Twilight Derealized

Twilight emerged from the woods like a primeval beast being born. Mud slathered her fur, twigs jutted from her mane, and her eyes were slightly puffy from not crying about being lost in the woods. Why was there always a marsh? You get lost in the woods, you end up in a marsh. Inconvenient marshes were yet another reason never to go outside again, or at least drain the wetlands and torch the forests.

Having triumphed over nearly half a square kilometer of inanimate objects, Twilight arrived at the library. The impostor and Spike must have been out, because she found herself walking through shelves alone. That was good, it gave her time for a bath.

Though it was her tub, the unicorn still felt strange as she rinsed herself. Can a changeling’s disguise be washed off? Twilight dismissed the thought as she looked at her face in the water. It was the same face she’d always had. No green eyes, no fangs, no chitinous plates.

Her bath complete--the other Twilight must really be taking her time, she was probably a disorganized fool--Twilight went over to her desk. A small statuette rested there. Celestia had given it to her in celebration of some minor accomplishment.

She picked it in her telekinetic grasp, noting that her headache was gradually subsiding, and turned it over, observing the familiar ...

No. It was wrong. Where there had once been a fabulous, extravagantly proud phallus dangling from the figure’s crotch, there was now nothing. The penis, proud and grand, had been the high point of the entire work. It was what held the piece together. This ... this was just trash.

She set it down, turning as she heard the door opening behind her.

“Excuse me, the library isn’t open right now, but if you’d like to explain what in Tartarus you think you’re doing.” The other Twilight’s voice barely shifted pitch as she switched from greeting to accusation.

“I was just returning to my house-”

“My house,” interrupted the impostor, her horn glowing.

“Yes, I said my house,” Twilight nodded her head. “Although, I see you’ve changed some things. Did someone break my statue when they were abducting me?”

The newly arrived Twilight snorted derisively. "Chrysalis sent you, didn’t she? Poor girl must have fallen off the wagon pretty hard this time. This is her worst plot yet, and as an Element of Harmony, I've seen plenty of plots."

"There is nothing wrong with--” protested Twilight, nearly stumbling over a dim realization. “Why are you saying that?” The unicorn lunged forward, missing as the alicorn lifted off with a sweep of her wings. Wings? Why did she have wings? Twilight’s thoughts were interrupted as she crashed into the wall and spun, facing the impostor again. “Who told you to say that?”

“Trying to defend the honor of your precious Queen? Such a proud people for a race of parasites.”

“I get it. You’re trying to get in my head. Confuse me with my own words, well it won’t work.”

“Would it be worth repeating what you just said back at you, or is it just to be understood that we share the same sentiment?”

“I said it won’t work,” shouted Twilight little louder than seemed necessary, indicating that not only would it work but it was working.

“Seriously,” the alicorn stepped forward appraising her foe with a predatory smile, “this is almost sad. She didn’t even get the wings.” As if summoned, the two sails unfurled on either side of her body, dwarfing the interloper.

“I never had wings,” the wingless mare mumbled, staggered by the size of the display.

“I’m pretty sure that changelings do have wings, but I do too now. Chrysalis needs to do better homework.”

“Or maybe she did her homework so poorly she forgot it was my babysitter who had wings?”

The larger mare decided to be the bigger horse, “This is not getting us anywhere. There is only one way to prove who is the real Twilight.”

“Of course,” Twilight replied, remembering her breathing exercises. It would do no good to freak out now.

“So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?”

“You’d be a poor imitation if we weren’t thinking the same thing.”

“Well, you are a poor imitation, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s very generous of you,” the unicorn conceded to the alicorn’s virtue, “for a changeling.”

“I figure that, as a changeling, you’d be better used to taking things from ponies.”

“That’s the sort of racist comment that a changeling would make.”

“Against themselves?” She laughed dismissively and regally. “I very much doubt it, although taking offense at it is the sort of thing that a changeling would do.”

“I didn’t receive a University education so I could sit by and listen to others make insensitive remarks.”

The Princess had begun to grow visibly exasperated, as much by the circular conversation as by the mirror image of exasperation on the face across from her. “But you seem to be avoiding the topic, impostor. What is the best way to determine which of us is genuine?”

Twilight opened her mouth to speak, and froze. What if she didn’t say the same thing that the other Twilight was thinking? Well, that wouldn’t be her failing, that would mean the impostor had failed, but what if the impostor was only trying to make her think that she had failed, but this couldn’t be a test anyway, or maybe the test was whether or not she thought this was a test? Would the real Twilight ... would she, who was the real Twilight, was she supposed to think that something like this was a test or not? What did any of this mean?

“You tell me,” she nodded her head in self-affirmation. Neatly dodged there, Real Twilight. Neatly dodged. If there was something to dodge, which maybe there wasn’t.

“I asked you first ...” alicorn Twilight’s voice trailed off in confusion, “I think I asked you first, didn’t I?”

Eight hooves shuffled for a moment as their owners tried to remember the conversation.

“Alright, on the count of three, we both say it at once.”

“1 ...”

Twilight gritted her teeth, this was it. There was absolutely nothing at stake, unless there was.

“2 ...”

The moment of glory approached, possibly. It was like rock paper scissors with an infinite number of options, and also no way of judging the winner. Also, ponies can’t play rock, paper scissors. It wasn’t much like rock, paper, scissors at all.

“3 ...”

“Postmodern literary analysis!” they shouted at once.

“Well played, False Twilight. Very well, played.”

“And the same to you.”

“Spike!” Twilight called, attempting to summon her servant from the Spike-related things he was doing off stage.

“You don’t call my dragon. Only I tell my dragon what to do.”

“Well it’s good thing I’m calling for Spike, and not your dragon.”

“Have you two decided who owns me yet?” The dragon asked as he entered the room, abandoning his Spike-related things to the non-Spike forces of the Universe, of which there were many.

“No one owns you, baby. You’re my ... MY,” Twilight repeated the word with greater emphasis, “number one assistant. We need you to help us with something.”

There was no more decisive measure of an intellectual than the ability to evaluate and provide a multiplicity of meaning to incomprehensible narratives, using primarily French and the vague quotes of obscure philosophers as evidence, and so Spike set about prepping the battlefield of the minds. He did it with the same quiet detachment that he carried out all his tasks, unconcerned who was ordering him or why. Such is the path of an unreflected life, and it is beautiful in its way.

They each chose their weapons, in addition to quills and parchment, and sat across the room from each other. Infinite Jennet was the subject, each being provided one of the library’s ample untouched copies.

Twilight closed her eyes. Absolute focus. Her breathing slowed as she prepared herself to unleash the bounty that was her unicorn brain.

“Remember,” her aged Master had once told her, “the pen must be an extension of yourself.”

Or, at least, that was the sort of flashback Twilight would have had, if there existed an elite group of essay writing monks who spent their days practicing, meditating and dispensing wisdom to young pupils. She’d had to make due with talking to Smarty Pants. Oh, they better not have removed his--

The scholar’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Spike turning over an hourglass. The glass container tapped upon the desk delicately sounding exactly not like the booming of a cannon.

Quills scribbled furiously as they vomited scholarly rainbows onto the paper. The sound of words spilling across the page like machine gun fire--Twilight made a mental note to acquire a pair of typewriters to provide proper diegetic sound for future existentialist competitions--filled the air. In the corner, the grains bounced through the narrow waist of the hourglass, headless of the life and death struggle they mastered.

Twilight turned her head to the side, she couldn’t see her rival’s paper, but she could see the fury with which she was writing. No way was she, Twilight Sparkle, about to be out-analyzed by a fake. She redoubled her effort, dragging a shred of meaning kicking and screaming from the text. A Griffon-Equestrian dictionary flew inches in front of her face, promising humiliation and paper cuts if she couldn’t master it.

She bit down on her lip as the seconds flew by. A quill snapped, sounding not very much like a gunshot but still pretty loud for a quill pen. Ink flew up, splashing black and heavy beneath her eyes as she dissected her premise, cutting apart sentences and symbols with a ruthless razor bladed wit. Her magic slid up and down the shaft of the quill, driving surges of fertile brilliance into the tabula rasa before her.

Ten seconds left, what should she do? Her spine throbbed from its rigid strain and her head ached more than before. Maybe add another quote, a quick check for typos, oh she did remember to write her name at the top, right, with ‘Unicorn’?

“Done!” Spike’s voice called out. “Time’s up.”

Well it was out of her hooves now, Twilight exhaled. Now it was Spike’s turn under the stress of performance. Dropping quills dramatically, each mare levitated an impressive stack onto the desk before him, proving that they could probably rival the baby dragon himself in blowing smoke.

Spike stared at the two bundles of paper before him for several minutes while both mares looked at him expectantly. His reptile brain made an audible grinding noise as it attempted to turn over.

“Which is the right answer again?”

“Just pick one!” snapped one Twilight.

“The right one.”

“The one which most effectively deconstructs the text as both the author’s document and the reader’s individual understanding,”

“But at the same time keeping in mind the political relationship between the text and society ...”

Their words continued as Spike stared down at the two pieces of parchment. “I ...” Normally, for decisions like this, he’d rely on Twilight. But there were two Twilights. “... I ...”

What to do? What could he do with the jumble of foreign symbols leering at him? The baby dragon still didn’t know where to start. True, Twilight often told him he was pretty destructive, but he didn’t know a first thing about the science of it, and he had no idea how to analyze postmen either, and did he even remember to get the mail today and--

Finally, he found it. An out. The one on the left was exactly one line longer.

“This one!” Spike declared triumphantly, raising it with the intensity that can only be found in one trying to escape academia.

Alicorn Twilight’s face lit up. “Yes! He picked mine, that one’s mine! In your face, you unverbose changeling!”

“There’s no way that can be right!” exclaimed unicorn Twilight. “I examined it through Post-structuralist, Anarcho-Capitalist, and Luna-era radical feminist lenses, I even analyzed it from the perspective of an adolescent otherkin colt identifying as fine china! Don’t I at least get points for creativity?”

“Oh please, the real Twilight would know better than to waste her time on such meaningless drivel. She’s a mare of hard science and solid facts.”

“The real Twilight would know that the point of such exercises isn’t to learn about the thing itself, but rather to learn how to learn.”

“Girls, girls,” Spike raised his claws in a placating gesture, “you’re both pretty, purple and smart. Can we please-”

“No, Spike!” the two Twilight’s turned and snapped as one.

“How did he even learn that sort of chauvinist attitude?” the unicorn turned on the alicorn, “what sort of books have you been letting him read?”

“Knowledge is designed to be shared, not hoarded. You’d know that if you weren’t a changeling and a crypto-fascist.”

“Except I’m not the chan--You know, this is going nowhere. Clearly we won’t be able to settle this between us, and Spike’s too young to understand deconstructionism anyway. What we need is to bring in the rest of our friends.”

“Hmm,” Alicorn Twilight considered, “That’s actually a pretty good idea... for a changeling.”

Unicorn Twilight dropped her unicorn face into her unicorn hooves as she sighed in unicorn disgust.