Reflections - AMA · 2:00pm Jul 5th, 2017
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Ask Me Anything.
I’ve spent the past week compiling your questions and I now proudly present that thing where those questions receive answers. Read on for discussions on four dimensions, missing Twilights, and meshing of time models!
For this AMA, I have two guests. Say hello.
The infinitely while expanse ended in a single circular rug. Two ponies occupied the rug in the middle of nowhere, each sitting on shiny velvet cushions. Besides a low, ambient hum, everything was silent.
Crystal Faire ruffled her wings and looked around. “What the hay…?”
Twilight Sparkle’s eyes darted around. “Where are we?”
Salutations. I have pulled you here to conduct an interview. That is, if you want to call it that.
“The two of us were just having dinner,” Crystal said, “but I don’t know how we got here…”
Don’t worry, you’ll be returned to your adventures at the conclusion of this AMA. Of course, you won’t remember any of this.
Crystal tapped the ground. “Wait, let me get this straight… You brought us here so that we could answer some questions… is that right?”
That is correct. There are many who are observing your adventures thus far and there are some things that they would like to know.
Twilight and Crystal exchanged glances.
“I don’t know… but I guess it can’t hurt,” Twilight said with a shrug.
Crystal shrugged in return. “Alrighty. We’ll play this game, I suppose.” She chuckled. “Actually, being interviewed will be kind of nice.”
Out of curiosity, is there any other beings that know the Multiverse a thing?
Twilight turned. “I know about it, at least.”
“But that question is probably directed at me,” Crystal said.
“Do you know of any others?”
Crystal shook her head. “And believe me, I’ve looked,” she added.
At this particular moment in time, there are no others. Not yet.
Twilight cross her forelegs and frowned. “Not yet… that implies that there will eventually be some.”
“And that they will appear soon.”
I highly doubt that any will appear over the course of Reflections. What I can confirm, however, is that at this point and through the end of the story, Crystal is the only one who can influence anything within the multiverse. I make no claims about later.
Crystal made a slant with her lips. “So then, I might reasonably expect company much further down the road.”
Perhaps.
The Equestria that Twilight now lives in; the Twilight of that Timeline? Crystal Flare said Twilight wouldn't have to worry about it and Starlight (or was it Spike?) said that she had gone to the Everfree Forest. Any info on what happened to her? I assume she died somehow.
Twilight turned in her seat. “Crystal?”
Crystal merely groaned in response.
Twilight’s features paled. “I… admit that I’ve given it some thought. Admittedly, I’ve just been so busy trying to wrap my head around everything that I couldn’t really explore it in detail, but… my other me…” She swallowed. “She did meet her end in the Everfree, didn’t she?”
Crystal’s lip quivered. “That’s right.”
“I knew it.” Twilight shook her head. “I just… want to know what happened. I want to know how it happened.”
If I may, that very question is going to come up a couple of chapters from now. You’ll get your full answer. Don’t worry, Twilight.
“Well, if that’s the case, then I look forward to hearing about what happened,” Twilight replied.
Crystal shuddered and withdrew into herself.
Is Crystal Faire going to have to make any bargains with ultimate evil beings?
Crystal sat back up and her mouth curled into a smirk. “Well… ultimate evil beings, huh?”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that in any circumstance,” Twilight said with a frown.
Crystal rolled her eyes. “I’m not worried.”
You’re not?
“No. I’ve already done all that.”
“Really?” Twilight asked. “When?”
“A few times. I’d get into deals with ultimate evils, and then I would do them a bamboozle.”
Twilight gasped. “You mean… You’d get into a deal and then not honor it?”
Crystal sat back in her seat and lit her horn. An apple appeared before her and she took a bite out of it. Her smile grew with every chomp. She swallowed and said, “Like they were going to honor it to begin with. I just made it a habit of backstabbing them first.”
Twilight narrowed her eyes. “You’re playing at their level,” she said with a sharp tone.
“These games are for two players,” Crystal replied.
Evidently, it works. I think she has a point…
Crystal took another bite of her apple.
So then, you would say that you wouldn’t be worried.
“Nah,” Crystal replied.
“But that questions asked if she will have to make a deal,” Twilight said.
True.
“And?” Crystal asked.
I don’t think so. I don’t foresee it, anyways.
Where is Sunset Shimmer? She's in the tags, yet I have yet to see her outside of one mention. The same could go for Chrysalis, but I don't really care about Chrysalis. What of Starlight?
Twilight blinked several times in rapid succession. “Tags?”
Crystal munched on her apple.
It’s a thing which lists the characters involved. Currently, it’s obviously you and Flurry Heart, and then Starlight and Sunset and Chrysalis are also tagged.
Crystal leaned over to Twilight and whispered, “Sounds to me like we’ll run into them later on.”
Twilight nodded in response.
Actually, Starlight Glimmer, the primary one for whom the character tag refers to, has already made her appearance. She just hasn't gained significance yet story-wise.
“It must be the Starlight in the timeline that you’re now in, Twilight,” Crystal suggested.
“That sounds about right.”
Sunset is slated to appear within a week of this AMA. And Chrysalis—
“Should not appear,” Crystal finished. She then took another bite of her apple.
…Crystal.
“Like, seriously. If you could not, that would be great.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “I agree.
You haven’t even seen how I’m going to use her.
“And I’d prefer to keep it that way, honestly,” Twilight replied.
Nonetheless, she’s going to appear in a few chapters or so. You’ll see.
Are all timeline collapses the same across the board? Is it always the gaping holes we saw back in Reflections!Twilight's timeline? Or can it happen in a variety of ways?
Of course. And there is a good reason for this.
We’ve already seen the line in itself. Equestria exists in three-dimensional space while the line is that fourth dimension of time. If we want to imagine the hole, then, it manifests as an absence of spacetime; in other words, it’s a part that is missing from the timeline. The hole is as wide as the area of three-dimensional space that is missing and it is as deep as the amount of time for while that spacetime is missing.
But, given that timelines are mutable, the holes can get deeper (as in, the bottom of the hole travels further back in time).
Twilight blinked. “Oh… that’s fascinating. So… for somepony like me who is living in a timeline, I wouldn’t even notice it because the timeline would be changing around me to accommodate the hole.”
That’s right. However… if Crystal is there, then the timeline is crystallizing at the same time.
Crystal narrowed her eyes. “So then… we’d be seeing points in time where the hole has a larger width. To us, it would look like some three-dimensional hole is growing larger but it’s a fourth-dimensional hole."
I imagine that these specifics might make an actual appearance within the story, once you can glean the actual state of the multiverse.
“And we’ll see that if a timeline is collapsing… it’ll be holes,” Twilight said.
Crystal hung her head. “That’s… not what happened with my timeline.”
Twilight whirled in her seat. "It's not?"
You might see that later. But yes, hers is an exception.
Crystal said nothing.
For now, I'm keeping silent about it. But do keep it in the back of your mind.
Since prior stories you've written deal with "Time," and how the rules of those stories are for the time stuff, how do those rules fit into the multiverse time travel stuff that Crystal does? I await some scientific maths!
And this one I saved for last because it’s quite fun. But I’ll need to provide some context.
These other stories which this question refers to are Feedback and its sequel Substitute. They are also time travel related stories. In those stories, there exists a crystal ball which can see nine days into the past. You can also communicate with the past if you touch the ball, just as long as somepony in the past is near enough to their crystal ball (because the crystal ball produces audio). Likewise, you can hear somepony who is speaking to you from nine days into the future, provide you are close enough to your crystal ball to hear.
In short, each reality is layered. The layer below you is nine days into the past, and the layer above you is nine days into the future. It turns out that there are infinitely-many layers in either direction, as dictated by logic.
Substitute expands on that by then including the alternate timelines seen in the season five finale. In particular, it postulates the existence of these timelines as having always existed and that they existed for all time only to diverge at the moment of the Rainboom (thanks to Starlight’s meddling).
“Wait,” Twilight said, shuddering, “they still exist!?”
Crystal nodded. “That they do. I can’t see them, unfortunately.”
And I highly doubt that you can see those other crystal ball layers, right?”
Crystal nodded. “That’s right. I can only see the one.”
In the context of Reflections, those alternate timelines are part of a single system and thus constitute a single timeline Reflections-wise.
“I think I implied their existence a bit ago,” Crystal said.
But we should also consider a model which allows for the existence of the crystal balls. To help illustrate this, I now recall some bits that I did in an AMA for Substitute:
To give a more technical picture of what’s going on, we might consider some 3-dimensional coordinate system. Alternate realities like Canterlot High and the Mirror World (see the comics for that one) would live on the x-axis while alternate timelines might exist on the y-axis. Thus, you could describe any world by its reality component and its timeline component. [We] might denote a Canterlot High in some [cutie-remark] timeline where King Sombra waged war as Canterlot High S.
In the same manner, we might thus consider the layering of worlds [as done with the crystal ball] to live on the z-axis, where traveling one unit up or down the z-axis is a nine day time difference. Thus, we might denote a Canterlot High S that is in the same layer as yourself as Canterlot High S 0, whereas an Equestria where Tirek reigned that happens to be 36 days into the future (which will be 4 layers above you) would be Equestria T +4.
Some things to keep in mind; because there can certainly be any number of variations among each of the axes, these conditions also occur:
-∞ < x < ∞
-∞ < y < ∞
-∞ < z < ∞
If we use the above definition and further postulate that the timelines that Crystal sees are z = 0, then that means that Crystal Faire can only see and travel to locations which lie on the origin (x = y = z = 0). This would mean Equestria Prime 0 (being Equestria in the prime timeline that lies on the z = 0 layer). Of course, the entire x-y-z space exists as a single timeline Reflections-wise.
That origin is, of course, an entire reality, and differentiation rules apply for it.
Crystal leaned back in her seat. “I’m impressed. I sort of knew much of how this worked already but seeing it put into words is illuminating.”
There is one final wrinkle in this problem of reconciliation that needs to be smoothed out. Thankfully, I already have the answer. In both Feedback and Substitute, it was postulated that when time travel is involved, time is immutable. This does not seem to be the case in Reflections. However, it is the circumstances in which these cases of time travel occur makes a significant difference.
In the conditions of Feedback and Substitute, the time travel is done infra-timeline. This, of course, is timeline Reflections-wise. When somepony time travels, they don’t actually leave the timeline and, in fact, their time travel is already written into the timeline. The timeline is, thus, immutable from that standpoint, which satisfied timeline immutability per those two stories.
However, Crystal Faire is an anomaly and she is thus unaccounted for as far as a timeline in concerned. As such, when she travels into one, the timeline has to change in order to accommodate her presence. It is mutable in that respect. We have already seen this in action within Reflections in which the timelines are mutable to anything which is multiversally significant such as Crystal and (now) Twilight.
“Oh! That’s… fascinating!” Twilight exclaimed. She whirled to face Crystal. “You hear that?”
“I do. And, again, I am impressed. I do like hearing about this sort of thing.”
And, actually, there is one final wrinkle. The most astute reader might notice that the application of the above and aforementioned rules leads to an impossible conclusion and thusly hints as to the current state of the multiverse. It is a conclusion that has been hinted at, actually. Its resolution, for that matter, is a big part of the plot.
I leave it to you, readers.
Twilight stroked her chin. “Huh. I wonder what that is?”
Anywho, that concludes this AMA. I hope that it was fun and educational.
“It wasn’t the interview that I was expecting,” Crystal said with a huff.
“It was educational, though. Too bad we’re not going to remember any of this, I guess.”
I’m sorry.
Anywho, cheers for joining us today.
“Thanks for having us,” Twilight said.
Crystal sat up and nodded. “Yes. Thanks.”
This was very interesting, thanks for doing it.
Wow, my question left Crystal Flare shaking in her horseshoes! I can't imagine how horrible what happened was.
Aw don't tell me they didn't get the Doctor Strange reference!