The Old Green Mare

Twilight Sparkle once told me that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  She claimed it was by some egghead member of the Apple family called Newton.  Apparently Newton got hit one too many times in the head with falling apples during applebucking season and started coming up with all of these wacky theories.  That gravity one is pretty heavy, though.

Anyway, Twilight went on to explain that other great philosophers and physicists took Newton’s laws and used them to explain how the world works.  I was only half paying attention at the time, because there was this cute orange bird flying around outside… no seriously, it was like an orange with blue wings!  It was the funniest thing I’d seen… well, all day at least.  So I missed a little bit of Twilight’s lecture about force, speed, vectors, velocity, and church...

Mass?  Aren’t church and mass the same thing?  Like I said before, I wasn’t paying attention to that part.

I tuned back in when she started theorizing about the possibilities of alternate universes.  That sounded interesting.  I mean, can you imagine the idea of me, Pinkamena Diane Pie, being a boring old businessmare?  Or using my Pinkie Senses for evil?  Or me as a stallion?  Neither could I before, but Twilight told me that in theory, everything that every made me Pinkie could have turned out differently somewhere else.   For want of a certain secret special ingredient, an entire batch of cupcakes was lost.  I think Twilight said it was a nail, but what silly pony uses a nail to bake cupcakes?

I asked Twilight if there was any way to visit these other realities.  She told me that they were just theories, but if anyone could do it, it would probably be me.  She said I already sort of do it when I break some of Newton’s laws with my Pinkie Sense.

You’re probably wondering why I’m the one talking to you instead of Granny Smith, who is supposed to be getting her day in the limelight.  Well, you see, somepony decided that in order to tap into your willing suspension of disbelief, I should at least be allowed to narrate the prologue, and then let the chips fall where they may.  Hopefully in my mouth, because chips are yummy.  Especially chocolate chips.  I tried to bake a cupcake with potato chips once, and it wasn’t pretty.

I can tell by that glazed doughnut look in your eyes that you want me to just get to the point already.  *sigh* Fine.

Like I was saying, the other stuff about Newton was boring, but this alternate universe stuff really pinked my interest.  No, I’m pretty sure the word is “pinked,” not “piqued.”  Rarity told me that a pique is a durable tightly woven ribbed fabric with raised cords.  Fine, have it your way.  I was really really really really really interested in alternate realities. Really.  I think it made Twilight happy to see me showing such curiosity about some of the science-y stuff that she likes as well. Plus she had so many books and letters about the subject that we totally lost track of time.

Before I knew it, what had started out as a little research project had lasted the whole day. I don’t think I’ve ever sat in one place that long, except for that one time, but this wasn’t watching paint dry.  This was funna, fun fun!  I wanted to know everything about other Pinkie Pies, and Twilight wanted to know about… well, the boring part of it. The Newton stuff.  But we worked together as a team.  Finally Twilight came to the conclusion that the only way we’d ever know if the theory was true would be to test it out, like we had when Twilight went back in time.  I reminded her how that did not work out as she had originally intended, although it was rather funny in hindsight.

“Don’t worry, Pinkie,” she said.  “We’re not going to actually travel to these other worlds.  We’re just going to watch.  It’ll be like reading a book, only we get to see it, too.”  She took the crystal ball that I had used during her time travel experience and set it down in front of us, connected to that weird contraption she tried to use to figure out my Pinkie Sense.

“Do I have to wear that funny hat again?”

“Only if you want to, Pinkie.  If my theory is correct, whoever wears the…um… funny hat will be connected to all alternate versions of themselves in the multiverse.  We’ll be able to see one of them at a time in the crystal ball, depending upon what frequency we set it to.”

“Ooh!  I want to wear that funny hat again!”

"I suspected you might.  It’s probably better if you do anyway, since it’ll be using my magic as kind of a battery.”

Putting the hat on, I gave a hooves up to Twilight. “Okie, dokie lokie!”

Twilight concentrated on… something or other.  Maybe it was me, maybe it was the crystal ball, maybe it was my hat.

“Um, Twilight, nothing’s happening.”

“Are you thinking about alternate Pinkie Pies?”

“Oh, was I supposed to be?”

Twilight facehoofed.  I guess I was supposed to be.  But which me did I want to see? Hey, that rhymed! I’m like Zecora!

“I’m getting something!” Twilight shouted with squee.  “It looks like… Zecora.”

“Zecora?” Oops. “Well, at least we know it works, right?”

“I’m not sure yet.  We could just be watching our Zecora.”

The zebra in the crystal ball hummed to herself as she stirred something in her cauldron.  There was a knock at her door.

“Come in, come in! Let the day begin!”

I watched myself enter Zecora’s home.

“It’s me!” I shouted.

“It’s good to see you awake.  Now help yourself to a cupcake!” the zebra said in a jolly voice.  She dipped a ladle into her cauldron and spooned twelve servings into a cupcake pan. Then, with a spark of magic, what I thought was soup or tea turned into cupcakes!

Twilight stared at the crystal ball dumbfounded.  Her jaw was literally on the library floor.  No, I meant literally. Would you figuratively stop interrupting me about my grammar and let me narrate?

“Thank you, Zecora,” the other Pinkie said.  “You always know how to make a pony smile.”

Twilight picked her jaw up off the floor so she would be able to talk again.

“Eureka,” she whispered.

“No, I think it’s Ponyville,” I said.

“No, Pinkie, I mean it worked.  It really worked.”

“The Cakes replaced me with Zecora…”  I wasn’t feeling too keen about that.  Honestly, after all I’ve done for the Cakes.

“It’s a different reality Pinkie.  Maybe you live in the Everfree Forest and Zecora lives at Sugarcube Corner.”

“I suppose that could be fun…”  I wasn’t convinced.

“I need to write to Celestia.  The possibilities for this could be endless.  Pinkie, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I think so, Twilight, but Rarity’s going to have to make you your own set of lederhosen.”

Twilight started to say something, but changed her mind and went off to find Spike so she could send a letter to the Princess, leaving me still hooked up to the machine.  Without her magic, the strange images of Zecora in the crystal vanished.  No matter how hard I concentrated, which must have been at least a minute, I couldn’t get anything to show up on my own without Twilight’s… um… Spark.  OK, even I thought that was a bad pun, forget I said it, OK?

That was probably a good thing, because what we thought was “just observing” had more of an effect than we could have possibly imagined.  The timey-wimey stuff that makes up the multiverse had been disturbed, and we were the ones who woke it up.

Twilight tried to explain it all to me later.  Something about how the Lollabrigator stopped gee-hawing with the double low e-flat commodulator.  Or I could just read you her notes…  they don’t make a salt lick of sense to me.

“Using a phonetic labeling system, I’ll start by calling our universe Alpha, and the one where I we saw Zecora in Sugarcube Corner is Bravo.  The barrier between the two worlds was disturbed by our scrying, causing a ripple effect throughout the multiverse.  In most cases, the effects were benign.  In Charlie, for example, Lyra Heartstrings memory that she had already eaten her breakfast was wiped from existence… just the memory.  So she had breakfast a second time and got a tummyache.  In Delta, Ditzy Doo’s strabismus was suddenly and inexplicably cured.  It caused Echo’s Octavia to abandon her cello for the accordion—“

See?  I told you we’d need lederhosen!  Pony Polka your eyes out!  Well, you get the idea.  Twilight’s notes go through the entire phonetic alphabet twice and takes up two pages of universes before she gets to even one of the three universes that had not-so-benign effects.

“Universe Papa Oscar Victor – A pulse of residual magic from this universe’s Fluttershy slips through the universal barrier.”

I didn’t understand how that could have happened.  Maybe Fluttershy was a unicorn in that universe instead of a Pegasus.

“Universe Bravo Six Hundred Twelve.  The pulse enters the universe in the form of a shooting star.  Filly Princess Luna catches the shooting star in a net and rides it to Equestria, meets a French earth pony trying to fix a flying machine somewhere around Saddle Arabia.  They discuss Philosophy, and eventually Luna disappears, trying to find her way home.  Her essence merges with what remains of the pulse, which gives them enough energy to bypass the barrier yet again.”

Skip a few more pages… aha!

“Universe Juliet Juliet Golf Hotel.  The LunaPulse enters and once again becomes a shooting star.  Spike makes a wish.  ‘I wish everything was back to the way it should be.’  Luna is separated from the pulse and returns to her own universe.  The pulse does the opposite and jumps all the way back to universe Alpha.”

And that, my fillies, is how Equestria was unmade.