The glasses in the lab fluttered along with the gushing plasma. All the curves and the bulges in their complicated link-up allow the light a playground to wash through, bending and contracting over and over. The occasional flashing from across the lab bathes these beakers and bottles and flasks in a bright yellow for a few seconds while Cherry snaps the mask up to check her handy work. Then back down again with the nod of her head to continue fusing stuff together. Lost in the sound of sparks being made, she's muttering some little song she heard this morning.
The excitement seems to be electric sliding down every nerve as the Professor trots by the sparks. His untamed, while main bobs with the constant giggling to himself. He stops. He takes out a pocket watch from his lab coat and reads the numbers as it floats in the space in front of him.
He should be here any second...
"Hellooo! I got iiit!" The blue maned pony walked in with a bag at his hooves. His azure side-parting flopped over one eye, despite his best efforts. He was also in a lab coat.
"Ah! Excellent! Yes, put it inside. Cherry will be ready with the modifications and Grey with be ready with the Calculations any minute now." Said the Professor, unable to do anything but beam excitedly at them all. The Azure Pony looked at the old Professor with concern.
"Are you al'right? You made me get Battenburg and you seem like you could gallop up the walls at any minute. Are you sure your OK?"
"I've never felt finer!" The Professor declared into the ceiling, raising a hoof high to make his point. "You see, we are to revolutionise transportation forever! Oh yes! No more 3-Dimensional space for us! Oh no, no, no, no, no!" He turns on a hoof, chest thrust out with pride and sense of occasion. His voice was loud and pompous. "We shall become the first ponies to attempt travel in that most strange of directions! No longer shall we be stuck in the confines of X, Y and Z. Soon, we shall no longer be travelling through space but time as well. Perhaps with more time to perfect the technology, we shall break even the linear nature of time. Go from moving backwards and forwards to perhaps sideways in time. Where we see the worlds that never formed. The Equestria that exists just out of reach! We shall take the first step into the great unknown of Chronological Transport. Not just for Equestria but for Science!"
There was a moments silence. Not so much because of the quality of that speech but more because the brain just can't seem to get going again after a rant like that without a breather.
"Sooo...what did you want me to do with your cake, again?"
"In the Chronological Transport, Teddy. Please keep up, we cannot afford screw ups today." Teddy snatches up the bag in his teeth, walking by Cherry who's still welding happily.
"Do you really think it'll do more than nothing this time Professor?" Teddy asked from inside the metal shell, covered in tubes.
"I should say so! I have had it with these magical nags telling me that some words chanted while holding a dragon scale in one's nostril and making faces at the moon is better than anything I have created with nothing but my brain and some simple remedies anyone with half a mind could create. I shall have the last laugh. Magic only makes us lazy, Teddy. Science, ah! Science keeps you on your toes. When we have Science, there is no need for all that Hocus Pocus tom-foolery."
"Huh...So is that Lightning Crystal you made me get from the Magician's Guild just Science-y enough to be part of this machine?" The Professor's horty demeanour vanished. He mulls over his response for a second, wiggling the dust-pan moustache he has kept trimmed for today.
"I am to build on the backs on giants if I am to advance this project. A stone that stores lightning is just one tiny part of a far more complicated design. You should know that that was necessary from the beginning. Now, stop this nonsense and check up on Grey will you?"
Ah, the normal Professor was back...
Grey is the graphite-coloured head sitting in what appears to be a small mountain of paperwork. Advanced calculations and theorems have mounted up around him as he continues to scribble frantically. As he finishes yet another notebook of possible ideas and equations, he throws it to the pile around him and picks up another to then start working again. Teddy walks in.
"Hey! How's it going?" He says, trying to keep things jolly.
"Can't talk, trying to condense three years of equations and theory into a few pages of notes necessary for trip." Grey said, smoke coming off the quill now. "Nearly done though."
"Yeah, good. You know, I think he's excited. He only ever rants on for hours when he's excited." Teddy said.
"No surprise. Big day." A flick of the page and back to writing.
"Yeah, he seems to turn back into a foal whenever he's going to make something big. He was still jittering when I left."
"Big day." Grey reiterated.
"Do you think we could do actually travel through time?" Teddy asked as he looked down at the only visible book on the floor; Chronological Manipulation for Dummies: Volume 7 of 42.
"Nothing says we can't." Grey flicks another page over.
"How many of these books you got around here?"
"17." Grey answered, curtly.
"Wow...How'd you read these without hurting your brain, man? I read one of these and I had a migraine for a week."
"Dunno, just can. I'm almost....Ah!"
"Huh?"
"I have it! Pass me my hat!"
Cherry Blossom shut the door behind them all then squealed into an ecstatic giggle.
"Everythings ready! I can't waaaaiiit!" She said, bouncing on the spot. Her scarlet and singed locks were bouncing along too. "Do you think this'll work?"
"Can we stop asking that? I've spent too long making sure to fail now." Grey said, now wearing both his brown fedora and lab coat. The four of them were inside a small room with a simple red carpet. The orange walls had a blackboard at one end and what looked like a church-organ keyboard of controls complete with pipes leading away into the wall. Lights of a multitude flickered their various signals and at least ten different dials sat dormant while the machine was still. The room inside the machine had a sofa and bunks hanging from the available wall. Most of the machine was outside, leaving as much room for those inside as possible.
"So...." Teddy said. "Shall we turn her on?"
"Yes!" The Professor declared. "Grey, input your formulae and I shall begin charging the Chronal-Engines. Teddy, Cherry; sit down and hold on." The pony's rushed to their positions. Teddy and Cherry to the matching sofa and cushions Cherry had provided from her own stash while the Professor pulled down on the main power switch. It ratchets into place with each notch it passes. The humming all-around them begins to grow. A few of the lights start flashing faster while a few gauges spring to life. Grey feeds a slot on the machine a piece of parchment that it happily gobbles up. A green glow then a small ding!
"We're ready to go, Professor." Grey announces. The Professor's heart is pounding away, out of both fear and utter delight of trying out an invention for the first time. The Professor keys in a date and time that appears on the display above the current time. He then checks all the jumping dials and readouts, all competing for attention. Everything was just as it should be. Good. This calls for brave words that sound good when he's later quoted in History's writings. He flicks the safety lid for the big 'Go!' button.
"To tomorrow, and beyond!" He pushes the button.
The metal box's shape is obscured by all the extra boxes covering it like technophiliac acne. Extra fans whirred in these boxes, most bigger than a pony's head, cooling everything while lightning arcs from one point to another. It sparks and fizzes and hums while electricity jumps like an acrobat from one point to the next to the next until a constant stream is made. Above the whole machine is a propeller that's getting fast by the second. The two steel balls on the propeller catch the occasional spark of energy from the constant current that's made a net around the machine. On the two ends of the propeller, larger lightning crystals fizz and splutter with the amount of energy passing into them. They made a halo over the machine with the glow while the room rapidly decayed around it. Tables rotted to nothing and brickwork became visible under peeling paint. All the while, lightning continued to arc. The machine was then spitting streams of the energy outwards, blowing the roof off with ease. It smashed the floor boards to pieces and crashed through the glass containers. More strikes blew up part of the wall, like a toddler's tantrum, the lightning continued to be spat out in all directions.
Inside the machine, the Professor eased the engines to a stop.
"There. Now, I thought I heard something..." he said. The other ponies were silent. Cherry shook her head.
"Just me? Ah, then I'll just check." The Professor trots to the heavy door to the outside. It swings freely, clanging against the remains of a work desk. "My word...."He says, breathlessly.
Then Teddy noticed the Time Display: "Hey! We've not gone anywhere! It's still Wednesday!"
The Professor looked up at the storm above him. Electric-blue flashes course through the dark, heavy storm clouds above him. Around the pony is the wreckage of his workshop and his other inventions.
"Good grief, what did..." He pauses for a second as he spots a part of the workplace over by the window. Firstly, it's not horribly burned or scorched in anyway. In fact, the black patches on the floor stop right at this area of clean floorboard. Secondly, while the area the Professor stood in was covered in cloud, therefore darkly lit, that area was brightly lit by the sunshine that was pouring in from the window. There was a sharp line where the sunlight and the relative darkness met like they were solid objects interlocking. Or maybe one blob of oil inside water. You could even see a bird tweeting happily in the window, grateful for the glorious morning.
"Get out here. You have to see this. We have a major problem." As always, Teddy piped up as hooves moved towards the exit.
"What do you mean?" He said.
"We" The Professor said, "have lacerated Time and Space."
Here would be an appropriate time for a theme song but alas, Fan Fiction is rarely an audio medium and I cannot be bothered to write one currently. If you'd like, then you may imagine the Doctor Who theme song to thunder over the image of The Professor staring at the wreckage.
They file out into the workshop, looking around at the mess, blackened and dark. The clouds above stained electric blue crackled a little as though hissing at them from above. They were all looking at the window, the intact window spewing sunshine into the wreckage.
"I...I'm going to need a little help here guys. Your all physicists, what's this?" Cherry asks, transfixed by how the light seemed to fill an invisible container. The Professor steps forwards, looking to Teddy.
"Find Cherry's radio. Quickly...And her skateboard." Snapping from his staring with a cautious glance, Teddy turns and begins to hunt through the wreckage immediately.
"Grey, I'm going to test a theory, I want you to stand on one side of that window ready. I'll stand on the other..." The Professor said. Both ponies trot to either side of the window as Teddy returns, shoving the radio along on the skateboard. Cherry would use it for long stretches of building things on her back. She'd attached a pillow to it with glue.
"Over here, Teddy." The skateboard is rolled towards the professor. The Professor turns on the radio. Nothing but static on the lack of radio waves whenever they were.
"Observe that we have no signal from anywhere. The Radio is picking up the usual rubbish...although, that is a touch louder than I'd have first thought."
Then he kicks the skateboard forwards. It trundles towards the light given by the window.
It was just hissing at them. Hissing, hissing, hissing...And then it passed over the threshold and into the light.
"Is Everypony AM, the time by my clock is ten-thirty, meaning it's time to announce the winners of our little give away of a full Humble Bun-"
As the skateboard trundled out of the light, the Radio returned to static again. Grey stops it with a hoof and nudges the off switch with a nose.
"That was amazing!" Teddy said, excitement building. "What do we send in next?"
"Teddy! Do you not know what this means?!" The Professor burst out towards the colt, horror on his face. "This is the extent of this machine's terrible power! We have failed to create a machine that travels through time. We have built a machine that will clumsily tear time and space asunder until it is nothing more than shards, scattered all over the place! The continuum is a mirror and we have just taken a hammer to it! Do you understand?!" Teddy stared, stuck dumb by the explosive speech. Each metaphor like a new balloon popping in his face.
"Yes..." Teddy whimpers, backing away. "I'll be good..."
"Not entirely...Are you saying that this was done by my machine? It's smashed time?" Cherry enpiured, regretting the action immediatly. The Professor looks up towards Cherry, clearing his throat.
"Apologies. I'm not sure what came over me...Teddy seems to bring the thespian in me out sometimes. I shall explain in black and white; the Time Machine was designed with the ideology in mind that the machine would not move in time but time would be made to move around it. It was deemed to make more sense and so me and Grey designed the machine with this in mind. The Machine pulls time around it in order to achieve temporal-movement. We also found it plausible to pull time in any direction, if you'll pardon the crude terminology, allowing for travel into alternative universes. Chronologically moving sideways, if that makes sense to you. If that was possible, then it would prove Multiverse Theory to be correct in some aspect. We could begin to safely explore chronological travel without endangering the world we know in any great way."
Cherry was nodding...
"I think I'm with you....Probably..."
The Professor continues: "But I'm rambling. The Machine seems to have actually caused damage to the continuum as it moved time around itself. Tears in the very fabric of our reality have been made as we clawed our way to now. If I am correct, we now have pockets of space that are now linked with different points in time. These Chonological Sectors have probably been assigned random dimensions and random dates of our hometown. We could enter one of these sectors and end up twenty years ago on a Wednesday, take only a few steps before we'd be on another Wednesday, two-hundred years in the future. I can't even guarantee the sectors will stay in one time every instance that you enter them. We are in a dangerous land here."
Cherry stops and thinks. Sci-fi...come on, think Sci-fi!
"Err...right...so...So, points of this towns history have appeared in...this..place..." She looks up at the storm clouds above anxiously. "As, as little areas of a particular time? And we're calling them Chronological Sectors..."
"Yes but Temporal Zones is just as good. Possibly more accurate. I fear today will be a day of new phrases."
"Right...OK...So, we managed time travel then! We can go to the past or the future with one of these time areas. These Temporal Zones?" Cherry said, a little triumph in her voice.
"Yeah! But we smashed time and space up pretty bad to do it!" Teddy scoffed.
"This may seem simplistic but...Do you think simply reversing the process of the Chronological Engines would fix all of this Professor?" Grey suggested.
"Perhaps if we were pulling a woollen jumper apart but this is the most intangible thing imaginable to attempt to repair! I mean, fix time? I might as well start putting the flowers in your mane now and talking about Mother Equestria!" The Professor scoffed. Grey was unaffected by the remark.
"Unless anyone else has a brilliant new plan, we have nothing left but to kick it in reverse and try to get out of here at least." Grey said. "Well?"
The room fell silent.
"All right then. We should have the power right? We start up the machine and get out of here." Grey said, with authority and a stern resolve.
"Nonsense!" Barks The Professor over Gray. "Just because we have broken the clock does not mean we cannot learn about it's mechanics while we are here. For the good of Science, we must venture into this strange world in order to learn more about the nature of time. We shall document new Temporal Phenomenon that may exist here. This is something we may fix at any moment we choose, Grey. We are in no particular hurry." He looks towards Teddy and Cherry.
"So! Teddy shall be our cameraman and Cherry can take pictures. I shall lead and Grey, you may collect samples, providing there is anything worth finding. Quickly! We may be able to linger here forever but I want to get onto this now. Go! Grab your things! We leave soon."
The Fractured World was far...blander than Sci-Fi says it should be. Here we have a desert of grey dust with a slightly green tint. The occasionally rolling thunder came with the blue flashes muzzled behind the clouds. Standing out of the dust dunes, black timbers with various signs hanging in the still air. On top of that, we have various temporal zones layering themselves over the landscape. The ponies wonder past a bakery; partly a blackened wreck, partly intact at night and partly covered in multi-coloured balloons.
"I still think this is stupid..." Cherry grumbles, plodding in front of the Professor. "And my machine's don't break!" Her voice drops viciously.
"I make sure of it."
"It's not the machine, it was the design, Cherry. You stopped us from getting turned inside out or something worse. Perhaps being transformed into cookies." Grey admitted, his eye caught by several fillies halted in mid-trot.
"Cookies? Really?" Teddy cranes around in alarm.
"I dunno..." Gray said blankly, "It was supposed to be a joke."
"Hmm...Perhaps this is a black day after all..." The Professor mumbles.
The four stop before a house that was oddly intact. A brightly coloured, wooden-timbered house like plenty they had seen before.
It was sitting in the dust as thought the world had gone to pot around it. Grey dunes of dust in all directions, no wind or vegetation except from another temporal zone. A tree to the right was poking out of such a zone, as though interested in the activity.
Teddy takes a step forward.
"What are you doing?" the Professor snaps.
"I'm going to investigate?"
"Are you sure?" The Professor asks.
"Well, yeah."
"Good luck!" The Professor said with a slight grin.
"Teddy, no!" Cherry said.
"Go on Teddy! Exploration is needed!" The Professor said with a shooing gesture.
"Teddy! We don't know what's behind there!" Cherry pleads.
"All the more reason to go in!" The Professor overrides.
The door is knocked open wide, swinging slowly on it's hinge. Inside the open living room was a young filly running around in circles on a mat. Her ebony mane trailling behind. Teddy closes the door.
"All-" He's stopped by loud voices muffled by the door. Teddy opens the door again.
"I'm a prisoner here! Why can't I-" The filly from before looked bigger here. Her flank wasn't blank either. Instead, a paint palette. The mane was combed over one eye.
"You want to move out?! How about getting yourself a job? Then you can pack up you stuff an'-"
"There's nothing here?! I've tried!"
"Picking apples? Delivering letters? Making-"
"They aren't taking anyone! We've been over-"
And then they stopped. Abruptly, like a ghost being flushed down the drain when Teddy closed the door.
"I wonder if that works everytime..." Teddy looks round at his comrades, hoof hovering just before the door. He got a round of shrugs from them all, eager to see what might happen. The door it nudged open.
Inside this time is the same mare, her mane flowing down her back in a long braid as she watches something gurgling in a cradle, making odd faces. The room was covered in decorations with all the same stork carrying a bundle through the air. She stood in the wake of wrapping paper and baby things, fresh and gleaming. Teddy closes the door.
Teddy re-opens the door. The living room is now covered in photos all over the walls and the mantle piece above the fire of a small filly with an ebony mane. The same mare wonders through carrying a lunch box as she walks up to the bottom of the stairs, just out of view.
"Come oooon! You'll be late!" She wonders away from the stairs, looking around at the state of the scattered toys and multicoloured dolls, lined up to sit on a sofa.
"And your cleaning up this place when you get home." The door closes again.
The door opens again. The living has gained yet more pictures of the small, filly. Her mother, the only mare that's been seen here, trots through the room, calling to someone: "Hurry! She'll be coming back from Canterlot soon! Hurry! I need to know what that schools been doing to her!" The door closes again.
The door opens and the ebony mane of the mare has gained plenty of platinum in there. She rocks backwards and forwards in the warm glow of the fire in the heath, muttering to the ebony-maned filly on her lap. A dusty photo album to one side, sitting on a table. She rocks gently, falling asleep. The door closes again.
The door opens again to the blank room find it filled with boxes to the ceiling. A brown coated colt wonders around, looking around, feeling pleased with himself. This place was a bargain. The door closes again.
"I'm...I'm going to leave that alone for now..." Teddy said, backing away from the house tentatively. He was half expecting something to pop out.
"The fuck?!" Cherry bursts out with suddenly. "That was like switching radio channels!"
The Professor clears his throat for all the hear: "What we are seeing is a Temporal Reflection. These are merely shadows of another time period, either in the future or the past. Light has and sound has travelled here after reflecting off of the ponies you saw there. Like how we can study the life of a star by it's light, so too can we observe these individuals by the light and sound reflected from them. However, the delay must be utterly different between stars and these ponies as we can hear them too. Light has not had a chance to put some distance on the sound waves and so we are presented in the form the temporal ghosts we just saw."
"OK...So...Why did it change every time I closed the door?" Teddy asks. The Professor thinks for a seconds before shrugging.
"Coincidence perhaps? The Temporal Field here is either particularly weak or only works one way. We may see two-way zones soon." The Professor trots just ahead of them, past the house. "Come along, there must be more than one discovery here."
Onwards they wonder through the patch-work landscape for another few metres before coming to a scene of the town square, ponies walk and chatting while going about their business. Utterly frozen in place as they approached. A pair of fillies were chasing another through the scene while a cart repair-pony was hard at work on a wheel. The stalls were surrounded by customers weaving around, looking for goods and good prices. So, the usual, then.
"Weird...This seems to be the present." Teddy said.
"Our present is probably close to theirs." Grey corrects, as he takes a few steps forwards. "But this is not ours. Professor, do you think this is similar to the reflections we saw before?" He said, walking along the vague divide between him and the ponies in the frozen scene. He stops for a second before walking forwards as he watches the frozen ponies. Then he stops again. Then he walks backwards, watching intently.
"Something up?" Cherry said, walking over to Grey. As she did, she saw the world in the temporal zone move forwards. The ponies and the fillies and the colts chasing after them who appeared from the distance, all came to life as she watched the scene. Animation happened with her movement, died when she halted to gaze with amazement.
"I..err...You, you guys have got to see this!" She said, waving them over with a hoof. "It's soo trippy!"
