Rarity Industries

by Blue Cloud Blues

Prologue: A Spell Just Right

“I have something extremely important to tell you about the future, and I only have a few seconds so you’ve got to listen! Whatever you do, don’t - !”

Then white light flared and burned everything away – the last week, the kempt and relatively unruffled Twilight Sparkle fussing over her schedule in the library, and the real, original time-traveling Twilight Sparkle’s voice, rising into it to be enveloped along with its message.

White light.

Everything was gone.

As it died down, winding and whining like a camera flash and still hot in Twilight’s good eye (good eye?), she could see all in a moment that the magic had burnt off and dropped her back into her proper place in space and time – Tuesday morning, Canterlot Archives, Star Swirl the Bearded Wing, back from time travel. She was too dazed to remember why Pinkie Pie and Spike were with her in black bodysuits to match (why match?), staring at her in questioning. There was a pressure around her head and her mane itched.

Words fell out. “…waste your time…”

Her memory settled in strands as her head cleared. She remembered standing face to face with herself, just before the spell wore off, and before that, seeing a grizzled version of herself, frazzled mane, scratched face, tattered black clothes, wearing a bandage around her head and an eyepatch – and by Celestia, she had looked ridiculous.

“…worrying…”

And what for? She would’ve shaken out her head just for good measure if her thoughts hadn’t so swiftly begun refocusing and restoring themselves. She remembered a visitation from her future self from this Tuesday morning, that is, this morning, then singed mane – Spike’s fire – and cutting her cheek; going to Pinkie’s, where a shard from a falling flowerpot had nicked her on the head; and looking at something very bright and burning out her eye –she’d stared at the sun through her telescope. Then she’d traveled through time, to avoid the events that had created that future Twilight Sparkle.

“…about…”

Now she was here, in the royal library, after a successful step back in time, grizzled with frazzled mane, a scratched face, and tattered black clothes, wearing a bandage around her head and an eye patch. And by Celestia, she looked ridiculous.

She pressed her front hoof into her face.

“…I can’t believe I just did that.”

“Did you tell her about the cool birthday present?” Pinkie inquired through her cotton candy pony terminal from someplace high and floating.

“Remember last week when Future Twilight came to warn me about something?” There it was – she remembered exactly how this had all played out now, and now it was preposterously obvious. Had it really all been so scrambled up until just now that she hadn’t seen what she was doing? “That was me trying to warn myself not to worry so much. Now I’m gonna spend the next week freaking out about a disaster that doesn’t even exist!”

“Aww, don’t worry about it! It’s Past Twilight’s problem now.”

Twilight giggled. “I guess you’re right, Pinkie.” It had been her problem already, but now it wasn't, and Past Twilight would get to this point just past it, too. What's coming is coming, and what's done is done: a neat and complete lesson for a letter to the Princess, if nothing better presented itself in the week.

Spike moaned.

Just the way she had already let him eat... Well, she couldn’t quite place a number to how many tubs of ice cream Spike had eaten while she was preoccupied.

“My stomach... I think it’s all that ice cream. I thought the stomachache would be Future Spike’s problem... Now I am Future Spike.”

Twilight took a telekinetic hold of the bloated little dragon as she laughed along with Pinkie. “Come on, Future Spike.” He bounced slightly when she plopped him onto her back. “Let’s get you home.”

What's done is done and consequences are consequences. She tried not to think of all the rescheduling and makeup chores that she’d left herself in the past few days – one step at a time, now. That beautiful sunrise would be the most fitting place to start. She had welcomed in a lovely and promising day, now, and as for the rest, perhaps a bit of mental scheduling within the day and no later was warranted. She would have to get Spike comfortable at home and clean herself up, of course. Maybe fix him a bit of tea – ginger ale may be too sweet for him at the moment. Ginger tea instead? She’d need to buy some after dropping him off to rest at the library, and perhaps replacement ice cream while she was shopping, if he could stand it any time in the next month. While she was home she’d peek into the fridge for a more complete shopping list. After that, she took the opportunity to ask Pinkie if she expected to have the time to make up for their missed lunch, and she seemed delighted.

Tonight, she could sort through all her necessary untouched work. She would simply pick up where she left off – and try to wind down her nerves enough to catch up on sleep. With any time between that, she could freely read about anything but time spells until she’d sufficiently laughed off the past few days’ neuroticism. She didn’t need to worry about time for a while – better not to even think about it on anything but the simplest level. Of course, once the applications of time spells ceased to tempt, they ought to be a rich personal research topic. She hadn’t ever exerted the necessary excess mental energy on trotting through theories of time travel and their paradoxical mazes due to the implausibility of any solid useful fact. Now, however, she knew ponies had created workable time spells, and she had tested one for herself – not that she’d dabble in them any more, but there was a library's shelf of guidance on enormous-scale spells, marked and pointing her off to cosmically ambitious magical insight...

For the future. For now, she wasn't playing with tense.

When she was ready, she’d read theory that there is no real "changing" the past – rather plowing off a set path of time and pulling it redirected. The new path, as she would read on, would loop back into itself once more to account for visitation from a “Future Pony” and then carry on. She would then mark that “Interesting” and store it in a drawer in her mental files with other so-deemed time spells. She isn’t going to know what exactly happened on the closed time loop, as the white flash that took her through time again swallowed it up, and it faded with it.

In the most decisive difference on the closed loop from her redirected course, Twilight had been shelving books when a moment – just one moment – of silence had held her still, across which, trailed thin on a long-distance flight, had come a scream.

She’d heard books thudding over the floor, caught on the edge of the shelf and knocked out of her telekinetic grip when she’d turned her head to the door, ears swiveled forward; and Spike pattering down the stairs, a modest half-cup of ice cream dissolved into his system by then from the night before. “What’s goin’ on, Twilight?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Well, yeah. That’s why I asked, what’s going...”

The door had slammed open and Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie had had Twilight and her dragon ward surrounded in a three-mare stampede, and by the time it had occurred to Twilight that they were indeed there, Rainbow had been skimming the shelves on the wing and Pinkie had been rifling through the loose books on the floor and tables.

Applejack had pulled her attention to a focus in front of her, lasso fastened to her saddlebag, actively smiling and taking quick, rough breaths through her nostrils. “Hey, Twilight... ya got anything here on barn-sized, three-headed monster dogs?”

That had been sometime after the point to which she would’ve looped back later on, but panic had hit far more acutely than it had after her encounter with herself in the redone past.

She had leaped straight in the air and drilled forward with questions, asking Applejack how long Cerberus had been in Ponyville, which she hadn’t been able to answer. While Spike had asked her what she was flipping out over – or freaking out, she had certainly heard him say something through the sounds of the re-disorganization of her organized books books – she had tried to steady herself and gather the facts. She’d looked Applejack in her ain’t-nothing-I-can't-handle smiling face and with a breath told her what she knew. The enormous three-headed dog was Cerberus – it was the only monster that fit that description – and Cerberus was the guard dog of the gates of Tartarus, the site of the confinement of the deadliest, most beastly beasts ponykind had ever seen, and plenty it probably hadn’t.

“We share Equestria with enough carnivorous and malevolent species as it is to fill entire book collections. And ponies have!” she had asserted, brandishing examples, at least four imposing, darkly-bound compendiums at a blanching farmpony. Applejack had winced as she'd watched them flop, spines up and covers wide, onto the muddle on the floor. In only tens of seconds of ransacking and pulling and rejection, books had gone spilling and pooling around their shelves like water through a cracked floodgate. Twilight had continued, pawing the floor with one forehoof in a peaking anxiety. “If Tartarus is left unguarded for even a second too long...”

An explosion of sound – a rumbling and booming bark wound from three very slightly different dog voices – had jarred and rattled the air and the heads of the ponies occupying it. Rainbow and Pinkie had been stunned, and frantic jabber from outside had boiled and bubbled at once into the place of the paper and binding sounds. Another mare had screamed, very close now.

Twilight’s knees had nearly knocked loose between her planted hooves when she’d opened the door for herself and seen Cerberus, black, Ursa-like, hot-eyed, and hulking, on the street immediately in front of the library, straining to crane all three heads to look over his boulder shoulders, growling an earthquake.

At something.

The unicorn had felt her eyes go wide and just become aware of Spike’s claw on her side, and told the dragon to hide, swiveling into him and blocking the doorway just as Cerberus barreled on and the air’s temperature intensified. A fire-colored herd of something had appeared on the horizon and blasted into closeness before blazing past. She had closed her eyes and pressed against Spike, the thought that a dragon ought to have a greater resistance to fire than her half striking her by the time she thought she smelled burning mane.

The first traces of the closed time loop back into the past to have been erased from Twilight’s mind were the fresher ones.

She had made her way into Canterlot Palace hugging close to the walls in a black bodysuit for the sake of unobtrusiveness, just in case anything nasty had crawled into the castle in all the panic outside. Wards had been placed over every civilian area in Canterlot as far as the Princesses and the city's mages could manage, leaving the unshielded, trooped palace leaning out like a lightningrod, which the princesses had claimed was all the better to keep the swarming monsters in one place. Twilight herself had encountered nothing but guards repositioning here and there inside. Her suit and hide were a bit scratched and battered and she’d put a patch over her eye when some serpentine thing had spat in it, and she’d benefited from pausing in every fifth corner for a few breaths but could have used more.

On her way to the Canterlot Archives, she’d galloped a parapet wall, head bowed while watching the still red-and-violet-and-magenta starry sky for the shadows and occasional glowing projectile. She’d broken her stride first on hearing a warped shriek beside her. When she’d turned, she’d flinched on seeing a large brown bird with an improbably-shaped beak held in place across the crenellations from her in a unicorn guard’s telekinetic field. The guard had told her good luck between grunts, and then with a rearing swing of his head hurled it off like a bull between flashing spat fireballs.

The second time had been on hearing a neigh, high, distinct, and melodiously important, giving her a flicker of a memory of academy bells. When she had made it to the crenellations to peer onto the defense on the ground, Celestia hadn’t quite touched down from rearing to rally the guards behind her. Her wings remained spread and Twilight had still heard and felt the call from her point further behind the guards. She had swallowed hard and imagined herself springing down and telling the princess that she would fight with her and do what work her well-trained magic could, like the faithful student she had been since that day she'd earned her cutie mark. She had thought of herself standing back-to-back with the princess, shielding her with her magic until they – the two of them – had sufficiently thinned that swarm of imps scrambling toward the palace, She could go on to the Archives after that – they weren’t going anywhere unless the castle was ransacked.

Her horn had glowed and she’d started to hold onto and raise herself.

Then she’d blinked at a spot on the horizon, just a bit darker than the sky around it. The imps had been serving as an entourage for something very large. Time stopped and slowed and sped around it - comets were pulled from the sky and then plastered against it to trickle diagonals. A pale pink circle of the morning had been blocked had radiated behind it, then sunset orange swelled inside that. A black hole had opened up in her stomach and an inarticulate realization told her that either way, there was absolutely no going back.

Just as Celestia had lowered her horn and begun charging a spell, Twilight had wrenched herself away from the barrier and galloped with all force for the end of the wall, to the Canterlot Archives where something forced the sand spewing down from the top of the large decorative hourglass to the bottom, hoping that she'd gathered it all properly to here and she could pull a spell in time to leap back to last week and pull everything, herself, Spike, her schedule, the Princess, and the entirety of Equestria, place and being, to veer away. It was a long shot when nopony had been able to tell her when Cerberus had left the gates or when the first monsters had surfaced in the first place, but anything could be done.

The best she had been able to do at a message for Past Twilight by the time she had made it had been “Don’t let your guard down!” The message she accidentally delivered to herself was in all likelihood more personally useful.

Celestia hadn’t even been pulled into her fight with that something very large.