”What do you mean ’why are you here?’?” Trixie looked confusedly back at the mare in front of her. “She can’t know, can she?”
“Will you humor an old lady, child? The question I asked was straight-forward wasn’t it? But now that I know can I thank you for ending my search?” As the few sentences ran along decades of hardships and tests dropped from the face of Mystery, showing a much less wrinkled face and more luster than before.
“I don’t understand, have you been looking for me a long time?” A confused expression grew on Trixie’s face as she asked the question that instantly showed up in her mind.
“No you exactly child. Did you know I’m a gypsy by trade, and by my own code I am not to look at myself for a reason? It’s because I saw your impact on this world and on my own life. By the look on your face you do not believe me child? Could a stranger like me do nothing to earn your trust?”
She had to admit it was hard to trust this stranger who said she had seen her in a vision change the world. She had no plans to do anything of the sort. Beside the way things had turned out, Trixie had only wanted to hide somewhere safe and wait out the events that took place into the future.
Yet now this Mystery claimed she would throw that away and change the things she knew would happen? Who knows what consequences that could have with the future? She had already changed too much with Soarin’, the police, the orphanage and now with this pony in front of her. No, she couldn’t risk it.
“I understand you’re still hesitating child? Look in the topmost shelf after a small bag of white powder, can you see it?” Trixie looked towards the shelf the hoof pointed at and saw the little blue bag resting neatly in a corner. “Would you kindly pick it up and bring it here?”
Curious Trixie picked up the bag in her magic and gently lifted it off the shelf and deposited in right in front of her on the table.
“Good, can you listen carefully now? Inside this bag is a memory drug illegal in Equestria, so not a word of this to anypony you understand?”–A nod–“This will show you what I saw in the vision and it is safe, would you trust me to use a little dose?”–Trixie shook her head a few times in answer–“I would’ve been a fool to expect different wouldn’t I?”
“How about this, you give this one small test and in return you can stay here for as long as you like? I assume you know sometime?”
“A decade.” The reply came a fair bit more quiet than she had liked, but the offer was all of a sudden tempting. She had no idea if the dose did what she said it would, but if she took it the troubles of finding somewhere to stay were gone in an instant.
“So you test this one time, and I let you stay here for at least nine year? Is that a fair deal to you?” Leaning over the table Mystery took the bag in one hoof and scooped out a minimal amount of white dust. Putting the bag back down she shifted around the small pile until it lay in a straight line between Trixie and herself.
“Okay, but give me your word this isn’t something else entirely.” The request seemingly didn’t surprise Mystery in the slightest as she quickly gave her own confirmation and promise that it did.
“Did you know you’re bright child? I promise that it’s exactly as I said, do you trust that? If you’re ready just put your tongue and hold it all still there, very important not to swallow you see?”
Trixie leaned in on top of the table and positioned her in line with the short stream of powder. Carefully she put her tongue directly on top of the powder. Immediately the first thing she noticed was the sweet taste, almost like sugar mixed with just a hint of vanilla. Joining the sweet smell was the odd numbness spreading from her mouth and towards the rest of her body.
The numbness spread down her neck and out in her forelegs, before quickly filling every last corner of her body. Eyes drooping and head hanging low she fell down on the floor, head resting on the still tea cup decorated table. The last thing Trixie saw before closing her eyes was the look of happiness that came from Mystery.
Trixie found herself standing in the exact same room she had just fallen out from. The décor looked exactly the same, but without most of the trinkets she had studied on her first and brief walk through the wagon. Looking around she found herself at her previous height, before this all started. Most surprisingly she found a mirror and what she didn’t expect startled her.
In the mirror was a far younger Mystery looking back out from it. That would mean at the moment Trixie had once more changed bodies, but this time she would probably be back in her second soon enough. Pushing the matter of her body-swap to the side Trixie did another once over of the room in the hopes of finding anything at all that would clue her in to the current events.
The shelves looked the same, the door and workspaces looked the same and as far as she could see nothing that would make this moment memorable stood out. Even a small blue tea cup sat atop the table, empty of any liquid just like hers had been.
Picking up the cup in her hooves she studied a bit closer. It was an exact replica of the one she had used minutes earlier, except blue. Finding another dead end she stretched her hooves to put the cup back down on the table, only to meet thin air. Confused Trixie looked down in front of her and what she saw stopped her in her tracks.
The table was gone.
No table anywhere to be seen, and now she had a cup with nowhere to put. She looked around only to grow more worried by the second.
Most of the shelves were gone, the kitchen had disappeared and none of the trinkets she had seen just minutes earlier was there. She watched as the last two shelves simply faded out of existence, leaving her in a completely empty room save for the tea cup in her hooves.
She blinked, and the room was gone. Floating in a complete darkness she saw nothing in any direction, only her own body. Floating for what seemed like eternity she finally saw a glimpse of colour in the distance slowly moving closer.
She watched as the ball moved closer and closer by the minute, and as it did it grew. Starting out the size of a pea it ended up far larger than her and she couldn’t look at it entirely without moving her head. Studying the globe in front of her closely she noticed a familiarity with the globe.
That is Equestria. But why is it tinted purple?
Across the entire surface continents were placed exactly where they should, oceans and seas separating them seamlessly. And all of it covered in a purple tint.
She was so captivated she never noticed her grip on the cup slowly slipping, and by the time she did the cup had already left her hooves. Tumbling down through the air at unimaginable speeds the cup plummeted towards the continent where her mentor, Princess Celestia, ruled. She watched as the cup entered the atmosphere and caught on fire, expecting it to disintegrate momentarily.
To her surprise the cup continued unhindered before crashing down in what looked like a smaller city. Blue ripples emerged from the point of impact and spread like rings on water across the red world. The places where the ripples had passed slowly turned from the monotone purple to a clear blue, much like the colour of the cup. At first the ripples stopped at the borders, but before long the entire world was engulfed in blue waves. Not long after Trixie looked out across an entirely blue world with not a hint of purple still in it.
With a barely noticeable speed Trixie started moving again, towards the globe once more. With a clear goal in mind she moved towards the place where the cup landed just minutes ago and turned the world into a different tint. As she got closer she could see the impact hadn’t scorched the world in the slightest, even though the cup had been on fire. The only sign of the cup ever existing was the blue patch of grass directly beneath her.
Touching down she studied her surroundings but the lonely plain gave no details she hadn’t already seen from the sky. She stood alone in a park, much like the ones you would find in almost any city. Nothing stood out to her and yet she kept looking around expectantly.
Hanging from a building was a small poster advertising something, but the details were very blurred and impossible to make out. The graffiti directly underneath the poster read clear as day however. Written in pitch black paint the letters made out the only words in the entire world that wasn’t blurred beyond legibility.
“So fragile yet our future rests upon its shoulders.”
And then the world collapsed. She stared as houses faded away and the ground beneath her hooves vanished just like the last time. Moments later she found herself back in the wagon where it all began, with the table once more in the center of the room. Sitting back down in the same place where she earlier found the cup, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Exhaling she opened her eyes and found herself looking back up at a smiling Mystery.
“Did you see it child? The cup? The world? The message? Do you understand what it means?” The questions came one after another without giving Trixie a chance to respond to any of them.
“In order, yes, yes, yes, maybe, not a clue. What was that?” Answering all those questions really in order felt right to her, even if it would’ve been enough to just give one response.
“A memory child, I told you I would show you my memory did I not? I can only guess, but you are the cup and you did something to the world that spread, would that make sense to you?”
Trixie didn’t respond for a moment, lost in thought. If the cup was her and that was her world, it would mean the purple world was her as Twilight and the blue when she was Trixie. But the woman in front of her couldn’t know about how she got here. None of this made any sense to her, so where to from here?
“The deal, does it still stand?” That was the first question that came to her mind. If she had taken this illegal and highly experimental drug for a deal, at least she wanted to know she didn’t get shafted now.
“Do you want it to, child? I cannot force you to do anything, you know that?”
“Can I ask one more thing from you as part of the deal” She waited for Mystery to nod before continuing. “Could you help me with my magic as well, if I’m doing this which I still haven’t decided, I need my magic.”
“Of course child, how could I say no? So does this mean you accept my offer and stay here?” Trixie didn’t know how much magic the earth pony could teach her, but she knew that accepting she would have somewhere to hide until she figured things out properly.
“Yes, it does.”