• Member Since 22nd Jan, 2013
  • offline last seen Oct 20th, 2022

Bradel


Ceci n'est pas un cheval.

E

Twilight discovers that the winter solstice and the new moon are happening at the same time. Exactly the same time.

With the magic of Equestria in danger, Twilight must hurry to Canterlot and save the princesses from... well... Something. Probably.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 44 )

Very cute and fun. Good to have you back.:pinkiesmile: And very subtle thing there.

5237105
Speaking of cute and fun, I love your new avatar!

I'm probably dumb. What actually did happen? Did they manipulate it for that lesson? Or something else?

5237135
Something did actually happen—and you have bookplayer to thank for that—and you may have to look carefully to catch it. My original intention was to just have Celestia show up at the end and be like, "You didn't tell her?" "Nope." "Cool."

I'm not saying that's all that happened. But books thought it'd be nice if there was a thing readers could actually see in the story. My attitude (and maybe I'm weird) is that what actually happened doesn't really matter a whole lot. Death of the Author and all, though, it kind of matters more what the people who read it think.

5237146 Interesting. I'll read through it a bit more to try and catch it.

5237163
Fair warning, it's tiny and totally unimportant... :trixieshiftright:

5237170 I'm too curious of a person for my own good. :rainbowwild:

Celestia playing her troll game. :trollestia:

Luna's horn glowed briefly and a bell rang outside the room.

Ah, there we are. I'm assuming that the bell had something to do with the little flex of magic, like alerting Celestia to do something. Or maybe it itself did it, since Celestia rang the bell after talking about teasing her. Although Luna seemed to think that was just for the servants. :raritydespair:
EDIT: Yup, she did that for tea. :derpyderp1:

5237129 Thankya I'm rather fond of it.

Luna blinked twice and took another sip of her coffee.

She took another sip of her tea.

Seriously? :ajbemused: I had all these silly ideas of what it could be, but on a second reading I instead found that. Either it's a mistake (and the thing-that-happened is that the servants made the tea for once) or your gimmick only rates a few micro-sillies.

Also, one of these days Celestia is going to give Twilight a heart attack with her 'teasing'. :trollestia:

5237349

Oh yeah, that's it.

Like I said, my original intention was to just have the two of 'em show up at the end and be like:
"Did you tell her?"
"Nope."
"Cool.
So the <cough> upgrade <cough> is Tiny Visible Effect.

"Fun to tease," she said. When Twilight is driven utterly mad and conquers Equestria before anything else gets the chance, we'll see just how fun she is to tease...

I don't know. I really sympathized with Twilight here. She's been kind of traumatized from having the weight of the world on her withers so often. And really, given Equestria's track record, there were good odds of something terrible happening.

A well-written story, but one that I just couldn't get behind.

5237762
Fair enough. I suspect I've been keeping this sort of story/ending in the tank for a while, though. The meta-humor around just what Twilight gets asked to do has gotten to be some of my favorite pony humor, and I think this deleted scene captures it nicely.

But you're right, Twilight does have every reason to be upset over this. Because it just keeps happening.

5237379

Tea and coffee are a pansy princess's beverages. Prune juice is a real warrior's drink. :trixieshiftleft:

How could you have a solstice party without a solstice!

The nerve of some ponies!

I couldn't help reading this with the gravity Twilight would have, as a serious epic. I was listening to Sun at the time, so that could have something to do with it.

You really like time-stamps in your stories, don't you? I think it's kinda cool. Maybe you should do something crazy with them, like jump around in time and see if people catch it.

Mint Condition

This is such a show character name I don't even.

Sometimes I stop by Rarity's place the exact same time Sweetie Belle gets home from school.

What is this analogy supposed to imply? :duck:

I should not have said that.

Thanks, Hagrid.

After Twilight left,

This bothers me. I don't know why. It's technically the right tense. I feel like it needs a 'had' though.

This is one of those laws of the universe though. You can't beat it. If you're prepared, it won't happen. It gets worse in Equestria though, what with these gods of the sky trolling ponies. That meta though. It does always happen. Even things that really were just coincidences become randomly important later, like that darn Cerberus thing.

Like I said at the beginning though, I read this very much in tune with Twilight. "I've predicted the downfall of Equestria perfectly accurately before. Y'know, except for the part where I saved it, and Celestia knew the whole time. Still, you should take this seriously!"

Also, what is this silliness that Derpmind found? You expect us to be okay with this!? Coffee transmutation? NO. nononono. Celestia and Luna switched bodies (and beverage containers, simultaneously), Equestria was sucked into the mirror universe, Aria came back and the matrix had to do a 3k year rebase and there were some glitches. Something. Gosh. :ajbemused:

5237349 is on to something, but it's not liquid transmutation. The liquid remains coffee after Luna says "There, it is done." The only time tea is mentioned is in the final scene, well after the event.

That suggests a body swap — especially given the blink reaction to the coffee — but the new Luna says she rang for the servants already, which happened before the Solstice; and we see her do it on-screen, so the new Luna is the same consciousness as the old Luna.

I got nothin' else. So, I think maybe it's a red herring, and the sisters are right — they're just trolling the audience along with Twi.

5238202
5238317
Omigosh, omigosh, you guys are both awesome!

Body swap was so totally my original idea for what happened, I just decided it was too wacky to go for.

Damn, maybe I should edit this to make it make sense...

5237762
"If I can't find an Equestria-shattering crisis, I'll just have to make an Equestria-shattering crisis!"

Small correction, or possibly a question about the mythos: I believe it should be "windigos" and not "wendigoes". The latter, while more mythologically legitimate and less afflicted by Equestrian puncraft, are not the creatures of the Hearth's Warming Eve tale; they aren't incompatible with canon but are unlikely to be endorsed by it, what with the child-unfriendly cannibalism. (Google tells me that "windigo" is an accepted alternate spelling for the original Algonquin legend -- but for weather-pun reasons only the "i" makes sense for the Equestrian version -- and that there should be no "e" in the plural.)

Well, that was fun. I do wish there was a slightly more obvious hint as to what happened, though.

5238502
The coffee was still coffee, Twilight still has her library, and the mention of Tirek also implies that Twilight's Kingdom hasn't happened. It's winter, so the Summer Sun Celebration after Twilight's coronation hasn't happened, but Discord HAS been reformed....Is she a unicorn here?

Was that magical twinge a signal of her upcoming wing growth?

Also, I kind of expected Luna to say something to Celestia about how the teasing actually made Twilight cry. OR DID IT.

Actually, maybe it WAS a body swap...

Twilight galloped to the balcony and threw open the glass doors, looking out into the moonless night.

She stared out at the night, at the darkened countryside lying in the shadow of Mount Canter.

What's casting the shadow?

Starlight would be shining from all directions...

5238893
Thanks for the catch! I have a hard time remembering that the spelling used by the show is different than the spelling I would have learned growing up. The idea that it's a pun (which I don't think I really got before) will probably help me remember, though.

5239044
I left whether or not she's an alicorn intentionally fuzzy , because I don't like wasting words and I didn't think it was super important to specify—which may or may not be true, actually, but it was my thought. I definitely wrote this thinking of her pre-alicorn, though. So yes, in that small space between Discord being reformed and Twilight gaining wings. I didn't want Twilight to seem/feel like she was on an even level with the princesses, and her having wings complicates the time bomb a bit because it's a lot easier for her to get to the castle in a timely manner.

But at the same time, that's sort of like me head-canoning my own story. I tried to leave out the detail there because I think this can probably get read with Twilight being anywhere in Season 4, too, without much difficulty. I do think my own ideas about when it was set probably played into me not playing for the body-swap, though—because a body-swap here would seriously recontextualize Twilight's alicorn ascension.

5239350
I dunno if this is bad of me, but I was thinking you could use that as a figure of speech without needing a proper shadow there at the time. That's the way the phrase works in my head. It sounds like it's not reading well for everyone, though? Something I should definitely keep in mind, then. I really don't like when phrases in my writing throw readers out of the story, and so this might be a phrase I want to avoid in the future—at least, avoiding when it's figurative instead of immediate.

Thanks for pointing it out to me!

5239598 5237807 5238317

"What about, I don't know... there was some guy named Tirek, right?"

"Tirek is safely locked in Tartarus. Celestia and I checked on him earlier this week. Precisely for this reason."

This narrows the time frame of the story, as Tirek escaped from Tartarus when Cerberus went AWOL in "It's About Time" in season two. Heck, maybe one of the sisters slipped up at the end of the inspection, precipitating later events! ("Who so art a fine canine? Yea, thou art, Cerberus! Yea, thou art! We are glad to see thee again, also!")

Luna blinked twice and took another sip of her coffee. "There. It is done. The solstice has passed, and the new moon with it. Now our power will return, as it ever does."

Luna rolled her eyes. “Patience, sister. I already rang for the servants when Twilight was here. They should be along shortly.” She took another sip of her tea.

I'm not sure if this is what happened, if it's an error, or if Luna's become a two-fisted-hooved drinker, given that the beverage swap occurs after the event in question. And if it is a body swap, it seriously re-conceptualizes all subsequent events in the show. Though it would go a long way towards explaining where "Luna" was during "A Canterlot Wedding"—she was sleeping in during the day, for a change!

5239983
AAAAGH! You are correct, sir/madam! On both counts. The Tirek one I just completely forgot about, and the other one... is entirely my bad.

Well, that's just downright embarrassing. Okay. This story needs some revision, unfortunately. :facehoof: I'll try to get on that in the next day or two. Eesh. Sorry...

5239996

I'll try to get on that in the next day or two.

For your own sake, please try to be a little bit precise about it. I mean, you can probably get away with just before lunch, but to be really safe you should try finishing it at something more traditionally significant, like the stroke of midnight. You can never be too careful with these things.

5239996
The implication that Twilight just barely knows of Tirek's existence impacts references to other threats. As of "It's About Time,"

• Discord is still re-petrified
• Queen Chrysalis will soon abduct and replace Princess Mi Amore Cadenza as the next step in her plan to invade Canterlot
• King Sombra is still a shadow, banished to the ice of the arctic north, the Crystal Empire barely even a myth
• It's moons before the magic mirror portal to Canterlot High reopens, so Sunset Shimmer and the Sirens are beyond reach
• The Great and Powerful Trixie is (probably) now working on a rock farm and saving her bits for something
• The Flim Flam brothers were recently run out of Ponyville for producing low-quality apple cider
• The general public believes Ahuizotl to be a figment of A.K. Yearling's imagination
• And what about… Naomi Starswirl?

So while there are several credible threats at this point in time, their existence is either unknown to Twilight (e.g., Sombra, Sunset Shimmer, the Sirens), a story or legend on the order of Nightmare Moon prior to the one-thousandth Summer Sun Celebration (e.g., Tirek, Ahuizotl, probably changelings), or actually not that much of a threat (e.g., pre-Alicorn Amulet Trixie, the Flim Flam brothers, re-petrified Discord).

Continuity—in about it's order things keeping all.

And I did some digging. It turns out that—on Earth, at least—a new moon on the same day as Winter Solstice is a somewhat rare event, to say nothing of them occurring at exactly the same minute. From what I can tell, the next time the two fall on the same date for us is on December 21, 2033!

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/phase/phases2001.html
http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/seasons.html

5245201
True, but the solstice happens at 11:03pm this year, and the new moon at 1:20am the morning of the 22nd or thereabouts if I remember correctly. So we've got them pretty darn close this year, too. :raritywink:

5237762

Yeah, that's pretty much how I felt too. They should have told Twilight she was an alicorn now, instead of lying and saying nothing happened.

5239996

No, no, this is fine. Tirek escaped, but he bunched up some pillows under his blanket, so it looked like he was still there when Celestia and Luna checked in on him.

Hmm. Can you have headcanon of fanfiction? I think I prefer that the thing that happened was a prank millennia in the making involving indirect influences on breeding and eventually tutelage to produce a neurotic, obsessive compulsive student to pull it on. It must get boring being long lived, right?

5276649
It is turtles all the ways down. Generally what happens next is someone writes a fanfic of that fanfic, and pretty soon you have a universe to play with such as the Optimalverse, or Winningverse.

Interesting premise, though the fact they went comic shopping in the middle of things BEFORE going to the castle seems out of place. I must admit, I also wanted more from the ending. I wanted the "nothing" to turn out to be important in its own right, or at least have some deeper lesson learned because of it. Of course, I guess that just means I should probably go write that story myself then. :twilightsmile:

Oh, and the whole inevitable anti-climax kept reminding me of the Violent Femmes song, "Machine."

Coincidences happen. Sometimes I stop by Rarity's place the exact same time Sweetie Belle gets home from school. Sometimes the solstice and the new moon happen together. It's not a big deal.

Is this a hint at Spike-Sweetie shipping, or is it just a coincidence? :unsuresweetie:

5239996

Well, I think the day or two have passed, and Luna is still drinking coffee... Which I find strange in general, since the solstice would happen at her equivalent of late morning/noon. :trixieshiftright:

...Or maybe it's just me unable to comprehend how people drink coffee for the taste. :unsuresweetie:

Ri2

I've reread the story and the comments and I STILL don't get it. Was it coffee turning into tea? Celestia and Luna swapping bodies? Twilight growing wings? WHAT?

Not being sure what, if anything, happened will bug me.

Kinda fun.

Should have been a little more sympathy for Twilight. She does have a point, that something always happens.

The premise was funny but in retrospect the whole thing seems kind of mean. Twilight's fear isn't exactly unreasonable, and they're causing her to stress out.

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