would have remembered to teleport herself to safety, but owing to her study of the time freeze spell, she ended up casting the only other spell that could have possibly saved her life.

Where once there was a library tree, there was now a crater. Only two objects marred the mathematically-perfect curves of the hemispherical depression: a conglomeration of books, and a still pony, both frozen in time.

Author's Note

For anybody clicking on that YouTube link (especially if you're trying to read at the same time), yeah I agree, it is a bit much. I guess I got carried away.

Chapter 8: The Power of Love

Accelerando

Chapter 8: The Power of Love

“Vinyl...Vinyl Scratch? Are you alright?”

Vinyl raised her head. “What happened?” she asked groggily as she put one hoof to the side of her throbbing head. “How did I get on the ground? Did I fall off of the...monster!”

Spike quickly looked around himself. “A monster? Where?” he asked.

“Oh,” Vinyl said after a moment when she realized that the “monster” looming before her eyes was actually the young dragon. “Never mind.”

“Hmph!” Spike snorted, twin puffs of steam escaping from his nostrils. “Not funny, Vinyl. Not funny.”

“I’m sorry, Spike,” Vinyl said as she rose to her hooves. “You were really close to me, and I’m not quite used to how perspective works.” She followed this explanation up by looking at the sky and winking slowly.

That was aimed at me, wasn’t it? If there’s one thing I hate in a story, it’s breaking the fourth wall.

“Oh, I get it!” exclaimed Spike. “So, do you know what happened? There was a big explosion at the other end of town.”

“That must have been when Lux and Umber destroyed each other,” explained Vinyl.

Spike sighed. “Comic book ending,” he muttered, before thinking of something more important. “What about—”

“Fluttershy and Trixie are fine...I think.” The unicorn groaned in pain as she rubbed her poll with her hoof. “It feels like somepony ripped my horn out!” she exclaimed. She nearly panicked for a moment, until her wandering hoof found the expected bump above her forehead. Walking over to the piano, Vinyl started to play some scales. She very quickly reached a maximum speed. Looking around herself, she saw no particular glow, no slowing of reality. “Well,” she concluded, “it’s definitely gone.”

“Your time powers?” asked Spike. “That’s awful!”

“Eh,” said Vinyl with a tilt of the head. “I’ll live. Like Pon-3 always tells me, ‘easy come, easy go.’”

“Um, aren’t you DJ Pon-3?” asked Spike.

“Yeah, of course!” Vinyl Scratch replied, looking around her desperately to find any excuse for changing the subject. “Hey!” she exclaimed as she managed to spot a nervous white rabbit hiding under an overturned table. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this so easily! You’re going to have to explain yourself to Fluttershy.”

Angel hung his head in guilt for a moment, then made a dash over to the other end of the town square.

Vinyl and Spike followed the rabbit, to see him gently shaking the prone pegasus in order to wake her.

“Oh, what is it, Angel?” she asked as she got up.

Angel began going into a rapid, and incredibly over-acted, pantomime.

“No,” Fluttershy said with a shake of her head. “Could you repeat that a little slower?”

Angel stopped, then began his defense once again, slowed down.

“I can’t...I can’t understand you,” Fluttershy said after a few minutes, her eyes glistening with tears. She ran up to the fountain to look up at a robin that was probably crying out to its mate. “I don’t understand you, either!”

“Fluttershy,” Vinyl said, choking up, “your cutie mark...”

Fluttershy turned to look, and then cried out in despair. The cutie mark of three bumble bees was gone; she was now a blank flank. “She really is gone,” she whispered to herself.

Just then Mayor Mare (the real Mayor Mare) and three royal guards emerged from one of the few buildings in the square that was still intact. She led the others straight to the unconscious form of Trixie. “Wake up!” she exclaimed, prodding Trixie with one hoof.

“Tell room service that the Great and Powerful Trixie would like to order the deluxe breakfast,” the unicorn said without getting up or opening her eyes. “Preferably after a ten minute power nap.”

“No, I think the ‘The Foul and Oh-So-Very-Much-in-Trouble Trixie’ shall be getting up right now!” the Mayor exclaimed.

Trixie opened her eyes and looked up at the mare she had tied up and impersonated for the competition. “Well first you’ll have to catch Trixie,” she said with a smirk as she closed her eyes.

A great spark of light bloomed from her horn...revealing a rather startled unicorn in the exact same place as before.

“That looked kind of like one of Twilight’s teleports,” noted Spike. “Only without the actual teleport.”

“Oh horseapples!” Trixie exclaimed in frustration. “I forgot that I can’t do that without Umber’s help.”

“Take her away!” the Mayor ordered the guards.

“Now hold on,” Vinyl said, coming between them. “You can’t just arrest her.”

“Why not?” the Mayor demanded.

“Well, it’s a bit complicated,” Vinyl replied.

“What do you mean, ‘complicated’?” asked the Mayor.

“Mental possession,” Spike explained.

The Mayor groaned. “And I suppose you Elements already took care of it?” She sounded rather disappointed not to have anypony to arrest.

Vinyl smiled inwardly at being regarded, however briefly, as an ‘Element of Harmony’.

“Yes,” answered Vinyl. “As for Trixie, I suppose it all depends on the circumstances of her possession. Trixie, did you willingly allow yourself to be possessed?”

“Um...” Trixie stalled. “It depends on your definition of ‘did’.”

The unicorn was swiftly cuffed and corked after that. “The Great and Powerful Trixie is the victim of an insidious conspiracy!” she exclaimed as she was taken to the nearby holding pen. “Oh and please tell Twilight that Trixie made sure to freeze her books as proof of how much she loves her! Trixie wonders what the prison’s visiting hours are...”

“Celestia-cursed mud ponies!” Parula exclaimed as she slowly raised her head from the ground. “Tell me which one of you dung beetles gave me this headache, and I’ll gladly end your pathetic excuse for a life with a dozen lightning bolts!”

“Now she, on the other hoof, you definitely can arrest,” said Spike with a smug little smile. “She conspired with the faerie to destroy Ponyville.”

“And I would have gotten away with it, too,” said Parula as she was being hauled away, “if it weren’t for you pesky groundlings!”

~ ~ ~

The survivors of the latest attack on Ponyville crept out of their hiding places and began to survey the damage.

At the same time, a fleet of carriages from Canterlot arrived carrying food, tents and building supplies. It was all part of a well-rehearsed drill.

See I have this theory that Ponyville is the bad luck capital of Equestria. Something about being located near Froggy Bottom Bogg, and the Everfree Forest, and who knows what other sources of weirdness—I expect Twilight to dig up a seventh entrance to Tartarus in her basement any day now. So a lot of the bad stuff that would have happened to Fillydelphia or Canterlot happens to Ponyville instead. That’s why the Princesses have never been stingy in paying for repairs any of the many, many times that the town’s been leveled. It takes an odd type of pony to move to a place where bad stuff happens all the time.

That’s why Twilight keeps complaining that all of us are crazy.

Of course, Twilight’s the craziest one of us all. But, don’t tell her I called her that.

Anyway, what I was trying to get at was that the main road that a pony would usually take to get to the library from the town hall was blocked by ponies, so Vinyl, Spike and Fluttershy decided to take a longer route around the outskirts of town.

“Where do you think the other Bearers are?” Spike asked Vinyl.

“Applejack was briefly caught up in the fight,” said Vinyl. “And judging by the way Applejack disappeared, I’d say Twilight was definitely in the area. I may have seen Pinkie once or twice out of the corner of my eye. I expect Twilight will be surveying the damage at the library, and the others will stay with her.” She looked behind herself to see Fluttershy following her. The pegasus’ eyes seemed unfocused. “It’s going to be alright,” Vinyl said, extending a hoof towards Fluttershy’s shoulder.

“No!” Fluttershy snapped as she swatted the hoof away. “It will never be alright, ever again!” She then closed her eyes and sniffed loudly. “No, I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “This is no time for my problems. We need to see how everypony is doing.” Taking to her wings, she passed the others and led the way south. “There’s a demolished building over there. Let’s see if anypony’s hurt.”

Vinyl and Spike exchanged a sad look before they began to follow her.

~ ~ ~

After walking south for a few minutes, the trio left the paved part of Ponyville to reach its grassy outskirts. Before them loomed the remains of a large building. Amid bits of crushed glass could be seen chunks of painted wood and a lightweight representation of a carousel horse.

“Oh no!” Spike exclaimed, running down a well-trod dirt road towards the structure. “It’s...” And then he suddenly stopped and looked around in puzzlement, like he had heard a voice that only he could hear.

“Well, if you don’t know who lived here, then I can’t help you,” said Vinyl, who walked past the dragon to examine the remains. “Fluttershy?”

“Um...I don’t really know that many ponies.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Let’s see what’s what. Is anypony there?”

The two ponies carefully poked around the wreckage.

“Well, I don’t think anypony got hurt,” Vinyl said after a few minutes. “I did find this, though.”

Using her magic, the unicorn levitated a large red ruby out of the dirt; it had been artfully carved into the shape of a heart. “It looks quite valuable. Unlike everything else,” she added with a sigh, looking at the debris that surrounded her. “Normally, I’d worry about somepony taking it. But considering that we’re probably at the end of the story—”

“We should keep it,” Spike said suddenly.

“‘We?’” asked Vinyl.

“You should keep it?” Spike corrected himself.

“Well, I dunno,” Vinyl said doubtfully, looking carefully at the dragon.

“Oh, do you think this is greed growth?” Fluttershy asked, slipping back behind a pile of rubble no higher than her ankles.

“It’s not—” Spike tried to object.

“Maybe,” said Vinyl. “Spike, stick out your tongue.”

A longer than normal tongue is the first sign of greed growth for dragons. Just explaining that in case it wasn’t common knowledge.

With a roll of his eyes, Spike demonstrated that his tongue was normal. “I didn’t mean to keep it keep it,” he explained. “We can leave it at Town Hall for the rightful owner after checking up on things.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good idea,” said Fluttershy, emerging from her ineffectual hiding spot. “We should leave a note.”

“All right,” said Vinyl, putting the gem in her saddlebag and pulling out some writing equipment. “‘Dear Jeweler/Carousel Enthusiast,’” she said out loud as she began writing the note.

~ ~ ~

About fifteen minutes later, the two ponies and the dragon reached the hemispherical hole in the ground where the Golden Oaks library once stood.

“Make way, make way!” Spike exclaimed as he pushed his way through the small crowd that had gathered at the edge of the crater. “Twilight!” he cried out in horror once he saw her. He tried to run down the smooth slope of the hole to reach her, only to tumble end over end and finally bump into her immobilized form. He was soon joined by Fluttershy and Vinyl: the former had flown down, while Vinyl ended up going the same way as Spike.

Waiting for them at the bottom of the pit were Pinkamena and Applejack. Pinkamena was fixing a rather familiar corner of the sky with an icy glare, while Applejack was warily watching Pinkamena.

Fluttershy flew over to Pinkamena. “Are you alright?” she asked.

The pink pony locked eyes with her. “How could she do that to poor Cloud Kicker?” she begged of Fluttershy.

“Pinkie?” asked Fluttershy, stepping back and shaking her head. Although the earth pony’s mane was still flat and her coat was still magenta, the hurt expression and the youthful tone seemed to the pegasus to be more Pinkie Pie than Pinkamena.

“This world is not supposed to work like that!” Pinkie wailed. “It was never supposed to come here.”

She closed her eyes and lowered her head. “It’s alright,” Pinkamena murmured to her other self. “I’m here for you.”

“Pinkie...” Fluttershy said warmly, holding her forelegs out for a hug.

Pinkamena looked warily at the pegasus for a moment before nodding to accept the embrace.

~ ~ ~

As soon as she got up, Vinyl walked right past Twilight to examine the pile located beside her. She picked up one of the now unfrozen books and flipped through its pages. “I don’t get it,” she told the others. “All of Lux and Umber’s magic faded away within a few minutes of their destruction. Why is Twilight still frozen?”

“Because Twilight cast this spell on herself,” said Applejack. “At least, that’s what I think. She went back into the library to figure out how it worked, and she must have cast it to save herself when those fae blew themselves up.”

“Is...is she...?” Fluttershy asked as she gently released the hug. She dared not finish her question.

“No,” said Spike with confidence. “If something like that happened to her, then I’d disappear.”

What?

“What?” echoed Applejack and Fluttershy.

With a slow exhale, Pinkamena’s colors shifted to Pinkie’s while her mane regained at least some of its bounce. “Can you fix her?” Pinkie asked Vinyl.

Vinyl sighed. “I doubt it...but I’ll try anyway,” she said. Walking up to the blue-tinted statue, she put two of her hooves on Twilight’s shoulders and concentrated for several minutes.

“It’s no use,” she said at last. “I have no connection to Time anymore.”

“But we have to be able to do something!” insisted Pinkie. “Maybe Princess Celestia knows some kind of forbidden magic she could use?”

“I don’t think so,” said Applejack. “Like Granny always told me, the fae have their own special kind of magic.”

Pinkie Pie raised her head in surprise. “Hey!” she exclaimed with a tiny smile. She closed her eyes and took in a breath to shift into Pinkamena. Amazingly, the usually morose pony retained the smile. “Spike!” exclaimed Pinkamena. “You can save her.”

“Me?” asked the dragon. “I don’t know any magic.”

“It doesn’t matter,” explained Pinkamena. “You’re Twilight’s familiar. You can cast any spell that she can cast.”

Spike sighed. “You don’t know how many times I’ve gotten that, but no. Unicorns don’t have familiars.”

Pinkamena smiled even wider.

I don’t care how nice she is now that she’s come out of her shell, but Pinkamena’s smiles always freak me out.

“But you are a familiar, Spike,” she told him. “A familiar is endowed with part of the soul of his or her mage, creating a mental link.”

“That never happened to me,” protested Spike.

“That never happened to the real Spike,” insisted Pinkamena. “But that perfectly describes how you were created.”

What?

“What?” asked Applejack.

Fluttershy had given up on the conversation at this point and was trying to find a spot behind the pile of books where the crowd at the edge of the pit could no longer see her.

“You’re right!” exclaimed Spike. He looked Twilight up and down. “So how do I do it?” he asked. “I don’t exactly have a horn.”

“Dragon spells are cast with their claws,” said Vinyl Scratch.

The other ponies looked curiously at her.

“What? I’ve been to a few of their concerts,” Vinyl explained. “I don’t know if all of their spells work the same, but I felt a lot of musical magic being discharged from the general area of their claws. Or maybe their bellies...”

“Naw, that would just be silly!” exclaimed Pinkie Pie. (Those two are getting really good at switching back and forth.) “I mean, can you imagine a dragon shooting some kind of ‘love beam’ of magical rainbows out of his belly?”

Everypony looked curiously at Spike.

“Dragons don’t shoot love beams out of their bellies!” he shouted. “Where do you get these ideas, Pinkie?”

“Channel surfing,” answered Pinkie.

Someday I’m going to get a straight answer from that pony. I’ll probably have to be committed to the nuthatch right afterwards, but it will so be worth it.

“My claws, huh?” Spike asked, turning to face Twilight. “So I just think about unfreezing her?”

“Pinkamena says to think about Twilight,” said Pinkie. “She says that Twilight should be able to channel the spell through you.”

“OK,” Spike said with a nod. He looked up into Twilight’s frozen eyes, then jumped a little as the tips of his claws began to glow a bright orange. Stepping forward, he wrapped his arms around the unicorn’s foreleg.

The glow from Spike’s claws slowly spread up Twilight’s forelegs, but had only reached the level of her chest before suddenly winking out. At the same moment, Spike blacked out, collapsing to the ground in a heap.

“Spike!” the ponies exclaimed as one.

Applejack was the first to reach him. “What happened?” she asked, as the dragon slowly woke up.

“I’m not sure,” he said, slowly rising to his feet. “I started feeling weaker and weaker. In fact, I’m still kinda tired.”

“Maybe dragons can’t pull magic out of the environment as fast as unicorns can,” Vinyl speculated.

“The fire ruby!” Spike exclaimed weakly. “I can feel the magic stored in certain gems,” he explained, “and Twilight thought that dragons might be able to pull that magic for their really big spells.”

Vinyl levitated the heart-shaped gem out of her saddlebag and gave it to Spike. “Is there a lot of magic in here?” she asked.

“Uh-huh!” said Spike. Just a moment after touching the ruby, he seemed to be fully alert. “Love is the strongest magic, after all.”

Nopony (including me) knew what he meant by that, but we all wisely decided that we might be better off not knowing.

Spike set the gem flat on the ground beside Twilight, climbed up to stand on it, and looked once more into Twilight’s eyes to start the spell.

The orange glow spread much faster this time, and when it faded, a restored Twilight fell limply to the ground.

“You did it, Spike!” Twilight Sparkle said with a weak smile. “Well, to be honest, I had no idea you could do anything like that, but seeing that you figured it out, I’m glad that you did.”

~ ~ ~

Vinyl quietly pulled Pinkie Pie aside. “Tell Pinkamena that that was some quick thinking on her part,” she said. “How did she make up all that stuff about familiars so fast?”

“Oh, that stuff was all true,” Pinkie replied. “Pinkamena was writing this Daring Do fanfic, about Ahuizotl kidnapping a parasprite to blackmail the Witch of Froggy Bottom Bogg into using her magic against Daring Do. The parasprite was her familiar, see? And Pinkamena wanted her story to be as believable as possible.”

Hey, I actually read that one! It was the cover story in DDAPA’s seventh fanzine, and it sure deserved its placement. Coyotl even provided the cover illustration. So that means that Coyotl is Pinkamena?

Wow. My mind is officially blown. The two of us have got to talk shop after this.

~ ~ ~

After a group hug, the ponies and dragon proceeded to swap stories about their experiences. They had a moment of silence in honor of poor Cloud Kicker, and agreed to organize a memorial service as soon as things in Ponyville had stabilized.

“That was really awful, what happened,” said a somewhat angry Pinkie, oddly aiming her words at the sky instead of at her friends. “But I guess it could have been worse. After this incredible, never-to-be-forgotten adventure, I’m sure our lives will never be the same, right?”

“You’ve sure got that right, Pinkie!” Twilight exclaimed in a very stilted manner, and then she and Pinkie laughed.

The others looked at them like they had gone mad, but after a moment Vinyl and Spike looked like they had figured something out, and started laughing with the other two.

A warning glare from Twilight got Applejack and Fluttershy to cautiously add their laughter to the others.

Well. That was incredibly weird.

The next day—

“Oh, come on!”

Chapter 9: Double Team

Accelerando

Chapter 9: Double Team

Ahem.

The next day, the ponies of Ponyville did their best to resume their daily habits, little suspecting that—

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Forgetting what, Pinkie?

“Forgetting that this is Ponyville Founder’s Day!”

Are you sure?

“The Best Young Musician’s Competition—assuming it’s on the same date as the real-life competition it’s replacing—is always on the seventh Canterday of Harvest, which in 7013 was the 50th. You said that the end of the competition was a week later, which would be the 57th. This is the day after that, and the day after the 57th of Harvest is—”

Ponyville Founder’s Day. I totally should stop being surprised that you’d remember something like that. Alright if you’re so smart, Pinkie, you tell me what’s going to happen today. Is it a party?

“No, silly! It’s a parade! And not just any parade, but a big giant ‘we survived almost certain doom and at the same time want to honor the memory of our fallen’ parade-apalooza! There were apple bobbing booths, and sweets and pastries and corn on the cob! And the Mayor was the grand mistress in a cart pulled by Applejack and Big MacIntosh, and then there was the band. Oh what a band! Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand. They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuosos. The cream of every famous band.”

Uh, any drummers?

“No. Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun—I was the fourth trombone by the way—with a hundred and ten cornets right behind. There were more than a thousand reeds, springing up like weeds. There were horns, of every shape and size!”

But what about timpani? Copper bottom timpani in horse platoons?

“No.”

Thundering, thundering all along the way?

“No! We sent an invitation to the best, most awesome drummer/band leader Equestria had ever known, but she had a prior commitment in Canterlot, and without her, any lesser talent would have been a letdown. So we played the ‘Zap Apple March’, and the ‘Canterlot Post’, and after the parade finished up, I organized a little swing band at the Town Square. I picked up my trombone, and I started to play Cloud Kicker’s favorite song.”

You didn’t!

“I did! Buppa-bum-pa-bom-pa! Buppa-bum-pa-pa!”

You played the theme from Haywaii Five-O?

“Yup!”

Without drums? Have you no sense of decency?

“Hey, is it my fault if Fire Boom didn’t want to be in this story? Buppa-bom-pa-bom-pa! Buppa-bom-pa-ta! Waugh! ...Hold on, this part is really high. La-la-la-la-la! Ahem. Wah—!”

The sounds of Pinkie Pie’s Firehouse Five Plus Two were just then supplemented by rhythm, bass and lead guitars and the all-important drums, as four pegasi descended from the sky in a blaze of glory.

“It’s Fire Boom and the Boomerangs!” exclaimed a breathless Scootaloo, who then fainted.

“From a lack of breath.”

The new additions loyally backed Pinkie’s band as the melody of “Haywaii Five-O” played out, but when it came time for the solos, the newcomers went all out! Fire Boom launched into a blistering journey through the music of Stungpetal, starting with “Big Bad Boom”, and then proceeding to...

“Alright, that should keep her busy for a while,” remarked Vinyl Scratch. She, Pinkie Pie, Twilight Sparkle and Spike had gathered at the ‘Crater Library Memorial Site’ (as Pinkie had dubbed the spot) to plan their next move. “Thanks for getting her down here, Pinkie.”

“No problem-o!” Pinkie replied. “Also, I now have another item struck off of my ‘Ten Octillion Things to Do Before Kicking the Bucket’ List: See R.D. descend from the sky in a blaze of glory, all while playing a full set of timpani.”

“So all we have to do,” said Vinyl, “is get her to end the dream.”

Twilight stepped forward. “According to...a trustworthy source on the nature of dreams—”

“The Big Pop-Up Book of the Pony Mind,” Pinkie Pie said helpfully.

“Yes,” Twilight said with an embarrassed sigh, “that book with the less than serious title. According to it, all we have to do to wake a dreamer is make her fall.”

“Right,” said Spike in deadpan. “And that’s going to be so easy to do to her.”

“Oh,” said Twilight, wincing. “Right. Well in that case we need to convince her that she’s dreaming.”

“Correction,” said Vinyl. “One of us needs to convince her. She’s been reluctant to let herself be a part of the story so far, and if our first attempt doesn’t work, she might make herself completely inaccessible from then on.”

“Yeah,” said Spike. “I guess it would be a lot harder to convince an unseen and unheard narrator to stop a dream than a pony standing right in front of you. Plus, it could get really bad if we don’t stop things soon.”

“How bad?” asked Twilight.

“I think she’s starting a limited edition miniseries,” Spike told them. He pronounced the phrase like it described a particularly nasty type of fireball spell. When his audience failed to react appropriately to this revelation, he spelled it out for them: “That means that the next boss is going to be about ten times worse than Umbra.”

“Alright, so not good, then,” Vinyl summarized in a weak voice before perking up. “I know! I’ll use logic on her like I did in your dream, Twilight.”

Twilight looked at Vinyl like it was the dumbest thing she had ever heard in her entire life. “Please repeat that phrase and tell me what’s wrong with it,” she said dryly.

Vinyl sighed. “OK, so logic is out. What do you suggest, Twilight?”

“I’ve never been able to get through to Rai—” She stopped herself from saying Rainbow Dash’s name just in time to avoid attracting her attention. “I’ve never been the one to convince her of anything. What does our comic book expert have to suggest?”

“Uh, convince her that her readership has declined into the negative numbers? Surely she’ll stop the story then?”

Twilight gave Spike the same look she had just bestowed upon Vinyl. “Need I remind you of the serialized reading of Daring Do and the Weathermare’s Gambit, Spike? All 78 chapters of it?”

Spike facepalmed.

Vinyl looked over to Pinkie Pie, who was bouncing up and down and waving all four hooves around every time she became airborne. She knew exactly what she was going to say. “Pinkie Pie?” she asked wearily.

“Asparagus facial!”

That was not the answer Vinyl had predicted. “What?” she asked.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, numbered or predicted!” Pinkie confidently declared. “My life is my own! But if the facial doesn’t work, I vote clown hammer.”

Bingo. “Yeah, I thought so,” said Vinyl. “I’m pretty sure that only works on you.”

“Aw, nuts!” Pinkie exclaimed.

“And that just leaves Pinkamena,” concluded Vinyl.

“No,” said Pinkie quickly, waving her forehooves. “You don’t want to hear her plan.”

“Nopony else has a plan that will work, Pinkie,” said Twilight.

“But her plan is mean,” replied Pinkie, biting her lip in worry. She then shot up to her hooves and directed her eyes down and to the left.

By the slight twitching of her lips, it looked like she was having a conversation with herself.

“But I’m over it!” she exclaimed to nopony in particular. “I was only scared for a moment. You don’t need to get revenge for my sake.”

“Are you planning to hurt her?” Vinyl asked.

Pinkie fell back into a seated position as Pinkamena took over. “Well that depends,” she said with a cruel smile. “Physically, or emotionally?”

“Vinyl,” Twilight said, stepping forward to put a leg around Pinkamena’s shoulder. “I trust my friend to do the right thing under the circumstances and not go too far. Right, Pinkamena?” She looked the magenta pony in the eyes as she asked this, with a smile that was equal parts warm and warning.

Pinkamena looked aside for a few seconds, then glanced at her lower left and sighed. “Agreed. Only enough to get her to stop,” she said.

...and after that we took a break.

I signed autographs for a few eager fillies, then whipped up a cloud to rest a bit on—making it low in case another fan wanted to come by, because I always have time for the fans.

Instead it’s Pinakamena. And she looks...well she’s using the Pinkamena Usual Scowl. Which means that somepony is in trouble.

Can’t be me, though—I just got here.

“Dashie...” she growls.

Uh, oh—it’s me. I decide to distract her. “So,” I say quickly, “I always meant to ask you: what’s it like sharing your brain with Pinkie?”

Pinkamena looks away for a second as she ponders how she’s going to answer the question. “There are no words in the Equine language,” she finally answers, then looks back at me. “Now, Dashie...”

The heat of her accusing glare is so hot, I could have sworn that a tree behind me suddenly ignited. New distraction, new distraction! “Hey, a little bird told me that you write fanfiction for Daring Do. And that’s really neat, because I do, too!”

“Oh, you write stories?” she asks me, with this really ominous grin.

Why do I get the feeling like I just walked right into a trap?

“I like to write stories about Ahuizotl,” Pinkamena says quietly to me, “because nopony else seems to respect him in their stories. They make him two-dimensional, or else use him as the butt of their jokes. I think you have to understand your characters when you write about them, or your story just...dies.”

I nod. “Yeah, I think that, too.”

“Really?” she asks with an arch in one brow. “What about Fluttershy?”

What about...I don’t believe it! I raise my cloud up a bit so I can lean down in her face. “Hey!” I exclaim. “You’re just a character! Don’t go questioning your part in my story!”

“What about Fluttershy?” she repeats calmly.

You know, I might be really mad at her for, like, smashing the fourth wall to splinters just now, but I’ve got to hoof it to her: she has a lot of guts to stand up to her creator like this. I mean, I could turn her into a slug right now if I felt like it.

And I have a perfect right to be mad. I work hard on my stories, but everypony thinks because I do nothing but r...play music (a-heh), that I don’t know how to put together a good plot with interesting characters. I can do that, easy!

“Fluttershy just had a character arc,” I tell Pinkamena, describing an arc with one hoof. “And it was moving and awesome and stuff. But now she can recover, because she won’t be in the next few chapters.”

“I figured you’d take the easy way out,” she replies, pointing accusingly at me with one hoof. “You don’t dare to show what’s going to happen to her.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to her!” I shout back, raising my cloud even more to show how far above her I am. “I would never do anything truly awful to Fluttershy, even if she’s just a character in my story. She lost her cutie mark, but she will recover here in the village, and then move on with her life.”

“No, she won’t!” Pinkamena yells, shaking her hoof in rage. “Don’t you know what you’ve done to her? She lost her cutie mark, which means she can’t understand animals anymore, and they no longer trust her.”

I hadn’t thought about the trust part, but that’s probably right. Ouch. Well I’ll...I’ll think of some way to make it up to her.

“So?” I ask, not wanting Pinkamena to know about that extremely brief moment of doubt. “She still has her friends. She can crash with them while she puts her life back together again.”

“But she won’t,” Pinkamena says, stamping her hoof. “She’s too kind to ever impose herself like that, especially since it seems like her new condition is permanent. She can’t support herself, and her crippling shyness means that she never will support herself. She’ll only have one choice.” She looks up at me, waiting for me to figure it out.

Wait, you don’t mean...no, I would never do anything that cruel to Fluttershy. It...it would break her.

But that’s what’s going to happen. You put Fluttershy in these circumstances, and there’s nothing else for her to do but—

But to move home...with her mother.

Thereby proving her right about us “dirt ponies”. Is that what you want? Is that what you really want to do to poor Fluttershy?

I...no...I’m sure there’s some way...oh, and you brought her over here? Low blow, guys, low blow.

Tell Fluttershy and me how you’re going to write your way out of this. How you are going to continue the story without doing that to Fluttershy.

I...well, she’ll just...

“Ooh, we’re going to just have so much fun together,” Parula told her daughter. “And by ‘fun’, I mean me telling you why your birth doomed the whole of Equestria. Or at least the atmospheric part. Because the part on the ground, including all of your friends in Ponyville, are the scum of the earth, and deserve everything that’s coming for them. And another thing, mudling—”

Aarrrgghhhh! Fine! Fine! I’ll admit it—I’m completely over my head! This story is running out of control, and it’s kinda making me sick. And if Fluttershy is going to, going to—I can’t even say it!

So, The End.

Okay?

Just, The End.

(I just don’t know what went wrong...)

Epilogue, Credits & Acknowledgements

Accelerando

Epilogue

Vinyl Scratch, Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash suddenly found themselves back in the small round room in Canterlot Castle.

Vinyl Scratch, Twilight Sparkle, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash and Applejack suddenly found themselves back in the small round room in Canterlot Castle.

“Much better,” Pinkamena commented darkly, her eye on the ceiling.

“It was a trap—I knew it!” Applejack exclaimed. “Everything that just happened was a dream, just like I suspected.”

“It was?” asked Rainbow. “Wait, was this like that thing you went through, Twilight? When the Dragon Emperor’s wizard made you think the world had ended?”

“Yes,” Twilight answered, “only this time you were doing the dreaming, and we were the ones stuck with the consequences.”

“Me?” said Rainbow. “And I didn’t even get to face off against an agent of the Emperor like you did—what a gyp!”

Twilight shook her head. “Only you, Rainbow Dash, only you.”

Vinyl Scratch scratched her head and asked, “So you’re telling us that those times Trixie tried to kill us was all you?”

“Well...” Rainbow hedged, rubbing the side of her neck with a hoof.

“And Cloud Kicker?” asked Pinkie with a horrified look on her face.

“No! No, that felt really weird when I did that,” Rainbow answered. “On top of the general...yuck of it. Wait, there was that voice...I think the Dragon Emperor did try to get to me...and I totally fell for it.” She dropped her head in shame, before she made a realization. “So that means...you saved me, Pinkie. Both of you, in fact.” She did a double-take when she realized that it was Pinkamena that she was now pointing at.

“Dashie,” Pinkamena said brightly as she took the pegasus aside, “we need to talk.”

~ ~ ~

“Applejack, it’s good to see you here,” Twilight said gladly to the orange earth pony looking curiously around the room. She was relieved that there was now one less dream they’d have to navigate through. “So, how did you figure it out? Hopefully we can use the same technique again in the next dream.”

“The next dream?” Applejack asked incredulously.

“Yeah, that’s the nature of the Dragon Emperor’s spell: we’re forced to go through everypony’s dream in order to break out. So far we’ve been in my dream and Pinkie Pie’s dream.”

Applejack’s jaw dropped. “You were in Pinkie Pie’s head?” she asked once she had recovered. “How did you make it out with your noggin in one piece?”

“You know, I’m not really sure...” Twilight said, her eyes unfocusing as she tried in vain to remember the details of the dream. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and noticed that Pinkamena and Rainbow Dash were talking to each other in low voices a few steps away. Or rather, Pinkamena was talking, and Rainbow Dash was looking more and more enthusiastic at what she was hearing.

Applejack put on a small smile of amusement. “I suppose it ain’t important,” she said. “Now as to how I figured out this dream business, I just sorta had this weird feeling the whole day that something wasn’t right.”

“That, and she accidentally overheard our plans after I lured Dashie down to Ponyville,” Pinkie added, pushing her head into the conversation.

“Well, I suppose that might be how it happened,” Applejack said slowly. “You know, the details are gettin’ kinda fuzzy.”

“Yeah,” said Twilight, “it’s a dream, so that tends to happen. And Pinkie, I thought you were talking to...” She looked around, to see Pinkamena and Rainbow Dash in the same conversation as before, which showed no signs that it had ever been interrupted. Pinkie herself was nowhere to be seen. “Huh. Nevermind. So, any questions?”

Applejack looked over at Vinyl Scratch, then back to Twilight. “I got a question for each of you. Vinyl, what are you doing here if nopony has been in your dreams yet? And Twilight, where’s Spike? I distinctly remember that he was in on this whole dream business, although I could have sworn we didn’t bring him.”

“Ooh, can I go first?” Twilight asked Vinyl.

Vinyl tilted her head incredulously. “Are...are you waving your hoof in the air, Twilight? Because it sure sounds like it. I’m not your teacher, you know.”

“Ah...heh, sorry,” said Twilight, putting down her hoof.

Vinyl chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. Sure, you can go ahead.”

“Thanks! You see, Applejack, what you saw was not really Spike. In fact, given that we’re kind of in a ‘dream waiting room’ right now, and considering the stunt that I’m pretty sure Pinkie Pie just pulled on us, I’m pretty sure I ought to be able to do...this!” She closed her eyes and concentrated for a few seconds. Applejack expected Twilight to cast a spell, but it appeared that she was up to something completely different.

With a sudden “pop!”, Spike the dragon suddenly materialized in the room. Since his head had appeared level with Twilight’s, he then dropped his own body length down to the ground.

“Oof!” Spike exclaimed. He then got up and dusted himself off as he looked around. “Hello again. Where are we now?”

“Applejack,” said Twilight proudly, “let me introduce you to Dream Spike, my imaginary friend.”

Applejack’s jaw dropped for the second time in the last ten minutes. “What...but...I...”

Any further ruminations were interrupted by the extremely bizarre sight and sound of Pinkamena laughing.

~ ~ ~

A few minutes earlier, Pinkamena had pulled Rainbow Dash as far away from the others as was possible in the small room. “So I need to ask you about this dream before we both forget it, Dashie,” she said in a low voice.

Rainbow smiled brightly. “Ask away!” she exclaimed.

“In the dreams so far,” Pinkamena said, “the dreamer was getting replaced with Vinyl Scratch. So I’d say your original dream was about you and your Rainbooms, right?”

“That’s right,” Rainbow replied, leaning forward slightly.

“And I’m positive that you wanted me, or at least Pinkie Pie, to get the part that you instead gave to Fluttershy.”

“Yes...” said Rainbow, leaning forward even more.

“Twilight said her dream was about a theory that she was trying out, so—”

“Yes, yes, that’s exactly what my dream was!” Rainbow said. She was trying her best to keep her voice down, but it was getting harder and harder for her.

“Sonic Rainbooms...and me,” said Pinkamena. “You were trying to figure out Pinkie Pie, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was trying to do,” said Rainbow. “So, how close did I get?”

Pinkamena sat down and put a hoof to her chin. “So let me see if I got this straight,” she said slowly. “You think that your Sonic Rainbooms somehow open temporary portals to the otherworldly dimension that is the source of all magic in Equestria, and that the first time you did this, a godlike being of pure magic was accidentally let into this universe, and that she’s been spending all the time since then renting a room in the back of my head. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, yes!” Rainbow exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to work you two out ever since I found out there were two of you to begin with. So is that it? Is that what Pinkie really is?”

Pinkamena chuckled. And then she laughed. And then she broke out into a full-bellied guffaw that descended into some of the second most-disturbing cackles that Rainbow Dash had ever heard.

She laughed for five minutes straight, as all her friends looked—or, in Vinyl Scratch’s case, listened—on in mixed awe and apprehension.

It did not escape Rainbow Dash’s attention that she never answered the question.

Credits and Acknowledgements

Thanks go to my loyal editor, Burraku_Pansa, for finding all of the nits that I missed picking the first time.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with extra credit given to Lauren Faust for creating Friendship Is Magic, and for the crew at Studio B for keeping the dream alive for three years now. The characters of Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, Vinyl Scratch/DJ Pon-3, Pinkie Pie/Pinkamena Diane Pie, Rarity, Fluttershy, Octavia, Princess Celestia, Princess Luna/Nightmare Moon, Iron Will, Spike, Zecora, Applejack, Mayor Mare, “Parula”, The Great and Powerful Trixie, Photo Finish, Angel, “Cloud Kicker”, Merry May, Medley, Rainbowshine, Big MacIntosh, Scootaloo, the Wonderbolts, Smarty Pants, Daring Do and Ahuizotl, parasprites, the locations of Equestria, Cloudsdale, the Unicorn Range (from the official map of Equestria), Ponyville, Carousel Boutique, the Golden Oaks Library, Sugar Cube Corner, Sweet Apple Acres, Froggy Bottom Bog, the Everfree Forest, Tartarus (or at least the version that appears in the series), Canterlot and the concepts of Hearts and Hooves Day, Magical Kindergarten and the Elements of Harmony are taken from that source, with any deviations from canon being entirely my doing (including the details of Rainbow and Fluttershy’s families, the former’s secret knowledge of music, and pretty much anything regarding Vinyl Scratch). My original contributions include the Second Pony-Dragon War (which started in my earlier fanfic “[Redacted]”), the Ancients (who go all the way back to “Javelin”), Equestria Acoustics (“Javelin”), the character of Jeff (first named here, but implied in some way or another from the beginning), the Best Young Musician Competition (modeled after the Best Young Flyer Competition from the “Sonic Rainboom” episode of Friendship Is Magic, written by M. A. Larson), my theory of pony piano chords (seriously, how does Frederick Horseshoepin do it?), the Visual Music-boom (modeled after Rainbow’s Sonic Rainboom), the fae (introduced in “Luna and the Tree Ponies”), Lux and Umber (the derivation of which should be obvious), Waking Terror (introduced in “Whopper of the Year”), Fire Bane and the name “Fire Boom” for Rainbow Dash (derived from Firefly, Lauren Faust’s inspiration for Rainbow), the (second) Dragon Emperor (introduced in “[Redacted]”), Bigby’s Book of Non-Unicorn Magic (first appearance in “The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville”), the terrifying hen demon, “Wheatstraw” as Fluttershy’s last name (taken from “The Best of All Possible Worlds”, which is otherwise not canon for this story), Stungpetal and her entire catalog of works, The Pop-Up Book of the Pony Mind (from “The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville”), and Daring Do and the Weathermare’s Gambit.

The cover illustration is modeled after the “Scottie’s Nightmare” sequence from Vertigo (1958, directed by Alfred Hitchcock). Chicago IX: Greatest Hits is an album by, of course, Chicago, from 1975. Apple Jacks is a brand of cereal manufactured by Kellogg’s—their slogan in the 1990’s was “we eat what we like”. Now That’s What I Call Classic Rock Hits is an entry in EMI’s Now series of song compilation albums, from 2012, devoted to classic rock of the 1970s—it includes the songs “25 or 6 to 4” (by Chicago from 1970, featured in my earlier story “The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville”), “Locomotive Breath” (by Jethro Tull from 1971), “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (by Meat Loaf from 1977) and “Crazy on You” (by Heart from 1976).

The Year 7015 is from my own idiosyncratic dating system which goes back to the beginning of Celestia and Luna’s reign. It corresponds to the middle of the second season of the show, except for the fact that second and third season episodes are only acknowledged in this series when it’s convenient.

“Trough of Youth” is the pony form of the “Fountain of Youth”. “Maretoven” is pony for “Beethoven”, as in Ludwig van. “Chopsticks” is pony for “Chopsticks” by Euphemia Allen (originally named “The Celebrated Chop Waltz” and written by the composer under a male pseudonym in 1877, when she was only sixteen years old). The “Revolutionary Etude” by “Chopping the Dragon” is actually the Revolutionary Étude (Étude Op. 10 No. 12, or “Étude on the Bombardment of Warsaw”) by Frédéric Chopin, written circa 1831—it commemorates Poland’s failed revolution against Russia, the November Uprising of 1831. The sheet music used was the C. F. Peters edition of 1879, taken from the Petrucci Music Library. “Bitalian” is pony for “Italian”, the language used to notate music.

Twilight “messing with time” comes from the episode “It’s About Time”. “The Flight of the Bumblebee” is a musical piece by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, taken from the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan from 1899. “Etheric trope” is pony for “TV trope”, as the “Etheric” is Equestria’s version of radio, and ponies haven’t invented TV yet.

The “Box-Ball Law” is Rainbow Dash’s mangling of the “Square-cube rule”, which explains why elephants have to be so blocky while mice can be much more delicate in structure. “Madragon” (“Mad Dragon”) is Equestria’s answer to Godzilla (Tomoyuki Tanaka, Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsubaraya for the Toho film studio, 1954), and Vinyl correctly described how his roar was created. The “Green Flashlight” is equivalent to the Green Lantern (John Boome, Gil Kane, Bill Finger and Martin Nodell for DC Comics, 1940), and the “Yellow Flash” is the Flash (Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert for DC Comics, 1940).

“Cracker Jacks” are pony for “Cracker Jacks” (a product of Frito-Lay). “Two dreams ago” is a reference to the events of “The Perfect Little Village of Ponyville”. Smarty Pants comes from the FIM episode “Lesson Zero”, written by Meghan McCarthy. “Roasting your own eyeballs” is a reference to a particularly gruesome scene in the otherwise random fanfic “Masquerade”. “Everybody knows Pinkie” was introduced in “Javelin”, and used as a running joke in my stories ever since. “Standards and Practices” is the name given to the department in a broadcast TV network responsible for keeping the content safe from causing unwanted controversy or legal attention—the censor, in other words. Pinkie Pie’s song is taken from “Witch Doctor” (Ross Bagdasarian Sr. as David Seville, 1958). A tinfoil hat is the stereotypical protection that the paranoid are supposed to block having their thoughts read or influenced by the nebulous “Them” that keeps persecuting their lives. Yes, I am explaining absolutely everything. And I’m not done yet.

“Apples and apple accessories” is a reference to the “propane and propane accessories” sales line uttered by the character Hank Hill from King of the Hill (Mike Judge and Greg Daniels for Fox, 1997)—the character is sometimes compared to Applejack. Applejack and Vinyl Scratch discuss the events of the episodes “Friendship Is Magic, Part 1” and “Friendship Is Magic, Part 2”, both written by Lauren Faust. “Fancy” as a pony synonym for “French” comes from the episode “The Cutie Pox”, written by Amy Keating Rogers—which makes three Season Two episodes I wasn’t supposed to reference in this alternate-universe Equestria. Rainbow’s exclamation of “pinfeathers” refers to the way new feathers on birds grow in—I’ve observed that they find them to be pretty uncomfortable. “Shetland Day” refers to the breed of pony, but also the Scottish islands they are named after, hence the reference to a kilt. The Complete Dream Book by “Hollow Way” is a reference to an actual book of the same name written by Gillian Holloway from 2006. The fan-named character of Parula appeared in the episode “The Return of Harmony Part 2” written by M. A. Larson—there was no indication given in the episode that she was related to Fluttershy, other than having the same manestyle.

The music Parula plays in Chapter 6 is my backwards arrangement of “Aquarium”, from The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns from 1885. “Kickens” is pony for the author Charles Dickens. Trixie’s line about saying “Neigh” if Twilight begged for mercy was lifted from Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986.

The big piece of music played in Chapter 7 is my arrangement of “Nightmare Night” by Wooden Toaster, specifically the piano version by Firelance2014. “Cloud Kicker”, like Parula, is the fan name for an as-yet unnamed pony. Her team consists of Blossomforth, “Lightning Bolt” (the white-coated, blue-maned mare), Medley (the blue-green mare), Merry May and Rainbowshine. “Incidental Pegasus #2” is the official name used for Cloud Kicker by the animators of Friendship Is Magic. Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone is the Daring Do book that Rainbow Dash was reading in the second season episode “Read It and Weep”, written by Cindy Morrow (that’s four!). F.S. Braveheart is the name given for the author of the Daring Do series in the fanfic “The Many Secret Origins of Scootaloo”, by defender2222.

“Greed growth” and the fire ruby are both references to the episode “Secret of my Excess”, written by M. A. Larson (five!). “DDAPA” stands for the Daring Do Amateur Press Association—fanzines made by APAs were the primary means by which fanfiction was distributed before the rise of the Internet. “Coyotl” is the original Aztec name for the coyote, and means “trickster”.

“Canterday” is the list of days of the week created by Baxil on the Ponies & Pegasi (Pony4e) board in this post. Harvest and other the 90 day seasons come from Loyal2Luna’s calendar.

Pinkie’s parade description liberally quotes from the lyrics of “Seventy-Six Trombones”, from The Music Man by Meredith Wilson (1957). Haywaii Five-O is the theme song to Hawaii Five-O, created by Leonard Freeman in 1968; the song is by Morton Stevens and was performed by The Ventures (check out those sideburns!). “The Firehouse Five Plus Two” is a reference to the Dixieland jazz band made up of Walt Disney animators and artists, led by Ward Kimball on trombone. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, numbered or predicted! My life is my own!” is a quote from The Prisoner (created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein for ITV in 1967)—“predicted” is my Pinkie-specific addition. And finally, the “clown hammer” reference harks back to “Masquerade”.

Author's Note

Yes, that's right, I have finally finished this story.

I am so, so sorry about how long it took to stick this Epilogue on here. Suffice it to say that there was something I had to do first, and that I have learned new respect for the power of procrastination.

As for the sequel of this story, it's right over here.

Chapter 1: Tempo Rubato

Accelerando

Chapter 1: Tempo Rubato

It started as an ordinary day. Clear weather as far as the eye could see. Birds and pegasi enjoying the clean spring air. Fillies and colts laughing and singing.

But for Vinyl Scratch, this would be a day like no other. A day in which she would be tested...in more ways than one.

~ ~ ~

The white unicorn slowly opened her eyes from her mid-afternoon nap, focusing gradually on puffs of white which were drifting before her.

She blinked rapidly several times, and then rubbed her eyes with the backs of her wrists.

“I’m never going to get used to this,” she muttered to herself in a flat tone.

Suddenly she sat up in shock. “Hello? Hello?! Great, I’ve traded my blindness for deafness.”

Oh, that’s right—she’s so good at faking being able to see, that I forget sometimes. I suppose I should fix that...but then I’d have to keep track of everything she can’t see, and describe everything she picks up with her freaky super senses and...You know what? This time, Vinyl can see. A good story beats an accurate story every time, after all. Now where was I...? Oh yeah!

A pony with a clipboard held in her wrist stepped into Vinyl’s sight just then, and waved at her.

“Yes?” she said.

The other pony tried to tell her something.

“I’m sorry,” she replied, “but I can’t hear you, and I can’t read lips.”

That’s odd, she thought to herself. Usually when the dream changes me, I get all the necessary skills to go along with it.

The stagehoof mimed removing something from the top of her head with a look of annoyance.

Reaching up, Vinyl was surprised to discover something indeed was on top of her head, so she removed it. The object turned out to be a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Immediately, the top of her head stopped feeling like it was being squeezed in a vice.

“Oh,” she said sheepishly. “I suppose I should have noticed that.”

“You’re on, Number Four!” the pegasus with the clipboard tucked under one wing repeated for the fourth time.

“I’m...on?” Vinyl asked, looking around herself.

She was standing on a plywood platform, in what she recognized as a dressing room of a concert hall. Since dressing rooms in most theaters were on the basement level, they tended to lack windows. This dressing room, on the other hoof, had a window. Looking outside, Vinyl saw a cloudy landscape. In fact, clouds were all she could see.

Vinyl Scratch, a unicorn, was in Cloudsdale. With no trace of a cloud-walking spell in sight.

Now I know this looks like a loser move on my part, but trust me: this is going to be awesome.

She made a quick check just to be sure. Yup, still a unicorn, she concluded. And her cutie mark was apparently the one she expected to have as well.

She saw no sheet music in her vicinity, but that didn’t really bother her. She’d been improvising before large crowds for years. If this was the worst she’d have to put up with, she didn’t think she’d have much of a problem.

On her walk to the stage, Vinyl Scratch passed a sign: Best Young Musician Competition, 7015. Or the “BYMC”, as all of my musician friends used to call it.

Oh wait, how old is she? Well I’m going to say that she’s young enough to qualify now. She can go ahead and thank me for the “Trough of Youth” treatment later.

The unicorn smirked, probably in response.

I thought I felt a little younger than usual, she realized. The first time I entered the BYMC, I was too intimidated to relax, and Octy blew my Maretoven out of the water. And then when I came back the next year with my own stuff, I was booed out of the theater for being too “modern”. I wonder what...

Vinyl’s thoughts—whatever they were—were interrupted as she walked out onto the stage. As with everywhere she had been walking so far, she was supported by wooden platforms that had been hastily set up. Otherwise, she would have plummeted to her death, because this building—like most in this pegasus city—usually had clouds for floors. In front of her was a set of portable stadium seats, brought in because the usual ones for this building were made out of cloudstuff. The stand was built to support a couple dozen ponies, but was currently being used by at least a hundred, their every motion causing the thin plywood floor to bend and buckle. Twilight, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Fluttershy and Applejack were there—

—But not Rainbow Dash, realized Vinyl—

—as well as Octavia, Vinyl’s uncle, her parents, and the rest of her humongous family, who all looked nearly identical to her.

The BYMC was never held in Cloudsdale, for obvious safety reasons, thought Vinyl to herself. But this is Rainbow Dash’s dream, so she can break any rule she wants to. Speaking of which, I bet all of those clones are supposed to be the members of my family she never met.

“I’m ashamed of you for a really stupid reason!” one of them exclaimed.

“You’ll never be as good as your sisters!” the patriarch of the clones added.

Yup, she concluded, definitely my family. Wait, since when did I have siblings?

Dominating the stage before her was a piano.

Vinyl smiled in triumph at seeing her instrument of choice, confident that she would ace this competition. Those hopes plunged through the floor and fell a couple thousand pony-heights to the surface of Equestria, however, on reading the sign hung above the piano:

SIGHT-READING ROUND

That meant, for those ponies lucky enough never to have endured this unique form of torture, that Vinyl would not be free to play whatever she wanted, but instead had to perform whatever sheet music the judges had selected. Music she was expected never to have heard or played before in her entire life.

This explained why she had been forced to wear headphones earlier, so she couldn’t find out early the piece every participant of the competition would be required to play.

From the look developing on her face, I’m thinking she hates sight-reading rounds the same as every other musical pony. Well, being blind she was probably exempt from them, but she had to have been there to witness the epic meltdowns that always resulted. I mean, I’ve seen ponies that were geniuses at improv and learning a song by ear turning into nervous wrecks because some sadistic pony had put up “Chopsticks” with one note transposed up a third on the repeat. The music academy was full of stories of broken students who had been expelled for attacking the judges during sight-reading, or else attempting to turn the piano into matchsticks.

Yeah, I know a little more about music than I like to let on. You’ve got a problem with that? Trust me, I’ve got my reasons for playing dumb.

Being formerly blind, Vinyl had one more reason to be terrified at that moment. RD, please remember to give me sight-reading ability! she pleaded silently.

“Woo! Go, Vinyl!” Pinkie exclaimed, waving a foam eighth note in the air.

Vinyl Scratch approached the piano. Sitting atop the music stand was this monstrosity, the Revolutionary Etude by Chopping the Dragon:

Vinyl stared at the page, the color draining out of her face.

The good news was that Vinyl could read sheet music. As for the bad news, her newfound ability made her absolutely certain that...

This music was unplayable. There was even a notation at the top: Ala draco. That meant “in the dragon style”. As in “requires fingers for playing”. The tempo of the piece was absurd, there was that huge “NO MAGIC” stamp at the top of every single page to block her only work-around, and it was littered with chords.

Chords, in case you didn’t know, are the arch-enemy of every pony piano player. With only two hooves to work with, chords of up to four notes at a time are played in sustained arpeggio. This meant first positioning a couple of special sliders on the piano to indicate what part of the keyboard the chord was—all pony pianos came with these. Next, the performer would press the sustain pedal down. And finally, the player would rapidly alternate back and forth, between playing a chord note, then a melody note, then another chord note, then the next melody note, then back to a chord note, and so on and so on. Holding that sustain pedal down would cause every note played within the slider range to blend together, creating the chord. The obvious downside of this technique is that a pony is forced to play three to six times more notes than a dragon performer on the same piano, and as a result, a pony’s maximum speed is reduced to just a third to a sixth of their speed on a string or wind instrument.

Vinyl glared out at the pony judges sitting at the front of the audience.

She could almost see their fangs when they smiled, the bloody carnivores.

Slowly, she sat down at the bench. She looked down in defeat at her two hooves, and with a sigh raised them above the keys.

“Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick!” beat an insistent metronome at the judge’s desk.

That was the cherry on the insult sundae. “Excuse me,” she addressed her tormenters with a fierce tone. “Chopping’s etudes are meant to be played rubato.” By which she meant to say that the player was supposed to vary the speed of the piece as they played to emphasize the emotional content.

The ticking instrument of torture was silenced.

“Thank you.” With what looked like a quick prayer to her muse, she began to play.

By Celestia, this is awful! Vinyl thought, as she plodded through the opening measures.

The poor dragon composer of this piece was probably rolling in his grave. Although, considering everypony who had preceded her through this monstrosity, he was probably turning so fast that he was boring a hole straight to the center of the planet by now.

After a couple minutes of this, Vinyl Scratch noticed something odd. This wasn’t tiring her. The rapid hops from high notes back down to low, maintaining the chords and the runs, managing the pedals and the sustain sliders, she should have been sweating under the hot lights, but this was all absurdly easy to her. Maybe she could dare to go faster.

And so she did. Her forelegs accelerated into blurs, and still she didn’t feel fatigued, although she did notice that her vision had gained a faint red tint.

“Yyaaaayyy, Vviiiiiinnyyyyllll!” shouted Pinkie.

Vinyl turned her head in confusion (although still managing to keep up the unbelievable speed). The ponies watching her performance were going nuts cheering for her, bouncing up and down in their seats, but they were doing it in slow motion. Even the judges, staring at her in slack-jawed amazement, were blinking about once per second, to her perception.

Vinyl looked back at her hooves in amazement. How am I doing this? she almost certainly asked herself. Then, if she’s anything like me (heh), she decided to let Twilight figure that out, and sped herself up even more, finally matching the blistering tempo set by the composer. As she did so, her vision became even more red-tinted than before. A thick blurry ring of darkness began to form around the piano...

Just then there was a long sickening crack, as the raucous audience caused the temporary floor beneath them to snap to pieces. With a drawn-out scream, the audience of earth and unicorn ponies began to fall, but thanks to whatever Vinyl was doing, it was happening in slow motion. The pegasi hovering in the air looked down in horror, with everything happening too fast—from their point of view—for them to react in time.

Vinyl turned to get up, hoping to use this strange slowing phenomenon to help her save these ponies. But the moment she stopped playing, the red tint and black ring disappeared, and the world snapped back to normal speed. She jumped back in her seat, and resumed playing, even faster than Chopping intended.

As the platform collapsed, Pinkie Pie instantly knew what to do.

“I do?” she asked the ceiling. “Does this mean I get to be a main character? Or maybe I can be the sidekick! I love being the sidekick!”

Um...on second thought, let me try that again.

As the platform collapsed, Fluttershy instantly knew what to do.

(“Aawwwwwwww,” said Pinkie with a slow-motion pout.)

“Vinyl!” the hovering Fluttershy shouted. “Play faster! Play faster!”

Vinyl’s vision was getting so red that it was getting hard to read the music. The sounds of other ponies had slowed to the point where they sounded like they were speaking a different language, and their screams from falling were ten times more tortuous to hear having them stretched out like this.

But Fluttershy’s words sounded completely normal to Vinyl. Well, normal in speed. They were far too authoritative to belong to the pony she knew.

Concentrating part of her mind on her playing, Vinyl snuck a glance over at Fluttershy. She was surprised to see that the pegasus was moving at a normal rate, and was free of the red glow that covered everything else.

On the more disturbing side, her cutie mark was three bumblebees instead of three butterflies, and her eyes were blood red. Those eyes seemed to pull the unicorn in towards them, like they were independent living things with lives and...appetites totally foreign to the gentle pony.

Vinyl quickly looked away from those eyes, and did as she was told. Faster, and faster still she pushed the speed of her playing.

From what she could hear, it sounded like Fluttershy was doing what she couldn’t, taking advantage of the slowing of the world to save as many ponies as possible. But they were falling too fast, and she seemed even weaker than normal.

“There’s...there’s too much momentum!” she exclaimed. “I can’t move them!”

“Faster...” Vinyl said under her breath, pushing the song to its utter limit. She had reached the end of the song and looped back to the beginning five or six times by now. She pushed just a little bit more...

...And Time stopped entirely.

She looked around herself in wonder, still playing. Despite the red glow, the playhouse gained an ethereal beauty, as dust motes and individual tufts of light sparkled around her. Their texture resembled that of Celestia’s mane.

(Something the last dream had made her very familiar with.)

“How about now?” she shouted to Fluttershy.

She heard a few frustrated sounds from the space beneath the busted floor, followed by a sob. “It’s no use!” Fluttershy exclaimed. “The momentum is just too great.”

Vinyl grinned as an impossible idea came to her. “Well what if I go even faster?” she asked.

“What?” Fluttershy asked in a panic. “Wait, don’t do it!”

But it was too late. Vinyl accelerated her playing to another level of speed, and the notes started coming out sounding like an audio experiment run amok. The dust motes began to float upwards, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The red tint changed to blue, becoming deeper in color the faster she worked into the past.

From the corner of her eye, she saw ponies beginning to float back into view. The stand rebuilt itself, followed by the flawed flooring. The judge ponies were frowning—from their point of view, she was playing the notes in the wrong order. Among the ponies affected by the reversal was Fluttershy, her motions comically accelerated compared to everypony else. With everything restored to normal, Vinyl slowed back down to “stop speed”.

“What did you do?!” Fluttershy asked insistently.

“I think I just reversed time,” Vinyl replied.

“NEVER DO THAT!” the pegasus screamed.

“It was either that or watch all of our friends die!” the unicorn insisted.

Fluttershy sighed. Her red eyes were really beginning to creep Vinyl out. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “Keep playing.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Vinyl joked.

Fluttershy flew around the platform, inspecting it carefully. Shaking her head sadly, she said, “No good. I’ll have to rig something to catch them. Do you think you can keep this up for a few minutes?”

The fatigue of doing the absolute impossible for nearly a half hour of subjective time was finally beginning to wear on the performing pony. “Yeah,” she said between pants, “but make it snappy!”

Fluttershy flew out of the back of the concert hall.

A seeming eternity passed, and then she returned. “Okay, let ‘er rip!”

“Finally!” Vinyl exclaimed. She started the piece over from the beginning, at the tempo that she calculated would sound just perfect to the slowed pony audience. For some reason (heh again), this calculation came naturally to her, like she had done it many times before. The black ring from earlier reformed and grew darker and darker, eventually resolving itself into a jostling band of living musical notes.

In the audience, Fluttershy had surrendered herself to the flow of time, and her eyes were their normal color once again.

Played at this speed, Vinyl found the piece to be almost too easy. She was playing four chord notes now for every one of the sixteenth notes that anypony else could hear.

Moments before the song was to end, the floor beneath the audience broke, and they fell out of sight, screaming in terror.

But then Vinyl heard that screaming turn to gasps of surprise, as they landed in the large net that Fluttershy had set up earlier.

Vinyl finished the song, and raised her hooves into the air. This was a sort of signal to the ring of notes around her, which suddenly whooshed out, expanding at a phenomenal rate. The ring passed through the walls of the hall, causing them to shake like a lightning bolt had struck, and accompanied by a deep booming sound.

“You did it!” exclaimed the voice of an uncharacteristically excited Octavia from the hole in the floor. “A Visual Music-boom!”

“That’s...that’s not supposed to exist!” exclaimed the voice of one of the judges. He was flat on his back in the net, and unable to deny the evidence of his senses.

“...Too much rubato,” clucked the voice of a second judge, desperate to find any reason not to give Vinyl a perfect score.

Whoa, I just realized! “Rubato” means “stolen time” in...whatever language it is that they write those music terms in. That absolutely perfect! From now on, Vinyl’s alter ego in this story is going to be “Rubato” instead of that dumb name I was gonna use.

Wait, “Rubato”? Or “Rubata”?

“Definitely the first one,” said Pinkie Pie. “‘Rubata’ sounds too much like ‘Rutabaga’.”

OK, that makes sense.

Vinyl meanwhile was coming to a similar revelation about “rubato” and its Bitalian meaning.

That’s what I just did, she realized. That’s what I am: a time thief!

“What happened?” Vinyl heard Twilight Sparkle’s voice asking in awe.

“I know, right?” asked the voice of a prone Pinkie Pie. “I had no idea that she had such a freakish knowledge of music! To think, I could have had her helping me on my musical numbers all this time!”

Um...she was talking about Vinyl, right?

Anyway, Vinyl’s friends all recognized that boom as being identical to the strange event that had changed all their lives ten years earlier.

None of whose lives had changed more than Fluttershy’s.