//------------------------------//
// Three Degrees of Freedom 
// Story: The Most Dangerous Game 
// by uberPhoenix 
//------------------------------//

Those who are new to the study of paradox space often assume that its name derives from the fact that it does not distinguish between the dimensions of time and space.  That reckless disregard, they reason, serves to enable a host of messy time paradoxes.

These students are indisputably wrong. As they further their knowledge, they slowly realize that the multiverse has built in mechanisms to deal with supposed temporal shenanigans.  Some of these mechanisms are more sentient than others, seeking to actively and maliciously punish transgressors of the rules, in addition to merely prohibiting them.  The truth of the abstraction's nomenclature is much more simple.

Paradox space is a hideous ugly thing to behold from within.  Alternate timelines twist about each other in a chaotic dance, and genesis frogs with their self-contained chronology orbit around the massive stars that distort time and space (or rather straighten it, as the small-minded insist).  So much of the system seems vestigal and needlessly complicated.  And certainly, since these mortal individuals could travel their whole lives and never see more than a fraction of all that paradox space has to offer, the complications continue to appear needless.

But imagine for a moment that we were to zoom out and take in the entire multiverse as a whole, with all of its incipispheres and suns and amphibians.  Suddenly, the pieces come together, and you are looking at the most beautiful piece of machinery ever designed.  (“And it must have been designed,” continue the same fresh pupils from before, but their debate belongs in a different story entirely.)  But they are right when they insist that every cog in the celestial machinery is well deserving of its existence.

Of course, this is all pure speculation.  No one has ever seen the entirety of everything at once, because such a task is blatantly impossible.  Suggesting such a thing would make one the laughingstock of their local institution.  This is why, although the “multiverse-as-machine” theory is thrown about in abundance, not a single soul has the first clue what the purpose of that machine could possibly be.

The important concept to grasp is that paradox space is simultaneously complex and simple, hideously inconvenient and elegantly beautiful.  Paradoxilly, there is no adjective that does not accurately describe paradox space from at least one point of view.  The point of view determines how this space behaves.

This is where the concept starts to become even more confusing, because while point of view most definitely affects paradox space, paradox space simultaneously affects one's point of view.  Thus, one can claim free will and complete dominance over their surroundings, while the surroundings are equally correct in their claim that the individual is at their mercy.

Likewise, when one is presented with four options, four ways to view the events that proceeded Twilight Sparkle's entrance into the incipisphere, the idea the viewer will immediately come to is that they have been granted a degree of control over the story that no reader has ever been able to wield before.  But, of course, as they begin to read, they slowly find their choices dwindling.  After the first choice of perspective comes the second, after the second comes the third, and after the third there is only one passage left to read (and no more freedom at all) before they end up in the exact same standing as if they had been forced to read the pages in an order of the author's choosing.

They have never been free at all.  But as long as they continue to believe they have been offered a choice, paradox space will not go out of its way to prove them wrong.

Be Rainbow Dash

Be Twilight

Be Fluttershy

Be Rarity